Eugenics in Britain is a much-explored field. Since the pioneering studies of George Mosse, Daniel Kevles and others, the opinions of Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, Caleb Saleeby and Leonard Darwin, R A. Fisher and J.B.S. Haldane have become widely known. With the exception of the USA, which is often examined along with Britain, the impact of eugenics in other European countries and on other continents is only now becoming clear, as a recent reviewer points out. [1] That fact does not, however, mean that only an international approach, desirable as that undoubtedly is, remains the sole task for scholars. [2] There is as yet confusion about eugenics in Britain.
The most pressing problem in the historiography of eugenics, though one which most scholars assume to have been settled, concerns the relative stress laid by eugenicists on class and race. The latter, ostensibly more pernicious emphasis, is usually associated with the strict hereditarianism and its 'perversion' into blood and soil ideology in certain strands of Rassenhygiene of Weimar Germany and the racially motivated genocide of the Third Reich. [3] The former, by contrast, is associated with the class-ridden societies of Britain and, to a lesser extent, the USA. The middle classes in Britain, so the assessment goes, felt trapped between a still dominant old elite and an emerging worlcing class clamouring for rights. The differential birth-rate between the professional classes and the fast-breeding lower orders, especially the 'submerged' (the lumpenproletariat) and those labelled 'feebleminded', was supposedly at the root of the eugenics movement, which was just one movement among many through which the middle classes could articulate their fears and aspirations. [4] Typical of this position was the statement made by the Oxford philosopher and eugenicist Ferdinand Schiller: 'We must get rid, therefore, of our unproductive and parasitic classes, alike of the idle rich and of the unemployables, and stimulate the rest to more and more efficiency.' [5]
In this chapter, I investigate the role that the notion of 'race' played in British eugenics. Doing so is no idle concern or simple matter; it should not be thought either that the connection is obvious, or that it has been long-proven. In fact, quite the opposite is the case, as the above comments indicate. The existing historiography on eugenics in Britain has not yet accounted for the impetus that race-thinking gave to the plans of the eugenicists. I will show that although class concerns were a major factor behind the ideas and enquiries of the British eugenicists, no less important was a concern with race. British eugenics cannot so simply be separated from an ostensibly 'harder' continental school, since race-thinking, so often overlooked by historians, was integral to the worldview of the British eugenicists. The centrality of race is shown in the way in which (mainly Jewish) immigrants were discussed, and in the assumptions appealed to, common since the early nineteenth century, of a racial hierarchy which saw the white European at the top and the black African at the bottom. This assumption, which encompassed fears of miscegenation and hybridity, encouraging prurient interest in the sexualities of 'inferior races', was one which would shape eugenic concepts and methods of enquiry for many years, even after the development of genetic science ought to have shown such racial schemas to be no more than creations of fantasy. Concentrating on texts of the Edwardian and interwar periods, I will show this continuity of thought across the whole spectrum of eugenicists, from the socially progressive to the protofascist. I end by looking at how investigations into race-mixing carried out by the Eugenics Society after the Second World War were still informed by the same assumptions about race. What all of these sources show is the inseparability of race and class in the writings of the British eugenicists.
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For some eugenicists, race was the primary concern. Although their numbers were few and their views were not popular, at least in terms of their impact on legislation, they served an important function in legitimising the opinions of those who shared many of their assumptions but would not go as far in their prognoses. It was, as J.A. Hobson put it, 'the ripest and most audacious example of the racial eugenics, upon which ruling classes and ruling nations everywhere rely, when they desire to support their will-to-power by quasi-scientific authority'. [6]
One such was Robert Reid Rentoul, whose credentials were impeccable: a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, the General Medical Council of Education, the Medico-Legal Society, and the Society for the Study of Inebriety, Rentoul had given evidence to the Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded. He was nevertheless one of the most outspoken of the eugenicists, as his book Race Culture; or Race Suicide? of 1906 shows. Taking it as read that environment has little or no bearing on degeneracy -- 'Heredity is the great cause' -- Rentoul set out to demonstrate the necessity of dealing harshly with degeneracy wherever it may be found. And for Rentoul this meant less the 'feeble-minded' synonymous with the lower classes, but alien immigrants and sexual 'perverts'. Rentoul indulged in an attack in which the ferocity of the language mimics what it condemns, revealing both a fear of and attraction to it.
On the subject of miscegenation, Rentoul's prurience is unmistakable: 'The intermarriage of British with foreigners should not be encouraged. A few of us know the terrible monstrosities produced by the intermarriage of the white man and the black . . . From the standpoint of race culture it is difficult to understand the action of those who advocate the naturalization of foreigners.' [7] He can only explain it by arguing that the 'race instinct' is dying out (p. 5). In order to make an argument for the sterilisation of degenerates, Rentoul has the following to say about 'sexual perverts'. It is worth quoting at length, in order to gain a sense of the breathlessness of Rentoul's prose:
Hysteria and nymphomania are but a name for the symptoms, while the removal of the ovaries or uterus often gives marked relief to those diseased. The surgeon knows that the elderly man with enlarged prostate soon loses his uncontrollable sexual desire when he has had his prostate removed; while the poor demented creatures who slink up back entries and display their sexual organs to children, or attack young girls, are as well known to the police as are the habitual inebriates and habitual criminals. 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 [sic] 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. (pp. 31-32)
The connection between race and sexuality has been often noted, both in colonial and metropolitan situations. [8] And in the United States, many eugenicists -- such as Charles Davenport, Paul Popenoe and Roswell H. Johnson, Edward Murray East and Herbert Spencer Jennings [9] -- advocated exactly what Rentoul proposed, with the result that sterilisation laws were implemented in many states. Here the sex-race connection is laid bare.
