Ed West

The Political Gene
by Dennis Sewell
Picador, £16.99

Between 1915 and 1919 a leading Chicago surgeon, Harry Haiselden, quite openly and publicly allowed six infants in his care to die, in one case actively killing the child. The justification was that his victims were “hereditarily unfit”. But rather than being arrested or vilified, Dr Haiselden became a cause célèbre among progressive thinkers who shared his wish to “have a debate” over eugenic euthanasia. As Dennis Sewell explains in this eye-opening book: “Haiselden lambasted a society in which ‘horrid semi-humans drag themselves along all of our streets’ and put the dying babies and their mothers on show to journalists as he explained why he thought these babies should not be allowed to live.”

Haiselden was at the forefront of the eugenics craze of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, one that had tragic and terrible consequences for millions of people. Indiana became the first state to pass forced sterilisations laws in 1907 and Oregon was the last to abolish it, as late as 1983. By then 33 US states had passed and repealed sterilisation laws, and 60,000 to 65,000 people were forcibly sterilised

Among the most famous cases was that of Carrie Buck, an orphan who was forcibly sterilised by the state of Virginia in 1927 after being raped at the age of 17 and deemed “mentally incompetent”. It was unfortunate for Buck that the man hearing her case was Justice Wendell Holmes, a man who had abandoned faith and turned to philosophical scepticism, which led him to a pessimistic moral relativism. “He recognised no law from Heaven to inform our laws on Earth. He viewed natural rights as nonsense, and regarded moral choices as arbitrary” and in the words of law professor, Grant Gilmore “saw in the course of human life nothing but a continuing struggle in which the rich and powerful impose their will on the poor and the weak.”

Although eugenics often had strong racist overtones, it was against country people that it was most forcefully used. Eugenicists cast their net wider, a boy who smiled was likely to be sterilised for being an idiot, but any “hillbilly” could be victimised. Deliverance was “just a movie, while the brutality visited upon the people of America’s rural heartlands was real, and has left a long trail of agony leading to the present day”.

It was this victimisation that led to the famous Scopes trial which, as Sewell expertly explains, is remembered entirely falsely. As he explains, John Thomas Scopes was just a football coach with “no special commitment to his pupils, and was not planning on staying in Dayton very long” and probably never really taught his class about evolution.

The trial itself was a “cynical contrivance”, a plot hatched by local businessmen to make Dayton famous, and responding to an advert by eugenicists hoping to challenge the anti-evolution Butler Act.

That Act, rather than being some fusty old reactionary ruling, had only been signed into law by the Governor on March 23, less than two months previously, passed by overwhelming margins by both houses. “These margins reflected the Butler Act’s enormous popularity among the people of Tennessee. In 1925, the nationwide eugenics campaign was at its height. In the rural areas of Tennessee folk may not have had a sophisticated grasp of Darwinian science, but they knew the eugenicists who preached Darwinism in the cities despised country people, called them ‘imbeciles’ and ‘defectives’ and would sterilise them if they got the chance. They knew they despised God and the Bible too. Now they wanted to teach children that grandpa was descended from an ape. But America was a democracy, and that meant that simple people, if they made their views plain, could fight.”

Prosecutor William Jennings Bryan, portrayed as a reactionary and idiot in the Spencer Tracey film glorifying Scopes, was actually the most radical and socially progressive man to ever stand for the American presidency, and saw the “trial as a contrivance on the part of a middle-class elite to cheat the ordinary citizens of Tennessee out a law that they very much wanted”.

The book Scopes claimed to teach from was George William Hunter’s A Civic Biology, which, consistent with the scientific orthodoxy of its day was “strongly influenced by scientific racialism and eugenics”. It said of a notorious criminal family that “if such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off.” It informed schoolchildren that mankind was divided into five races, with the African at the bottom of the evolutionary scale and the white man at top.

Such racial science would be taken to its extreme in Germany, but the influence of Darwin on Hitler is well-trodden, and Sewell rightly does not overdo it. Far more interesting is eugenics influence on the Left, which continues up to the present day. Justice Holmes was in direct, almost daily, communication with Fabian socialist Harold Laski, and once wrote to him that he had “delivered a decision upholding the constitutionality of a state law for sterilising imbeciles the other day and felt that I was getting near to the first principle of real reform”.

After 1945 the pre-war eugenicists effortlessly discarded their Nazi-stained cloaks and adopted the clothes of “family planning”, and the campaign for abortion laws was “crypto-eugenics in action”.

In 1992 Lord Steele paid tribute to the role of the Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA) in helping the 1968 Abortion Act pass. The ALRA, as Sewell points out, was founded by five members of the Eugenics Society, and Steele was advised by Malcolm Potts, a Eugenics Society Fellow, and Peter Diggory who would later join it.

Darwin’s legacy continues to surprise, as Sewell points out, with new discoveries in genetics inspiring a political journey down into the darkest reaches of man’s soul.

And there are more detonations to come: the next will be the bell curve and the study of race and intelligence, which according to one specialist will “detonate” in the next 10 years.

This book followed the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Darwin, a man revered as a secular god by the anti-religious movement. It’s a timely reminder, if ever it was needed, just how dangerous his discoveries, realised without the restraints of Christian morality, can be.

From this week’s Catholic Herald.