Eugenics, Part 1: The Fear of Human Decline

**Become a member of Wrong Side of History** Get the complete End Notes at the end of each series, occasional essays and Q&As, and help support the research behind the show. Join here Why did eugenics become mainstream among some of the most educated, scientifically minded and socially conscious people of the early twentieth century? Before eugenics became inseparable in public memory from Nazi Germany, forced sterilisation and racial supremacy, British eugenicists believed modern civilisation had created a serious problem: medicine, sanitation, welfare and charity were saving lives while interrupting the natural selection that had shaped humanity. In Part One, we try to understand the fear of human decline that gave the movement its urgency, from evolution and heredity to Victorian workhouses, “care and quarantine,” positive and negative eugenics, and the belief that humanity could consciously direct its own future. This is the story of how a movement remembered for cruelty understood itself as compassionate, enlightened and even religious. Follow Wrong Side of History so you don’t miss **Part Two: The Promise of Human Betterment.** September 15. **READ THE SOURCES** *Parenthood and Race Culture* by Caleb Williams Saleeby: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42913/42913-h/42913-h.htm *The Descent of Man* by Charles Darwin: https://darwin-online.org.uk/converted/published/1874\Descent\F944/1874\Descent\F944.html *Essays in Eugenics* by Francis Galton: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/73802 *The Eugenics Review*, Volume 1: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000529261 **ON THIS EPISODE** Jay Singleton: Writer and host El Train: Music **JUMP TO:** (00:00) — What Were They Thinking? (00:55) — Why Eugenics Became Mainstream (02:25) — Two Observations That Changed Everything (04:17) — Could Humanity Direct Its Own Evolution? (05:21) — The Three Questions of Eugenics (06:38) — Eugenics as a New Religion (10:34) — The Victorian Problem: Charity and Natural Selection (14:05) — Care, Quarantine and Human Decline (18:00) — If Natural Selection Was Broken, What Next? (18:52) — Positive and Negative Eugenics (20:05) — Why Persuasion Came Before Force (24:29) — Preventing Predictable Hereditary Harm (25:31) — Next: The Promise of Human Betterment