War Against the Weak Page 6
“Race suicide” was an alarum commonly invoked to restrict European immigration, as 1880 Census Bureau Director Francis Walker did in his 1896 Atlantic Monthly article, “Restriction of Immigration.” Walker lamented the statistical imbalance between America’s traditional Anglo-Saxon settlers and the new waves flowing in from southern Europe. Eminent sociologist E. A. Ross elevated the avoidance of “race suicide” to a patriotic admonishment, decrying “the beaten members of beaten breeds” from Croatia, Sicily and Armenia flooding in through Ellis Island. Ross warned that such groups “lack the ancestral foundations of American character, and even if they catch step with us they and their children will nevertheless impede our progress.”7
As the nineteenth century closed, women still could not vote, Native Americans who had survived governmental genocide programs were locked onto often-barren reservations, and Blacks, as well as despised “white trash,” were still commonly lynched from the nearest tree-from Minnesota to Mississippi. In fact, 3,224 Americans were lynched in the thirty-year period between 1889 and 1918-702 white and 2,522 black. Their crimes were as trivial as uttering offensive language, disobeying ferry regulations, “paying attention to [a] white girl,” and distilling illicit alcohol.8
The century ahead was advertised as an epoch for social progress. But the ushers of that progress would be men and women forged from the racial and cultural fires of prior decades. Many twentieth-century activists were repelled by the inequities and lasting scars of racial and social injustice; they were determined to transform America into an egalitarian republic. But others, especially American eugenicists, switched on the lights of the new century, looked around at the teeming, dissimilar masses and collectively declared they had unfinished business.
Crime analysis moved race and ethnic hatred into the realm of heredity. Throughout the latter 1800s, crime was increasingly viewed as a group phenomenon, and indeed an inherited family trait. Criminologists and social scientists widely believed in the recently identified “criminal type,” typified by “beady eyes” and certain phrenological shapes. The notion of a “born criminal” became popularized.9 Ironically, when robber barons stole and cheated their way into great wealth, they were lionized as noble leaders of the day, celebrated with namesake foundations, and honored by leather-bound genealogies often adorned with coats of arms. It was the petty criminals, not the gilded ones, whom polite society perceived as the great genetic menace.
Petty criminals and social outcasts were abundant in Ulster County, New York. Little did these seemingly inconsequential people know they were making history. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, this rustic Catskill Mountain region became a popular refuge for urban dropouts who preferred to live off the land in pastoral isolation. Fish and game were abundant. The lifestyle was lazy. Civilization was yonder. But as wealthy New Yorkers followed the Hudson River traffic north, planting opulent Victorian mansions and weekend pleasure centers along its banks, the very urbanization that Ulster’s upland recluses spurned caught up to them. Pushed from their traditional fishing shores and hillside hunting grounds, where they lived in shanties, the isolated, unkempt rural folk of Ulster now became “misfits.” Not a few of them ran afoul of property and behavior laws, which became increasingly important as the county’s population grew.10 Many found themselves jailed for the very lifestyle that had become a local tradition.
