Authors: Edwin Black
In other words, within hours the demographic information went from merely problematic to absolutely worthless. Quotas could not be reliably ordained under the circumstances. On the last day of the 1927 session, Congress passed Senate Joint Resolution 152 postponing implementation of the new quotas for one year. House debate on the question ran less than thirty minutes. A year later, in 1928, quotas were once more postponed, again after a protracted statistical and political standoff replete with Congressional letter-writing campaigns and fractious newspaper editorials. Eugenicists were outraged and saw it as a triumph by organized foreign elements.
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Even before the first postponement, Laughlin began investigating the heritage of the individual senators themselves. “We are working on the racial origin study of present senators,” Laughlin reported to a eugenic immigration activist, “and will line the study up with the data which you sent on members of the [original] Constitutional Convention. It will make an exceedingly interesting comparison,” he added, “showing the drift of composition in the racial make-up of the American people, or at least of their leaders.”
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Finally, in 1929, after indecisive demographic scuffles between census scholars and eugenic activists trying to preserve Nordic preference, compromise quotas were agreed upon by scholars formally and informally advising Congress and the president. Admitting that the numbers were “tainted” and “far from final,” binding quotas were nonetheless created. The new president, Herbert Hoover, promulgated the radical reductions based on the accepted analysis of the 1890 census. Even those quotas did not last long. Two years later they succumbed to redistricting pressures, political concerns and the momentum of the coming 1930 census. Finally, the quotas were revised based on national percentages from the 1920 census.
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Laughlin’s quest for an overseas network of eugenic investigators achieved only brief success. The system was installed in Belgium, Great Britain, the Irish Free State, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Holland and Poland, and for a time the system eugenically inspected some 80 percent of the would-be emigrants from those countries. On average, 88 of every 1,000 applicants were found to be mentally or physically defective. Laughlin aimed to have one eugenicist stationed in each capital. But overseas examination was short-lived for lack of the extraordinary funding and complicated bilateral agreements required. Moreover, too many foreign governments ultimately objected to such examinations of their citizens.
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Long after the examinations ceased, however, America’s consuls remained eugenically aware of future immigrants and refugees as never before. Their biological preferences and prejudices would become insurmountable barriers to many fleeing oppression in the world of the 1930s.
Quotas and the National Origins Act ruled immigration until 1952. Only the 1952 McCarran-Walter Immigration and Naturalization Act amended almost a century of racial and eugenic American law to finally declare: “The right of a person to become a naturalized citizen … shall not be denied or abridged because of race or sex or because such person is married.”
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American eugenics felt it had secured far less than half a loaf. For this reason, it was important that inferior blood be wiped away worldwide by analogous groups in other countries. An international movement would soon emerge. During the twenties, the well-funded eugenics of Laughlin, Davenport and so many other American raceologists would spawn, nurture and inspire like-minded individuals and organizations across Europe.
B
y 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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