Eugenics, Human Genetics and Human Failings

The Eugenics Society, its sources and its critics in Britain

Pauline Mazumdar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134950218
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This scholarly and penetrating study of eugenics is a major contribution to our understanding of the complex relation between science, ideology and class.

1

THE EUGENICS EDUCATION SOCIETY

The tradition, the setting and the programme

The Eugenics Education Society was founded in 1907, a result of the enthusiasm and organising drive of Sybil Gotto, then aged twenty-one and recently widowed.¹ She was already interested in social problems, but it was Francis Galton's books that inspired her to act. According to Lady Theodore Chambers, who worked with her on the Society's council in those early days, Sybil Gotto ‘had the vision to see the effect eugenics would have once Galton's teaching permeated the mind of mankind no matter to what race they belonged. … She was a born organizer with an almost tireless energy which infected and stimulated all those who came in contact with her’.²

Her first contact was through the Sociological Society. Its Secretary, James W. Slaughter, was excited by her idea, and introduced her to Montague Crackanthorpe, a lawyer friend of Galton's. Crackanthorpe in turn became interested and introduced her to Galton himself. Together they set to work to form a society founded upon Galton's definition of eugenics as ‘the study of all agencies under social control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations’.³

Eugenics was to apply an understanding of the laws of biology to the laws that determined the lives and environments of the subjects of the realm, to immigration and emigration, to marriage and prostitution, to the quality and quantity of the human race. In particular, British eugenics was to concentrate on applying the laws of inheritance to the social problems of poverty and pauperism. The Committee of the Moral Education League was next approached, and a provisional committee including some of their members was set up in 1907. Georgina Chambers remembered, forty years later, that ‘Mrs Gotto was the moving spirit which inspired them all; the idea of educating the public on such broad and varied lines filled all with what might almost be called a religious zeal. The success of the movement without any thought of self dominated all those who joined.’⁴

The Eugenics Education Society was the only group to concentrate its attention solely on human biology and ‘racial responsibility’; but, as Georgina Chambers pointed out, most of its members were also active in a variety of other social and environmental concerns, and there were many invitations to expound their aims before other similar groups. Before long, Sybil Gotto's energetic organising had brought together a society with 341 members, and the eugenics movement in Britain had begun to move.⁵

Every historian who has read the public statements of the British eugenists has recognised that as a movement they spoke on behalf of the educated middle class; their position is as obvious to us as it was to the movement's founders. The rollicking spirit in which men like the Dean of St Paul's damned the lower classes leaves no doubt as to the special position of eugenics as an expression of the aggressively outspoken class-consciousness of these early enthusiasts.

The Australian historian Lyndsay Farrall, writing in 1970, was the first to analyse the membership of the Eugenics Education Society from the point of view of a class and its interests. His counts showed that nearly 80 per cent of the early membership was eminent enough to be included in the Dictionary of National Biography. Most of them were university people, and two-thirds of these were biological or social scientists. There were a few only who were medical or physical scientists and fewer still from the humanities, although medical men were better represented on the Council of the Society.⁶ Farrall called them middle-class radicals, a phrase which has been used to describe the middle-class leaders of reform movements from the days of Henry Brougham and his Whig friends.⁷

Donald MacKenzie brought out another implication of Farrall's membership counts. He suggested that it was the interests of the more modern and more scientific professions that were served by eugenics, rather than those of the older traditional professions such as law and the Church.⁸

However, there were many exceptions among the movement's early leaders. The first president of the Society was a lawyer, Galton's friend Montague Crackanthorpe, and one of the most outspoken of the early members was the Reverend William R. Inge, later Dean of St Paul's. The Society's founder, Sybil Gotto, belonged to no profession but was interested in social questions generally. Mackenzie went on to suggest that less science-oriented members of the same group of people might join the Fabian Society instead of the Eugenics Society.⁹

Within the ‘modern professions’, G.R. Searle picks out a still smaller group, those whose professions were based on the biological sciences: the biologists, the statisticians and the medical men, especially if their speciality involved diseases thought to be inherited. Searle finds very few members of what he calls the environmental professions, local government officials, civil servants and social workers. Middle-class opinion, he feels, tended to group itself not so much along traditional versus modern lines, but on whether the biological sciences were actually part of one's job or not.¹⁰ However, although there was quite a number of doctors among the Society's members, eugenics was not supported by the British Medical Association, nor did it ever become part of the medical curriculum.

Each of these generalisations follows Farrall's in being based on the membership of the Eugenics Education Society alone. But the Eugenics Education Society was just one of a network of organisations representing a common front of social activists who might be doctors, teachers or social workers, or simply ladies interested in social problems. Many were active in more than one society; social activism did not confine itself to a single remedy, though a given society might be specialised in its interests. The same person might join the Eugenics Education Society, the Moral Education League, the Charity Organisation Society, the National Association for the Care and Protection of the Feeble Minded, or the Society for the Study of Inebriety. All these organisations shared members, interests and programmes with one another. With the exception of the Eugenics Education Society, all of them were formed before 1900: the Charity Organisation Society in 1869, the Society for the Study of Inebriety in 1884, the National Association for the Care and Protecion of the Feeble Minded in 1896, the Moral Education League in 1898. The Eugenics Education Society itself was founded in 1907. It had particularly close links with the Moral Education League, but it drew members from all the older groups. Environmentalism had not yet become the dividing issue. Their common appeal was to the educated class’, and their common goal the control of pauperism and the management of the class they called the residuum.

