“We Who Champion the Unborn”: Racial Poisons, Eugenics, and the Campaign for Prohibition

Abstract

Dr. Caleb Williams Saleeby was the author of Parenthood and Race Culture, one of the first monographs on eugenics and the book that popularized the term “racial poison.” The goal of eradicating the racial poisons and the harm they caused — particularly infant morbidity and mortality — provided common ground for early 20th century reformers, and their concerns fed the growing support for legal prohibition of alcohol.

Introduction

In 1920, the 18th amendment to the United States Constitution, commonly known as the “Prohibition Amendment,” became effective. Its provisions outlawed “the manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors.” Williams Jennings Bryan, three-time candidate for president and secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson, was one of the most prominent advocates for Prohibition. Bryan highlighted the importance of a scientific argument that bolstered the case for abolishing the liquor trade in an article published several years after the amendment had passed. “The most frightful warning” against alcohol, Bryan said, “was furnished by the study of eugenics. It was found that alcohol travels in the blood and curses, even before their birth, the children of drinking parents.” Bryan reserved “special praise” for the “noble women who banded together under the name of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union” and spread the eugenic message of alcohol toxicity “to the students in schools” and distributed to the public “the results of scientific research” on the alcohol question. ¹ The most important proponent of that eugenic explanation of the dangers of alcohol was Scottish physician Caleb Williams Saleeby.

A growing body of scholarship describes the American legal experience with eugenics, which provided justification for dozens of state laws such as the statutes that mandated sexual sterilization or prohibited interracial marriage. ² There is also a considerable literature about the only federal statute passed with the support of open lobbying by eugenic leaders: the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act. ³ But the most important source of law for the United States is the Constitution, and little has been published about how 20th century eugenic concerns were an important factor in passage of a major constitutional amendment. In this article I will explain how the Prohibition Amendment received support from one of the founders of the eugenics movement, who began his work not in the U.S., but in Great Britain.

My specific focus is Caleb Saleeby, who is regularly mentioned in books on eugenics, ⁴ and whose campaign in favor of prohibition was described decades ago, ⁵ but who otherwise has received little attention, despite his major role in mounting an international coalition against alcohol, in the name of eugenics. Saleeby provided language and concepts that amplified fears of alcohol and publicized the importance of adopting laws that would prohibit its manufacture, sale, and use. His efforts were directly aligned with individuals, such as Bryan, and organizations like the Anti-Saloon League and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which led the campaign that eventually resulted in the U.S. Prohibition amendment. Saleeby linked alcohol to the societal maladies of crime, disease, poverty, and welfare dependence, putting him in the mainstream among eugenists who prescribed medical and scientific solutions to social problems.

Saleeby earns our attention not only because he was so important to the success of Prohibition in the U.S., but also because his activism gives us insight into what eugenics meant to many of its earliest adherents. His drive to dramatize the danger of the “racial poisons,” like alcohol, shows how concerns that people had about environmental toxins could be fit into the broader field of eugenics.

⁶ He provides a bridge between people who became medical eugenists in the 19th century, such as John H. Kellogg, who emphasized “biologic living,” ⁷ public health leader W.A. Evans, ⁸ or Harvey Wiley, father of the Food and Drug Administration. ⁹ Those men embodied the transition between sentiments commonly described as “Lamarckian,” which argued that traits acquired during a parent’s life would be passed down to children, and those who later put much less emphasis on environmental factors and explained anatomy, morbidity, temperament, and the character of children via a theory of “hard heredity.” ¹⁰

Saleeby earns our attention not only because he was so important to the success of Prohibition in the U.S., but also because his activism gives us insight into what eugenics meant to many of its earliest adherents. His drive to dramatize the danger of the “racial poisons,” like alcohol, shows how concerns that people had about environmental toxins could be fit into the broader field of eugenics.

Caleb Saleeby

Caleb Williams Saleeby was born 1878. He graduated with honors in medicine from Edinburgh University and practiced in a maternity hospital briefly before taking a position as a resident officer at the York City Dispensary, where he observed obstetrics from the other side of the Atlantic. He moved to England in 1901, settling in London to do postgraduate medical work. After only a short time as a physician, Saleeby left medical practice to be a journalist and author. He eventually wrote sixteen books, and he published regularly on a variety of issues for popular magazines like Pearson’s Weekly and Harpers, while contributing numerous articles to professional and technical journals.

A turning point in Saleeby’s career came soon after he had received his medical degree. ¹¹ In May 1904, he attended the meeting of the Sociological Society at the University of London, at which Francis Galton delivered a now famous lecture on eugenics. Galton’s lecture was entitled: “Eugenics, its definition, scope and aims,” and it quickly drew the attention of the press both in England, and within days in the United States as well. One American newspaper announced Galton’s talk with the dramatic headline: “Doctor invents science.” ¹² The lecture was soon published in an American journal, further alerting the academic world to its significance. ¹³

Galton’s lecture was fateful for Saleeby, who would claim a spot in the leadership of a new movement by coining terms such as “eugenist,” to describe like-minded advocates, “positive and negative eugenics,” to distinguish among eugenic policies, ¹⁴ and “eugenic feminism,” his designation for women in the movement. ¹⁵

Saleeby was eventually credited as “the outstanding propagandist for eugenics.” ¹⁶ In 1907 he put his skills as a publicist to use when he helped found the Eugenics Education Society, described by one commentator as “the intellectual heart of English Eugenics.” ¹⁷ Others saw him not only as “an evangelizing eugenicist and acolyte of Francis Galton” but also an “eccentric.” ¹⁸ That eccentricity, and his heated attacks on the work of Galton protégé and biographer Karl Pearson, led to an early break with the Eugenics Education Society and formal eugenics establishment in England, ¹⁹ but did nothing to prevent the public from identifying Saleeby as an early and prominent spokesman for the new movement.

