Eugenics

The word eugenics was coined in 1883 by Francis Galton (1820–1911), a British writer and pioneer of statistics, who defined it as the improvement or repair of the qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally. For Galton, the chief criterion of improvement was civic worthiness, or the value of a person to the community. Galton understood worthiness to include physique (including good health), ability, and character, and in his Hereditary Genius of 1869, he argued that “eminence” in lawyers, statesmen, scientists, writers, musicians, scholars—and even wrestlers—was hereditary.

Eugenics (coined from the Greek for “well bred”) implied the antonym dysgenics (“ill bred”). According to Galton, who was a cousin of Charles Darwin (1809–1883), civilization diminishes the rigor of natural selection, or survival of the fittest, and preserves the unfit who otherwise would have perished. The leading biologist of the day, Julian Huxley (1887–1975), who was president of the British Eugenics Society from 1959 to 1962, held that “the elimination of natural selection is largely … rendered inoperative by medicine, charity, and the social services” (Lynn 2001, p. 21). According to the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) speaking in 1930, “There can be no doubt that the civilization produced by the white races has this singular characteristic, that in proportion as men and women absorb it, they become sterile… At the present, the most intelligent sections of the Western nations are dying out” (Lynn 2001, p. 23).

Such views were widely held in the first half of the twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic and of the political divide. The British Fabiansocialists Beatrice and Sidney Webb carried out research in the 1890s confirming the high fertility of the “improvident”: the “degenerate hordes … unfit for social life” (Lynn 2001, p. 33). In the United States, Margaret Sanger (1883–1966), a pioneer advocate of birth control, supported contraception in part for eugenic reasons, and a British follower declared, “more children from the fit, less from the unfit—that is the chief issue of birth control” (Lynn 2001, p. 33).

A distinction is often made between positive and negative eugenics. Negative eugenics describes the attempt to prevent the birth, growth, and development of individuals with undesirable traits. According to Galton, “Stern compulsion ought to be exerted to prevent the free propagation of the stock of those who are seriously afflicted by lunacy, feeble-mindedness, habitual criminality, and pauperism” (Lynn 2001, p. 12). In the twentieth century, the most notorious examples of this were the programs of compulsory sterilization seen in such countries as the United States (60,000 sterilizations up to 1970; 50 percent were performed on the mentally retarded, with the majority of the remainder being performed on criminals and the insane), Sweden (60,000 from 1934 to 1976, or 1 percent of the total population), and Japan (16,500 women from 1949 to 1995). Positive eugenics describes programs designed to encourage the birth, growth, and development of the most desirable individuals. Galton thought it would be as easy to produce “a gifted race of men” as it had been to breed excellent dogs, race horses or any other type of domesticated animal. However, Galton's comments were [Page 470]made before the true basis of genetics was known and, with the benefit of twenty-first-century hindsight, started from a number of false assumptions.

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