The Social Context Of Eugenic Thought

By Professor W. H. G. Armytage

(Editorial Note: This is the first of a series of articles written by Harry Armytage for original publication in the Newsletter. They portray the social context in which the eugenics movement developed and operated in twentieth century Britain. Drawing on the literary, political and scientific sources of the period these articles demonstrate an overwhelming intellectual preoccupation with those issues to which the Eugenics Society gave a theoretical and practical coherence. The Society, in each decade, numbered amongst its members the elite of the professions (including two Prime Ministers of England) and thus both reflected and influenced prevailing social thought. Above all, these articles provide the justification of John Carey’s characterisation of the early decades of this century as the “eugenic generation” (The Intellectuals and the Masses - 1992). The Newsletter is glad to have the opportunity of publishing these articles).

I. THE STOCK QUESTION (or The Issue of Issue)

“There can... be no doubt as to the desirability of qualifying ourselves in all possible ways to assist those who, we hope with increasing frequency, will seek out advice as to their eligibility for parentage, as well as to take a leading part in impressing upon the public mind and conscience the racial significance of the eugenic point of view.”

“The Racial Responsibility of Medicine”,
B.M.J. editorial, 17 July 1912, p. 187.

Was it significant that, with two exceptions, no babies were born in the fictional world of Joseph Conrad and that nearly all his married characters were childless? Even the baby envisaged in an early outline of Under Western Eyes was subsequently discarded (1). Was it further significant that the fashionable Oxford don FCS Schiller was putting about the equally disturbing view that “under certain circumstances the more lowly organised may be the fitter, ie the better adapted to cope with the conditions of life that prevail at the time”? For this would mean that the higher classes “must either die out or degenerate” (2). As one whose professional concern was the identification of dilemmas, Schiller had no hesitation in asserting that “race-suicide” among the best human stocks was “a far more urgent evil” than over-population (3).

Did “dependency” lead to degeneracy? Yes, answered the President of the British Medical Association as he denounced the National Health Insurance Act of 1911 as “a long step in the downward path towards Socialism” that would “increase that spirit of dependency which is ever found in degenerate races” and encourage them “to multiply their breed at the expense of the healthy and intellectual members of the community” (4). So he wanted to forbid such “moral and physical degenerates” from taking “any part in adding to the race” (5).

But the number involved was enormous: thirteen millions no less, of what one social observer unkindly described as “poor white trash”, were identified and he proposed a “new order” of reformatory island colonies to prevent such from perpetuating their kind (6). He advocated placing them under some form of “medical” “sanitary” police and insisted that “no pretentions, no favoured maxim must be allowed to stop the impeding hand of the State for that which is at stake is the very existence of the Nation” (7). This “Medical Police” would be under a Minister of Public Health (or State Department of Hygiene) which would be empowered:

“to enter, cleanse and disinfect insanitary places; to arrest filthy and disreputable persons, such as are allowed at present to walk freely about in the streets polluting all they touch and swarming with germs; to aid local authorities in times of epidemic; to assist the campaign for the destruction of vermin; and otherwise to take action, under the authority of a board of scientists, as a mobile force operating against all menaces to the public health”.

There would also be reformatories for the shirkers, vagabonds and lazy, who would be put under discipline and arduous physical labour and drilled and exercised “until the beer is sweated from their degenerate systems” (8). All with wages and salaries of up to £500 a year would pay for this:

“We must help the Thirteen Million under-efficient; we must not pauperise the twenty-six million efficients. Freeholds for the main body, redemption for the residue... So long as the majority of the workers are being converted into freeholders, it will clearly be impossible for the treatment of the minority to lead towards Socialism.” (9).

To Rudyard Kipling “the present trend of legislation” was “making milksops of the democracy” and “about the only way of salvation” he could see were Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts (10). And Baden-Powell repaid the compliment by naming the Wolf Cubs after characters in Kipling’s Jungle Books. Even the Fabian Society was told that it was not “defective character or ignorance or physical degeneration” that was the ultimate source of trouble. “Nothing kills character so much as the shifting of responsibility from the individual to the State” a zoologist informed one of its meetings: “As far as possible a man must be left to fight his own battles” (11).

A virtuous Boy Scout drawn by Baden-Powell, leaping over life's shortcomings

With all this rumbling around him it is not surprising that the Webbs’ publicity expert, Clifford Sharp, should report that “the Tories” were “still seeing visions of bloody revolution which will inevitably come upon them if they don’t behave - and very likely if they do” (12).

