by Edwin Black
Lidbetter’s outlook was expressed perfectly in his lecture to a few dozen colleagues one Wednesday night in 1913, at a board meeting of the Metropolitan Relieving Officer’s Association. Research into hereditary pauperism, far advanced in America and accepted in many official circles, was just starting in England. Eugenic notions were completely new to his audience. Lidbetter displayed heredity diagrams and insisted that England was plagued by a biologically distinct “race of chronic pauper stocks.” He insisted that doubters “had to be answered, not in the light of their opinion, but by a series of cases checked, tested and confirmed over and over again.” Hence he urged their cooperation in assembling pauper pedigrees from amongst their poverty cases.47
Attempts to create more than token samples of degenerate family trees were interrupted by the Great War, which began in the fall of 1914. British eugenics understandably slid into the background. In 1918, after shell-shocked soldiers climbed out of Europe’s muddy trenches, British eugenics slowly regrouped. Lidbetter did not resume his examination of degenerate families until March of 1923, more than a decade after he had begun. By this time the Eugenics Education Society had been infused with other scientists, including the esteemed agronomist and statistician Ronald A. Fisher. Fisher had calculated the Mendelian and genetic secrets of various strains of potatoes and wheat, and he had used this information to create more effective manures at an experimental agriculture station north of London. He and others were now applying the coefficients and correlations so successful in mixing fertilizer and spawning stronger crops to complex hereditary formulas for humans. Fisher tacked the essence of Pearson’s biometric measurements and agrarian science onto American Mendelism to create his own strain of eugenics.48
Lidbetter finally resumed his simple work in March of 1923, with a survey of all the indigents of Bethnal Green’s workhouses and welfare clinics. He counted 1,174 people. But the society, especially its so-called Research Committee, which now included Fisher, insisted on proper statistical “control groups.” Lidbetter, a welfare worker, was lost. Control groups? Should he compare streets, or maybe homes, perhaps families, or would one school against another be a better idea? In any event there was no money to finance such as effort. Eventually someone donated a token £20, which allowed a student to begin field work in the summer of 1923. But as the project sputtered on, it made little progress.49
The society shopped around for a few hundred pounds here and there, with little luck. In September of 1923, Laughlin showed up. He was in the middle of his Congressional immigration mission. The society provided him office space for three weeks so he could undertake American-style pedigree research on eugenically suspect immigration applicants. The society’s difficulties were instantly apparent to him. England was helping too many of its indigent citizens. Laughlin wrote to his colleague Judge Harry Olson in Chicago. “England has a particular hard eugenic problem before her, because her Poor Law system has worked anti-eugenic, although from the standpoint of pure charity, it has saved much individual suffering.”50
Eugenicists from Laughlin to Lidbetter were staunchly opposed to charitable works as a dysgenic force, that is, a factor that promoted eugenically unacceptable results. Lidbetter, a Poor Law officer charged with helping the disadvantaged, regularly lectured his fellow relief officers that charity only “created an environment in which the worst could survive as well as the best.” He believed that poor people were “parasites” and that “public and private charity tended to encourage the increase of this class.”51
Disdain for charity dramatically increased during and after World War I, especially among eugenic theorists such as David Starr Jordan, Laughlin and indeed many Britons. They postulated that in war, only the strong and brave killed each other. In other words, in war, the finest eugenic specimens of every nation would die off en masse, leaving the cowards, the infirm, the physically incapable and the biologically weak to survive and multiply.52
In articles, speeches and booklets, eugenicists lamented the loss of life. In his 1915 booklet, War and the Breed, David Starr Jordan wrote as a concerned American, years before the U.S. entered the conflict. Jordan mourned the dead young men of Scotland, Oxford and Cambridge. He quoted one war dispatch: “Ypres cost England 50,000 out of 120,000 men engaged. The French and Belgian loss [is estimated] at 70,000 killed and wounded, that of the Gennans at 375,000. In that one long battle, Europe lost as many men as the North lost in the whole Civil War.”53 More then seven million would ultimately die in the Great War.
