society should encourage the strongest, fittest and brightest to have more children, while pushing, or even forcing, those deemed inferior or weak to produce fewer children or none at all, held great sway over the elites of pre-war Britain and America. In some, it fed dreams of a new breed of supermen, a pantheon of almost godlike people destined to rule over an ever-stronger human race. In others, it meant dangerous — and lethal — schemes to weed out those branded unfit for life.
The historical surprise is that the advocates of eugenics were not, as one might expect, right-wing cranks and racists. Enthusiasts included some of Britain’s greatest intellectuals, many of them on the left, all revered to this day. The quotations and arguments James comes across in the Sterling Library — from the great writer George Bernard Shaw, philosopher Bertrand Russell, the father of the welfare state William Beveridge, the lauded economist John Maynard Keynes and many others — are real and accurate. The pioneer of birth control, Marie Stopes, was so dedicated a eugenicist that she disinherited her son on the grounds that he had married a woman who wore glasses — thereby risking that his children would be short-sighted — preferring to leave much of her fortune to the Eugenics Society.
Across the Atlantic, the idea had an equally strong hold on the most privileged circles. Eugenics was particularly in vogue at Yale, as the genuine quotations cited by the fictional Dr Curtis in his evening seminar attest, including the one attributed to the former president of the university, James Angell, described by historians as ‘a fanatic eugenicist’. All the italicized passages and chapter headings from Leonard Darwin are quoted faithfully from his book What is Eugenics?
Evidence of the extent to which eugenic theory ran deep in the American academy is to be found in the bizarre saga of the naked ‘posture photographs’. Two scholars did indeed dream of compiling an Atlas of Men and an Atlas of Women and, to that end, persuaded several Ivy League colleges to trick their undergraduates into posing nude, with pins taped to their back. The full story was revealed in ‘The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal’ by Ron Rosenbaum, published in the New York Times magazine in January 1995: the phrase ‘physique equals destiny’, uttered by Dr Curtis, should properly be credited to Rosenbaum. He discovered that among those snapped without clothes in this effort to establish a link between physical prowess and intellectual ability were the younger selves of the first President Bush, Hillary Clinton and Meryl Streep, along with the journalists Bob Woodward and Diane Sawyer.
The two authors of the initiative, one from Harvard, the other from Columbia, were apparently inspired by Francis Galton, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin’s, who was fascinated by questions of intelligence and inheritance, and who had earlier proposed a comprehensive photographic archive of the British population. His US heirs aimed to realize that dream in their own country, appropriating the already-existent practice of freshmen posture photographs as cover for the project.
Related was the apparently harmless practice of bussing girls from women’s colleges to Harvard, Princeton or Yale to meet boys, the experience recounted in the novel by Dorothy Lake. Again, this did actually happen and is widely thought to have had a eugenic motive, encouraging the young men and women of the educated elites to meet and to mate in what one account of the period calls ‘a kind of eugenic dating service’. The Wolf’s Head Society does exist and does have a ‘tomb’ of the kind James sees, but there is no record of it having any association with eugenics. The same is true of the Elizabethan Club.
As for the rest of the story, much of that too is borne out by the historical record. The Right Club is no figment of the imagination; it did meet at the Russian Tea Room in London, with the participation of the organizations and individuals named. My Reginald Rawls Murray is fictional, but some will detect a resemblance to Archibald Maule Ramsay, the Conservative MP and anti-Jewish agitator who did indeed pen the ditty ‘Land of Dope and Jewry’, its lyrics reproduced here exactly as he wrote them. After 1940, Ramsay spent the rest of the war behind bars, interned under Defence Regulation 18B, partly because of his involvement with a suspected spy at the US Embassy.
That man was Tyler Kent, a truly remarkable character who has much in common with the Taylor Hastings of this novel. A cipher clerk at his country’s embassy in London, he became involved with the Right Club and was eventually entrusted with its membership list, kept in a leather-bound, lockable red book — which can now be read in full in The Red Book: The Membership List of The Right Club edited by Robin Saikia.
The young American removed from the embassy multiple secret documents, including the clandestine correspondence between Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. He passed those papers onto Ramsay, apparently in the hope that they would reach isolationist US politicians bent on thwarting FDR’s march to war. Scholars agree that had those letters to Churchill become public, Roosevelt may well have been wounded beyond recovery. In the event, they fell into the hands of German intelligence. The extracts appear here exactly as they were written. The full exchanges can be read in Churchill amp; Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, Volume 1, Alliance Emerging, October 1933-November 1942, edited with commentary by Warren F Kimball.
Kent was eventually exposed. When the authorities raided his home, they found nearly two thousand stolen documents as well as the keys to the US Embassy cipher room. He was tried and sentenced and, like Ramsay, served out the rest of the war in prison. Later he resurfaced in the United States, as the publisher of a newspaper identified with the Ku Klux Klan. He is said to have died a pauper in a Texas trailer park in 1988.
The American milieu in which James Zennor finds himself in late July 1940 is, I hope, also faithful to the facts. At that time the United States in general, and the Yale campus in particular, were riven by debate over US involvement in the war. The university chaplain, the Reverend Sidney Lovett, was a pacifist; others were strongly in favour of coming to Britain’s aid.
In Washington, there certainly were senior politicians aiming to discredit Roosevelt, both to sabotage his re- election in November 1940 and to thwart his advocacy of military action. Hans Thomsen, the then Charge d’Affaires at the German Embassy, actively sought to influence US domestic politics, backing vocal isolationists and even covertly paying for newspaper advertisements making the case against war.
It is also well-documented that the Chicago Tribune was the leading mouthpiece of the America First movement, formally launched in September 1940, while Time magazine under its campaigning editor Henry Luce, was a loud advocate for US intervention.
The novel’s earlier action is also grounded in fact. Barcelona did indeed host an alternative Olympic Games, the People’s Olympiad, in 1936 on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. The battles I refer to during that conflict are anything but fictitious, with James Zennor’s war experience tallying in part with that of the real-life Esmond Romilly, in whose story I was educated by the excellent Rebel: The Short Life of Esmond Romilly by Kevin Ingram.
Preston McAndrew is entirely fictitious and based on no one. And yet his notion of war as a cleansing fire is, I believe, no more than the idea of eugenics taken to its logical conclusion — an idea that was utterly mainstream in the pre-war period. Painful though it is to admit, a veritable pantheon of British and American intellectual heroes believed in a theory that today would make most of us shudder.
Three generations on, we take pride in the belief that the Second World War was fought out of moral revulsion at the ideas embodied by the Nazis. The awkward truth, however, is that intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic were deeply in thrall to a set of principles we would now regard as horribly close to Nazism. This fact, one of the last great secrets of the Anglo-American elite, has lay buried for more than seventy years. It may be time to exhume it and give it proper examination.
