Reflecting on the legacies of eugenics

Marius Turda is a professor at Oxford Brookes University and Director of its Centre for Medical Humanities. His main research interests include the history of eugenics, scientific racism, history of anthropology, and history of medicine. He has published several books on the history of eugenics, including Modernism and Eugenics, Latin Eugenics in Comparative Perspective, Eugenics and Nation in Early 20th Century Hungary and The History of East-Central European Eugenics: Texts and Commentaries. He is the general editor of A Cultural History of Race, published in 6 volumes by Bloomsbury. He is also the curator of two exhibitions, including “We Are Not Alone”: Legacies of Eugenics at The Wiener Holocaust Library on show 21-30 September 2021. These views are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Wiener Holocaust Library.

Eugenics is based on the erroneous claim that most human activity, whether physical or mental, is determined by heredity. To control heredity, eugenicists claim, is to ensure the betterment of future generations and the survival of the species. Another erroneous claim is that our society is under constant threat from those with physical and mental disabilities. Eugenicists want to prevent these people from having children. Finally, eugenics promises a solution to social problems as varied as crimes, alcoholism, and poverty. None of these claims are substantiated by credible scientific evidence, and none are socially or morally justified. In the 20th century, eugenic beliefs supported the murder of millions of people belonging to religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities, and those living with disabilities. It motivated the institutional confinement and sterilisation of those deemed a ‘threat’ to society which continues to this day.

Reinvented in late 19th century Britain, modern eugenics married together with a range of academic disciplines such as sociology, statistics, anthropology, and medicine. Incorporating ideas from the medical, social, and natural sciences, eugenics blended opposing visions of human improvement into a new form of scientific knowledge, based on theories of evolution and heredity. Its aims were social and political, including the monitoring of the quality of population, the restriction of immigration, and securing the dominance of certain racial groups. By the 1920s, national eugenics societies were established in most countries, and international congresses allowed eugenicists to meet and share their ideas.

The internationalisation of eugenics reflected a general appreciation in many parts of the world that science was the sufficient and necessary foundation for the long-awaited renewal of the human race.

As a self-styled scientific theory of human betterment and planned breeding, eugenics was based on the principle that people who were deemed socially and biologically ‘unworthy’ of reproduction should be excluded. In the name of future generations, eugenicists dissolved aspects of the private sphere, scrutinising, and working to curtail reproductive, individual, gender, religious and indigenous rights.

The boundary between the private and public spheres was blurred by the idea of public responsibility for the nation and the race which came to dominate both. In the 20th century, the state and the society at large increasingly adopted a eugenic worldview, even though none of it was based on proven scientific arguments. Instead, eugenics relied on speculations about social norms, cultural, ethnic, and gender differences, and racial worth. Ideas of economic and social productivity also flowed readily from eugenic arguments, and eugenicists argued that if an individual was found to be socially ‘unfit’, it was appropriate for them to be ‘weeded out’. ‘Unfit’ had become a label for those members of society who were deemed ‘pathological’, ‘criminal’, ‘asocial’, ‘foreign’, and ‘undesired’.

It may surprise some people today, but eugenics successfully spread across the political spectrum. Both the right and the left, for their own different reasons, sought to exorcise the ‘unfit’ for the salvation of the ‘fit’. Pursuing a political project in the name of science, eugenicists fused ideas of heredity and cultural determinism with modern visions of a ‘new society’ and a ‘new man/new woman’, insisting that both demanded the same goal: to prevent further degeneration of the human race and to save it from imploding under the weight of overpopulation.

Constructing a quasi-mythical eugenic person was one ambition that eugenics shared with other modern political ideologies such as communism, fascism and Nazism, and with nationalism, racism and imperialism.

In addition to offering protection for the population’s racial health, eugenics further provided a defensive biological strategy for particular social, gender, and ethnic groups. Profound socio-political changes brought about by industrialisation, the First World War, and the Great Depression created the need to generate a powerful sense of social cohesion and shared national identity. Trying to meet this need, eugenicists often employed discriminatory arguments to justify their visions of national improvement. A person’s life was to be determined by biological, social, and cultural boundaries, separating those who belonged to the ‘chosen’ community from foreigners and outsiders, who were viewed as aliens of potential enemies. At the same time, eugenics created a complementary system of ‘internal cleansing’, which separated those members of society deemed ‘unhealthy’, ‘diseased’, and ‘anti-social’ from the ‘healthy’ majority. The ‘dysgenic’ individuals were often segregated, sterilised, and, in some cases, like Nazi Germany, murdered.

The centenary of the Second International Eugenics Congress creates a critical moment to review how myriad assumptions and attitudes rooted in eugenics continue to affect our world in ways both obvious and hidden. Engaging with, and contributing to, a global anti-eugenic movement of reckoning with the past, the exhibition “We Are Not Alone”: Legacies of Eugenics reveals the shifting and fluid meanings that characterised ideas of human betterment in different national and international contexts. It offers a historically informed account of our eugenic past, present, and future, balancing various elements of continuity and discontinuity, of idiosyncrasy and similarity. Continued education about and engagement with eugenics, as well as its public condemnation, are essential components of our efforts to understand a hidden and tenebrous past, while at the same time, continuing work towards a fair and just society.

Suggested further readings

• The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia by Mark B. Adams
• The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics by Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine
• Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilizartion Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finalnd by Gunnar Broberg, Nils Roll-Hansen eds.
• Struggle for National Survival: Chinese Eugenics in a Transitional Context, 1896-1945 by Yuehtsen Juliette Chung
• Seeing Race again: Countering Colorblindness across the Disciplines by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw et. al. eds.
• Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa by Saul Dubow
• In the Name Of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity by Daniel J. Kevles
• The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism by Stefan Kühl
• A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era by Paul A. Lombardo
• Eugenics, Human Genetics and Human Failings: The Eugenics Society, its Sources and its Critics in Britain by Pauline M. H. Mazumdar
• Eugenics at the Edges of Empire New Zealand, Australia, Canada and South Africa by Diane B. Paul et. al. eds.
• Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France by William H. Schneider
• “The Hour of Eugenics”: Race, Gender and Nation in Latin America by Nancy Leys Stepan
• Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America by Alexandra Minna Stern
• Modernism and Eugenics by Marius Turda
• The History of East-Central European Eugenics, 1900-1944: Texts and Commentaries by Marius Turda
• The Eugenic Mind Project by Robert A. Wilson

For more related sources, try a search for any of the following keywords in our Collections Catalogue: Eugenics; Modernity; Racial Doctrine; Sterilisation; Welfare; Social Policy; Biology.