Cursed by Eugenics

By Paul Gray

At a time when science promises such dazzling advances in the practice of medicine, it may be prudent to cast a glance over the shoulder, back to an earlier era when scientists--or people who thought they were doing science--stirred hopes that better days were only a generation or so away. The rise and fall of the theory known as eugenics is in every respect a cautionary tale. The early eugenicists were usually well-meaning and progressive types. They had imbibed their Darwin and decided that the process of natural selection would improve if it were guided by human intelligence. They did not know they were shaping a rationale for atrocities.

The man who in 1883 coined the term eugenics, from a Greek stem meaning "good in birth," was a cousin of Charles Darwin's. Englishman Francis Galton (1822-1911) had a substantial inheritance and a Victorian range of scientific curiosity. He dabbled in a number of fields, including geographical exploration, but his passion was mathematics, particularly the infant field of statistics.

In Britain and the U.S., the great age of quantification had begun. An unforeseen consequence of industrialized democracy had been the mammoth increase in the measurement and survey of all sorts of things. Galton relished this new flood of data--"Whenever you can, count" was his motto--and eventually became absorbed in studying the mathematical distribution of what he called "natural ability" among a sample of British subjects. Galton thought natural ability could be tracked down by reading the biographical sketches of eminent Britons in handbooks and dictionaries. When he did so, he discovered that a disproportionate number of these worthies were in some way related to one another. Ergo, he concluded, intelligence and talent were bestowed by heredity. "Could not," he wondered, "the undesirables be got rid of and the desirables multiplied?"

In fairness to Galton, he came to see the encouragement of "good" marriages as a better way to his eugenic heaven than discouraging or preventing "bad" ones. But the seed of a very dangerous notion had nevertheless been sown.

Interest in eugenics grew with the rediscovery and wide dissemination of an obscure Austrian monk's experiments in breeding peas. Gregor Mendel's discovery of genetically transmitted dominant and recessive traits seemed to many the key that would unlock the mysteries of human heredity. In the U.S., biologist Charles Davenport (1866-1944) established, with the help of a $10 million endowment from the Carnegie Institution, a center for research in human evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. A strict Mendelian, Davenport believed so-called single-unit genes determined such traits as alcoholism and feeblemindedness. The way to eradicate such failings in the human stock, he argued, was to prevent their carriers from reproducing. He voiced the hope that "human matings could be placed upon the same high plane as that of horse breeding." He declared that prostitution was not caused by poverty but by an "innate eroticism." He advocated eugenic castrations.

In his In the Name of Eugenics (1985), an invaluable source for everyone interested in this strange movement, historian Daniel J. Kevles notes, somewhat dryly, that "eugenicists identified human worth with the qualities they presumed themselves to possess--the sort that facilitated passage through schools, universities and professional training." Kevles' insight helps explain the almost messianic fervor that eugenicists on both sides of the Atlantic displayed during the early years of this century. These were people who felt themselves and the future of their children threatened. In Britain members of the upper middle class feared they would be swamped and taxed to extinction by the profligate overbreeding of the lower orders. In the U.S., members of the Wasp ascendancy looked with dismay at the flood of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Italians! Poles! What was the country coming to?

Much of this public fervor looks comically ill informed in hindsight. In the U.S. and Britain, fairs and exhibitions regularly featured exhibits illustrating Mendelian laws of inheritance, often in the form of black-and-white guinea pigs stuffed and mounted to demonstrate the heritability of fur color. Kevles quotes from a chart accompanying such a display: "Unfit human traits such as feeblemindedness, epilepsy, criminality, insanity, alcoholism, pauperism and many others run in families and are inherited in exactly the same way as color in guinea pigs."

Less amusing is the number of intellectuals, businessmen and political leaders who gave eugenics their blessing or fervid support. The list begins with Darwin, who in The Descent of Man praised his cousin Galton and decreed that genius "tends to be inherited." Other champions included the young Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, Alexander Graham Bell, John Maynard Keynes, Theodore Roosevelt and the usually taciturn Calvin Coolidge, who declared during his vice presidency that "Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races."

Eugenics was not just gassy theories. Impressed by the pseudo science, many U.S. states enacted laws requiring the sterilization of those held in custody who were deemed to suffer from hereditary defects. In 1927 the U.S. Supreme Court heard an appeal of Virginia's decision in Buck v. Bell to sterilize Carrie Buck, an institutionalized 17-year-old whom the state had decreed a "moral imbecile," the daughter of a "feebleminded" mother and the mother herself of a daughter who was found to be, at age seven months, subnormal in intelligence. The court, by an 8-to-1 vote, rejected Buck's appeal. In his majority opinion, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes," and concluded, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Nowhere, of course, were eugenic theories more enthusiastically codified into binding state doctrine than in Nazi Germany. In 1933 Adolf Hitler's government adopted the Eugenic Sterilization Law. Formulated by the Reich Ministry of the Interior, this edict ordered the compulsory sterilization of all German citizens--not simply those in custody or institutions--who displayed symptoms of a number of presumptively hereditary afflictions, including blindness, schizophrenia and offensive physical deformities. Government officials countered potential objections about the cruelty of this measure by asserting that personal sacrifices would serve the common weal. "We go beyond neighborly love," said one. "We extend it to future generations. Therein lies the high ethical value and justification of the law." As Kevles notes, the Nazis' draconian eugenics program did not originally encompass the anti-Semitism that later so rabidly characterized the Third Reich. But as Hitler and his regime turned ever more fiercely against the Jews, the sterilization of "undesirables" escalated into genocide, a horrifying realization of Francis Galton's vision of the world biologically cleansed according to one group's idea of human improvement.

Eugenics never recovered from the news of what had been carried out under its banner in Hitler's Germany. In truth, a number of people--including G.K. Chesterton, H.L. Mencken, Walter Lippmann and Clarence Darrow--had ridiculed and debunked eugenic theories well before the horrors of the Holocaust occurred and became widely known.

And the flaws, so obvious to us now, in the eugenicists' thinking--starting but by no means ending with their assumption of the immutable heritability of character and the attribution of complex human traits to simple Mendelian genes--did spur, among scientists who recognized the errors, valuable research in the actual science of human genetics. They were wrong, with unintended consequences for millions of people. But the legacy of the eugenicists may be instructive. The next time you hear someone promoting the scientific improvement of the human race, think of them.