Lancashire doctors argued that the only way to solve the problems of poverty and disease was to eradicate them from the race rather than merely ameliorate the lot of the individual. To this end they proposed a State Medical Service. Thus Dr. Benjamin Moore of Liverpool presented in 1910 his case for the establishment of a preventative, curative corps of salaried doctors servicing up to 500 families, each with “no rivals, no bills”, under a Cabinet Minister responsible to Parliament and people “for the maintenance of health and the proper control of disease”. He defined it (in what is apparently the first use of the term) as a “National Health Service”. To work for its establishment, the first meeting of the State Medical Service took place on 26 July 1912. Within three months 135 doctors had joined and meetings were being held up and down the country. Other Lancashire doctors like Dr. R. T. Irving of Southport and Dr. Milson R. Rhodes of Manchester developed and expanded these ideas (13).

The Secretary of this State Medical Society described one real struggle for existence as the prevalence of competition between doctors: a competition he regarded as “altogether bad” in that it had resulted in “shoddy output”. Speaking with “brutal frankness” at the Cambridge Medical School he considered that the average doctor was far from free. He could not “attack the squire for his germ-breeding cottages.... the parson for his habits of life” or persuade his most lucrative patient to leave the district for his health. That doctors did gravitate towards lucrative patients, and that certain consequences ensued, he indicated by a table:

Although, as he acknowledged, factors other than the proportion of doctors to population lay behind these figures the provision of those other factors - food, clothes, housing and open air space - would greatly be affected by doctors having a greater say in the affairs of the community. This would be possible in a State Medical Service embracing all branches of the medical profession including midwives, nurses, dispensing chemists, dentists and veterinarians, and all working under a Minister of Public Health with a seat in the Cabinet (i.e. the Local Government Board with its other work shed) which would also check the advertisment of harmful drugs and quack nostrums, a subject then of paramount importance (14).

Unfortunately, the Medical Officer responsible for administering (under the Local Government Board) the National Health Insurance Act of the previous year was understandably cautious. Though one of Beatrice Webb’s favourites, he was also one of the twelve contributors chosen by the National Social Purity Crusade to write a Tract for the Times in the style of the Oxford Movement of a century before. In it, Sir Arthur Newsholme acknowledged that “the state” was vitally concerned in the conditions under which infants were “procreated, born and reared”. But he, too, bowed to the feeling that:

“in regard to the feeble minded, the intermittently insane, and possibly the chronic dependent, it may be hoped that public opinion will ere long demand that these should not be permitted to multiply. It may even be hoped that social pressure will be exercised towards diminishing multiplication in families which are non-supporting.” (16)

One sign that public opinion was indeed moving in this direction is to be found in the widespread use of the image of “weeding out”.  Even the BMJ invoked this metaphor as a counter-strategy to contraception: “did the diminished number of children in a family outweigh the disadvantages of slackening the intensity operating upon a larger number of children some of whom must be weeded out?” (17). True, the BMJ was rebuked by Dr. Binnie Dunlop - a member both of the Eugenics Society and the Malthusian League - for making “a most inhumane suggestion”. Dr. Dunlop held it to be “totally indefensible from a medical man whose mission is the saving of life” to hold that a couple who could only afford to maintain two children should be “encouraged or compelled to have more than two in order that there may be some weeding out”. “In other words,” he argued this would involve “submitting children to a semi-starvation test as to whose children will prove fittest” (18).

Why was this concept of human “weeds” regarded as especially apt at this time? We need look no further than The Training of the Human Plant (1907), a much read book by the great Californian plant breeder Luther Burbank (19). The paradigm was invoked by the best-selling novelist Eden Philpotts. “The savage weeded his garden; must we” he asked, “forever breed weeds and then keep them under hot-house glass at the mandate of outworn laws and an obsolete faith?” (20). Philosophers and doctors hastened to agree. The Grote Professor of Philosophy at London University argued that “only time would show whether anything could be done” to weed the population by permanently segregating criminals and quasi-lunatics and imbeciles “by preventing marriage amongst certain classes of individuals and hereditary suspects” and “by euthanasia of certain idiots and incurable sufferers” (21). Lecturing to an audience of working men in Manchester a local doctor publicly admitted that “permanent progress is a question of breeding rather than of pedagogies; a matter of gametes not of training” (22).

