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EUGENICS, POPULATION RESEARCH, AND SOCIAL MOBILITY STUDIES IN EARLY AND MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITAIN*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2015

CHRIS RENWICK
CHRIS RENWICK*
Affiliation:
University of York
*
Department of History, University of York, York, yo10 5dd[email protected]
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Abstract

Eugenics and sociology are often considered polar opposites, with the former seen as a pseudo-science that reduces everything to genes and the other a progressive social science focused on the environment. However, the situation was not quite so straightforward in mid-twentieth-century Britain. As this article shows, eugenics had a number of important formative intellectual, institutional, and methodological impacts on ideas and practices that would find a home in the rapidly expanding and diversifying discipline of sociology after the Second World War. Taking in the careers of leading individuals, including Alexander Carr-Saunders, William Beveridge, Julian Huxley, and David Glass, and focusing on the relationship between eugenics, ‘population research’, and the emerging field of social mobility studies, the article highlights the significant but underappreciated influence interwar biosocial thinking had on intellectual, scientific, and political cultures in post-war Britain. In so doing, the article draws on recent scholarship on the ‘technical identity’ embedded in mid-century British social science, which, it is suggested, provided the link between the research under consideration and the progressive politics of those who carried it out.

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Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 59 , Issue 3 , September 2016 , pp. 845 - 867
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for their financial support (grant number AH/L007312/1), Alex Goodall and Mike Savage for reading and commenting on earlier drafts, Sabine Clarke for pointers on colonial contexts, two anonymous referees for their generous, insightful, and helpful reports, Nicholas Gane for enlightening discussions about history and sociology, and the numerous conference and seminar audiences whose probing questions helped clarify my thoughts on a number of issues. I must also thank the Galton Institute for permission to consult and quote from papers in the Eugenics Society archives and the staff in special collections at the London School of Economics for their assistance.

References

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2 Ibid., p. 3

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4 For an example of a recent debate that touched on many of these issues, see Scott, John and Husbands, Christopher T., ‘Victor Branford and the building of British sociology’, Sociological Review, 55 (2007), pp. 460–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Studholme, Maggie, ‘Patrick Geddes: founder of environmental sociology’, Sociological Review, 55 (2007), pp. 441–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fuller, Steve, ‘A path better not to have been taken’, Sociological Review, 55 (2007), pp. 807–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Studholme, Maggie, Scott, John, and Husbands, Christopher T., ‘Doppelgängers and racists: on inhabiting alternative universes: a reply to Steve Fuller's “A path better not to have been taken”’, Sociological Review, 55 (2007), pp. 816–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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14 This criticism was shared by the branch of Galton's followers led by the socialist biostatistician Karl Pearson, the first Galton Professor of Eugenics at University College London, who emphasized the importance of expert knowledge and technocratic approaches to social problems. Mazumdar, Eugenics, human genetics, and human failings, p. 43; Theodore M. Porter, Karl Pearson: the scientific life in a statistical age (Princeton, NJ, 2004), ch. 9; MaKenzie, Statistics in Britain, ch. 4.

15 Kevles, In the name of eugenics, chs. 8–12; Mazumdar, Eugenics, human genetics, and human failings, chs. 3–4.

16 Werskey, The visible college, pp. 60–6, 101–14, 199–211; Lancelot Hogben, Scientific humanist: an unauthorized autobiography, ed. Adrian Hogben and Anne Hogben (Woodbridge, 1998).

17 James Tabery, Beyond versus: the struggle to understand the interaction of nature and nurture (Cambridge, MA, 2014), ch. 2; Steindór Jóhann Erlingsson, ‘The rise of experimental zoology in Britain in the 1920s: Hogben, Huxley, Crew, and the Society for Experimental Biology’ (Ph.D. thesis, Manchester, 2005).

18 William Provine, The origins of theoretical population genetics (2nd edn, Chicago, IL, 2001); Peter J. Bowler, The eclipse of Darwinism: anti-Darwinian theories in the decades around 1900 (London, 1992); David J. Depew and Bruce H. Weber, Darwinism evolving: systems dynamics and the genealogy of natural selection (Cambridge, MA, 1995), chs. 8–9.

19 Tabery, James, ‘R. A. Fisher, Lancelot Hogben, and the origin(s) of genotype–environment interaction’, Journal of the History of Biology, 41 (2008), pp. 717–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Tabery, Beyond versus, ch. 2.

20 Lancelot Hogben, Mathematics for the million: a popular self-educator (London, 1936); Lancelot Hogben, Science for the citizen: a self-educator based on the social background of scientific discovery (London, 1938); Peter Bowler, Science for all: the popularization of science in early twentieth-century Britain (Chicago, IL, 2009), ch. 6.

