Chapter 17. The Doctrine of the Thoroughbred.
From Which Way Western Man by William Gayley Simpson
Free crossing obliterates characters.
Darwin
Material prosperity encourages the preservation, pampering, and reproduction of the biologically inferior elements which are parasitical upon rich civilizations. Then some cleaner-blooded and culturally crude stock crashes in and wipes clean the slate. . . We can either prune off our own rotten branches or submit to a ruthless cutting down and thinning out by more vigorous conquering stocks.
Earnest A. Hooton
In my last chapter, we began a discussion of eugenics. We noted the appalling state of the physical and mental health of the American population. At least one out of every ten persons, to put it very conservatively and safely, has to be carried by the rest of us. We discovered, also, that on every level, through the operation of what is called the differential birth rate, the less capable are outbreeding the more capable, and in consequence slowly but surely taking their place. Those qualified to give the country firm and deeply wise leadership, or to give such leadership the solid backing essential to its ascendancy are gradually disappearing, and, year by year, the people approach ever nearer to the state of a confused and helpless horde. Finally, we searched diligently and unsparingly to determine the truth about the relative importance of heredity and environment in the development of the individual. And we found that, while both are important, heredity is much the more so. In general, it may be said that environment is only the negative, limiting factor: it creates no capacity, but only may decide whether or not innate capacity shall be developed. Potentiality, how far a man has it in him to go (environment not preventing) is something a man gets from his ancestors, is born with or forever goes without. In reviewing the evidence, Professor East of Harvard said, “Summing up all the genetic experiments where the inheritance was constant and the environment variable, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the resulting dissimilarity of product is negligible.” 1
We will now continue our discussion of eugenics, carrying it on, first, into an investigation of the facts in regard to inbreeding and outbreeding (the fourth point in my presentation); and, finally, undertaking to draw up a list of some of the more important and feasible measures by which a people might avail itself of the hereditary factor in human reproduction, not only to prevent the decline of its breeding stock, but even to improve its quality.
To avoid the risk of having to contend throughout the following presentation, with a suspicion in the minds of my readers that I am trying adroitly to build up a case for breeding human beings like animals, let me say before I begin that I have no such intention. That the principles of inbreeding have bearing on my concern that the life of man should be exalted, I readily allow, and what this is I shall make clear in due course, but you may be sure that I shall not use them crudely. Nevertheless, it must be courageously faced and honestly admitted that, however much eugenic measures may be decently cloaked out of regard for human sensibilities, an improvement of our human breeding stock will need to be in essential agreement with the principles and practices to which we owe the extraordinary improvement in our grains, vegetables, fruits, flowers, livestock, horses and dogs. This is inescapable.
IV. INBREEDING AND OUTBREEDING
Lest there be any misunderstanding as to what we are talking about, I will begin with definitions. Ordinarily, inbreeding refers to the mating of close relatives, such as parent and offspring or brother and sister; while outbreeding has to do with matings less close, as between individuals comparatively unrelated or related only distantly; and cross-breeding to matings between individuals not known to have any blood relationship whatever, as between members of different breeds or varieties or races.2 One can see at a glance that in dealing with such variable quantities it is difficult to be altogether precise. Some of the geneticists themselves who have made special study of consanguineous matings (for example, Professor E.M. East and Professor Raymond Pearl) advise the use of the word inbreeding “in a relative sense only.” The reason is obvious. At one end of the scale of inbreeding we have self-fertilization, where the male and female cells are taken from the same individual plant, as in the case of maize (or corn, as we commonly call it). At the other end, we have endogomy, which Webster’s dictionary calls inbreeding, although the matings here may be close only in the sense that they are within the tribe or race, and are yet distant enough so that in the definitions above they might often fall under the head of outbreeding. Marrying one to whom you were only distantly related would be out-breeding as compared with marrying, say, your cousin, but it would take on the color of inbreeding and might often very properly be called inbreeding as compared with marrying altogether outside your race, as with a Negro or a Japanese. It seems best, therefore, to make our definitions fairly flexible. Except when referring to self-fertilizing organisms, where its meaning is obvious, we shall always use inbreeding to refer to matings by which the network of the lines of hereditary characteristics they bring together is narrowed, and outbreeding to refer to matings by which this network is widened.3
Unless I am greatly mistaken, the prevalent attitude in regard to these two kinds of breeding, not only in our populace at large but also among our intellectuals and leaders in general, is one of well-nigh complete certainty that out- or cross-breeding represents the course that we as a nation wish to follow in our human matings. In any case, it represents the course we have followed for at least the past four or five generations. All kinds of people have flocked here from all parts of the Earth, and once here have been free to marry, and have married, into the established stocks of the land. And being a very vain people, feeling very much pleased with ourselves when we look into the mirror of history, we tend—not unnaturally—to confirm and extol the means by which we have come to be what we are. There is in America a veritable cult of the mongrel, of the hybrid. The idea of pure blood, as of the thoroughbred, is ridiculed. It is widely believed that the American type, which is assumed to be the best in the world, in large part owes its superiority to the fact that its blood is mixed. Cross-breeding, it is asserted, yields offspring of superior size, stamina, energy, and fertility.
On the other hand, when one says the word “inbreeding,” people think at once of the “Hillbillies” of our southern mountains, among whom there is a high rate of defectiveness, feeble-mindedness, and sterility. Moreover, this attitude has been confirmed in legal enactment. “Many of our states prohibit cousin marriages, and Oklahoma even prohibits the marriage of second cousins,” 4 the idea being, apparently, that cousin marriages are likely to lead to very undesirable results in the offspring. And when one speaks the word “incest,” one touches a taboo before which most men stand horrified. Incest is sexual intercourse between people closely related. It is pronounced a crime by the law, and by the Church a monstrous sin. Even cousin marriages are commonly included in the prohibitions of the taboo.
And yet as long ago as Darwin, it was recognized that the taboo did not have a firm scientific foundation. In 1870, in a letter to Sir John Lubbock, then in Parliament, Darwin wrote, “In England and many parts of Europe the marriages of cousins are objected to from their supposed injurious consequences; but this belief rests on no direct evidence. It is therefore manifestly desirable that the belief should either be proved false, or should be confirmed.” 5 And he called for an investigation instituted by Parliament, to settle the matter.
Nevertheless, though the taboo against the mating of close relatives might lack really scientific support, it has long been known with great certainty, both to animal breeders and to observers of human life, that close inbreeding was often followed by very undesirable offspring. Doubt, however, arose from the fact that the offspring from close matings were not always defective: indeed, though the taboo against incest is one of the oldest and most widespread of all human prohibitions, it was yet recognized that some cousin marriages at least yielded decidedly desirable offspring, and that some degree of inbreeding, however risky and uncertain in its outcome, offered the only known path to a superior breed of animals. The trouble was that no one had discovered why the same procedure at one time led to good results and at another time to bad. Indeed, the answer to the problem could never have been reached by such an investigation as Darwin called for, even if it had been authorized. The right answer had to wait until men had learned to appreciate and apply the discoveries of Mendel.
Meanwhile, there came to be a considerable, and growing, body of knowledge that was very definitely at odds with the prevailing and powerful prejudice against incest.
For one thing, it was a matter of common observation, as Dr. Robert Briffault pointed out, in reviewing the situation, that “all animal species propagate without regard to the closest inbreeding.” 6 A collie bitch, belonging to a friend of mine, once had a litter of pups, and subsequently mated with one of her own sons, then full-grown, and by him had another litter of pups, all sound and saleable. Many of my readers must have observed like results of close inbreeding of animals.
Moreover, as already remarked, some cousin marriages were known to have had very happy results. A notable instance was the marriage of Charles Darwin himself with his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, both of whom belonged to families of sound and already distinguished stock. According to Professor S. J. Holmes, so often quoted in my last chapter, “All of Darwin’s sons became celebrated for their intellectual achievements and are noteworthy for being unusually able and normal types of men.” 7
Again, despite all the taboo against inbreeding within certain specified degrees of closeness, there was a very significant amount of inbreeding among many ancient peoples. “Among the Persians,” for instance, according to O.A. Wall, “the logical wives are considered to be the cousins on the father’s side.” 8 Sir Richard F. Burton declared that “the kings of Persia intermarried with their sisters.” 9 And Professor East said that “Zoroaster appears not only to have permitted cousin marriages but to have recommended and blessed them above all others.” 10
Inbreeding went even further among the Greeks. According to Professors E.M. East and D.F. Jones, “Galton concluded the ablest race in history was that built up in Attica between 530 and 430 B.C., when from 45,000 free-born males surviving the age of 50 there came fourteen of the most illustrious men of all time.” After attempting to explain this, in part, by the cultural environment of the day, they go on, “Further, there can be little question but that in this little settlement [Attica] there was much selective breeding. Had we the data, would we not find the Athenians all more or less related to one another? Had they not built up somewhat of a superstock by inbreeding? Endogamy was their custom (Westermarck, 1901). Marriage with half-sisters was allowable, and if an Athenian lived as husband or wife with an alien, he or she was liable to be sold as a slave and have all property confiscated.” 11 Again, during the period in which inbreeding was closest, the Spartans were the greatest race physically of which we have any record. The fall came after the original customs had been relaxed.” 12
Like claims are made for inbreeding among the ancient Hebrews. Hastings’ Dictionary Of The Bible says that “the Hebrews [of the Old Testament] were strongly endogamous, marrying within the nation.” Moreover, Abraham is said to have “married his half-sister [Sarah]” (Gen. 20:12), and Jacob to have married his first cousins Rachel and Leah (Gen. 24). But it is doubtful that much should be made of this, since many scholars are inclined to believe that the stories of the Patriarchs are only personalized records of traditions as to the origins of the Hebrew tribes. More convincing evidence of incestuous practice among the people is to be found in 2 Sam. 13:13 and Ezek. 22:11. It is not improbable that when, centuries later, the priests came to edit the old historic records, they colored them with their own bitter antagonism to marriages with the hated gentiles (non-Hebrews), as in Gen. 25:34, 27:46 to 28:1ff. Yet from very early times, there was strong and sustained opposition, conceived as enjoined by Jehovah, to all marriages with aliens. (Cp. Gen. 24 and 34; Numb. 12:1 and Ch. 25.) The point of view in Judges 14:3 is that the best marriage is with a woman taken from “among the daughters of thy brethren.” Hostility to marriage with outsiders was intensified during the subsequent period of priestly domination. (But the evidence that I have submitted shows that this hostility was not then initiated, but, contrary to what Dr. Oscar Levy undertook to maintain in letters to me during the last year of his life, dated back to very early times.) Jubilees 30 forbade them absolutely: they were “fornication.” Jewish strictness in this respect was notorious. (Tacitus—History V.5, Acts 10:28.) It is interesting to note that, according to Westermarck, even “now the proportion of mixed to pure marriages among the Jews is about 1 to 500.” 13 We may remark in passing, too, that according to Hastings, “Cousin marriages among the Jews are said to occur now three times more often than among other civilized people.” 14 Sir Richard Burton says that similar customs have always prevailed among the Arabs.15
The most interesting and startling record of inbreeding, however, comes from the Incas and the ancient Egyptians, and here it reached the closest degrees possible—father with daughter, son with mother, brother with sister. Professor East conjectures that the object was to prevent the debasement of the royal line with ignoble blood,16 but probably the real object will never be surely known. The facts, however, are “certain and indisputable.” Maspero says, “A union of father and daughter . . . was perhaps not wholly forbidden, and that of brother and sister seems to have been regarded as perfectly right and natural; the words brother and sister possessing in Egyptian love-songs the same significance as lover and mistress with us.” 17 Sir James Frazer speaks of “the marriage of full brothers with full sisters” as the “most remarkable feature in the social system of the ancient Egyptians,” and adds that in the eyes of the Egyptians “marriage between brother and sister was the best of marriages, and it acquired an ineffable degree of sanctity when the brother and sister who contracted it were themselves born of a brother and sister, who had in their turn also sprung from a union of the same sort.” 18 And Miss R.E. White, writing on woman in Ptolemaic Egypt, says that the principle did not “apply only to gods and kings: the common people acted on it in their daily life. They regarded marriages between brother and sister as the most natural and reasonable of all . . . such unions were the rule, not the exception, in ancient Egypt, and . . . continued to form the majority of marriages long after the Romans had obtained a firm footing in the country.” 19 As far as I have discovered all the recognized authorities on ancient Egypt are agreed about these incestuous marriages.20
The fullest summary of the facts is to be found in Ludovici’s 21 The Choice Of A Mate and
