PART 1 OF 2
CHAPTER 11: Britain's Crusade
By the time four hundred delegates crowded into an auditorium at the University of London to witness the opening gavel of the First International Congress of Eugenics in 1912, Galton had died and Galtonian eugenics had already been successfully dethroned. America had appropriated the epicenter of the worldwide movement. Eugenic imperialism was vital to the followers of Davenport, as they envisioned not just a better United States, but a totally reshaped human species everywhere on earth.
Nowhere was American influence more apparent than in the cradle of eugenics itself, England. The same centuries of social consternation that had shaped Galton also shaped the new generation of eugenicists who supplanted him. Several storm fronts of historic population anxieties collided over England at the turn of the century. Urban overcrowding, overflowing immigration, and rampant poverty disrupted the British Empire's elegant Victorian era. After the Boer War, the obvious demographic effects of Britain's far-flung imperialism and fears over a declining birth rate and future manpower further inflamed British intellectuals, who were reexamining the inherent quality and quantity of their citizens. [1]
English eugenicists did what they did for Britain in a British context, with no instructions or coordination from abroad and precious little organizational assistance from anyone in America. While Britain's movement possessed its own great thinkers, however, British eugenic science and doctrine were almost completely imported from the United States. With few exceptions, American eugenicists provided the scientific roadmaps and the pseudoscientific data to draw them. During the early years, the few British attempts at family tracing and eugenic research were isolated and unsuccessful. Hence, while the population problems and chronic class conflicts were quite British, the proposed solutions were entirely American.
Galton died in 1911, more than a year before the First International Congress, but his marginalization had begun when Mendel's work was rediscovered in the United States. Quaint theories of felicitous marriages among the better classes, yielding incrementally superior offspring, were discarded in favor of wholesale reproductive prohibition for the inferior classes. Eugenic thought may have originated in Britain, but eugenic action began in America.
In the first decade of the twentieth century, while Galton and his circle were still publishing thin pamphlets, positing revolutionary positions at elite intellectual get-togethers and establishing a modest biometric laboratory, America was busy building a continent-wide political and scientific infrastructure. In that first decade, no government agency in Britain officially supported eugenics as a movement. But in America, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and its network of state college agricultural stations lent its support as early as 1903. Galton in London did not enjoy the backing of billionaires. But on Long Island, the vast fortunes of Carnegie, Rockefeller and Harriman financed unprecedented eugenic research and lobbying organizations that developed international reach. By 1904, when Galton and his colleagues were still moderating their theories, Charles Davenport was already creating the foundations of a movement that he would soon commandeer from his British predecessors. Before 1912, the Eugenics Record Office would begin extensive family-by-family lineage investigations in prisons, hospitals and poor communities. In England the one major attempt at tracing family pedigrees was a lone, protracted effort that took more than a decade to complete and another decade to publish. [2]
Americanized eugenics began to take root in England in the twentieth century under the pen of a Liverpool surgeon named Robert Reid Rentoul. In many ways, Rentoul helped lay the philosophical groundwork for British eugenics, and he would become a leading voice in the movement. A distinguished member of the Royal College of Surgeons, Rentoul worked with the feebleminded and had undertaken intense studies of America's eugenic activities. In 1903, he published a twenty-six-page pamphlet, Proposed Sterilization of Certain Mental and Physical Degenerates: An Appeal to Asylum Managers and Others. He urged both voluntary and compulsory sterilization to prevent reproduction by the unfit. As precedents, Rentoul devoted several pages to the legislative efforts in Minnesota, Colorado, Wisconsin and other U.S. states. The pamphlet's appendix included an abstract of Minnesota's early marriage restriction law. Rentoul lobbied for similar legislation in the United Kingdom. In one speech before the influential Medico-Legal Society in London, he proposed that all physicians and lawyers join the call to legalize forced sterilization. [3]
Rentoul's ideas quickly ignited the passions of new eugenic thinkers, including those who gathered at a meeting of the London Sociological Society on the afternoon of May 16, 1904. Galton delivered an important address entitled "Eugenics, its Definition, Scope and Aims," stressing actuarial progress, marriage preferences and general education. "Over-zeal leading to hasty action," he cautioned, "would do harm, by holding out expectations of a near golden age, which will certainly be falsified and cause the science to be discredited." He added, "The first and main point is to secure the general intellectual acceptance of Eugenics as a hopeful and most important study." But the famous novelist and eugenic extremist H. G. Wells then rose to publicly rebuke Galton, bluntly declaring, "It is in the sterilization of failures, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies." On that afternoon in Britain the lines were clearly drawn -- it was positive eugenics versus negative eugenics. [4]
