by Edward Dutton, The Unz Review:
Almost all of the Establishment—most mainstream politicians, journalists, academics and literary-types—favor teaching Critical Race Theory. They obsess about “equality” and avoiding “harm” to the “weak” and “marginalised.” Particularly obsessed are women, and women school teachers all the more so, due their strong social conformity. Granted, some communities have banned CRT because parents protested, but in the main it still marches through the education system [Ban on teaching critical race theory in Temecula, Calif., sparks heated debate, By Chanelle Chandler, Yahoo! News, March 28, 2023]. Now imagine a world where the entire Establishment, including all the schoolteachers, unquestioningly accepted an ideology based upon eliminating the “weak” and breeding the “strong,” intelligent and genetically healthy, for the future good of the “group.” And imagine that parents protested. Well, you don’t have to imagine it. As I explore in my new book, Breeding the Human Herd: Eugenics, Dysgenics and the Future of the Species, that was the world of just more than a century ago.
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In June 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I, there was a “school strike” in Dronfield in Derbyshire in the English Midlands. Parents were horrified to discover that the headmistress was teaching their daughters about eugenics. She had attended a conference at the University of London the previous year, which included a paper read by Sir J. Arthur Thomson, Regius Professor of Natural History at Aberdeen University, on how to teach eugenics. Parents refused to send their daughters to school, then landed in court and were fined. It was a national scandal called the “Peasants’ Revolt at Dronfield.”
The year before, Home Secretary and future Prime Minister Winston Churchill organized the International Eugenics Congress in London. Prominent members of the Eugenics Society included Conservative Prime Ministers Neville Chamberlain and Arthur Balfour, the latter of whom helped endow a still-existing chair in genetics at Cambridge and co-organised the congress with Churchill.
A Department of Eugenics flourished at University College London (which grovelingly apologized in 2021)endowed by Francis Galton, who had coined the term eugenics and argued that only a “new religion” of eugenics could save civilization from dysgenics and ultimate collapse. Charles Darwin himself espoused eugenics, noting in his 1871 book The Descent of Man that
It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
Interest in eugenics went right across the political spectrum. Welfare state founder William Beveridge was involved in the Eugenics Society; Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George favoured eugenic solutions. Whether it was family planning, social work, the novels of H.G. Wells or D.H. Lawrence, or the socialism of Bertrand Russell, a strong belief in eugenics underpinned them all.
In 1908, Lawrence was particularly blunt with regard to what should be done with the congenitally sick:
If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly and a Cinematograph working brightly; then I’d go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them all in, all the sick, the halt and the maimed; I would lead them gently and they would smile me a weary thanks, and the band would softly bubble out the “Hallelujah Chorus.”[Letter to Blanche Jennings, dated 9 October, 1908, Letters of D.H. Lawrence (1979]
In general, the only serious opponents of eugenics were conservative Christians, such as G. K. Chesterton, who wrote that eugenics was “evil” and interfered with God’s plan.
But eugenics also had fervent Christian advocates. In 1912, the Very Rev. Walter Taylor Sumner, Dean of the Episcopal Cathedral in Chicago, announced that he wouldn’t marry couples unless they presented him with a medical certificate proving that they were physically and mentally healthy.
Forget Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and other “woke” films. The big hit of 1916—shown in American theaters until 1942—was The Black Stork, later called Are You Fit to Marry? In 1915, Harry J. Haiselden, a Chicago surgeon, stunned the nation by revealing that he had allowed the deaths, with parental consent, of “at least six infants.” He diagnosed them as “defectives” and refused to perform surgery on them. Haiselden “displayed the dying infants to journalists, wrote about them for the […] newspapers, and starred in a feature film about his crusade” [The Black Stork, By Martin Pernick, 1996]. Prominent Americans including lawyer Clarence Darrow, defence counsel at the Scopes Monkey Trial, and the most famous blind deaf-mute of all time, Helen Keller, rallied to his cause. The result was the film.