in an article entitled “Should Cousins Marry?” by the well known eugenist Paul P. Popenoe.22 Marriages of royal brother and sister are found at least as far back as the Fourth Dynasty, and they are known to have occurred in the XIIth and XIIIth dynasties, and in every dynasty from the XVIIth through the XXIst. Popenoe says, “The eighteenth dynasty, which ruled Egypt in the sixteenth, fifteenth and fourteenth centuries before Christ, probably represented as high a point as the power of the country ever reached.” It was marked not only by the consolidation of the state and the extension of empire, but also by a great development of the pursuits of peace, including the fine arts. In this period we have no less than seven cases of brother-sister marriages on the part of rulers. One of them resulted in Egypt’s greatest queen. From another sprang Thutmose III, of whom Breasted says,
“His character stands forthwith more color and individuality than that of any king of early Egypt except Ikhnaton. We see the man of a tireless energy unknown in any Pharoah before or since. . . His reign marks an epoch not only in Egypt but in the whole east as we know it in his age. Never before in history had a single brain wielded the resources of so great a nation and wrought them into such centralized, permanent and at the same time mobile efficiency. . . He built the first real empire, and is thus the first character possessed of universal aspects, the first world hero.” 23
And yet, according to Popenoe, this man of such versatile genius and stupendous energy “was the product of five unbroken generations of brother-sister marriages.” 24
Sir Marc Armand Ruffer concludes his study of the physical effects of consanguineous marriages in the royal families of Egypt in the XVIIIth dynasty in these words:
“There is no evidence to show that idiocy, deaf-mutism, or other diseases generally attributed to consanguineous marriages, ever occurred among the members of this dynasty, and as far as can be ascertained from mummified bodies, masks and statues, the features of both men and women were fine, distinguished and handsome . . . The result of this inquiry is that a royal family, in which consanguineous marriage was the rule, produced nine distinguished rulers . . . There is no evidence that the physical characteristics or mental power of the family were unfavourably influenced by the repeated consanguineous marriages.” 25
In the XIXth and XXth dynasties, which Briffault calls “the golden age of the Egyptian monarchy,” he says that “every king of the former [married] his sister as the lawful mother of the heir to the throne.” And he concludes, “Yet the race that produced Seti and Ramses affords no evidence of degeneration, nor does there exist in the age-long records of by far the longest line of kings in the world’s history, among whom not mere inbreeding, but actual incest was a fundamental and immemorial principle, any fact that can lend support to the doctrine of the evil results of inbreeding.” 26
Popenoe and Ludovici carry the story through the Ptolemies, down to the time of Julius Caesar. And Briffault agrees with them that though the Ptolemies may have been profligate and monstrous, they certainly were not lacking in physical and mental energy, and that they were no more degenerate than many of the great characters of the magnificent Italian Renaissance.27 This record of the Egyptians is of the utmost significance, since it is universally recognized that they produced one of the greatest and longest-lasting cultures known, and some authorities have even believed that all the other cultures of the entire Earth had their origin in, and spread from, Egypt.28
From this brief survey of the historic record in regard to human inbreeding, more especially as it affects our own cultural past, let us turn now to see what science has discovered that will explain these well-established facts. The problem really did not admit of any solution until approached with a thorough equipment of Mendelian genetics. Then, however, this refractory block fell apart, so openly revealing its long-locked secrets that there is now (so far as I have been able to ascertain) practically universal agreement as to the principles involved.29 30 This very significant result was reached about 1915. Several thorough experiments had been pointing to the eventual resolution of the problem. “The work of Castle and his pupils on the fruit fly Drosophila showed that brother and sister matings could be carried on for 59 generations without loss of fertility. . . Moenkhaus found that within a closely inbred strain of Drosophila, fertility could be increased as well as decreased by selective breeding. Some of the lines were inbred (brother and sister) for 75 generations without loss of fertility or vigor.” The experiments of Shultze, Copeman, and Parsons on mice, and of Castle on rats, yielded the same results. A more thorough investigation by Miss H.D. King, with albino rats, disclosing “several sources of error that have to be guarded against in a study of inbreeding and which not improbably misled some previous investigators of the subject,” showed that “twenty-five generations of such close inbreeding as brother and sister matings did not produce any loss in the vigor, growth, or fertility of the inbred strains as compared with the controls.” 31
The most extensive investigation of inbreeding, however, and apparently the one that proved conclusive, was the series of experiments with maize that was begun by Professor East in 1905 at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station and that was still being carried on by Professor D.F. Jones in 1919. They chose maize because, being self-fertilizing, it admitted of inbreeding even closer than that represented by the mating of parent and offspring or brother and sister in animals or humans. The object they set before themselves was to determine “whether inbreeding is injurious merely by reason of the consanguinity.” The significance of this experiment requires that it be described in some detail.32
Professors East and Jones began by self-pollinating individual plants from different varieties of all the principal types of maize. The seed from these pollinations yielded plants of the greatest diversity. For instance, they bore ears of every sort of size, shape, and condition. Some were incapable of producing seed, or of producing seed that would germinate. Moreover, for some reason apparently more or less peculiar to maize,33 there was even great reduction both in size of plant and in yield. (Though it should at once be added that the rate of reduction diminished as the inbreeding was continued, until it finally ceased altogether; and that the original size and vigor could at any time be recovered, and often even exceeded, by a single crossing of inbred plants.) If judgment had been passed at this time, therefore, it would have been necessary to say that the results of inbreeding were most emphatically injurious, not to say disastrous. But the experimenters persisted, repeating the self-pollination of individual plants for twelve generations. It is to be noted well, however, for it is highly important, that beginning with the first generation and continuing to the end, they always threw away the seed of the defective plants and used only the best. It was soon observed that the proportion of defectives was growing smaller and smaller with each generation, until at the last they had seed, every grain of which from every plant was free from any sort of abnormality, and could be counted upon to breed true to type. In commenting on the results of their experiments the authors state that they wish to “emphasize” the fact that the inbred plants “are normal and healthy. No actual degeneration has occurred. The monstrosities that are common in every field of maize, such as the occurrence of seeds in the tassels, anthers in the ears, dwarf plants, completely sterile plants, and other similar anomalies [such as misshapen ears with crooked rows] . . . no longer occur in these inbred strains.” 34
We now come to the interpretation and significance of these results. Professors East and Jones are unequivocal about the answer to the inquiry that they set before themselves: inbreeding is positively not injurious “by reason of the consanguinity.” “The only injury proceeding from inbreeding,” they say, “comes from the inheritance received. . . If undesirable characters are shown after inbreeding, it is only because they already existed in the stock and were able to persist for generations under the protection of more favorable characters which dominated them and kept them out of sight. . . If the evil is brought to light, inbreeding is no more to be blamed than the detective who unearths a crime. Instead of being condemned, it should be commended. After continued inbreeding [with the discarding of undesirables] a cross-bred stock has been purified and rid of abnormalities, monstrosities, and serious weakness of all kinds. Only those characters can remain which either are favorable or at least are not definitely harmful to the organism.” 35
They say further, “When linked with Mendelian phenomena it was clearly recognized for the first time that one and the same principle was involved in the effects of inbreeding and the directly opposite effects of outbreeding. Inbreeding was not a process of continuous degeneration. Injurious results, if present, were due to the segregation of characters.” 36 That is, if defectiveness was inherent in the stocks of which male and female were brought together, inbreeding would bring it out. It would bring it out because when individuals of like hereditary endowment are brought together (as happens in inbreeding), you tend to get a double dose of whatever hereditary determinants came down out of the ancestry, and this double dose tends to force them into manifestation, whether it be of defectiveness or of superiority. If the individuals mated are of identical hereditary endowment, they are bound to get such a double dose. In the case of outbreeding, however, where they are of unlike hereditary constitution, a determinant (or gene) of defectiveness from one parent is much more likely to be combined with a determinant from the other parent which is against defectiveness; and if the latter is a dominant it will prevent the defectiveness from making an appearance, even though the offspring may carry this recessive determinant in his germ plasm and transmit is to his offspring. So that if, when this offspring marries, this determinant for defectiveness finds a like recessive for defectiveness in his mate, the double dose will cause it to appear in their offspring even though it may not have appeared in either of the parents. Inbreeding only tends to isolate, to bring out in individual offspring, and thus to uncover, whatever qualities and capacities are latent in the ancestry. If defectiveness is not in the stock, inbreeding 37 cannot bring it out. If the stock is marked by superiority, inbreeding must tend to result in individuals in whom superiority is concentrated. “It is not to be wondered, therefore,” East and Jones comment “that examination of the pedigree records of one family led to one conclusion, and of another family to exactly the opposite.”
This verdict is confirmed by every qualified investigator of inbreeding that I have come across. Some of these I cannot forbear to quote, partly for their authority, partly for their illumination of the subject.
Dr. Knight Dunlap of Johns Hopkins and Dr. Robert Briffault are unequivocal.38,39 Dr. Crew says, “Inbreeding is only disastrous if the ingredients of disaster are already in the stock.” 40 And again, “The records of the breeds of domesticated animals show that close inbreeding of a sound stock, if associated with intelligent elimination of the weakly and abnormal, can be practiced for many generations without any undesirable consequences.” 41 (Emphasis added.) Professor Castle says, “Continuous crossing only tends to hide inherent defects, not to exterminate them, and inbreeding only tends to bring them to the surface, not to create them.” 42 Professor Samuel J. Holmes writes, “If the parents are free from recessive defects, inbreeding produces no bad results.” 43 And again, “Inbreeding does not cause defect; it simply brings out latent defect when it occurs in both parents. Whether or not inbreeding is followed by inferior progeny depends, therefore, upon the composition of the germ plasm of the inbred stock. If the stock is good it not only produces no degeneracy, but affords a means of perpetuating valuable qualities, and it becomes especially useful when the desired qualities are recessive.” 44 He adds that studies have shown that “in no one instance could healthy consanguinity be regarded as a cause of idiocy, epilepsy, or insanity.” 45 Even Otto Klineberg says, “If a brother and a sister have absolutely no flaws in their genetic constitution, there is no reason why they should not have perfectly normal, healthy offspring.” 46
Quotations from authorities might easily be multiplied, but enough have been submitted to make it clear that scientific investigation of inbreeding has so completely altered its position that it can no longer be regarded by intelligent and informed people as the bogey it was to all men for long centuries. It is now known beyond question that in itself it is harmless in its effects on offspring, that it does not add any evil to the evil in the ancestry, and that the taboo against it is without rational foundation.
It is important, next, that we inquire what may be the practical value of inbreeding. To a considerable extent the answer to this question has been implicit, if not plainly stated, in the material already presented. But it will be worthwhile to have it restated and sharpened.
Inbreeding is of value to him who is concerned about quality of life, whether it be in plant, animal, or man. Darwin, of course, had no help from genetics, but he was very much interested in the problem of inbreeding and was a very acute observer, so that it is of considerable significance that, despite all the uncertainty and drawbacks under which in his time inbreeding was supposed to operate, he should nevertheless have said, “It should . . . be clearly understood that the advantage of close inbreeding, as far as the retention of character is concerned, is indispensable and often outweighs the evil of a slight loss in constitutional vigor.” 47 (Emphasis added)
Inbreeding serves to improve character or quality in two ways: negatively and positively. Negatively, it is the quickest and surest means known for bringing all latent defects to the surface, and so providing the opportunity for their detection and elimination. It must, however, be clearly recognized, and very strongly emphasized, that upon this elimination of defectives the negative value of inbreeding absolutely depends. As Ludovici points out so unequivocally, “All inbreeding, . . . , to be successful, must be attended with the most ruthless selection.” 48
As to the positive side, we may again quote East and Jones, who say, “The value of inbreeding in plant and animal improvement in the past may be summed up in the statement that it is the greatest single agency in bringing about uniformity and the concentration of desired qualities”; 49 or Dr. Crew, who declares that “some degree of ‘narrow’ breeding is essential for progressive improvement leading to production of a uniform and true-breeding stock.” 50 Dr. Popenoe reminds us that “every great breed of livestock has been built up on continued and intensive inbreeding, the mating of brother and sister, of father and daughter, of father and granddaughter. Thus the desired qualities came to be more and more concentrated.” 51 Again, “the principle of the pure line has been firmly established by an ever-increasing body of evidence, and is of the utmost importance in a proper understanding of the facts involved in inbreeding and outbreeding.” 52 Even to reap the fruits of cross-breeding, this principle is of the highest importance, for, as we shall see later, cross-breeding yields its most significant results only when the stocks to be crossed have previously been purified by inbreeding.
