The Past Is A Foreign Country

A recurring series featuring old things that look utterly alien today

In the late 19th- and early-20th centuries, a prominent idea in public policy circles was eugenics — the idea that governments and other institutions should promote the procreation of intelligent, healthy, and morally upstanding individuals while actively suppressing lesser sorts from breeding. Over time, the argument went, the population as a whole would improve. Everyone would benefit.

If this sounds like animal husbandry — breed only the fastest horses to get faster horses — you get the idea.

The rise of the eugenics movement was, in part, a response to rapid declines in fertility rates as nations urbanized. Who was having fewer children? It was the intelligent, healthy, and morally upstanding people — or so it was widely believed. At the same time, the lesser sort — their terms, not mine! — continued to breed like rabbits. It followed, supporters of eugenics argued, that if governments failed to implement policies that promoted the health of the nation, the same dynamic that could collectively improve the population would drag it down.

Taken to its most ruthless extreme, eugenics underlay many Nazi policies, including Aktion T4, the murder of the mentally ill, the developmentally disabled, and the physically handicapped. Understandably, when eugenics is mentioned today, it’s usually connected to the Nazis. But that’s a bit misleading.

Eugenics took many forms that were much less extreme, and these were popular across the industrialized world for decades prior to the rise of the Third Reich. In fact — and this is where it gets quite uncomfortable — eugenics was mostly embraced on the progressive side of the political spectrum: Many of the major figures who pushed for women’s rights, labour reforms, health and safety regulations, trust busting, income taxes, and social security also strongly advocated for eugenicist policies like voluntary or mandatory sterilization of those deemed mentally deficient. They often succeeded. Sterilization programs — some voluntary, some involving trickery and coercion, some mandatory — became widespread. The United States led the way.

It’s a struggle to wrap our modern minds around this worldview.

While trawling through newspaper archives looking for something else, I came across an obscure old article that illustrates the point in stunning fashion.

From The Evening World, New York City, published October 26th, 1915:

Picture it happening in Manhattan — on Wall Street, no less. Four men trudging up and down sidewalks with banners proclaiming that they are unfit to have children and laws should be passed to ensure they don’t.

The reporter’s descriptions of the men, in the section reproduced above and what follows, are not merely sensational. They drip with disgust and contempt.

Four ragged, deformed, poverty-stricken derelicts….

…a shuffling creature , whose shoulders were bent and twisted out of all normal semblance and whose scarred and swollen left hadn't hung uselessly at his side.

…an unshaven, shifty-eyed man, who could not answer a single question intelligibly.

…an undersized man with vacant blue eyes.

…a man who seemed a trifle more intelligent than the others, although there were traces of dipsomania [ie. alcoholism] in his face.

In the section of the article that follow the portion above, the reporter traces the spectacle to its source.

He is Dr. Fredrick Robinson, “editor of the Medical Review of Reviews and well known as a propagandist of eugenics and family limitation.”

“This is only the beginning,” said Dr. Robinson, who is president of the Sociological Fund Committee and who not long ago announced the prize of $1000 for a perfect eugenic marriage. "We are going to conduct a nationwide campaign for the limitation of undesirable offspring, and such banners as you have seen in Wall Street today will be raised in every city of importance throughout the country.”

At the end of the story, there is, finally, a brief note of compassion.

“Isn’t it rather hard on the banner carriers to make them proclaim degradation so publicly?” [Dr. Robinson] was asked.

“They don’t seem to mind it,” he replied. “They are mostly illiterate. And I think the effect on the beholder is the stronger, since he sees weak men calling upon society to protect itself against their weaknesses.”

It was the novelist L.P. Hartley who wrote, “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” They do, indeed.