The Growing Need for a National Eugenic Program
Bios
Volume 7, Number 3 (October, 1936)
pages 176-187
Sue D. Comer
Mississippi Stale College for Women
This paper received second award in the 1936 undergraduate competition.
There has been much discussion during the past half century concerning Eugenics. This discussion has not been limited to scientists but has interested laymen as well who have looked upon the subject as something mysterious and new. As a matter of fact, however, Eugenics is not new. The old saying “There’s nothing new under the sun” holds true again. In very early times a sort of Eugenics program was carried out by nature herself; there was natural selection or to put it in another way the survival of the fittest. In ancient Sparta there was a rather ruthless program in which all the defective children were abandoned because there was no place for them in society. Thus on up through the years men have given the subject of human betterment consideration. “As early as the first half of the sixth century B.C. the Greek poet, Theognis of Megara, wrote: ‘We look for rams and asses and stallions of good stock, and one believes that good will come of good: yet a good man minds not to wed an evil daughter of an evil sire, if he but give her much wealth. . . . Wealth confounds our stock. Marvel not that the stock of our fold is tarnished, for the good is mingled with the base.’ ” A century later Plato set forth a eugenic plan in which the best were to mate the best and the worst, the worst. The best were to be encouraged in having large families; the worst, small families or none at all, and the children of the unfit were to be done away with. At about this same time, Aristotle had a program for eugenics which was based on the belief that the state should have the right of intervention in the interest of reproductive selection.
“For nearly two thousand years after this, conscious eugenic ideals were largely ignored. Constant war reversed natural selection, as it is doing today, by killing off the physically fit and leaving the relatively unfit to reproduce the race, while monasticism and the enforced celibacy of the priesthood performed a similar office for many of the mentally superior, attracting them to a career in which they could leave no posterity. At the beginning of the last century a germ of modern eugenics is visible in Malthus famous essay on population, in which he directed attention to the importance of the birthrate for human welfare, since this essay led Darwin and Wallace to enunciate the theory of natural selection, and to point out clearly the effects of artificial selection. It is really on Darwin’s work that the modern science of eugenics is based, and it owes its beginning to Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton.”…
…We have considered the inbreeding of the human race; now let us turn to the question of outbreeding.
The outbreeding of the human race may result happily or unhappily depending upon elements entering in the cross from either side. There is undoubtedly a difference of temperament among the races and, though this difference may seem small, it is to this that a nation may owe its success or failure. Between races of such great diversity as European and Japanese there is hardly likely to result a happy blend. “The genes now carried by each group are the foundations of at least moderately successful and distinct racial types, and it is hardly likely that a mixture of genes would produce an equally coherent and satisfactory type.” There are records of extremely successful crosses of such nature but these should not lead us to expect such lucky accidents each time. If, however, the races to be blended are of the same fundamental type, there should be no hesitancy concerning the success of the marriage on the racial score.
Professor Thorndike has made measurements in comparing the white and colored races and finds the difference to be from five to ten per cent lower intellect in the Negroes. It is evident from this information that interbreeding with the colored race will tend to lower the intellect of the population as a whole. Such a cross is undesirable, therefore, not only from a social view which everyone, particularly those in the South, readily sees but also from the biological or eugenic standpoint…
…One of the greatest dysgenic forces of both the past and the present is war. In the time of conflict the young and the most able men both physically and mentally are used in the army. By far the greater per cent of these men are either killed or seriously disabled. This leaves the weaklings to marry and bring forth the next generation. Not only is war a menace but also the preparation for war. Army and naval academies and the army service as well are factors in cutting down on the birth rate of the upper middle classes for the men, if they marry at all, marry rather late in life. War must be abolished…