In 1874, Richard Dugdale, an executive of the New York Prison Association, conducted interviews with a number of Ulster County’s prisoners and discovered that many were blood relatives. Consulting genealogies, courthouse and poorhouse records, Dugdale documented the lineages of no fewer than forty-two families heavily comprised of criminals, beggars, vagrants and paupers. He claimed that one group of 709 individuals were all descendants of a single pauper woman, known as Margaret and crowned “mother of criminals.” Dugdale collectively dubbed these forty-two troubled families “the Jukes.” His 1877 book, The Jukes, a Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity, calculated the escalating annual cost to society for welfare, imprisonment and other social services for each family. The text immediately exerted a vast influence on social scientists across America and around the world.11
While Dugdale’s book spared no opportunity to disparage the human qualities of both the simple paupers and the accomplished criminals among the Jukes family, he blamed not their biology, but their circumstances. Rejecting notions of heredity, Dugdale instead zeroed in on the adverse conditions that created generation-to-generation pauperism and criminality. “The tendency of heredity is to produce an environment which perpetuates that heredity,” he wrote. He called for a change in social environment to correct the problem, and predicted that serious reform could effect a “great decrease in the number of commitments” within fifteen years. Dugdale cautioned against statistics that inspired false conclusions. He even reminded readers that not a few wealthy clans made their fortunes by cheating the masses-yet these scandalous people were considered among the nation’s finest families.12
But Dugdale’s cautions were ignored. His book was quickly hailed as proof of a hereditary defect that spawned excessive criminality and poverty-even though this was the opposite of what he wrote. For example, Robert Fletcher, president of the Anthropological Society of Washington, insisted in a major 1891 speech that germ plasm ruled, that one criminal bred another. “The taint is in the blood,” Fletcher staunchly told his audience, “and there is no royal touch which can expel it…. Quarantine the evil classes as you would the plague.”13
The Jukes was the first such book, but not the last. Tribes of paupers, criminals and misfits were tracked and traced in similar books. The Smokey Pilgrims of Kansas, the Jackson “Whites of New Jersey, the Hill Folk of Massachusetts and the Nam family of upstate New York were all portrayed as clans of defective, worthless people, a burden to society and a hereditary scourge blocking American progress. Most convincing was a presentation made in 1888 to the Fifteenth National Conference of Charities and Correction by the social reformer Reverend Oscar McCulloch. McCulloch, a Congregationalist minister from Indianapolis, presented a paper entitled Tribe of Ishmael: A Study of Social Degeneration. The widely-reported speech described whole nomadic pauper families dwelling in Indianapolis, all related to a distant forefather from the 1790s.14
Ishmael’s descendants were in fact bands of roving petty thieves and con artists who had victimized town and countryside, giving McCulloch plenty of grist for his attack on their heredity. He compared the Ishmael people to the Sacculina parasites that feed off crustaceans. Paupers were inherently of no value to the world, he argued, and would only beget succeeding generations of paupers-and all “because some remote ancestor left its independent, self-helpful life, and began a parasitic, or pauper life.” His research, McCullouch assured, “resembles the study of Dr. Dugdale into the Jukes and was suggested by that.”15
Many leading social progressives devoted to charity and reform now saw crime and poverty as inherited defects that needed to be halted for society’s sake. “When this idea was combined with the widespread racism, class prejudice and ethnic hatred that already existed among the turn-of-the-century intelligentsia-and was then juxtaposed with the economic costs to society-it created a fertile reception for the infant field of eugenics. Reformers possessed an ingrained sense that “good Americans” could be bred like good racehorses.
Galton had first pronounced his theory of the well-born in 1883. For the next twenty years, eugenics bounced around America’s intellectual circles as a perfectly logical hereditary conclusion consistent with everyday observations. But it lacked specifics. Then, as one of the first sparks of the twentieth century, Gregor Mendel’s theory of heredity was rediscovered. True, between 1863 and 1868, various theories of heredity had been published by three men: Spencer, Darwin and Mendel. But while Darwin and Spencer presided with great fanfare in London’s epicenter of knowledge, Mendel was alone and overlooked by the world of science he aspired to.
Mendel preferred peas. Peering through flimsy wire-rim glasses into short tubular microscopes and scribbling copious notes, Mendel studied over ten thousand cross-fertilized pea plants. Key differences in their traits could be predicted, depending upon whether he bred tall plants with short plants, or plants yielding smooth pods with plants yielding wrinkled pods. Eventually, he identified certain governing inheritable traits, which he called “dominating” and “recessive.” These could be expressed in mathematical equations, or traced in a simple genealogical chart filled with line-linked N's and B’s. Among his many conclusions: when pea plants with wrinkled skins were crossed with plants yielding smooth skins, the trait for wrinkled skin dominated.17 In other words, the smooth pea pod skin was corrupted by wrinkled stock. Wrinkled peapods ultimately became a powerful image to those who found the human simile compelling.
