Curtis raised the book once more. ‘“ As to the inferior types, we cannot, as we have seen, reduce the number of their descendants by the simple expedient of murder. All that can be done is to lessen the size of their families.” He makes it sound so easy, doesn’t he? Easy enough for Major Darwin, sitting there in his study in Kent or Staffordshire’ — he pronounced it Stafford-shy-er — ‘or wherever it was. But not so easy for those of us who wish to translate these ideas into practical policy. So what should we be doing? What action should we be taking to, in Darwin’s words, “lessen the size” of those inferior families?
‘We’re all familiar with the obvious methods: birth control, sterilization and so on. These are all useful, and indeed I’m proud to say the United States has been a leader in sterilization. But we are rapidly being overtaken, thanks to laws permitting involuntary sterilization or its variants right across Europe: Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, even little Estonia. And of course the true lead is now set by Germany, where forced sterilization has become a matter of state policy, the preferred methods being vasectomy for men, ligation — or tying — of the ovarian tubes for women and, in a few cases, the use of x-rays. Hundreds of thousands of Germany’s feebleminded or otherwise abnormal population have been prevented from reproducing under this programme. I hope it is clear that the old debate — on whether this range of available, medically-established methods should be used simply to persuade rather than to compel the naturally inferior to refrain from parenthood — is becoming rather out of date.’
James was watching the faces in the room, not one of which had so much as demurred. They were listening to this without a word of dissent, many nodding as Curtis moved onto definitions, quoting Leonard Darwin on what groups constituted the inferior: ‘“ These include the criminal, the insane, the imbecile, the feeble in mind, the diseased at birth, the deformed, the deaf, the blind, etc, etc.”’
The man on James’s left had now filled two pages of his notebook and was beginning a third, listing those whom Major Darwin, quoted by Curtis, further defined as undesirable for reproduction: the unemployed, those on low wages, who had thereby proved their lack of value to the wider society, as well as those who had experienced consumption or epilepsy. The lecturer helpfully spelled out Darwin’s exact words on the matter: ‘“ No one who has had unmistakable epileptic fits should become a parent.”’
‘ What, though, of those who seem sound enough in mind and body, but who have what Darwin calls “many defective relatives”?’ asked Curtis, affecting to sound genuinely vexed by the conundrum. ‘The answer is not immediately obvious, which is why such people, cursed by a family tree laden down with so much rotten fruit, should consult a doctor.’ Apparently Darwin was clear what the wise physician would propose in such a situation: ‘“ a marriage which should result in no more than one or two children.”’
Suddenly James knew, to the depths of his stomach, why he had declined the Oxford invitations to hear Miss Marie Stopes speak on the merits of contraception — yet another leaflet about that had landed in his pigeon-hole the day after Florence disappeared — why he had turned the page at the first sight of an editorial in praise of the eugenic approach to population control, why the idea had repelled him.
What right did these people have to say how many children he, or anyone else, was allowed to have? To them it was no more than arithmetic, a matter of simple utilitarian calculus, working out what set of arrangements would result in the greatest happiness for the greatest number. On that measure alone, it made perfect sense to reduce the number of criminals, lunatics and imbeciles along with the deaf, dumb and blind. But couldn’t they see that ‘utility’ could never be the only measure, that every one of those ‘defectives’ was a unique person, a person with a life and needs and desires and loves?
He thought of his parents, how they never referred to numbers of people but rather to ‘souls’: we had a good twenty souls at the meeting this morning. It was a habit of mind, a reminder that people were not mere building blocks in the creation of some theoretical utopia, but that each one of them was individual and precious. He used to mock such talk in his youth, but now he had a good mind to start hurling the phrase ‘sanctity of life’ from his back row seat, heckling the speaker and challenging this complacent audience of nodding heads by reminding them that human beings were not cattle to be bred but that each one was unfathomable and mys-terious and full of wonder — that people were never a means to an end, but an end in themselves.
