CHAPTER 11: Britain's Crusade

By the time four hundred delegates crowded into an auditorium at the
University of London to witness the opening gavel of the First
International Congress of Eugenics in 1912, Galton had died and Galtonian
eugenics had already been successfully dethroned. America had appropriated
the epicenter of the worldwide movement. Eugenic imperialism
was vital to the followers of Davenport, as they envisioned not just a better
United States, but a totally reshaped human species everywhere on earth.

Nowhere was American influence more apparent than in the cradle of
eugenics itself, England. The same centuries of social consternation that
had shaped Galton also shaped the new generation of eugenicists who supplanted
him. Several storm fronts of historic population anxieties collided
over England at the turn of the century. Urban overcrowding, overflowing
immigration, and rampant poverty disrupted the British Empire's elegant
Victorian era. After the Boer War, the obvious demographic effects of
Britain's far-flung imperialism and fears over a declining birth rate and
future manpower further inflamed British intellectuals, who were reexamining
the inherent quality and quantity of their citizens. [1]

English eugenicists did what they did for Britain in a British context,
with no instructions or coordination from abroad and precious little organizational
assistance from anyone in America. While Britain's movement
possessed its own great thinkers, however, British eugenic science and doctrine
were almost completely imported from the United States. With few
exceptions, American eugenicists provided the scientific roadmaps and the
pseudoscientific data to draw them. During the early years, the few British
attempts at family tracing and eugenic research were isolated and unsuccessful.
Hence, while the population problems and chronic class conflicts
were quite British, the proposed solutions were entirely American.

Galton died in 1911, more than a year before the First International
Congress, but his marginalization had begun when Mendel's work was
rediscovered in the United States. Quaint theories of felicitous marriages
among the better classes, yielding incrementally superior offspring, were
discarded in favor of wholesale reproductive prohibition for the inferior
classes. Eugenic thought may have originated in Britain, but eugenic action
began in America.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, while Galton and his circle
were still publishing thin pamphlets, positing revolutionary positions at
elite intellectual get-togethers and establishing a modest biometric laboratory,
America was busy building a continent-wide political and scientific
infrastructure. In that first decade, no government agency in Britain officially
supported eugenics as a movement. But in America, the U.S.
Department of Agriculture and its network of state college agricultural stations
lent its support as early as 1903. Galton in London did not enjoy the
backing of billionaires. But on Long Island, the vast fortunes of Carnegie,
Rockefeller and Harriman financed unprecedented eugenic research and
lobbying organizations that developed international reach. By 1904, when
Galton and his colleagues were still moderating their theories, Charles
Davenport was already creating the foundations of a movement that he
would soon commandeer from his British predecessors. Before 1912, the
Eugenics Record Office would begin extensive family-by-family lineage
investigations in prisons, hospitals and poor communities. In England the
one major attempt at tracing family pedigrees was a lone, protracted effort
that took more than a decade to complete and another decade to publish. [2]

Americanized eugenics began to take root in England in the twentieth
century under the pen of a Liverpool surgeon named Robert Reid Rentoul.
In many ways, Rentoul helped lay the philosophical groundwork for British
eugenics, and he would become a leading voice in the movement. A distinguished
member of the Royal College of Surgeons, Rentoul worked with
the feebleminded and had undertaken intense studies of America's eugenic
activities. In 1903, he published a twenty-six-page pamphlet, Proposed
Sterilization of Certain Mental and Physical Degenerates: An Appeal to Asylum
Managers and Others. He urged both voluntary and compulsory sterilization
to prevent reproduction by the unfit. As precedents, Rentoul devoted
several pages to the legislative efforts in Minnesota, Colorado, Wisconsin
and other U.S. states. The pamphlet's appendix included an abstract of
Minnesota's early marriage restriction law. Rentoul lobbied for similar legislation
in the United Kingdom. In one speech before the influential
Medico-Legal Society in London, he proposed that all physicians and
lawyers join the call to legalize forced sterilization. [3]

Rentoul's ideas quickly ignited the passions of new eugenic thinkers,
including those who gathered at a meeting of the London Sociological
Society on the afternoon of May 16, 1904. Galton delivered an important
address entitled "Eugenics, its Definition, Scope and Aims," stressing actuarial
progress, marriage preferences and general education. "Over-zeal
leading to hasty action," he cautioned, "would do harm, by holding out
expectations of a near golden age, which will certainly be falsified and cause
the science to be discredited." He added, "The first and main point is to
secure the general intellectual acceptance of Eugenics as a hopeful and most
important study." But the famous novelist and eugenic extremist H. G.
Wells then rose to publicly rebuke Galton, bluntly declaring, "It is in the
sterilization of failures, and not in the selection of successes for breeding,
that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies." On that
afternoon in Britain the lines were clearly drawn-it was positive eugenics
versus negative eugenics. [4]

Rentoul continued his study of American eugenics throughout 1905,
specifically fixing on the emerging notion of "race suicide" as espoused by
the likes of American raceologist E. A. Ross and President Theodore
Roosevelt. In 1906, Rentoul published his own in-depth eugenic polemic
entitled Race Culture; Or, Race Suicide?, which became a veritable blueprint
for the British eugenic activism to come. In page after page, Rentoul
mounted statistics and percentages to document Great Britain's mental and
physical social deterioration. But as remedies, Rentoul held up America's
marriage restriction laws, advocacy by American physicians for sterilization,
and recent state statutes. He explained the fine points of the latest legislative
action in New Jersey, Delaware, Minnesota, Ohio, Indiana, North
Dakota and other U.S. jurisdictions. "I cannot express too high an appreciation,"
Rentoul wrote, "of the many kindnesses of the U.S.A. officials to
me in supplying information." [5]