Rentoul continued his study of American eugenics throughout 1905, specifically fixing on the emerging notion of "race suicide" as espoused by the likes of American raceologist E. A. Ross and President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1906, Rentoul published his own in-depth eugenic polemic entitled Race Culture; Or, Race Suicide?, which became a veritable blueprint for the British eugenic activism to come. In page after page, Rentoul mounted statistics and percentages to document Great Britain's mental and physical social deterioration. But as remedies, Rentoul held up America's marriage restriction laws, advocacy by American physicians for sterilization, and recent state statutes. He explained the fine points of the latest legislative action in New Jersey, Delaware, Minnesota, Ohio, Indiana, North Dakota and other U.S. jurisdictions. "I cannot express too high an appreciation," Rentoul wrote, "of the many kindnesses of the U.S.A. officials to me in supplying information." [5]
Rentoul declared that he vastly preferred Indiana's vasectomies and salpingectomies to the castrations performed in Kansas and Massachusetts. But he added that the Kansas physician's pioneering efforts at asexualization were enough to justify "erecting a memorial to his memory." In one chapter, Rentoul cited an incident involving Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the father of the future Supreme Court justice. When called to attend to a mentally unstable child, Dr. Holmes complained that to be effective, "the consultation should have been held some fifty years ago!" Rentoul also quoted Alexander Graham Bell's eugenic denigration of charity: "Philanthropy in this country is doing everything possible to encourage marriage among deaf mutes." Rentoul urged his countrymen to duplicate American-style surveys of foreigners housed in its mental institutions and other asylums. [6]
Rentoul summarized his vision for Britain's eugenic future with these words: "It is to these States we must look for guidance if we wish to ... lessen the chances of children being degenerates." [7]
Of course Rentoul's scientific treatise also addressed America's race problem in a eugenic context. In a passage immediately following references to such strictly local curses as Jack the Ripper, Rentoul asserted, "The negro is seldom content with sexual intercourse with the white woman, but culminates his sexual furor by killing the woman, sometimes taking out her womb and eating it. If the United States of America people would cease to prostitute their high mental qualities and recognize this negro as a sexual pervert, it would reflect greater credit upon them; and if they would sterilize this mentally afflicted creature instead of torturing him, they would have a better right to pose as sound thinkers and social reformers." [8]
The next year a few dozen eugenic activists formed a provisional committee, which a year later, in 1908, constituted itself as the Eugenics Education Society. Many of its founders were previously members of the Moral Education League, concerned with alcoholism and the proper application of charity. David Starr Jordan, president of the Eugenics Section of the American Breeders Association, was made a vice president of the Eugenics Education Society. The new group's biological agenda was to cut off the bloodlines of British degenerates, mainly paupers, employing the techniques pioneered in the United States. The two approved methods were sterilization -- both voluntary and compulsory -- and forcible detention, a concept euphemized under the umbrella term "segregation." Sympathetic government and social service officers were intrigued but ultimately unconvinced, because England, although steeped in centuries of class prejudice, was nonetheless not yet ready for American-style coercive eugenics. [9]
True, some in government explored eugenic ideas early on. For example, in August of 1906 the Lancashire Asylums Board unanimously resolved: "In view of the alarming increase of the insane portion of our population, immediate steps [should] be taken to inquire into the best means for preventing the propagation of those mentally afflicted .... " But that resolution only called for an inquiry. Then the office of the secretary of state considered establishing a penal work settlement for convicts, vagrants and the weak-minded on the Island of Lundy, thus setting the stage for segregating defectives. But this proposal floundered as well. [10]
It wasn't that England lacked the legal or sociological precedents for a eugenics program. Pauperism was thought to be hereditary and had long been judged criminal. Class conflict was centuries old. But America's solutions simply did not translate. Marriage restriction and compulsory segregation were anathema to British notions of liberty and freedom. Even Galton believed that regulated marriages were an unrealistic proposition in a democratic society. He knew that "human nature would never brook interference with the freedom of marriage," and admitted as much publicly. In his published memoir, he recounted his original error in even suggesting such utopian marriages. "I was too much disposed to think of marriage under some regulation," he conceded. [11]
As for sterilization, officials and physicians alike understood that the use of a surgeon's knife for either sterilization or castration, even with the consent of the family or a court-appointed guardian, was plainly criminal. This was no abstruse legal interpretation. Reviewers commonly concluded that such actions would be an "unlawful wounding," in violation of Section Twenty of the 1861 Offense against the Person Act. Thus fears of imprisonment haunted every discussion of the topic. Ministry of Health officials understood that in the event of unexpected death arising from the procedure, guardians or parents and physicians alike could be prosecuted for manslaughter. Such warnings were regularly repeated in the correspondence of the Eugenics Education Society, in memorandums from the Ministry of Health, and in British medical journals. Even the Journal of the American Medical Association and Eugenical News made the point clear. [12]
America enjoyed a global monopoly on eugenic sterilization for the first decades of the twentieth century. What was strictly illegal in the United Kingdom was merely extralegal -- a gray area -- in America. Therefore Indiana prison physician Harry Clay Sharp was able to sterilize scores of inmates long before his state passed enabling legislation in 1907. Moreover, while American states maintained control over their own medical laws, in Britain only Parliament could pass such legislation. British eugenicists understood what they did about sterilization by observing the American experience.
