Control, p.7
Control, page 7
The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the Feeble-Minded and Insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate. . . . I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed.
The Idiots Act of 1886 had attempted to formalize the psychiatric diagnoses of lunatics, idiots and imbeciles, but other terminology had evolved in the intervening years, as more and more people were detained into the expanding asylum industry. The report of a royal commission on feeblemindedness was published in the British Medical Journal in 1908, attempting to quantify the number of citizens who were problems for the state.
Persons who cannot take a part in the struggle of life owing to mental defect, whether they are described as lunatics or persons of unsound mind, idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded, or other wise [sic], should be afforded by the State such special protection as may be suited to their needs.
The report put this number at a suspiciously precise 271,607. The blurring of the line between psychiatric diagnoses and antisocial behaviors is clear in this report. It states that 60 to 70 percent of “habitual inebriates” are mentally defective. It is virtually impossible to understand precisely what that diagnosis means in twenty-first-century terms.
Churchill’s correspondence on matters of eugenics is voluminous, and all indicate a very strong commitment to the Galtonian idea of innate undesirable traits, and the prevention of the unfit from further polluting the British stock. He informed the prime minister in 1910 that the feebleminded at large in our midst deserved “all that could be done for them by a Christian and scientific civilization now that they are in the world” but should be “segregated under proper conditions so that their curse died with them and was not transmitted to future generations.” There is Galton’s link between the innate and behavior, and between the science of heredity and politics.
Churchill had read a pamphlet by H. C. Sharp, an American physician and vasectomy fanatic at the Indiana Reformatory, called “The Sterilization of Degenerates”:
Most of the insane, the epileptic, the imbecile, the idiotic, the sexual perverts; many of the confirmed inebriates, prostitutes, tramps and criminals, as well as the habitual paupers found in our county poor asylums; also many of the children in our orphan homes belong to the class known as degenerates.
Sharp asserts that the majority of cases of “insanity” have ancestral roots—again a Galtonian interpretation of heredity—and that marriage sanctions are not enough to prevent sex or reproduction. Sharp advocates vasectomy—of which he had performed 236 since 1899, taking three minutes without local or general anesthetic, and without any “unfavorable symptom.” He provides quotations from eminent doctors to extend an equivalent sterilization practice to women and concludes that this “should at least give courage to others that are interested in the purity of the race.”
I suppose there is something of an irony buried in Churchill’s enthusiasm for purging alcoholics and the mentally ill from the population. He was a proud and hard drinker, quite possibly an alcoholic, throughout his life. He mocked those who criticized his drinking, including King George V, who announced he would abstain in support of the British troops in the First World War, and openly admitted he relied on alcohol. Furthermore, Churchill was plagued by periods of melancholy and mood swings. Posthumous diagnosis of profound mental ill health is always a minefield, but some have claimed that he suffered clinical depression, even bipolar disorder (though I think this is a stretch). Nevertheless, Churchill’s behaviors may well have put him in his own category for enforced sterilization and absolute removal of freedom, had he not been born into hereditary power and privilege.
Churchill asked the Home Office to look at the sterilization law passed in Indiana in 1907 to consider how it could be implemented successfully abroad. The Feeble-Minded Control Bill was presented to the House of Commons on May 17, 1912. It proposed to implement the findings of the 1908 royal commission report, including the segregation of tens if not hundreds of thousands of people from society into asylums, and the criminalization of attempts to marry anyone designated as feebleminded or one of the other criteria of unfitness.
I have labored the point that support for eugenics was broad, but that does not mean it was uncontested. Though wildly popular across political divides, eugenics was by no means universally supported, and this bill would not survive its critics. Plenty of people vocally and publicly opposed the principles and the enactment of eugenics policies in the United Kingdom and abroad.
Just as some of the classic literature of this age references eugenics, activists and writers had significant impact on hampering the progress of eugenics in society. Perhaps the most lasting of these works is H. G. Wells’s science fiction classic The Time Machine. Written in 1895, it’s not really a story about time travel at all, in the sense that it doesn’t deal with the consequences of altering chronological cause and effect, as happens in later sci-fi time-travel movies such as Back to the Future, La Jetée, Avengers: Endgame## or Hot Tub Time Machine. Wells’s time traveler experiences a dystopian future in the year 802,701, where humankind has bifurcated into two distinct species: the Eloi, a surface-dwelling fruitarian people descended from the Victorian upper classes, who avoid the dark and moonless night for fear of encountering the Morlock, apelike subterranean grunting cave-people whose ancestors were the working classes. The Morlock are seen at first as an underclass effectively in service of the fey Eloi: the machinery of state that they rely upon is maintained by the surly Morlock, but as the story progresses it is clear that this peculiar symbiosis is collapsing. The Eloi are degenerating, and the Morlock growing independent. Wells, an avowed socialist, vacillated on the subject of eugenics, and wrote fiction and essays about its moral and scientific folly, even though he also sometimes expressed sympathy and support for its implementation. Nevertheless, the best science fiction always acts as a commentary on the issues of the present, and one interpretation of the themes in The Time Machine is as a cautionary tale of societies as they evolve away from a recognition of the value of every human life.