21 Alexander Carr-Saunders to C. P. Blacker, 17 Feb. 1932, Eugenics Society Collection, Wellcome Library, London, SA/EUG/C/56, © The Galton Institute; Lancelot Hogben, Genetic principles and medicine and social science (London, 1931).

22 Robert Bud, The uses of life: a history of biotechnology (Cambridge, 1991), ch. 3; Renwick, Chris, ‘Completing the circle of the social sciences? William Beveridge and social biology at London School of Economics during the 1930s’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 44 (2014), pp. 478–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jose Harris, William Beveridge: a biography (revised edn, Oxford, 1997), chs. 11–12; Ralf Dahrendorf, A history of the London School of Economics and Political Science, 1895–1995 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 249–66.

23 J. L. Gray and Pearl Moshinsky (1938), ‘Ability and opportunity in English education’, in Lancelot Hogben, ed., Political arithmetic: a symposium of population studies (London, 1938), pp. 337–8. For more on Arthur S. Otis and his tests, see Franz Samelson, ‘Lewis M. Terman and mental testing: in search of the democratic ideal’, in Michael Sokal, ed., Psychological testing and American society, 1890–1930 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1987), pp. 95–112. For more on testing in an English context, see Gillian Sutherland in collaboration with Steven Sharp, Ability, merit, and measurement: mental testing and English education, 1880–1940 (Oxford, 1984); Adrian Wooldridge, Measuring the mind: education and psychology in England, c. 1860–c. 1990 (Cambridge, 2006).

24 Gray and Moshinsky, ‘Ability and opportunity in English education’, p. 335.

25 IB essentially judged an individual in terms of their distance from what was deemed the normal score (always expressed as 100) for someone of their age. Gray and Moshinsky argued that a different measure was required because the selective status of some of the schools they studied made interpreting their results using IQ difficult.

26 Gray and Moshinsky, ‘Ability and opportunity in English education’, pp. 349–66, 366–73.

27 J. L. Gray and Pearl Moshinsky, ‘Ability and opportunity in relation to parental occupation’, in Hogben, ed., Political arithmetic, pp. 377–417.

28 David V. Glass and J. L. Gray, ‘Opportunity and the older universities’, in Hogben, ed., Political arithmetic, pp. 418–70.

29 Gray and Moshinsky, ‘Ability and opportunity in English education’, p. 336.

30 Hogben, ‘Introduction to part II’, in Hogben, ed., Political arithmetic, pp. 332–3. The idea of ‘social wastage’ became increasingly visible in social science research from the mid-1920s onwards. Two of the most prominent examples include Kenneth Lindsay's Social progress and educational waste: being a study of the ‘free-place’ and scholarship system (London, 1926), which included a preface attributed to Viscount Haldane but actually written by R. H. Tawney, and Richard Titmuss's Poverty and population; a factual study of contemporary social waste (London, 1938), though Titmuss was referring to the higher mortality rates among the lower classes.

31 Richard Toye, The Labour party and the planned economy, 1931–1951 (Woodbridge, 2003), chs. 1–3; Daniel Ritschel, The politics of planning: the debate on economic planning in Britain in the 1930s (Oxford, 1997). See also Richard Cockett, Thinking the unthinkable: think-tanks and the economic counter-revolution, 1931–1983 (London, 1994), chs. 1–2.

32 Indeed, as Andrew Hull has argued, economists were much more successful than their counterparts in the natural sciences when it came to selling themselves as experts to government during this period. Hull, ‘Passwords to power: a public rationale for expert influence on central government policy making: British scientists and economists, c. 1920–c. 1925’ (Ph.D. thesis, Glasgow, 1994), chs. 5–7.

33 Anonymous [Nicholson, Max], ‘A national plan for Great Britain’, Week-End Review supplement (14 Feb. 1931)Google Scholar; John Pinder, ed., Fifty years of Political and Economic Planning: looking forward, 1931–1981 (London, 1981); Richard Overy, The morbid age: Britain and the crisis of civilization (London, 2010), pp. 81–6; Ritschel, The politics of planning, ch. 4.

34 Charles, Enid, ‘The effect of present trends in fertility and mortality upon the future population of England and Wales and upon its age composition’, London and Cambridge Economic Service Special Memoranda, 40 (1935), p. 6 Google Scholar. See also Enid Charles, The menace of under-population: a biological study of the decline of population growth, originally issued under the title The twilight of parenthood (London, 1936), and C. P. Blacker and David V. Glass, The future of our population? (London, 1937). On the issue of declining fertility in government statistics, see Szreter, Fertility, class and gender; Soloway, Demography and degeneration. See Alison Bashford, Global population: history, geopolitics, and life on earth (New York, NY, 2014), for an account of these issues in national and international perspectives during the twentieth century.