Mendel’s scientific paper, describing ten years of tedious work, was presented to a local scientific society in Brno and mailed to several prominent biologists in Europe, but it was ignored by the scientific world. Mendel grew more unhappy with the rejection. His combative exchanges with local officials on unrelated issues were so embarrassing to the order that when Mendel died in 1884, the monastery burned all his notes.18
In May of 1900, however, the esteemed British naturalist and Darwin disciple William Bateson unexpectedly discovered references to Mendel’s laws of heredity in three separate papers. The three papers were independently researched and simultaneously submitted by three different students. Amazed at Mendel’s findings, an excited Bateson announced to the world through the Royal Horticultural Society that he had “rediscovered” Mendel’s crucial studies in plant heredity. The science that Bateson called genetics was born. Mendel’s laws became widely discussed throughout the horticultural world.19
But Galton’s eugenic followers understood that the biological arithmetic of peapods, cattle and other lower species did not ordain the futures of the most complex organism on earth: Homo sapiens. Height, hair color, eye color and other physical attributes could be partially explained in Mendelian terms. But intelligent, thought-driven humans beings were too subtle, too impressionable, too variable and too unpredictable to be reduced to a horticultural equation. Man’s environment and living conditions were inherent to his development. Nutrition, prenatal and childhood circumstances, disease, injury, and upbringing itself were all decisive, albeit not completely understood, factors that intervened in the development of any individual. Some of the best people came from the worst homes, and some of the worst people came from the best homes.
Hence, during the first decade of the twentieth century, as Mendel was being debated, most Galtonian eugenicists admitted that their ideas were still too scantily clad to be called science, too steeped in simple statistics rather than astute medical knowledge, too preliminary to even venture into the far-reaching enterprise of organized human breeding. Eugenics was all just theory and guesswork anyway. For example, in 1904 Galton wrote to his colleague Bateson seeking any initial evidence of “Mendelianism in Man,” suggesting that any data could contribute to what he still called a “theoretical point of view.” In another 1904 letter, Galton reminded Bateson, “I do indeed fervently hope that exact knowledge may be gradually attained and established beyond question, and I wish you and your collaborators all success in your attempts to obtain it.”20
As late as 1910, Galton’s most important disciple, mathematician Karl Pearson, head of the Eugenics Laboratory, admitted just how thin their knowledge was. In a scientific paper treating eugenics and alcoholism, Pearson confessed, “The writers of this paper are fully conscious of the slenderness of their data; they have themselves stated that many of their conclusions are probabilities… rather than demonstrations. They will no doubt be upbraided with publishing anything at all, either on the ground that what they are dealing with is ‘crude and worthless material’ or that as ‘mathematical outsiders,’ they are incapable of dealing with a medico-social problem.” Pearson added in a footnote that he also understood why some would find the linkage of eugenics and alcoholism an act of inebriation in itself. He went on to quote a critic: “The educated man and the scientist is as prone as any other to become the victim… of his prejudices…. He will in defense thereof make shipwreck of both the facts of science and the methods of science… by perpetrating every form of fallacy, inaccuracy and distortion.”21
Galton himself dismissed the whole notion of human breeding as socially impossible-with or without the elusive data he craved. “We can’t mate men and women as we please, like cocks and hens,” Galton quipped to Bateson in 1904. At the time, Galton was defending his recently published Index to Achievements of Near Kinfolk, which detailed how talent and skill run in the same celebrated families. Wary of being viewed as an advocate of human breeding, Galton’s preface cautioned Mendelian devotees with strong conditionals, ifs and buts. “The experience gained in establishing improved breeds of domestic animals and plants,” he wrote, “is a safe guide to speculations on the theoretical possibility of establishing improved breeds of the human race. It is not intended to enter here into such speculations but to emphasize the undoubted fact that members of gifted families are… more likely… to produce gifted offspring.”22
