The History and Practice of Eugenics, Pt. 1

The History and Practice of Eugenics. 

(This Article will be divided into several parts.)

If you have ever heard of eugenics, you have probably only heard about it in reference to blacks or the Nazi Holocaust. But you need to be aware of it even if you are not black or Jewish. Because it is being used in the 21st century to eliminate more that just those two groups of people. If you do not belong to one of the elite families who wield power around the world, you have the potential to become a victim of eugenics, thanks to the modern advances of genetics, nano-technology and robotics.

In the 1800's, geneticists believed that they could use science to prove that degeneracy was an hereditary trait. And if it was, the premise was that these people should be prevented from reproducing. Eugenics is the self direction of human evolution. It was also explained by Sir Francis Galton as "the study of the agencies under social control, that improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally."Eugenicists believed that if people were poor and unfortunate and disadvantaged, it was because they were genetically inferior.

The basis for eugenics came from Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton, who believed in something called positive eugenics, and selective breeding for the upper classes. He is considered the father of eugenics. The result of these two men's ideas is called Social Darwinism. The fathers of these two men and a man named Josiah Wedgwood pledged that their families would only breed with each other. You can see their family tree charting the characteristics of philosophy, science and art, here: http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/html/eugenics/index2.html?tag=1061 There is an easier to follow chart here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin%E2%80%93Wedgwood_family

So to them, it was not just a theory, they intended to put it into practice. They believed that within a few generations, their gene pool would produce super men. The Darwin's were scientists and doctors. The Galtons made their money through arms manufacture, but diversified into banking later. The Wedgewood family are famous for Wedgewood blue pottery.

Francis Galton was born in 1822. He dropped out of school in 1842, at the age of 20. But he inherited a fortune two years later. In the 1850's he was studying genetics and the family trees of noble families. In 1869, he wrote a book titled, Hereditary Genius. It had some of his early ideas on the subject of eugenics, without actually calling it that name. He believed that the lower classes would out breed the upper classes who practiced restraint. It would be necessary to take steps "to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable." It is interesting to speculate to what degree the fact that his marriage did not produce children, effected his opinions. Upon his death, he left his fortune to London University for an endowment for a Professional chair on eugenics. There were many people from different backgrounds interested in the subject. One of Galton's friends, Karl Pearson, was a statistician. Tracking statistics would have been highly valuable to the field.

As I said before, Social Darwinism was also part of eugenics. It was the idea that Darwin's ideas had to be applied to humans, so that the race wouldn't be over run by degenerates. It is an entirely human tendency to feel that you are better than other people who are different than you are. Eugenicists were mostly from the upper class, and therefore considered themselves better than the lower classes. If the upper class were the "fittest" then the lower classes were considered "unfit." In the U.S., the lower classes were predominantly black or some other minority. So, it took on racist tones from the start. Although it wasn't only aimed at blacks. Irish Catholics and Jews were a target. The Irish posed a threat to Anglo-Saxon Americans because they were competition for jobs, land and space. And they fell into the idea of being considered "others" because they were mostly Catholic, and Americans were mostly Protestants. And Jews were often darker complected. as well as being historically blamed for all the ill in the world by Christians. The lower races, the poor, and mentally handicapped were said to be sexually immoral. Sex was not usually addressed directly in polite conversation. But in the minds of upper class people. children being born were evidence of sex just by their very existence. The lower classes supposed tendency to be preoccupied with sex, was considered degeneracy, or in other words, morally corrupt. Degeneracy referred to physical short comings, and moral ones, like promiscuity, alcoholism, and criminal tendencies. The other term used to single people out was feeble-mindedness. This included both mental illness and a low I.Q. I will cover how I.Q tests were used in the field of eugenics later. Since they were supposedly using science, alcoholism and crime were evidence that you were degenerate, incapacitated and feeble-minded.

Sir Frances Galton, the father of eugenics studied twins and family traits, and began the nature vs. nurture debate that continues today. He believed in Positive Eugenics, which encouraged the reproduction of imminent men whose family accomplishments, which he had tied to human progress. The opposite of Positive Eugenics is the discouragement of reproduction in people who are considered to have undesirable traits, and blamed for hindering human progress. While he cautioned against drawing any definitive conclusions from his work, his work was ultimately used just as his cousin Charles Darwin's was to justify, some awful crimes throughout history.

Some people point out that he eventually rejected slavery, but his family derived their wealth from slavery, and he did not reject it until after it had ended.

"I do not join in the belief that the African is our equal in brain or in heart; I do not believe that the average negro cares for his liberty as much as an Englishman or even as a serf-born Russian; and I believe that if we can, in any fair way, possess ourselves of his services, we have an equal right to utilize them to our advantage..."(Frances Galton, 1857)

"...average Negroes possess too little intellect, self-reliance, and self-control to make it possible for them to sustain the burden of any respectable form of civilization without a large measure of external guidance and support." (Frances Galton, 1873)

Most people do not know that Charles Darwin himself, was racist. "At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world...The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state...and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla." (Charles Darwin, 1890)

He was saying in a very polite way that black people were a link between man and gorillas or baboons.

The original title to The Origin of Species had subtitles. The original title was, On the Origin of Species, By Means Of Natural Selection Or The Preservation Of Favored Races In The Struggle For Life. The later editions had the shorter and more politically correct title.

