The Social Context of Eugenic Thought

"Knowing how deeply Sir William Beveridge is immersed in affairs connected with his Report and how numerous his speaking commitments must be, it may seem an act of great courage on the part of the Council of the Eugenics Society to invite Sir William here today. But Council did not underestimate the status of the Galton Lecture and therefore did not hesitate to approach him. Its courage has been rewarded."

Lord Horder, President of the Eugenics Society, introducing the Galton Lecturer for 1943.(1)

Beveridge had in fact paid the Eugenics Society (of which he was a life-long supporter) the supreme compliment of arriving to give the Galton Lecture directly from observing the House of Commons debate on his Report. He had left just as Sir John Anderson had announced that the rate of child allowance would be fixed at five shillings, compared with the eight shillings recommended by Beveridge.(2)

Addressing a large gathering of Eugenics Society members and their guests assembled at the Mansion House to hear his Galton Lecture, Sir William was generous in acknowledging the part which the Eugenics Society had played in originating and promoting public discussion on the issue of children’s allowance. As long ago as 1932 the Society had discussed a paper presciently proposing to give five shillings per week to each child through the post office whether the parent was employed or unemployed. The Eugenics Society, Beveridge pointed out, had however always been ambivalent on the merits of family allowances with one section being totally opposed to income redistribution by means of taxation or allowances being made a charge on the state, whilst others saw the possible eugenic benefits of family allowances as a means of correcting the dysgenic factors inherent in the inverted birth rate. Professor Fisher was good-humouredly credited with the ability to hold both opinions simultaneously.

Beveridge, however, sought to argue that the proposals contained in his Report were eugenic in intent and effect. Referring to the prevailing preoccupation with "the main dysgenic factor in our society today"(3), the inverted birth rate, he stressed the apparently irreconcilable views as to its causes. Does success lead to infertility? Do people tend to have relatively fewer children because they are rich or is it the other way round that infertility is the cause of economic success? Biological and economic tendencies were clearly in conflict.

Beveridge might almost have been proposing his Report as a candidate for the fuller "Eugenic Charter" for which Titmuss had pleaded on the grounds that the production of "well-born" human beings involved nutrition, activity, economic and social opportunities and psychological and moral atmosphere. "So entangled are the factors of ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’", he argued, "so scanty still is our knowledge of human genetics that no eugenicist can afford to neglect the study of environmental factors - especially of economic and social conditions."(4)

Titmuss had stressed the eugenic importance of perinatal events and had pointed out that the infants of the poor were relatively worse off than they were before the First World War and certainly worse off than they would have been in Chicago, Oslo, Tokyo, Buenos Aires or Montevideo(5). Indeed Titmuss and Lord Horder had publicly argued that "the birthrate might well prove to be incapable of effective resuscitation until drastic changes for the better are introduced into our social and economic system"(6).

Nor should such drastic changes encourage "a considerable section of the future population" to be " recruited from a number of very large, and very poor, families." For despite the eightfold increase of spending on the social services, deaths from environmental causes were 453 per cent higher in Class V than in Class I, whereas deaths that had nothing to do with the post-natal environment were only 61 per cent higher.

The Times took Titmuss so seriously that his book was made the subject of a leading article showing that the country was further away from the goal of equalised wealth in 1943 than it was in 1911 when the fertility census was taken.(7) And The Lancet agreed, "If all social classes in 1930-2 had experienced the death-rates of Social Class I some 52,000 deaths in the first year of life would have been saved and 17,000 in the second year... adding still births would probably raise the total to nearly 90,000, no mean number in the present situation of the population".(8)

To encourage the Government to act on Lord Beveridge’s proposals, the Tory Reform Committee shaped up to remedy the social causes of the "halted breed". Thelma Cazalot-Keir was actually reproved by the Labour Parliamentary Secretary of the Board of Education for "taking the first step to a Fascist State" by asking in May 1942 whether as a preliminary to post-war educational reform the President would not take the necessary steps to make it compulsory for all children up to the age of 11 years to attend the same school.(9)

Nor was she the first natalist to be accused of being a Fascist; Sir Arnold Wilson had similarly suffered. His recommendations were compared with those of the newly issued Beveridge Report under the heading "What more can Sir William say?". Sir William, however, did have one more thing to say that greatly strengthened the arm of his brother-in-law R H. Tawney: "people will not have children for pay."(10)

Beveridge’s engagement to be married was announced four days before the publication of his report. This and his report’s favourable reception by the 1922 Committee encouraged others to raise themes like housing and schools, which The Times saw were now "opportune to consider".