35 Osborne, Thomas and Rose, Nikolas, ‘Populating sociology: Carr-Saunders and the problem of population’, Sociological Review, 56 (2008), pp. 552–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Angner, Erik, ‘The history of Hayek's theory of cultural evolution’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 33 (2002), pp. 695–718 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Alexander Carr-Saunders, The population problem: a study in human evolution (Oxford, 1922).

37 Alexander Carr-Saunders and David Caradog Jones, A survey of the social structure of England and Wales (Oxford, 1927); Alexander Carr-Saunders and P. A. Wilson, The professions (Oxford, 1933).

38 Alexander Carr-Saunders, Eugenics (London, 1926).

39 Carr-Saunders, Alexander, ‘Eugenics in the light of population trends’, Eugenics Review, 27 (1935), p. 11 Google ScholarPubMed.

40 Ibid., p. 18.

41 Bud, The uses of life, ch. 3; Renwick, ‘Completing the circle of the social sciences?’; Harris, William Beveridge, chs. 11 and 12.

42 Glass had worked on the project that led to William Beveridge et al., Changes in family life (London, 1932), before working on projects based in the department of social biology.

43 Blacker and Glass, The future of our population?, p. 30; Blacker, C. P., ‘The future of our population’, Eugenics Review, 28 (1936), pp. 205–12Google ScholarPubMed.

44 Lancelot Hogben, ‘Introduction – prolegomena to political arithmetic’, in Hogben, ed., Political arithmetic, pp. 13–46, especially pp. 24–30; Renwick, ‘Completing the circle of the social sciences?’.

45 Hogben, ed., Political arithmetic, epigraph. Beveridge's statement was taken from his hugely controversial farewell lecture as director of the LSE, in which he attacked the kind of social science practised by the likes of John Maynard Keynes and Hayek. Beveridge believed his support for empirical and positivist social research was at the root of opposition to his directorship. Beveridge, William, ‘The place of the social sciences in human knowledge’, Politica, 2 (1937), pp. 467 and 470 Google Scholar. See Renwick, ‘Completing the circle of the social sciences?’.

46 Census of 1911, vol. xiii, Fertility of marriage report, Pt 1, Cd. 8678, PP 1917–18; Census of 1911, vol. xiii, Fertility of Marriage Report, Pt 2 (London, 1923); Szreter, Fertility, class and gender, chs. 2–5.

47 Susan Pederson, Family, dependence, and the origins of the welfare state: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge, 1993); John Macnicol, The movement for family allowances, 1918–1945: a study in social policy development (London, 1980); Mazumdar, Eugenics, human genetics, and human failings, pp. 48–50. For his part, Beveridge introduced a family allowance scheme for LSE's academic staff in 1926.

48 David V. Glass, The struggle for population (Oxford, 1936); Glass, David V., ‘The Berlin Population Congress and recent population movements in Germany’, Eugenics Review, 27 (1935), pp. 207–12Google Scholar; Glass, David V. ‘Population policies in Scandinavia’, Eugenics Review, 30 (1938), pp. 89–100 Google ScholarPubMed; Glass, David V., ‘Gross reproduction rates for the départements of France, 1891 to 1931’, Eugenics Review, 30 (1939), pp. 199–201 Google ScholarPubMed.

49 Glass, The struggle for population, pp. 87–9.

50 François Lafitte, The internment of aliens (Harmondsworth, 1949); Deakin, Nicholas, ‘Besieging Jericho: episodes from the early career of François Lafitte’, Cercles, Occasional Papers Series, 11 (2004)Google Scholar, www.cercles.com/n11/deakin.pdf.

51 ‘First draft of memorandum, February 23rd 1938’, Political and Economic Planning Collection, British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics, PEP/PWS/1/folder 1.

52 Royal Commission on Population report, Cd. 7695, PP 1949, p. iii.

53 David V. Glass and Eugene Grebnik, Trend and pattern of fertility in Great Britain: a report on the family census of 1946, Part i, Papers of the Royal Commission on Population, vol. 6 (London, 1949). For more on the Royal Commission, see Soloway, Demography and degeneration, pp. 346–43. After the wartime lull in its activities and a period stationed in the Eugenics Society's premises, the PIC received a substantial grant from the Nuffield Foundation, which was founded in 1943, and was re-housed at the LSE.

54 Renwick, British sociology's lost biological roots.

55 One important exception is Szreter, Richard's study of the sociology of education – ‘Some forerunners of sociology of education in Britain: an account of the literature and influences c. 1900–1950’, Westminster Studies in Education, 7 (1984), pp. 13–43 CrossRefGoogle Scholar – though Szreter's account of eugenics is fairly light.

56 Halsey, A history of sociology in Britain, p. 70.

57 Savage, Identities and social change.

58 Steinmetz, George, ‘A child of the empire: British sociology and colonialism, 1940s–1960s’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 49 (2013), pp. 353–78Google ScholarPubMed.

