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Eugenics is not 'Right-wing'

By Ed West Politics Last updated: November 26th, 2010

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Marie Stopes on a stamp from the Royal Mail issued in 2008

Following Howard Flight’s breaking of the unofficial rule that no one in Parliament should speak the truth about anything, Dave Osler at Liberal Conspiracy writes, in an article called “Eugenics and the Tory Right”:

It seems that Lord F is just the latest upholder of the tradition of class-based eugenics that has been a singularly ugly undercurrent in British intellectual life at least since 1798, the year in which an anonymous pamphlet entitled “An Essay on the Principle of Population” first saw the light of day.

Hmm. And where did that ugly undercurrent come from? What, for instance, have Marie Stopes, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes and Sidney Webb all got in common? All of them are progressives from the Leftie pantheon who believed the state should forcibly sterilise large sections of the population.

Fabian socialist Harold Laski was even penpals with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who once wrote to his British friend that he had “delivered a decision upholding the constitutionality of a state law for sterilising imbeciles the other day and felt that I was getting near to the first principle of real reform”.

Laski certainly didn’t object. In fact, as Dennis Sewell recounts in the excellent The Political Gene, which is just out in paperback, eugenics was largely the preserve of metropolitan progressives who wished to improve society, not of conservatives.

Although eugenics often had strong racist overtones, the bulk of the 65,000 forced sterilisations in the US were against white country folk. A boy who smiled was likely to be sterilised for being an idiot, but any “hillbilly” could be victimised. Deliverance, as Sewell writes, was “just a movie, while the brutality visited upon the people of America’s rural heartlands was real, and has left a long trail of agony leading to the present day”.

To understand why eugenics was not Right-wing one only has to look at the Scopes Trial, historically seen as a battle between modernism and fundamentalist forebears of the Religious Right.

And yet, as Sewell explains, it is remembered entirely falsely. Supposedly heroic teacher John Thomas Scopes was just a football coach with “no special commitment to his pupils, and was not planning on staying in Dayton very long” and probably never really taught his class about evolution.

The trial itself was a “cynical contrivance”, a plot hatched by local businessmen to make Dayton famous, and responding to an advert by eugenicists hoping to challenge the anti-evolution Butler Act.

That Act, rather than being some fusty old reactionary ruling, had only been signed into law by the Governor on March 23, less than two months previously, passed by overwhelming margins by both houses.

Sewell writes: “These margins reflected the Butler Act’s enormous popularity among the people of Tennessee. In 1925, the nationwide eugenics campaign was at its height. In the rural areas of Tennessee folk may not have had a sophisticated grasp of Darwinian science, but they knew the eugenicists who preached Darwinism in the cities despised country people, called them ‘imbeciles’ and ‘defectives’ and would sterilise them if they got the chance. They knew they despised God and the Bible too. Now they wanted to teach children that grandpa was descended from an ape. But America was a democracy, and that meant that simple people, if they made their views plain, could fight.”

Prosecutor William Jennings Bryan, portrayed as a reactionary and idiot in the Spencer Tracey film glorifying Scopes, was actually the most radical and socially progressive man to ever stand for the American presidency, and saw the “trial as a contrivance on the part of a middle-class elite to cheat the ordinary citizens of Tennessee out a law that they very much wanted”.

A progressive, Left-wing middle-class elite, as most of the eugenicists were right up until the Second World War, after which eugenics became discredited and – not coincidentally – associated with conservatives.

Eugenics didn’t die out, however. It simply re-branded itself “family planning”.

Tags: Dennis Sewell, eugenics, family planning, howard flight, Liberal Conspiracy, Political Gene, Religious Right, Scopes Trial, William Jennings Bryan