Nor did Galton believe regulated marriages were a realistic proposition in any democratic society. He knew that “human nature would never brook interference with the freedom of marriage,” and admitted as much publicly. In his published memoir, he recounted his original error in suggesting such utopian marriages. “I was too much disposed to think of marriage under some regulation,” he conceded, “and not enough of the effects of self-interest and of social and religious sentiment.”23
Unable to achieve a level of scientific certainty needed to create a legal eugenic framework in Britain, Galton hoped to recast eugenics as a religious doctrine governing marriages, a creed to be taken on faith without proof. Indeed, faith without proof constitutes the essence of much religious dogma. Eugenical marriage should be “strictly enforced as a religious duty, as the Levirate law ever was,” wrote Galton in a long essay, which listed such precedents in the Jewish, Christian and even primitive traditions. He greeted the idea of a religion enthusiastically, suggesting, “It is easy to let the imagination run wild on the supposition of a whole-hearted acceptance of eugenics as a national religion.”24
Many of Galton’s followers agreed that founding a national religion was the only way eugenics could thrive. Even the playwright George Bernard Shaw, a eugenic extremist, agreed in a 1905 essay that “nothing but a eugenic religion can save our civilization.” Late in his life, in 1909, Galton declared that eugenics in a civilized nation would succeed only as “one of its religious tenets.”25
But in America, it did not matter that Galton and his followers found themselves fighting for intellectual acceptance with little evidence on their side. Nor did it matter that British eugenic leaders themselves admitted that eugenics did not rise to a level of scientific certainty sufficient to formulate public policy. Nor did it matter that Mendel’s newly celebrated laws of heredity might make good sense for peapods, but not for thinking, feeling men, women and children.
In America, racial activists had already convinced themselves that those of different races and ethnic backgrounds considered inferior were no more than a hereditary blight in need of eugenic cleansing. Many noted reformers even joined the choir. For example, in a 1909 article called “Practical Eugenics,” the early twentieth-century education pioneer John Franklin Bobbitt i
nsisted, “In primal days was the blood of the race kept high and pure, like mountain streams.” He now cautioned that the “highest, purest tributaries to the stream of heredity” were being supplanted by “a rising flood in the muddy, undesirable streams.”26
Bobbitt held out little value for the offspring of “worm-eaten stock.” Although considered a social progressive, he argued that the laws of nature mandating “survival of the fittest” were constantly being countermanded by charitable endeavors. “Schools and charities,” he harangued, “supply crutches to the weak in mind and morals… [and] corrupt the streams of heredity.” Society, he pleaded, must prevent “the weaklings at the bottom from mingling their weakness in human currents.”27
Defective humans were not just those carrying obvious diseases or handicaps, but those whose lineages strayed from the Germanic, Nordic and/or white Anglo-Saxon Protestant ideal. Bobbitt made clear that only those descended from Teutonic forefathers were of pure blood. In one such remonstration, he reminded, “One must admit the high purity of their blood, their high average sanity, soundness and strength. They were a well-born, well-weeded race.” Eugenic spokesman Madison Grant, trustee of the American Museum of Natural History, stated the belief simply in his popular book, The Passing of the Great Race, writing that Nordics “were the white man par excellence.”28
Indeed, the racism of America’s first eugenic intellectuals was more than just a movement of whites against nonwhites. They believed that Germans and Nordics comprised the supreme race, and a typical lament among eugenic leaders such as Lothrop Stoddard was that Nordic populations were decreasing. In The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, Stoddard wrote that the Industrial Revolution had attracted squalid Mediterranean peoples who quickly outnumbered the more desirable Nordics. “In the United States, it has been much the same story. Our country, originally settled almost exclusively by Nordics, was toward the close of the nineteenth century invaded by hordes of immigrant Alpines and Mediterraneans, not to mention Asiatic elements like Levantines and Jews. As a result, the Nordic native American has been crowded out with amazing rapidity by these swarming, prolific aliens, and after two short generations, he has in many of our urban areas become almost extinct.” Madison Grant agreed: “The term ‘Caucasian race’ has ceased to have any meaning.”29