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7 Francis Galton (1822–1911) coined the term eugenics. The English gentleman scholar’s elaborate definition encompassed “all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.”¹ The term would eventually become popular as a label for the field concerned with “better breeding” or, as its Greek roots suggested, being “well-born.” Biographers have often dwelt on Galton’s “enviable pedigree,” which included his half-cousin Charles Darwin. The “scientific imagination” of Galton’s family seems to explain more fully why he was among the first to make a serious statistical study of inherited family traits.² He thought of eugenics as a “virile creed full of hopefulness” that should appeal to our “noblest feelings.”³ Galton became identified with ideas of “hereditary merit ,” the cluster of desirable traits he wished to replicate through “positive eugenics.”⁴ But in addition to exhorting the “better classes” to mate and breed liberally , Galton also suggested the notion, without pressing the point too forcefully , that setting limits on the fertility of the less fortunate might be an appropriate role for government. Just such a scheme of negative eugenics was portrayed in his novel Kantsaywhere, set in a Utopia where hereditary worth was measured by tests that determined a citizen’s place. Only the genetically gifted won diplomas from the Eugenic College in that fictional realm. Genetic failures were shunted off to labor colonies, where enforced celibacy was the rule; childbirth for the “unfit” was a crime.⁵ Kantsaywhere was not the only place where Galton hinted at his enthusiasm for reproductive interventions. While voicing opposition to compelled marriages, Galton agreed with “stern compulsion” to prevent unions of those with “lunacy, feeble-mindedness, habitual criminality and pauperism .” He counted measures that would “check the birth rate of the Unfit” among the first objects of his new science of eugenics.⁶ Problem Families 1 8 | Three Generations, No Imbeciles Even before Galton developed a name for his “science of good breeding,” a rich mythology had developed in America about the power of heredity to generate laziness, lawlessness, a weakness for liquor, and an appetite for unbridled sex. Anxiety about those who failed in the contest of life, relying on charity and inflating the taxes of everyone else, was widespread. When an author proposed that the “dangerous classes” could blame their ancestors for lives of crime and poverty or that where there was mental defect, “there must have been sin,” he was doing nothing more than echoing the well-received theory of “degeneracy” that had been used to explain social degradation since the seventeenth century.⁷ Degeneracy theory gave a human face to the biblical curse condemning children to inherit the sins of their fathers.⁸ The curse carried particular power when those sins were demonstrated in dissolute living leading to legal transgressions, disease, and “pauperism,” as poverty was typically known. By the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory enhanced fears of degeneration. Many worried that repeated generations of debased living could reverse evolutionary processes, yielding a corruption of blood, a polluted “germ plasm” that would be passed down. Degeneracy was an idea that seemed to blame simultaneously heredity and environment for personal as well as social ills; it could lead to the reappearance of bad health, bad behavior, and bad environments for years to come.⁹ The well-informed readers of Scientific American knew all about degeneracy . They could hardly have been surprised in early 1875 to read that statistical reports were being compiled about the kinfolk of a vagrant girl known simply as “Margaret.” Margaret’s descendants were clustered in a part of New York’s Hudson River Valley where crime ran rampant. Constant residents of local jails and almshouses, they represented a living model of the “hereditary disposition to crime.”¹⁰ Commentary in the popular journal despaired at the “pestilent brood of human vipers” that descended from children of “Maggie.” These “sturdy sinners” made up a “hereditary caste” that multiplied “like vermin” and justified drastic remedies to dam up the flood of ill-spent passion that “makes for unrighteousness.” The magazine’s prescription to prevent more “lusty savages” from filling the prisons: interrupt the parade of vice by “the knife remedy.”¹¹ If readers of Scientific American found this florid account of interest, so too did members of the medical fraternity who read Margaret’s story in the [18.188.61.223...

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