Nor did organized British eugenics immediately launch any field studies to trace the ancestries of suspected degenerates. Indeed, the whole idea of family investigation caused discomfort to many in Britain, especially members of the peerage, who cherished their lineages and genealogies. Eugenicists believed that the firstborn in any family was more likely to suffer crippling diseases and insanity than later children, and this undermined the inheritance concepts attached to primogeniture, by which the eldest often inherited everything. Essentially, they thought the peerage itself had become unsound. In fact, Galton and his chief disciple, Karl Pearson, described the House of Lords as being occupied by men "who have not taken the pains necessary to found or preserve an able stock." [13]
Only a sea change in British popular sentiment from top to bottom, and an overhaul of legal restraints, would enable eugenical activity in England. Hence the Eugenics Education Society well understood that education would indeed have to be its middle name. That mission never changed. Almost twenty years later, when the organization shortened its name to the Eugenics Society, its chief organizers admitted, "It was believed that the object of the Society being primarily education was so universally established as to make the word education in the title redundant." [14] In reality, of course, "education" meant little more than constant propagandizing, lobbying, letter writing, pamphleteering, and petitioning from the intellectual and scientific sidelines, where British eugenics dwelled.
From its inception in 1908, the Eugenics Education Society had adopted American attitudes on negative eugenics. But with a movement devoid of any firsthand research in English society, the newly born EES was reduced to appropriating American theory from Davenport and company, and then trying to force it into the British sociological context. Although an aging Galton agreed to become the society's first "honorary president," by 1910 Galton and Pearson both understood that their ideas were not really welcome in the society. The Galton Laboratory and the simple biometric ancestral outlines recorded at various collaborating institutions by Pearson were seen as innocuous vestiges of the current movement. The society's main function was suasion, not science. [15]
Throughout late 1909, parlor lectures were given to inquisitive audiences in Derby, Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham. Groups in Liverpool, Glasgow, Cardiff and London scheduled talks as well. Such propagandizing was repugnant to Galton and Pearson, who saw themselves as scientists. Moreover, while monies were being raised for a Lecture Fund to defray the society's travel expenses, much of Pearson's research remained unpublished. In a January 3, 1910, interview with The Standard of London, Pearson complained about "four or five memoirs [scientific reports] on social questions of which the publication is delayed from lack of funds ... the problem of funds is becoming so difficult that the question of handing it over to be published outside this country has already arisen." Almost derisively, he clarified, "The object of the Galton Laboratory is scientific investigation, and as scientific investigators, the staff do not attempt any form of propaganda. That must be left to outside agencies and associations." [16]
By 1912, America's negative eugenics had been purveyed to likeminded social engineers throughout Europe, especially in Germany and the Scandinavian nations, where theories of Nordic superiority were well received. Hence the First International Congress of Eugenics attracted several hundred delegates and speakers from the United States, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and Norway. [17]
Major Leonard Darwin, son of Charles Darwin and head of the EES, was appointed congress president. But the working vice presidents included several key Americans, including race theorist David Starr Jordan, ERO scientific director Alexander Graham Bell, and Bleeker van Wagenen, a trustee of New Jersey's Vineland Training School for Feebleminded Girls and Boys and secretary of the ABA's sterilization committee. Of course Charles Davenport also served as a working vice president. [18]
Five days of lectures and research papers were dominated by the U.S. contingent and their theories of racial eugenics and compulsory sterilization. The report from what was dubbed the "American Committee on Sterilization" was heralded as a highlight of the meeting. One prominent British eugenicist, writing in a London newspaper, identified Davenport as an American "to whom all of us in this country are immensely indebted, for the work of his office has far outstripped anything of ours .... " [19]
