The Hour of Eugenics"

Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America

Nancy Leys Stepan

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 1996
• ISBN:
  9781501702259
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Eugenics was a term coined in 1883 to name the scientific and social theory which advocated "race improvement" through selective human breeding. In Europe and the United States the eugenics movement found many supporters before it was finally discredited by its association with the racist ideology of Nazi Germany. Examining for the first time how eugenics was taken up by scientists and social reformers in Latin America, Nancy Leys Stepan compares the eugenics movements in Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina with the more familiar cases of Britain, the United States, and Germany.In this highly original account, Stepan sheds new light on the role of science in reformulating issues of race, gender, reproduction, and public health in an era when the focus on national identity was particularly intense. Drawing upon a rich body of evidence concerning the technical publications and professional meetings of Latin American eugenicists, she examines how they adapted eugenic principles to local contexts between the world wars. Stepan shows that Latin American eugenicists diverged considerably from their counterparts in Europe and the United States in their ideological approach and their interpretations of key texts concerning heredity.

1

The New Genetics and the Beginnings of Eugenics

Eugenics was hardly a new idea in 1883, despite the new name coined for it that year. In some ways the weeding out of unfit individuals went back to the Greeks, as British eugenists were fond of pointing out, perhaps because the association gave classical authority to the otherwise shocking notion that since not all individuals are equally endowed in nature not all should necessarily be allowed to reproduce themselves.

Nevertheless, “our” eugenics, properly speaking, belongs to the late nineteenth century and to the era of modern hereditarian science. The eventual enthusiasm for eugenics expressed by scientists, physicians, legal experts, and mental hygienists must be seen as the culmination of a long process of intellectual and social transformation in the nineteenth century, in which human life was increasingly interpreted as being the result of natural biological laws. Early in the century, for instance, Thomas Malthus, whose works on the “laws” of the biological inevitability of human overpopulation haunted nineteenth-century political economy, remarked that it did not by any means seem impossible that by selective breeding “a certain degree of improvement, similar to that amongst animals, might take place among men.” He added, however, “As the human race could not be improved in this way, without condemning all the bad specimens to celibacy, it is not probable that an attention to breed should ever become general.”1

The moral objections to the deliberate control of human breeding to improve the species seemed unanswerable, especially in the light of the inadequacy of knowledge of the matter or of the pattern of hereditary transmission. But as hereditarian explanations of both pathological and normal traits in human beings gained in popularity in mid-century, so protoeugenic speculations and proposals increased. For example, in 1850 the French scientist Prosper Lucas, in one of the most widely read studies of heredity of the period, drew up genealogical tables of the mental and moral characteristics of condemned criminals and urged the French government to discourage the perpetuation of such lineages, on the understanding that criminality would thereby be checked and French society improved permanently.2 This example serves to remind us that negative eugenics did not depend on a specific theory of heredity, such as Mendelism, even though eugenic ideas became more acceptable as the consensus grew that the laws of heredity were actually understood.

New Theories of Heredity and Evolution

The new evolutionism of the 1860s was of great importance to the rise of eugenics in giving it a new scientific rationale and its indispensible terminology. The first assays into the dangerous territory of human hereditary and social policy by the “father” of eugenics himself, the scientist, traveler, geographer, and statistician Francis Galton, occurred in 1865 shortly after his reading of The Origin of Species. Evolution gave Galton ideas that, clustered together in a new fashion, formed the kernel of eugenics: the significance of hereditary variation in domestic breeding, the survival of the fittest in the struggle for life, and the analogy between domestic breeding and natural selection. The implications of natural and domestic selection for human society were worked out in more substantial, if substantially flawed, fashion in 1869 in Hereditary Genius, a book that still stands as the founding text of eugenics.

