Eugenics after World War II

Eugenics has been one of the major forces shaping this century. Despite that, very few people have ever heard of it. One reason for this dangerous ignorance is a mistaken belief that eugenics died when Hitler lost the war. So at the end of the 20th century, a key question about eugenics is: what was left of it after World War II? If it had changed, what were the changes?

The eugenics movement had worked in several areas, such as promoting white supremacy, forced sterilization and immigration control. What happened to these projects? Did they flourish, or disappear, or change? What happened to the overall vision of humanity, the "anthropology" of eugenics, focusing on genes and the race but ignoring the individual? What happened to the twin programs of getting "more from the fit, less from the unfit"? The organizations that were established to promote eugenics -- including the Eugenics Society in Britain and the American Eugenics Society here -- were damaged by their association with Nazism; did they recover?

These are some of the obvious questions about post-war eugenics. The answers to some of these questions were clear within a few years.

Katharine O'Keefe, an American researcher, began working in the late 1980s to understand post-war eugenics. She has challenged the view of many historians, who assume that eugenics ended with the defeat of Hitler. She has focused attention on the eugenics societies, and we will follow her lead.

C. P. Blacker and "Crypto-Eugenics"

In the late 1950s, a leader of the British eugenics movement put forward an interesting idea. Dr. Carlos Paton Blacker had been an officer in the Eugenics Society since 1931; he had been Secretary, then General Secretary, then Director, then Chairman. His proposal to the ES was:

That the Society should pursue eugenic ends by less obvious means, that is by a policy of crypto-eugenics, which was apparently proving successful in the US Eugenics Society.

In 1960, the Eugenics Society adopted Blacker's idea, passing a resolution which stated (in part):

The Society's activities in crypto-eugenics should be pursued vigorously, and specifically that the Society should increase its monetary support of the FPA [Family Planning Association, the English branch of Planned Parenthood] and the IPPF [International Planned Parenthood Federation] and should make contact with the Society for the Study of Human Biology, which already has a strong and active membership, to find out if any relevant projects are contemplated with which the Eugenics Society could assist.

From Blacker's proposal, we can see several things. Leaders of the eugenics movement were concerned about their public image, but were continuing at least some of their work. One of their tools was the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which promoted access to birth control. Eugenicists were still interested in biology, or some part of biology. And there was something like "crypto-eugenics" in the United States, a success story that the British wanted to imitate.

So what was happening in the United States?

The Fraudulent Reform

The dominant figure in American eugenics after World War II was a complex individual, Frederick Osborn (1889-1981). He is credited with reforming eugenics, removing the taint of racism and putting the field back on a firm scientific footing. But during his "reform," from 1947 until 1956, he was president of the Pioneer Fund, a secretive white supremacist group. So he did not oppose racism; he opposed open racism. His reform of eugenics, then, would disguise, not remove, the taint of racism.

Osborn was a Major General. But he never made much of his military rank after World War II, perhaps because he was a little uncomfortable holding such a high rank without ever seeing combat. He was in charge of boosting troop morale during World War II, and got his exalted rank by politics. He spent most of his life boosting eugenics.

In 1956, Osborn traveled across the Atlantic to give the annual Galton Lecture at a meeting of the Eugenics Society. The speech was later published in the Eugenics Review (volume 48, number 1, April 1956). His words were well received then, and remain fascinating today.

In the address, entitled "Galton and Mid-Century Eugenics," Osborn stated his devotion to the cause. Galton had envisaged a movement to raise the average of human intelligence and character that would "sweep the world and make man at least the master of his own destiny on earth." But it had not happened, and the movement was reduced to "a few small handsful of men in various countries . . . not influencing public opinion." In fact, Osborn noted, "The very word eugenics is in disrepute in some quarters." Despite these problems, Osborn affirmed that "I still believe in Galton's dream."

Then Osborn posed the key question: "What have we done wrong?" He was concerned because "we have all but killed the eugenic movement."