Rentoul, after explaining the sexual voracity of negroes and other degenerates, went on to elucidate the dangers of immigration. In particular he was shocked by the nonchalance displayed by his fellow Englishmen in the face of widespread naturalisation of foreigners, who, with their names changed, could more easily pass unnoticed among the English. 'The immigration of diseased, insane, criminals, and pauper persons into this country is a point which has not been sufficiently noted,' says Rentoul' The Englishman must not continue to be seduced by the flattery of foreigners, praising 'Britain's greatness', for this prevents him 'from seeing that race instinct and race preservation are his first, and sometimes his only duty' (pp. 101-04). Once again, the threat posed by immigrants is not one of higher taxes, but one of racial degeneration.
A similar scenario to Rentoul's is presented by Charles Armstrong, in a book advertised as explaining that a new moral code must replace the old, 'if we of the Anglo-Saxon Race are not to lose for all time our place in the Vanguard'. [10] The Survival of the Unfittest is one of the most racially motivated of all the eugenicist writings, from its opening claim that 'England, possessing the finest human stock in the world, is at the present time doing all in her power to destroy it' to his final call for a 'New Party ... sincerely devoted to the causes of Retrenchment, Freedom and Eugenic Reform', a call which (in name at least) adumbrated Oswald Mosley. [11] In between, Armstrong argued for the classification of nations along the same line as families -- 'there is no reason why C3 peoples should hold and neglect vast fertile territories, as at present, while others which are A1 or A2 are confined by the status quo within narrow limits' (p. 90) -- and explained Bolshevism with racial categories -- 'the deliberately devilish policy of these Russian Jews is to use eventually the whole of Asia's immense resources in population and wealth for the furtherance of their aim -- world revolution, or the suppression of civilization' (p. 92). Basically, Armstrong's book was an attack on democracy and its founding belief in the equality of human beings. Armstrong simply stated the argument of the mainstream eugenicists -- that humanitarian policies, and civilisation generally, have led to the survival of the weak -- and extended it to its logical conclusion.
One other writer who was also fond of taking arguments to their logical conclusions was Anthony Mario Ludovici, the author, as we have seen, of many books on Nietzsche, Tory revivalism, anti-feminism, eugenics, race and religion. Widely read and wide-ranging, Ludovici made a name for himself as an erudite and outspoken reactionary. On the question of eugenics he was unstinting. Opposing the Eugenics Society's official position on voluntary sterilisation because he believed this would only be taken up by the intelligent, he advocated, until his death in 1971, extreme forms of negative eugenics. Deriving his position from an understanding of the Ubermensch popular among early interpreters of Nietzsche, Ludovici celebrated the qualities of the strong and denigrated those of the weak. With this division between weak and strong, one has to accept, so Ludovici says, the inevitable consequence that someone must suffer. Unlike under socialist and communist schemes, Ludovici's proposed eugenic reformers 'must do what no society hitherto has ventured to do, i.e., they must determine by law beforehand who is and who is not to be sacrificed'. [12] This he saw as perfectly feasible: 'where they take over the whole burden, as they do in this country, of indigent lunatics and other degenerates, they have the right to exercise all the means at their disposal for preventing degenerates from being born'. [13]
Thus, Ludovici advocated infanticide -- 'the tendency will be, in a society whose principle it is to sacrifice the less to the greater, to proceed to some kind of controlled and legalized infanticide' [14] -- incest -- 'we are entering upon an era in which miscegenation for human society will be discredited and inbreeding and possibly even incest adopted in its stead' [15] -- and, eventually, mass-murder -- 'the time has come to recognize the inevitability of violence and sacrifice, and consciously to select the section or elements in the world or the nation that should be sacrificed.' [16]
Ludovici, despite these strident opinions, was by no means an outcast from the eugenics movement. His books, published in a steady stream throughout the interwar period, were reviewed in the Eugenics Review (both favourably and unfavourably), and as well as his work on Nietzsche and his art column for the New Age in 1913-1914, he wrote for the Cornhill Magazine, the conservative English Review and scientific publications such as Marriage Hygiene.
Particularly interesting are Ludovici's dealings with the Eugenics Society. In correspondence with C. P. Blacker, one of the society's leading lights, he argued that as well as the pre-natal selection which Blacker advocated, there had to be, as in animal husbandry, some form of post-natal selection, 'either by total elimination when the aberration is too pronounced, or by the selection of a particular member of a brood or the particular product of a cross for further breeding'. [17] The society was not put off; indeed, it wrote to Ludovici asking him to join them, but he refused on account of their co-operation with religious groups and their promotion of contraception. The secretary wrote back, accepting the validity of the criticism, but arguing that the society was trying 'to convert Christianity to Eugenics', adding that 'I greatly hope that we shall not hereby be debarred from occasionally getting your help in debates and discussions.' [18] Nor was Blacker, the same man who after 1945 decried the extremism of pre-war eugenics, personally affronted, and he and Ludovici remained friends. In 1932 Ludovici invited Blacker to stay with him in his holiday home in Lewes, and the following year Blacker sent Ludovici a pedigree schedule he had drawn up, saying that it 'may be of interest to the English mistery [sic],' the proto-fascist group with which Ludovici was involved. [19]
Although these were extremists, there were too many of them, and their views were not so far removed from those of the mainstream ideas on race, to dismiss them as having little or no bearing on the eugenics movement.
