Abstract
The nineteenth century closed with racism firmly established in popular opinion and in science. Despite disagreements among biologists about the proper definition of ‘race’, and the elusiveness of the very concept when attempts at racial classification were made, most scientists thought that the mental, moral and physical differences between racial groups were profound and socially significant. Belief in the racial superiority of whites, and the practice of racial discrimination at home and abroad, if often deplored on moral grounds, had nevertheless acquired some sanction in the seemingly objective findings of modern science.
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Notes and References
Francis Galton, ‘Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims’, Nature 70 (1904) 82.
See G. R. Searle, Eugenics and Politics in Britain, 1900–1914 (Leyden: Woordhoff International Publishing, 1976);
D. McKenzie, ‘Eugenics in Britain’, Social Studies of Science 6 (1976) 499–532; and the unpublished theses by
Lindsay Andrew Farrall, The Origins and Growth of the English Eugenics Movement, 1865–1926 (Ph.D., Indiana University, 1969) and
Bernard J. Norton, Karl Pearson and the Galtonian Tradition: Studies in the Rise of Quantitative Social Biology (Ph.D., University College, 1978).
Nicholas Pastore’s The Nature-Nurture Controversy (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1949) contains much useful information, as does the work by the eugenist,
C. P. Blacker, Eugenics: Galton and After (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1952). See also the reader by
Carl J. Bajema, ed., Eugenics, Then and Now (Stroudsberg, Pennsylvania: Dowden, Hutchinson and Ross, 1976).
Biographical details are found in D. W. Forrest, Francis Galton: The Life and Work of a Victorian Genius (New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1974). See also
Karl Pearson’s monumental biographical study, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, 3 vols (Cambridge: University Press, 1914–1930) and Galton’s autobiographical Memories of My Life (London: Methuen, 1908).
Ruth Schwartz Cowan, ‘Francis Galton’s Contributions to Genetics’, J. Hist. Biol. 5 (1972) 389–412, esp. pp. 390–403 on the confusions concerning the terms such as ‘heredity’, ‘inheritance’, and ‘variation’ in the 1850s. For Galton’s commitment to a non-Lamarckian theory of inheritance see Cowan’s Nature and Nurture: The Interplay of Biology and Politics in the Work of Francis Galton’, Studies in the History of Biology I (1977) 133–208.
Karl Pearson, ‘The Problem of Alien Immigration into Great Britain, Illustrated by an Examination of Russian and Polish Jewish Children’, Annals of Eugenics i (1925–6) 5–127. On intelligence tests and eugenics, see pp. 131–4 of this chapter.
Darwin, as is well-known, was deeply impressed with Galton’s arguments concerning the inheritance of mental qualities. See Blacker, Eugenics, p. 92. Nevertheless, he was on the whole optimistic that natural selection did eliminate the unfit. Huxley for rather different reasons, also rejected eugenics. See T. H. Huxley, Prolegomena to ‘Evolution and Ethics’, (1894) in Evolution and Ethics and other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1894) pp. 39. Wallace rejected eugenics as a distasteful infringement of marital choice, though in later papers he saw eugenical choice as emerging naturally in a socialist society. See A. R. Wallace, ‘Human Selection’, Fortnightly Review xlviii (1890) 325–37; ‘Human Progress, Past and Future’, The Arena (January 1892) 493–509; and Social Environment and Moral Progress (New York: Cassell, 1913) pp. 146–7.
Ruth Schwartz Cowan, ‘Francis Galton’s Statistical Ideas: The Influence of Eugenics’, Isis 63 (1972) 509–28.
For developments in genetics, see L. C. Dunn, ed., Genetics in the 20th Century: Essays on the Progress of Genetics During its First 50 Years (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1951);
Robert Olby, Origins of Mendelism (New York: Schocken, 1966);
William Province, The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1971) and
Garland E. Allen, Life Science in the Twentieth Century (New York: John Wiley, 1975) chs. iii and v.