Saleeby was extensively involved in governmental commissions and voluntary organizations. He held positions on the National Conference on Infantile Mortality, the National Birth Rate Commission, the Divorce Law Reform Union, the National Temperance League, and the National Council of Public Morals. ²⁰ Five times between 1907 and 1924 he was designated as Royal Institution Lecturer on eugenics, and he was a founder and Chairman of the Sunlight League. ²¹

He lobbied for initiating a ministry of health as part of the war effort in World War I and worked to perfect the design of body armor for soldiers, winning significant attention for his advocacy for, and invention of, the steel helmet. ²² His greatest contribution to the prohibition effort was the idea that some substances or conditions to which people might commonly be exposed constituted a eugenic threat. To characterize the biologic nature of this threat, Saleeby coined the term “racial poison.” ²³

Some racial poisons were diseases — like syphilis or gonorrhea — that could kill off a population by causing sterility. The phrase also encompassed environmental toxins like lead, nicotine, and alcohol. Saleeby’s coinage became shorthand for factors that simultaneously poisoned individuals, inhibiting their growth and healthy functioning, and their “germ plasm,” the cellular repository of heredity. Eugenists like Saleeby knew that alcohol lowered moral inhibitions and provided a gateway for familial destruction through interpersonal violence, promiscuous sex, and subsequent disease. As Saleeby said, drinking was like “the germinal tissues of years … soaking in alcohol.” ²⁴ Its effects cascaded from users to their mates, ultimately leading to more “ill-born” children.

The goal of eradicating the racial poisons and the harm they caused provided common ground for early 20th century reformers, linking the movements for social hygiene, public health, and temperance. In the United States, the phrase “racial poison” became a rallying cry for eugenic enthusiasts fearful of decreasing fertility among the “better classes” which they condemned as “race suicide.” Their concerns fed the growing support for legal prohibition of alcohol. When Prohibition became law in the U.S., Saleeby called it America’s “Great Experiment in Eugenics.” ²⁵

Parenthood and Race Culture

Galton’s original definition of eugenics appeared in 1883, ²⁶ but 25 years passed before anyone else attempted to write a complete book on the topic. Saleeby filled that gap in1909, with Parenthood and Race Culture, in which he confidently claimed to “survey and define the whole field of eugenics” ²⁷ and announced dramatically: “eugenics is going to save the world.” ²⁸

Saleeby’s book and other writing received extensive publicity. The New York Times published advertisements ²⁹ and followed up with several feature articles by Saleeby. ³⁰ Saleeby’s focus on the “racial poisons” immediately caught on among those who were selling alcohol cures, as well as among those who advocated for prohibition of strong drink. ³¹

The goal of eugenics, said Saleeby, “is a better race.” First, the right kind of parents must be encouraged to reproduce. Then, we must “take care of those selected” to be parents, which included protecting “the expectant mother from alcohol, lead or syphilis.” “That,” said Saleeby, “is strict eugenics by any definition worth a moment’s notice.” ³²

Reminding his reader that he had coined the term “eugenist,” “which is now the accepted term,” Saleeby echoed Galton, asserting that eugenics is “at once a science and a religion.” ³³

We have to consider the parental environment of the children we desire, as well as their innate quality. Thus, positive eugenics must largely take the form, at present, of removing such disabilities as now weigh upon the desirable members of the community, especially of the more prudent sort. ³⁴

But Saleeby also saw another side to the eugenics equation: “The proportion of the mentally defective in Great Britain is now 0.83 per cent.: and it is doubtless rising yearly. Only by the recognition and application of negative eugenics can this evil be cured.” ³⁵

Saleeby’s attention was drawn to environmental factors that might have an impact on prospective parents, and he had developed the phrase “racial poisons” to identify those factors. Did this put him into the camp of the Lamarckians, who believed that acquired characteristics could be inherited? In his early work, he made his position on Lamarckism clear. He was entirely familiar with the controversy surrounding the Lamarckians and August Weissmann’s work emphasizing the impossibility of acquiring parental characteristics. Weismann had attacked the premise of Lamarck in an experiment. He cut off the tails of rats, rebreeding them generation by generation, and then noting that each new generation still had a tail. ³⁶

Saleeby admitted that the semantics of “acquiring” were confusing, but, he said, the failure to take into account the fetal environment only added to the confusion.

Said Saleeby:

An acquirement is an acquirement, whether it be acquired five minutes or months before, or five minutes or months after, the change in environment which we call birth. Thus a character may be congenital — that is, present at birth — but not inherent or germinal, not inborn at the real birth, which was the union of the maternal and paternal germ-cells at conception. Such congenital characteristics are really acquirements, and — poisonings apart — are not transmissible. ³⁷

On Lamarkism, Saleeby said specifically: “This doctrine of the transmission of acquired characters by heredity, as we have seen, is, at the present day, repudiated by biologists.” Nevertheless, he emphasized that “the inherited potentialities of the germ are only potentialities; no more. They are entirely at the mercy of the environment.” ³⁸ He later insisted: “Heredity or no heredity, we cannot desire to have children born into the alcoholic home; heredity or no heredity, we cannot desire to have children born into the criminal environment.” ³⁹ His last word on Lamarck: “The controversy between Lamarck and Weismann has absolutely nothing to do with the question.” ⁴⁰

In Parenthood and Race Culture Saleeby trained his sights on alcohol, which he considered the most destructive racial poison.