Yet eugenicists seemed more distressed that the strong were dying on the battlefield while the inferior remained. Jordan railed in his volume, “Father a weed, mother a weed, do you expect the daughter to be a saffron root?” The Eugenics Education Society published another typical article entitled “Skimming the Cream, Eugenics and the Lost Generation.” War was denounced as dysgenic because “the cream of the race will be taken and the skimmed milk will be left.”54
Lidbetter’s research efforts were still unable, however, to attract the financial or investigative resources needed to convince British policymakers to do away with their unfit by a widespread American-style program of sterilization. By 1926, the quest for financing had compelled the society to plead with a Harvard eugenic psychologist, “English finances are indescribable, and we greatly fear our work will be brought to a standstill for want of the small sum needed, namely £300-£500 per year.”55
An internal struggle developed within the society as skilled statisticians, such as Fisher, tried to oust Lidbetter from the Research Committee leadership in an attempt to improve the appearance of studies. The minutes of acrimonious meetings were doctored to conceal the degree of organizational strife. Financial resources dwindled. Lidbetter’s meagerly paid assistant quit over money. At one point the society was unable to acquire the family index cards Lidbetter had accumulated. The society’s general secretary, Cora Hodson, wrote to the new assistant, “I am trying to persuade Mr. Lidbetter to let us duplicate his index… keeping cards here.… I may not succeed….”56
But Lidbetter’s new assistant also quit within a year, again for lack of money. On September 15,1927, Hodson revealed to a member, “I am rather seriously troubled about Mr. Lidbetter’s research work. Funds have dropped tragically off…. We are now faced with the loss of [an assistant]… simply for want of an adequate salary.”57
Years of solitary and unfinanced effort had produced precious little data to support the society’s vituperative rhetoric against so-called defectives. When the issue of publishable “results” came up, the society was forced to inform its membership, “It is impossible to speak of the ‘result’ of an investigation such as this after so short a period of work. The sum of money available was enough to provide an investigator for only a few months…. Much useful work has been recorded and the oudine of seven promising pedigrees prepared. In none of these however was it possible in the time available to prepare the work in such detail as to warrant publication. “58
Eventually, in 1932, after many society squabbles and a cascade of attempted committee coups, Lidbetter arranged to publish his results. He planned a multivolume set. “There is good hope of funds for the publication of a first volume to be contributed from the U.S.A.,” a society official wrote. But that funding fell through. The first book in his series was finally released in England, but it was also the last; the other volumes were dropped. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, British eugenicists were forced to rely mainly on American research because it was the only other English-language science available to them, except for materials from Scandinavia and Germany-and these too had generally been translated by American sources. In February of 1926, the society secretary had sent off a note to a member, “Do you read German? The most thoughtful articles on the new methods are in a Swiss medical journal.”59
At one point Saleeby bragged that he had accumulated a eugenic bibliography 514 pages long. But this bibliography was in fact the work of U
niversity of California zoology professor Samuel J. Holmes, and it was published by the university’s academic press.60
As late as mid-1925, EES secretary Hodson was still seeking elementary information on heredity. On June 17, 192 5, she dispatched a letter to Yale University’s Irving Fisher, who headed the Eugenics Research Association. “My Council is considering the question of trying to extend the knowledge of heredity by liaison with our Breeders Associations. They are eager to get as much information as possible about the very successful work in Eugenics done by the American Breeders’ Association, and I shall be most grateful if you will… forward any particulars that you think will be useful, or to tell me with whom I should communicate on the matter.” She was referred to the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor.61
When Hodson tried to interest British high schools in adding eugenics to their curriculums, she wrote to the American Eugenics Society for information. “We are just making a beginning over here,” she wrote, “with definite eugenic teaching in schools and it will be most helpful to me to be able to say that something concrete is being done in the United States, even if I cannot give chapter and verse for statistics.”62
When British officials needed information on sterilization, they often wrote to America, bypassing the Eugenics Education Society-which had in 1926 changed its name to the Eugenics Society. In the spring of 1928, for example, when the medical officer for the County Council of Middlesex sought preliminary information on “sterilization of mental defectives,” he wrote a letter directly to the American Social Hygiene Association, a Rockefeller-endowed organization in New York. In his response, the acting director of ASHA’s Division of Legal and Protective Measures took the liberty of mentioning to the Middlesex medical officer Laughlin’s vast legislative guide, Eugenical Sterilization in the United States. ASHA contacted Laughlin and asked him to send anything additional “which might be of aid to him. We are sure he would appreciate anything you may be able to send.”63
By the late twenties, thousands of Americans had been forcibly sterilized. British eugenicists believed that America was lighting the way while Britain cowered in the shadows. British eugenicists were steadfast in their determination to introduce similar legislation in England. This meant a continued reliance on the science of Laughlin and Davenport.
