With ‘scientific’ racism making a full-fledged return, this will surely follow. Paul Amberson with a 1934 dismantling of the eugenicist’s class-based pseudo-science.

‘The Swastika Sterilizes: Eugenics as a Class Weapon’ by Paul Amberson from New Masses. Vol. 11 No. 6. May 8, 1934.

EUGENICS has been hugged to the Nazi bosom with a vengeance. Between one and two hundred thousand men, women, and children are to undergo compulsory sterilization in Germany, and the process. has already begun. This may seem paradoxical to those who have unsuspectingly swallowed the pernicious eugenics propaganda so widely preached in our schools and colleges under the guise of “Science and Racial Betterment.” Why should the Nazis, who have brought German science to a new low, thus vigorously adopt this “advanced,” “progressive,” “scientific” doctrine?

It is not at all strange. Eugenics never has in fact rested on an adequate scientific basis. On the contrary, its use as a class weapon, ideologically and in practice, extends back for more than half a century to the days of its founder, Sir Francis Galton. Like the Nordic Myth, that cardinal principle of Nazi science, it has long been associated with race- and class-prejudice, snobbery, and anti-semitism. It has been used to oppose the minimum wage, old-age pensions, workers’ unions, and the granting of free scholarships to working-class children.

In the standard American textbook on the subject, the Applied Eugenics of Popenoe and Johnson (1927), reactionary dogma is given forth as science in the cool, objective manner of a Times editorial. In concluding an analysis showing that longevity and low infant mortality are correlated and tend to run in the same families, the authors state: “If the interpretation which we have given is correct, the conclusion is inevitable that child mortality is primarily a problem of eugenics, and that all other factors are secondary. There is found to be no warrant for the statement so often repeated in one form or another, that ‘the fundamental cause of the excessive rate of infant mortality in industrial communities is poverty, inadequate incomes, and low standards of living’ (Hibbs). [i.e., poverty, poverty, and poverty–P.A.] Royalty and its princely relatives are not characterized by a low standard of living, and yet the child mortality among them is very high–somewhere around 400 per 1,000, in cases where a parent died young. If poverty is responsible in the one case, it must be in the other–which is absurd. Or else the logical absurdity is involved of inventing one cause to explain an effect today and a wholly different cause to explain the same effect tomorrow.” One does not have to be a physician to know that death may have a number of different causes in different cases. And one does not have to be a logician to recognize the above as perverted logic and prostituted science. If space permitted, an indefinite number of such examples be given.

While the fundamental fallacies of reasoning are not always so close to the surface, such an attitude toward social problems is characteristic not only of the book from which the above passage is taken, but of practically all of the output of the eugenists. True, they are often against war, against unemployment, against poverty, just as they are against insanity and high infant mortality–though some have glorified these evils as a means of weeding out the unfit. Yet, just as truly, they are working, consciously or unconsciously, for the perpetuation of these very conditions. The gravest danger of eugenics lies precisely in this–its misplaced emphasis upon the biological rather than the economic causation of our social miseries. As a cause of war, the eugenist stresses “over-population,” not the clashing of imperialist interests, not the rapacity of bankers and munitions-makers. Unemployment and poverty?—hereditary feeble-mindedness! Prostitution, drunkenness, insanity, disease?–inherited tendencies! “You are unfair!” cry the eugenists, quick to detect injustice, “we are not pretending to deal with any but the biological aspects of these problems–we are biologists, not economists!”

Then, gentlemen, you should be careful to make clear to your readers the relatively insignificant role played by biological factors in these matters, instead of giving the impression that they are all-important. Indeed, if you were to give some attention to the problem, you might even find that biological thought may be strongly influenced by economic factors. Besides, is it more biological to fret about the money spent in caring for the feeble-minded, than about the vastly greater sums lavished upon unproductive royal and wealthy bourgeois families? We are expected to tremble at the spectre of the swamping of “our best blood” by the “rabble,” due to the increasing blood” by the “rabble,” due to the increasing difference between the birth-rates of the two groups. The more or less implicit assumption is invariably made by eugenists that economic superiority is equivalent to genetic superiority, despite the absence of scientific evidence for it. In fact, the best data pertaining to the subject offer no support to such an assumption, so far as they go.

Recent studies by Newman and Burks deal with the intelligence of many pairs of identical twins, brought up separately, in different environments, and that of non-identical twins brought up together. (Identical twins, the kind that “can’t be told apart,” develop from separated halves of a single fertilized eggs, and in general resemble each other genetically no more than any two children of the same parents.) The identical twins, although raised in not widely different social strata, showed on the average just as great differences between the I.Q.’s of the members of a pair, as did the non-identical twins. This means that intelligence, as judged by the standard tests, is determined in these cases just as much by environment as by heredity. At the same time, there is reason to believe–though here again good evidence is meagre–that differences in the structure and function of the brain may to some extent be inherited. If this is so, sincere eugenists should make their primary aim the abolition of a system which perpetuates vast inequalities of opportunity having no scientific relation to the social value of the individual. On the impossibility of the development of truly eugenic practice under capitalism, see the outspoken article by H.J. Muller in the Scientific Monthly for July, 1933.