The term racial poisons teaches us to distinguish, amongst substances known to be poisonous to the individual, those which injure the germ-plasm: and amongst substances poisonous to the expectant mother herself, we must distinguish those which may also poison her unborn child. ⁴¹

Alcohol was, insisted Saleeby, “pre-eminently the racial poison,” which was “the most important aspect of the whole alcohol question.” ⁴² He linked alcoholism as both the cause and the result of feeblemindedness, and said that the children of alcoholic, feebleminded women “are not only doomed by the very nature of their germplasm, but they will actually be many times intoxicated not merely in their cradles but before their birth.” ⁴³ Defective women inhabited a vicious cycle. Their germ plasm made them defective at birth, the alcohol ingested by their mothers provided additional poisoning as they nursed, then they were condemned to live in a home polluted by alcohol. Most “chronic inebriates” were feebleminded and so were their progeny. Therefore, he concluded, “the chronic inebriate must not become a parent.” ⁴⁴

Saleeby had written a memorandum for the Eugenics Education Society that he included in Parenthood. “It perhaps fairly sums up, in the briefest possible space,” he concluded, “the indisputable relations between alcohol and parenthood.” He argued that three factors insured that the “children of the drunkard” were “less capable of citizenship” than other children:

1. 1. The inheritance of nervous defect inherent in the parent. (defective germ plasm),

2. 2. Intra-uterine alcoholic poisoning in cases where the mother is an inebriate. (prenatal environment),

3. 3. Neglect, ill-feeding, accidents, blows, etc., which are responsible on the one hand for much infant mortality, and combined with the possible causes before mentioned, for the ultimate production of adults defective both in body and mind. (family environment).

Restraining the drunkard was imperative, he claimed, lest “a defective race” emerge that would pose “a grave financial burden upon the sober portion of the community, to say nothing of higher considerations.” ⁴⁵

Saleeby’s argument about the effects of alcohol was hardly novel. Francis Galton had focused on the hereditary inclinations that fostered a “craving for alcohol” in 1865, as did his precursors throughout the 19th century. ⁴⁶ One of those authors had been Saleeby’s own grandfather, who made similar arguments in 1856. ⁴⁷ Saleeby’s writing came long after the career of “habitual drunkard” Jane Cakebread had been thoroughly chronicled in the British press. She held the record for most arrests “for drunkenness and rowdyism,” and made her 300th visit to the prison in 1895. ⁴⁸ Her notoriety prompted some to propose abolition of criminal sentences for drunkenness, in favor of commitment to an asylum or other efforts at reform. ⁴⁹ Immoral women were often the group to blame as a font of evil following drink. ⁵⁰

Trends in birth rates added to general concerns about the toxicity of alcohol to women. The national birth-rate began to decline in Great Britain in the mid-1870s, and by 1901 births had dropped by twenty-one percent, falling most dramatically among the middle classes. Studies in England and Wales showed nearly one in six babies died by their first birthday. ⁵¹

Saleeby supported the Notification of Births Act, which Parliament passed in 1907. It enabled local health authorities to keep track of newborn babies, monitor their progress, and provided more substance to what before then had often been speculative concerns. ⁵² Alcohol was thought to be a significant factor in the failure of some pregnancies to yield a live birth, as well as the difficulties that infants faced in their first year of life.

The birth rate fell an additional 13 percent by the time World War I started in 1914 and continued in decline until the War’s end. Some statistical analyses showed a decrease of as much as 37 percent during the same period, ⁵³ a time when Saleeby held a leadership role on the National Birth Rate Commission. In 1916 he contributed to the report on the Declining Birth Rate, where he noted that “… alcohol is also a racial poison of large importance, causing direct blastophthoria, which may often lead to failure of conception or ante-natal death affecting the birth-rate and survival rate.” ⁵⁴

At the time Parenthood was published, Saleeby sat on the executive committee of the National Conference on Infantile Mortality. Speaking at that group’s 1908 annual meeting on “The Human Mother,” he argued that: “If certain influences, such as alcohol and some few diseases, have been in operation, the babies may be already doomed” at birth. ⁵⁵ To remedy infant mortality, Saleeby urged “the principles of maternalism: There is no State womb, there are no State breasts, there is no real substitute for the beautiful reality of individual motherhood.” ⁵⁶

Saleeby was quick to enlist the government as the agency to enforce his eugenic prescription. He proposed a four-point program on motherhood that put the government in charge of all things maternal, making childbirth a public health issue.

1. 1. All motherhood to be regarded as a first charge on the resources of a nation.

2. 2. Government authority to look after maternity.

3. 3. The handing over of all maternity cases, regardless of wealth or social conditions, to the public health authority.