In this book, Galton took it upon himself to prove by simple genealogical and statistical methods that human ability was a function of heredity and not of education. From the demonstration of the part played by heredity in human talent, it seemed a relatively easy move from this knowledge to its social possibilities: “I propose to show in this book,” said Galton in the very first sentence of his introduction, “that a man’s natural abilities are derived by inheritance. . . . Consequently, as it is easy . . . to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses, gifted with the peculiar powers of running, or of doing anything else, so it would be quite practicable to produce a highly gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations.”3

Nevertheless, the path from hereditarianism in biosocial thought to the deliberate manipulation of the hereditary fitness of human populations was far from straight and narrow. Until the end of the nineteenth century moral and political distaste for interfering in human reproduction continued to prevent the translation of eugenic arguments into action. Galton’s deductions from evolutionary biology intrigued but troubled Charles Darwin, for instance; Darwin cited Galton several times in his Descent of Man, but though he seemed at times to be on the brink of accepting the necessity for some kind of eugenic control over human reproduction in the name of evolutionary advancement, Darwin was reluctant about so radical a notion.4 For most of his contemporaries, moral caution overrode the apparent logic of Galton’s argument that, as civilization improved so that the weak and unfit were cared for, thereby diminishing the power of natural selection to eliminate the unfit, society should contemplate a deliberate social selection to protect future generations from biological unfitness.

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, attitudes began to change. The reasons for this were as much social as scientific. The last three decades of the nineteenth century saw growing economic competition among nations and the rise of new demands from previously marginalized groups. Working-class and feminist politics challenged the status quo. Socially, the optimism of the mid-Victorian period began to give way to widespread pessimism about modern life and its ills. Anxiety about the future progress of society was reinforced by unease about modernity itself. This anxiety provided the context in which a scientific movement of reform could develop. “Degeneration” replaced evolution as the major metaphor of the day, with vice, crime, immigration, women’s work, and the urban environment variously blamed as its cause.5 The belief that many of the diseases rife among the poor—tuberculosis, syphilis, alcoholism, mental illness—were hereditary merely fueled the fear of social decay. Many writers believed the “rapid multiplication of the unfit” to be a further threat.6 Events seemed to be bearing out Galton’s belief that the modern race was “over-weighted, and . . . likely to be drudged into degeneracy by demands that exceed its powers.”7 Meanwhile, the mysteries surrounding heredity seemed about to be solved by new conceptual and technical developments in science. From evolution, whose essence was the natural selection of inherited variations in animals and plants, Galton had concluded that society could do quickly what nature in the past had done more slowly, that is, improve the human stock by the deliberate selection of the fit over the unfit.8 What was required to give such an idea weight in scientific circles was concrete knowledge of how heredity worked, a knowledge that was lacking when Galton first approached the subject of eugenics.

Then, in the 1890s, the German biologist August Weismann put forward his theory of the continuity of the “germ plasm,” which indicated that there were theoretical and experimental grounds for thinking that only a portion of each cell carried hereditary material; moreover, Weismann proposed that the germ plasm was completely independent of the rest of the cell (the somaplasm) and that the germ plasm was inherited continuously by one generation from another without alteration from outside influences. Weismann’s ideas challenged the long-standing notion of the inheritance of acquired characters associated with the French biologist Lamarck and his theory of transmutation. In the Lamarckian tradition it was assumed that external influences on an individual life could permanently alter the germ plasm, so that the distinction between germ plasm and somaplasm was blurred. As a theory of inheritance, the inheritance of acquired characters had long been commonplace in biology—it was in fact the standard explanation of how heredity worked.9

Galton had been convinced since the 1860s that Lamarckian ideas were wrong, in part because of his socially based conviction that the “genius” or intellectual success enjoyed by people like himself was unconnected to the educational and other social opportunities he enjoyed. He preferred to believe that social eminence was due to an inherited fitness that no amount of social engineering could affect and that was passed on from generation to generation by biological inheritance. His own genealogy, which linked him to the Darwins and the Wedgwoods, successful families of Victorian Britain, gave personal satisfaction and inner conviction of the correctness of his view that ability and success were primarily matters of biological history.

Several historians have analyzed the complicated social roots of Galton’s eugenic argument; what is significant to our story is the way the language of “disinterested” science disguised those roots.10 It is in fact only one of many examples in the history of the natural sciences in which issues that are social and political in character get “scientized” (to use an ugly neologism) so that they may claim an apolitical identity from which are later drawn highly political conclusions that have considerable authority precisely because they are based on apparently neutral knowledge.11 The result was not a pseudoscience in any simple sense, since Galton stood squarely in a recognized scientific tradition and was a fully paid-up member, as it were, of the scientific establishment. In many respects the way social values constructed a language of human variation and selection was typical, rather than otherwise, of the human social and biological sciences of the period.

