War Against the Weak Read online

  Galton never finished his studies at London’s King College Medical School and instead studied math at Cambridge, where he quickly became an aficionado of the emerging field of statistics.23 He joyously applied his arithmetic prowess and razor-like powers of observation to everyday life, seeking correlation. Galton distinguished himself by his ability to recognize patterns, making him an almost unique connoisseur of nature-sampling, tasting and discerning new character in seemingly random flavors of chaos.

  More than correlation, Galton’s greatest quest was prediction. To his mind, what he could predict, he could outwit-even conquer. And so Galton’s never-ending impulse was to stand before life and defy its mysteries, one by one, with his indomitable powers of comprehension.

  Perhaps counting relieved the throbbing of his constant headaches or was an intellectual consequence of his insatiable desire to excel. More than once, he succumbed to palpitations and even a nervous breakdown amidst the fury of his cogitations. Even his visage seemed sculpted to seek and measure. A pair of bushy eyebrows jutted out above his orbits almost like two hands cupped over the brow of a man peering into an unfathomable distance. At the same time, his dense windswept sideburns swerved back dramatically just behind his earlobes, as though his mind was speeding faster than the rest of his head.24

  Galton counted the people fidgeting in an audience and tried to relate it to levels of interest. He tried to make sense of waves in his bathtub. He gazed from afar at well-endowed women, using a sextant to record their measurements. “As the ladies turned themselves… to be admired,” wrote Galton, “I surveyed them in every way and subsequently measured the distance of the spot where they stood… and tabulated the results at my leisure.” He even tried to map the concentration of beauty in Britain by noting how many lovely women were located in different regions of the country.25

  Galton’s favorite adage was, “Whenever you can, count.”26

  Much of Galton’s quantitative musings amounted to little more than distraction. But some of it became solid science. In 1861, he distributed a questionnaire to the weather stations of Europe, asking the superintendents to record all weather details for the month of December. He found a pattern. Analyzing the data, Galton drew up the world’s first weather maps, peppering them with his own idiosyncratic symbols for wind direction, temperature and barometric pressure. His maps, revealing that counterclockwise wind currents marked sudden changes in pressure, eventually made isobaric charts possible. Galton’s 1863 publication, Meteorographica: or Methods of Mapping the Weather, greatly advanced the science of meteorology.27

  Later, he discovered that the raised ridges on human fingertips were each unique. No two were alike. He devised a system for analyzing and categorizing the distinctive sworls, and inking them into a permanent record. Galton simply called these fingerprints. The new discipline permitted the identification of criminals-this at a time when a wave of crime by unidentifiable felons gripped London and Jack the Ripper prowled the East End. Galton’s book, Finger Prints, featured the author’s own ten arched across the page as a personallogotype.28

  About the time Darwin, Spencer and Mendel began explaining the heredity of lower species, Galton was already looking beyond those theories. He began to discern the patterns of various qualities in human beings. In 1865, Galton authored a two-part series for Macmillan Magazine that he expanded four years later into a book entitled Hereditary Genius. Galton studied the biographical dictionaries and encyclopedias, as well as the genealogies of eminent scholars, poets, artists and military men. Many of them were descendants of the same families. The frequency was too impressive to ignore. Galton postulated that heredity not only transmitted physical features, such as hair color and height, but mental, emotional and creative qualities as well. Galton counted himself among the eminent, since he was Darwin’s cousin, and both descended from a common grandfather.29

  Galton reasoned that talent and quality were more than an accident. They could be calculated, managed and sharpened into a “highly gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations.” Far from accepting any of Malthus’s notions of inhibited procreation, Galton suggested that bountiful breeding of the best people would evolve mankind into a superlative species of grace and quality. He actually hoped to create a regulated marriage process where members of the finest families were only wed to carefully selected spouses.30

  Galton did not worry that inbred negative qualities would multiply. He said there was “no reason to suppose that, in breeding for the higher order of intellect, we should produce… a feeble race.” He explained his own incapacitating physical frailties away as a manifestation of hereditary distinction. “Men who leave their mark on the world,” wrote Galton, “are very often those who, being gifted and full of nervous power, are at the same time haunted and driven by a dominant idea, and are therefore within a measurable distance of insanity.”31

  Galton struggled to find the pattern, the predictability, the numerical formula that governed the character of progeny. Mathematics would be the key to elevating his beliefs from an observation to a science. He didn’t have the answer yet, but Galton was certain that the secret of scientific breeding could be revealed-and that it would forever change humankind. “Could not the undesirables be got rid of and the desirables multiplied?” he asked.32

  In 1883, Galton published Inquiries into Human Faculty and Development and created a new term for his discipline. He played with many names for his new science. Finally, he scrawled Greek letters on a hand-sized scrap of paper, and next to them the two English fragments he would join into one. The Greek word for well was abutted to the Greek word for born.33

  In a flourish, Galton invented a term that would tantalize his contemporaries, inspire his disciples, obsess his later followers and eventually slash through the twentieth century like a sword. The finest and the fiendish would adopt the new term as their driving mantra. Families would be shattered, generations would be wiped away, whole peoples would be nearly erased-all in the name of Galton’s word. The word he wrote on that small piece of paper was eugenics.34

  * * *

  Eugenics was a protoscience in search of vindicating data. Galton had described the eugenically well-born man as a trend in science, but he desperately sought to quantify the biological process. After all, if Galton could advance from merely discovering the scientific mechanism controlling human character to actually predicting the quality of the unborn, his knowledge would become almost divine. In theory, the master of any enforced eugenics program could play God-deciding who would be born and who would not. Indeed, the notion of constructing a brave new world by regimented reproduction has never receded.