4. 4. The establishment of maternity centers, both per-natal and post-natal, throughout the country. ⁵⁷

“All this,” said Saleeby, “is fundamental eugenics, and is far more feasible than any question of breeding for genius or of deciding who shall marry whom and who shall not marry whom.” ⁵⁸

His interest in eugenics was directly related to his work as a physician, but Saleeby’s focus on infant mortality and the declining birth rate also fed into the concerns of other groups, like the American Association for the Prevention of Infant Mortality, which also had a eugenics section. ⁵⁹ Increased infant mortality led to fewer babies, and highlighted growing fear of what became known as “race suicide,” the concern that a demographic Armageddon would end with extinction of the white, Anglo Saxon population. At the time of The Declining Birth Rate in 1916 this had become a constant trope in the U.S., as it had in Europe, ⁶⁰ and played a large part in the immigration restriction debate of that time.

Saleeby did not support the idea, sometimes prevalent in eugenic circles, that some infant mortality had a positive impact.

The causes of infant mortality destroy many children inherently unfit, diseased or weakly. But we are not justified in keeping up our infant mortality, if we find, as we do, that for every diseased child whom they destroy they kill many who were healthy at birth and damage for life many more.… ⁶¹

Finally, said Saleeby, “The opponent of infant mortality and the eugenist appeal to the same principle and avow the same creed: that parenthood is sacred, that it must not be casually undertaken.” ⁶²

Racial Poisons and Alcohol: The Eugenic Context

Saleeby’s emphasis on the “racial poisons” fit neatly into the larger eugenics movement. The two most well-known eugenic problem families were the Jukes, described in Richard Dugdale’s 19th century treatise, and the Kallikak family, the saga of Deborah Kallikak by psychologist Henry Goddard. Both studies highlighted the dangers of alcohol. Dugdale included dozens of tables and charts in The Jukes, showing the study subjects classified in groups that reflected the hereditary effects of habitual drunkenness as a cause of family degradation and community degeneracy. ⁶³

The problems of Martin Kallikak, described in Goddard’s blockbuster text, The Kallikak Family, ⁶⁴ were directly related to his encounter with the so-called “feebleminded tavern wench.” That single alcohol drenched dalliance led to “hundreds of the lowest types of human beings.” ⁶⁵ Students of eugenics in the U.S. trained at the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) read those books and learned to list the telltale signs of degeneration and decay in pedigrees, with alcohol listed as the alphabetically first and key consideration in compiling a heredity chart. ⁶⁶

The Woman’s Christian Temperance Movement in the Campaign for Prohibition

The eugenic connection between alcohol, infant morbidity and mortality was taken up by advocates for Prohibition. They spoke of social degeneration linked to the presence of alcohol, and regularly blamed increases in crime and demographic decay on the liquor trade. It was the policy of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Movement (WCTU) that such social problems were amenable to eugenic reforms.

The WCTU was founded in 1874, with the purpose of creating a “sober and pure world” by abstinence, purity, and evangelical Christianity. ⁶⁷ The constitution of the WCTU called for “the entire prohibition of the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors as a beverage.” ⁶⁸

The WCTU also engaged in numerous other reform activities, including the improvement of labor conditions, the abolition of prostitution, the funding of sanitation and public health, and advocacy for women’s suffrage and international peace.

By 1879 the movement for “scientific temperance” had become a focal point of the WCTU campaign against alcohol. That year Mary Hunt spoke to the WCTU’s national convention on “Scientific Temperance Instruction.” She urged the adoption of “text-book study of Scientific Temperance in public schools as a preventive against intemperance.” The following year the WCTU established a Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction in Schools and Colleges through which Hunt and her colleagues pressured state and national legislators to mandate temperance education. Instruction, said Hunt: “should give clear and emphatic utterance to the solemn warnings of science on this subject.” ⁶⁹ Congress adopted a federal law in 1886, and by 1900, every state had a law requiring students to receive anti-alcohol education. ⁷⁰

The eugenic marriage laws, which required medical examinations before marriage, provided an overlapping area of interest between eugenics and the WCTU. ⁷¹ Tying together the burgeoning popularity of those laws, with their insistence on premarital health examinations, Mrs. Frances W. Leiter, head of the WCTU health department, heralded the coming “eugenic woman with her correct poise of both mind and body.… The eugenic young woman will make certain demands before the sacred ceremony at the altar of matrimony — the certificate of health.” ⁷² As time passed the fervor for eugenic marriage laws spread from coast to coast. ⁷³ Before long eugenics took a regular position on the program of WCTU meetings and conventions, and the arguments against liquor also benefited from a eugenic gloss. ⁷⁴ When Cornell University began to provide instruction in eugenics and alcohol ⁷⁵ as part of the “first regular course on this subject in the world,” the organization responded: “We rejoice.” ⁷⁶

In time prominent leaders within the WCTU allied themselves with the eugenics movement in support of the abolition of alcohol. Mary Teats, “national purity evangelist” of the WCTU Christian Temperance Union later founded the Chicago Correspondence School of Gospel and Scientific Eugenics. ⁷⁷ Her embrace of eugenics was intended to eradicate prostitution as well as prohibit strong drink. She condemned “habits of life” such as sexual excess and the alcohol consumption that marred parental bodies and worked to “curse their offspring.” ⁷⁸