Rentoul declared that he vastly preferred Indiana's vasectomies and
salpingectomies to the castrations performed in Kansas and Massachusetts.
But he added that the Kansas physician's pioneering efforts at asexualization
were enough to justify "erecting a memorial to his memory." In one chapter,
Rentoul cited an incident involving Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the father
of the future Supreme Court justice. When called to attend to a mentally
unstable child, Dr. Holmes complained that to be effective, "the consultation
should have been held some fifty years ago!" Rentoul also quoted
Alexander Graham Bell's eugenic denigration of charity: "Philanthropy in
this country is doing everything possible to encourage marriage among deaf
mutes." Rentoul urged his countrymen to duplicate American-style surveys
of foreigners housed in its mental institutions and other asylums. [6]

Rentoul summarized his vision for Britain's eugenic future with these
words: "It is to these States we must look for guidance if we wish to ...
lessen the chances of children being degenerates." [7]

Of course Rentoul's scientific treatise also addressed America's race
problem in a eugenic context. In a passage immediately following references
to such strictly local curses as Jack the Ripper, Rentoul asserted, "The
negro is seldom content with sexual intercourse with the white woman, but
culminates his sexual furor by killing the woman, sometimes taking out her
womb and eating it. If the United States of America people would cease to
prostitute their high mental qualities and recognize this negro as a sexual
pervert, it would reflect greater credit upon them; and if they would sterilize
this mentally afflicted creature instead of torturing him, they would have a
better right to pose as sound thinkers and social reformers." [8]

The next year a few dozen eugenic activists formed a provisional committee,
which a year later, in 1908, constituted itself as the Eugenics
Education Society. Many of its founders were previously members of the
Moral Education League, concerned with alcoholism and the proper
application of charity. David Starr Jordan, president of the Eugenics
Section of the American Breeders Association, was made a vice president
of the Eugenics Education Society. The new group's biological agenda
was to cut off the bloodlines of British degenerates, mainly paupers,
employing the techniques pioneered in the United States. The two
approved methods were sterilization-both voluntary and compulsory and
forcible detention, a concept euphemized under the umbrella term
"segregation." Sympathetic government and social service officers were
intrigued but ultimately unconvinced, because England, although steeped
in centuries of class prejudice, was nonetheless not yet ready for
American-style coercive eugenics. [9]

True, some in government explored eugenic ideas early on. For example,
in August of 1906 the Lancashire Asylums Board unanimously
resolved: "In view of the alarming increase of the insane portion of our
population, immediate steps [should] be taken to inquire into the best
means for preventing the propagation of those mentally afflicted .... " But
that resolution only called for an inquiry. Then the office of the secretary of
state considered establishing a penal work settlement for convicts, vagrants
and the weak-minded on the Island of Lundy, thus setting the stage for segregating
defectives. But this proposal floundered as well. [10]

It wasn't that England lacked the legal or sociological precedents for a
eugenics program. Pauperism was thought to be hereditary and had long
been judged criminal. Class conflict was centuries old. But America's solutions
simply did not translate. Marriage restriction and compulsory segregation
were anathema to British notions of liberty and freedom. Even
Galton believed that regulated marriages were an unrealistic proposition in
a 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 even suggesting
such utopian marriages. "I was too much disposed to think of marriage
under some regulation," he conceded. [11]

As for sterilization, officials and physicians alike understood that the
use of a surgeon's knife for either sterilization or castration, even with the
consent of the family or a court-appointed guardian, was plainly criminal.
This was no abstruse legal interpretation. Reviewers commonly concluded
that such actions would be an "unlawful wounding," in violation of Section
Twenty of the 1861 Offense against the Person Act. Thus fears of imprisonment
haunted every discussion of the topic. Ministry of Health officials
understood that in the event of unexpected death arising from the procedure,
guardians or parents and physicians alike could be prosecuted for
manslaughter. Such warnings were regularly repeated in the correspondence
of the Eugenics Education Society, in memorandums from the
Ministry of Health, and in British medical journals. Even the Journal of the
American Medical Association and Eugenical News made the point clear. [12]

America enjoyed a global monopoly on eugenic sterilization for the
first decades of the twentieth century. What was strictly illegal in the
United Kingdom was merely extralegal-a gray area-in America.
Therefore Indiana prison physician Harry Clay Sharp was able to sterilize
scores of inmates long before his state passed enabling legislation in 1907.
Moreover, while American states maintained control over their own medicallaws,
in Britain only Parliament could pass such legislation. British
eugenicists understood what they did about sterilization by observing the
American experience.

Nor did organized British eugenics immediately launch any field studies
to trace the ancestries of suspected degenerates. Indeed, the whole idea
of family investigation caused discomfort to many in Britain, especially
members of the peerage, who cherished their lineages and genealogies.
Eugenicists believed that the firstborn in any family was more likely to suffer
crippling diseases and insanity than later children, and this undermined
the inheritance concepts attached to primogeniture, by which the eldest
often inherited everything. Essentially, they thought the peerage itself had
become unsound. In fact, Galton and his chief disciple, Karl Pearson,
described the House of Lords as being occupied by men "who have not
taken the pains necessary to found or preserve an able stock." [13]

Only a sea change in British popular sentiment from top to bottom, and
an overhaul of legal restraints, would enable eugenical activity in England.
Hence the Eugenics Education Society well understood that education
would indeed have to be its middle name. That mission never changed.
Almost twenty years later, when the organization shortened its name to the
Eugenics Society, its chief organizers admitted, "It was believed that the
object of the Society being primarily education was so universally established
as to make the word education in the title redundant." [14] In reality, of
course, "education" meant little more than constant propagandizing, lobbying,
letter writing, pamphleteering, and petitioning from the intellectual
and scientific sidelines, where British eugenics dwelled.