It is worthwhile to quote the summary of Ludovici, who so constantly weighs everything for its value to human life. “Inbreeding,” he says, “canalizes and isolates health and other desirable qualities, just as it canalizes and isolates ill-health and other undesirable qualities. It stabilizes the germ plasm, and this causes hereditary factors to be calculable. It therefore makes appearance a guide to the individual’s hereditary equipment. . . . it acts as a purifier of a stock or family.” 53
That inbreeding has its limitations and drawbacks, let it be allowed. It has no power of itself to create any qualities, good or bad. It can at most only bring out and intensify the qualities already inherent in the two hereditary endowments it brings together. To be of the greatest value, these endowments must have been enriched with a genetic diversity (or range and variety of qualities and capacities) such as can be obtained only by a measure of judicious crossing. Also, I think it should be recognized that some of the foremost authorities seem to maintain that one of “the principal effects of inbreeding both in animals and plants [is] . . . a usual, but not inevitable, decline in general vigor.” This is from Dr. Crew, in his compendium on genetics entitled 54 Heredity. It would seem, however, that this needs to be amplified by what he says on pages 94 and 95 of his Organic Inheritance In Man.55 Here we find that “it has been demonstrated” that inbreeding of rats, mated brother to sister for twenty-five generations, with rigorous selection, “does not necessarily produce any adverse effects.” On the other hand, another experiment “involving about 30,000 guinea-pigs” and carried on for “23 generations of the closest inbreeding,” “revealed that the average effect of inbreeding was the production of a decline in all elements of vigour.” At first glance this looks bad for inbreeding, and seems to contradict his preceding statement. But as one reads on, one discovers that in the former experiment the results were gauged after “rigorous selection,” whereas the observation on the second experience rated the “average” result— i.e., without selection. Most of the lines in the second experiment, Dr. Crew says, were so full of determinants unfavorable to health and even to life, that, when inbred, they soon became extinct. But there were one or two that “compared very favourably indeed with the original stock.” For to the original vigor of the stock had been added the genetic dependability and concentration of capacity that resulted from inbreeding. And thus is laid the foundation for the considered conclusion of East and Jones that “homozygosity [a like hereditary endowment, such as is produced by inbreeding when accompanied with rigorous elimination of defectives], when obtained with the combination of all the most favorable characters, is the most effective condition for the purpose of growth and reproduction,” 56 and for that of Dr. Fritz Lenz that “the healthy offspring of parents who are related have therefore far better hereditary prospects than the offspring of unrelated parents.” 57
But we must now examine the facts in regard to outbreeding or cross-breeding, though this need not detain us as long, since it has been less misunderstood.
What outbreeding is, we already have seen. The values that are claimed for it are chiefly two. In the first place, it is a means by which to widen and enrich the hereditary endowment of character combinations, which later inbreeding may be called upon to isolate. 58 Needless to say, this is a matter of primary importance. What inbreeding will be able to concentrate, to stabilize, and to bring out must depend upon what outbreeding has put in.
In the second place, we must consider the phenomenon known as heterosis, or hybrid vigor. This is a phenomenon due to the pooling of the hereditary resources of the two parents. Any deficiencies in one parent may be offset and cancelled out by the excellencies in the other; and the good in one may be intensified by a like good in the other. Hybrid vigor is based on the unlike hereditary endowment brought together in a cross.59
Very early in the history of animal husbandry, breeders discovered that the first crosses of purebred farm animals commonly exhibited a superiority over either of their parents in strength, fecundity, and general constitutional vigor, and in size above the average of the parents but not always above that of both parents. Crossing in plants showed like results. 60 Because of the advantage of size in animals to be raised for meat, steers intended for the butcher are usually crossbred. It must be noted well, however, that this hybrid vigor does not by any means follow upon any and every cross. But the fact that it happens often is probably responsible for the superstition in favor of crossbreeding that has taken root and made a rank growth in the midst of our mongrel-admiring populace. Because crossing has been found advantageous to the producers of animals for meat, it has been assumed that science had issued a mandate for the indiscriminate mixing of human stocks. The truth is, scientific research has proved as damaging to this prejudice as it has to the taboo against inbreeding. Certain facts are now established. A few quotations should make these clear.
1. Hybrid vigor is a phenomenon only of crosses between inbred stocks. “In order to obtain it in any degree, it is essential that the two parents shall be unrelated, purebred. . . that the individuals used for the production of the first cross shall be as excellent as may be and that the good qualities of the two shall be, as far as possible, complementary.”
“Without the purebred, there cannot be the cross-bred of any worth.” “Since for the production of hybrid vigour the qualities of the two parties must be compensatory and complementary, it follows that all matings cannot be expected to yield it and that some may end in disaster.” This, I would advise you, is from Dr. Crew, who, among other things, was Director of the Animal Breeding Research Department of the University of Edinburgh.61 But Dr. Crew has more to say on this subject.
2. “Hybrid vigour,” when it does occur, “is the peculiar possession of the first cross.”
“Further crossing of these hybrids results in a manifest decrease of vigour in subsequent generations. The second crosses are not so vigorous as their hybrid parents.” 62 To recover hybrid vigor you have to begin again, with another cross of pure-breds. That is, “The first cross, deliberately bred for a definite commercial purpose, must not be used for further breeding.” It cannot pass on even its own size and vigor, let alone the particular excellencies concentrated and stabilized in its parents. For breeding it is worthless. The most successful animal breeders knew this even in Darwin’s time.63
3. “Hybrid vigour, as great as that which results from the crossing of different species or breeds, can follow the crossing of individuals from different families or strains of one and the same variety or breed. The breeder who keeps his family lines distinct can, by appropriate matings, secure all the hybrid vigour he seeks, without calling on the aid of other stocks.” 64 This would seem just about to reduce outbreeding to a function of inbreeding.
But outbreeding is subject to other dangers and limitations. I can take the space, however, to mention only two. One of these is reversion. Ludovici calls attention to the fact that in many different species, such as pigeons, ducks, horses, rabbits, cattle, pigs, and the like, outbreeding often leads to reversion, that “the crossing of cultivated stocks invariably produces throw-backs to a stage much earlier in the history of the race.” He bases this on well-known experiments with pigeons made by Darwin, who took individuals from two long-established varieties that usually bred true, and crossed them. All of the young showed the “characters of the wild rock pigeon, the common ancestor of all pigeons.” They had lost many of the distinctive characters of both their parents. Other experiments of Darwin and the later experiments of more recent investigators showed similar phenomena of reversion, that is, of degeneration, the loss of the specific differentiations by which all superiority is marked and maintained. It is evolution 65 in reverse.
The last danger implicit in outbreeding to which I shall call my reader’s attention here, is the anatomic and functional disharmonies likely to appear in hybrids. This is based upon the apparent fact that different parts of the bodies of different individuals vary considerably in size, and that hereditary factors determining the size of each bodily part are transmitted to the offspring independently. In consequence, the offspring may, for example, get a body with a heart or other organs too small to do the work forced upon them, or legs or arms that are either too long or too short for the trunk to which they are attached. The result is an organism that can only with difficulty function as a whole. At the least, health is impaired, efficiency diminished, and beauty, which is largely a matter of symmetry, plus vigor and ease of function, is lost.
As yet, we must allow, there is not a complete consensus among first-rank geneticists in regard to this matter. Castle, for instance, on the basis of an experiment that he made with rabbits, is much quoted for his inability to find “certain evidence of factors independently influencing the size of particular organs.” Other men, however, have an answer to Castle. And we are left with a not unimpressive array of some of the foremost authorities who posit the independent inheritance of bodily parts as established fact. I think particularly of Crew, Gates, Mjoen, Davenport, Lundborg, and Holmes.66 It is necessary to quote some of their pronouncements.
Gates says, “Physical disharmonies result [from crossing], such as the fitting of large teeth into small jaws, or serious malocclusion of the upper and lower jaw; of, as Davenport points out, large men with small internal organs or inadequate circulatory systems, or other disharmonies, which tax the adjustability of the organism or may lead to early death.” 67 (Dr. Gates’ reply to Dr. Castle may be found in the same work from which this passage is quoted, p. 329. The reply of Dr. Holmes will be found in his Human Genetics And Its Social Import, p. 351ff.)
Professor Charles B. Davenport concluded, on the basis of the study that he and Dr. Morris Steggerda made of race crossing in Jamaica, “That there is evidence of physical, mental and instinct disorders in hybrids.” 68
Dr. Holmes, who is characteristically cautious on this point, goes so far as to say,
“It seems probable, a priori, that, on account of the Mendelian segregation in the second and subsequent generations, the mingling of very distinct races would result in many inharmonious combinations. Each race may be assumed to have evolved in the course of time a fairly well adjusted combination of organs. If the members are tall or short, the proportions between the lengths of legs, arms, breadths of shoulders and sizes of other parts would be much the same in each race. Insofar as these traits are inherited as Mendelian units, one might find in the second generation combinations of long legs and short arms, or various other associations of parts which would detract from the general effectiveness of the whole. . . ‘Nothing is more striking,’ says Davenport, ‘than the regular dental arcades commonly seen in the skulls of inbred native races and the irregular dentitions of many children of the tremendously hybridized Americans.’ In Davenport’s opinion, ‘A hybridized people are a badly put together people.’ ” In conclusion, Holmes says, “The fact that Mendelian segregation is expressed somatically at all would seem to make it very probable that it would sometimes lead to unfavorable combinations of characteristics.” 69
I will add the word of one more authority, one of the greatest, whom we already have had occasion to quote so often. Dr. Crew says, “The fact that there are inherited differences in the size of the organs and parts is of profound significance when it is remembered that it involves the inevitable sequel that racial and other crossing can lead to serious disharmony. That orthodontia is now a well-developed and important branch of dentistry is an indication that such disharmony exists, and there is every reason to hold that this is the result of the mating of different true-breeding types. Disharmony between teeth and jaws, between size of body and size of some important organ or organs, disharmony among the various components of the endocrine chain, this can result from ill-advised interracial crossing. Such a disharmony is commonly displayed in difficult labour caused by disproportion in the sizes of the passenger and of the maternal passages. The Nordics have the broadest pelves, the Negroid races the smallest, and though in the same race the sizes of the foetal head and of the pelvic outlet are in harmony one with the other, in racial crosses this harmony is disturbed.” 70
Dr. Weston A. Price, in his 71 Nutrition And Physical Degeneration , dismisses race-crossing as a cause of malocclusion of the jaws and other abnormalities, and undertakes to explain them all by malnutrition. But though I, too, am convinced that such abnormalities may result from the prolonged eating of food that lacks the elements essential to growth and to the maintenance of health, I am nevertheless forced to believe that they are caused as well by unwise racial crosses.
Ludovici has brought to my attention a paragraph from Herbert Spencer, which, though written in 1874, may fittingly conclude what I have to say as to the dangers of indiscriminate cross-breeding. “An unmixed constitution,” he says “is one in which all the organs are exactly fitted to each other—are perfectly balanced: the system as a whole is in stable equilibrium. A mixed constitution, on the contrary, being made up of organs belonging to separate sets, cannot have them in exact fitness—cannot have them perfectly balanced; and a system in comparatively unstable equilibrium results . . . the offspring of two organisms not identical in constitution is a heterogeneous mixture of the two, and not a homogeneous mean between them.” 72
In a country like ours, whose matings are greatly influenced by the belief in indiscriminate crossing, the cult of the mongrel, marriage must result in a very large proportion of offspring with such a confused, divided, discordant genetic constitution as Spencer describes. One can but wonder whether this condition must not to a considerable extent account for the jumble of ill-assorted bodily parts so manifest about us, and also for many of the obscure elusive ailments of body and mind with which our population is plagued.
