Abstract
‘It was the Nazis who perpetrated the deed, but men and women everywhere believed in the distinction between races, whether white, yellow or black, Aryan or Jew.’ This, in a nutshell, was the dilemma of race biology in the 1930s and 1940s. The deed was the single greatest crime in the history of mankind — the systematic extermination of six million Jews because, it was claimed, they belonged to an inferior race. The dilemma of race biology was that what men and women everywhere believed, scientists believed also — that there was a hierarchy of superior and inferior races. However hard scientists tried to disassociate themselves from Nazi racism by labelling it a ghastly perversion of science for political ends, the fact was that racism received its sanction in science.1
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Notes and References
The quotation is from George L. Mosse, Towards the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1978) p. xi. The reasons for the persecution of the Jews were, of course, very complex, and went way beyond any supposed ‘scientific’ explanations. The social place of Jews in Germany, economic factors, and Germany’s defeat in World War I all played a part.
George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1968), chs. 7–9, and his edited book, The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883–1911 : A Franz Boas Reader (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
Andrew D. Lyons, The Question of Race in Anthropology from the Time of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach to that of Franz Boas with Particular Reference to the Period 1830 to 1890 (approx.) (Oxford, D. Phil, 1974) esp. 520–34. He notes that among the social anthropologists, the diffusionists like G. Elliot Smith, Perry and Rivers were the last to consider race a factor of even secondary importance.
See also G. M. Morant, The Races of Central Europe; A Footnote to History With a preface by J. B. S. Haldane (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1939). Other books in this genre by American and other scientists include
G. Dahlberg, Race, Reason and Rubbish (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942);
Ruth Benedict, Race, Science and Politics (New York: Modern Age Books, 1940); and
Ashley Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942).
Loren R. Graham, ‘Science and Values: The Eugenics Movement in Germany and Russia in the 1920s’, American Historical Review 83 (1978) 1133–64.
The preliminary notes for the book by the Catholic convert, literary figure and social satirist, G. K. Chesterton, called Eugenics and Other Evils (London: Cassell, 1922) had, according to the author, been written before the war, when eugenics was the ‘topic of the hour; when eugenic babies (not visibly very distinguishable from other babies) sprawled all over the illustrated papers …’. After the war, he realised eugenics was not, as he had believed, about to disappear; that in fact Englishmen would return to ‘the stinks of that low laboratory’. So the book was written and published.
John Mackinnon Robertson, The Saxon and the Celt: A Study in Sociology (London: University Press, 1897).
On these developments, see Philip Abrams, The Origins of British Sociology, 1834–1914 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1968). Sociologists seeking to make their field an autonomous discipline originally turned for advice to both Galton and Dufkheim. Galton was led to institute a eugenics laboratory because of the success of his lectures to the new Sociological Society, founded in 1905. But
Michael Freeden, in his The New Liberalism: An. Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) argues that the social thinkers, even Hobhouse, regarded biology as a necessary part of sociology; the main issue among social thinkers like Hobson and Hobhouse was the degree to which society was autonomous. See esp. pp. 767–116.
Abrams, Origins of British Sociology, p. 91. On Hobhouse, see also John E. Owen, L. T. Hobhouse, Sociologist (London: Nelson, 1974).
Gary Werskey, The Visible College (London: Allen Lane, 1978).
Lancelot Hogben, Dangerous Thoughts (London: Allen & Unwin, 1939), p. 51.
Lancelot Hogben, Nature and Nurture (London: Allen & Unwin, 1939) revised edition, p. 29. J. Arthur Thomson had already pointed out in 1916 that traits were a result of nature and nurture. See his ‘The Biological Theory of Nurture’, Eugenics Review viii (1916) 50–61.
See Nicholas Pastore, The Nature-Nurture Controversy (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1949) p. 163.
R. A. Fisher, ‘The Correlation Between Relations on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance’, Trans. Royal Soc. Edinburgh 52 (1918) 339–433.
Bernard John Norton, Karl Pearson and the Galtonian Tradition: Studies in the Rise of Quantitative Social Biology (PhD, University College, London, 1978) pp. 251–8. Norton concludes that Fisher’s contribution should not be seen, as it traditionally has been, as a contribution to ‘pure’ genetics, but as a ‘stunning contribution to eugenics’.
R. C. Punnett, ‘Eliminating Feeblemindedness’, Journal of Heredity 8 (1917) 464–5.
R. A. Fisher, ‘The Elimination of Mental Defect’, Eugenics Review xvi (1924) 114–16.
Hogben, Genetic Principles in Medicine and Social Science (London: Williams and Norgate, 1931) p. 120.
See Rosalind Mitchell, British Population Change Since 1860 (London: Macmillan, 1977) pp. 80–4.
For Haldane’s life and work, see K. R. Dronamajin, ed., Haldane and Modern Biology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1968) and
William Provine, The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1971).
J. B. S. Haldane, ‘Karl Pearson, 1857–1957’, Biometrika 44 (1957) 303–13.
For Müller’s views, see Carl Bajema, ed., Eugenics Then and Now (Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania: Dowden, Hutchinson and Ross, 1976) pp. 170–209, 237–43, 265–6, and H.J. Müller, ‘The Dominance of Economics over Eugenics’, in A Decade of Progress in Eugenics: Scientific Papers of the Third International Congress of Eugenics (Baltimore: The Williams and Williams Co., 1934) pp. 138–44.