The Pioneer Fund The first president of the Pioneer Fund was Harry Laughlin, from the Eugenics Record Office in New York. Laughlin had promoted coercive sterilization and racist immigration controls. The Pioneer Fund promoted white supremacy, but did not do so openly. For example, in 1939 the Pioneer Fund offered to guarantee a college education to any child born to an Air Force officer in 1940 if the officer had three children already. That does not sound racist. But memos from the Pioneer Fund show that before the Pioneer Fund made the offer, they ran a study to see what kind of people would benefit. They made the offer after they were convinced that in most cases it would benefit white people whose ancestors were in America before the Constitution was signed.

It is hard to imagine such moral blindness. Speaking just a decade after World War II, when tens of millions of people died fighting the savagery of a master race ideology, is Osborn concerned about the deaths of the Jews? Is he sorry about what happened to that the Nazis killed the feeble-minded? Is he ashamed of the role that eugenics played in Germany and Japan, churning out death for civilians? No, he is troubled because they had almost killed the eugenics movement.

So what went wrong, according to Osborn? He said that they had "failed to take into account a trait which is almost universal and is very deep in nature. People simply are not willing to accept the idea that the genetic base on which their character is formed is inferior and should not be repeated in the next generation. We have asked whole groups of people to accept this idea and we have asked individuals to accept it. They have constantly refused ... they won't accept the idea that they are in general second rate." As you try to understand why people may have been slow to accept that they were second-rate, keep in mind that Osborn considered the upper five or ten percent of the population to have the intelligence and character that the entire human race should have.

Osborn's response to the challenge was a proposal he called "voluntary unconscious selection." The idea was to alter laws, customs and social expectations, so that individuals would decide for themselves that they did or did not want to have children. The way to persuade people to exercise this voluntary unconscious selection was to appeal to the idea of "wanted" children. Osborn said, "Let's base our proposals on the desirability of having children born in homes where they will get affectionate and responsible care." In this way, the eugenics movement "will move at last towards the high goal which Galton set for it."

Osborn's speech shows that the eugenics movement was hurt, but not dead. They still held to Galton's dream, they were trying to find new ways to achieve it, and they were still making plans.

Planned Parenthood and the Population Council

In Britain, one tool for crypto-eugenics was the International Planned Parenthood Federation. Starting in 1952, IPPF gradually built birth-control organizations in most of the nations of the world. One of the affiliates, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, was the new name of the old Birth Control Federation of America, founded by Margaret Sanger.

Planned Parenthood promoted birth control, but also worked unceasingly to develop more effective contraceptives. In the United States, Planned Parenthood funded research that led to the development of the oral birth control pill.

While Blacker worked with IPPF, his counterpart in the United States, Frederick Osborn, worked with a similar group. Osborn was among the founders of an effective organization called the Population Council. The Population Council was founded in 1952, the same year as IPPF, at a meeting in Williamsburg, Virginia. It was the brainchild of John D. Rockefeller III. Its purpose was to control population growth around the world.

John D. Rockefeller's leadership in the Population Council was not the first Rockefeller foray into eugenics. When Alexis Carrel wrote his book advocating euthanasia institutions with a suitable gas for exterminating various people, he was on the staff of the Rockefeller Institute. The Rockefellers financed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in the 1920s, and provided funds for Ernst Rždin for genetic research in the 1920s.

The founding conference brought a very powerful group together in Williamsburg. Rockefeller brought with him several officers of the Rockefeller Institute, including Detlev W. Bronk, then president of both the Rockefeller Institute and the National Academy of Sciences. There was a representative from the Carnegie Institution. Two members of the wealthy Osborn family were there -- Fairfield Osborn, representing the Conservation Foundation, and Frederick Osborn, Secretary of the American Eugenics Society. Warren S. Thompson came, as director of the Scripps Foundation for Research in Population Problems.

Thomas Parran, former Surgeon General during the Tuskegee syphilis study, was there. Pascal K. Whelpton from the Population Division at the United Nations came, and so did two men who ran the UN Population Division in later years, Frank Notestein and Kingsley Davis.

The Population Council began its first years of operation with $2.6 million in capital contributions, primarily from John D. Rockefeller III and the Ford Foundation, along with an endowment of approximately $1.5 million.

