The doctrine and movement holding that human heredity should be improved by deliberate intervention in reproduction. Francis Galton coined the name in 1883, and for the half-century that followed it was no fringe heresy but a respected mainstream of science and public policy in Britain, the United States, Scandinavia, Latin America, and East Asia—endowed with university chairs and learned societies, and the source of several foundational results in statistics, which grew out of its research programme. Its policy form was most fully developed in the United States: from Indiana in 1907, more than thirty states legislated compulsory sterilization; the Supreme Court upheld the practice in Buck v. Bell (1927); and some sixty thousand people were sterilized under these laws in the course of the century. Sterilization statutes in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark remained in force into the postwar decades. In Germany the same discourse was taken up and radicalized by the Nazi regime, supplying the medical language of Aktion T4. Eugenics dissolved as a discipline after the war, but argument over what counts as a life worth being born did not end with it.
Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
—— Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., opinion in Buck v. Bell (1927)
History
Galton coined "eugenics" in 1883, arguing that since human ability could be counted it could be improved by marriage and generation. The rediscovery of Mendelian inheritance gave the programme great impetus: a chair of eugenics was founded at University College London, the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor in the United States, and international congresses met from 1912, attended by some of the most eminent biologists, economists, and public-health officials of the day. Its policy expression varied by country. The United States went earliest and furthest: Indiana legislated in 1907 for the compulsory sterilization of the "unfit," more than thirty states followed, and in 1927 the Supreme Court upheld Virginia's statute eight to one in Buck v. Bell, in an opinion written by Justice Holmes, a jurist of liberal repute. Some sixty thousand people were sterilized under such laws during the century, with Black Americans, the poor, and institutionalized women represented far above their share of the population. The Nordic statutes came around the 1930s, argued within a framework mixing eugenic claims with the cost calculations of the welfare state; several remained on the books into the 1970s. Germany's Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring of 1933 drew directly on Californian precedent, and from 1939 Aktion T4 carried the discourse to killing—directed by physicians, selecting by medical assessment forms, its personnel and techniques transferred in the autumn of 1941 to the extermination camps in eastern Poland. After the war the word all but vanished from science and most societies renamed themselves or dissolved; compensation and apology for compulsory sterilization, however, began only in the 1990s and after, in the United States, Sweden, and Japan among others.
Connections
Causes1
- Natural SelectioninspiresDarwin's half-cousin Francis Galton carried selection into human society; a misappropriation, not an inference
Consequences1
- The HolocaustinformsEugenics supplied the medical language of "life unworthy of life," and T4's personnel and gassing techniques passed to the extermination camps; but a decisive political leap lies between them
Sources
- Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity
- Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race
- Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis
- Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927)
- Eugenics
Open questionswell attested
- The figure of about 60,000 people compulsorily sterilised in the United States is the usual estimate compiled from state records; since those records vary in completeness, the true number may be higher.
- Sterilisation laws in the Nordic countries mixed eugenic and social-welfare motives and do not fully fit the racist pattern of the American case, so the two should not be lumped together.
- "Eugenics led to the Nazi genocide" is a simplification, because eugenics was international while the extermination policy was not, and a decisive political leap separates the two.
- The methodological roots shared by eugenics and modern statistics (Pearson, Fisher and others) are generally accepted, but it does not follow that statistics itself has eugenic leanings.
Why it matters
Eugenics occupies its place in the history of technology not because it was wrong but because of the manner of its wrongness. It was not the doctrine of charlatans but the work of the best scientists of the day using the best methods of the day: the statistical tools Pearson and Fisher developed for it are still in use, its journals were refereed, and its supporters included social reformers, feminists, and pioneers of public health. Which means that professional consensus, peer review, and statistical significance, the marks by which we judge credibility, can all show green at once over a programme wrong at its root. The lesion lay not in the methods but in a premise: it silently exchanged the worth of a person for the hereditary utility of a person, and the exchange was never treated as a proposition requiring argument but set out as self-evident background. The pathology is the same as that of the ideology of efficiency. On its relation to the Nazi killing, proportion is essential: eugenics was international; extermination policy was not. Britain, the United States, and Sweden all had eugenics and none arrived at the death camps. Between restricting reproduction and systematic killing lies a decisive political leap, and science did not make it. The correct statement is therefore not that eugenics caused the Holocaust but that eugenics supplied it with a ready medical vocabulary and a body of professionals willing to act—which is grave enough without exaggeration. A last layer touches the present. The questions raised by genetic screening and reproductive medicine resemble in form those eugenics raised, with one decisive difference: whether the state decides or the person concerned decides. That distinction was bought at very great cost in the twentieth century and should not be blurred lightly.