Julian Huxley, ‘Eugenics and Society’, Eugenics Review, xxvii (1936) 11–31.
Lionel S. Penrose, Mental Defect (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1934).
In none of the standard works on eugenics, such as G. R. Searle’s Eugenics and Politics in Britain, 1900–1914 (Leyden: Noordhoff International Publishing, 1976),
Lyndsay Andrew Farrall’s The Origins and Growth of the English Eugenics Movement, 1865–1925 (Indiana University, PhD, 1969) or
Donald McKenzie’s ‘Eugenics in Britain’, Social Studies of Science 6 (1976) 499–532 is the fate of eugenics in the late 1920s and in the 1930s discussed at any length. Nor is it clear that British eugenics followed the same path as that described by
Kenneth M. Ludmerer in Genetics and American Society: A Historical Appraisal (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1972).
Lawrence S. Waterman, in The Eugenic Movement in Britain in the Nineteen Thirties (University of Sussex, MSc, 1975) attributes the decline of the eugenics movement to the fact of unemployment, the reduction of socialism as a real threat in politics, and because of the link between fascism, anti-Semitism and eugenics.
Leonard Darwin acknowledged in his address to the Second International Eugenics Congress in New York in 1921 that human beings were products of environment and heredity and that eugenists had often aroused opposition by unnecessarily running down reform dependent on changes in environment. See Leonard Darwin, ‘The Aims and Methods of Eugenical Societies’, in Eugenics, Genetics and the Family (Baltimore: William and Williams Co., 1923) pp. 5–19.
See, for example, the remarks of the American, Dr E. Blanche Sterling, from the US Public Health Service, in ‘Child Hygiene in Human Ecology’, in A Decade of Progress in Eugenics, p. 343, or the apparently eugenic yet in fact environmentalistic book by Sir James Merchant, The Claims of the Coming Generation (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1923). In fact environmentalism and Lamarckianism had always formed a strand of eugenical thought in Britain.
R. B. Cattell, The Fight for our National Intelligence (London: P. S. King, 1937).
For Haldane, see Werskey, The Visible College, p. 209. On Fisher, see Joan Fisher Box, R. A. Fisher, and for Burt, see L. S. Hearnshaw, Cyril Burt, Psychologist (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1979) pp. 61–70. On the change in Scottish children’s test scores, see
Lionel S. Penrose, Outline of Human Genetics (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1973) 3rd edn, p. 118.
For details of this and other aspects of his life and work, see the biography by Fisher’s daughter, Joan Fisher Box, R. A. Fisher: The Life of a Scientist (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1978) esp. pp. 24–31 and 189–93.
Ronald A. Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (New York: Dover Publications, 1958) esp. pp. 189–284. The book was dedicated to Major Leonard Darwin.
George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution (New York: The Free Press, 1968) pp. 62–3.
Charles Myers, ‘The Future of Anthropometry’, J. of the Roy. Anth. Inst. 33 (1903) 36–40.
Franz Boas, ‘Changes in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants’, in Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture (New York: The Free Press, 1966) pp. 60–75. Not until 1939 did Shapiro establish Boas’ conclusions beyond doubt by his careful, statistical studies of the changes in the body type of Japanese who had moved from Japan to Hawaii. See
H. L. Shapiro, Migration and Environment: A Study of the Physical Characteristics of the Japanese Immigrants to Hawaii ana the Effects of Environment on Their Descendants (London: Oxford University Press, 1939).
Arthur Thomson, ‘A Consideration of Some of the More Important Factors Concerned in the Production of Man’s Cranial Form’, J. of the Roy. Anth. Inst. 33 (1903) 135–66.
Arthur Thomson and L. H. Dudley Buxton, ‘Man’s Nasal Index in Relation to Certain Climatic Conditions’, J. of the Roy. Anth. Inst., 53 (1923) 92–122.
William Ridgeway, ‘Presidential Address: The Influence of Environment on Man’, J. of Roy. Anth. Inst. 40 (1910) 10–22.
W. M. Flinders Petrie, ‘Migrations. The Huxley Lecture for 1906’, J. of the Roy. Anth. Inst. 26 (1906) 189–220.
Alfred C. Haddon, The Races of Man and Their Distribution (Cambridge: University Press, 1924) p. 8.
H. J. Fleure and T. C. James, ‘Geographical Distribution of Anthropological Types in Wales’, J. of the Roy. Anth. Inst., xlvi (1916) 37.
William C. Boyd, ‘Critique of the Methods of Classifying Mankind’, American J. of Phys. Anth., 27 (1940) 333–64.
William C. Boyd, Genetics and the Races of Man: An Introduction to Modern Physical Anthropology (Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1950) pp. 18–19.
Alfred C. Haddon and Julian Huxley, We Europeans: A Survey of Racial Problems (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935).
H. J. Fleure, ‘The Nordic Myth: A Critique of Current Racial Theories’, Eugenics Review xxii (1930) 117–21, and ‘Race and Politics’, Eugenics Review, xxvii (1936) 319–26.
R. Ruggles Gates’ Mendelian and polygenist views were spelled out in ‘Mendelian Heredity and Racial Differences’, J. of the Roy. Anth. Inst., xv (1925) 468–82, and ‘Genetics and Race, Man 32 (1937) 1–4.
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© 1982 Nancy Stepan
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Stepan, N. (1982). A Period of Doubt: Race Science before the Second World War. In: The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960. St Antony’s/Macmillan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05452-7_6
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