Quote of the Day (Quinn Slobodian, on the Current ‘Libertarian Eugenics’)

“All told, the picture is one of a consistent, if unacknowledged, libertarian eugenics. The high-tech fertility market privileges those able to pay for genetic advantage. The retreat of public health abandons the social minimum needed to ensure that all children can survive and thrive. And immigration policy redraws the body politic along racial lines, achieving by exclusion what mid-century welfare states once sought through inclusion. What emerges is not a paradox but a 21st-century return of social Darwinism, wrapped in a language of choice, freedom and national greatness.”— Canadian historian Quinn Slobodian, “Libertarian Eugenics Is on the Rise,” The Financial Times, Nov. 15-16, 2025

The image of Quinn Slobodian accompanying this post was taken at the book presentation of the German edition of "Crack-Up Capitalism" (Kapitalismus ohne Demokratie), at the University of Frankfurt, on Nov. 21, 2023, by Toter Alter Mann.

Quote of the Day (Francis Galton, on Evolution and Eugenics)

“I was encouraged by the new views to pursue many inquiries which had long interested me, and which clustered round the central topics of Heredity and the possible improvement of the Human Race.”—Sir Francis Galton, Memories of My Life (1908)

It’s funny how some of the major advocates of science-based racism fell short of their own warped standards of perfection. In the last century, you need only look at Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and the object of their psychopathic veneration, Adolf Hitler. In the Victorian Era, the unprepossessing physical specimen would have been Sir Francis Galton (pictured), born on this date 190 years ago today.

The “new views” to which Galton (1822-1911) alluded in the quote above derived from cousin Charles Darwin’s epochal 1859 study, The Origin of Species. It’s been said that genius is not far removed from madness, and Galton treaded that line consistently—including, to preposterous effect, an equation linking male-pattern baldness to brain activity. (It may have been the first time in history that mathematics was employed to demonstrate that physical disfavor was a sign of genius. Talk about self-interested work!)

Now, this eccentric polymath (exploration was among his many endeavors) strove to prove that a) intelligence could be inherited and b) that laws should be propagated to help winnow out the more feeble-minded. He even coined the term for his pseudo-science: eugenics. Darwinians who dismiss how interrelated the work of Darwin and Galton is are best advised to read the fifth chapter of The Descent of Man (1871), “On the Development of the Intellectual and Moral Faculties,“ where Galton is cited approvingly several times.

Over the years, it’s become increasingly common to tie Christopher Columbus to the demographic decimation that virtually wiped indigenous tribes from North America. But there’s a far more direct line between Galton and the Holocaust.

This was the man who, after all, indicated that North American Indians were ''melancholic''; Negroes possessed ''neither patience reticence nor dignity''; and the Irish, after the potato famine, became ''low and coarse.'' Undesirables who procreated, he believed, should be declared “enemies of the state.” There really wasn’t that much distance between that statement and Hitler’s euthanasia program, which sought to eliminate “life not fit for life”--a kind of trial run for the gas chambers.

This Day in Woman’s History (Marie Stopes, Family Planning and Eugenics Advocate, Dies)

October 2, 1958—Having disinherited her son for marrying a woman not completely healthy (the daughter-in-law was nearsighted) and left her money to an organization that had called for racial purity and forced sterilization, Marie Stopes—scientist, poet, novelist, and birth-control advocate—died of breast cancer at age 77 in Dorking, England.

Together with her partner in family planning across the Atlantic, Margaret Sanger, Stopes has been hailed as a feminist icon who played a crucial role in securing reproductive rights for women.

It ought to be possible to consider the morality of contraception separately from abortion, just as it should be possible to evaluate the lives of these women without resorting to hagiography. When the study of history becomes politicized, however, as in these two cases, questions of motive and character that inevitably figure in assessing legacies are shunted to the side.

As implied by the opening sentence of this post, eugenics and scientific racism formed indelible parts of Stopes’ view on population control. That worldview underlay such developments in the first half of the 20th century as immigration restrictions, minority quotas in higher education, race theory, bans on interracial marriage, and the Nazis’ euthanasia program, the dress rehearsal for the Holocaust. (For a fine discussion of this shamefully broad-based movement, see Peter Quinn’s 2003 article “Race Cleansing in America” in American Heritage—or, if you’re inclined toward excellent historical fiction or mysteries, read the same author’s novel Hour of the Cat.)

Yet this aspect of the thinking of some of the most important family-planning pioneers has been, if not sanitized, then decidedly softpedaled by their biographers. Sanger, for instance, has been labeled a “Woman of Valor” by Ellen Chesler.

Anthony Comstock, the demented Puritan whose hysterical anti-obscenity campaigns led George Bernard Shaw to coin the term “Comstockery,” makes a convenient villain in the traditional narrative about Sanger’s drive to dispense birth-control advice. How often, however, do women’s studies curricula inform students that Sanger saw eugenics as “the great biological interpretation of the human race” that provided “the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems”? ("The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda," Birth Control Review, October 1921) Or that “Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race"? (Woman, Morality, and Birth Control, 1922).

Marie Stopes represents, at one and the same time, a more brilliant and problematic heroine than her friend Sanger. As a paleobotany student and lecturer, she not only broke down barriers to women but surpassed male colleagues.

Yet her unsuccessful attempt to help her scientist husband overcome his impotence—and the marriage’s subsequent annulment—altered the arc of her career, leading her to write a slew of books within only a handful of years describing birth control: Married Love, Wise Parenthood, Radiant Motherhood, and The Control of Parenthood. During this time, like Sanger, she founded the first birth-control clinic in her country (in this case, in 1921).

Critics’ charges that Stopes’ writings were, like obscene works then and now, designed to arouse were probably everything she could ask for in terms of increasing her sales. Making an enemy of the Catholic Church –especially through suing a Catholic doctor for misrepresenting her views and through writing critical letters to Pope Pius XI--also didn’t hurt her “street cred” with large elements of progressive opinion.

Too bad that so many of Stopes’ views, like Sanger’s, however, need to be hidden, or, if that is intellectually impossible, then explained away. How does one go about doing this?

* By saying that her views “need to be viewed in the context of her time.”
* By putting up red herrings (e.g., H.G. Wells, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Winston Churchill supported some form of eugenics, too).
* By ignoring the obvious (so many of her clinics were located in poor areas because she was keenly interested in ensuring minorities didn’t breed).
* By ignoring the fact that this woman of foresight in one area lacked elementary understanding in another (she believed that eugenics could solve, at a stroke, some of the most nettlesome problems of the industrialized world, but failed to note, as a scientist, that new cures and treatments could eliminate these problems in a far less draconian fashion)

Was Stopes really as "progressive" and "liberal" as her admirers--including the organization Marie Stopes International, which continues to offer advice on contraception and abortion in nearly 40 countries around the world--say? Let's see:

* The believer in women’s reproductive rights thought that some had more equal rights than others. Those who didn’t rate were women with inheritable mental or physical defects.
* This “progressive” was anti-Semitic (her stipulation for any potential baby she adopted included the provision that the child “must be completely healthy, intelligent and uncircumcised”).
* She warmed early on to Hitler--attending a eugenics conference sponsored by the Nazis, sent Hitler poems she had written, and only broke with him because his population surge beckoned war).

* She believed that "free love" within marriage was permissible, but not "perversion"--a category that she thought included homosexuality.

This month, at the recommendation of feminist academics and historians, Great Britain’s Royal Mail is putting Stopes on a postage stamp as part of a series marking women’s achievements. This has aroused headshaking from people who have trouble with someone who not only made the occasional mistake, but who committed the major part of her life to a whole series of them.