What is also important to the history of eugenics is that Weismann’s work, which was based on careful consideration of the problems of evolution and heredity, tended to confirm the movement toward the rejection of Lamarckian beliefs. Many biologists adopted his ideas with enthusiasm for this reason, thus strengthening the hereditarian strain in biological and social thought.

A few years after Weismann’s work appeared, there followed the rediscovery in 1900 of Gregor Mendel’s laws of the independent assortment and recombination of hereditary characters in plants. The stability of the Mendelian characters during genetic crosses and their reappearance in the next several generations unchanged, in definite numerical ratios, seemed to confirm Weismann’s notion of the autonomy and inviolability of the germ plasm in which the hereditary material was carried. Mendelism offered the possibility that the simple numerical ratios discovered in plants would be found in animals and, by extension, in the human species.12 Within a few years, the new science of “genetics” was defined and developed rapidly with the chromosome theory, the idea of the gene, and the use of statistical and biometric studies to become the foundation stone of modern genetics and evolutionary biology as we know them.13 Mendelism thus represented a landmark in the development of modern biology.

Eugenics Movements in Europe and the United States

Eugenics as a social movement was shaped decisively by these developments. Even before 1900, scientists had begun to advance the idea that society should recognize the power of heredity in its social laws, in such a way as to favor reproduction of the physically and morally eugenical over the noneugenical.14 Now that a science of human heredity seemed at hand, moral objections to the social control of human reproduction received less weight. Nonetheless, the correct social conclusions to be drawn from Weismann’s theory of heredity were not immediately obvious. Because science is never unambiguous in its social messages, the meaning of this theory for social policy was a matter of interpretation and was open to several possibilities. If Weismann’s ideas about the continuity of the germ plasm were right, then the effects of education and improved surroundings would not be assimilated genetically over successive generations. Each new generation would have to start over, in hereditary terms, de novo. This result in turn could be read in two ways: good genetic qualities could be found in all elements of the human population, including the lower classes; or those found at the top of the social pile were, in effect, the naturally best endowed genetically. Weismann could be read, that is, either optimistically or pessimistically, radically or conservatively, positively or negatively. All these kinds of readings are found in the literature of the period.

The fear in Europe and the United States about social degeneration, about the alterations brought about by industrialization, urbanization, migration, immigration, about changing sexual mores and women’s work, gradually led the more negative social interpretation of Weismannism to predominate. Socially successful individuals and groups were taken to be genetically and innately well endowed; the poor and unsuccessful were viewed as products of poor heredity. In most countries where Weismannism and Mendelism thrived, alternative interpretations were eventually marginalized in social-eugenic debate. Henry Fairfield Osborn, the director of the American Museum of Natural History, spoke of the need to select “the fittest chains of race plasma”; he was typical in moving in the 1890s from an initially sanguine view of Weismannism to a pessimistic and conservative eugenic interpretation of human heredity.15 When Mendel was rediscovered in 1900, his ideas on inheritance were easily assimilated into the eugenic outlook. Since Mendelism, when combined with Weismann’s theory of the autonomy of the germ plasm, was associated with the idea of the complete separation of hereditary units from environmental influences, to many scientists it seemed that no amount of tinkering with the social environment would result in long-lasting improvement of hereditary traits. Ancestry, rather than social life, was taken to determine character; heredity was now all. Indeed, simply calling a trait, condition, or behavior “hereditary” rather than “social” in origin seemed to imply a host of specific conclusions—that the condition was somehow “in” the individual in a way that something socially caused was not, that it...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The New Genetics and the Beginnings of Eugenics
• 2. Eugenics in Latin America
• 3. Racial Poisons and the Politics of Heredity in Latin America in the 1920s
• 4. “Matrimonial Eugenics”
• 5. National Identities and Racial Transformations
• 6. U.S., Pan American, and Latin Visions of Eugenics
• 7. Conclusion