British and German Eugenicists in Transnational Context, 1930-50 (360G-Wellcome-092724_Z_10_Z)

This project strives to provide a new contextualisation of the interwar eugenics movement with special emphasis placed on the impact of hereditarian thought on international policy-making discussions and processes. This analysis will be concentrated on the three most active national eugenics movements prior to the Second World War: that of the United States, Great Britain, and Germany. It was researchers in these nations that developed most of the underpinnings of eugenics and the formal structures responsible for its influence on state policy. Despite the largely uniform early strength of eugenics in these countries, by 1939 they had reached differing policy achievements. American state governments were the first legislative bodies to implement eugenic laws including sterilisation of the mentally defective. In Germany the newly unified state considered a sterilisation act during the Weimar Republic but this was rejected due to the Catholic opposition. It was only after the rise of Hitler's government that eugenics found fertile ground for its policies. While the example of the United States seems to indicate that a combination of wealthy backers and grass-roots support for eugenics was most critical to its success at the local level and the German example appears to confirm the intuition that nondemocratic governments could most easily implement eugenic policies, the British case provides an interesting counterexample. Despite the fact that Francis Galton and many of the field's most significant early researchers were British there was little pressure to implement eugenic ideas in practice. The campaign for sterilisation in the early 1930s failed to attract powerful supporters and failed quietly, effectively marking the end of attempts to pass eugenic policies prior to the War. This project aims to seek new explanations for the successes and failures of eugenics in policy-making circles by examining these in international contexts. For instance, there is evidence that the British campaign for sterilisation had been launched largely because of pressure from German and American delegates at international congresses who sought to push British representatives from leadership positions by demonstrating their comparative impotence in lobbying for domestic policies these nations had already passed. Similarly, after the promulgation of the 1933 German sterilisation law American eugenicists feared that their continental colleagues were rapidly pushing their governments toward eugenic policies that might threaten American power. The result was a short-term idolisation of Nazism in American eugenic circles. Thus, this research will provide a network analysis of the international connections and indeed rivalries that affected the production of eugenic laws in the countries under consideration. This aspect has never been considered by scholars and will enhance the understanding of how and why eugenics was able to have such a significant impact in some countries while remaining excluded from the corridors of power in others.