59 Savage, Identities and social change, ch. 3; David Edgerton, Warfare state: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge, 2004).

60 R. R. Kuczynski, Demographic survey of the British colonial empire, iii (London, 1948); Alexander Carr-Saunders, New universities overseas (London, 1961); Sir Charles Jeffries, ed., A review of colonial research, 1940–1960 (London, 1963), part ii, ch. 1; Steinmetz, ‘A child of the empire’.

61 Glass, ‘Preface’, in David V. Glass, ed., Social mobility in Britain (London, 1954), p. vi.

62 Glass, ‘Introduction’, in Glass, ed., Social mobility in Britain, p. 5; Pitirim Sorokin, Social mobility (London, 1927). Indeed, Sorokin acknowledged Glass's assessment in the foreword to the post-war reprints of his 1927 book. Sorokin, Social and cultural mobility (New York, NY, 1964), foreword [no page reference].

63 See, for example, Becker, Howard, ‘The process of secularisation: an ideal typical analysis with special reference to personality change as affected by population movement’, Sociological Review, 24 (1932), pp. 138–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Almost all articles published in the Sociological Review during the interwar period pursued these economic definitions of social mobility.

64 Alfred Marshall, Principles of economics, i (2nd edn, London, 1891), book 4, chs. 4–12. See also Robbins, Lionel, ‘Notes on some probable consequences of the advent of a stationary population in Great Britain’, Economica, 25 (1929), pp. 71–82 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Andrew Miles, Social mobility in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England (Basingstoke, 1999), chs. 1–2. As criticism of Glass's post-war social mobility project indicated, the focus on economic issues, particularly occupation, was problematic, not least because it excluded huge numbers of women. In many ways, these problems were an inevitable constraint of the methods that Glass and others pursued, which only permitted analysis of issues and categories on which sufficient data was collected – a trend that was reinforced by John Goldthorpe's exclusion of qualitative evidence in his hugely influential Nuffield study, which began during the early 1970s. As Geoff Payne has argued, these constraints had implications for political debates about social mobility, in which politicians equate social mobility with increased wages. Payne, Geoff, ‘The new social mobility? The political redefinition of a sociological problem’, Contemporary Social Science, 7 (2012), pp. 55–71 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65 Volker Welter, Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the city of life (Cambridge, MA, 2002); John Scott and Ray Bromley, Envisioning sociology: Victor Branford, Patrick Geddes, and quest for social reconstruction (Albany, NY, 2013); Chris Renwick, ‘Evolutionism and British sociology’, in John Holmwood and John Scott, eds., The Palgrave handbook of sociology in Britain (Basingstoke, 2014), pp. 71–96.

66 Ginsberg, Morris, ‘Interchange between social classes’, Economic Journal, 39 (1929), pp. 554–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Lucinda Platt, ‘Poverty studies and social research’, in Holmwood and Scott, eds., The Palgrave handbook of sociology in Britain, pp. 30–53; G. R. Searle, The quest for national efficiency: a study in British politics and political thought, 1899–1914 (Oxford, 1971); Ben Jackson, Equality and the left: a study in progressive political thought, 1900–1964 (Manchester, 2007).

68 R. H. Tawney, Equality (London, 1931), especially chs. 3, 5, and 6; Miles, Social mobility, chs. 1–2.

69 Miles, Social mobility, p. 5.

70 Glass, ‘Introduction’, in Glass, ed., Social mobility in Britain, pp. 24–5.

71 John Goldthorpe in collaboration with Catriona Llewellyn and Clive Payne, Social mobility and class structure in modern Britain (Oxford, 1980); Savage, Identities and social change.

72 Michael Young, The rise of the meritocracy, 1870–2033: an essay on education and equality (London, 1958); Asa Briggs, Michael Young: social entrepreneur (Basingstoke, 2011), ch. 5; Ramsden, Edmund, ‘Surveying the meritocracy: the problems of intelligence and mobility in the studies of the Population Investigation Committee’, Studies in History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Science, 47 (2014), pp. 130–41CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. The term ‘meritocracy’ was coined two years earlier by Allan Fox, ‘Class and equality’, Socialist Commentary, May 1956, p. 13.

73 Payne, ‘The new social mobility?’; Janet Finch, Research and policy: the uses of qualitative methods in social and educational research (London, 1986).

74 Glass, ‘Introduction’, in Glass, ed., Social mobility in Britain, p. 28.

75 Savage, Mike and Burrows, Roger, ‘The coming crisis of empirical sociology’, Sociology, 41 (2007), pp. 885–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 For more on this idea, see Friedman, Sam, ‘The price of the ticket: rethinking the experience of social mobility’, Sociology, 48 (2014), pp. 352–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Selina Todd, The people: the rise and fall of the working class, 1910–2010 (London, 2014).