We have come now to the point where we need to evaluate inbreeding and outbreeding as means for elevating the life of man. Much of the data that we have gathered thus far has been drawn from experiments with plants and animals, but from the beginning our own primary concern has been with man, and, as we know, “the laws of inheritance. . . apply with equal force to all kinds of living things.” 73 Conclusions based on observation of other organisms must have considerable bearing on human life as well. If we now try to gather together and hold before our minds all the factual knowledge, scientific and historical, which I have passed in review in this chapter, what are we constrained to think in regard to inbreeding and outbreeding as agencies for advancing the life of man?
In the first place, we must recognize that both are necessary, that each has a place. But with a view both to the most robust health of the individual and to the attainment of that homogeneity of a people upon which, in the fiery test of a desperate crisis, its very life may ultimately depend, I believe that the rule should be: Inbreed, but occasionally freshen and broaden the base of your stock by a cross with a stock not too dissimilar.
This certainly seems to be the course to be followed with animals. Crew says, “The secret of successful breeding is to keep on improving the pure breeds by selection, and, in order to achieve certain results, to cross but only with discretion.” 74
Ludovici, whose work The Choice of a Mate is the most monumental and impressive presentation of this subject of which I know,75 has drawn a like conclusion for humans. He stresses the necessity to inbreed. His cry to us is: Marry your like.
This may not fly as much in the face of our tradition and usual practice as at first we may think. There is reason to believe that it is a law of Nature for like to choose like. In any case, there is impressive evidence that, to a considerable extent, like does choose like. Dr. Holmes says that “all studies of the way in which marriage selection works out in practice show that, contrary to a frequently expressed opinion, like tends to marry like. Pearson has shown that the tall tends to mate with the tall, the short with the short, the intellectual with the intellectual, and even the tuberculous with the tuberculous.” 76
Moreover, Ludovici does not stand alone in advocating, for the sake of the highest life both of individuals and of a people, that like should marry like. Many of the authorities seem not to have committed themselves publicly, but some of the foremost among them stand with him unequivocally, and in so doing they only follow the path indicated by the scientific findings to which all of them subscribe.
For instance, Professors East and Jones have said, “Inbreeding is the surest means of establishing families which as a whole are of high value to the community.” 77
Dr. Fritz Lenz has said, “Really healthy and efficient families are too valuable to be mixed with the sick and morbid; they ought, therefore, as far as possible, to intermarry among themselves, as ought also the less desirable.” 78
Professor Knight Dunlap has said, “It is now well known that inbreeding has in itself no evil effects . . . Instead of inbreeding being a racial evil, it may be a distinctly valuable means of progress. Strong strains are thereby conserved, and weaknesses in other strains are brought to the surface, so that they may be recognized and eliminated . . . For the welfare of the race therefore, like should be encouraged to mate with like, especially insofar as weaknesses are concerned, and inbreeding, insofar as there is no encouragement to incest, should have the ban against it removed . . . there is little reason, in America, in discouraging the marriage of first cousins.” 79 Dr. Popenoe has declared that “laws prohibiting cousin marriage . . . are not scientifically well based. They are not needed, and should be removed from the statute books.” 80
Dr. Crew has gone so far as to say, “Inbreeding is only disastrous if the ingredients of disaster are already in the stock. Inbreeding will purify a stock but the process may be most expensive. It would seem to be a fact, sufficiently secure for the foundation of sociological practice, that incest between individuals of undoubtedly sound stock . . . is a sound biological proposition.” But he stresses the necessity of “full and accurate knowledge of the hereditary constitutions of the individuals concerned,” before any given marriage is contracted or approved.81
I know full well that the general current of modern thought is against the judgment of these authorities. Nevertheless, after years of fairly thorough study of this problem, with careful weighing of pros and cons, I anticipate that gradually, as scientists gather the courage to apply their own findings to human life, and as men of all sorts increase in their knowledge of the means by which this can best be done, there must come to be a consensus in which scientists, philosophers, statesmen, and men of that ultimate wisdom about life, which we hardly know today, but whom we might call seers, shall unite in impressing upon the whole people the necessity of marrying their like.
That the advocacy of inbreeding among men raises problems of the utmost gravity, I should be among the first to allow. But as far as I can see, these are only the problems, in a sharpened form, with which any people has got to come to grips if it is not to surrender itself to degeneration and disaster. To my mind, the sooner we get at it the better. These problems, however, I wish to leave for discussion in my next, and final, section.
Inbreeding also bears upon the problem of race-crossing. But I wish to leave this to my chapter on race, which will follow this. For the present, I limit myself to the problems of human mating without this complication.
We are now ready to turn to our next section, which will be devoted to an investigation of the reasonable and practical measures imposed upon any people that would lift its life to the heights. I do not mean to imply that these alone would suffice. They would need to be supplemented with a firm and consistent environmental influence by which the people would be impressed, over a long period, with the same values. But they could not be omitted. There can be no superstructure without a sound biological foundation.
V. MEANS
The attainment of any great end in life imposes stern limitations. This is no more true for a man than it is for a nation. The ultimate test of any people is whether or not it has the health, and the excess and reserve and peculiar strength, necessary to achieve greatness. But the primary test that it must face is whether it is strong enough to survive. And even the minimal goal fixes narrow necessities. For its very existence, there are certain things that a people must do, and there are certain other things that it must not do. “The one searing human question which needs immediate answer,” cried Dr. Hooton on the first page of his 82 Apes, Men and Morons , “is . . . What is the matter with man? All the social doctors are fussing with the irrelevant secondary symptoms of an undiagnosed human degeneracy.” He does not say this with the whole world in mind. He says it with Western Europe in mind, and with the United States in mind. He says it having in mind the state of America as indicated in my last chapter—the staggering burden of physical, mental, and moral defectives; and the differential birth rate by which the country is fast becoming a mob, and rule passing into the hands of mediocrities. We are sick. And we are sick at a time when peoples of unspoiled vitality, who hate the White man, and have reason for hating him, are pressing upon us from every side. We have taught them our technics, and they have the numerical strength and are fast acquiring the skill, to drive what are really our own weapons harder and farther and deeper than we can. We are in this plight—that is, we are degenerate, in great part because we have neglected the biological foundations without which no people’s life can long be maintained.
Some people may smile at this, and exclaim, “Extremist! Alarmist! Are not we the richest, comfortablest, and strongest people on Earth—at least, we in the United States? Is not our infant death rate decreasing and our average span of life lengthening? Do not our planes start on time and all our push buttons work marvels? Where is our decadence?” But their very complacency is evidence of their decadence. Failure to sense danger in things that menace our life is unmistakable evidence of decadence, evidence that our racial force has ebbed, that if we go on as we are, we are fated to go under in that struggle for a place in the sun that is inescapable, unremitting, and relentless. And if we refuse to recognize such struggle as necessary, as an inextricable feature of life itself, and fancy in time to reform it, then we only reveal our decadence from yet another angle. We reveal that we lack the stamina to take life as it is. We bury our heads under our “ideals” and from this cover whisper pretty words. But in reality we are beaten. The stuff has gone out of us. And presently the whirlwind of life will pick us up and blow us away.
I have said that if a people is to climb the heights of greatness, if it is even to survive, then there are certain things that it must do, and there are certain things that it must not do. I should like to take up the negative first.
What I want to say from the negative side can be summed up in the single word selection. With any great end in view it is quite impossible to regard all one’s material as of equal worth. No one could get anything fit to be called a garden who tried to save every plant that came up. The weeds have to be cut down, and even of the plants in our rows we must thin out all but the best. Again, every organism sifts the elements that it takes in as food. Whatever will make for growth and health is distributed throughout the body to meet its need. But what cannot be assimilated is rejected and thrown out. And every organism that fails to excrete its waste products, dies! This is not a law of man, but a law of Nature. And biological sin is never forgiven, and no organism is excepted. It holds for every individual, for every species, for man as surely as for animal, and even for what we may think of as the body of a society, of a people. In the wild the waste products of every species, its deformed and defective ones, are soon struck down by Nature, with rough and bloody hand. But under the conditions of our modern civilization, natural selection tends to be frustrated. Those whom Nature would mercilessly strike down, we dutifully load upon our backs, by the million, and feed them, clothe them, house them, and doctor and nurse them, until they die. And we think highly of ourselves for so doing. We pronounce ourselves enlightened, humane, and civilized. But Nature looks at our performance with a different eye. The whole system of our society, and every organ and every cell in it, she sees clogged, overtaxed and poisoned by the long accumulating festering mass of our uneliminated human waste products. She does not say anything. She makes no plea. Apparently, it is nothing to her if it is not discovered in time what she is up to. But those who have observed her at her work, wherever there is any life, know what is in her heart. Any living thing that does not excrete its waste products dies. There is no argument here. The only question is whether we are to leave the selection to Nature or undertake it ourselves. It is my own conviction that if we undertake it ourselves, we can accomplish the same end, but more humanely, less wastefully, and with more certainty of reaching a humanly desirable goal.
In a country like the United States, any such proposal could count on plenty of opposition. There would be those who would deem its severity unnecessary, assuming that defective stock was susceptible of improvement. But there is no way known by which hereditarily defective stock can be improved by changes in environment, such as better food, or housing, or education.83 It can be improved only by getting rid of the defective genes, and that means preventing reproduction on the part of those who carry these genes in their germ-plasm. On the other hand, the very existence of our defective stock in our midst is a burden and a menace to all superior stock, steadily depressing its birthrate by the load it has to carry. And when superior stock begins to die out, as is happening today, we no more know how to replace the superior than we know how to lift the inferior. Ineluctably, one lives at the expense of the other. When seen in this light, there can be no doubt about our answer. Shall the whole be sacrificed to the part, or the higher to the lower? Any man of sound mind and clear insight knows that this must not be.
More emotional elements would leap to the fight against any serious effort to get rid of our defectives. The church people would be there, with their belief that all men, however broken, are reflections of God, and that therefore everything that can breathe is of infinite worth. The champions of democracy would be there, with their belief in equality and their fierce rejection of any effort to discriminate against some in favor of others. The humanitarians would be there, with their “Blessed are the merciful,” with their doctrine that the strong should bear the burdens of the weak, and that the highest morality and the most beautiful life is that of him who makes himself equal with the lowest and does unto others as he would have them do unto him. Viewed in this light, the individual man, regardless of who or what he is, becomes of such absolute importance that he believes that he should not be sacrificed for anybody or for anything. No matter how defective, or vicious, or misshapen or crazed, his vanity has become so swollen by our altruism and by all our talk of equality that, if he can think at all, he thinks that he has as much right to life as anyone else: and if he cannot carry his own load he expects the well-constituted to carry him, and to wait upon him, until he dies. Worst of all, it is precisely the “good man” among us, precisely the man who feels that he is “following the Master,” who is looked up to everywhere as an example and sets the pace for the adoring throng.
There is an answer to every one of the claims and arguments of all these humanitarians and protagonists of Christianity and democracy. And if there were space and if I were in a different mood, then I might undertake to give it, point for point. Some of the claims advanced may be sincere enough, but even when sincere they are evidence of decadence. And often they are not even sincere. Our vaunted belief in the infinite value of each individual life, for instance, vanishes into thin air when we develop a delight in driving our man-killing automobiles with their 120-mile-an-hour speedometers fastened to the dashboards of the cheapest of them, or support the strategy of massacring Germans by the cityful, or choose to drop atomic bombs on the unsuspecting men, women and children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, it has been laid against us that “we have grown so callous to such things that . . . the only taking of life to which Americans object is that which is done by judicial process.” 84
But my evaluation of all these claims and arguments compels me to give them short shrift. In any elevated perspective upon the situation that we are considering, a man of balanced mind can see clearly that there is one thing that stands out above all else; our human wreckage must go. It is an Either-Or. Either our wreckage goes, or quality of life among us goes, and then we ourselves go, as our society decays towards its inevitable death. In the interest of life, some must be sacrificed. An easy-going indulgence toward all is stupidity or weakness. The absolute necessity of sacrifice exists in any society and in any age. In the light of this stark fact, we perceive that all those who would resist firm measures at this point, whether they know it or not, and whether or not they so intend, are the enemies of life. The cry of equality, as we have seen before this, is but a decoy by which to ensnare all strong, noble, masterful men to their ruin and thus to make the world a happy hunting ground for the mediocre. And any morality, no matter what its religious sanction, that would exalt pity for the botched, and preach the duty and the beauty of loving them, of serving them, of self-effacement before them, in such a way as to paralyze the hand that would cut this gangrene from the body of society, is in actuality an inversion of all morality. For any system of values that consistently weakens, or poisons, or frustrates life, by that single token is seen to be in fact the supreme immorality. To betray ascending life, the purpose of which is ever to surpass itself, ever to give birth to that which is beyond itself, that is the supreme crime—worse than embezzlement, worse then treason, worse than adultery or rape, worse than murder. This is what I think of any religion, or morality, or political doctrine that would sacrifice the whole to the part, and betray the higher to the lower.
