Culture Of Life 101… The Early History Of The Eugenics Movement

By BRIAN CLOWES

(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For an electronic copy of more than a thousand pro-eugenics quotes, including those by Margaret Sanger, e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)

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“The eugenic movement, therefore, cannot be a short campaign like many political or social movements. It is, rather, like the founding and development of Christianity, something to be handed on from age to age” — Report of the President of the American Eugenics Society, Inc., 1926.

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The Pioneers Make Their Case. In 1798, the Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society. This short work stressed that the human population was growing at a geometrical rate, but food production was only growing at an arithmetic (straight line) rate. This meant that, sooner or later, widespread starvation and famine would occur, resulting in a catastrophic collapse in the human population.
This idea was argued in academia and in other milieu for several decades. For example, Charles Dickens’ character Ebenezer Scrooge presented Malthus’ ideas in The Christmas Carol.
The debate over the possibility of an inevitable food shortage reached a full boil when Charles Darwin set the scientific world on its ear in 1856 by publishing On the Origin of Species, which set forth for the first time a coherent explanation of the theory of evolution. In his Preface, Darwin stated that evolution was “an application of the theories of Malthus to the entire animal and vegetable kingdom.” Darwin stated that his “theory of natural selection” — why some species endured as others disappeared — was based on Malthus’ mathematical theories.
In 1871, Darwin extended this thesis in his book The Descent of Man. He stated that humanity would see some of the weaker races reduced in number or even wiped out by natural selection in the form of famine, diseases, war, and other influences, while the stronger races would survive and thrive.
Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, coined the term “eugenics” in 1883, a derivation of the Greek “good birth” (it is no coincidence that the term “euthanasia,” the control of death, is derived from the Greek “good death”).
Galton described eugenics as: “The science of improving [human] stock . . . to give the more suitable races a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.” He founded the Eugenics Society in 1907, whose purpose was “to spread eugenic teaching and bring human parenthood under the domination of eugenic ideals.”
Galton’s new science, which came to be known as “Social Darwinism,” held that the struggle for existence in society and evolution would inevitably lead to the “fittest” races achieving domination over the “less fit.”
In 1869, Galton had published his work Hereditary Genius, in which he wondered if it might be possible to produce geniuses by inbreeding the upper classes through several generations, while sequestering the “less desirable elements” in monasteries, convents, and institutions, a combined program of both positive and negative eugenics.
Galton held the popular view that the naturally occurring evolution of the human race was being thwarted by philanthropy directed toward “undesirable” segments of the population. He proposed allowing Darwin’s “natural selection” to operate more freely without interference by society, and, further, combining it with human engineered “artificial selection” in order to accelerate the evolution of the human race.
One of the first tasks at hand for the new eugenicists was to cut off, as far as possible, aid to the poor so that natural selection could once again do its work. Margaret Sanger, in her book Pivot of Civilization, stated:
“Such philanthropy, as Dean Inge has so unanswerably pointed out, is kind only to be cruel, and unwittingly promotes precisely the results most deprecated. It encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant.”
Galton believed in the power of religion to move men’s souls and minds, so he proposed that eugenics evolve from a hard science into national policy and eventually into a religion. The American Eugenics Society even published a Eugenics Catechism for Clergymen, which outlined the tenets and dogmas of this new religion.
Atheist and racist Julian Huxley was the most important strategist of the early twentieth-century eugenics movement. He was the first director general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and president of the English Eugenics Society. He also founded the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and was a member of both the British Euthanasia Society and Great Britain’s Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA).
His grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, was a leading advocate of Darwin’s theories. His brother Aldous was the famous New Age psychedelic drug lobbyist.
Julian Huxley seconded Galton’s view that eugenics should eventually “evolve” into a religion:
“I find myself inevitably driven to use the language of religion, for the fact is that all this does add up to something in the nature of a religion: Perhaps one might call it Evolutionary Humanism. The word ‘religion’ is often used restrictively to mean belief in gods; but I am not using it in this sense. . . .
“I am using it in a broader sense, to denote an overall relation between man and his destiny, and one involving his deepest feelings, including his sense of what is sacred. In this broad sense, evolutionary humanism, it seems to me, is capable of becoming the germ of a new religion, not necessarily supplanting existing religions but supplementing them.”
One of the foremost eugenicists of the first half of the twentieth century is known to almost all pro-lifers as the founder of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) — Margaret Sanger. Her journal The Birth Control Review, along with her many books, features hundreds of examples of racist and eugenicist thinking, culminating in her 1932 “Plan for Peace.”
In light of all of these racist and eugenicist statements, it is astounding that Planned Parenthood continues to deny that Margaret Sanger had a “program” for those she considered unfit — including one for especially for “Negroes.”
Theories Put Into Practice. American eugenicists confined themselves primarily to theorizing and philosophizing until the early 1920s, when state and local governments began to “try out” (purely for academic or fiscal reasons, of course) some of their more apparently innocuous schemes.
These plans naturally targeted those who had the weakest voices; the poor and the institutionalized. The eugenicists soon found the simplest and most effective way of preventing the “less desirable classes” from reproducing — widespread involuntary surgical sterilization. Famous New York urologist William Robinson was certainly not unique in his view that “it is the acme of stupidity to talk in such cases of individual liberty, of the rights of the individual. Such [unfit] individuals have no rights. They have no right in the first instance to be born, but, having been born, they have no right to propagate their kind.”
Adolf Hitler was personally fascinated by the American eugenics program, and at one point said:
“Now that we know the laws of heredity, it is possible to a large extent to prevent unhealthy and severely handicapped beings from coming into the world. I have studied with great interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock. I’m sure that occasionally mistakes occur as a result. But the possibility of excess and error is still no proof of the incorrectness of these laws.”
Foundations of the Holocaust. In the early 1930s, a number of leading German academics began to lay the foundation of thought and theory that would soon culminate in the mass elimination of the “unfit,” and ultimately the Holocaust.
For example, Halle University’s Professor Doctor Heinz Kürten pioneered the first German university course on “race hygiene for physicians.” He based it on “the American pathfinders Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard” — Stoddard being, of course, the author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy and a board member of Margaret Sanger’s American Birth Control League for a decade. Kürten also explained that he used American racial and eugenic legislation as a model for the German extermination program.
By 1935, leading American geneticist Hermann J. Muller complained that the legitimate aspects of the science of eugenics had been “hopelessly perverted into a cult for advocates for race and class prejudice, defenders of vested interests of church and state, Fascists, Hitlerites, and reactionaries generally.”

More Popular Than Ever

Of course, Britain, the United States, and Germany were not the only nations to violate their citizens’ rights on a vast scale through enforced eugenic sterilization.
As shown in the history of the world eugenics movement, Japan, Sweden, Finland, and other nations enacted and enforced draconian sterilization measures on their most helpless citizens.
As the next article will show, eugenics did not die out after World War II. Its principles and practices are more popular than ever.