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Where then does the notion that class was the main concern of the eugenicists come from? The idea that there were two strands of eugenic thought, a German one emphasising race and a British one stressing class, was promoted, after the Second World War, by the eugenicists themselves. C.P. Blacker, for example, the first postwar Honorary Secretary of the Eugenics Society, went to some lengths, first to dissociate British eugenics from the 'authoritarian ideal in eugenics' which had 'revealed itself as perhaps the most repellent and dangerous manifestation of German National Socialism'; and second, to attack those in Britain who had used eugenics as a way of disparaging the poor. Blacker acknowledged that what characterised British eugenics had been its stress on class: 'Social class was sometimes put forward as a criterion of eugenic value; and terms were sometimes used such as "lower classes", "riff-raff', "dregs", which seemed to imply a contempt for certain sections of the poor.' In postwar Britain, the intention of eugenicists was to promote neither class, professional achievement, nor personal characteristics, but the 'fulfilment of parental obligations'. [20] The claims served two vital purposes if eugenics was to enjoy a postwar role: to establish a large gap between Nazi racism -- fuelled by hatred and implemented by force -- and British eugenics -- educational and never coercive; and to acknowledge, thereby overcoming, the class bias of pre-war British eugenicists.
Before the war, that is, before the reputation of eugenics was devastated by the revelations of what had occurred in Nazi-occupied Europe, British eugenics was, however, far less predictable than Blacker claimed in 1945. In fact, even among the most moderate figures among British eugenicists, racial and class considerations blurred into one another. Havelock Ellis, for example, the doyen of eugenics and sexology, noted that 'good stocks are ... so widely spread through all classes ... [that] we are not entitled to regard even a slightly greater net increase of the lower social classes as an unmitigated evil', although he was quite ready to accept that eliminating the burden placed on society by the feeble-minded was desirable. [21] According to Ellis, eugenicists should improve the physical condition of the race as a whole (however that was defined), not of any particular class within it.
One can of course object that the way in which eugenicists envisaged improving the race was precisely through manipulating the class framework of society. One can also object that Ellis was too much on the avant-garde of scientific inquiry to be said to be representative. When one analyses the popularisers of eugenics, so the story goes, one arrives at a different, more pedestrian conclusion. [22]
While class-related fears were central to the activities and undertakings of certain eugenicists, they were not the only, nor even the primary reasons for the success of eugenics in the Edwardian and interwar period, a success which is measured not so much in legislative influence -- for here the way was blocked by the existing public health establishment [23] -- but in the way in which eugenic ideas of decay, degeneration, struggle and selection pervaded social and cultural life in this period. There was a multitude of reasons why people became involved with eugenics. A desire to protect the British empire, to resist the political aspirations of feminism and organised labour, and racist beliefs in the superiority of the British (usually 'English') race and hence the need to protect it from immigration and miscegenation were all fundamental motivations, as were less grandiose interests in public health issues. Furthermore, the popularity of eugenics on the left -- and not just on the 'aristocratic socialist' or technocratic, social engineering left of the Fabians and Shavians -- indicates that eugenics had an appeal far beyond that of a middle-class protest movement. [24]
Yet scholars, following Blacker's lead, have continually sought to domesticate British eugenics, surrounding it with an aura of pipe-tobacco fuddydud, as if, like Georgian quatrains and other innocent pursuits, it were to disappear along with the Golden Summer of 1914. But just as the Golden Summer existed for none but a tiny, privileged section of the population, so eugenics was more than a naive movement of tweed-clad fogeys which would be swept aside by advances in genetic science.
That most of the leading eugenicists came from the professional middle classes is undeniable, as Donald MacKenzie and G.R. Searle have demonstrated. [25] But advocating the disappearance of a dirty, disease-ridden and (most importantly) expensive underclass was not their only aim. Confining herself to the Eugenics Society, where the argument is most pertinent, Pauline Mazumdar typifies this anaesthetising historiographical approach, in which the prejudices of the eugenicists appear, despite themselves, as forerunners of a more sensitive approach to public health and social welfare. But if its members did find their motivation in class prejudice, they, and many other eugenicists, were also driven more profoundly by other illiberal aspirations, aspirations which were common across Europe. Just as William Schneider has shown that the French scientific establishment's claim that it was never seduced by a 'hard', Anglo-German, genetic approach to eugenics is somewhat economical with the truth, [26] so the view of British eugenics as separated from a 'continental', racist school is false. 'Race' was not simply a synonym for 'nation' in Edwardian Britain, [27] unless one accepts that the word 'nation' itself carried implicit racist assumptions. Even if not yet having acquired the biologistic hue that Nazi eugenics would later take on, eugenics in Britain was, on both the left and the right, a basically racist enterprise. It remained (and remains) so for the right, whereas the left slowly moved away from this position during the interwar period (though not from the basic eugenicist position that the genetic make-up of society as a whole could and should be improved, as the 1939 Geneticists' Manifesto shows, and not so far that they could not base their research on methods derived from German race scientists).