Something must be done. But I don’t get much encouragement when I turn to the eugenists themselves. Professor Hankins saw the country so in the grip of ingrained “humanitarian sentiment, uplift complexes, and the religion of democracy,” along with a belief in the possibilities of social reform, that he was in despair over accomplishing anything.85 The American Eugenics Society, until it was virtually smothered out of existence by the rising tide of equalitarianism, which in the last forty years has gradually engulfed the entire country, had its recommendations, but what it called for was—on the basis of the eugenists’ own findings—not enough. In general, though they knew what must be done, they seemed not to dare say it. And today, except for a few men like Dr. Elmer Pendell,86 the voice of eugenics has been stilled. There must be many men who in their hearts know what must be done, but they keep very silent. Perhaps they shrink from the infamy under which they would be buried if they blurted out the truth. Or perhaps they have become so imbued with the caution and professional detachment that are characteristic of science, that they hesitate to commit themselves until they can see their way clear to the end of any course that they would counsel. They fear to make mistakes. But in a thing like this no one can beforehand see his way clear to the end. And mistakes are bound to be made. But though wisdom perceives the necessity of the utmost intelligence and care, it perceives also that no mistake that could be made would be as serious as the mistake that we now make all the time merely by doing nothing, which if continued much longer must prove fatal. Among the few outstanding scientists in whom I have felt something like a due sense of urgency and responsibility are Dr. William Shockley, Dr. Crew, and Dr. Alexis Carrel. Dr. Shockley, in a letter recently published in Scientific American (January, 1971), said, “If what I fear is true, our society is being profoundly irresponsible. Our nobly intended welfare programs may be encouraging . . . retrogressive evolution through disproportionate reproduction of the genetically disadvantaged. . . The consequences may be extremes of racism and agony for both Blacks and Whites.” Dr. Crew pointed out that while men argue over whether or not feeble-mindedness is inherited, or how it is inherited, the feeble-minded reproduce their kind. “Today,” he declared, “most attention must be given to the condition and not to the cause, for the matter is urgent.” 87 “The reproduction of all stocks exhibiting characteristics admittedly undesirable and known to be inherited should be prevented.” 88 But Dr. Carrel was the boldest of the lot. He was unequivocal that “the propagation of the insane and the feeble-minded . . . must be prevented.” But he went on to place a question mark against the very existence of “the immense number of defectives and criminals.”
“Why do we preserve these useless and harmful beings?” he asked. “The abnormal prevent the development of the normal. This fact must be squarely faced.” He recognized that “we are not capable of judging men.” And indeed moral judgment is not involved. It is simply a matter of the community’s right to “be protected against troublesome and dangerous elements.” “Modern society should not hesitate to organize itself with reference to the normal individual.” He questioned the wisdom of prisons, on more grounds than one. For certain of the most vicious offenders, he advised “small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases.” 89
It is very good to have one of the most distinguished scientists of our time speak out thus plainly and bluntly. Though anyone who knows about American life today is forced to doubt whether any program calculated to deal adequately with the problem of our botched and broken humanity can hope to receive more than the merest passing consideration. Nevertheless, whether it be with the United States in mind or some other perhaps sounder and wiser people, of our own day or of the future, I believe that some of us, at least, ought to come squarely to grips with the sort of steps that any people, of any age, must take, for its very life’s sake, to purge itself of its waste products. Let us therefore pass in review the most important of the various measures that have been advocated.
1. One of the instruments of which we must most certainly avail ourselves, is sterilization. Its cost to society would be as much less than that of segregation in institutions as its humanity to its victims would be greater. It is necessary to correct false impressions as to what sterilization is. It “does not call for unsexing . . . or desexing an individual; it is not castration; it is not emasculation; it is not mutilation; it does not interfere with sex functions in any way, except in the ability to reproduce one’s kind.” Sterilization in the male is a trifling operation, involving only the severance of the seminal ducts; and while in the female it is a major operation, requiring the cutting of the oviducts, five thousand cases “showed only three deaths and these due to other causes.” 90
A sterilization law has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in a decision in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes remarked that if at times “the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives, it would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices.” And he said in conclusion, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” In California, “most of the feeble-minded and a considerable proportion of the insane who have been committed to institutions are sterilized before they are released. The great majority of the persons sterilized either welcome the operation or make no objection to having it performed.” 91 “The percentage of sexual delinquency attributable to sterilization is relatively very small, about one in a thousand.” “Many of [those sterilized] marry, and . . . such marriages have turned out as successfully as could reasonably be expected. Marriage acts as a stabilizing influence, and apparently contributes to the welfare of both parties.” 92 Sterilization is much less cruel than segregating the sexes in institutions—and vastly less expensive to society.
There would, of course, be special Eugenics Courts, guided by competent medical and psychiatric counsel, and every effort should be made to see that both the judges and the doctors were men of high character, above subservience to any clique, and free of economic dependence on anyone. Professor Dunlap thought the likelihood of ethical lapses at this point to be so great that sterilization “must be emphatically rejected”—at least, under present conditions. And yet I am satisfied that we dare not reject it. Better sterilization, with the risks and even the consequences of occasional injustice, than the spreading degeneration that seems to be the inescapable alternative.
At this point, I must set down the testimony put on record by Dr. Lothrop Stoddard in 1940, after a day spent in attendance upon a session of the High Eugenics Court of Germany. The cases under review came under Germany’s Sterilization Law. What Stoddard saw and heard indicates how successfully a great modern nation of the West can administer a thoroughgoing and resolute effort to purge and regenerate its breeding stock. The current denunciation of the Nazi regime in Germany affords no valid ground on which to ignore the obvious wisdom of its eugenic policy.
Stoddard reported that the entire day was spent on four cases. He was impressed by “the meticulous care with which these cases had already been considered by the lower tribunals. The dossier of each case was voluminous, containing a complete life-history of the subject, reports of specialists and clinics, and also exhaustive researches into the subject’s family history. In reaching its decision, the High Court not only consulted the records of the case but also personally examined the living subjects themselves.”
All four cases had been recommended for sterilization, but in all four the Court concluded that sterilization had not been proven mandatory,” and they were sent back “for further investigation.”
Stoddard remarked in conclusion that all the cases he observed that day were “conducted in the same painstaking, methodical fashion.” “I came away,” he said, “convinced that the law was being administered with strict regard for its provisions and that, if anything, judgments were almost too conservative. On the evidence of that one visit, at least, the Sterilization Law is weeding out the worst strains in the German stock in a scientific and truly humanitarian way.” 93
It is, however, a big question who should be sterilized. The most that is usually advocated is those whose mental defect, whether feeble-mindedness or insanity, is known to be hereditary. Dr. Crew says “confirmed criminals, imbeciles, and rapists.” 94 The German Law to Prevent Transmission of Hereditary Disease of July, 1933, provided for the sterilization of people with “congenital feeble-mindedness, certain mental diseases such as schizophrenia and manic depression, hereditary epilepsy, blindness, deaf-mutism, and severe malformations.” 95 Dr. Holmes submits carefully stated reasons for believing that a given hereditary defect might be reduced by at least 17 percent in a single generation, with a reduced rate of elimination subsequently. But he is dubious “whether measures coming under the head of negative eugenics will be sufficient to prevent the race from being perpetuated by people of . . . subnormal quality. Certainly the segregation or sterilization of the small percentage of persons who are defective enough to warrant official commitment cannot be expected to contribute much toward this end.” 96 The trouble is that the sum total of those whom there is any thought of sterilizing constitutes only “a small fraction of the hereditary defectives who in the interest of the race should not procreate their kind.” 97 For one thing, there is the large number of morons and borderline cases, whom Dr. Holmes pronounces “the most serious problem.” But the supremely difficult aspect of the situation is the fact that many people are “carriers” of recessive hereditary defects that they themselves do not display, and the further fact that such carriers are probably more numerous than the manifest defectives. What should be done with these people? There is usually no ground on which to commit them for sterilization, and yet if two of them mate, any offspring they have are bound to be defective. This fact has often caused eugenists to despair of accomplishing anything by sterilization.
But the situation is hopeless only to those who lack the firmness of mind both to apply proven purgative measures and to deal with their consequences. Dr. Crew would “encourage celibacy and chastity on the part of all the near relatives of a feeble-minded person,” 98 but, however desirable this might be, it seems to me folly to hope for any such self-restraint on the part of those genetically near the moron. The usual prescription is that the feeble-minded be prohibited from marrying the feeble-minded, and possible carriers from marrying into families where there is any history of feeble-mindedness.99 But if they are above a condition requiring segregation or sterilization, whom are they to marry? What does this mean but that the feeble-minded and the carriers of feeble-mindedness should be encouraged to marry those whose genetic record is clear? But on the geneticists’ own findings is not this precisely what they should not do? What would be the inevitable result but that the contamination would be spread into sound stocks, and hidden there, and the difficulty of locating and eradicating it actually increased? Have not all the multitudinous experiments with inbreeding proved beyond question that if we want really to uncover all the hidden defectiveness lurking in our midst, so that we can get at it to deal with it, all that we must do is to follow a course exactly opposite to that usually recommended? By encouraging, or even requiring, that the feeble-minded (if allowed to marry at all), and the morons, and the possible carriers of defects, shall marry others in a state like unto their own, any people could without question cleanse its stock effectively and in a comparatively short time. The geneticists all know this. Why then do they not urge it? So far as I can ascertain, for only one reason. Such a procedure would produce a number of defectives that would overwhelm us, unless in one way or another we got rid of them; and under existing conditions they believe it would be utterly impossible to obtain legal authorization to get rid of them effectively. Because of the domination of false and sentimental church and democratic values, doubtless they are right. But all peoples are not so weakened and blinded by such values as we are. There have been, there may be now, in any case there may be in the future, people capable of applying to themselves such a cathartic. And the first people to do this will place its feet on the way that leads to soundness and greatness.
Further objection to sterilization has been made on the ground that we should run the risk of depriving society of the offspring of a man like Steinmetz. It is sufficient answer to this to point out (1) that Steinmetz was hardly of the order of man to be chosen for sterilization; (2) that the amount of genius hidden in the stock of the grossly deformed, the feeble-minded, or the hereditarily insane is negligible; and (3) that the loss to society to be sustained by the elimination of our whole stock of defectives would be infinitesimal as compared with the loss inflicted upon society now by having our most gifted stocks overburdened, and their birth rate curtailed, by their support of our almost completely worthless human waste products.
The foregoing pages will have served to introduce the general idea of sterilization, and to present the objections and the difficulties that have stood in the way of its acceptance.
But only a few months ago (in the summer of 1971), I came upon a proposal that seems to me so largely to by-pass or to cut through the obstacles that have loomed most formidably in people’s minds or in the way of actually applying sterilization, that it impresses me as being of really vast importance, if ever we are to achieve that eugenic hygiene that has become essential to our survival.
But before presenting the proposal itself, I must submit a few ideas that seem to me essential to a sympathetic approach to it.