From its inception in 1908, the Eugenics Education Society had
adopted American attitudes on negative eugenics. But with a movement
devoid of any firsthand research in English society, the newly born EES
was reduced to appropriating American theory from Davenport and company,
and then trying to force it into the British sociological context.
Although an aging Galton agreed to become the society's first "honorary
president," by 1910 Galton and Pearson both understood that their ideas
were not really welcome in the society. The Galton Laboratory and the
simple biometric ancestral outlines recorded at various collaborating institutions
by Pearson were seen as innocuous vestiges of the current movement.
The society's main function was suasion, not science. [15]

Throughout late 1909, parlor lectures were given to inquisitive audiences
in Derby, Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham. Groups in Liverpool,
Glasgow, Cardiff and London scheduled talks as well. Such propagandizing
was repugnant to Galton and Pearson, who saw themselves as scientists.
Moreover, while monies were being raised for a Lecture Fund to defray the
society's travel expenses, much of Pearson's research remained unpublished.
In a January 3,1910, interview with The Standard of London, Pearson complained
about "four or five memoirs [scientific reports] on social questions
of which the publication is delayed from lack of funds ... the problem of
funds is becoming so difficult that the question of handing it over to be pub
lished outside this country has already arisen." Almost derisively, he clarified,
"The object of the Galton Laboratory is scientific investigation, and as
scientific investigators, the staff do not attempt any form of propaganda.
That must be left to outside agencies and associations." [16]

By 1912, America's negative eugenics had been purveyed to likeminded
social engineers throughout Europe, especially in Germany and
the Scandinavian nations, where theories of Nordic superiority were well
received. Hence the First International Congress of Eugenics attracted
several hundred delegates and speakers from the United States, Belgium,
England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and Norway. [17]

Major Leonard Darwin, son of Charles Darwin and head of the EES,
was appointed congress president. But the working vice presidents
included several key Americans, including race theorist David Starr Jordan,
ERO scientific director Alexander Graham Bell, and Bleeker van
Wagenen, a trustee of New Jersey's Vmeland Training School for Feebleminded
Girls and Boys and secretary of the ABA's sterilization committee.
Of course Charles Davenport also served as a working vice president. [18]

Five days of lectures and research papers were dominated by the U.S.
contingent and their theories of racial eugenics and compulsory sterilization.
The report from what was dubbed the "American Committee on
Sterilization" was heralded as a highlight of the meeting. One prominent
British eugenicist, writing in a London newspaper, identified Davenport as
an American "to whom all of us in this country are immensely indebted, for
the work of his office has far outstri pped anything of ours .... " [19]

Although Galton had died by this point, a young Scottish physician and
eugenic activist by the name of Caleb Saleeby informed his colleagues that
if Galton were still alive, he would agree that eugenics was now an
American science. If Galton could "read the recent reports of the American
Eugenics Record Office," wrote Saleeby, "which have added more to our
knowledge of human heredity in the last three years than all former work
on that subject put together, [Galton] would quickly seek to set our own
work in this country upon the same sure basis." [20]

By the final gavel of the First International Congress of Eugenics,
Galton's hope of finding the measurable physical qualities of man had
become officially passe among British eugenicists. Saleeby cheerfully
reported, "'Biometry' ... might have never existed so far as the Congress
was concerned." Indeed, Pearson declined to even attend the congress. In
newspaper articles, Saleeby denounced biometrics as a mere "pseudoscience.
" [21]

The society had by now successfully purveyed the notion that defective
individuals needed to be segregated. Whenever social legislation arose, the
society's several dozen members would implore legislators and key decision
makers to consider the eugenic agenda. For example, when the Poor Laws
were being revised in 1909, a typical form letter went out. "The legislation
for the reform of the Poor Law will be prominently before parliament. It is
most essential that, when the reforms are made, they should include provisions
for the segregation of the most defective portion of the community; it
will be the business of the Society, during the coming year, to appeal to the
country on this ground .... " [22]

But the crusade to mass incarcerate and segregate the unfit did not
achieve real impetus until England considered a Mental Deficiency Act in
1913. Like so many freestanding social issues invaded by eugenics, mental
illness, feeblemindedness and pauperism had long been the subject of legendary
argument in England. From 1886 to 1899, Britain passed an Idiots
Act, a Lunacy Act, and a Defective and Epileptic Children Act. With the
arrival of the twentieth century, the nation sought an updated approach. [23]

From 1904 to 1908, a Royal Commission on the Care and Control of
the Feebleminded had deliberated the question of segregating and sterilizing
the mentally unfit. The commission's ranks included several British
eugenicists who had formed other private associations ostensibly devoted
to the welfare of the feebleminded, but which were actually devoted to promoting
eugenic-style confinement and surgical measures. The associations
sounded charitable and benevolent. But such groups as The National
Association for the Care and Protection of the Feebleminded and The
Lancashire and Cheshire Association for the Permanent Care of the
Feebleminded really wanted to ensure that the "feebleminded"-whatever
that meant-did not reproduce more of their kind. [24]

The ambitious British eugenic plans encompassed not just those who
seemed mentally inferior, but also criminals, debtors, paupers, alcoholics,
recipients of charity and "other parasites." Despite passionate protestations
from British eugenicists, however, the commission declined to recommend
either widespread segregation or any form of sterilization. [25]