One of the most effective campaigners against eugenics in the United Kingdom was the writer and Christian apologist G. K. Chesterton. He regarded eugenics as a tremendous evil that ran counter to his deeply felt Catholicism. Over many years, Chesterton wittily and forcefully wrote and lectured about eugenics—“a thing no more to be bargained about than poisoning”—and especially its anti-Christian rubric. He believed that an inherent property in the principles of eugenics as proposed by its advocates was that it targeted not the weak—whether that was assessed by somewhat arbitrary physical, behavioral or mental abilities—but the poor.
The Eugenist, for all I know, would regard the mere existence of Tiny Tim as a sufficient reason for massacring the whole family of Cratchit. . . . The poor are not a race or even a type. It is senseless to talk about breeding them; for they are not a breed. They are, in cold fact, what Dickens describes: “a dustbin of individual accidents,” of damaged dignity, and often of damaged gentility. The class very largely consists of perfectly promising children, lost like Oliver Twist, or crippled like Tiny Tim. It contains very valuable things, like most dustbins.
That quote was among Chesterton’s many thoughts on the subject published in a 1922 book whose title could not have made his opinion any clearer: Eugenics and Other Evils. His is a prescient view, I think born not of an advanced or predictive sense of biology that was at that time undiscovered, but of a political belief that would ultimately be ratified by genetics. The eugenics of this era was predicated on the conviction that certain traits were innate, but in fact in time we would realize those are mediated more by nurture than nature. All traits are heritable to some degree or other, but that does not mean that they are primarily genetic. We inherit our environment from our parents, family and peers, so for many of the traits that animated the eugenicists, the prospect of breeding them out of families and populations was always doomed to failure. Criminality can run in families, but there is no gene for it. Alcoholism can run in families, and while there are genes that increase the risk of addiction, there is no gene for alcoholism. You can have every one of those risk factors, but never become an alcoholic if you never drink alcohol. Poverty runs in families, but there is no gene for being poor.
Christianity, a religion born out of poverty, was inconsistent in its position on eugenics, just as it had been in its position on slavery in the nineteenth century. Both eugenicists and their opponents claimed religious principles as their guide. As today, the simplistic notion that this was a battle between science and religion is false. Galton, a Quaker by birth, was frequently dismissive of religion: he used statistics in 1872 to show the inefficacy of prayer*** and praised Darwin for uprooting the “nightmare” of Christianity (something that arguably neither Darwin nor his work ever truly did). Galton’s antagonism to the religious celibacy of eminent Englishmen of the Middle Ages stalling the inevitable greatness of the nation set eugenics against the Church at its inception. Yet many Christians in the early twentieth century saw eugenics as a way to deliver their religious principles, and not in conflict with the teachings of the Church. The Reverend W. R. Inge, the dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and a weekly columnist for the London Evening Standard, was one such prominent and influential voice. The Eugenics Education Society (later the Galton Institute) had courted religious leaders for support, and wished to embrace “religion, in so far as it strengthens and sanctifies the sense of Eugenic duty.” Reverend Inge took up that mantle, writing in the first issue of the society’s magazine, The Eugenics Review, that the “moralist and the biologist may have a somewhat different standard of values, but they want the same thing—to make men better.” Like so many of the eugenicists, he expresses fear of the fecundity of what he calls “degenerates”: “I cannot say that I am hopeful about the near future. I am afraid that the urban proletariat may cripple our civilisation, as it destroyed that of ancient Rome.”
He reinterprets Galton’s criticism of great men who chose to not have children:
If such a man lives and dies unmarried we do not think any the worse of him. It never occurs to us that, in spite of his valuable contributions to literature, science, or what not, he has perhaps neglected the chief duty which God and his country required of him. . . . [I]t is the moral imperative of the Christian to embrace the new eugenics to challenge the natural degeneracy of the lower classes. It is not Christian, it is only barbarous and medieval, to say that cure is right, and prevention wrong. Be patient, my scientific friends, with us clergy, for we are the natural custodians of various race-traditions . . . our common enemy must be met with modern weapons.
G. K. Chesterton’s view was the polar opposite. He and other Christians saw the problems that came with poverty as things to be fixed rather than eradicated. His writing on eugenics consistently highlights the value and sanctity of human life. It was Chesterton’s lobbying, particularly of the Liberal MP (and member of the extended Darwin–Wedgwood pedigree) Josiah Wedgwood, that proved effective in stalling the Feeble-Minded Control Bill. Wedgwood described it as a “monstrous violation” of human rights.