See Searle, Eugenics and Politics, p. 9, and Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social-Imperial Thought 1895–1914 (Garden City, New York: Anchor, 1968). There were many signs of governmental and official Concern about the intellectual and physical condition of the British population in the period prior to and contemporary with the institutional developments of eugenics. Between 1904 and 1906, an interdepartmental committee on Physical Deterioration examined the state of health of the urban poor. In 1904 a Royal Commission was appointed to look into the care of mentally defective people; the Commission’s report of 1908 resulted eventually in the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 which arranged for the care of young defectives by the education authorities. Schooling and school meals were other issues.
On the Mendelian-biometrie controversy, see the following: Robert de Marais, ‘The Double-Edged Effect of Sir Francis Galton: A Search for the Motives in the Biometrician-Mendelian Debate’, J. Hist. Biol. 7 (1974) 142–74;
A. G. Cock, ‘William Bateson, Mendelism and Biometry’, J. Hist. Biol. 6 (1973) 1–36; Norton, Karl Pearson, and his ‘Biology and Philosophy: The Methodological Foundations of Biometry’, J. Hist. Biol. 8 (1975) 85–93, ‘The Biometric Defense of Darwinism’, J. Hist. Biol. 6 (1973) 283–316; ‘Karl Pearson and Statistics: The Social Origins of Scientific Innovation’, Social Studies of Science 8 (1978) 2–34; and Cowan, ‘Nature and Nurture’.
Karl Pearson, ‘On the Fundamental Conceptions of Biology’, Biometrika 1 (1901–2) 320–44.
See B. Norton, ‘Metaphysics and Populational Genetics: Karl Pearson and the Background to Fisher’s Multi-Factorial Theory of Inheritance’, Annals of Science 32 (1975) 537–53. Norton notes that G. U. Yule had begun to develop biometric Mendelism as early as 1902. Fisher’s paper was regarded as the first to unite convincingly the two different traditions in the science of heredity.
David Heron, Mendelism and the Problem of Mental Defect: I. A Criticism of Recent American Work, Question of the Day and of the Fray, no. 7 (1913).
J. Arthur Thomson, Heredity (London: John Murray, 1908) ch. xiv, ‘Social Aspects of Biological Results’, pp. 506–38.
R. C. Punnett, Mendelism (New York: Macmillan, 1911) p. 183.
Karl Pearson, The Problem of Practical Eugenics. Eugenics Laboratory Lecture Series v (1912) p. 8.
Loren Graham, ‘Science and Values: The Eugenics Movement in Germany and Russia in the 1920s’, American Historical Review 83 (1978) 1135–64.
For eugenics in Brazil, see the article by Renato Kehl, ‘Eugenics Abroad-Brazil’, Eugenics Review 23 (1931) 234–7. The eugenics movement dated from 1917.
See Mark Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1963);
Kenneth Ludmerer, Genetics and American Society: A Historical Appraisal (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1972); and
D. K. Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives (Nashville, Tenn: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968).
Sir Francis Galton, Essays in Eugenics (London: The Eugenics Education Society, 1909) pp. 6–11.
José Harris, Unemployment and Politics: A Study in English Social Policy, 1886–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) pp. 29–30. One hundred and twenty thousand Jewish immigrants settled in England in London, Leeds, Manchester and other commercial centres, between 1870 and 1914. See also
Lloyd P. Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant in England, 1870–1914 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1960).
V. G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind: Black Man, Yellow Man, and White Man in an Age of Empire (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969) p. 230, comments that ‘mystique of race was Democracy’s vulgarisation of an older mystique of class’.
Francis Galton, English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture, 2nd ed., with a new introduction by Ruth Schwartz Cowan (London: Frank Carr, 1970) first published in 1874; National Inheritance (London: Macmillan, 1889); for Norton’s remark, see
B. J. Norton, Theories of Evolution of the Biometric School (M.Phil., University of London, 1971) p. 35.
Sir Arthur Keith, ‘Galton’s Place Among Anthropologists’, Eugenics Review xii (1920) 14–28.
The expression ‘external’ social Darwinism to refer to a struggle between groups and races rather than individuals has been used by Bernard Semmel, in ‘Karl Pearson: Socialist and Darwinist’, British Journal of Sociology 9 (1958) 111–25 and in his Imperialism and Social Reform, pp. 24–42.
Karl Pearson, National Life From the Standpoint of Science (1900). Reprinted as Eugenic Laboratory Lecture series no. XI (1919).