Edith Smith Davis was the Superintendent of the Scientific Temperance Department of the WCTU when she compiled a Compendium of Temperance Truth, a series of essays that were written by WCTU temperance counselors and instructors. ⁷⁹ The book had a whole chapter on alcohol and eugenics, deemed by Davis “this great field of scientific study” and included the Biblical curse of generational guilt often repeated by eugenists: “That there is nothing new under the sun receives confirmation in the fact that the law of Moses is the law of Eugenics—that the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.” ⁸⁰

Some prominent educators criticized the expansive overreach of the WCTU, whose insistence on making the anti-prohibition message a mandatory feature of the curriculum threatened to crowd out other scientific study in high schools. ⁸¹ But the WCTU had built a national campaign using the rhetoric of “poison” to describe alcohol, regardless of the amount or form in which it was ingested. Though scientific support for this position was often weak, for years it remained a key feature of the campaign for “scientific” temperance. In 1910, a publication by Saleeby’s rivals at the Galton Laboratory in London posed a challenge to the WCTU’s teachings.

As a member of the Eugenics Education Society, Saleeby engaged in the “running feud” with London’s Eugenics Laboratory, founded by Francis Galton and the home of pioneering biometrician Karl Pearson. ⁸² Pearson supported the position that hereditary defects in children — what he termed “inherent worthlessness” — led to early death, thus infant mortality represented an efficient elimination of those unfit to live. ⁸³ From that perspective, campaigns of social amelioration were counterproductive, and they interfered with “natural selection.”

Saleeby argued that heredity was important to “health, vitality and longevity,” but it was not “all important.” He was pointedly critical of Pearson’s interpretation of “natural selection.” “Conditions initiated in the slums are not natural,” said Saleeby, “they are hideously unnatural.” Saleeby catalogued the conditions to which pregnant women were exposed, saying that it was crucial not to forget “prenatal influences due to environment” and that “nurture was playing on heredity” during the entire term of a pregnancy. Saleeby also drew notoriety for disagreeing with the “better off dead” school of eugenics, which claimed that high infant mortality signaled a eugenic benefit. ⁸⁴ Saleeby’s brand of eugenics condemned any attempts at infanticide or neglect after birth. He also spoke energetically against abortion, as did most eugenists at the time, and listed himself among those “who champion the unborn.” Saleeby supported curbs on parenthood among those he judged “unfit.” But he also did “entirely deny the right of the eugenic idea to any voice or place as to the fate of children once they have come into being.” ⁸⁵

Ethel Elderton and her colleague Karl Pearson at London’s Galton Laboratory focused their research on how degeneracy or defect was passed down in a family. They claimed in a series of publications that people who had a dangerous impulse to drink were themselves possessed of hereditary weakness. It was that defect that led to their alcoholism, not alcohol that caused the defect. Consequently, they concluded, most people who drank to no serious ill effect were not a threat to future generations. ⁸⁶

Leaders of the WCTU linked the problems of “race suicide” with alcoholism, as Saleeby had, claiming that the increase in infant mortality and the falling birth rate were fueled by alcohol consumption. One headline captured the WCTU position. The temperance organization, it said, “Upholds Eugenics.” After prohibition had become law in America, one commentator in the WCTU’s Union Signal looked to the future, predicting that “world prohibition will be an ideal which we may work towards.”

Saleeby and his colleagues at the Eugenics Education Society took exception to the Galton Laboratory contention. Their campaign against alcohol rested on the designation of alcohol as a racial poison that posed a danger not only to the current, but also to future generations. Both Saleeby and the WCTU Scientific Temperance Journal quickly issued critiques of the Galton Laboratory’s work. ⁸⁷ As the debate between the eugenists persisted, the WCTU was caught up in the controversy, raising questions about which directions future efforts toward “scientific temperance” education would take.

Part of the educational work of the WCTU involved drafting short leaflets on important topics. A “leading scientist” reviewed tracts on “eugenics” and “inheritance” before approving them for distribution. When a pamphlet on “alcoholism and heredity” was submitted for vetting, reviewers noted that “the status of the question has not been definitely determined.” ⁸⁸ Temperance advocates found the comments of Henry Goddard, an early stalwart of the eugenics movement, particularly troubling. He underlined the lack of consensus in the field as to the actual effects of alcohol on “germ plasm,” the factor that transmitted heredity. Goddard targeted “unfounded statements” that asserted a link between drinking in parents and feeble-mindedness in children. His own position as author both of the best-selling book The Kallikak Family ⁸⁹ and Feeble-Mindedness—Its Cause and Consequences, ⁹⁰ a study that summarized data from three hundred cases, provided adequate credibility to his observations. Goddard was unwilling to conclude that “strong and incontrovertible evidence existed connecting alcohol as the cause of feeble-mindedness.” ⁹¹

This debate raged for years, but by the time the Prohibition campaign was over, The Union Signal newspaper, “official organ of the WCTU,” had sided with Saleeby. Galton Laboratory scientists had downplayed the effects of parental alcoholism on children, said Cora Stoddard, leader of the WCTU Scientific Temperance Federation. This study was often “exploited” according to Stoddard, as “would-be evidence” of the “claim that drinking by parents makes no difference with the children.” ⁹² By then, the WCTU was clearly in the Saleeby eugenics camp. Saleeby had described the Elderton/Pearson paper as a “terrible blow to eugenics” ⁹³ and Stoddard quoted directly from the Saleeby article that had condemned the Elderton/Pearson research.