  Numbers were needed. In 1884, Galton opened his Anthropometric Laboratory at London’s International Health Exhibition. Using questionnaires-just as he had in quantifying weather-Galton asked families to record their physical characteristics, such as height, weight and even lung power. Later Galton even offered cash rewards for the most comprehensive family history. The data began to accrue. It wasn’t long before nine thousand people, including many complete families, offered their physical details for Galton’s calculations.35 He began pasting numbers together, sculpting formulas, and was finally able to patch together enough margins of error and coefficients of correlation into a collection of statistical eugenic probabilities.

  At the same time, German cellular biologist August Weismann, using more powerful microscopes, announced that something called “germ plasm” was the true vehicle of heredity. Weismann observed what he termed a “nucleus.” He theorized, “The physical causes of all apparently unimportant hereditary habits… of hereditary talents, and other mental peculiarities must all be contained in the minute quantity of germ-plasm which is possessed by the nucleus of a germ cell.”36 Others would later identify character-conveying threads termed “chromatic loops” or “chromosomes.”

  Superseding Darwinian precepts of descent and Weismann’s germ plasm, Galton, in
his essays and an 1889 book entitled Natural Inheritance, tried to predict the precise formulaic relationship between ancestors and their descendants. He concluded, “The influence, pure and simple, of the mid-parent may be taken as 1/2, of the mid-grandparent 1/4, of the mid-great-grandparent 1/8, and so on. That of the individual parent would therefore be 1/4, of the individual grandparent 1/6, of an individual in the next generation 1/64, and so on.” In other words, every person was the measurable and predictable sum of his ancestors’ immortal germ plasm. Inheritable traits included not only physical characteristics, such as eye color and height, but subtle qualities, such as intellect, talent and personality. Galton ultimately reduced all notions of heritage, talent and character to a series of complex, albeit fatally flawed, eugenic equations.37

  Above all, Galton concluded that the caliber of progeny always reflected its distant ancestry. Good lineage did not improve bad blood. On the contrary, in any match, undesirable traits would eventually outweigh desirable qualities.38 Hence, when eugenically preferred persons mated with one another, their offspring were even more valuable. But mixing eugenically well-endowed humans with inferior mates would not strengthen succeeding generations. Rather, it would promote a downward biological spiral. What was worse, two people of bad blood would only create progressively more defective offspring.

  It was all guesswork, ancestral solipsism and mathematical acrobatics-some of it well-founded and some of it preposterous-forged into a self-congratulatory biology and social science. Scholarly kudos and celebration abounded. Yet Galton himself was forced to admit in 1892, in the preface to the second edition of Hereditary Genius, that his theories and formulae were still completely unprovable. “The great problem of the future betterment of the human race is confessedly, at the present time, hardly advanced beyond the state of academic interest.”39

  Years later, in a preface to a eugenic tract about gifted families, Galton again warned that musing about “improved breeds” of the human race were still nothing more than “speculations on the theoretical possibility.”40

  Nonetheless, Galton remained convinced that germ-plasm was the ultimate, elusive governing factor. As such, environment and the quality of existence were by and large irrelevant and actually an impediment to racial improvement. No amount of social progress or intervention could help the unfit, he insisted. Qualifying his sense of charity with a biological imperative, Galton asserted, “I do not, of course, propose to neglect the sick, the feeble or the unfortunate. I would do all… for their comfort and happiness, but I would exact an equivalent for the charitable assistance they receive, namely, that by means of isolation, or some other drastic yet adequate measure, a stop should be put to the production of families of children likely to include degenerates.”41

  Galton called for a highly regulated marriage licensing process that society at large would endorse. By prohibiting eugenically flawed unions and promoting well-born partners, Galton believed “what Nature does blindly, slowly and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly and kindly.”42

  Galton believed that eugenics was too broad a societal quest to be left to individual whim. He espoused a new definition of eugenics that wed the biology to governmental action. “Eugenics,” asserted Galton, “is the study of all agencies under social control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations.”43

  Galton’s ideas ultimately became known as “positive eugenics,” that is, suggesting, facilitating, predicting and even legally mandating biologically conducive marriages. Every family hopes its offspring will choose wisely, and Galton hoped his scientific, equation-filled epistles would encourage families and government bureaus to require as much. His convictions, even those involving legislation and marriage regimentation, were, within his own utopian context, deemed noninvasive and nondestructive.