But eugenicists continued their crusade. In 1909 and 1910, other socalled
welfare societies for the feebleminded, such as the Cambridge
Association for the Care of the Feebleminded, contacted the Eugenics
Education Society to urge more joint lobbying of the government to sanction
forced sterilization. Mass letter-writing campaigns began. Every candidate
for Parliament was sent a letter demanding they "support measures ...
that tend to discourage parenthood on the part of the feebleminded and
other degenerate types." As in America, sterilization advocacy focused first
and foremost on the most obviously impaired, in this case, the feebleminded,
but then escalated to include "other degenerate types." Seeking
support for the Mental Deficiency Act, society members mailed letters to
every sitting member of Parliament, long lists of social welfare officials, and
virtually every education committee in England. When preliminary governmental
committees shrank trom support, the society simply redoubled
its letter-writing campaign. [26]

Finally the government agreed to consider the legislation. Home
Secretary Winston Churchill, an enthusiastic supporter of eugenics, reassured
one group of eugenicists that Britain's 120,000 feebleminded persons
"should, if possible, be segregated under proper conditions so that their
curse died with them and was not transmitted to future generations." The
plan called for the creation of vast colonies. Thousands of Britain's unfit
would be moved into these colonies to live out their days. [27]

But while on its surface the proposed Mental Deficiency Act seemed
confined to the feebleminded, many of whom already resided in institutions,
the bill was actually a stalking-horse for more draconian measures.
The society planned to slip in language that could snare millions of
unwanted, pauperized and other eugenically unsound families. EES president
Major Leonard Darwin revealed his true feelings in a speech to the
adjunct Cambridge University Eugenics Society.

"The first step to be taken," he explained, "ought to be to establish
some system by which all children at school reported by their instructors to
be specially stupid, all juvenile offenders awaiting trial, all ins-and-outs at
workhouses, and all convicted prisoners should be examined by trained
experts in mental defects in order to place on a register the names of all
those thus ascertained to be definitely abnormal." Like his colleagues in
America, Darwin wanted to identify not just the so-called unfit, but their
entire families as well. [28]

Darwin emphasized, "From the Eugenic standpoint this method would
no doubt be insufficient, for the defects of relatives are only second in
importance to the defects of the individuals themselves-indeed, in some
cases [the defects of relatives] are of far greater importance." British
eugenicists were convinced that just seeming normal was not enough-the
unfit were ancestrally flawed. Even if an individual appeared normal and
begat normal children, he or she could still be a "carrier" who needed to be
sterilized. One society leader, Lord Riddell, explained, "Mendelian theory
has disclosed that human characteristics are transmitted through carriers in
a weird fashion. Mental-deficients may have one normal child who procreates
normal children; another deficient child who procreates deficients and
another apparently normal child who procreates some deficients and some
normals. Mathematically, this description may not be quite accurate, but it
will serve the purpose." [29]

More than a decade after Rentoul first proposed mimiclcing U.S. laws,
British eugenicists now lobbied to install American-style marriage restrictions.
Once again, it was the seemingly "normal" people that British
eugenicists feared. Saleeby explained, "The importance ... will become
apparent when we consider the real meaning of the American demonstration
that many serious defects are Mendelian recessives. It is that there are
many persons in the community, personally normal, who are nevertheless
'impure dominants' in the Mendelian sense, and half of whose germ cells
accordingly carry a defect. According to a recent calculation, made in one
of the bulletins of the Eugenics Record Office, about one-third of the population
in the United States is thus capable of conveying mental deficiency,
the 'insane tendency,' epilepsy, or some other defect .... Their number
would be increased ... [unless] Dr. Davenport's advice as to the mating of
defectives with normal persons were followed, for all their offspring would
then belong to this category." [30]

Leonard Darwin and his colleagues hoped "a system will also be established
for the examination of the family history of all those placed on the
register as being unquestionably mentally abnormal, especially as regards
the criminality, insanity, ill-health and pauperism of their relatives, and not
omitting to note cases of marked ability." Their near lcin were to be shipped
off to facilities, and marriages would be prohibited or annulled. [31]

But once the plan to incarcerate entire families became known, revolted
critics declared that the eugenic aspects of the Mental Deficiency Act
would "sentence innocent people to imprisonment for life." In a newspaper
article, Saleeby strongly denied such segregation need always be permanent.
In a section subheadlined "No Life Sentences," Saleeby suggested,
"All decisions to segregate these people must be subject to continual revision
.... " [32] Under the society's actual plan, however, incarcerations of ordinary
people would occur not because of any observable illness or
abnormality-but simply because of a suspect lineage.

Leonard Darwin authored a revealing article on the proposed law in
February of 1912 for the society's publication, Eugenics Review. He confessed
to the membership, "It is quite certain that no existing democratic
government would go as far as we Eugenists think right in the direction of
limiting the liberty of the subject for the sake of the racial qualities of future
generations. It is here we find the practical limitation to the possibility of
immediate reform: for it is unwise to endeavor to push legislation beyond
the bounds set by public opinion because of the dangerous reaction which
would probably result from neglecting to pay attention to the prejudices of
the electorate." [33]

The First International Congress of Eugenics convened in London in
July of 1912, at the height of the Parliamentary debate about the Mental
Deficiency Act. Saleeby hoped the American contingent could offer their
latest science on feeblemindedness as grist to sway lawmakers. But while
the American delegation had spent over a year preparing a report on methods
to terminate defective family lines, they were focused on sterilization of
the unfit, not segregation. On the eve of the congress, Saleeby bemoaned
the lost opportunity in a newspaper editorial. "It so chances, most unfortunately,"
he wrote, "that though the American Committee on Sterilization
will present a preliminary report on the practicability of surgical measures
for the prevention of parenthood on the part of defectives, no paper is
being read on Mental Deficiency, of all subjects that which we should most
have desired to hear discussed and reported widely at the present time." [34]

