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1. Malthusianism and Eugenics: A Preamble
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Chapter 1 Malthusianism and Eugenics A Preamble The population control movement has been named after its earliest modern proponent, Thomas Robert Malthus, an English clergyman who wrote at the end of the eighteenth century. Malthus believed that without direct checks on the poor, such as famine, disease, and war, population growth would outstrip food supplies. His ideas inspired the creation of the fearsome workhouses that segregated poor families along gender lines to prevent the birth of more children.1 Malthus was attacked relentlessly by the radical William Cobbett, who even wrote a play against his “diabolical” idea,2 but also inspired a handful of other radicals and, in the late nineteenth century, the tiny “Neo”-Malthusian movement, led by atheists Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant. Unlike Malthus, they advocated contraception rather than abstinence, which they deplored as harmful.3 1 1. Daugherty and Kammeyer (1995, 26). Although Ancient Greece saw a form of population control in the practice of pederasty, with men forbidden to marry until age 40, and eugenic infanticide and abortion, Malthus (1766–1834) marked the beginning of the modern population control movement (An Essay on the Principle of Population [1798]). Workhouses existed in the eighteenth century, but the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act directed English and Welsh parishes to form a Poor Law Union with its own workhouse. Thousands were erected in the late 1830s; some were burned down in riots; they were specially designed to segregate, e.g., men, women, and children, and the infirm from the able-bodied, and this still pertained when the author’s father and brothers were separated from their mother and sisters on entering the Shoreditch workhouse in East London in the 1920s; his younger sister Joan died there, aged three (M1). 2. Cobbett (1830/2001, 293). 3. For example, Francis Place, Richard Carlile, and Robert Dale Owen; see Farmer (2002, 10–11). Neo-Malthusian Dr. George Drysdale wrote Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion (1854), They rejected Marx’s notion that the poor contributed to the production of wealth; moreover, philanthropy and social improvements for the poor were seen as problematical because they increased the burden borne by the wealthy and resulted in even more children.4 Besant, despite inherent tensions between the two philosophies, declared : “I am a Socialist because I am a believer in evolution”;5 she was inspired by Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which described sophisticated life forms evolving from more primitive organisms.6 Besant was an atheist, and in an age of declining religious influence,7 both radicals and conservatives saw Darwin’s theory as scientific underpinning for social prejudice; poverty was seen as proof of the lowly evolutionary status of the poor, their large families placing them on a level with insects. A harsh financial system, with financial rewards for economic success and social penalties for economic failure leading to an improved human race, was seen as perfectly demonstrating Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest .”8 Indeed, Spencer favored laissez-faire capitalist economics as part of an evolutionary process eliminating the weakest in the struggle for survival .9 Although eugenicists later intervened in politics, they privileged the biological over the political struggle, and Spencer saw “hereditarily valuable ” individuals as the first condition for the well-being of the nation.10 This was a fundamentally different approach from that of political parties and radical movements such as feminism, which sought to change social and economic systems to benefit humanity rather than the reverse. Social Darwinists saw charitable help for poor people as interfering with natural processes, despite the fact that the culture of the poor was actually marked later titled Elements of Social Science, as a “trumpet blast” against abstinence, prostitution, and poverty; see Farmer (2002, 32–34). 4. Farmer (2002, 72; 122). 5. Besant (1886, 2). Followers of Karl Marx were opposed to Malthusian doctrines (Daugherty and Kammeyer 1995, 244); see note 68. 6. Darwin (1859) (see note 7). 7. “Social Darwinism substituted natural, scientific processes for God as the guarantor of social equilibrium” (Jones 1980, xiii ). Darwin himself eschewed controversy (Burleigh 2005, 216– 17 ), and his theories were in many ways derivative, but were anchored in the need to justify his theory of “naturalistic” human development (i.e., excluding a supernatural explanation; see Jones 1980, chapter 2 ). 8. McLaren (1990, 17). See also Jones (1980). 9. Stepan (1982, 82). The “laissez-faire” approach, advocated by among others Adam Smith (1723–90) favored minimal intervention by governments in economic affairs. 10...