Karl Pearson, ‘Darwinism, Medical Progress, and Eugenics’. The Cavendish Lecture, 1912. English Laboratory Lecture series 9 (London, 1912) pp. 28–9.
See, for instance, R. Ruggles Gates, ‘Heredity and Eugenics’, ER 12 (1920) 1–13 and
Jon Alfred Mjoen, ‘Harmonic and Unharmonic Crossings’, ER 14 (1922) 35–40. As late as 1939, Haldane in Heredity and Politics urged a study of race crossing, saying that it might not be desirable to forbid it, but there was no reason to encourage it between widely different races. See ER 32 (1940) 114–20. Galton believed the admixture to British stock of certain ‘selected’ immigrant stocks, such as Huguenots, had been advantageous. See Blacker, Eugenics, pp. 116 17. G. Elliot Smith also believed civilisation was a product of racial mixture; the civilising element in Egypt, home of all civilisation according to his diffusionist views, was a northern, white race. The backwardness of contemporary Egypt was, in his view, due to the inferior Negro race. See his ‘The Influence of Racial Admixture in Egypt’, Eugenics Review 7 (1915) 163–83.
See C. P. Mudge, ‘The Menace to the English Race and to its Traditions of Present-Day Immigration and Emigration’, Eugenics Review 11 (1920) 202–12;
Leonard Darwin, ‘The Eugenics Policy of the Society’, Eugenics Review 18 (1926) 91–4, and his remarks in The Need for Eugenic Reform (New York: D. Appleton, 1926) pp. 489–94; and
Karl Pearson and Margaret Moul, ‘The Problem of Alien Immigration into Great Britain, ‘Illustrated by an Examination of Russian and Polish Jewish Children’, Annals of Eugenics i (1925–6) 5–127. Searle has remarked that in the matter of immigration, the anti-Jewish and class biases of the eugenists clearly revealed themselves. See Searle, Eugenics and Politics, 39–41.
For example, Lt. Balzarotti and C. S. Stock, ‘Niceforo on the Highly Superior German’, Eugenics Review 10 (1918) 30–43.
Radcliffe N. Salaman, ‘Heredity and the Jew’, Eugenics Review 3 (1911) 187–200.
L. S. Hearnshaw, Cyril Burt, Psychologist (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1979). I have relied on Hearnshaw for the historical background to Burt’s work and for the details of Burt’s life and career. See also Cyril Burt, ‘Inheritance of General Intelligence’, American Psychologist (March 1972) v. xxvii, 175–6.
Cyril Burt, ‘The Inheritance of Mental Characteristics’, Eugenics Review iv (1912) 168–200.
William McDougall, ‘Psychology in the Service of Eugenics’, Eugenics Review v (1914) 295–308.
Editorial in Biometriha i (1901–2) p. 1. See E. S. Pearson, Karl Pearson: An Appreciation of Some Aspects of his Life and Work (Cambridge; University Press, 1938) pp. 104–6.
Cicely D. Fawcett, assisted by Alice Lee and others, ‘A Second Study of the Variation and Correlation of the Human Skull, with Special Reference to the Naqada Skull’, Biometriha i (1901–2) p. 409.
M. A. Lewenz and Karl Pearson, ‘On the Measurement of Internal Capacity from Cranial Circumferences’, Biometriha iii (1904) 336–97.
Karl Pearson, ‘On Our Present Knowledge of the Relationship of Mind and Body’, Annals of Eugenics i (1925–6) 382–406.
G. M. Morant, The Races of Central Europe: A Footnote to History. With a preface by J. B. S. Haldane (London: Allen & Unwin, 1939).
Victor V. Bunak, ‘Race as a Historical Concept’, in Earl W. Count, ed., This is Race (New York: Henry Schurman, 1950) pp. 558–75.
Th. Dobzhansky, Mankind Evolving: The Evolution of the Human Species (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976) pp. 256–7.
Joseph B. Birdsell, ‘On Methods of Evolutionary Biology and Anthropology. Part II Anthropology’, American Scientist 45 (1957) 394.
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© 1982 Nancy Stepan
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Stepan, N. (1982). Eugenics and Race, 1900–25. In: The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960. St Antony’s/Macmillan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05452-7_5
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