Sarah E. Wise, head of the Moral Education branch of the WCTU, said:

The need of the education of parents along lines of eugenics, of heredity, of prenatal influences, alcoholic or emotional, of self-control, of child nature and child psychology becomes every day more urgent and more apparent. The character and condition of the parents determines the character of the child.

Again echoing Salleby, Wise added: “Parents need to be taught the close inter-relationship between the physical, the mental and the moral natures … We know that certain poisons in the body mean definite defects in the brain.” ⁹⁴ Just as Cora Stoddard had said: alcoholic drinks “by their effects on the germ-plasm … curse the unborn child.” ⁹⁵

Leaders of the WCTU linked the problems of “race suicide” with alcoholism, as Saleeby had, claiming that the increase in infant mortality and the falling birth rate were fueled by alcohol consumption. One headline captured the WCTU position. The temperance organization, it said, “Upholds Eugenics.” ⁹⁶ After prohibition had become law in America, one commentator in the WCTU’s Union Signal looked to the future, predicting that “world prohibition will be an ideal which we may work towards.” He suggested that soon “eugenics and sex hygiene” might be addressed by the Scientific Temperance department, though religious leaders cautioned that it might be premature to initiate “Sunday school instruction” in such topics. ⁹⁷

Passing Prohibition

The prohibition Amendment was introduced in Congress in December 1917 with a seven-year deadline for passage. Pundits and politicians predicted that it would pass easily, and their optimism was confirmed when Nebraska endorsed ratification in 1919, providing the two-thirds margin needed within little over a year. ⁹⁸ The clock began to tick toward enforcement measures that would begin on January 20, 1920.

Newspapers reported a plan that had been announced by the Anti-Saloon league to bring European speakers to America so that they could learn the value of prohibition first-hand. Then those thought leaders could speak for themselves to their European counterparts in the fight for worldwide prohibition.

To help launch the international campaign Saleeby traveled to the U.S. in spring 1919 for a convention of the Anti-Saloon League. It was a several-week meeting that brought together delegates from every continent in five different cities in North America. On June 5, international delegates including Saleeby assembled in Washington, DC; two days later they signed a constitution for the new World League against Alcoholism. The next day, Saleeby was joined on the dais by William Jennings Bryan and Dr. Howard Hyde Russell, who had founded the Anti-Saloon League in 1893 and was numbered among the “prophets of the anti-liquor movement.” ⁹⁹ All three addressed the mass meeting. Saleeby’s talk reiterated his beliefs about the role of alcohol as a “racial poison.” He reminded the crowd of his long-standing conviction that “we eugenists would never succeed in purging mankind of its defective elements if we merely confined ourselves to the task of segregating the feeble-minded, etc., of the present generation,” but he had undertaken the equally pressing task to “protect parenthood against the racial poisons.” ¹⁰⁰ Saleeby would join Russell in leadership positions for the World League against Alcoholism as a member of the General Council, the Executive Committee and Permanent International Committee, where he served as the representative of England. He was later elected as Chairman, and also toured in this role in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. He called Prohibition “the greatest health measure in history.” ¹⁰¹

As the effective date for Prohibition approached, Saleeby embarked on the Anti-Saloon League speaking tour in support of the coming regime. But the headlines that announced the tour inevitably gave first billing to another more famous prohibition champion. William Jennings Bryan is well remembered for his political career, but is also known today as the opponent of Clarence Darrow in the famous Scopes 1925 “Monkey Trial,” which challenged the use of a textbook that taught both evolution and eugenics. Because of that role, Bryan is often portrayed as an opponent of eugenics. Bryan clashed with eugenic popularist Albert Wiggam, and his undelivered “Last Speech” meant for the Scopes trial railed against Wiggam’s New Decalogue of Science, which praised the “beneficent hand of natural selection.” ¹⁰² Bryan’s opposition to evolution also prompted a response from eugenic leader Charles Davenport. ¹⁰³

But the assessment of Bryan as “implacably opposed to Social Darwinism and eugenics,” ¹⁰⁴ ignores the distinction between attitudes characterized as “Social Darwinism,” a phrase used by philosopher Herbert Spencer and later popularized decades after Bryan, ¹⁰⁵ the actual statements of Darwin in books like Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1871), and everything else that one might identify with eugenics. In The Descent of Man Darwin described some of the attitudes later expressed by many eugenic enthusiasts, arguing against asylums, hospitals and relief for the poor, and seemingly applauding the social benefit of deaths among those suffering from disease or disability. Bryan condemned this recitation of the “cruel law by which the strong kill off the weak,” saying, “Can you imagine anything so brutal?” ¹⁰⁶

Bryan’s quarrel with Darwinism, by his own account, began during his college years in the 1870s when he “became confused by the different theories of creation,” ¹⁰⁷ before Galton’s theory of eugenics even had a name. Bryan’s rejection of Darwin’s theory, even then, was focused on his understanding of natural selection: “The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate—the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak.” ¹⁰⁸ He disavowed the idea of a dog-eat-dog process of natural selection and was unsettled by many questions about the origins of life that Darwin’s theory left unanswered. Bryan eventually committed these conclusions to paper in a famous speech, “The Prince of Peace,” which he gave regularly starting in 1904. ¹⁰⁹ When Bryan’s views on evolution were taking shape, Galton’s ideas about eugenics were all but unknown among most Americans. While there are many features of “survival of the fittest,” a phrase first used by Spencer, that were echoed by people who embraced eugenics, there were others, like Saleeby, who rejected those implications of “natural selection.” ¹¹⁰ It was the “better off dead” faction of eugenists that drew objection from both Bryan and Saleeby.