The Population Council put some funds into developing the contraceptive Pill, but was far more enthusiastic about the intrauterine device, or IUD. An IUD is a piece of metal or plastic inserted into a woman's uterus. It inflames the uterus, and prevents implantation of a newly conceived baby into the mother's uterus.

A feminist author, Germaine Greer, commented on the post-war movement, saying: "It now seems strange that men who had been conspicuous in the eugenics movement were able to move quite painlessly into the population establishment at the highest level, but if we reflect that the paymasters were the same -- Ford, Mellon, Du Pont, Standard Oil, Rockefeller and Shell -- are still the same, we can only assume that people like Kingsley Davis, Frank W. Notestein, C. C. Little, E. A. Ross, the Osborns Frederick and Fairfield, Philip M. Hauser, Alan Guttmacher and Sheldon Segal were being rewarded for past services." In other words, the population control movement was the same as the old eugenics movement -- the same money, the same leaders, the same activities -- but with a new excuse.

United Nations Involvement

One of the places where the eugenics movement made strides after the war was in the new global peace-keeping operation, the United Nations. In 1948, when the United Nations was founded, the Americans and British pushed through a provision for population studies as an official function of the UN. Some other countries resisted the idea, but the U.S. and Britain succeeded in making a Population Commission part of the international body.

Another part of the new UN was the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO. Its first director was Julian Huxley, a determined eugenicist who used his global platform very effectively. His family had worked with the Darwins for decades promoting eugenics, and he spoke of the ideology in religious terms.

The Shift to Genetics

Before the war, in 1938, the American Eugenics Society had laid out its research aims, including many investigations in sociology, psychology, anthropology and biology. But they noted especially the important new fields: population study and genetics. These two fields corresponded with the chief aims of the eugenics movement -- "more from the fit, less from the unfit."

The eugenics movement discovered (or invented) the population explosion after the war, and used it to whip up global hysteria. From 1952 on, a major part of the eugenics movement was the population control movement. The population explosion made it possible for the eugenics movement to continue its work on one of the two new fields discussed in 1938. The field of genetics offered the hope (or illusion) of improving the human race, and after the war the field of genetics also grew.

One of the leaders in the field of genetics was Dr. Franz J. Kallmann. According to the journal of the Eugenics Society in Britain, Kallmann had been "associated with Dr. Ernst Rždin, investi-gating in genetic psychiatry." He was half Jewish, so he was driven out of Germany in 1936 by Hitler. Nonetheless, he testified on behalf of von Verschuer after the war, and he became a member of the American Eugenics Society.

Kallmann moved to the United States and taught psychiatry at Columbia University. In 1952 he was president of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG), a group started by eugenicists. Society members later developed hundreds of prenatal tests without looking for cures, although every test was hyped as a potential lead toward a cure. Detecting prenatal problems often leads to eugenic abortion, so the impact of the ASHG was destructive, not medicinal. Over the next years, at least 124 people were members of both Kallmann's American Society of Human Genetics and the American Eugenics Society.

Open Racism Declined

Open white supremacy declined after World War II outside the American South. The idea that Aryans or Nordics should rule the world sounded too much like Hitler, and people shied away from it when they recognized it. It continued in many subtle forms which we will study later.

White supremacy declined, but did not disappear completely. In 1960, a member of the Eugenics Society, Reginald Ruggles Gates, founded a new periodical to advance racist ideas. The Advisory Council of the new journal, Mankind Quarterly, included yet another member of the Darwin family, Charles Galton Darwin. One idea advanced in the journal is the belief that anthropology, if it is understood honestly, shows that mankind is divided into four species. An early issue of the journal stated that desegregation happened because "American anthropologists were responsible for introducing equalitarianism into anthropology, ignoring the hereditary differences between races ... until the uninstructed public were gradually misled. Equality of opportunity, which everyone supports, was replaced by a doctrine of genetic and social equality, which is something quite different."

Discuss: What is the difference between "voluntary unconscious selection" and "freedom of choice," other than the length of the words?

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