Of course, there were notable examples of class-prejudice voiced by eugenicists. Ferdinand Schiller has already been cited, but perhaps the most vociferous were William and Catherine Whetham, the husband and wife team who, from William Whetham's position as fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, published a large amount of eugenic literature in the years preceding the First World War. Merely the titles of several pieces explain their position: 'The Extinction of the Upper Classes', 'Eminence and Heredity'. And they lost no time asserting their distinctively pompous claims: 'With the birth-rate falling in other classes, especially the most provident classes, the influence of a high rate of increase in feeble-minded families must mean the rapid and progressive deterioration of the race.' Their research findings that members of pauper families tended to marry other members of pauper families led them to the conclusion that 'such pauperism is due to inherent and inborn defects which are hereditarily transmitted'. [28] Similar concerns were raised by C.T. Ewart, assistant medical officer at Claybury Asylum, in an article devoted to eugenics and degeneracy. Making it clear that degenerates came from the lower classes, Ewart stressed the undesirability of caring for such people by calling the reader's attention to the cost involved, and to the threat posed by them to respectable society. 'Nothing is more wasteful,' he wrote, 'than this army of degenerates who, when they are not living at the cost of the taxpayer in workhouses or prisons, are wandering at large, idling, pilfering, injuring property, and polluting the stream of national health by throwing into it human rubbish in the shape of lunatics, idiots, and criminals.' [29]
Most eugenicists would have concurred. Yet when talking of the need to regenerate the race, almost all claimed that this project would involve people from all classes. James Marchant, the director of the National Social Purity Crusade, a body campaigning for moral rectitude, also believed that the differential birth-rate was a threat to society. Yet he asserted that rectifying the situation was to be achieved 'not by keeping the under dog down, not by levelling down, but by levelling up, and by the creation in all classes of an active sense of parental, social and racial responsibility'. Based as much on environmental as hereditary concerns, this was certainly an expression of middle-class angst. But Marchant's position also came "from a distinct belief in the strength of the nation as a whole, seen as an organic unit. This vision of a healthy society was one which necessitated co-operation between the classes, but was one which, in Marchant's mind, transcended class politics. Hence he pleaded for 'improving the physical and moral environment of all classes for the next few generations' and believed that a shift in morals was more important than tampering with the nation's genetic makeup: the young must be taught, he argued, 'to regard the sex instinct as a "racial instinct", as something which exists, as it in reality does, not primarily for the individual but for the race. It is a trust for posterity .... [T]he racial act is for the race.' [30] The 'race', where it was synonymous with the 'nation', was founded on notions of ethnic exclusivity.
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Another example of the way in which eugenics both fed on and fuelled common assumptions about race is the way in which it is closely tied, through the theory of the 'rule of the best', to the aristocratic and Tory revivalism of the Edwardian period. This revivalism is correctly understood as a reaction to the rise of feminism and organised labour, and the concomitant shifts in society and politics. Such obviously class-based theories as those put forward by Tory revivalists like Arthur Bountwood and J.M. Kennedy vehemently condemned the new, radical movements. [31] But this reactionary response to changes in British political life did not automatically mean a hatred or fear of the lower classes. It is no coincidence that the 19th Baron Willoughby de Broke, the leader of the 'Diehard' peers against the Parliament Act in 1911 and against Irish Home Rule in 1913-1914, was also a theorist of aristocratic society. His vision of an organic society, based on the concept of noblesse oblige, had room for the 'working man', just as long as he knew his place. As Lord Selborne wrote in his obituary of Willoughby de Broke, 'He knew and understood, and cared for the working Classes, as brother-Englishman, in a manner and with a depth of feeling which would no doubt be incredible to a communist.' [32] One might wonder whether such paternalism was put forward anything other than cynically, as a ploy to hang on to power, but Willoughby de Broke stated his case for 'National Toryism' repeatedly and honestly, in articles in the National Review and in numerous letters to other Tories, including several to Andrew Bonar Law stating the case for 'a school of thought that will stand by us in future hours of need, and create a strong permanent body of followers who will rely on you to vindicate National or Tory principles'. [33] As George Dangerfield memorably put it, Willoughby de Broke was a man who 'had quite a gift for writing, thought dearly, and was not more than two hundred years behind his time'. [34]
It should come as no surprise, then, to find that the man who was at the forefront of Tory revivalism was also an admirer of eugenics. Indeed, he became an ardent fan of Caleb Saleeby, the chairman of the National Birth-Rate Commission, vice-chairman of the National Council for Public Morals, and one of the prime movers of the Eugenics Society. That Saleeby was also (in a manner of speaking) a socialist was no obstacle. The class-transcending potential of eugenics was precisely what attracted Willoughby de Broke to it. He wrote an enthusiastic introduction to one of Saleeby's books, and fulsomely praised him in public and in private. [35] The point is that eugenic theories of aristocracy and good breeding were not necessarily accompanied by antipathy to the lower classes; several writers based their eugenic visions on a society already economically levelled. [36] When articulated by members of the peerage, however, eugenics objected to an organisation of the lower classes which left them outside an organic society, independent of their 'superiors' and the country's 'natural leaders'. The fear of organised labour was a stock one among the middle classes, but eugenics could be applied as both an offensive and defensive weapon in the fight for workers' rights.
