The belief in eugenics, the science (or as modern eyes would see it — the pseudoscience) of “improving the quality of the human race, especially by selective breeding”❈, had a powerful hold on societal thinking in Australia and New Zealand in the first half of the twentieth century, as it did elsewhere in the world, predominantly in western countries or western-implant societies.

A cycle of low fertility rates in the West commencing in the late 19th century together with rising levels of crime and the emergence of welfare state dependency provoked concerns of moral and physical degeneracy of the white race[1]. In Australia this concern prompted a Royal Commission into the Decline of the Birth Rate in NSW in 1904. The widespread perception in Western countries was that the decline was hitting the “good stock” hardest, as a consequence ‘inferior’ people of “low racial stock” were out-breeding the ‘superior’ stock of the country❇.

White societies like Britain and the Dominions were viewed as becoming ‘soft’ and ‘weak’ and the foundations being laid for the welfare state in the UK were attacked as contributing to this ‘decay’ – the survival and multiplication of the poor, the deranged and other “social undesirables” was a financial burden on the state, driving up the welfare costs. Even the man who later provided the blueprint for the British welfare state post-WWII, pursued a strong eugenics agenda. William Beveridge in 1909 called for the ‘defectives’ within society to be denied their “citizen rights” – “the franchise … civil freedom and fatherhood”[2].

Britain, the US, New Zealand, Australia and other countries were informed by ‘scientific’ notions of eugenics and sought to implement policies and practices which remedied this trendஐ. This was a two-fold process, the first involving so-called positive eugenics – elevating or ‘purifying’ the racial stock by encouraging the so-called ‘fit’ people in society to procreate more (in New Zealand the act of providing literature on contraceptives was proscribed in the 1900s). Simultaneously the states sought to deal with negative eugenics (or more precisely ‘dysgenics’¤), identifying those members of society thought to be ‘unfit’ for procreation (people of unsound mind, of physical deformity, the intellectually-handicapped, the epileptic, the criminal classes including prostitutes, slum dwellers, homosexuals, dipsomaniacs, the indigenous non-white population and other marginalised sections) and either segregating them, preventing them from marrying or having them sterilised to stop their sexual reproduction[3].

The E tree

Some of the contemporary popular fiction produced in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, etc. played on the anxieties of a “race war” which put the supremacy of the white European in peril. Influential writers such as Charles H Pearson in Australia, helped to shape these perceptions with books like National Life and Character: a Forecast which argued that it was the “racially defiled” non-white races with their higher birth-rates, not the white race with its relentless imperial juggernaut, that was on the ascendency[4].

What sectors and groups of society were in the Vanguard of the Eugenics Movements in Australasia?
The eugenicists and fellow travellers of the eugenics movement were drawn from the elite circles of Australian and New Zealand society§ – including politicians, scientists, medical practitioners, educators, academics, social workers, women’s groups, churches and clergymen (excluding the Catholic Church). Other professionals such as psychiatrists, anthropologists and magistrates aided and abetted the work of the movement. Eugenics was not a left /right thing, support for it came from across the political spectrum – from socialists and conservatives both.

Opponents of Eugenics in Australasia
Although eugenic thought was accepted as the normative approach to tackling social problems in the interwar period, it was not universally countenanced by all sectors of Australian and New Zealand society. Opposition to eugenics came from organised working class elements, ie, the trade unions, as well as from the Catholic Church, from moral campaigners (concerned that sterilisation might lead to increased promiscuity), from some medical practitioners (also concerned that the poorly educated sterilised would be sexually indiscriminate and spread VD[5], plus wary of the legal ramifications of sterilising citizens), and from public intellectuals and scientific dissenters.

The eugenics movement in Aeotearoa
New Zealand in the first 40 years of the 20th century presents a similar story to its large trans-Tasman neighbour. The New Zealand Eugenics Education Society, founded in 1910, led the call for eugenic measures necessary it claimed to manage the population and ensure a healthy country. Grass roots pressure prompted a government investigation in 1924 which concluded that there was a birth-rate disparity distorting the population’s genetic balance – “the ‘fit’ were being swamped by the ‘unfit'”. It informed a view that NZ was in racial decline as a consequence of growing numbers of the feeble-minded and social defectives which eugenicists argued posed a social menace[6].

PM Stout (Picture: www.digitslnz.org)

Chief Justice Sir Robert Stout was one of the leading figures in NZ eugenics in the first half of the century. Stout, in a discursive and often anecdotal lecture to the Wellington Eugenics Society in 1912, espoused the standard eugenicist position. Stout linked heredity to fatal diseases, condemned high levels of alcohol consumption and cigarette-smoking, and warned that “the peerage” was committing “race suicide”, “the best blood” was being “enervated” and supplanted by the “second best”, “the extinction of the race was being seen everywhere”, etc[7]. Chief Justice Stout’s race views carried even more weight because he had previously been premier of NZ in the late 19th century. William Chapple was another leading NZ eugenicist who was influential in the NZ movement through his dual roles as medical practitioner and Liberal Party politician. His book Fertility of the Unfit advocated enforced sterilisation in certain circumstances.

In touch with the latest currents in eugenics thinking in Britain and the US, eugenicists in Australia and New Zealand whole-heartedly set about rejuvenating the racial ‘fitness’ of Australians. This would be achieved they believed by encouraging the elite in society to procreate, whilst at the same time, with the aid of legislators, denying those they labelled as “social misfits” or ‘degenerates’ that same right to reproduce[8].