  But a few years later, by the dawn of the twentieth century, Galton’s notions of voluntary family planning and positive governmental structures would be transmogrified into an entirely different constellation of negative and coercive thought. The new faithful called it “negative eugenics.” Galton died in 1911. With his passing, his positive eugenic principles of marriage regimentation also disappeared from the eugenics main stage. Certainly his name lived on as a rallying call, stamped on the plaques of societies and academic departments. But before long others would come along to chew up his ideas and spit them out as something new and macabre, barely resembling the original.

  What Galton hoped to inspire in society, others were determined to force upon their fellow man. If Galton was correct-and these new followers were certain he was-why wait for personal choice or flimsy statutory power? In their minds, future generations of the genetically unfit-from the medically infirm to the racially unwanted to the economically impoverished-would have to be wiped away. Only then could genetic destiny be achieved for the human race-or rather, the white race, and more specifically, the Nordic race. The new tactics would include segregation, deportation, castration, marriage prohibition, compulsory sterilization, passive euthanasia-and ultimately extermination.

  As the twentieth century opened for business, the eugenic spotlight would now swing across the ocean from England to the United States. In America, eugenics would become more than an abstract philosophy; it would become an obsession for policymakers. Galton could not have envisioned that his social idealism would degenerate into a ruthless campaign to destroy all those deemed inadequate. But it would become nothing less than a worldwide eugenic crusade to abolish all human inferiority.

  CHAPTER 3

  America’s National Biology

  America was ready for eugenics before eugenics was ready for America. What in England was the biology of class, in America became the biology of racial and ethnic groups. In America, class was, in large measure, racial and ethnic.

  Everything Galtonian eugenics hoped to accomplish with good matrimonial choices, American eugenicists preferred to achieve with draconian preventive measures designed to delete millions of potential citizens deemed unfit. American eugenicists were convinced they could forcibly reshape humanity in their own image. Their outlook was only possible because American eugenicists believed the unfit were essentially subhuman, not worthy of developing as members of society. The unfit were diseased, something akin to a genetic infection. This infection was to be quarantined and then eliminated. Their method of choice was selective breeding-spaying and cutting away the undesirable, while carefully mating and grooming the prized stock.

  Breeding was in America’s blood. America had been breeding humans even before the nation’s inception. Slavery thrived on human breeding. Only the heartiest Africans could endure the cruel middle passage to North America. Once offloaded, the surviving Africans were paraded atop auction stages for inspection of their physical traits.1

  Notions of breeding society into betterment were never far from post-Civil War American thought. In 1865, two decades before Galton penned the word eugenics, the utopian Oneida Community in upstate New York declared in its newspaper that, “Human breeding should be one of the foremost questions of the age…. “ A few years later, with freshly expounded Galtonian notions crossing the Atlantic, the Oneida commune began its first selective human breeding experiment with fifty-three female and thirty-eight male volunteers.2

  Feminist author Victoria Woodhull expressed the growing belief that both positive and negative breeding were indispensable for social improvement. In her 1891 pamphlet, The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit, Woodhull insisted, “The best minds of today have accepted the fact that if superior people are desired, they must be bred; and if imbeciles, criminals, paupers and [the] otherwise unfit are undesirable citizens they must not be bred.”3

  America was ready for eugenic breeding precisely because the most established echelons of American society were frightened by the demographic chaos sweeping the nation. England had certainly witnessed a mass influx of foreigners during the years leading up to Galton’s eugenic doctrine. But
the scale in Britain was dwarfed by America’s experience. So were the emotions.

  America’s romantic “melting pot” notion was a myth. It did not exist when turn-of-the-century British playwright Israel Zangwill optimistically coined the term.4 1n Zangwill’s day, America’s shores, as well as the three thousand miles in between, were actually a cauldron of undissolvable minorities, ethnicities, indigenous peoples and other tightly-knit groups-all constantly boiling over.

  Eighteen million refugees and opportunity-seeking immigrants arrived between 1890 and 1920. German Lutherans, Irish Catholics, RussianJews, Slavic Orthodox-one huddled mass surged in after another.5 But they did not mix or melt; for the most part they remained insoluble.

  But ethnic volatility during the late 1800s arose from more than the European influx. Race and group hatred crisscrossed the continent. Millions of Native Americans were being forced onto reservations. Mexican multitudes absorbed after the Mexican-American War, in which Mexico lost fully half its land to United States expansion, became a clash point in the enlarged American West and Southwest. Emancipated African slaves struggled to emerge across the country. But freed slaves and their next generation were not absorbed into greater society. Instead, a network of state and local Jim Crow laws enforced apartheid between African Americans and whites in much of the nation, especially in the South. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 temporarily halted the immigration through California of any further Chinese laborers, and blocked the naturalization of those already in the country; the measure was made permanent in 1902.6