The timing here is delicate. The Feeble-Minded Control Bill was rejected, but the government quickly followed it with the Mental Deficiency Bill, which Churchill helped to draft. The bill, which was brought before Parliament on June 10, 1912, attempted to clarify the terms of the “mentally deficient” such that they could be categorized, and segregated from society, but not using the specifics of IQ, as had been adopted in the United States. These are the definitions used in the bill:
(a) Idiots; that is to say, persons so deeply defective in mind from birth or from an early age as to be unable to guard themselves against common physical dangers;
(b) Imbeciles; that is to say, persons in whose case there exists from birth or from an early age mental defectiveness not amounting to idiocy, yet so pronounced that they are incapable of managing themselves or their affairs, or, in the case of children, of being taught to do so;
(c) Feeble-minded persons; that is to say, persons in whose case there exists from birth or from an early age mental defectiveness not amounting to imbecility, yet so pronounced that they require care, supervision, and control for their own protection or for the protection of others, or, in the case of children, that they by reason of such defectiveness appear to be permanently incapable of receiving proper benefit from the instruction in ordinary schools;
(d) Moral imbeciles; that is to say, persons who from an early age display some permanent mental defect coupled with strong vicious or criminal propensities on which punishment has had little or no deterrent effect.
The bill also proposed a Board of Control, an Orwellian-sounding governing body whose jurisdiction was anyone subject to the bill’s definitions, and which would “be charged with the general superintendence of matters relating to the supervision, protection, and control of defectives.”
A few weeks later, in July 1912, eight hundred delegates met at the First International Eugenics Congress to discuss ideas and policy. The meeting was dedicated to Galton, who had died in January of the previous year, aged eighty-eight. Ironically, his own genius and eminence would not be passed down the generations: he was married to Louisa Butler for forty-three years, but their matrimonial pair bonding was childless.
The meeting was organized by the Eugenics Education Society and the University of London. Politicians and scientists from around the world met at the Cecil Hotel on the Strand and discussed their ideas at one of the peaks in the popularity and influence of eugenics. Future prime minister Winston Churchill was there, as vice-president of the meeting, along with former prime minister Arthur Balfour, who declared at a keynote banquet speech that the grand challenge of eugenics was persuading “the ordinary man that the task science had set itself was one of the most difficult and complex it had ever undertaken.” Eugenics, he said, “depended upon facts—which ought not to be difficult to verify.” There, yet again, is that misplaced confidence of politicians when speaking of science. It turned out that the facts of heredity, especially the Galtonian staple of nature and nurture, in all our studies of human biology, was and is the hardest button to button.
By now though, Churchill had been promoted to the position of First Lord of the Admiralty, the political chief of the Royal Navy, and had other matters to deal with. The eugenics movement had lost one of its primary advocates for the key principle of involuntary sterilization.
The Mental Deficiency Act became law in August 1913, but without enforced sterilization included. Instead, it ensured that people deemed undesirable by their categorization of being idiots, feebleminded or moral imbeciles would be separated and isolated from society in institutions, under the auspices of the Board of Control for Lunacy and Mental Deficiency. Only three votes were cast against the bill. It stood as law until 1959.
That cross-bench parliamentary support is notable. It is appealing to think that the eugenic maintenance of existing power structures in Britain was solely the preserve of right-wing ideology, but this was not the reality. Though it is obviously the case that upper-class people like Churchill and Galton were keen supporters, eugenics also fell within some of the principles of prominent left-wing thinkers and politicians in the years that followed (they were also frequently born of inherited wealth and power). The reduction of poverty via coercion or compulsory sterilization was not anathema to the socialism of prewar Britain; it was part of it. In 1903, the playwright George Bernard Shaw, champion of socialist virtues, wrote that the “only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man.” Many of the founders of the influential left-wing think tank the Fabian Society were eugenics fans, such as Beatrice and Sidney Webb.††† The traditionally left-wing press, notably The Guardian (then the Manchester Guardian) and the New Statesman, were also supportive. An editorial in the New Statesman in 1931 spelled it out:
The legitimate claims of eugenics are not inherently incompatible with the outlook of the collectivist movement. On the contrary, they would be expected to find their most intransigent opponents amongst those who cling to the individualistic views of parenthood and family economics.
Perhaps the most confounding of these supporters is William Beveridge, who fits the educational pattern of the eugenicists to a tee: top private school (Charterhouse), math and classics at Oxford. In 1942, Beveridge authored Social Insurance and Allied Services—aka the Beveridge Report—which outlined the architecture of the forthcoming British welfare state, and the foundations for the National Health Service. In 1906, well before he developed this beloved system of free socialized health care for all and an economic model designed to serve the poorest members of society, he was quite open in echoing the antiliberty views of the most ardent eugenicists of the time:
[T]hose men who through general defects are unable to fill such a whole place in industry are to be recognized as unemployable. They must become the acknowledged dependents of the State . . . but with complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights—including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood.
THE MODERN SYNTHESIS
These bills, the legislation and the political views about society and its ills that they reflect all seem illiberal, arbitrary and draconian to our modern ears. They are the opposite of personal freedoms. They were popular though not unopposed, and with the removal of compulsory sterilization from those bills in the years up to 1913, Britain had dodged state-legislated eugenics by a whisker, at a time when countries around the world, notably the United States, had embraced it warmly. That doesn’t mean that eugenics died a death in its birth nation. Galton’s scientific legacy was still flourishing.
