Who Fought Eugenics?

I'll divide the essay according to three periods. Here: 1) before, 2) during, 3) after World War II.

Before the Second World War.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was a heartfelt opponent of Eugenics.

Eugenics and Other Evils
by G.K. Chesterton 1922
http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/Eugenics2.html

Clickable chapters but too small text. Copypaste and read in larger format, whatever section you like.

Here is an example, with the first paragraph from the chapter click:

PART ONE : THE FALSE THEORY
I, WHAT IS EUGENICS?
http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/Eugenics2.html#part11

The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. It is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists. It is no answer to say, with a distant optimism, that the scheme is only in the air. A blow from a hatchet can only be parried while it is in the air.

Eugenics and Other Evils
by G.K. Chesterton 1922
http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/Eugenics.html

Same work. The text is large enough, but no subdivisions can be separately clicked.

Später wandte er sich wieder dem Christentum zu, was 1922 zu seinem Eintritt in die Römisch-katholische Kirche führte.

So, he converted the exact same year as he wrote or at least published the book. This means the Catholic Church receiving him agreed with it. Actually, he wrote before Pius XI published Casti connubii in 1930. This means, the Catholic Church was another opponent before the Second World War, and remained so during and after. But all the countries where Eugenics was a thing back then (not yet involving Slovakia) were countries where the Church did not have the number of faithful needed to singlehandedly vote Eugenics out of power.

Some have pretended that Pius XI "condemned Nazi Eugenics" in "Mit brennender Sorge" - there is certainly a paragraph in it that indirectly refers to Eugenics, since that was one of the breaches against the Decalogue in the National Socialist régime. But Pius XI condemned Eugenics in 1930, before there was a Nazi régime. Italian Fascism had by then not yet imitated National Socialism on this matter.

Another opponent was the Austro-Fascist régime, one item why they refused Anschluss was that the National Socialist régime had implemented Eugenics within months of the takeover. Note, Dollfuss also was a dictator, but he was not condemned by the Church and he was not into Eugenics.

During the Second World War.

Catholics inside Germany, like Count Clemens August von Galen, the Bishop of Munster.

And opponents outside Germany helped to end it in Germany.

Vivat Patton.

It can be added that while the Red Army had other issues, East Germany did not continue that particular evil.

In around 1940, some people in Spain were involved in some Eugenics ideals, but thanks to the Catholic Church, Franco at least never legislated on the evil suggestions of Valleja Nájera, even if they were less directly evil than the Lynchburg and Nazi version. Lynchburg? Should have already mentioned it, but I'm coming to it.

The Origins and Development of Catholic Opposition to Eugenics
April 11, 2022, Dennis Durst
https://voegelinview.com/the-origins-and-development-of-catholic-opposition-to-eugenics/

After the Second World War.

If someone said, not totally without cause, "we fought a war to end Eugenics" this could leave the impression that Patton ended Eugenics not just in Germany, but overall. He unfortunately didn't end it in Lynchburg.

The lies of Lynchburg (How U.S. evolutionists taught the Nazis.)
by Carl Wieland, This article is from
Creation 19(4):22–23, September 1997
https://creation.com/the-lies-of-lynchburg

So, who ended it in Lynchburg, and when?

The end of Eugenics didn't come in 1945, but in the 1970's. At least this is true for the practise of "legal" forced sterilisations. Some other practises, either continuing the malpractise in secret (Swedish psychiatry has been accused of this) or changing the means, like putting "voluntary" abortion (and an indoctrination meant to push many "probable mothers of undesirables" to chose abortion) continued. But who exactly is to be honoured for ending forced sterilisation? Who was to Lynchburg what Alito was to Roe v Wade?

It was not Patton. George S. Patton died in 1945, on December 21st. It was also not his son George Patton IV, since he made a military only carreere. So, who?

The Catholic Church didn't rise to enormously more power in the 1970's, not in US, not in Canada, not in the four countries Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark.

There was exactly one power that really helped to end Eugenics. Culture - including counterculture.

Secular hippie freaks helped.
Jesus freaks helped.
Either batch could be described as undesirables, and either batch got involved in making babies too fast for Lynchburg to control it.

That's it. These are the guys who took on where Chesterton had failed and where Patton hadn't even been involved.

And for Sweden, Katarina Tajkon, the gipsy woman who was known as Katitzi in her childhood. And the people who turned her mémoirs into a comic.

And Ted Kennedy helped:

U.S. Senate hearings in 1973, chaired by Sen. Ted Kennedy, revealed that thousands of U.S. citizens had been sterilized under federally supported programs. The U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare proposed guidelines encouraging each state to repeal their respective sterilization laws. Other countries, most notably China, continue to support eugenics-directed programs openly in order to ensure the genetic makeup of their future.

Britannica : Popular support for eugenics : Anti-eugenics sentiment
https://www.britannica.com/science/eugenics-genetics/Popular-support-for-eugenics

Who didn't really help?

