According to historian Stephen Garton, eugenics in Australia and New Zealand was everywhere, nowhere and, eventually, somewhere. Pervasive among reformers, it shaped debates about national fitness, racial decline, miscegenation, invasion and many other issues. Yet legal and political achievements were few; neither country passed sterilization laws, built gas chambers, or even systematically segregated the feeble-minded. Eventually, eugenics made âheadway mainly behind the scenes, in government bureaucracies such as prisons, lunacy, health, education, and child welfare, where innovation without legislative sanction was always possibleâ. Immigration constituted the movementâs success story. A cordon sanitaire excluding undesirable outsiders, especially Asians, trumped attempts to prevent the propagation of the unfit within. But why, asked Garton, did such a powerful movement fall so far short of achieving its aims? Why were Australia and New Zealand âstony soil for a seed that many saw as essential for the survival of white civilizationâ? 1
This chapter investigates these questions by exploring the eugenic views of William Pember Reeves, a Fabian socialist minister in New Zealandâs Liberal government of the 1890s, who introduced the eugenically-inspired Undesirable Immigrants Exclusion Bill into parliament in 1894. After outlining Reevesâs motives and aims in introducing it, I investigate its reception. Who supported the measure and why? Who criticized it and on what grounds? What light can it shed on the early history of eugenic ideas and practices in Britainâs southernmost colony?
Reeves occupied a strategic site at the heart of the colonial state. As Minister of Justice, Education and Labour, he connected an expanding state with the health, welfare, education and labour bureaucracies where eugenics made most headway. Reeves forged important relationships with several heads of these bureaucracies, notably Duncan MacGregor, Inspector of Lunatic Asylums, Hospitals and Charitable Aid, and Edward Tregear, Secretary of the Department of Labour.
Although historians of eugenics have paid increasing attention to religion recently, 2 doing so might seem unnecessary in New Zealand, where freethinkers, agnostics and rationalists flourished, earning the country a reputation as a secularistsâ paradise. It was more secular than the United Kingdom in some ways, lacking an established church, for example. It was also highly Protestant. Roman Catholics, mostly opposed to state-directed eugenics, constituted a smaller proportion of the population by 1900 (around 13%) than in Australia, Canada or the United States. Despite the relative paucity of Catholics, I argue that religious communities and traditions, including MÄori ones, must be taken into account in order to understand why advocates of hard biological determinism met considerable resistance. I focus on two varieties of determinism that Reeves embraced: the claim that the MÄori race was dying out before the incoming white colonists (a variant of a âdying nativeâ ideology that flourished elsewhere); and the idea that âtaintedâ heredity caused most serious mental and moral defects, which would be passed on to the next generation unless stopped.
When Reeves introduced his Undesirables Bill in 1894, he had already alienated many religious voters: Catholic campaigners for state aid to private schools, Protestant Bible-in-Schools advocates, and evangelical prohibitionists. They joined conservatives, businessmen, liberals and white workers to attack the Undesirables Bill and its author as arrogant, authoritarian, elitist and illiberal. Premier Richard Seddon, a populist Anglican sensitive to the concerns of religious voters, kicked âUndesirable Billâ upstairs to London as New Zealandâs Agent-General in 1895. The limits of eugenics in late-Victorian New Zealand cannot adequately be understood apart from the religious communities that sustained a lively liberal political culture.
Biographical Sketch of Reeves
Born into a prosperous English Anglican family in Christchurch in 1856, Reeves went to school at Christâs College before studying law at Oxford. But his health broke down and he did not graduate. Returning to Canterbury, he worked as a journalist for his fatherâs liberal Lyttelton Times newspaper before entering parliament in 1887. Reeves became minister of Education, Justice and Labour in the Liberal government of John Ballance, which, winning power in 1890, ruled until 1912. A Fabian socialist, Reeves devised progressive labour and industrial laws that won New Zealand a reputation as âthe social laboratory of the worldâ. He also supported the campaign that in 1893 made New Zealand the first country in the world to give women (MÄori as well as PÄkehÄ) the right to vote (although he initially wanted to confine suffrage to women who had matriculated). In 1895 Reeves went to London as New Zealandâs Agent-General, later High Commissioner. Serving as the stateâs best-paid public servant, he became New Zealandâs first major historian. His friendships with English Fabians such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb helped him win appointment in 1908 as first director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. 3 Reeves retired in 1919 and died in 1932.
In order to understand his ideas and career, the close connections Reeves forged with a group of progressive colonial intellectuals require attention. Key allies included freethinking Liberal politicians Robert Stout and John Ballance and civil servants MacGregor and Tregear. Reeves, MacGregor and Stout were university-educated, MacGregor earned medical degrees, and the others were largely self-taught. Although none practiced science as a profession, all read widely in the latest science, philosophy, history and politics. Despite occasional disagreements, they shared important beliefs and values that set them apart from more religiously conventional colleagues. Although raised Protestant, they saw themselves as moving beyond Christian dogma to embrace more rational, enlightened, scientific and modern outlooks. Placing more faith in science, reason, politics and the state than in revelation, Judeo-Christian tradition and the churches, they poured their energies into this-worldly visions of improving race and nation. Aware that some Christians argued that irreligion would lead to immorality, these men, secular puritans, took care to present themselves as upright and respectable citizens. In 1908, for example, H.G. Wells, a Fabian socialist and married man, began an affair with Reevesâs beautiful and talented daughter, Amber, who became pregnant. Her father exploded in fury. 4
Historiography
Reevesâs historical writing requires attention because the celebratory nationalist historiographical tradition he founded, embraced by many subsequent scholars, helps to explain why eugenics remains poorly integrated into general New Zealand history. The poem with which he introduced his stylish general history, The Long White Cloud: Ao Tea Roa (1898), captured its central message. By minimizing if not eliminating the class, religious and racial divisions that troubled other places, New Zealand under the Liberals, an exemplary social democracy, was leading the world into a better future:
And the stars watch her lamp newly lighted
And its beams shot afar oâer the sea
With a light of old wrongs at length righted
By men who are free.
This lofty, almost messianic, vision of New Zealand as an example to the world, a modern secular âcity upon a hillâ, delighted readers. The most influential New Zealand historians of the next two generationsâJ.C. Beaglehole, Keith Sinclair and W.H. Oliverâfollowed Reevesâs progressive nationalist model. Focusing on the nation-state, they privileged politics, marginalized religion (Oliver partly excepted), praised Reeves and ignored eugenics. In a 1965 biography depicting Reeves as âthe first great European New Zealanderâ, Sinclair skated over the Undesirables Bill. 6
Revisionist views emerged during the 1970s, when Oliver argued that concerns about national efficiency, social discipline and racial improvement inspired Liberal social policy as surely as ...