There is no such thing as an inborn or inalienable right. Certainly, merely being alive gives no man or woman any right to have a child. Children should come by permission of the community of which they will become a part; and permission should be given, or granted within specified limits, or altogether withheld, according to whether or not suitable physical and mental tests and examinations, and the individual and family records of the persons in question, satisfy competent authorities that they are qualified to have a child that will be a contribution to the genetic improvement of the nation, or at the very least, not be a drag upon it. Thus, having children would become a privilege, and an outstanding mark not only of a married couple’s social status but of society’s confidence that they could be trusted with one of the greatest of social responsibilities—the responsibility of taking a part in bringing a new generation into the world and adequately preparing it for life. And thus there would tend to be emulation among the best family stocks for the honor of being allowed an exceptionally large family.
From these preliminary remarks, let us now turn to the proposal itself. It originated with Professor Elmer Pendell of Jacksonville State College in Alabama, and is entitled “A Eugenic Marriage Law.” He presented a paper on the subject at the Fifth International Conference on Planned Parenthood in Tokyo in October, 1955. In my judgment, the elaboration of this proposal is a monument to Dr. Pendell’s bold originality, practical ingenuity, insight into human nature, and, not least, his profound concern over the dire genetic plight in which our people now find themselves. A copy of his proposed marriage law may be found on pages 87 to 92 of his The Next Civilization. (This book was originally published in 1960 by the Royal Publishing Company of Dallas, Texas. It is now out of print, but a copy of it may be obtainable from University Microfilms, 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106. Also, Dr. Pendell is now preparing a new edition.)
The law would provide for officers, employed by the community or the state on a salary basis, to collect information, to grant licenses, and to keep records.
In general, under the proposed law, almost any couple free of venereal disease or other disease of a serious nature, would be permitted to marry, but—in case of those who fell in certain specified categories a license would be withheld until they had submitted to sterilization. These categories, roughly, would be (1) those who were unable to earn a living; (2) those of very low IQ or less than four years of satisfactory schooling; and (3) those with a defect, disease, addiction, or evidence of degraded character that would be likely to result in offspring of low quality. As can easily be understood, the desire for marriage in such cases would provide society with a very valuable means, hitherto not so readily available, of inducing persons of gross physical and mental defects to accept sterilization. This provision seems to hold out the possibility of a society’s purging itself of a vast amount of defectiveness within a relatively short time, and at that, on a largely voluntary basis.
Moreover, on each marriage license permitting a couple to have children, it would be specified how many children their health and general genetic constitution entitled them to have. For example, Article 14 states that “couples complying with other legal requirements are to be authorized for reproduction according to the following scale,” in which the number of children allowed begins at one, for a couple whose completed school work averages at least as high as fourth grade (with corresponding IQ)—one child per completed marriage is so low as to ensure that, on the average, the couple’s stock will not be perpetuated; almost four children per completed marriage are necessary to ensure perpetuation. The scale rises incrementally to four children, for a couple who have stood in the top two-fifths of their class in high school or in college (with corresponding IQ). It increases to “no limit,” for a couple who have stood in the top fifth of their class in high school or in college (again, with corresponding IQ). It is provided in the proposed law, too, that any couple who overstep the limit of children permitted them will be required to submit to sterilization that will make further pregnancies impossible.
Before turning to my next prophylactic measure, I must take a moment to bring my reader’s attention to a proposal advanced in April, 1971, by Professor William Shockley of Stanford University, a Nobel Prize laureate, which I consider very practical and promising. “To reduce dysgenic agonies both for the genetically disadvantaged and the overburdened taxpayer” he would encourage “voluntary sterilization. . . by bonuses weighted for genetic disadvantages, perhaps $1,000 for each point below 100 IQ.” This would sweeten the pill of sterilization, and the cost to society, even at the most, would be small compared to that of caring for patients for years in institutions, or paying for the consequences of leaving them free to spread the genes of their defectiveness throughout the entire nation.
2. Another measure commonly advocated as a means of racial hygiene is birth control. Having already, in my chapter on Pacifism, discussed the disturbing evidence of definitely injurious effects on the individuals who make habitual use of contraception, I will confine myself here to the objections that bear more immediately on our problem. These all support the conclusion that the cure is worse than the disease.
a. Wherever birth control has gone, the birth rate has fallen. In some Western countries more people are dying than are being born. The population is actually on the decline. But this, as Dr. Carrel remarked in a letter to the American Mercury years ago, is a symptom of race suicide. It must never be forgotten that the primary test that every people must face is whether it is strong enough to survive. Its fate may well be decided by war, and the issue of a war may hinge simply on how many men it can mass on its side of the struggle. In this light, birth control is seen to be the knife by which civilized White man is cutting his own throat. The fact stressed by Sir Arthur Keith should be burned into the consciousness of all our youth: “The process of evolution permits no balking of the reproductive instincts; the infertile groups are rigorously eliminated, and the fertile perpetuated.” 100
b. Birth control is not only reducing populations quantitatively to the danger point, but it has disturbed adversely the balance that must obtain between the better and the worse portions of the population. It is conceded that birth control has not, to any eugenically satisfactory degree, taken root among those of inferior constitution, whose fecundity it is so highly important to limit, but on the contrary has found its greatest vogue among those of proven capacity, where it has cut down the families of six, eight, or ten that the better classes commonly had up until a hundred years ago, to families of one or two—not enough even to perpetuate their stock. In other words, it is recognized by those who know the facts that birth control is directly responsible for the differential birth rate that, in my last chapter, we found to be so direly menacing.101 Furthermore, since effective use of birth control requires a degree of intelligence and self-control usually lacking in the most defective classes, it stands to reason that it will never become an important factor in reducing the least desirable part of our population.
c. But birth control has not only, in actual application, been a very large factor in debasing the genetic quality of Western peoples by decimating the ranks of the superior, from whom alone leadership can come in the necessary quantity, but it tends to reduce quality wherever it goes. Selecting one’s offspring by means of birth control, Ludovici has pointed out, 102 is like hoeing one’s garden in the dark. You cannot see whether you are cutting down the weeds or the flowers. It would be wiser to make our selection after our children are born, as did the ancient Greeks, and the old Norse as well,103 eliminating those we know to be unfit by what we can see with our eyes.
In much the same vein, Dr. K. A. Wieth-Knudsen, in his valuable book Understanding Women 104 , points out another dysgenic aspect of birth control, the seriousness of which has otherwise, so far as I am aware, never been duly stressed. He reminds us that apparently Nature’s efforts to ensure anything like quality in any of her living creatures is limited to a constant prodigality in her production of life. Out of the ensuing struggle of one with another for room to develop, in an environment where opportunities are more or less limited, comes all that we call biological and racial progress. Among all healthy peoples, Nature usually causes the sex instinct to produce twice as many children as are needed merely to maintain the population. It would seem that she brings into the world an excess of human beings in order thereby to gain the opportunity to make a selection, to pick out her lucky strokes from her botches and culls, electing the former to survive and leaving the latter to fall by the wayside. But birth control tends to frustrate all this. What human selection is made in the act of contraception itself is, in the first place, as we have seen, made blindly, as it were in the dark, and therefore it is fully as likely to prevent the birth of the best as it is to prevent the birth of the worst. Moreover, this human curtailment of Nature’s prodigality so limits the population that the struggle for existence is greatly eased. This means, looking at the matter from another angle, that the conditions of life are improved to such an extent that almost the whole offspring, including all deficient types, grow to maturity. Most people would fancy this a highly desirable state of affairs. But it has been precisely this condition (among animals at least), and not only in periods when competition was too great or the external conditions too difficult, that has proved the precursor of extinction. “The reason probably was,” says Dr. Wieth-Knudsen, “that the whole race was thereby weakened for want of sufficient selection (which in Nature usually means a high birth-rate and a high mortality), so that at the next turning in the line of evolution it collapsed at the first assault of more difficult conditions, which are bound to come, in the case of both men and animals.” He then asks, “May not the meaning of this be that the Frenchman Bertillot (the elder) was right in saying: Pour avoir la qualite il faut avoir la quantite? [In order to have quality it is necessary to have quantity.] But if this be the case, the two children system will quickly ruin the race, not only quantitatively but also qualitatively.” 105
3. The next, and last, measure that we must consider under negative eugenics is euthanasia—that is, elimination by some form of painless death, decreed in the interest of social welfare. The need for this instrument arises from the fact that there is, in the aggregate, a considerable body of human life that is so hopelessly deformed or deficient that it can never come to anything, or that is so incorrigibly vicious as constantly to menace other people with grave injury. And such life imposes upon society a burden, the expense of which tends directly to discourage reproduction in our best stocks.106 “The surest, the simplest, the kindest, and most humane means for preventing reproduction” among such as we have just mentioned and whom we deem unworthy of the high privilege of reproducing their kind, “is a gentle, painless death . . . administered not as a punishment, but as an expression of enlightened pity for the victims . . . and as a duty toward the community and toward our own offspring.” 107
These are the words of Dr. W. D. McKim, so far as I know the first man in modern times to undertake a serious case for euthanasia. Dr. Holmes lists his book Heredity and Human Progress108 109 in one of his bibliographies and pronounces its proposal “ably defended.”
Dr. McKim suggested for elimination “all idiots . . . and of imbeciles by far the greater number, and especially those who, while intelligent, gave indication of moral imbecility. . . the great majority of epileptics. Respecting habitual drunkards . . . the essential question being the degree to which the man might be dangerous to society. . . In the case of criminals, we should need to exercise much discrimination.” 110 One thinks at once, too, of the botched infant life, which can never be anything but a misery to itself and a useless burden to its parents. Our sentimentality about “life” has run to such lengths that we now feel that we must exhaust every resource “to preserve and grow to adolescence every runt that comes out of a woman’s womb.” 111 Some of us may remember the case of five-weeks-old Helaine Colan of Chicago, “suffering from a rare disease which seemed to offer only the single choice between total blindness and death,” who held center stage for the whole nation while medical science fairly turned itself inside out in an effort to save her life. But, despite the long editorial in the New York Times eulogizing this effort and acclaiming “the right to live which the tiniest, blindest organism has,” 112 we must turn thumbs down, pronounce both the effort and the editorial mere maudlin sentimentality, and wish that there were in the country a little more of the discrimination and the iron of the old Greeks, whose feeling for life was expressed in Aristotle’s judgment that “nothing imperfect or maimed [should] be allowed to grow up.”
Dr. McKim recognized that “an idea so radical and so replete with practical difficulties cannot at first be shaped into any great degree of definiteness. Indeed, no one individual is competent; but I believe that the task is not too grave for the aggregate wisdom of society” (op. cit., p. 189). At the end of the section of his book given over to meeting probable opposition, he makes an observation that will bear considerable reflection. “There is an objection which, so far at least as our own republic is concerned, seems to me the strongest of all. The adoption of this plan would throw a great increase of power into the hands of those who represent the State, and there would be the great risk that the men charged with the administration of it, however intelligent and honorable at first, might become the corrupt tool of some political ring. . . The objection is a very grave one, but its force is a dishonor to our people rather than an intrinsic defect in the plan. If we, as a nation, approve a measure but dare not entrust its administration to the officials whom we select to execute our will, then are we, indeed, far gone on the downward path of degeneracy” (op. cit., pp. 252-3).
It may be worthwhile to remind my readers that this idea received the endorsement of a scientist so distinguished as Dr. Alexis Carrel. It would seem, too, that Dr. S. J. Holmes, in his heart of hearts, would have liked to endorse the proposal, but was forced to recognize that “there is not the slightest chance of its being adopted,” and so—passed it by.113 Some of you who know me may find yourselves astounded that I, with all my natural instinct toward gentleness, could ever bring myself to support a proposition such as this. And I must admit that it would be exceedingly difficult for me to take any practical part in such a program. On the other hand, when I have set an end before myself, I never have been a man to falter at the necessary means for reaching it. And in all my thought about the immense number of our utterly useless hereditary defectives, which every competent authority recognizes to be a menace to our very existence, I am forever brought back to the terrible but inescapable biological fact that any organism that fails to excrete its waste products dies. To this, there is only one answer. Certainly, it is not a matter with which any people of sound instinct and in full possession of its wits will ever dare to dillydally. If there is any other method as effective as euthanasia and at once more humane and less repugnant, I certainly should be very open to it. Doubtless, there are many plausible objections that can be raised against a proposal so radical, and doubtless many practical difficulties would arise in any attempt to put it into operation. But Dr. McKim, who recognized all this, leaves us with the final reminder “that, as Dr. Johnson observed, ‘so many objections might be made to everything, that nothing could overcome them but the necessity of doing something,’ and that objections often disappear marvelously when a plan has been set in motion. In law, as in morals, that ‘can be done which ought to be done’ ” (op. cit., p. 253). He might have added, That can be done which must be done—lest we die. And if we should elect rather to die than to arouse ourselves to decree and to carry out the purging necessary to life and to health, then indeed we ought to die, and the world would be well rid of us, since such a decision would prove us a craven people, fit only for the dunghill.