Although Galton had died by this point, a young Scottish physician and eugenic activist by the name of Caleb Saleeby informed his colleagues that if Galton were still alive, he would agree that eugenics was now an American science. If Galton could "read the recent reports of the American Eugenics Record Office," wrote Saleeby, "which have added more to our knowledge of human heredity in the last three years than all former work on that subject put together, [Galton] would quickly seek to set our own work in this country upon the same sure basis." [20]
By the final gavel of the First International Congress of Eugenics, Galton's hope of finding the measurable physical qualities of man had become officially passe among British eugenicists. Saleeby cheerfully reported, "'Biometry' ... might have never existed so far as the Congress was concerned." Indeed, Pearson declined to even attend the congress. In newspaper articles, Saleeby denounced biometrics as a mere "pseudoscience. " [21]
The society had by now successfully purveyed the notion that defective individuals needed to be segregated. Whenever social legislation arose, the society's several dozen members would implore legislators and key decision makers to consider the eugenic agenda. For example, when the Poor Laws were being revised in 1909, a typical form letter went out. "The legislation for the reform of the Poor Law will be prominently before parliament. It is most essential that, when the reforms are made, they should include provisions for the segregation of the most defective portion of the community; it will be the business of the Society, during the coming year, to appeal to the country on this ground .... " [22]
But the crusade to mass incarcerate and segregate the unfit did not achieve real impetus until England considered a Mental Deficiency Act in 1913. Like so many freestanding social issues invaded by eugenics, mental illness, feeblemindedness and pauperism had long been the subject of legendary argument in England. From 1886 to 1899, Britain passed an Idiots Act, a Lunacy Act, and a Defective and Epileptic Children Act. With the arrival of the twentieth century, the nation sought an updated approach. [23]
From 1904 to 1908, a Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feebleminded had deliberated the question of segregating and sterilizing the mentally unfit. The commission's ranks included several British eugenicists who had formed other private associations ostensibly devoted to the welfare of the feebleminded, but which were actually devoted to promoting eugenic-style confinement and surgical measures. The associations sounded charitable and benevolent. But such groups as The National Association for the Care and Protection of the Feebleminded and The Lancashire and Cheshire Association for the Permanent Care of the Feebleminded really wanted to ensure that the "feebleminded" -- whatever that meant -- did not reproduce more of their kind. [24]
The ambitious British eugenic plans encompassed not just those who seemed mentally inferior, but also criminals, debtors, paupers, alcoholics, recipients of charity and "other parasites." Despite passionate protestations from British eugenicists, however, the commission declined to recommend either widespread segregation or any form of sterilization. [25]
But eugenicists continued their crusade. In 1909 and 1910, other so-called welfare societies for the feebleminded, such as the Cambridge Association for the Care of the Feebleminded, contacted the Eugenics Education Society to urge more joint lobbying of the government to sanction forced sterilization. Mass letter-writing campaigns began. Every candidate for Parliament was sent a letter demanding they "support measures ... that tend to discourage parenthood on the part of the feebleminded and other degenerate types." As in America, sterilization advocacy focused first and foremost on the most obviously impaired, in this case, the feebleminded, but then escalated to include "other degenerate types." Seeking support for the Mental Deficiency Act, society members mailed letters to every sitting member of Parliament, long lists of social welfare officials, and virtually every education committee in England. When preliminary governmental committees shrank from support, the society simply redoubled its letter-writing campaign. [26]
Finally the government agreed to consider the legislation. Home Secretary Winston Churchill, an enthusiastic supporter of eugenics, reassured one group of eugenicists that Britain's 120,000 feebleminded persons "should, if possible, be segregated under proper conditions so that their curse died with them and was not transmitted to future generations." The plan called for the creation of vast colonies. Thousands of Britain's unfit would be moved into these colonies to live out their days. [27]
But while on its surface the proposed Mental Deficiency Act seemed confined to the feebleminded, many of whom already resided in institutions, the bill was actually a stalking-horse for more draconian measures. The society planned to slip in language that could snare millions of unwanted, pauperized and other eugenically unsound families. EES president Major Leonard Darwin revealed his true feelings in a speech to the adjunct Cambridge University Eugenics Society.