PostScript 1: British Models
The Australian and New Zealand eugenics movements took impetus from the larger and more advanced movements in Britain and the US. The leading British eugenicists themselves acknowledged a debt to Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouting movement. Baden-Powell’s emphasis on the traits of character[9], discipline, citizenship and patriotism were appealing to eugenicists such as Karl Pearson and Caleb Saleeby. Dr Saleeby wrote in ‘The progress of eugenics’: “If national eugenics is ever achieved in Great Britain, it will come through the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides”[10].

PostScript 2: Eugenics, an agricultural template
Sidestepping the moral and ethical considerations, some contemporary eugenics enthusiasts made the argument for efficacy based on agricultural models. They advocated the utilisation of the successful principles of selective stock and plant breeding, applying them to the reproduction of humans to improve the quality of future generations. One US agricultural society member in 1911 summed it up in a straightforward, no nonsense sort of way, “better horses, better cattle, better hogs …. (why not) … better babies?”[11] The agriculture/eugenics nexus has a further dimension in the US … two of America’s foremost eugenicists, Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin, had been chicken breeders.

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌
❈ some basic definitions to begin with – the etymology of the word ‘eugenics’ is Greek, from eugenes, root derivation: eu-, ‘good’ or ‘well’, + -genos, ‘birth’ or ‘stock’ … contrast with dysgenics, dys (‘bad’ or ‘ill’) + -genos, Collins Concise Dictionary (Australian Edition, 1995)
ஐ the US in particular was a hotspot of the eugenics movement, producing pro-eugenic films like The Black Stork (1917) which preached a chilling message of “Kill defectives, Save the Nation”
¤ this dysgenic sensibility, that race disintegration was occurring was so universally pervasive in the early 1900s that even black intellectuals in America led by W E B DuBois advocated that the ‘Negro race’ guard against racial decay by elevating up the “talented tenth” of the black community
⍍ Charles Darwin himself was ahead of the movement expressing elitist eugenics views in 1871 in The Descent of Man, “We civilised men…. do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick.. . thus the weak members of society propagate their kind.”
❇ the offspring of “low stock” were characterised as “the increasingly disproportionate progeny of the criminal” who were “swamping civilisation”, R Waddell, (Preface) The Fertility of the Unfit, cited in E J Wilson, ‘Eugenic ideology and racial fitness in Queensland, 1900-1950’, Unpub. PhD thesis (Department of History, University of Queensland, May 2003),
www.espace.library.uq.edu.au
§ pointedly, many of the top figures (especially the medical doctors) in the Aust/NZ eugenics movements were born in Britain and migrated to the Antipodes

[1] the self-doubt harboured by Britons and by colonials in other dominions of the Empire was accentuated by a further sense of diminution after the Anglo-Boer War felt by the British professional classes, resulting what has been described by C L Bacchi as a “gloomy heredity determinism”, C L Bacchi, ‘The Nature-Nurture Debate in Australia, 1900-1914, Historical Studies, (19) 1980, quoted in M Cawte, ‘Craniometry and Eugenics in Australia: R.J.A. Berry and the Quest for Social Efficiency, Historical Studies, (22) 1986
[2] D Sewell, ‘How eugenics poisoned the welfare state’, The Spectator, 25-Nov-2009, www.spectator.co.uk
[3] ‘Story: Contraception and sterilisation Page 5 – Information about contraceptives’ Encyclopedia ; ‘Eugenics – Positive And Negative Eugenics’, http://medicine.jrank.org/pages/2210/Eugenics-Positive-Negative-Eugenics.html; some eugenicists, driven by fear of miscegenation, advocated complete segregation of races, especially prominent in South Africa and the USA; S Dubow, ‘Placing “Race” in South African History’, in W Lamont [Ed.], Historical Controversies and Historians, (1998),www.disciplinas.stoa.usp.br
[4] ‘Charles Henry Pearson’, Wikipedia, www.en.m.wikipedia.org. The race war notion – especially in regard to Japan’s emerging Pacific presence – found a fervid home in the Australian and New Zealand press and literature in the early century, eg, ‘The Commonwealth Crisis’, published in The Lone Hand, presents a fantasy scenario of a Japanese invasion of the Northern Territory, D Walker, ‘National Identity’, in J Jupp [Ed.], The Australian People: An Encyclopaedia of the Nation, Its People and their Origins
[5] Venereal disease was exceptionally virulent during the Great War, and in the prevailing eugenics environment in Australia, an indicator of what constituted racial ‘unfitness’ … the dilemma for society’s ruling elite as the war went on was that ‘respectable’ citizens also found themselves victims of the disease!, M Larson, ‘The iconography
[6] A Wanhalla, ‘New Zealand’, 23-Oct-2014, (Eugenics Archive NZ). Retrieved 8-Nov-2016 from www.eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/connections/544873c7d861fb0000000001
[6] ‘Eugenics – Problem of the Race – a lecture by Sir Robert Stout’, Evening Post (Wellington), 6-Aug-1912 https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/EP19120806.2.53
[7] Neo-Malthusian ideas informed eugenics thinking, especially regarding fertility control, R A Soloway, ‘Neo-Malthusians, Eugenists, and the Declining Birth-Rate in England, 1900-1918’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Autumn, 1978)
[8] Baden-Powell declared in 1911: “Our business is to … pass as many boys through our character factory as we possibly can”, M Rosenthal, The Character Factory: Baden-Powell and the origins of the Boy Scout movement
[9] M A Hasian, The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought
[10] C Muir, The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress: An Environmental History