But negative eugenics can never by itself be enough. Getting rid of our worst stocks will not of itself increase the numbers of those from whom alone leadership comes, nor will it improve the general quality and solid strength in that large body of the population upon which the leaders must depend for support. It is absolutely essential, therefore, as Dr. Carrel reiterates, that we “turn our attention toward promoting the optimum growth of the fit. By making the strong still stronger, we could effectively help the weak. For the herd always profits by the ideas and inventions of the elite.” 114 Dr. John M. Radzinski declared that “the sum total of significant creativity and leadership for all mankind, at least in recorded times, has been the work of probably less than 100,000 persons among the many billions who have made their brief and undistinguished sojourn on this Earth.” (See “The American Melting Pot: Its Meaning to Us” in The American Journal of Psychiatry, April, 1959, Vol. 115, No. 10, p. 8.) But for them, the whole human race might still be at the level of the cave man. There is absolutely no substitute for an improvement in the quality of the upper strata of our population, and an increase in their birth rate. We must now, therefore, turn to the consideration of positive eugenics, and with this I shall bring our present study to a head and to a conclusion.
Positive eugenics, at least for the present, is not at all, as I had better assure my readers at the outset, a matter of deliberate breeding for any particular quality or qualities, or for any particular kind of man or woman. One is permitted to believe that the time for this may come. In fact, as long ago as 1937, Dr. Hooton declared that something like a “manual on the technique of breeding” for genius “is by no means impossible for the future.” 115 And at about the same time (1939), a panel of scientists very distinguished in the field of genetics, in what is known as “The Geneticists’ Manifesto,” announced that as far as “purely genetic considerations are concerned,” it was already “physically possible within a comparatively small number of generations” (say, a century or two) to “raise the level of the average of the population nearly to that of the highest now existing in isolated individuals,” as respects such matters as “physical well-being, intelligence and temperamental qualities.” 116 And the ever-existing and ever-beckoning possibility of such a miraculous transformation of human life and of all its present problems, must constantly be held before our eyes, it seems to me, as a beacon of hope and as our guiding pole star.
But Dr. Hooton, at least, was emphatic that until, for a considerable period, we have given fully as much attention to the genetic improvement of man as we now give to that of animals, our proposals must be more moderate. Just as it is the purpose of negative eugenics to cleanse our reproductive stock of such genes as prevent the appearance of good qualities of every sort, so it is the primary purpose of positive eugenics to encourage the growth, and to ensure the proportional dominance in the population, of good sound stock of every sort, out of which will come not only many kinds of genius but also the sound substantial mediocrity that is every people’s backbone. Anyone interested in the general recommendations to this end can find them readily in a number of books to which I have made frequent reference. In the rest of this chapter, I should like to dwell upon such measures or principles that may promise, especially, to increase the proportion of our already superior stock and still further to improve its quality.
1. Marry your like. I have already stressed this in my chapter “Woman and Marriage,” but it is important enough to deserve reiteration here. Indeed, it would be wise to elevate it into a general rule as to mating for the entire population. But it would be most natural to, and most proper for, our best-endowed stock, those of superior ancestry, beauty, health, character and mind. Such as they know not the mongrel’s instinct to seek in his mate complement and correction for his own defects, but know rather wherein they are superior to the mass, and are proud of it, and in their mates seek confirmation and concentration of the very qualities by which they feel themselves to be distinguished.
To this end, it would be well to extend the likeness to every point in regard to which likeness is possible—color of eyes and hair, proportional height (the woman should be somewhat shorter), facial type and bodily build, race, ancestry (including similarities of occupation and achievement), social status, religion, intellect, education, temperament, energy, interests, friends, and so on. It would promise well for the future if a “brother and sister likeness” were to be remarked in a couple about to be married, as once happened in the case of a couple of my acquaintance. Where the stock is surely known to be completely sound on both sides, it would usually be good to marry one’s cousin, though marrying a person who is markedly one’s like may come genetically pretty close to this. In either case, however, since today we must deal with the mishmash resulting from much mixed marrying, it would always be wise to see whether the likeness to oneself that one observes in one’s proposed mate is corroborated by what one sees in his or her brothers and sisters, father and mother, and grandparents and other relatives.
It may be questioned whether one can learn to love, as it were, “on order.” But if, through one’s youth, one has gradually been impressed with a conception of the kind of person that one should marry, those who do not come within the purview of this conception are simply not looked at. There would, of course, be times when instinct bolted, but as a rule it would stay in harness if it had been well trained during its formative period. Dr. Carrel pointed out that, despite the common view that love is hopelessly erratic, “many young men fall in love with rich girls, and vice versa.” 117 If desire for a girl with money can make a man fall in love with one who has it, then a desire for a girl like oneself will go far toward ensuring that when he finds her he will love her. Some years ago, a young friend of mine fully confirmed my conviction.
It would, of course, be ground for heartiest congratulation for a man to find a woman who was almost completely the counterpart of himself. Often, however, he would have to accept the best approximation available. Also, though the highest possible degree of mutual likeness is always important, as promising stability and happiness in the prospective marriage, it is less important in marriages from which no issue is expected, where convenience or companionship are more to be considered than the possibility of children.
2. The remainder of my proposals narrow down to various means for increasing the birth rate from superior stock of all sorts. It should be borne in mind that negative eugenics alone would make, indirectly, a very great contribution to this end. As we have seen, the cost of the maintenance and care of the defective classes runs into scores of billions of dollars each year, and this burden falls very largely on the shoulders of the best-endowed stock that we have. If this burden were lifted, or even greatly lightened, there is good reason to believe that the birth rate among the more gifted strata of the population would automatically rise. But the matter goes deeper than this. Mere removal of an obstacle is not enough, especially if there is no push behind the obstacle. It is absolutely undeniable that “family survival . . . depends most upon the wish and the will of individuals,” and “that we need to regard the possession of an ardent desire for offspring and the equally ardent wish to perpetuate one’s own strain as an essential trait in the human species . . . a trait which is essential to race survival.” 118 When that begins to go, a people itself has begun to go. It has begun to die at the heart. If somehow the old instinct and strength by which it once hewed out a place for itself, cannot be revived, so that once again the best people have the largest families, then the day will come when a people of unspoiled vigor will press upon it until it breaks, and the place that knew, it will know it no more. I do not say that it can be done. When everything is taken into account, the odds against it seem hopeless. But that is the task—greatly to increase the birth rate in the best stocks. What might help to this end? I can give here only the veriest sketch of some of the most important proposals.
a. It is necessary to foster feeling for family and for family pride, and to make it a matter of family pride to have many children. Ten or twelve is by no means too many. And better, in order to have the family large, that some of the children have to work for the advantages they get, than that the number should be curtailed. And they, in their turn, should be brought up to understand the vital necessity to the nation to which they belong, of having a large and steady stream of offspring from the best family stocks. They should grow up believing that they can be relieved of this duty to contribute offspring to society only if they have a contribution to make that is of even greater value than children and which makes the normal contribution of children impossible.119 Their fathers and mothers should so pass on to them the family history that they have grounds on which to base an estimate of their own genetic constitution, and so be the better prepared to select a mate bearing similar potentialities. They should learn to think of their marriages as marriages between families. And marriages between families with comparable records of achievement in a given field are advisable and valuable not only for the capacity they tend to concentrate and to stabilize in the resulting offspring, but also in order to keep intact the body of tradition that comes down in such families, as to how best to do things, whether it be in regard to teaching, painting, writing, ruling, managing a household and rearing children, or in regard to farming, weaving, house-building, cabinet-making, or running a business. Partly through their years of close association, partly by deliberate instruction, parents should teach their children the general importance of marrying their like; advise them of the established correlation between intelligence and character,120 impress upon them, in all their consideration of a mate, to make of full health an absolute requirement, to place a premium on beauty as a sign of health and fitness for procreation, and to find in poise an indication of that sound integrative function which is the foundation of sound mental life. 121 Parents should teach their children not to believe in “spiritual” substitutes or compensations for obvious bodily defects. They should caution them against giving any promise to marry before they have had the opportunity to observe their prospective mate in a modern bathing suit. And they should instruct them in all the lore of outward and visible “marks” of desirability, in which all desirability, mental and spiritual as well as physical, ultimately manifests itself. (The outstanding book on this subject is Ludovici’s The Choice Of A Mate, London, 1935.) With a background of some such training as this (on the genetic side, which is what we are now examining), a young man or woman should be able to approach marriage with the knowledge that they have thereby met one of the solid requirements, not only for finding fulfillment for themselves, but for maintaining their family tradition and for making to the breeding stock of their race the richest contribution of which they are capable.
b. But to have large families it is necessary that young people marry early. How vitally urgent it is, at once for the good of the woman, her children, and of society, that women marry much earlier than on the average they do now, I have already undertaken to show in a previous chapter. Here, I wish to deal with the problem presented in the fact that many young men do not feel themselves well enough established in their lifework to take on the support of a family, until they are well along in their thirties. To make it easier for such men to add perhaps ten years to the length of their married lives, it has been advocated that, where parents are in a position to do so, they offer to subsidize their sons during the years while they are getting on their feet financially. This help should be certain, regular, and as long as needed. While care should be exercised that it did not lead to idleness, it should be given ungrudgingly and unconditionally, the young people being left free to spend the money as they saw fit. It should be given less as any kindness to one’s children than as a duty to society. Something on this order seems to have been very generally in operation in France for a long time. 122
Other proposals have been made to a like end. Dr. William E. McDougall, in his Is America Safe For Democracy? suggested that “every family that has any good claim to belong to what might be called ‘the selected classes’ should know that the addition of each child should automatically bring with it an increase of income sufficient to meet the expenses normally incurred in the bringing up of that child. He advised that this increase be “not less than one-tenth of the earned income and might well be rather more.” He believed that the “eugenic effect” of this assurance “would be very good, far surpassing in this direction the effects of any other eugenic measure that has been proposed.” It is worthy of note that such an arrangement actually has been in operation in Roberts College in Constantinople, in the American University at Beirut, in the London School of Economics, and in Yale University; and also among the missionaries of the Baptist and Congregational Churches, and the ministers of the Methodist Church of England.123 It is claimed that the arrangement has obviously been effective in raising the birth rate in these occupational groups.
c. Since, on the average, people of superior attainments have children who average superior to the children of the rest of the population, it has been recommended that parents who meet certain requirements as to ancestral history, and as to personal health and ability, be offered free education for their children through university and professional school. This would certainly encourage many parents of superior stock to increase the size of their families.124
d. One of the most important proposals for increasing the birth rate from the upper portion of society, in the large, is that of marriage loans without interest. A substantial sum of money would be advanced by the community or by the State at the time of marriage, one-quarter of which would be cancelled at the time of the birth of each child. The births of four children, enough, on the average, to perpetuate the stock of the parents, would leave the couple debt-free. Such an offer, however, would be made only to a carefully selected body of young people. Requirements could vary somewhat, but in general should include, at a minimum, evidence that the family health-history was free of organic disorders and hereditary defects, ability to pass an exacting intelligence test, and satisfactory attendance upon a course in marriage education.125 According to Dr. Holmes, the system of this sort that was in operation in Germany before the Second World War resulted in “a conspicuous rise” in her birth rate, “while that of most other European countries has continued to fall.126
e. From the eugenic point of view, it would doubtless be profitable to effect a measure of relaxation in the strictness of our monogamic standard. Since I wrote about this matter at some length in my chapter “Woman and Marriage,” I will here only briefly review what I said there. It might well prove considerable gain to the public welfare if those men most conspicuously gifted, who were so inclined and who were able to afford the responsibilities, were to contribute to society the greatly increased number of offspring that they could sire if they were husband to more than one wife. There is, of course, a very strong prejudice among us against any such arrangement, though I am not at all sure that this could sustain close examination. A further consideration in its favor is that thereby we might take up into marriage a considerable portion of the very large number of young women who are now, by the mere fact that our women outnumber our men by some millions, deprived of the marriage and motherhood which, for the great majority of them, must constitute the very fulfillment of their lives. Society’s indifference to the fate of these young women almost passes belief. It might help to puncture our prevalent assumption of superiority if it were known that among Mohammedans no marriageable woman is left without a husband. It should be remembered that the fearful losses of men in the First World War led the Anglican Conference of Anglican bishops to consider relaxing the monogamic standard until the balance of the sexes had been recovered.127 This much we may as well face: the present condition in which our young women find themselves will not continue indefinitely. In marriage or out of it, legally or illegally, a large number of them are going to have at least the experience of sex, whether or not they have the courage to let it lead to motherhood. But eugenically, of course, this is no gain at all. How much better it would be if we recognized that the just requirements of life come above the preservation of our forms, and made humane provision for all this crying need in one of two ways: either (1) by making it legal and entirely respectable, even though unusual, for a man to have more than one wife, or else (2) by expressly recognizing and sanctioning the right of any woman who could meet certain requirements, to take steps toward pregnancy, either by intercourse with a man of her choice or through artificial insemination by sperm known to be genetically superior. The requirements should be the ability to show herself possessed of superior qualifications for motherhood, and evidence of financial means or backing sufficient to maintain herself and her offspring.