Convinced that the Government should take "very special care" to see that "undue burdens" were "not incurred in respect of the old at the expense of the young", the heavy Scots calculating machine, Sir John Anderson, added, "if savings have to be made anywhere, we should not wish them to be made in respect of the young".(11)

To Harrod the shrinking birth rate presented problems of "unprecedented gravity which the Beveridge report would do little to solve".(12) To this the correspondence column of The Times vibrated with sympathy. So did the owner of the Daily News, L. J. Cadbury. (13) "Would a nation with a falling birth rate be able to defend itself or its standard of living against envious and less civilised nations with rising birth rates?".(14) Another suggested that professors of population should be appointed in the universities.(15) And The Times itself, editorialising on the need "to begin thinking of population policies", reminded readers that it took eighteen years to replace a mother and only a few months to replace a bomber. Even to stabilise the population at 42,700,000 (it was then 46,500,000) a twenty-five per cent rise in fertility was needed.(16)

The Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, added his weight to the stabiliser pointing out in a widely reported speech at Nottingham in February that even to maintain the population at its existing level, families would have to be 25 per cent bigger. This he saw would necessitate building a social order that would induce such an increase in the birth rate.(17) This and Sir John Anderson’s speech on the Beveridge Report elicited a second leading article in The Times.

Expecting little from the Beveridge plan to bring about a rise in fertility, as "social security means exactly what it says: security against want, the maintenance of a minimum standard, but not the provision of a higher standard", The Economist stressed the connection between increased production and adequate manpower and urged that the Beveridge plan for children’s allowances should have physical counterparts in houses and schools of an adequate standard. And on schools it used words suspiciously like Tawney’s by arguing for "increasing the standard; not of restricting the children to the opportunities available but of making far more opportunities available".(18) For in a study in 1940, part-authored by a research associate of the Population Investigation Committee, R. H. Tawney had described "the nemesis of a plutocratic educational system" as "the adjustment not of education to the needs of the children but of the number of children to the limitations of education".(19)

References:

(1) Eugenics Review Vol XXXIV, (1942-43), p. 143.

(2) The reduction might well have been greater; two days before this first reading debate, on 14February 1943 Churchill had circulated a memorandum to the Cabinet arguing that nolegislation could be initiated and no commitment given since no-one knew how expenditureon social insurance would "fit in" with other social expenditure or how this "group ofbetterment expenditure" could be "reconciled with maintaining strong naval and air forcesand a certain military force for a considerable time". Winston S Churchill, The Second World War, IV, Cassell, 1951, p. 80.

(3) Eugenics Review, 0p cit, p. 124.

(4) Richard M Titmuss, "War and the Birth Rate", Eugenics Review, Vol XXXIII (1941-42) pp49-50 and (with Francois Lafitte) "Eugenics and Poverty", ibid p. 106.

(5) R. M. Titmuss, Birth Poverty and Wealth, A Study of Infant Mortality, Hamish HamiltonMedical Books, 1943. This was a series edited by Maurice Newfield.

(6) Lord Horder and Richard M. Titmuss, The Times, 20 April 1942, 5f.

(7) The Times, 29 September 1943, 5e, f and g.

(8) The Times, 23 October 1943, p. 515.

(9) Journal of Education, June 1942, which tartly reproved Mr. Chuter Ede for "trying toshelter behind the Fascist bogy".

(10) The Times, 3 December 1942, 4g; 5 December, 5c; 10, 2g.

(11) The Times, 17 February, 8f.

(12) Roy Harrod, "Modern Population Trends", The Manchester School of Economic andSocial Studies, x, 1 (1939), pp. 1-20; Britain’s Future Population, Oxford UniversityPress, 1943, pp. 28-9; See also The Times, leading article, 2 December 1943 5c.

(13) The Times, 4 January 1943, 3e.

(14) Ibid., 7 January, 5e.

(15) Ibid., 8 January, 5d, quoting Professor Whelpton.

(16) Ibid., 26 January, 5c-d.

(17) Ibid., 15 February 1943, 2b. But as Gosden points out (op. cit. p. 494) Morrison thoughtthat "vast sums were being thrown down the drain" on education.

(18) The Economist, 12 December 1942, p. 724.

(19) Grace C. Leybourne and Kenneth White, Education and the Birth Rate. A Social Dilemma. Jonathan Cape, 1940, p. 12.