Bryan made no blanket condemnation of eugenics, and readily allied himself with several other famous eugenists in the liquor fight. While Bryan was collaborating with Saleeby, he was also an officer in the National Dry Federation with eugenics booster and Kansas Senator Arthur Capper, who supplied the bronze “Capper Medal” given to winners of the American Eugenics Society’s Fitter Family Contests. ¹¹¹ Richmond Pearson Hobson was among the first congressmen to support a prohibition amendment. His failed bills in 1911 and 1914 set the stage for the 18th amendment. ¹¹² Hobson also named Saleeby’s work as a key to his decision in introducing early prohibition legislation. ¹¹³

The Bryan/Saleeby/Russell tour traveled through Tennessee, then North Carolina. The two main speakers often appeared as part of a coordinated program, where Bryan spoke at one church, and was followed by Saleeby, who had already spoken at a second church nearby. Russell joined them to make a trio.

Bryan’s wife, the attorney Mary Baird Bryan, was herself an official in the WCTU. She championed the National Society for the Promotion of Practical Eugenics along with Ellen Axson Wilson, wife of the President, and Antoinette Hughes, wife of Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes. That organization campaigned for mandatory health certificates and tests for syphilis as part of a eugenic marriage law. ¹¹⁴ Its members quoted the leaders of the eugenics movement, and endorsed immigration restriction, prohibition of marriage among those with disabilities or others “living on charity or receiving state assistance,” while applauding sterilization “for the good of the community,” and generally supporting measures “to make the stock better.” ¹¹⁵ It is highly unlikely that the woman who “managed his correspondence, helped prepare his speeches, edited his articles, and on occasion even negotiated with his fellow politicians,” whom he described as “my faithful helpmate” ¹¹⁶ would have publicly endorsed such a breadth of eugenic policies, had Bryan objected.

Bryan’s own comments on eugenics were a regular part of stump speeches on the lecture circuit. In 1912 newspapers reported that “Mr. Bryan discussed eugenics for a time during his address,” tracing “some of the faults of men” to “hereditary influences which were hard to overcome.” ¹¹⁷ Later, Bryan, the anti-evolutionist, joined Saleeby, the eugenicist, in fighting for Prohibition, even though Saleeby had publicly endorsed radical reforms like eugenic sterilization. ¹¹⁸ One scholar of the Scopes trial has concluded that “there is no evidence in Bryan’s writings on evolution (or in his available correspondence and papers) to suggest that he was particularly concerned with eugenics.” ¹¹⁹ We also know that attorney Clarence Darrow, Bryan’s opponent in the Scopes case, made arguments in favor of evolution and those arguments were not merely a part of his legal advocacy for Scopes. Darrow felt so strongly about the supporting the teaching of evolution that for the only time in his career, he volunteered his services for the Scopes case. ¹²⁰ Why would Darrow, who publicly condemned eugenics in published essays such as widely popular “The Eugenics Cult” ¹²¹ if he thought it was the same thing as evolution? Darrow embraced evolution while he rejected eugenics. In contrast, Bryan was happy to give public credit to eugenics if it led to Prohibition, but he rejected the monkey-to-man account of evolution and the cruelties he associated with natural selection.

Prohibition and Eugenics: Bryan and Saleeby on the Road

The Bryan/Saleeby/Russell tour traveled through Tennessee, then North Carolina. The two main speakers often appeared as part of a coordinated program, where Bryan spoke at one church, and was followed by Saleeby, who had already spoken at a second church nearby. Russell joined them to make a trio.

Bryan’s leading role was clear. “There was not the least doubt, … but that William Jennings Bryan is looked upon by the Anti-Saloon League Leaders as being possessed with 100 percent views on all prohibition subjects.” ¹²² Although his profile could not compete with “the great Commoner” and famed orator, Saleeby’s hand in the work of the World League against Alcohol was important, but more subtle. Its constitution, adopted in June 1919, incorporated a eugenic argument that could have been taken from Saleeby’s texts. The League planned

1. 1. To educate mankind regarding alcoholism, which is the poisoning of body, germ-plasm, mind, conduct and society, produced by the consumption of alcoholic beverages.

2. 2. To secure by legislation the suppression of the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages throughout the world. ¹²³

Bryan, Saleeby, and Russell all came to Washington, DC in September 1920 for a meeting of the World League against Alcohol. Both Bryan and Saleeby appeared several times on the program, and Russell was a member of the National Honorary Committee and an official Delegate to the Congress. Bryan addressed the delegates with stories about the long march of the prohibition movement. “Nearly half a century ago,” he said, “the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union was organized” in Ohio. Approximately twenty-five years later, Ohio also “gave birth to the Anti-Saloon League.” Both groups were “born in prayer,” noted Bryan, as he gave both organizations credit in “winning of this victory” for prohibition. But while he pointed to “conscience” as a critical factor in the campaign, he was quick to add a comment on the role of science. It “has taught us that even a moderate use of intoxicating liquor is harmful … [and] … that the alcohol habit fastened on man or woman does not stop with the one who drinks, but goes on and on, and curses children unborn.” He credited Saleeby directly for this insight:

… we have before us as one of the delegates from Great Britain, perhaps the most distinguished of all the authorities on eugenics, and by the study of this science they’ve learned that little children come into the world with their eyes closed to life’s possibilities before they could have a chance to see the light of day. My friends, I can’t think of anything more terrible than that a father or mother, for the pleasure of drinking, should thus injure their own flesh and blood — those who come into the world at their call.