I find it highly ironic that Francis Galton left his studies due to a mental breakdown, being that he felt that mental incapacity, was relegated to the lower classes. He even wrote this: "Men who leave their mark on the world are very often those who, being gifted and full of nervous power, are at the same time haunted and driven by a dominant idea, and are therefore within a measurable distance of insanity." Another biographical fact that was of interest to me was the fact that he was a Mason. In 1844 he became a member of the "Scientific Lodge."

People of color have been viewed as not quite the equal of even well meaning white people since the days of abolition. While they felt that some time in the future, that black slaves might catch up and become equal, even men who were considered to be open minded enlightened thinkers, believed blacks to be inferior and colonialism was based on the idea that whites had a Christian duty to help them become more like whites by force if necessary. The believed that they had to send missionaries to places like Africa and India to bring the peoples there over to their religion, ideology, and social customs, which to them were obviously superior. They had to civilize the uncivilized. Eventually, the abolitionists and missionaries came to the conclusion that people of color could not be civilized and should be exterminated. Where British men and women went to settle, like in Australia, they held the view that the races were arranged into some sort of hierarchy, with them at the top. So, since the Aboriginal people were at the bottom of that hierarchy, they were justified in treating them like sub-human animals. When they had to compete with them for land, they felt justification in killing them. In Tasmania, they wiped out almost all of the approximate 5000-6000 Aboriginal people. The British began colonizing Tasmania in 1803, about 25 years after they settled in Botany Bay. When they were down to a few hundred, the governor, decided to send a missionary who had been working amongst them to convert them to Christianity, to round them up under the premise of negotiating a treaty with them. He convinced them to go to an island with the missionary supposedly temporarily, so that they would be safe and be able to live in peace. As in the manner of US reservations this place really turned out to be a place to finish removing their culture from them and force them to become civilized Christians. They eventually became susceptible to European diseases because they were worn down physically and mentally. The result was that almost all of the remainder of them died off. The place where they moved them to, had been a convict station, and was abandoned, because it was not considered a fit place for convicts to live. There have been some people recently, who say that through studying the records, there is no evidence that there was any conflict between the whites and the Aborigines. But the fact remains, that by 1825, there were 13,000 whites, to the original 5,000 Aboriginal people. They didn't stand a chance.(Forgotten Genocides: Oblivion, Denial, and Memory - Page 71,René Lemarchand - 2011)

By the 1840's, all around the world the Christian abolitionists found that the peoples that they sought to civilize did not learn to be civilized as quickly as they had hoped they would, and in places like the Caribbean where the whites were losing money in the sugar cane plantations, began to say that it was because the missionaries had been wrong and that civilizing blacks was never going to work because they were born lazy and inferior. Thomas Carlisle was a British writer and historian, and he was among those who began to call for returning to some sort of slavery. People began to be swayed back to the idea, that there was a proper order that things should be ran in. Men should rule over women, white people should rule over people of color, educated people should rule over uneducated people, because they knew what was best. Many imminent writers of the time held opinions that we would now recognize as racist. Charles Dickens wrote about the inequality of classes, but he was only concerned with whites. William Makepeace Thackeray, who wrote Vanity Fair, was racist. "It is to the middle-class we must look for the safety of England." Charles Kingesley who wrote Water Babies, was a racist. They showed this by showing support for the governor of Jamaica who had been put on trial for ordering his troops to kill 500 Jamaicans and burn their homes in the 1860's. Many people believed that he was justified in doing it , because blacks only understood brute force and violence. During the Victorian period, anatomy was flourishing due to the study of dead bodies. Robert Knox wrote a book called The Race of Man. He said that race was important in everything. Literature, science, art, and civilization as a whole depends on race. It would determine your character, your position in society, and your destiny as a whole. He said, "Can the black races become civilized? I should say not." He was using the science of anatomy to base his opinions on, a scientific basis for racism. He believed that whites and blacks were in a war of extermination, and that one or the other must prevail.

Samuel G. Morton collected the skulls of people of different races and studied them. Skulls were deemed to be of importance because they held the brain, and the bigger the skull the bigger the brain. The American School of Race Sciences decided that the skulls of the races were so different that they must be different species. They began to think that other races were not lower races of man, but probably not human at all.

But the person who had the greatest effect on racism was Charles Darwin. Because of his theory of natural selection, people began to feel that whites had evolved into something superior to people of color. And it justified British Colonialism. People like Thomas Henry Huxley, ancestor of Aldous and Julian, and the economist Herbert Spencer began to be what we call Social Darwinists. Darwin’s theory said that all through nature, the most successful organisms were the ones that specialized. And British people were specialized at expanding. They were the most recently evolved, and the most successful at it, and by default, the other races that were in competition would naturally be eliminated. They would disappear because they couldn't compete. The more successful they were at wiping out other people and expanding their territory, the more they saw it as proof that they were right and were the superior species.

It didn't take long for British people to begin seeing each other as separate races, Cockney people, Welsh people, Scottish people were referred to as races. So whatever your economic status in society, was a result of your race and defined your race. But in direct opposition to Darwin’s theories, the lower classes multiplied faster than their so called superiors. Darwin’s cousin, Frances Galton was deeply affronted and frightened by the fact that those he considered the least fit, were surviving, and felt that he had to stop it. Thus eugenics came into being because he felt that the middle classes should be encouraged to multiply and the lower classes discouraged and prevented from multiplying in an attempt to direct human evolution.