Like the Tory revivalists, but from a different political tradition, Karl Pearson, the first Galton Professor of Eugenics at University College, London and director of the Eugenics Laboratory, an institution devoted to Pearson's new science of biometrics, who held the Eugenics Society's 'unscientific' popularising in contempt, was quick to draw broader conclusions from his research than his statistics merited. MacKenzie has shown the extent to which Pearson's eugenics was an expression of the habitus of the professional middle class. Yet that does not mean that the science of eugenics was solely focused on class-related efforts at producing healthier children, nor that the scientists' claim to objectivity was a whitewash. Pearson, who can be seen as a sort of national socialist (in the literal sense), believed that he was working not just for the benefit of the middle classes but for the health of the nation, the race. Hence his clarion call:
There is a hereditary nobility, an aristocracy of worth, and it is not confined to any social class; it is a caste which is scattered throughout all classes; let us awaken it, that it may be self-conscious, and realise how the national future lies incontrovertibly in the feasibility of making it dominant in numbers and submitting the rest to its control. [37]
For example, in a lecture delivered to the Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle on 19 November 1900, Pearson began with the standard fear of the 'over-fertility of the unfit' and the 'lessened relative fertility in those physically and mentally fitter stocks' and applied it to an international context. 'What I have said about bad stocks seems to me to hold for the lower races of man,' said Pearson. He then went on to argue that 'the Kaffir' and 'the Negro' have failed to produce civilisations comparable to that of 'the white man', and that it was not to be regretted that indigenous peoples had been driven off their lands by white colonisers, since this was preferable to the two races living side by side or, even worse, 'that they had mixed their blood as Spaniard and Indian in South America'. [38] By the time of the lecture's publication, German colonial troops were massacring the Hereros in South West Africa. [39]
Here we see a typical example of the boundaries between science and prejudice being blurred. While Pearson's class-prejudice is much in evidence, in that he holds the unfit to come from the lower classes, his argument only begins and does not end there. In fact, he ended his lecture by attacking the section of society that was supposedly parasitic on the other, but appealing to a rectification of the situation 'as a step towards the improvement of the whole herd'. [40]
Class was, then, only one source of motivation for the eugenicists. In Pearson's case, paying careful attention to his language reveals that, for all his distaste at the support given to 'degenerate' families of low status, his position has broader concerns. When he turns to the subject of immigration, miscegenation and international competition, Pearson's tone takes on a heightened emotional charge. In one pamphlet, for example, he begins by setting out the desirability of encouraging a higher physical and mental condition of the nation as a whole. He then explains this desirability not as being merely a way of reducing the threat posed to respectable society by degenerates but as a way of ensuring Britain's standing in the world: 'Selection of parentage is the sale effective process known to science by which a race can continually progress. The rise and fall of nations are in truth summed up in the maintenance or cessation of that process of selection.' [41]
Elsewhere, in a lecture delivered at the Galton Laboratory on 17 March 1914, Pearson argued that the eugenicist was nothing other than a scientifically advanced social reformer whose sole aim was the patriotic one of improving the race as a whole: 'it is to parentage itself that the patriot who would work for racial progress must turn in the first place, if he would achieve a greater success than the environmentalists with a century of social reform have hitherto been able to claim'. [42] Again, Pearson explicitly sees his project in terms of patriotism, in terms of protecting the position of the empire from competition from other aspiring races. This national position takes precedence over, though it is partly constituted by, the class-prejudice that is so often seen as the sum total of British eugenicists' concerns. In this he was following Galton, who wrote of the importance to the British of eugenics that 'To no nation is a high human breed more necessary than to our own, for we plant our stock all over the world and lay the foundation of the dispositions and capacities of future millions of the human race.' [43]
Nowhere is this claim more defensible than in Pearson's work on Jewish immigrants, work which he undertook with Margaret Moul, one of several women who worked at the Galton Laboratory (anti-feminism was one prejudice which Pearson did not share with his colleagues). [44] The starting point of the research was this simple question: 'What purpose would there be in endeavouring to legislate for a superior breed of men, if at any moment it could be swamped by the influx of immigrants of an inferior race, hastening to profit by the higher civilization of an improved humanity?' But this apparently disinterested investigation into whether or not the Jewish immigrants of the East End of London constituted such an 'inferior race' was hampered from the start by its presuppositions. The reports of Pearson and Moul's tests -- on such things as the correlation between head shape and intelligence, or eye colour and intelligence -- run to over one hundred pages, before the authors conclude that 'Taken on the average, and regarding both sexes, this alien Jewish population is somewhat inferior physically and mentally to the native population.' They recommend, on the basis of this finding, a firmer concentration on the existing inhabitants of the British Isles: 'The welfare of our own country is bound up with the maintenance and improvement of its stock, and our researches do not indicate that this will follow the unrestricted admission of either Jewish or any other type of immigrant.' [45]
One cannot simply call these writings of Pearson's 'propagandistic' and hope thereby to isolate them from the 'scientific' work undertaken by the Biometrics Laboratory or the Eugenics Record Office. As well as a marked dislike of the 'inferior classes' at home, Pearson's writings were concerned equally, if not more, with 'patriotic' issues of the standard of the British race, and the protection of the British empire. For Pearson, then, the themes of class, empire and race overlap and are part of a single problematic.
Among the writings of the eugenicists, the writings of Pearson are well known. But other writers were willing to be far more outspoken in their claims, disproving the claim that Pearson was exceptional among eugenicists when it came to voicing 'belligerently patriotic' sentiments. [46] The same rise in pitch that is characteristic of Pearson is audible in other writers too, when the subject turns to the defence of the realm.
A striking example occurs in a book by the Reverend Horton, National Ideals and Race-Regeneration (1912), written for Cassell's New Tracts for the Times series, a series which did much for the popular reception of eugenics. Attacking a supposed drift towards cosmopolitanism and internationalism, Horton advises his readers not to lose sight of their own nation. This danger he believes to be especially real for the British, since the empire is all too easily understood as a 'pseudo-nation':
And in this pseudo-nation the overwhelming majority, probably four-fifths, are people of a different colour, a different religion, and a different political provenance. Nothing but confusion and degeneration can come from imperialism thus understood; the fifty or sixty millions of white men and Christians will be dragged down by the three hundred and twenty millions of Mohammedans, Hindoos, and Negroes. [47]
Horton does not object to international co-operation (pp. 23, 63), but insists that the empire should be a group of nations united under the British crown, 'and held together by the reverence and gratitude which daughters feel for their mother' (p. 19).
But when he turns to eulogising the virtues of the British race, Horton becomes distinctly dewy-eyed:
The white cemeteries that dot the veld in South Africa and the ocean sown with the bodies of our brave men,'Whose heavy-shotted hammock-shrouds Drop in the vast and wandering deep',
the great tradition that we place our country before our own lives and, thinking of what England has done for us, ask, What can we do for England? these are part of our national life, and feed the springs of our national service. (p. 26)
Apart from the interesting shift from 'Britain' to 'England' at this almost liturgical moment, Horton's argument ties together the long-standing military tradition of sacrificing oneself for the greater good with the eugenicist's argument that the protection of the national 'germ-plasm' is of far greater importance than the life of the individual. As he puts it later in the book, 'Eugenics becomes a matter of patriotism' (p. 38).