Later in his address to the conference Bryan again quoted Saleeby, who had repeated during the Temperance tour a year earlier:

The saloon is not only an evil in itself, but it is the gateway to all other evils; and when we took away alcohol we took away the things that followed in the wake of alcohol; and our boys set an example in cleanliness of life and in freedom from the diseases that are attributable to immorality. ¹²⁴

Just as he had praised the WCTU for its eugenic message, ¹²⁵ Bryan echoed warnings about the eugenic dangers of diseases like syphilis, another of Saleeby’s “racial poisons.” “Eugenics furnishes us with a strong inducement to restrain against immorality,” he said, evoking “the child that is wrecked in the very dawn of its life by the inherited effects of immorality.” ¹²⁶ Bryan did not always agree with the eugenists, particularly when he discussed evolution, and he proclaimed that “scientific breeding as if man were an animal is a false doctrine.” ¹²⁷ But in the battle for Prohibition, the eugenist idea of alcohol as a “racial poison” was one of his most potent weapons.

After Prohibition had been in place for several years, Congressional hearings probed its effectiveness, providing an occasion for others to comment on the messages that had impact in advocating for original passage. A representative of a state constituent group of the WCTU again recounted the work of that organization and its ongoing efforts to enforce the law. She also reminded lawmakers of the role of the WCTU in education during the run-up to the prohibition campaign, and included a reference to Saleeby’s key concept — alcohol as racial poison:

The National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union is mobilizing a half million women for law observance and law enforcement. This organization laid the foundation for the passage of the eighteenth amendment by teaching in the schools of this Nation the fact that alcohol is a racial poison and educated the present generation which gave to us the eighteenth amendment. We continue to affirm this truth and will also continue this education of our youth. ¹²⁸

Yale Professor Irving Fisher, President of the Eugenics Research Association the year that prohibition went into effect, said that it was the “mission of the eugenics movement to discover and set itself against racial poisons” such as alcohol. ¹²⁹ He also invoked the name of Saleeby in Congressional Hearings: “… prohibition has come in, and the people who have worked for prohibition have done more than all the doctors and all the medicines in the world against the deadliest and most horrible of all diseases.” ¹³⁰

Another person who testified to Congress also echoed Saleeby’s “racial poison” argument, saying:

The advocates of the complete abolition and destruction of the liquor traffic have been persuaded that the eradication of this nefarious industry was the only remedy against alcoholism. The strongest argument for such a contention is that alcohol is a narcotic, a habit-forming drug, and a racial poison which, like lead and syphilis destroys the protoplasm and in that way injures the generations to come. ¹³¹

It is clear that many identified the language of “racial poison” as a eugenic message point and that most credited Saleeby as a key voice that swayed major advocates in advocacy for the prohibition amendment.

Conclusion

After 10 years, prohibition in American proved a social and legal failure. As the momentum built toward repeal, Anti Saloon League advocate Atticus Webb joined Texas Senator Morris Sheppard, author of the Prohibition Amendment, in publishing Dry America, a pamphlet distributed to churches and Sunday schools. It was meant to marshal arguments against repeal, and its cover declared Saleeby’s message: “alcohol must be branded a racial poison.” ¹³² But while speakers at the International Congress of Eugenics in 1932 continued to condemn alcohol as a racial poison, most eugenic organizations took no position on the momentum that was building for legal repeal of prohibition. ¹³³ They realized that the law did not prevent many people from drinking. New proposals for “gin marriage” laws began to appear ¹³⁴ that mirrored early attempts to regulate marriage with a eugenic motive. By requiring a 30-day waiting period for marriages, they would prevent risky, drunken, last minute weddings. As the gin marriage laws were adopted in several states over 10 years, proposals also proliferated to push a federal law regulating marriage. ¹³⁵ Other eugenicists, ignoring the coming demise of prohibition, attempted to address the degenerate alcoholic with sterilization — a legal remedy that was already available in most states. ¹³⁶

After more than 10 years of a “dry” regime in the U.S., in late 1932, Senator John Blaine of Wisconsin submitted a resolution to the Senate that would lead to the repeal of Prohibition. The 21st Amendment to the Constitution reversed the anti-alcohol law on December 5, 1933.

Less than 10 years later, Caleb Saleeby died. Some journalists seemed surprised that a person of such renown left only a very modest estate, ¹³⁷ and was remembered primarily as the person who advocated for steel helmets for British troops during WWI. Saleeby began his career arguing for prenatal care for pregnant women, and the children they would bear. One eulogist reminded readers that his proudest declaration was: “I am counsel for the unborn.” ¹³⁸ Yet the obituaries made no mention of Saleeby’s role as a champion of eugenic prohibition or of his famous tour with Bryan, and the term “racial poison” disappeared from the headlines. ¹³⁹ Bryan’s alliance with the eugenist was forgotten, and his “rejection of modern biology” was erroneously equated with hostility to eugenics. ¹⁴⁰ As the history of Prohibition was written, Saleeby and his crusade against alcohol as the most dangerous racial poison all but vanished.