Saleeby added, "Dr. Davenport, the director of the American Eugenics
Office ... is to read a paper, but unfortunately he will not deal with the feebleminded."
Nonetheless, Saleeby saw progress. "Four years after a Report
[by the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feebleminded]
which the American Students altogether superseded in 1909, thanks to
their introduction of the Mendelian method, we have at last got a Mental
Deficiency Bill through its second reading in the House of Commons." [35]

Parliament, however, could not endorse the wholesale segregation into
colonies envisioned by the society. Political parties clashed on the issue.
Catholics, laborites and libertarians staunchly attacked the legislation. At
the end of 1912, Eugenics Review informed its members, "It is with the
deepest regret that we have had to relinquish all hope of seeking this muchneeded
measure become law this Session." The clauses most important to
the society were stricken. Clause 50, for example, had mandated an
American-style marriage restriction-it was rejected. But eugenics' supporters
in the House of Commons promised to revive the bill for the next
session. "Our efforts to secure this result," Eugenics Review continued,
"must not, however, be in the slightest degree relaxed .... " Speaking to its
several branches and affiliates throughout the nation, the publication
urged: "Members of Eugenic societies should continue to urge on their
representatives in Parliament by every available means ... and should
unsparingly condemn their abandonment on account of the mere demands
of party." [36]

Throughout 1913, the society continued to press for eugenic action
along American lines. One eugenically-minded doctor reintroduced the
marriage restriction clause, asking that existing marriages to so-called
defectives be declared "null and void." This clause was refused. So were
sweeping efforts to round up entire families. But in August of 1913, much
of the bill was passed, partly for eugenic reasons and partly for social policy
reasons. Britain's Mental Deficiency Act took effect in April of 1914. The
act defined four classes: idiot, imbecile, feebleminded and moral defective.
People so identified could be institutionalized in special colonies, sanitariums
or hospitals established for the purpose. A Board of Control, essentially
replacing the old Lunacy Commission, was established in each area to
take custody of defectives and transport them to the colonies or homes. A
significant budget was allocated to fund the new national policy. [37]

In many ways, this measure was simply an attempt to provide care and
treatment for the needy. Colonies for epileptics, the insane, the feebleminded
and those suffering from other maladies were already a part of
Britain's national medical landscape. But to eugenicists, institutionalization
was the same as incarceration. In a journal article, Saleeby explained to
British readers, "The permanent care for which the Act provides is, under
another name, the segregation which the principles of negative eugenics
requires .... In the United States, public opinion and understanding appear
to be so far advanced that the American reader need not be appealed to." [38]

But as the law was finally rendered, the families of identified individuals
were in no danger of being rounded up. Marriage restrictions were also
rejected. The society admitted that the watered-down act "does not go as
far as some of its promoters may have wished." In a review, one of its members
conceded that legislators could not in good conscience enact profound
new policies "where so much is debatable, so much untried, or still in
experimental stages." Quickly, however, twenty-four Poor Law unionscharitable
organizations-in the north of England purchased land to create
colonies. Others proceeded much more slowly. It was all complicated
because standards for certifying mental defectives varied widely from place
to place. [39]

The eugenicists intended to press on, but several months later they
were interrupted by the outbreak of World War 1.

***

American eugenicists enjoyed a gargantuan research establishment, well
funded and well staffed. The list of official and quasi-official bodies supporting
or engaged in eugenical activities was long: the Carnegie
Institution's Experimental Station, the Eugenics Record Office, the
Eugenics Section of the American Breeders Association (which had by now
changed its name to the American Genetic Association), the U.S. Army, the
Department of Agriculture, the Labor Department, agencies of the State
Department, and a Committee of Congress. Moreover, scores of state,
county and municipal agencies and institutions added their contributions,
as did a network of biology, zoology, genetic and eugenic departments at
some of the country's most respected private and state universities.
Buttressing all of it was a network of organizations, such as the Eugenics
Research Association in New York, the Human Betterment Foundation in
California, the Race Betterment Foundation in Michigan, as well as professional
organizations throughout the medical and scientific fields. A
labyrinth of American laws, enough to fill a five hundred-page guide to
sterilization legislation, innervated the sterilization enterprise. [40]

At any given time there were hundreds of field workers, clinicians,
physicians, social workers, bureaucrats and raceologists fanning out across
America, pulling files from dimly-lit county record halls, traipsing through
bucolic foothills and remote rural locations, measuring skulls and chest
sizes in prisons, asylums and health sanitariums, and scribbling notes in the
clinics and schools of urban slums. They produced a prodigious flow of
books, journal articles, reports, columns, tables, charts, facts and figures
where tallies, ratios and percentages danced freely, bowed and curtsied to
make the best possible impression, and could be relied upon for encores as
required. Little of it made sense, and even less of it was based on genuine
science. But there was so much of it that policymakers were often cowed by
the sheer volume of it.

British eugenic groups were merely eager end users.