"The first step to be taken," he explained, "ought to be to establish some system by which all children at school reported by their instructors to be specially stupid, all juvenile offenders awaiting trial, all ins-and-outs at workhouses, and all convicted prisoners should be examined by trained experts in mental defects in order to place on a register the names of all those thus ascertained to be definitely abnormal." Like his colleagues in America, Darwin wanted to identify not just the so-called unfit, but their entire families as well. [28]
Darwin emphasized, "From the Eugenic standpoint this method would no doubt be insufficient, for the defects of relatives are only second in importance to the defects of the individuals themselves -- indeed, in some cases [the defects of relatives] are of far greater importance." British eugenicists were convinced that just seeming normal was not enough -- the unfit were ancestrally flawed. Even if an individual appeared normal and begat normal children, he or she could still be a "carrier" who needed to be sterilized. One society leader, Lord Riddell, explained, "Mendelian theory has disclosed that human characteristics are transmitted through carriers in a weird fashion. Mental-deficients may have one normal child who procreates normal children; another deficient child who procreates deficients and another apparently normal child who procreates some deficients and some normals. Mathematically, this description may not be quite accurate, but it will serve the purpose." [29]
More than a decade after Rentoul first proposed mimicking U.S. laws, British eugenicists now lobbied to install American-style marriage restrictions. Once again, it was the seemingly "normal" people that British eugenicists feared. Saleeby explained, "The importance ... will become apparent when we consider the real meaning of the American demonstration that many serious defects are Mendelian recessives. It is that there are many persons in the community, personally normal, who are nevertheless 'impure dominants' in the Mendelian sense, and half of whose germ cells accordingly carry a defect. According to a recent calculation, made in one of the bulletins of the Eugenics Record Office, about one-third of the population in the United States is thus capable of conveying mental deficiency, the 'insane tendency,' epilepsy, or some other defect .... Their number would be increased ... [unless] Dr. Davenport's advice as to the mating of defectives with normal persons were followed, for all their offspring would then belong to this category." [30]
Leonard Darwin and his colleagues hoped "a system will also be established for the examination of the family history of all those placed on the register as being unquestionably mentally abnormal, especially as regards the criminality, insanity, ill-health and pauperism of their relatives, and not omitting to note cases of marked ability." Their near kin were to be shipped off to facilities, and marriages would be prohibited or annulled. [31]
But once the plan to incarcerate entire families became known, revolted critics declared that the eugenic aspects of the Mental Deficiency Act would "sentence innocent people to imprisonment for life." In a newspaper article, Saleeby strongly denied such segregation need always be permanent. In a section subheadlined "No Life Sentences," Saleeby suggested, "All decisions to segregate these people must be subject to continual revision .... " [32] Under the society's actual plan, however, incarcerations of ordinary people would occur not because of any observable illness or abnormality -- but simply because of a suspect lineage.
Leonard Darwin authored a revealing article on the proposed law in February of 1912 for the society's publication, Eugenics Review. He confessed to the membership, "It is quite certain that no existing democratic government would go as far as we Eugenists think right in the direction of limiting the liberty of the subject for the sake of the racial qualities of future generations. It is here we find the practical limitation to the possibility of immediate reform: for it is unwise to endeavor to push legislation beyond the bounds set by public opinion because of the dangerous reaction which would probably result from neglecting to pay attention to the prejudices of the electorate." [33]
The First International Congress of Eugenics convened in London in July of 1912, at the height of the Parliamentary debate about the Mental Deficiency Act. Saleeby hoped the American contingent could offer their latest science on feeblemindedness as grist to sway lawmakers. But while the American delegation had spent over a year preparing a report on methods to terminate defective family lines, they were focused on sterilization of the unfit, not segregation. On the eve of the congress, Saleeby bemoaned the lost opportunity in a newspaper editorial. "It so chances, most unfortunately," he wrote, "that though the American Committee on Sterilization will present a preliminary report on the practicability of surgical measures for the prevention of parenthood on the part of defectives, no paper is being read on Mental Deficiency, of all subjects that which we should most have desired to hear discussed and reported widely at the present time." [34]
Saleeby added, "Dr. Davenport, the director of the American Eugenics Office ... is to read a paper, but unfortunately he will not deal with the feebleminded." Nonetheless, Saleeby saw progress. "Four years after a Report [by the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feebleminded] which the American Students altogether superseded in 1909, thanks to their introduction of the Mendelian method, we have at last got a Mental Deficiency Bill through its second reading in the House of Commons." [35]