It is worthy of note that Paul Popenoe, the author of the passage quoted above, is the high priest of the sterilization movement in the United States. And it is no accident that of the 27 states in which sterilization of the feeble-minded, insane, and criminal is legal, California is responsible for over 7,500 operations, or 63 percent of the 12,000 performed up to 1933 in this country. California–the state of William Randolph Hearst, Hiram Johnson, “Sunny Jim” Rolph, open-shop Los Angeles–and of Tom Mooney and Imperial Valley!

But turning from the record of the social misuses of eugenics to the question of its more strictly scientific foundations, let us examine the scientific justification for the sterilization in Germany of individuals suffering from feeble-mindedness, insanity, epilepsy, St. Vitus’ dance, hereditary blindness and deafness, severe physical deformity, and hereditary alcoholism. (See N.Y. Times for Dec. 21 last.) To what extent can any of these conditions be objectively identified in a given individual, and how sure are we that each of these defects is hereditary and that we can tell the hereditary from the non-hereditary?

Merely to raise the question of identification of these defects is enough to strike doubt into the mind of anyone even slightly familiar with these fields. The arbitrariness of the dividing line between the normal and the moron is universally admitted. It is only by convention that the highest mental age for the feeble-minded is commonly set at twelve. The slope of the distribution curve at this point is such that a slight change of the intelligence test will have the effect of adding to or subtracting from the group of morons relatively large numbers of individuals. In the case of insanity the difficulty is even greater, because of the complexity of the phenomena and the lack of sufficiently standard tests. The opening chapter of any textbook of psychiatry makes clear enough the impossibility of coming to a definite decision in the multitudes of borderline cases. One need not go to the law courts to see experts in sharp disagreement. Even in the clinics, where economic considerations may be considered minimal, the psychiatrist is continually under the necessity of arbitrarily deciding whether a patient is to be called psychopathic or merely eccentric, catatonic or just stubborn, manic or only very talkative. He throws up his hands if you ask him when a fit of the blues becomes insane depression, when suspicion becomes delusion, when cock-sureness becomes paranoia, when lapse of memory becomes senile dementia. And surely it is reasonable to ask which criteria will be used to distinguish poor vision from blindness, and hardness of hearing from deafness; and to determine when physical deformity is “severe,” or when a heavy drinker becomes an alcoholic?

It is when one considers what is known of the inheritance of these defects that the havoc wrought by the eugenists in the field of human biology (and with human lives!) becomes appallingly clear. It is understood, of course, that geneticists have rather reliable knowledge of the mode of inheritance of such normal human characteristics as blood groups and some eye-colors; and of some defects such as hemophilia (bleeding), albinism, certain kinds of color-blindness, some hand defects, a particular form of club-foot, and a few more. Scientific analysis has been relatively successful in the case of these defects, in spite of their rarity of occurrence, because (1) the defects are rather readily and sharply distinguishable from the normal, (2) the environment plays a relatively small part in their appearance, (3) economic, social, and moral considerations are not involved.

Merely to list these reasons is to make it plain why the study of the defects to be weeded out by the Nazis has not given results approaching the satisfactory. To show that feeble-mindedness, insanity, drunkenness and the rest tend to run in families is not enough. For many decades it was commonly held among physicians that tuberculosis, syphilis, pellagra, goitre, gout, and many other diseases whose real causes are now known, are inheritable. “Extensive family pedigrees of rickets have been placed on record, and reproduced in more than one textbook of human genetics. To superficial examination in print they bear an impressive appearance. Actually we know that deficiencies of diet accompany poverty. Poverty is inherited in the legal but not in the biological sense, and family pedigrees are records both of legal and of biological inheritance.” (Hogben, Genetic Principles in Medicine and Social Science.) As bacteria, vitamins, and the need for dietary balance were discovered, “hereditary disease” changed to “hereditary tendency.” Anything but the admission that good food, clothing, and shelter, sunshine and fresh air are necessary for health! Of what significance is an “inherited tendency” to tuberculosis (a question-begging assumption in the first place), if by taking certain simple precautions, we can positively prevent it? We might just as correctly speak of an inherited tendency to starvation–that runs in families, too.