The tradition already existed. On January 29, 1924, Laughlin had lectured at a society meeting. He described the American approach. “Then we go down still further and include the great mass of people, about nine-tenths of humanity. Then there is the submerged tenth, the socially inadequate persons who must be prevented from reproducing. If we try to classify them by types, we must call them the insane, the feebleminded, the paupers, the epileptic, the criminals, and so on. These people, and the family stocks that produce them… must be cut off and prevented from reproducing at all.”64
Laughlin emphasized that it was not enough to sterilize an individual; his entire extended family needed to be sterilized as well. “I do not believe that humanity would ever make… eugenical progress if it simply prevented these individuals from reproducing. In order to prevent the reproduction of such individuals, we have to go up higher into the upper strata, and find out which families are reproducing these degenerates. The remedy lies in drying up the source. It is the pedigree rather than the individual basis of selection that counts in racial fortunes.” This mandate was published more than a year later in the April 1925 Eugenics Review as a reminder. The society was determined to follow the American lead and sterilize all suspects, not just the obvious ones.65
In 1927, still desperate for research, Hodson circulated a draft letter endorsing eugenics in Britain. Members of the society were to sign these letters and mail them en masse to the editors of the Times-without disclosing their affiliations. “Two distinguished American authors,” the proposed letter began, “have recently calculated that 1,000 college graduates will have scarcely 200 grown up great-grandsons, whilst 1,000 miners will have 3,700. We have no reason to doubt these figures, though unfortunately British statistics give us no means of checking them accurately…. We have nothing based on past experiences to guide us…. “66 The nation was still reeling from a devastating coal miners’ strike and Hodson’s letter was surely designed to inflame.
The society was sending strategic letters to newspaper editors because it intended to make its strongest push to legalize sterilization. The first step in the British game plan, segregation, was faltering. Sterilization was needed. Medical, welfare and eugenic circles had been debating the subject for years. The British Medical Association’s section on medical sociology had examined the subject extensively in 1923; Hodson appeared before the group and proclaimed that at least 10 percent of the nation must be forcibly sterilized at once—or many more would need to be sterilized within one or two generations. This warning became a popular slogan for society advocates.67
By 1926, British intelligence testers were surprised to discover that the number of mental defectives had vastly increased and maintenance costs were running as high as £4 million annually. Within three years, government investigators, employing mental tests designed by the Americans Goddard, Terman and Yerkes, claimed that the numbers of the mentally deficient had almost doubled in two decades, from 156,000 in 1909 when numbers were being gathered during the first Royal Commission to some 300,000 in 1929. The rate of mental deficiency had nearly doubled as well, they claimed, from 4.6 per thousand to 8.56 per thousand.68 There was no way to know if the numbers had genuinely doubled or were merely a result of Terman and Goddard’s questionable methodology-which had recently deemed 70 percent of American military recruits feebleminded.