One answer would be - Lenin's Soviet Union. Or, not before Stalin, 1931:

By examining this previously unstudied and almost completely forgotten relationship, this article casts light on the complex and contradictory co-operation between Swedish and Soviet racial biologists in the 1920s and its paradoxical afterlife. Condemned under Stalin but partially rehabilitated after 1956, Lundborg was cited as an authority by Soviet raciologists well into the 1970s, long after his ideas had fallen out of fashion and become highly controversial, if not outright rejected, in Sweden. Particular attention is given the enduring popularity in Soviet science of the concept of race.

...

Eugenics in Soviet Russia and Sweden developed along much different paths. Long understudied, the history of the Soviet eugenics movement has gained serious attention only in the past 20 years.28 In the 1920s, the Soviet eugenicists were actively supported by the People’s Commissariat of Health and Education. These aimed at establishing a Marxist, Soviet eugenics movement as part of a vision for a scientific organization of society.29 The young Soviet state gave the phenomenon of nationalism serious attention. In their nation-building efforts, Soviet ideologues affirmed the existence not only of nations, but also of races. The Soviet nationalities policies of the 1920s were pragmatic, maybe also politically opportunistic, but the Soviet anthropologists’ concepts of race and nationality also reflected attitudes prevalent in the European and North American discourse at a time before eugenics turned into a politically divisive issue.

...

Following the rise of Stalin, in 1931 eugenics was condemned as “bourgeois” and “fascist” whereas, somewhat paradoxically, primordialism and the belief in the existence of physical human races became integral components of Stalinist ideology.

Eugenics and Racial Biology in Sweden and the USSR
https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/cbmh.31.1.41

28

On Soviet eugenics, see Paul Weindling, “German-Soviet Medical Co-operation and the Institute for Racial Research, 1927- c. 1935,” German History, 10, 2 (June 1992): 177-206; Adams, Allen, and Faith Weiss, “Human Heredity and Politics”; and Mark B. Adams, The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil and Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). On eugenics in the People’s Republic of Poland, see William de Jong Lambert, “Przyczynek do myśli eugenicznej i łysenkizmu w polskiej biologii okresu międzywojennego i w latach powojennych,” in Magdalena Gawin and Kamila Uzarczyk, eds., Eugenetika-biopolityka-państwo: Z historii europejskich ruchów eugenicznych w pierwszej połowie XX w. (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Neriton and Instytut Historii PAN, 2010), p. 187-204.

29

Kühl, Die Internationale der Rassisten, p. 93.

So, Stalin did some good after all. Probably partly due to his past as seminarist in the Orthodox Church.

But another example would be modernist or liberal Protestants.

Other studies have attempted to describe the general pattern of the response of Christian groups towards eugenics. Véronique Mottier has noted that Protestant countries tended to practise eugenics more readily than Catholic ones, however she suggests that religion was not the decisive factor in determining the implementation of eugenic legislation: the balance of regional and national power in the provision of welfare was crucial.5 Marouf Hasian Jr., has demonstrated that eugenic theories in the USA were allied with nativist and anti-Catholic prejudice.6 In this case conflict was divided along religious, cultural, and racial lines; eugenics was just one more factor added to an existing split. In general, where religious believers responded positively to eugenics, these individuals have been identified as those who abandoned, or adapted, elements of ‘orthodox’ theology. Christine Rosen has argued that it was religious leaders who had ‘moved away from traditional religious tenets’ that were most supportive of eugenics. She highlighted ministers in the Social Gospel movement, ‘liberals’, and ‘modernists’, as those with the most representation in eugenics organisations; however, Rosen also notes the influence that such members were able to exert by offering criticism from within. This included advice from members such as Fr. John Cooper, a Catholic Priest.7 Jonathan Rose, in his study on working-class thought, has discussed the case of Ruth Slate; Rose argues that Slate became interested in the ‘sex question’ and attended lectures about eugenics after she had adopted the ‘new theology’ of Reginald John Campbell.8 The impression created by this scholarship is that eugenics was an aggressive force of secularisation, and religious participants were passive, liberal believers who sacrificed orthodoxy to the eugenic cause.9

Christianity and Eugenics: The Place of Religion in the British Eugenics Education Society and the American Eugenics Society, c.1907–1940
Graham J. Baker*, Soc Hist Med. 2014 May; 27(2): 281–302.
Published online 2014 Apr 8. doi: 10.1093/shm/hku008
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4001825/

People like Dean Inge (mentioned in this paper) would be the kind of guys who would consider Catholic dogmaticism "arrogant" and who were themselves arrogant enough about other people marrying and making children.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Clement Maria Hofbauer CSR
15.III.2023

Vindobonae, in Austria, sancti Clementis-Mariae Hofbauer, Sacerdotis professi Congregationis a sanctissimo Redemptore nuncupatae, plurimis in Dei gloria et animarum saliite promovenda ac dilatanda ipsa Congregatione exantlatis laboribus insignis; quem, virtutibus et miraculis clarum, [Sanctus] Pius Decimus, Pontifex Maximus, in Sanctorum canonem retulit.