The fact is that with the advance of medical science, there has been an increasing recognition of the importance of environmental as against hereditary factors in the causation of the various forms of mental deficiency and disease and physical deformity. For example, “As causes of ‘the epilepsies’ we recognize organic conditions, such as neurosyphilis, brain tumor, arterial disease of the brain, multiple sclerosis, etc., toxic conditions such as alcoholism, plumbism, and the toxic states of pregnancy, ‘reflex’ causes such as gastro-intestinal stasis, bad diet, ear and nose conditions, and finally there remains a large group of cases in which we find no known cause and thereupon beg the question by calling such cases idiopathic, implying that it is constitutional and innate.” (Myerson, Inheritance of Mental Diseases, 1925.)

Just the other week the following note appeared in “Science”: “Convincing proof that many cases diagnosed as true epilepsy are actually cases of infestation with tapeworm larvae was presented to the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine in London by Col. W.P. MacArthur, Professor of Tropical Medicine. Cases of cysticercosis [tapeworm larvae] had been wrongly diagnosed as acute mania, melancholia, delusional insanity, dementia, brain tumors, and the nervous disease, disseminated sclerosis. Col. MacArthur believes that in Col. MacArthur believes that in England many persons in civil life who have been stigmatized as hereditarily insane are suffering from cysticerosis.” In Hart’s little classic of psychiatry, “The Psychology of Insanity,” the concluding sentence reads: “It is possible that insanity, or a part of insanity, will prove to be less dependent upon intrinsic defects of the individual than on the conditions in which he has to live, and the future may determine that it is not the individual that must be eliminated, but the conditions which must be modified.” Or, finally, we may say with Hogben: “With regard to insanity and dementia, we can thus conclude that the study of environmental agencies, including prenatal nutrition, difficulty of labor, lactation, toxemias of pregnancy, maternal diet and the social environment as determined by the size of family, make a first claim upon investigation directed to the elucidation, the control, and the elimination of such conditions.”

So much for the role of the environment in complicating the picture. What are we to say of the part played by the economic, social and moral views of investigators? This is all the more insidious if these research workers themselves are sometimes not fully aware of it. Almost every student of biology in America for the last twenty years has had impressed upon him the baleful story of the “Kallikaks.” From textbook to textbook, the tale has been handed down of “Martin Kallikak,” soldier of the Revolutionary War, who founded a line of worthless descendants through an illicit affair with a “nameless feeble-minded girl,” then married a respectable girl and established a family distinguished by its respectability for five generations. Of the 480 progeny following from the first mating, 143 are “known” to have been feeble-minded, only 46 are “known” to have been normal, the rest being unknown or doubtful. “36 have been illegitimate; 33, sexually immoral, mostly prostitutes; 24, alcoholic; 3, epileptic; 82 died in infancy, 3 were criminal, and 8 kept houses of ill fame.” Of the 496 legitimate descendants, on the other hand, only two were alcoholic, and only one sexually immoral. A remarkable family, indeed! The summary as it stands looks suspicious enough, but only a reading of the original book by Goddard (“The Kallikak Family”) can give the full flavor of the crusading spirit which inspired this work. Scientific caution is cast aside as feeble-mindedness, alcoholism and syphilis are diagnosed on meagre hearsay evidence concerning unfortunates dead for half a century and more. Shiftlessness, vagrancy, pauperism are repeatedly taken as equivalent to feeble-mindedness. In short, the results are genetically worthless, and the same must be said of the histories of the “Jukes,” the “Tribe of Ishmael,” and other stock examples of eugenics. Their claims to scientific validity have been completely exploded by such writers as Hogben, David Heron, Myerson, and Hoffmann.

But even if we knew how to distinguish sharply between the feeble-minded, insane, etc., and the normal, and even if we could tell which, if any, cases are hereditary, and which are not, how well could we trust the Nazis for an impartial application of such knowledge? Are we to believe that these avowed exterminators of Marxians, pacifists, and Jews will be dispassionate, objective judges of who is to breed and who is not? It is significant that the 280,000 inmates of institutions are not to undergo sterilization, according to a recent change of plan, and only the 120,000 or so unconfined defectives–in other words, mostly borderline cases–will be so treated. The inclusion in the tests for feeble-mindedness of questions involving moral and political views is reported by the New York Times. Finally, consider well the recommendations of Dr. H. Finke, warden of Waldheim prison, writing in Blätter für Gefängniskunde, 1933, Vol. 64, on “Castration of Sex-criminals”:

“I. Limitation of social-educational efforts to those cases, where there is sufficient evidence that the lapse into criminality was caused by extraneous factors.

“II. Imposition of a strict imprisonment… not requiring special effort or expense, on such lawbreakers as show neither a positive nor a negative conscious attitude toward the State.

“III. Severe, special measures against a small group of criminals, where community welfare demands such, even if in the process the otherwise protected rights of individuals are harmed. The most important measures of this kind are protective arrest, sterilization, and castration.”

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1934/v11n06-may-08-1934-NM.pdf