Parliament, however, could not endorse the wholesale segregation into colonies envisioned by the society. Political parties clashed on the issue. Catholics, laborites and libertarians staunchly attacked the legislation. At the end of 1912, Eugenics Review informed its members, "It is with the deepest regret that we have had to relinquish all hope of seeking this much-needed measure become law this Session." The clauses most important to the society were stricken. Clause 50, for example, had mandated an American-style marriage restriction -- it was rejected. But eugenics' supporters in the House of Commons promised to revive the bill for the next session. "Our efforts to secure this result," Eugenics Review continued, "must not, however, be in the slightest degree relaxed .... " Speaking to its several branches and affiliates throughout the nation, the publication urged: "Members of Eugenic societies should continue to urge on their representatives in Parliament by every available means ... and should unsparingly condemn their abandonment on account of the mere demands of party." [36]
Throughout 1913, the society continued to press for eugenic action along American lines. One eugenically-minded doctor reintroduced the marriage restriction clause, asking that existing marriages to so-called defectives be declared "null and void." This clause was refused. So were sweeping efforts to round up entire families. But in August of 1913, much of the bill was passed, partly for eugenic reasons and partly for social policy reasons. Britain's Mental Deficiency Act took effect in April of 1914. The act defined four classes: idiot, imbecile, feebleminded and moral defective. People so identified could be institutionalized in special colonies, sanitariums or hospitals established for the purpose. A Board of Control, essentially replacing the old Lunacy Commission, was established in each area to take custody of defectives and transport them to the colonies or homes. A significant budget was allocated to fund the new national policy. [37]
In many ways, this measure was simply an attempt to provide care and treatment for the needy. Colonies for epileptics, the insane, the feebleminded and those suffering from other maladies were already a part of Britain's national medical landscape. But to eugenicists, institutionalization was the same as incarceration. In a journal article, Saleeby explained to British readers, "The permanent care for which the Act provides is, under another name, the segregation which the principles of negative eugenics requires .... In the United States, public opinion and understanding appear to be so far advanced that the American reader need not be appealed to." [38]
But as the law was finally rendered, the families of identified individuals were in no danger of being rounded up. Marriage restrictions were also rejected. The society admitted that the watered-down act "does not go as far as some of its promoters may have wished." In a review, one of its members conceded that legislators could not in good conscience enact profound new policies "where so much is debatable, so much untried, or still in experimental stages." Quickly, however, twenty-four Poor Law unions -- charitable organizations-in the north of England purchased land to create colonies. Others proceeded much more slowly. It was all complicated because standards for certifying mental defectives varied widely from place to place. [39]
The eugenicists intended to press on, but several months later they were interrupted by the outbreak of World War 1.
***
American eugenicists enjoyed a gargantuan research establishment, well funded and well staffed. The list of official and quasi-official bodies supporting or engaged in eugenical activities was long: the Carnegie Institution's Experimental Station, the Eugenics Record Office, the Eugenics Section of the American Breeders Association (which had by now changed its name to the American Genetic Association), the U.S. Army, the Department of Agriculture, the Labor Department, agencies of the State Department, and a Committee of Congress. Moreover, scores of state, county and municipal agencies and institutions added their contributions, as did a network of biology, zoology, genetic and eugenic departments at some of the country's most respected private and state universities. Buttressing all of it was a network of organizations, such as the Eugenics Research Association in New York, the Human Betterment Foundation in California, the Race Betterment Foundation in Michigan, as well as professional organizations throughout the medical and scientific fields. A labyrinth of American laws, enough to fill a five hundred-page guide to sterilization legislation, innervated the sterilization enterprise. [40]
At any given time there were hundreds of field workers, clinicians, physicians, social workers, bureaucrats and raceologists fanning out across America, pulling files from dimly-lit county record halls, traipsing through bucolic foothills and remote rural locations, measuring skulls and chest sizes in prisons, asylums and health sanitariums, and scribbling notes in the clinics and schools of urban slums. They produced a prodigious flow of books, journal articles, reports, columns, tables, charts, facts and figures where tallies, ratios and percentages danced freely, bowed and curtsied to make the best possible impression, and could be relied upon for encores as required. Little of it made sense, and even less of it was based on genuine science. But there was so much of it that policymakers were often cowed by the sheer volume of it.