Resembling not so much a garden as an “uncared forest”, society appeared to have the increasingly acute problem of what Edward Isaacson called “the surplus class”. To abolish this, he suggested, would require the “socialism of the two child family” and an energetic working class leadership educating its followers to reduce numbers and capitalists to share the good things of life. He especially stressed the need to recognise the independent working woman as a type other than the family woman paid to rear children. Only twenty to thirty percent of women would, in his opinion, be necessary to discharge that function. He asked what could bring Western Europe to abandon its internal rivalries and “organise into one social and economic group, not for warfare against other race groups, but for cooperation with them against the common danger of over-population?“(23).

Was it any wonder that Catholic intellectuals like Hillaire Belloc should inveigh against The Servile State (1912) in which the physical played such a prominent part? Or that G. K. Chesterton should ask the Socialists: “As the English trust everything to the Churchills and call that democracy, why should they not trust everything to the Churchills and call that Socialism?” Chesterton was of course referring to Winston Churchill’s confessing to “personally drafting the Bill which proposed to ‘shut up’ people of weak intellect and so prevent their breeding” (24).

REFERENCES

1. Bernard C. Meyer, Joseph Conrad. A Psychoanalytic Biography, Princeton University Press. 1967, pp. 204, 272. The exceptions were “Gaspar Ruiz” and “Amy Foster”.

2. F.C.S. Schiller, Humanism, Macmillan, 1912, p. 139.

3. F.C.S. Schiller, Riddles of the Sphinx, Macmillan, 1912, p. 115

4. The Times, 26 December 1911, 7f: B.M.J., 30 December 1911, p. 174.

5. B.M.J. 27 July 1912, p. 158.

6. W. Lawler Wilson, The Menace of Socialism, London, Grant Richards, 1909, p. 430. One of the early members of the Anti-Socialist League was Ernest E. Williams, the internationally minded Social Darwinist who quarrelled with Harold Cox in the last decade of the old century on the extent of the German menace. He also wrote the preface for The Anti-Socialist Speakers’ Handbook in 1911.

7. ibid., p. 482.

8. ibid., pp. 477-8

9. ibid., p. 482

10. Rudyard Kipling, “The only Way for Democracy”, Daily Express, 4 November 1911.

11. F. W. Headley, Darwinism and Modern Socialism, Methuen & Co., 1909, p. 33.

12. E. C. Sharp to Sidney and Beatrice Webb, 28 July 1911 (quoted from the Webb papers by David Morgan, Suffragists and Liberals, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1975).

13. D. Stark Murray, Why a National Health Service? The Part Played by the Socialist Medical Association

14. Charles A. Parkes, “A State Medical Service”. Fortnightly Review, May 1913, pp. 962-974.

15. A. J. Hubbard M.D. The Fate of Empires: An enquiry into the Stability of Civilization. Longmans Green & Co., 1913 S. Low, “Is our Civilization Dying?” Fortnightly Review, April 1913, pp. 627-639.

16. Arthur Newsholme, The Declining Birth-Rate. New Tracts for the Times 3, 1911.

17. B.M.J., 3 May 1913, p. 1179

18. ibid., 28 June 1913, p. 1404.

19. Luther Burbank, The Training of the Human Plant. New York, Century Co., 1907, p. 88. It was reissued in 1909, 1912, 1917, 1919 and 1922. He believed, as a result of his observations in greenhouses, that “heredity in recombination multiplies tendencies as surely as it divides or adds and subtracts them...” Luther Burbank and Wilbur Hall, The Harvest of the Years. Constable & Co., 1927, p. 277.

20. Eden Philpotts, “A State Department for the Unborn” New Age, 7 March 1908, p. 369

21. Carveth Read, Natural and Social Morals, 1909, p. 159

22. S. Herbert M.D. (Vienna), The First Principles of Heredity.  Adam & Charles Black, 1910, p. 183.

23. Edward Isaacson, The Malthusian Limit: A Theory of a Possible Static Condition for the Human Race. Methuen, 1912, pp. xxv, 59-60. 163, 205.

24. G.K. Chesterton, “A Shriek of Warning” Part I. The New Age, 15 April 1909, p.500; W. S. Blunt, 20 October 1912, My Diaries. Being a Personal Narrative of Events 1888-1914. 1920, ii, p. 416.

Part II of this series “Towards the Child Care State” will appear in the March 1995 issue of the Newsletter.