The history of middle-class efforts to deal with this difficult group goes far back into the nineteenth century, long before the appearance of the eugenics movement. These themes, the causes of pauperism and the problem of the residuum, were to constitute the core of eugenic thinking in Britain. They were already being discussed by the social activists of the 1850s, a cross-section of whose concerns can be discovered in the programmes of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, a group founded in 1857.¹¹

The purpose of the Social Science Association, as it was called for short, was to bring together people actively interested in social reform, who were working in five different areas: jurisprudence and amendment of the law, education, punishment and reformation, public health and social economy. This last was intended to cover 'social questions related to Capital, Labour and Production’, under which it grouped together economic science and statistics, population, labour and capital, the condition of the working class, including the problem of intemperance, and workhouse management.¹²

The first President of the Social Science Association was Lord Brougham, the Whig reformer and the original middle-class radical, by then an old man. He was well known for his interest in education, particularly working-class education.¹³ In the 1820s he had formed and led the Mechanics Institute movement and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and he had been active in organising the University of London when it was founded in 1826.¹⁴

The problems of the causes and control of crime and pauperism were the Association's central interests. Social science adopted a point of view and a method of empirical investigation that was very close to that of sanitary science. It linked statistics on crime, education and sanitation into a complex whole enthusiastically discussed by middle-class reformers as a basis for legislative changes that were intended to lead to the moral and physical improvement of the lower class. The Association's Handbook of 1857 stated its aims in these words:

while statistics reveal that crime is not the necessary attendant upon poverty or low wages, they show that it is found most abundant [sic] in closely crowded houses, in ill-drained localities, while the morals of the poor quickly manifest an improvement when sanitary reform has been carried out in their dwellings. … The religious condition of the people, the education of their children, the wretched sanitary state of crowded neighbourhoods, the connexion of intemperance with crime, have all been tested and proved by statistical science.¹⁵

The sanitary movement seems to have been the model for the Association's methods, as the British Association for the Advancement of Science had been for its initial formation. The Public Health Section was supported by most of the movers of the sanitary movement. At various times, it heard papers from Edwin Chadwick, author of the famous Sanitary Report of 1842 and from his two main informants on the sanitary condition of the working class in England, Dr Southwood Smith and Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, the first Secretary of the Committee of Privy Council on Education.¹⁶ Chadwick and Kay-Shuttleworth had also been the movers behind the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, that had abolished outdoor relief for the poor, and had established the principle of less eligibility.¹⁷

A focus on problems connected with the urban poor was typical of all sections of the Social Science Association. At its first Annual Meeting in 1857 the Education Section of the Association listened to a few papers on middle-class education, but like the section on crime control, its major interest was the education of the working class, and particularly in the extension of education to the sub-proletariat through the Ragged Schools, the Industrial Schools and the Reformatories.¹⁸

The best-known authority on the education of this class was Mary Carpenter, who had devoted herself to the Ragged School movement, and to the organisation of reformatories for the education of the ‘children of the perishing and dangerous classes’.¹⁹ Mary Carpenter spoke at the first two meetings of the Association, on Reformatories and on Ragged and Industrial Schools.²⁰ She argued passionately that the education of this kind of child should concentrate on moral training rather than intellectual instruction, and that it should include industrial discipline.²¹ Papers on this borderland between education, discipline and punishment, or education, that is, as it applied to the ‘dangerous classes’, were to be a common feature of Association meetings of the future.

The working class did not, it seems, make the members of the Association feel particularly welcome when they appeared at the door with advice on hygiene and educational enlightenment. As one of the Association's speakers said:

All who have had to deal with working men have encountered similar manifestations of suspiciousness, Why should they be, as a class, so suspicious? … By looking back a little … we may detect causes … that have produced a set of traditional notions concerning the relations between the different classes of society, that are calculated to render the bulk of the poorer classes very suspicious of political interference that comes or seems to come from those who are socially above them. It is still held as an hereditary article of popular faith that the leading effect of political and social effort on the part of the rich is to keep the people down and to secure to themselves the perpetual maintenance of their own existing advantages.²²

The stated aim of the society was not, of course, to ‘keep the people down’. But the connection between pauperism, crime, intemperance and lack of sanitation in streets and houses was perfectly clear to the meliorists. To ‘promote the comfort, the health and the morals of the sunken masses of the people by a sanitary reformation’ was also the way to make the streets safer for their betters.²³ As we have often been warned, historians should be careful not to use the concept of social control too facilely.²⁴ But the list of social evils which were to be ameliorated, and the coerciveness of the suggested remedies, certainly sound more like a programme of control than one of comfort, in common with much of the Victorian reformers' rhetoric.

It was ge...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 THE EUGENICS EDUCATION SOCIETY: THE TRADITION, THE SETTING AND THE PROGRAMME
• 2 THE AGE OF PEDIGREES: THE METHODOLOGY OF EUGENICS, 1900–20
• 3 IDEOLOGY AND METHOD: R.A. FISHER AND RESEARCH IN EUGENICS
• 4 THE ATTACK FROM THE LEFT: MARXISM AND THE NEW MATHEMATICAL TECHNIQUES
• 5 HUMAN GENETICS AND THE EUGENICS PROBLEMATIC
• EPILOGUE AND CONCLUSION
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index