But the Eugenics Education Society understood that it would be nearly
impossible to apply American eugenic principles to the British social context
without native research. Certainly, Galton and Pearson had been
devoted to statistics from the beginning. Galton was the one who came up
with the idea of family pedigree. His first efforts at organized human measurement,
self-financed, were launched in the 1880s. Galton even created his
own short-lived Eugenics Record Office in 1904, which was soon merged
with Pearson's Biometric Laboratory. But lack of funds, lack of manpower
and lack of momentum made these slow and careful pursuits far too tentative
for the new breed of British eugenicists. Although pedigrees were faithfully
published in the Galton Laboratory's multivolume Treasury of Human
Inheritance, this was done not so much to show transmissible flaws as a prelude
to sterilization, but rather to track the incidence of disease and defect,
demonstrating the need to carefully control one's progeny. [41]

After a few years, Pearson and his circle of biometricians became bitter
and isolated from the movement at large. At one point the Carnegie
Institution routinely dispatched a staff scientist from its Department of
Physiological Psychology, Professor Walter Miles, to tour European
eugenic and biological laboratories. Miles made a proper appointment at
Pearson's laboratory with the receptionist. But when Miles arrived, he was
rudely refused entry. Nor was Miles even allowed to announce his presence
or leave a message. Miles complained in a confidential memo, "She said
that Dr. Pearson was an extremely busy man and could not be interrupted."
The Carnegie representative was also denied a courtesy tour in the computational
section of the lab away from Pearson. "The porter," continued
Miles, "would not even take my card with a written statement on it that I
had called and was exceedingly sorry ... not to have been able to visit the
Laboratory." An irritated Carnegie lab director in Boston later demanded
an explanation of Pearson. An antagonistic exchange of letters culminated
in a blunt message from the Boston director to Pearson declaring that the
Carnegie Institution "will have to forgo the privilege of having personal
contact with you or your associates .... It is more than obvious that visitors
are not wanted." [42]

Galtonian biometrics and sample pedigrees remained handy relics
within the British eugenics establishment, but the Eugenics Education
Society was convinced it needed more substantial homegrown research to
advance its legislative agenda. It tried to utilize ERG-style pedigrees in
1910 when a Poor Law reform committee asked for information. From the
society's point of view, the "conclusion that pauperism is due to inherent
defects which are hereditarily transmitted" was inescapable. In some cases
pauper pedigrees reached back four generations, enabling society lobbyists
to declare, "There is no doubt that there exists a hereditary class of persons
who will not make any attempt to work." [43]

Yet the Royal Commission on the Poor Law-in both its minority and
majority reports-found the few cases unconvincing. The eugenic viewpoint
"was almost wholly neglected," as the society's liaison committee
bemoaned. "It soon appeared," a 1910-1911 society annual report admitted,
"that before anything could be ascertained concerning the existence of
a biological cause of pauperism, research must be made into a number of
pauper family histories." [44]

Ernest J. Lidbetter stepped forward to emulate the American model.
He would lead the society's charge toward a semblance of convincing
research. But it took him twenty-two years to complete his work and publish
his results. When he eventually did so, it was amid accusations and
acrimony by and among his colleagues. [45]

Lidbetter was neither a physician nor a scientist. Since 1898, he had
been a case investigator with the Poor Law Authority in London. He was
eventually assigned to Bethnal Green, one the East End's most povertywracked
districts. It had been a zone of impoverishment for decades. Once
the society began probing pauper heritage, the eugenic match was made. In
about 1910, Lidbetter became a proponent of the society's hereditarian
view of pauperism, speaking to his fellow relief officers through the
Metropolitan Relieving Officer's Association, university circles and at willing
venues. The EES thanked Lidbetter for his help when several workhouses
contributed family tree data to the society. [46]

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 shellshocked
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, U7ar 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 Germans 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 policyrnakers
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 outline 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
University of California zoology professor Samuel J. Holmes, and it was
published by the university's academic press. [60]

As late as mid-192 5, EES secretary Hodson was still seeking elementary
information on heredity. On June 17, 1925, 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 defi
nite 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!
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 ninetenths
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 192 5 Eugenics Review as a reminder. The soci
ety 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 masseto 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 longterm
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 eville
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 courtappointed
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, 1928, 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]

Eugenicists also capitalized on legitimate economic fears arising from
years of crippling domestic strikes and the worldwide depression. Lord
Riddell had challenged both the Medico-Legal Society and the Ministry of
Health with visceral economic rhetoric. He calculated that the annual cost
of caring for a growing population of the unfit could skyrocket to well
above £16 million. "One is appalled by the prospect of multiplying these
vast colonies of the lost, and ... the injustice ... of erecting splendid new
buildings to house lunatics and mental defectives, when thousands of
sound citizens are unable to secure decent dwellings at a moderate rent."
He hammered, "As it is, the abnormal citizen receives far more care and
attention than the normal one .... Consider an alternative solutionnamely
sterilization." [76]

In 1930 the society launched another attempt to create a consensus of
sorts among welfare organizations, the medical establishment and the
British populace. A sudden endowment helped enormously. The society's
financial problems disappeared when a wealthy Australian sheep rancher
who periodically visited England (but spent most of his time at his villa in
Nice, France) endowed the society. His name was Henry Twitchen. A
bizarre and diseased man whom society elders called a "queer being,"
Twitchen had become enamored with eugenics in the early twenties and
had promised to bequeath his fortune to the society. He died in 1929.
Although his fortune had shrunk by that time, the £70,000 he donated
changed everything for the organization now known as the Eugenics
Society. One society official happily remembered that the money suddenly
made the organization "rich." [77] Money meant travel expenses, pamphlet
printing, better orchestrated letter-writing campaigns and the other essentials
of political crusades.