Here one can see how the eugenics movement appealed to those who had been involved with the 'national efficiency' campaign of the turn of the century. The most famous advocate of national efficiency was the journalist Arnold White, whose book Efficiency and Empire (1901) was the movement's central text. White went on to become a member of the Eugenics Education Society (as the Eugenics Society was originally called), and he contributed an article to the first volume of the Eugenics Review as well a number of pieces on eugenics for The Referee under the pen-name 'Vanoc'. [48] White too was a vigorous anti-aliens campaigner, and wrote a considerable amount on the Jews. [49] It is clear that the class-prejudices of the mainstream eugenicists were invariably accompanied by racial prejudices; indeed, one could go so far as to say that the two forms of prejudice were inseparable, and fed one another. Most importantly, they were not perceived to be discrete issues by the eugenicists themselves.
***
Even members of the Eugenics Society, who are usually considered as the epitome of middle-class respectability, as well as the real motor of the British eugenics movement, often reveal more of a concern with racial degeneration than with the threat to their middle-class way of life. Racial degeneration in this context is not synonymous with Nazi biologism, but nor is it simply the same thing as 'nation' (understood in a non-racialised sense). Race, in particular the standing of the British race in the world, was a key concern of the Eugenics Society's members.
Major Leonard Darwin, for example, Charles Darwin's son, was president of the Eugenics Society from 1911 to 1928. Despite the clash between Pearson and the society, their statements about race and nation overlap considerably. The thrust of Darwin's major book, The Need for Eugenic Reform (1926), was to insist on the importance of heredity, and the need to sacrifice immediate interests for the health of future generations. One of the greatest threats to this health was miscegenation which, though he accepted that 'evil social effects' were a factor in explaining the treatment of 'half-breeds', Darwin said (following Popenoe and Johnson's 1918 Applied Eugenics) usually brought about a situation in which 'the mixed stock may in some instances be worse than both parent stocks'. In the case of 'mulattoes', Darwin argued, again in the manner of the American eugenicists, that even if the level of the black was raised, the level of the white was lowered, and so the cross should be prevented. [50]
Two years later, Darwin presented these findings in a smaller book aimed at a popular audience. In What is Eugenics?, he again set out to explain how farming methods can guide human action regarding hereditary transmission. Here he did in fact apply a more class-based analysis than in The Need for Eugenic Reform, but Darwin still appealed to patriotism and the role of the 'best citizens' in sending their sons to fight during the First World War as exemplars. Here, although it is clear that the lower classes, especially criminals, drunkards and the feeble-minded, were his targets, the ultimate value of eugenics was grounded not in any particular class but in the race: 'Sacrifices for our country's good 'must often include the abandonment of personal pleasures and of social ambitions. The path of duty is the road to racial progress.' [51]
Another leading light in the Eugenics Society was Caleb Saleeby, converted to socialism by Sidney and Beatrice Webb in 1910, and, thanks to his attacks on biometrics -- which 'is so called because it measures everything but life, [52] -- a particular thorn in the side of Pearson. Saleeby devoted considerable attention to the question of race-regeneration, stressing that this was not a partisan programme: 'Those who seek to save the race by setting class against class, or sex against sex, or creed against creed, are condemned at the outset: no class or sect or sex within the social organism can be saved alone.' [53]
Who then did Saleeby target? Although he wanted to raise his readers' consciousness of the threat posed by the feeble-minded, he never succumbed to the violence of a Rentoul or a Ludovici. He advocated 'permanent care' of the feeble-minded and for education in parenthood for those of healthy stocks. Like most eugenicists, however (Pearson is the important exception), he was an anti-feminist, insisting that 'the cause of woman, which is the cause of man, and the cause of the unborn, is by nothing more gravely and unnecessarily prejudiced and delayed than by this [feminist] doctrine of sex-identity'. He opposed feminism and supported parental eugenic education because of his belief in the power of science to aid in the breeding of a stronger race: 'The parental instinct is connected subtly with the racial instinct; and it is undisputed that, except in utterly degraded persons, the object of the feelings which are associated with the racial instinct becomes the object of the feelings which are associated with the parental instinct.' [54]
Saleeby abhorred all forms of coercive or repressive eugenic schemes, [55] was open-minded about the relative import of heredity and environment, and never made scaremongering statements about the inescapability of degeneration. Yet he was not without his prejudices. Nor was his thought without limits. And although Saleeby may have argued that these limits were set by science, this was far from being the case. On the question of 'inter-racial aspects', for example, he was adamant:
I mistrust not only the brilliant students who, unhampered by biological knowledge, pierce to the bottom of this question in the course of such a [lecture] tour, but also the humanitarian bias of those who, like M. Finot, or the distinguished American sociologist, Mr. Graham Brooks, would almost have us believe that the negro is mentally and morally the equal of the Caucasian. [56]
And, like Galton, Saleeby believed that eugenic knowledge, though 'significant for all races and nations', was 'of unique significance for us Britons', because the British had an empire to care for. [57]
But among prominent Eugenics Society members, perhaps none put forward the imperial and racial, as well as class, defence of eugenics with more clarity than Ferdinand Schiller. Writing in the 19208 and 1930s, Schiller rehearsed the argument that civilisation was 'a deteriorating agency' that 'carries within it the seeds of its own decay and destruction'. [58] Without reform of these humanitarian values, Schiller forecast catastrophe.
