Authors: Edwin Black
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 subhead lined “No Life Sentences,” Saleeby suggested, “All decisions to segregate these people must be subject to continual revision….”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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In many ways, this measure was simply an attempt to provide care and treatment for the needy. Colonies for epileptics, the insane, the feeble-minded 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.”
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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.
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The eugenicists intended to press on, but several months later they were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I.
* * *
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.
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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 policyrnakers 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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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 work-houses contributed family tree data to the society.
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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.
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Attempts to create more than token samples of degenerate family trees were interrupted by the Great War, which began in the fall of 1914. British eugenics understandably slid into the background. In 1918, after shell-shocked soldiers climbed out of Europe’s muddy trenches, British eugenics slowly regrouped. Lidbetter did not resume his examination of degenerate families until March of 1923, more than a decade after he had begun. By this time the Eugenics Education Society had been infused with other scientists, including the esteemed agronomist and statistician Ronald A. Fisher. Fisher had calculated the Mendelian and genetic secrets of various strains of potatoes and wheat, and he had used this information to create more effective manures at an experimental agriculture station north of London. He and others were now applying the coefficients and correlations so successful in mixing fertilizer and spawning stronger crops to complex hereditary formulas for humans. Fisher tacked the essence of Pearson’s biometric measurements and agrarian science onto American Mendelism to create his own strain of eugenics.
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