Lidbetter's study, for whatever it was worth, was still unpublished. To
compensate for their total lack of scientific evidence other than the
American offerings, which even then were becoming increasingly discredited,
in mid-1930 the society reached out to Germany, where expanding
eugenic research was producing prodigious volumes of literature. German
eugenicists were only too happy to forward packets of materials, including
a five-page explication of the existing German literature on feeblemindedness
along with four reprints. One of these essays, "Psychiatric Indications
for Sterilization," was translated by the society and published as a pamphlet.
Most of all, the German studies reflected the control groups that the
statisticians demanded. One essay explained, "My procedure is to ascertain
the number of psychopaths a) in an affected family, b) in families carefully
selected ... [and] a sample of the average population." [78]

Packets of documentation from Germany did not prevent Hodson
from expressing her continuing admiration for American eugenics. On
June 11, 1930, Hodson wrote to her counterpart at the American Eugenics
Society that her recent review of "the wide and far-seeing development of
the task in the United States" only reinforced her belief in the primacy of
America's movement. "I used to say, when asked," Hodson added, "that I
thought probably Germany was taking Eugenics most seriously, but I am
quite sure that now the American Eugenics Society leads the world."
British efforts, Hodson admitted, "are not covering even one-third of the
field of your committees." [79]

Hodson's continuing appreciation for American eugenics was understandable.
Throughout the first half of 1930, Hodson had corresponded
with Davenport in preparation for a gathering of international eugenic scientists
in September. Davenport would serve as president of the conference.
In February of 1930, Hodson wrote him for approval of conference
dates and discussion topics, and then asked if she could print the program
in both French and English for distribution. Hodson hoped that
Davenport's latest views on race mixing would "wake up our Government
people .... " She added, "There is another point of importance for England
in this connection-our anthropologists are not working much in unison
.... [The conference's work] might be a focus in getting their activities
combined .... " [80]

In March of 1930 she wrote Davenport asking if any good films could
be brought over from the ERO to screen at the conference. "Our English
films I should offer only in the last resort as we are not really proud of
them." A few days later, Davenport wrote back answering Hodson's cascade
of questions, approving or rejecting detail after detail. In April, Hodson
sent a letter to colleagues explaining, "Dr Davenport hopes that this year,
the American interest in standardisation of human measurements may be
linked up with the work proceeding in that direction in England .... " [81]

In May, Davenport mailed Hodson another long list of approvals and
declinations of her ideas. Typical was his review of her draft letters, which
Davenport had to approve. "I think the draft of Letter #2 is to be preferred
to #1. Of course, it is much weaker than #1 but may serve as a penultimate.
Something like your draft #1 might serve as an ultimate and then we can
prepare an ultissimum, if that has no effect." [82] Davenport was accustomed
to treating Hodson like a secretary, not a general secretary.

A month later, however, Davenport cancelled his trip altogether, saying
he was suddenly in poor health and in need of a long rest. It was after this
unexpected cancellation that Hodson finally turned to the Germans for
information, in July of 1930, since German eugenicists would now be running
the conference in Davenport's absence. [83]

That summer Britain first confronted American-style eugenics. Dr.
Lionel L. Westrope was the doctor at the High Teams institution located in
London's Gateshead district. He impressed Ministry of Health officials as
"an enthusiast on the question of the sterilisation of the unfit and was
inclined to mix up the therapeutic and sociological aspects of these cases."
Around June of 1930, supervisors discovered that Westrope was castrating
young men. He admitted to having performed two in May of 1930, and a
third on an unknown date. [84]

William George Wilson had been admitted as a diagnosed imbecile to
the Gateshead mental ward about a decade earlier. Later, Wilson was
described as "thoroughly degenerate ... extremely dirty and absolutely
indifferent as to his personal appearance." Wilson also masturbated excessively,
so much so "that there was actually hemorrhage from the penis." His
mother reportedly caught the boy masturbating once and asked for help.
Westrope castrated Wilson, then twenty-two years old, and reported, "the
improvement was wonderful. Not only did the patient cease to masturbate,
but, three months after the operation, he began to take some interest in his
appearance .... " But a year later Wilson died, supposedly of pneumonia. [85]

Nonetheless, Westrope was encouraged. In February of 1930, an eightyear-
old boy named Henry Lawton was brought to Gateshead for being an
"epileptic imbecile, unable to talk" and for suffering what Westrope called
"fits." After admission, Henry was discovered writhing on his stomach, as
though in a "sexual connection." When staffers rolled him over they found
his penis to be erect. No determination was made as to whether the writhing
was a "fit," an epileptic seizure or just ordinary prepubescent activity.
On May 7, 1930, the boy was castrated. [86]

Five days later, fifteen-year-old Richard Pegram was arrested for
allegedly sexually assaulting a woman. The record stated that Pegram
"pushed up against her and said that he was 'horny.'" When asked to explain,
Pegram flippantly replied, "Well, I had the 'horn.'" Police immediately
brought the young man to Gateshead. Within days, he too was castrated. [87]

When the Ministry of Health learned of Westrope's illegal surgeries, a
flurry of anxious memos and reports were exchanged as astonished officials
tried to find some way to justify what they themselves knew was criminal
castration. Westrope claimed he had parental consent. Officials bluntly
rejected this assertion. One wrote, "Consent or no consent, the surgeon is
guilty of unlawful wounding ... and in the case of [the] death, manslaughter."
As officials passed the reports back and forth, some of them scribbled
in the margins that two of the boys had not even been certified as mentally
defective. One wrote, "This was NOT a case of certified mental defect."
Another penned in the margin, "Not a certified case." Hence there was no
possibility of arguing therapeutic necessity. [88]

Westrope himself simply claimed that it had not occurred to him that
the procedure might be illegal. But in fact anyone associated with the sur
geries might have been held civilly or criminally responsible, including
Board of Control officials themselves. The Board of Control had custody
over the boys. On August 1, 1930, facing the prospect of criminal prosecution,
Board of Control Chairman Sir Lawrence Brock wrote a letter to a
Ministry of Health attorney providing all the details and admitting that the
boys had been castrated "as the result of sexual misbehavior." Brock then
added, "If sterilization is to be carried out by Medical Officers of Poor Law
Institutions it would in any case seem to be preferable to adopt the
American method [of vasectomy] and not resort to the extremer course of
actual castration." [89]