f. Still another proposal is that we concentrate our intelligence on locating and notifying to receive special opportunities, any conspicuously gifted young men and women, in any part of our entire population, who give promise of becoming good breeding stock. Such young people could be given scholarships that would assure them free education as far as they wished to carry it. Others might be adopted by married couples who would afford them the same opportunities they gave their own children. In the cases of gifted young people whose environment was so vicious as to call for their removal from it, and where no home proved open to receive them, they could be taken into special boarding schools or other institutions that would attempt to provide both a homelike environment and exceptional opportunities. Some of this material might turn up in very unexpected places. Dr. Carrel, who advocated such an effort to find and to develop the high capacity hidden away in our population, reminds us that the great criminals (not the vicious ones) may have offspring of imagination, courage, and judgment. No possible source should be overlooked.128 It is of interest that the Civic Club of the City of Pittsburgh made a start in locating valuable youth. The outstanding students from the graduating classes of all the high schools are assembled for special testing. The group consists of those who have stood highest, whether scholastically, in mental tests, or in the estimation of the teachers. The object is to provide with the privilege of higher education any of this youth that might otherwise have to leave school prematurely.129 If this sort of work were taken up all over the country, and greatly extended, it should help substantially to increase the birth rate from our better stock, and to ensure that much of the giftedness that is now often smothered for lack of opportunity would both come to fulfillment and be passed on to equally gifted posterity.
g. But I have yet to mention the proposal that is the most original and revolutionary, and which, if it can be put into operation in even a small and scattered way, holds out by far the most favorable prospect of effecting great and sudden improvement in our genetic stock on the highest levels. Perhaps the idea ultimately traces back to John Humphrey Noyes, of some one hundred years ago, who in his Oneida Community (located between Syracuse and Utica, N.Y.), made the first deliberate and intelligent attempt in modern times to improve the human breeding stock by selective mating. He called it “stirpiculture.” As a community, the venture finally failed, but Dr. Robert L. Dickinson, who forty years ago was one of the foremost gynecologists in the country and greatly interested in problems affecting our human breed, told me personally that the venture had nevertheless been remarkably successful in its primary purpose: the youngsters born and reared in that community had had an exceptionally high record of average achievement.
But, by this time, its idea might have been quite forgotten but for two men. One of them, the older, was Dr. Horace Dutton Taft, a brother of President Taft and an uncle of Senator Robert Taft, founder and for many years headmaster of the Taft School at Watertown, Connecticut. The other, whom I have already introduced to my readers, was Dr. Elmer Pendell. From 1934, when they were brought together by Dr. Ellsworth Huntington of the American Eugenics Society (and a professor at Yale), until Dr. Taft’s death in 1943, the two men collaborated on the development of their great idea. Those who wish to learn about it in its variant forms as sponsored by each—known in the one case as the Taft Plan, and in that of Dr. Pendell as Heredity Corporations, will find everything set forth in some detail, together with some excerpts from the correspondence between the two men, in Dr. Pendell’s The Next Civilization, Chapters V, VI, and VII (pages 101-140). But for reasons of space, and further because as yet the “stirpiculture” idea has never, anywhere, taken hold of the American mind in such a way as to make it of present practical importance, I will confine myself here to those essentials that the various forms of the proposal have in common.
First of all, let it be understood that there never has been any thought of displacing marriage. The intention has been primarily to meet a crisis in the genetic constitution of our breeding stock that threatens us with a creeping catastrophe of greater enormity and more irretrievable than defeat in any major war. It is to be looked upon primarily, therefore, as a temporary expedient, a provisional supplement to marriage, and at most as a venture that is never likely to attract more than a very small, though always superior, portion of our population.
The purpose would be to effect a wide and sudden dispersion of the highest potentialities of genius among us by means of artificial insemination. Ventures of this sort would be made by separate, though related, communities, which would be given the most substantial foundation, to cover the members with adequate insurance, and to provide against sickness, unemployment, disability, and old age, and for all the needs of their children.
There would be modifications of the general community idea designed to suit the interests, tastes, and circumstances of the sort of people likely to be attracted. The plan envisages communities of from 100 to 200 adults, in which as a rule women would predominate—perhaps by as much as three to one. These adults would be marked by their deep concern over the calamitous state of the nation’s breeding stock, and by their desire to dedicate themselves, as part of their principal mission in life, to do their utmost to improve it. They themselves would be selected as the most outstanding specimens obtainable of every sort of significant human superiority—as judged by the records of their family history, by their own robustness, beauty, intelligence, creativeness, emotional balance and charm, and by their profound interest in the rearing of young lives.
Commonly each male member would be allowed one corporation supported child by a woman member of the community, and they could marry if they wished. But if not, and the woman consented, suitable arrangements would be made for artificial insemination. Taking into account the quality of their parents and of their parents’ lineage, the consequent offspring of such “unions” would certainly tend to be superior themselves. But the improvement that would accrue to the national breeding stock would certainly be greatest and most rapid if all the women of the group from the start and throughout their bearing periods, were to be impregnated artificially by sperm donated by men from outside the community who had been very judiciously selected as representative of the supreme genius of the entire country. Each woman might thus bring into the world a total of six to a dozen children of the highest potentialities. And if any considerable part of the girls among these children eventually decided to follow in the path of their mothers, it is obvious that the resulting enrichment and strengthening of our leadership class would be spectacular.
I must leave further details for interested parties to dig out for themselves. But I will permit myself two general observations.
On the one hand, it seems to me that anyone of intelligence and capable of a reasonable degree of detachment from conventional mores, must recognize at a glance what possibilities for the rejuvenation and elevation of our human breeding stock are held out in such a controlled and well-thought-out undertaking with artificial insemination. My hesitation or reservations center, in the first place, around the profound and pivotal importance of marriage—especially whenever children are involved—and, in the second place, to the instinctive uneasiness that I feel at the thought of anything that approaches, or might easily lead to, children’s being brought up en masse. As much as is humanly possible, I want each single child to know the securing warmth of his own mother’s love and her sedulous attention to his fullest development. I should not be willing to see any mother in a Heredity Corporation become a mere “baby tender” to her own children. If she does not want to give them the first place in her life, let her give up motherhood and go find herself a job!
The seven proposals that I have submitted do not by any means exhaust the possibilities. The mind of man is still fertile to invent means to further his progress in whatever direction he sets his face. From the eugenic point of view, the real problem is not so much in the means as in the aim. How to get people remade—which is, in the end, what it comes to—so that they will want quality enough to pay the price for it! Where are the statesmen—or the prophets—who can get them to move toward being remade before they are remade?
We have now reached the point where I must tie up a few loose ends and then say my closing words.
It must have occurred to many of my readers that in America almost every proposal that I made, under negative and even positive eugenics, must fall on rather deaf ears. Christianity and democracy have conditioned our people against such ideas. I was only too painfully conscious of this while I wrote. In all soberness, I know of no other great Power in the world that seems to me genetically in so desperate a plight as the United States. As if there were not already enough false prophets to lead her astray and to seal her fate, there are so many like Amram Scheinfeld, with his You and Heredity, who seem to give even biological justification to the American cult of the mongrel, and thus the further to lull the people to sleep. Whereas I see, with terrifying clearness, that somehow she must be aroused soon, or it will forever be too late. I am convinced to the very marrow of my bones that except our country speedily reverses the whole course she has long been following, unless she begins to select severely, and learns to look up to the thoroughbred, and pays the price, no matter how high it comes, for increasing the proportion of her most gifted children—we shall go under. The hour hand moves on. The time still left us in which to act grows ever shorter.
Perhaps America and the Western world will never awake, but be struck down like a man walking in his dreams. That possibility, too, we must face. And what then? Well, what we have written remains the truth. The future belongs to the people of whatever race, who first begin to breed for quality.130 And the very religion that shapes any great people in the days to come will have in its table of holy commandments the precepts and prohibitions of eugenics. But I yearn over our people, and over the people of Britain and Western Europe, and their stock wherever they have gone all over the world. Even though today they are sick, and debased, and threatened with destruction, yet are they my people, bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. But I cannot forget—I know—that Nature at least has no sentiment and knows no mercy. Her law is: “Obey my commandments or die. Weed out your culls, or I shall give your place to a people that do.” Who will heed in time, few men would venture to predict. Maybe it will yet be one of our own peoples.
It may be asked—though after all that I have said, there should be no need to ask—what all this about the body, and sex, and genes, and heredity and offspring has to do with the spiritual life of man, with which I was once and for long almost completely preoccupied. Professor Knight Dunlap has given the answer about as concisely as can be. “Only the race which is physically and mentally fit can survive and flourish long enough to develop and put in practice moral ideals. The problem after all is not one of choice between two ideals, but of having such regard for the primary ideal that it may help us to the attainment of ultimate ideals.” 131 When all is said and done, genetics is a matter of the stuff a people has in it. And on the health, quality and giftedness of this stuff, everything else is built—literature, art, philosophy, science, religion, saintliness, everything. Those seers and mystics who, by the narrowness of their absorption in their own pursuits and final vision, tend to forget or to ignore their own origins and to deny the primary importance of the body and of sound genetic constitution, only help to breed their own kind out of existence, to further the growth of a population to whom their teaching is nothing but meaningless gibberish. Culture of every sort is an end product of the life of a people. It may reach to the sun, and manifest the most marvelous forms and variety of color, and seem to swing in the air almost free, like a flower. But except, like the flower, it was rooted from the beginning in the deep dark earth of elemental realities, it could never have come into existence; and except it remain so rooted it must soon wither and die.
We live in a world inexorably limited on all sides. Always we can have what we want, but always to have it we must give up something else. Everything comes at a price. Every beauty has its dark side. Always, therefore, we must choose. The supreme question before us is: What kind of man do we want? For myself I am committed—forever and forever—to quality. If we cannot be noble, if we cannot do great and beautiful things that will linger on the mouths of men for centuries, if there cannot be those among us who walk the Earth like gods, whom the rest of us know to be like gods, and look up to as gods, and love to listen to, and reach after, and follow as gods, then I should rather that I, and mine, and my people should pass into oblivion.
Where do you stand? The question is put to us about as compellingly as it can be, in a letter Ruskin wrote “to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain,” in 1872. “My friends,” he said, “the follies of modern Liberalism, many and great though they be, are practically summed in this denial or neglect of the quality and intrinsic value of things. Its benevolences—theology of universal indulgence, and jurisprudence which will hang no rogues—mean, one and all of them, in the root, incapacity of discerning, or refusal to discern, worth and unworth in anything, and least of all in man; whereas Nature and Heaven command you, at your peril, to discern worth from unworth in everything, and most of all in man. Your main problem is that ancient and trite one, ‘Who is best man?’ and the Fates forgive much—forgive the wildest, fiercest, cruelest experiments—if fairly made for the determination of that.”