British eugenic groups were merely eager end users.
But the Eugenics Education Society understood that it would be nearly impossible to apply American eugenic principles to the British social context without native research. Certainly, Galton and Pearson had been devoted to statistics from the beginning. Galton was the one who came up with the idea of family pedigree. His first efforts at organized human measurement, self-financed, were launched in the 1880s. Galton even created his own short-lived Eugenics Record Office in 1904, which was soon merged with Pearson's Biometric Laboratory. But lack of funds, lack of manpower and lack of momentum made these slow and careful pursuits far too tentative for the new breed of British eugenicists. Although pedigrees were faithfully published in the Galton Laboratory's multivolume Treasury of Human Inheritance, this was done not so much to show transmissible flaws as a prelude to sterilization, but rather to track the incidence of disease and defect, demonstrating the need to carefully control one's progeny. [41]
After a few years, Pearson and his circle of biometricians became bitter and isolated from the movement at large. At one point the Carnegie Institution routinely dispatched a staff scientist from its Department of Physiological Psychology, Professor Walter Miles, to tour European eugenic and biological laboratories. Miles made a proper appointment at Pearson's laboratory with the receptionist. But when Miles arrived, he was rudely refused entry. Nor was Miles even allowed to announce his presence or leave a message. Miles complained in a confidential memo, "She said that Dr. Pearson was an extremely busy man and could not be interrupted." The Carnegie representative was also denied a courtesy tour in the computational section of the lab away from Pearson. "The porter," continued Miles, "would not even take my card with a written statement on it that I had called and was exceedingly sorry ... not to have been able to visit the Laboratory." An irritated Carnegie lab director in Boston later demanded an explanation of Pearson. An antagonistic exchange of letters culminated in a blunt message from the Boston director to Pearson declaring that the Carnegie Institution "will have to forgo the privilege of having personal contact with you or your associates .... It is more than obvious that visitors are not wanted." [42]
Galtonian biometrics and sample pedigrees remained handy relics within the British eugenics establishment, but the Eugenics Education Society was convinced it needed more substantial homegrown research to advance its legislative agenda. It tried to utilize ERO-style pedigrees in 1910 when a Poor Law reform committee asked for information. From the society's point of view, the "conclusion that pauperism is due to inherent defects which are hereditarily transmitted" was inescapable. In some cases pauper pedigrees reached back four generations, enabling society lobbyists to declare, "There is no doubt that there exists a hereditary class of persons who will not make any attempt to work." [43]
Yet the Royal Commission on the Poor Law -- in both its minority and majority reports -- found the few cases unconvincing. The eugenic viewpoint "was almost wholly neglected," as the society's liaison committee bemoaned. "It soon appeared," a 1910-1911 society annual report admitted, "that before anything could be ascertained concerning the existence of a biological cause of pauperism, research must be made into a number of pauper family histories." [44]
Ernest J. Lidbetter stepped forward to emulate the American model. He would lead the society's charge toward a semblance of convincing research. But it took him twenty-two years to complete his work and publish his results. When he eventually did so, it was amid accusations and acrimony by and among his colleagues. [45]
Lidbetter was neither a physician nor a scientist. Since 1898, he had been a case investigator with the Poor Law Authority in London. He was eventually assigned to Bethnal Green, one the East End's most poverty-wracked districts. It had been a zone of impoverishment for decades. Once the society began probing pauper heritage, the eugenic match was made. In about 1910, Lidbetter became a proponent of the society's hereditarian view of pauperism, speaking to his fellow relief officers through the Metropolitan Relieving Officer's Association, university circles and at willing venues. The EES thanked Lidbetter for his help when several workhouses contributed family tree data to the society. [46]
Lidbetter's outlook was expressed perfectly in his lecture to a few dozen colleagues one Wednesday night in 1913, at a board meeting of the Metropolitan Relieving Officer's Association. Research into hereditary pauperism, far advanced in America and accepted in many official circles, was just starting in England. Eugenic notions were completely new to his audience. Lidbetter displayed heredity diagrams and insisted that England was plagued by a biologically distinct "race of chronic pauper stocks." He insisted that doubters "had to be answered, not in the light of their opinion, but by a series of cases checked, tested and confirmed over and over again." Hence he urged their cooperation in assembling pauper pedigrees from amongst their poverty cases. [47]