But there was something else, too. He thought of his shattered shoulder. He recalled the repeated rejections from even non-military wartime service, explained to him by Bernard Grey down the telephone at Liverpool docks: not suitable for sensitive work. He remembered the verdict the Medical Examination Board had passed on him and which they might as well have branded onto his forehead: D1. He thought of all that and he realized his loathing for eugenics was grounded not only in principle but also in bitter, personal anger. He hated it because he knew that the likes of this William Curtis and his precious Leonard Darwin and probably everyone else in this bright, civilized seminar room would regard him, James Zennor — with his broken body, his blackouts, his rages and his torment — as ‘extremely undesirable’, as ‘inferior’, as ‘ defective’. And that, if Curtis and Darwin had their way, James too would doubtless have been told gently, and then compelled, to ‘refrain from parenthood’.
And it wasn’t just him, it was all the people these eugenicists were ready to throw aside like so much refuse. He thought of the young men born in the slums of Manchester, Birmingham or Glasgow who were now the defenders of Britain, risking their lives to save the country. Eugenics would have branded these soldiers sub- standard, not good enough to last another generation. He remembered a friend in the International Brigade, Len, who one night admitted that he was the child of a prostitute, that he had never known his father. Eugenics would have preferred he had never been born, yet he was one of the finest, bravest men James had ever known. He thought of his own parents, his father the son of a Cornish tin miner whose lungs had given out when he was barely forty years old. What would Darwin and Curtis have made of him, eh? He would hardly have made the cut, would he? They’d have snuffed him out, along with his son and his son — all of them expendable, so much human rubbish.
Christ, the blood was boiling in his veins. His body seemed to be quaking with rage. He needed to get a hold of himself. In an act of will, his right hand gripped his left wrist and squeezed tight. He had to assert control. He needed to know what this group, the American Eugenics Society, was all about; what connection, if any, they had with the Wolf’s Head and how they might lead him back to Florence and Harry.
So he calmed himself and, as if fiddling with the dial on the wireless, tuned in again to the speaker. Curtis seemed now to have turned to the specific task that confronted eugenicists in America. Quite baldly, as if it were entirely uncontroversial, the speaker explained that one fifth of the current population of the United States should never have been born — and that it was their duty, as the leaders of the coming generation, to ensure that such people were not born in the future.
‘Happily,’ Curtis went on, ‘you find yourselves in the right place. While other cities in the United States of America still labour in confusion and uncertainty, we are privileged to gather at a university where eugenics has taken firm root. Take these words, for example.’ He raised his hand again to signal a quotation. This time he was holding not Darwin’s little red book, but a sheaf of notes: ‘“ We could make a new human race in a hundred years if only people in positions of power and influence would wake up to the paramount importance of what eugenics means… we could save the bloodstream of our race from a needless amount of contamination.” Those,’ said Curtis with a beam of institutional pride, ‘were the words of the founder and first president of the American Eugenics Society, Irving Fisher, who, I’m glad to note, was a professor in the economics faculty right here at Yale. I don’t need, I’m sure, to mention Ellsworth Huntington, who only stepped down as president of our society’s board of directors a couple of years ago. He, as you all know, was Professor of Geography here at Yale. Or what about these words? “ Granting that society can decide just which individuals it wishes to eliminate as genetically inferior… how shall it proceed to eliminate them? ” That was Edmund W Sinott, a botanist, here at Yale. Those of you who are not yet subscribers to the Journal of the American Eugenics Society, I suggest you become so immediately: there are gems like that in every edition!’ he said to polite laughter.
‘And lest you think we have no allies at the very top, let me reassure you by citing the name of James Angell.’ There were nods of recognition. ‘Angell was President of Yale University until three years ago. Well, let me — and I promise this will be the last one — let me quote him to you: “ Modern medicine, unless combined with some kind of practicable eugenic program, may result in an excess of feeble and incompetent stock. Certainly the preservation and increase of life for individuals unable to make reasonably happy and effective adjustments to the conditions of living is a highly dubious blessing.” So you see. We have support at the highest possible level.’
A worm of suspicion was forming in James’s mind, slowly and steadily turning through everything that had happened these last few weeks. He wanted to follow it, to watch it. But he needed to pay attention to what he was hearing in this room. Eugenics had crossed the Atlantic and seemed to have docked and found safe harbour here at Yale. Nor could it be dismissed as the marginal preoccupation of a few cranks: these people counted the former