The alarming new intelligence statistics were produced by the government’s Mental Deficiency Committee, established to investigate mental defectives under the leadership of Sir Arthur Wood. Wood was a former assistant secretary of the medical branch of the Board of Education. Several eugenic advocates were associated with the Mental Deficiency Committee, and the resulting 1929 three-volume Wood Report closely resembled eugenic thinking on the deterioration of British intelligence levels. The committee used a new category, the “Social Problem Group,” to describe the subnormal tenth of the nation. The Social Problem Group was comprised not only mental deficients, but also criminals, epileptics, paupers, alcoholics and the insane. Wood speculated that Britain was afflicted by a large number of problem types who although not certifiable, were nevertheless “carriers.” The committee thanked the eugenics movement for its service in addressing the problem, but declined to endorse sterilization.69 It was a significant setback.
To the additional outrage of eugenic activists, government policymakers now recommended that the many colonies and custodial institutions governed under the Mental Deficiency Act stop operating as mere long-term warehouses of people. Instead, these facilities “should be used for the purpose of stabilizing, training and equipping defectives for life in the community, [rather] than providing permanent homes,” as one society memo glumly reported. The society complained that these colonies would soon be “turned into ‘flowing lakes’ rather than remain as ‘stagnant pools.’” Deinstitutionalization would reverse all the society had sought to achieve.70
Sterilization was now more imperative than ever. By early 1929, the society mounted a fresh campaign to pass a national sterilization act. In mid-February of 1929, they sent a petition to Minister of Health Neville Chamberlain, a future prime minister. “Segregation as a remedy is failing,” the resolution advised, “principally owing to the increasing number of deficients and the enormous costs.”71
Within sixty days, a preliminary sterilization bill was drafted and circulated. It proposed coercive sterilization for those certified as feebleminded or about to be released from an institution; it also mandated broad marriage prohibitions, gave the state the power to unmarry couples, and criminalized the concealment of sterilization from a spouse. A postscripted suggestion declared, “If ever we have a proper system of
registration, each person would have a card (or some equivalent), and on this card [eugenic] events, such as cancellation of marriage should be entered.” Sir Frederick Willis had assembled the draft law almost two years earlier and passed it along to the society with one condition. “Should you care to use this draft, I should prefer that it should not be known that I have had anything to do with it; it does not necessarily represent my view.”72
Eugenic stalwarts began propagandizing in earnest. Lord Riddell created a position paper for the Medico-Legal Society, a copy of which was duly forwarded to Chamberlain. Citing the many billions devoted to caring for the unfit, Riddell cautioned, “Unless we are careful, we shall be eaten out of house and home by lunatics and mental deficients.” Riddell then quoted Harvard eugenicist Edward East. “Professor East says ‘We are getting a larger and larger quantity of human dregs at the bottom of our national vats.’” Assuring that vasectomy did not reduce sex drive, Riddell asserted, “This is confirmed by replies sent to questionnaires put to 75 normal, intelligent, mostly professional American men who had undergone voluntary sterilization…. The dangers for men are negligible, and for women, in light of the Californian experience, not very serious. “73
Indeed, Riddell emphasized that the proposed British law was efficacious because, “In California, where the law is similar to that now advocated, the results have been highly satisfactory.”74
A Committee for Legalising Sterilization was formed in about 1930, and it began proffering intellectual position papers and suggestions for a draft law fused with layers of standard eugenic dogma. The phrase “voluntary sterilization” was employed to make it more palatable to the British public. The bill also provided so-called “safeguards” that would allow court-appointed guardians to make the decision for the individual-which technically constituted a voluntary decision. One report from the Committee for Legalising Sterilization repeatedly pointed to the 8,515 compulsory sterilizations performed throughout America, and especially California, as precedents. The CLS explained that California had performed 5,820 surgeries up until January 1, 192 8, and had increased that number to 6,255 by January 1, 1929. These procedures were largely recorded as “voluntary.” The committee’s report explained, “In the California institutions, the defectives have been made to feel that by asking for sterilization, they are behaving in a laudable and socially useful manner. “75