The biggest threat to civilisation, according to Schiller, fell on the middle classes: 'One of the chief effects, therefore, of endeavours to improve social conditions by our present methods is to deteriorate the race. And they do this in a twofold manner: they eliminate the middle class, and they promote the survival of the unfit and defective.' [59] Once again, however, despite Schiller's explicit class bias, his concern is primarily for the empire; like the Whethams, Schiller expends considerable effort explicating the ruin of Rome, ascribing it to 'the Extirpation of the Best'. In his book of 1932, Schiller joined forces with a by now out-of-date aristocratic revivalism, but also emphasised the importance of eugenics by setting domestic degeneration into an international context. Schiller, as well as worrying about the threat to the middle classes, was just as concerned about the fate of the white race: 'At the moment worldwide race wars of extermination ( ... ) might end in the triumph of whites, if they were united; but they are so unlikely to unite, and hate each other so cordially, that their future looks by no means bright.' [60] Schiller's class considerations went hand in hand with his racial ones.
Schiller typifies the 'respectability' of the Eugenics Society, though he maintained his position with rather more stentorian confidence than others such as Darwin. To show that Schiller's racism was also not untypical no clearer case can be found than that of A.C. Gotto, a participant in a Eugenics Society discussion on the topic of 'Eugenics and Imperial Development'. She had the following to say on the subject of miscegenation:
I agree that our whole instinct warns us not to allow crosses to be made between races which differ widely from one another; and I certainly hope that science will prove this instinct to be correct, because although, like a good many other people, I am quite ready to look upon the coloured races as our brothers, I do not want to look upon them as our brothers-in-law. [61]
The transcript of the discussion records laughter at this point, the culmination of numerous examples of racial stereotyping and anti-miscegenation statements by respected Eugenics Society members, including Leonard Darwin and E.J. Lidbetter.
The point of these citations is not to suggest that race was the sole concern of the British eugenicists, for it was not. The aim is to correct a widely held view that race was of little or no concern to British eugenicists, and to show that racial prejudice formed an intrinsic part of a whole worldview in which the superiority of the white race and a domestic ruling elite -- either middle-class technocratic or aristocratic, depending on the writer -- was firmly interconnected with a distaste for labour, socialism, feminism and, usually, liberalism.
Lest this be thought to be a passing interest, which gradually faded away during the interwar years, an instructive example of race-crossing investigations from the Eugenics Society archives provides evidence that an interest in these matters survived long after they had been rejected by mainstream scientists. In the mid-1920s the geographer Professor H. J. Fleure, a prominent member of the Eugenics Society's Research Committee, and his assistant, a Miss Fleming, undertook research into race-crossing in Liverpool. With the full co-operation of ~he local Women Police Patrols, who helped locate children of Anglo-Chinese descent, and clergy, especially Revd J.H.G. Bates of St Michael's Vicarage, Grenville Street, the pair went to undertake 'anthropological measurements on slum children who are hybrid British-Chinese'. Rev. Bates was especially enthusiastic about the work, writing to Hodson that in his area the problem of race-mixing was 'more urgent than is generally realised', though in this case it concerned the 'Anglo-Negro' rather than 'the problem of the Anglo-Chinese'. According to Bates, the 'Anglo-Negro girl is in a deplorable state. Her condition has to be studied on the spot.' He went on to claim that, despite his lack of expertise on the matter, 'The moral question is one to be carefully understood: further my experience is that Anglo-Negro offsprings are generally T.B.' [62]
At about the same time the society produced a memorandum in which, asserting its political disinterestedness and accepting the lack of information on the effects of 'racial admixture', it nevertheless claimed that the 'racial type' was being diluted by 'undesirable' foreigners. In the 19508 the society took up this issue again, with the arrival of West Indian immigrants to Britain. As before the war, anti-immigration claims were made without scientific knowledge (this was acknowledged), but with the assertion that the writers were working for objective science. In one paper, for example, G. C. L. Bertram argued that there was a difference between 'white' and 'coloured' races, without setting out in what that difference consisted. He went on to argue for the need, on eugenic grounds, to prevent further immigration, even though this meant 'no implication that race-mixture in itself is bad, since we don't know enough about this yet'. Although he was anxious about this paper being in the public domain, it was published with the Eugenics Society's blessing in 1958. [63] Even after this point, research was carried out by the society into the effects of white/black hybridisation in Liverpool, and into the fertility of immigrants in the Sparkbrook area of Birmingham. [64]
***
According to Mazumdar, 'The all-important problem of the British eugenists was the inheritance of pauperism. The specific pathology of pauperism was feeble-mindedness, which provided the biological basis for its inheritance.' Hence she goes on to argue that Ernest Macbride's racism was 'very unBritish' and 'not heard very often in London, where it was the poor who were dangerously fecund, not the Mediterranean races'. But this rather misses the point. For in London, a large proportion of the poor were immigrants, as is both implicitly and explicitly clear in the negative stereotypes employed in most attacks on them. The fact that British eugenicists often refrain from naming Jews and other 'aliens' explicitly, using coded language instead, does not render the sentiment any less real. Besides, as I have shown, most felt no such compunction, and expressed their racism freely.
