Eugenics and Protestant Social Reform

Hereditary Science and Religion in America, 1860–1940

Durst

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781532605789
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

The eugenics movement prior to the Second World War gave voice to the desire of many social reformers to promote good births and prevent bad births. Two sources of cultural authority in this period, science and religion, often found common cause in the promotion of eugenics. The rhetoric of biology and theology blended in strange ways through a common framework known as degeneration theory. Degeneration, a core concept of the eugenics movement, served as a key conceptual nexus between theological and scientific reflection on heredity among Protestant intellectuals and social reformers in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Elite efforts at social control of the allegedly "unfit" took the form of negative eugenics. This included marriage restrictions and even sterilization for many who were identified as having a suspect heredity. Speculations on heredity were deployed in identifying the feeble-minded, hereditary criminals, hereditary alcoholics, and racial minorities as presumed hindrances to the progress of civilization. A few social reformers trained in biology, anthropology, criminology, and theology eventually raised objections to the eugenics movement. Still, many thousands of citizens on the margins were labeled as defectives and suffered human rights violations during this turbulent time of social change.

Chapter 1

Degeneration Theory and Eugenics Discourse

These facts show that heredity is not a freakish or haphazard principle but a great and immutable law, as positive and certain in its action as the law of gravitation. The lesson which we desire to draw from the knowledge of this great biologic principle is the fact that in all civilized lands heredity is taking note of every condition, every habit, every act which results in the deterioration of the stamina of the race. Nature is a good bookkeeper; nothing escapes her notice.

—John Harvey Kellogg, 191011

Introduction

French psychiatrist Bénédict Morel (1809–1873) was a pioneer in integrating biological explanation of human defectiveness with psychiatry. Though he was a devout Roman Catholic who acknowledged the role of spiritual factors in mental health, Morel also stressed the biological causation of many forms of insanity. For Morel, the disease model formed the best framework for explaining mental disorders. As a monogenist (literally: one beginning), Morel accepted the created unity of the human race, and in his 1857 Treatise of Degeneracy set forth degeneration as a “morbid deviation from the primitive human type.”12 Morel accepted the role of original sin in his notion of degeneration, but saw this as a universal problem and thus not a sufficient explanation for the level of degeneration seen in his patients. According to Coffin, original sin in Morel’s view “needs to be associated with other causes coming from the pathogenic natural and social environment to carry on influence.”13 Morel pioneered an investigation of the role of brain lesions within the development of insanity. He blended milieu (his term for environment) with hereditary factors in explaining the multi-generational effects, for example, of alcoholism. Coffin notes Morel’s observation that “Individuals drink because of their moral misery and drinking has negative physiological impacts on the body. Then, children from this heritage are particularly exposed to degeneration. Organic predisposition and heritage of a vicious milieu will indeed favor the disease.”14

Degeneration Theory as Nexus between Science and Religion

The interplay of science and theology is a marked characteristic of Morel’s theory of degeneration. Coffin summarizes it succinctly: “Milieu and the original sin cause abnormality; heredity maintains and accelerates the abnormality and there is no cure because this is the tragedy of the human race.”15 Many later social reformers would use the language of degeneration while moving away from Morel’s resignation in the face of this tragedy. They would seek out eugenic cures not primarily for the benefit of individual patients but for the human race (or the “germ plasm”) as a whole.

Not far behind any scientific or theological discussion of heredity and the details of generation comes the tale of degeneration.16 Like many terms of its day, degeneration came to be used in a wide range of intellectual discourses, with a resulting swelter of differing and contradictory meanings. At the center of the term’s meaning, degeneration stood out as “a condition analogous to illness in which the human organism is said to exist in a state of decay.” Further, “the deterioration can be physical, intellectual, psychological, or all three at once.”17

For religious figures the term usually carried connotations of sin or moral deficiency. Degeneration theorists looked for various signs of degeneration, such as cranial or facial characteristics. This propensity was in part due to the contemporaneous popularity of phrenology, the study of cranial shapes to discern mental ability. Those who imbibed degeneration theory also held a wide range of maladies to be evidence of degeneration, such as epilepsy, criminality, pauperism, alcoholism, and a host of other social ills. Such alleged evidences of degeneration were often designated by the religiously-laden term “stigmata” of degeneration, the extensive subject of a later chapter.18

Degeneration theory echoed theological and biblical antecedents, not least of which was the Christian doctrine of original sin. Degeneration theory also invited a strongly moralistic assessment of humans, especially (for most social reformers) “other” humans, mainly of the underclass. Degeneration theory also got caught up within racialist theorizing among scientists and theologians alike, to the disfavor of minorities and immigrants.19

The widespread usage of degeneration theory, not merely in psychiatry, but in various genres of social commentary such as journalism, drama, and political discussions, led to a widespread sense of degeneration as “threatening the very overthrow of civilization and progress.”20 Pick notes that degeneration is not a new concept, tracing it back at least as far as the pre-Christian figures like the satirist Horace or the philosopher Plato. He insists that the particular historical form the theme of degeneration took in the nineteenth century is worth investigating, noting that “important and revealing differences do emerge in the meaning of seemingly homogenous and timeless concepts.”21 Pick’s analysis of Morel’s studies of cretinism in the 1850s illustrates how Morel came to espouse a degeneration theory wide in social application. Pick writes: “The cretin was an instance, an emblem of racial degeneration. The notion of degeneration became more elastic and expansive, whilst the prognosis of the degenerate became more rigid.”22 Transatlantic fascination with heredity would only grow in the ensuing decades, and versions of degeneration theory spread across many disciplines. The discordant ways degeneration was deployed by Protestant theologians and scientists in the American context add yet more layers to a multi-layered historical narrative of degeneration.

The religious resonance of the pejorative noun “degenerate” has long been seen as a sermonic synonym for an especially depraved sinner. The religious identification of the person’s very being with their most obvious flaw, along with the quasi-scientific resonance of degeneration as biological defect or regression, makes the sources ripe for conceptual slippage and distortion. The proliferation of degeneracy language, the development of its use in the discourses of theology and science, and its importation into social policy, served a recurring role in the history of all three topics. Exploration of degeneracy, with its multivalent nuances and usages in historical context, can shed light on how distortions of both theology and science can easily occur when poorly conceived terms with rhetorical power come to serve as the basis of social policy.

Degeneration and Atavism

In an era dominated by notions of progress, the spectre of atavism, or finding “throwbacks” to an earlier, retrograde, semi-human, and eventually bestial form, haunted the public consciousness. Chicago Physician Eugene Talbot asserted in 1898 that “Reversional heredity or atavism consists in the reproduction in the descendants of the moral or physical qualities of their ancestors.”23 Talbot was one of Morel’s leading American interpreters, and embraced a definition of degeneration as “a marked departur...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Degeneration Theory and Eugenics Discourse
• Chapter 2: Theories of Heredity and the Rise of Eugenics
• Chapter 3: “Stigmata of Degeneration”: The Religious Rhetoric of Eugenics
• Chapter 4: Eugenic Family Studies, Science, and Religion
• Chapter 5: The Degenerate Mind and Hereditary Mental Defect
• Chapter 6: Epilepsy and Eugenics in Scientific and Religious Perspective
• Chapter 7: From Sinful to Criminal: The Making of Hereditary Criminality
• Chapter 8: Drink and the Degeneration of the Germ Plasm
• Chapter 9: Degeneration and the Race Question
• Chapter 10: Theologians, Hereditary Sin, and Eugenics
• Conclusion: The Quest for Good Births
• Bibliography