The matter was hushed up as some sort of therapeutic necessity or
medical oversight. Westrope was not prosecuted and remained at his post
at Gateshead. He was, however, required to submit an immediate letter of
apology, and to promise not to do it again. On October 14, Westrope, writing
on Gateshead Borough letterhead, penned a short note to Ministry of
Health officials: "I now hereby give an undertaking, that I will not perform
the operation again, until such time as the operation may be legalized."
Two days later, a supervising doctor came by and asked Westrope to sign
the note, which he did. Nine years later, Westrope was still presiding at
Gateshead, and even sat as a merit judge in awarding gold medals to ambulance
crews who distinguished themselves by promptly delivering patients
to the institutions. [90]

The campaign to legalize sterilization continued in 1930, Westrope's
misconduct notwithstanding. However, despite efforts to convince policymakers,
the British people simply could not stomach the notion. Labor was
convinced that the plan was aimed almost exclusively at the poor. Catholics
believed that eugenics, breeding and sterilization were all offenses against
God and the Church, and indeed in some cases a form of murder. [91]

With a sense that eugenic marriage restrictions and annulments, as well
as sterilization, would soon be enacted in Britain, the Vatican spoke out.
On December 31, 1930, Pope Pius XI issued a wide-ranging encyclical on
marriage; in it he condemned eugenics and its fraudulent science. "That
pernicious practice must be condemned," he wrote, "which closely touches
upon the natural right of man to enter matrimony but affects also in a real
way the welfare of the offspring. For there are some who over solicitous for
the cause of eugenics ... put eugenics before aims of a higher order, and by
public authority wish to prevent from marrying all those whom, even
though naturally fit for marriage, they consider, according to the norms
and conjectures of their investigations, would, through hereditary trans
mission, bring forth defective offspring. And more, they wish to legislate to
deprive these of that natural faculty by medical action [sterilization] despite
their unwillingness .... [92]

"Public magistrates have no direct power over the bodies of their subjects;
therefore, where no crime has taken place and there is no cause present for
grave punishment, they can never directly harm, or tamper with the integrity
of the body, either for the reasons of eugenics or for any other reason." [93]

Making clear that the destruction of a child for any "eugenic 'indication'"
was nothing less than murder, the encyclical went on to quote
Exodus: "Thou shalt not kill." [94]

Disregarding religious and popular sentiment, the society pressed on.
Articles that they promoted continued to warn British readers of the dangers
posed by family lines such as America's Jukes; readers were also
reminded of the success California was having with sterilization. But
Labor and Catholics would not budge. or would their representatives in
Parliament. [95]

Two more papal decrees, issued in March of 1931, denounced both positive
and negative eugenics. On July 21, 1931, A. G. Church exercised his
right under the House of Commons' Ten Minute Rule to put the issue to a
test. Under the Ten Minute Rule, debate would be massively curtailed.
Church was a member of the Eugenics Society's Committee on Voluntary
Sterilization, and in his ten minutes he stressed the strictly "voluntary"
nature of his measure. But then he let it slip. He admitted that, indeed, the
voluntary proposal offered that day was only the beginning. Ultimately,
eugenicists favored compulsory sterilization. [96]

Sterilization opponents in the House of Commons "crushed" Church,
as it was later characterized. In the defeat that followed, Church was voted
down 167 to 89. He was not permitted to introduce his legislation. Society
leaders were forced to admit that it was Labor's opposition and the
Church's encyclicals that finally defeated their efforts. [97]

Still unwilling to give up, within a few weeks the society began inviting
more experts to form yet another special commission. Constantly trumpeting
the successes in California and other American states, the society convinced
Minister of Health Chamberlain to convene a special inquiry to
investigate the Social Problem Group and how to stop its proliferation.
The man selected to lead the commission was Board of Control Chairman
Brock, the same man who had presided over the Gateshead debacle. [98]

The Brock Commission convened in June of 1932. One of its first acts
was to ask the British Embassy in Washington and its consulates through
out the nation to compile state-by-state figures on the numbers of men and
women sterilized in America. British consular officials launched a nationwide
fact-finding mission to compile America's legislation precedents and
justifications. Numerous state officials, from Virginia to California,
assisted consular officials. Reams of interlocutory reports produced by the
Brock Commission advocated using American eugenic sterilization as a
model, and in 1934 the commission formally recommended that Britain
adopt similar policies. Section 86 of the recommendations, entitled "The
Problem of the Carrier," endorsed the idea that the greatest eugenic threat
to society was the person who seemed "normal" but was actually a carrier of
mental defect. "It is clear that the carrier is the crux of the problem," the
Brock Report concluded, bemoaning that science had not yet found a
means of identifying such people with certainty. [99]

But for opponents, the Brock Report only served to confirm their rejection
of sterilization in Britain. The Trades Union Congress condemned the
idea, insisting that protracted unemployment might itself be justification
for being classed "unfit." In plain words, Labor argued that such applications
of eugenics could lead to "extermination." The labor congress's resolution
declared: "It is quite within the bounds of human possibility that
those who want the modern industrial evils under the capitalist system to
continue, may see in sterilization an expedient, degrading though it may
be, to exterminate the victims of the capitalist system." [100]

No action was ever taken on Brock's recommendations. By this time it
was 1934, and the Nazis had implemented their own eugenic sterilization
regime. In Germany, the weak, political dissidents, and Jews were being
sterilized by the tens of thousands. [101] The similarities were obvious to the
British public.

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