Similarly, Mazumdar's description of Chatterton-Hill's Nietzschean form of eugenics as being in 'the Continental form of race, rather than class conflict', [65] again seeks to draw a distinction between German and British eugenics which in reality was not so marked. The institutions of both countries shared their information and expertise; in fact the Germans owed a great deal to the achievements of Galton and Pearson, whom they held in veneration. The Archiv fur Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie explicitly acknowledged its debt to the publications of the eugenics institutions at UCL, as did many other scholars in private correspondence. The divide between British and German eugenics did not come when Chatterton-Hill was writing in 1907, but only during the 1920s and 1930s, as British eugenicists became aware of the dangerous implications of the Aryan myth. [66] And the fact that even liberal-left, anti-racist scientists such as J.B.S. Haldane and Lancelot Hogben could borrow their methodologies from German race scientists such as Fritz Lenz Erwin Baur and Eugen Fischer -- who in their widely used textbook Human Heredity (1928) argued for the dangers of race-crossing -- shows that even in the 1930s assumptions underlying the science had still not been questioned. [67] Scientists such as Hogben and Haldane may have rejected the class element of British eugenics, but the racist presuppositions that had always also been there -- that is, that race-crossing was a subject of serious research -- they did not question, despite their anti-racist polemics. Hence despite their vigorous attack on Nazi race theories, 'they stopped short of denying hereditary mental differences or condoning all racial intermingling'. [68] In a chapter devoted to exposing 'The Biology of Inequality', for example, Haldane noted that 'although pure lines do not exist in man there are nevertheless human groups which breed true, or very nearly true, for certain physical characteristics', by which he meant primarily skin colour, as though the genetic differences between black and white skin were more significant than genetic differences within any selected group. [69] Hogben, a socialist and vigorous anti-racist, may also be held partially responsible for the view of British eugenics as a class-oriented enterprise, for he attacked the eugenicists in his own class terminology, for 'decking out the jackdaws of class prejudice in the peacock feathers of biological jargon'. [70] Even so, like other radical scientists'such as Haldane and Julian Huxley, Hogben continued to believe, even in the 'face of the increasing complexities of genetic research, that heredity was the prime factor in determining people's characteristics, both intellectual and physical. [71] There was thus no absolute break between the educational, middle-of-the-road, failed legislative programmes of the Eugenics Society and the vociferous and often violent recommendations of extremists such as Rentoul, Armstrong and Ludovici. Rather, they represented different articulations of the same position along a eugenic parabola, a parabola which encompassed right and left, reactionary and progressive.
British eugenicists were indeed vociferous; they were also, in terms of legislation, ineffectual. But their ideas grew out of existing popular prejudices, especially those concerning the hierarchy of races and Britain's God-given imperial role, and provided these same prejudices with scientific justifications which permeated British society for many years. The anti-racist eugenicists of the 1930s may have dispensed with the class-prejudices of the Eugenics Society, but in terms of proposing a science that would inevitably lead to invidious hierarchies being drawn up among social and ethnic groups, they represented a continuation of the eugenics that had gone before.
A quarter of a century ago, in a book which was a great stimulus to work on British eugenics, G. R. Searle argued that, despite the attractions that eugenics held for anti-alien campaigners, antisemitism was apparent in only 'a handful of eugenists', that an 'account of the "racialist" strand in the British eugenics movement can be pressed too far', and that, with the exception of Pearson, 'no serious attempt was made by any eugenist . . . to justify British rule in Africa and Asia on biological grounds'. [72] This chapter has shown that actually there is plenty of evidence to the contrary.
There is also an important point to be made here about the sociology of knowledge, especially the transmission of scientific knowledge. Searle claimed that 'There were elements in eugenical thinking which prevented the elaboration of full-blooded theories of race. For a start, even a rudimentary understanding of genetics would have been enough to disabuse eugenists of the popular belief in the existence of 'pure' races.' [73] To be sure, in the early days, eugenicists such as the American Charles Davenport could be forgiven for thinking that simple Mendelian laws of inheritance could be applied to human beings. Yet very soon the knowledge was available which should have scotched such simplistic applications. [74] The knowledge was, however, ignored, not just by extremists, but also, as we have seen, by left-wing, anti-racist scientists, and even mainstream scientists such as Ronald A. Fisher, who advocated eugenics long after a more sophisticated understanding of human heredity had, thanks to the Hardy-Weinberg principle, been arrived at. Indeed, they even utilised the principle in order to bolster their defence of eugenics. [75] What this failure to act indicates is the fact that scientific knowledge does not necessarily win out over prejudice, that science can even strengthen prejudice in unexpected ways, among scientists just as easily as lay people.
A final example illustrates this point. In 1921 the novelist R. Austin Freeman contributed to the literature on degeneration with a book, Social Decay and Regeneration, which was praised in a preface by Havelock Ellis. Freeman shows how class-prejudice was key but not sufficient for eugenicists. Certainly, and in defence of the argument mounted by Searle, MacKenzie and Mazumdar, Freeman attacks the Labour movement, and ends his book with an appeal to the 'Voluntary Segregation of the Fit', 'most of whom,' he asserts, 'would probably come from the Middle class', for the simple reason that this class contains the highest proportion of 'mentally and physically fit persons'. [76] Yet the most vigorous and linguistically spirited section of the book is that in which Freeman deals with the 'alien sub-man'. Introducing this 'profoundly sinister social phenomenon', Freeman notes that
For many years past there has been flowing into this country a steady stream of men and women of the lowest type -- the very dregs of inferior populations ... These hordes of unclean wastrels, including a large proportion of diseased, destitute, and criminal persons, were permitted freely to settle on this land like swarms of pestilential flies. (p. 265)
When, Freeman says, one accounts for the fact that these foreigners control certain crimes, 'such as procuration and the "white slave" traffic', and when one notes that by intermarrying, aliens are lowering the quality of the population at large, 'we shall conclude that the alien sub-man, diffusing racial as well as personal inferiority, is an even more potent anti-social factor than the indigenous variety' (p. 267, my emphasis). Hence, when promoting his middle-class eugenic colonies, Freeman stresses from the outset that they will be restricted 'to persons of pure English ancestry' (p. 317). Eugenics was a concern of the middle classes, but this concern was articulated primarily through a racist worldview.