White Supremacy (eBook)

CHAPTER 2

Eugenics and the Origins of ‘White Genocide’

So where did Gendron’s ideas about the Great Replacement of white people come from? Later chapters in this book will consider contemporary versions of the term, but its origin goes back much further. History seldom repeats itself but with this phrase and the race politics behind it, there is a striking continuity and it starts with Charles Darwin.

The popular perception of Darwin is of a humanist genius who saw further than his contemporaries, and there’s much to commend this view. The co-founder of the theory of natural selection was one of the first to recognise that we all evolved from Africa. He opposed slavery and called for the arrest of the British governor responsible for the brutal suppression of the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica in 1865. He showed compassion to individual black people and in The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) wrote: ‘If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature but by our institutions, great is our sin.’ But in that same book his attitude to other races emerges, including the hunter-gatherers of Tierra del Fuego: ‘Viewing such men, one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow creatures placed in the same world. I believe if the world was searched, no lower grade of man could be found.’

As he absorbed the ‘scientific’ racism that flourished after the mid-19th century, his ideas about the superiority of white men became more defined. In his last significant book, The Descent of Man (1871), it flowed from his pen. He drew an analogy between the limited cognitive and heightened instinctive potential of women and black people, writing that women differed from men in ‘mental disposition’ and possessed ‘powers of intuition, of rapid perception and perhaps imitation’ that were also ‘characteristic of the lower races and therefore of a past and lower state of civilisation’. He had this to say about black people: ‘Their mental characteristics are … very distinct; chiefly, it would appear, in their emotional but partly in their intellectual faculties.’ He said ‘civilised races’ were superior to ‘savage races’ and would ‘exterminate or replace them’, adding: ‘The break will then be rendered wider for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between a negro or Australian and a gorilla.’ His suggestion here is that there is not a very large gap between black people and gorillas.

Darwin proposed that something should be done to ensure the human stock in ‘civilised’ nations did not deteriorate, complaining that ‘weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind’, and that this was ‘highly injurious to the race of man’. This in essence is the basis of the eugenics propagated by his younger cousin, Francis Galton, who had none of the leavening character traits of the cousin whose work he so admired.

This polymath, thirteen years Darwin’s junior, was obsessed with data collection and measuring things as part of his quest for defining people in terms of race, class and ability – from regional ratings of female beauty to racial ratings of intelligence and ability. ‘Whenever you can, count’ was his motto. He had no qualms about proclaiming his own brilliance but showed little sign of appreciating that of others, particularly if not from his class or race. He had no children and, despite 43 years of marriage, scant interest in sex, preferring the company of men in scientific societies and the Freemasons, which he joined at 22 and participated in with zeal.

Drawing on his own experience of mental disturbance that included a ‘nervous breakdown’ at university, Galton noted that ‘gifted’ men who were ‘full of nervous power’ and ‘haunted and driven by a dominant idea’ were ‘within a measurable distance of insanity’. Some have suggested his systemising brain and lack of empathy put him on the autism spectrum, but he died in 1911, more than three decades before autism was first diagnosed. What we can say is that Galton’s empathy vacuum was most acute when it came to those he regarded as inferior to him and to his type – like Darwin he came from wealth, being the son of a Quaker gun manufacturer. He believed those at the top of society were innately smarter than those below and wrote about the superiority of Europeans over ‘lower races’, describing black people as being ‘so childish, stupid and simpleton-like as frequently to make me ashamed of my own species’. He placed ancient Greeks at the top of the ‘ablest’ table and at the bottom were native Australians – ‘the Australian type is at least one grade below the African negro,’ he wrote.

The younger cousin was captivated by On the Origin of Species when it was published in 1859, not least its opening chapter’s account of breeding livestock to enhance traits. He applied this to people, reasoning that humans were animals and could be bred accordingly. To test this idea, he traced the relatives of eminent men, reasoning that if their children were also eminent then eminence must be biologically innate – never considering that this might relate to their wealth, education, social cachet and upbringing. He took this further, reasoning that if the ‘eminence’ of people from his class was a product of biology, then so was poverty. According to Galton, people were poor because of bad biology, and if qualities like genius and stupidity were inherited then society could avoid regression by controlling breeding. He attempted something similar with twin studies. Like Darwin, he’d not heard of the discovery of genetics through experiments with pea plants (between 1856 and 1863) by the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel and did not understand the mechanism of inheritance, but he compared those who looked alike with those who didn’t. With both sets the ‘external influences have been identical; they have never been separated,’ he said. He found that those twins who said they looked more alike diverged less in later life and claimed his results proved that ‘nature prevails enormously over nurture’.

Galton made proposals based on the belief that nature trumped nurture and not just among individuals but across races, classes and populations. In 1869 he advocated that those who were ‘gifted’ should get all the help needed to rise to the top and those who were ‘weak’ should end up in ‘celibate monasteries or sisterhoods’. In 1883 he coined the term ‘eugenics’ (from the Greek words for ‘well’ and ‘born’), which involved ‘the science of improving the stock’ so as to ‘give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable’. He promoted this new idea with vigour, believing it would raise the level of humanity. On the one hand he advocated incentives to promote able people, categorised by a system of family merit marks, encouraging them to breed early to counter their tendency to have fewer children later in life. For those he saw as less able, including Africans, he preferred extinction. He hoped colonialism would do the ‘necessary job of replacing them with their betters because they would stupidly fail to submit to the needs of a superior civilisation’. This prospect didn’t phase him. ‘There exists a sentiment, for the most part quite unreasonable,’ he wrote, ‘against the gradual extinction of the inferior race.’ He proposed the Chinese should migrate en masse to Africa to displace the ‘inferior’ Africans.

So, right from the start, eugenics was bound up with race in its drive to eliminate what was seen as physical and mental weakness and to promote strength. Galton campaigned to have his ideas turned into policies, writing scores of papers and articles on eugenics, making speeches and delivering lectures to august bodies like the Royal Anthropological Society. In 1904 he founded the Eugenics Record Office at University College London (UCL). Five years later the Eugenics Education Society began publishing The Eugenics Review, with Galton, the society’s honorary president, writing the foreword of the first volume.

Galton’s British disciples

Galton attracted disciples who promoted his ideas, most notably the statistician Carl Pearson, who became UCL’s ‘Galton Professor of Eugenics’. Pearson thought the implication of evolution was ‘war with inferior races’ and that it was a waste of money to try to improve the lot of people from inferior stock. He particularly opposed the immigration of Jews, whom he regarded as ‘inferior mentally and physically’ to native Englishmen.

In 1912 the First International Eugenics Congress was held in London and dedicated to Galton, who had died the previous year. The event was chaired by Charles Darwin’s son, Leonard, a eugenicist who said ‘moral courage’ was needed to introduce better breeding programmes for humans. Among the 400 delegates was Winston Churchill, who’d also become fervently pro-eugenics.

In 1900, Gregor Mendel’s pioneering research had been rediscovered and biologists divided into two camps. There were those like Galton and Pearson, who tried to explain evolution through non-genetic, statistical means, and those...