Eugenics, Euthenics, and, Institutionalization

In my last post in this series I talked about social Darwinism and the general idea that was current in the latter part of the 19th and early part of the 20th century that humanity shouldn't "molly coddle" the poor and weak because that would just encourage them to pollute the gene pool. This encouraged the worst excesses of capitalism, militarism, and, colonialism. That's talking on the "macro scale". This article is going to show how this way of looking at the world influenced important Canadian policies that continue to be an issue.

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Possibly the most notorious outgrowth of the Canadian eugenics movement was the Alberta Sexual Sterilization Act of 1928. It's important to understand the context.

First, at the time it was widely believed that a wide variety of human behaviours were considered to originate in heredity. These included:

• mental illness
• mental retardation
• epilepsy
• alcoholism
• pauperism
• certain criminal behaviours
• social defects, such as prostitution and sexual perversion

In theory, you could be forcibly sterilized any of these all of these different issues. But in actual fact---as in most other government policies---the rules were enforced selectively, which meant that this fell disproportionately on the following minorities:

• women
• children
• the unemployed 
• domestics
• unmarried
• followers of the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox flavours of Christianity 
• those with Ukrainian, Native and Métis ethnicity

The way the Act worked, the government appointed a committee consisting of four individuals: two physicians nominated by the University of Alberta and the College of Physicians, and, two lay people appointed by the Lieutenant Governor General. This committee was then given the power to order the forcible sterilization of individuals that had been recommended to them by medical superintendents of Alberta mental hospitals. And in practice these superintendents made submission to sterilization part of the conditions of release. In other words, for some individuals the only way to be able to leave was to get sterilized.

The Act was amended at various times, but it stayed into effect until 1972. While still part of law of the land, 4800 individual names were submitted to the four person committee with 99% being approved for the procedure.  

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Dr. Helen McMurchy, CBE.
Public Domain Image c/o
Canada's History.

Similar legislation was proposed in Ontario, but it failed to pass. This didn't stop people from teaching and advocating for eugenics, though. There was a veritable "who's who" of people who advocated for it. One of the most prominent was Helen MacMurchy CBE, who was often a guest lecturer at the MacDonald Institute at the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph. MacMurchy was a real trail blazer. She graduated with a medical degree in 1901 from the University of Toronto, was the first women intern at Toronto General Hospital, and, the first woman to do post-doctoral studies under Sir William Ostler at John's Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

She advocated for the health of both mothers and babies, and did a great deal of good. But she was also a vocal supporter of eugenics and was appointed "inspector of feeble-mindedness" by the province of Ontario in 1915.

Among other things, she published a little book in 1920 titled  The Almosts: A Study of the Feeble-Minded that draws upon examples from English literature to illustrate the various degrees of "feeble-mindedness" and suggests what she considers would be good social policy towards them. In it she shows a great deal of compassion towards these people. She suggests that they be found a place in society where their particular gifts will be properly understood and valued.

Give them justice and a fair chance. Do not throw them into a world where the scales are weighted against them. Do not ask them to gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles. But give them one chance to bring out the best that is in them. This is but a fair request on behalf of human beings who nevertheless are permanent children and will never grow up---whose joys, and sorrows, and sins, and virtues are all on a childish scale. Responsibility, except so far as a child understands it, is not in their portion. The achievements of life, for them, are bounded by their mental make-up and character---just as our own achievements are, though on a little larger scale. (The Almosts, pp 170-171.) 

Her response to the existence of the "feeble-minded" was two-fold. First, they needed to be recognized as such and made wards of the state. This was because only government institutions would be able to give them a place where their special gifts could be nurtured, where they wouldn't be forced into a cruel competition for life with people who didn't suffer from the same mental deficiencies, and, where they couldn't be exploited by others.

---they cannot be adequately dealt with unless we stop neglecting the mentally defective and reorganize charitable institutions, work for dependents and delinquents, procedures in criminal courts, and above all education and school-work, according to the facts, recognizing mental defectives as children, the wards of the state, who must receive the training, protection and care---in one word, the home that they need, so they do not mingle with the general community [emphasis added by Bill Hulet] (p-177)

The second important point she promotes is that feeble-mindedness is inherited and society needs to stop it's propagation into future generations. She "pussy-foots" around the issue of birth control---which was a pretty scandalous subject at that time---but an intelligent reader should be able to understand the implications of this language. That's because she goes to great length to point out---using a literary example---that the absolute worst thing for society is when a feeble-minded person is allowed to have children.

She introduces this idea while talking about Charles Dickens' novel Little Dorrit (a book that I admit that I've never read). One of the characters is an upper class "dimwit" by the name of "Edmund Sparkler", which Wikipedia describes as

A dimwitted, upper class, young man who falls for Fanny Dorrit as a dancer. They meet again when the Dorrits are wealthy, and he pursues Fanny until she agrees to marry him. Before Mr Merdle (his “governor”) fails, he secures a position for Sparkler in the Circumlocution Office.

McMurchy describes the marriage between Fanny Dorrit and Edmund Sparkler

The dark tragedies involved in this problem are, naturally and properly enough, lightly touched upon in fiction. Miss Fanny, though she said Young Sparkler was "almost an idiot," and despised him for his mental feebleness, married him in the end. He could not earn a living---he had no more mind or will of his own than "a boat when it is towed by a steamship". (p-175)

She also underlines this point by saying later on:

"Our duty to our neighbour must now be held to include our duty to posterity." (p-176)

It's important to remember this concern about the propagation of feeble-mindedness into future generations in her social prescription. It seems obvious to me that she genuinely wants to help individual people. But she is also tremendously concerned about controlling the people she sees as being defective so they don't reproduce.

The mentally defective are those who cannot make, or help to make, a home.

We must make a happy and permanent home for them during their lives. The only Permanent Parent is the State. (p-178) 

I think it's tremendously important to emphasize this point, because I think helps explain part of the motivation to warehouse people in institutions. It isn't just to help people who cannot take care of themselves, but rather to control them because they pose a danger to the long-term health of the human race. Humanitarian concern is being linked to social Darwinism.  And, as I hope to show in a future post, that created a great deal of misery for individuals.

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And now, let's talk about "euthenics"---

Dr. Frederkick Tisdall.
Public domain image
c/o the Wiki Commons.

Another famous fellow who used to lecture at the Macdonald Institute has also been implicated in another current of thought that dramatically affected our institutions: euthenics. Whereas eugenics was concerned about improving humanity through weeding out "bad genes", euthenics is about improving the human race through creating an efficient way of living that maximizes an individuals human potential. In other words, eugenics is about nature, and, euthenics is about nurture. The person I'm referring to is a fellow named Frederick Tisdall who is probably most famous for being one of the inventors of pablum.

The story that I'm going to focus on started in WW2 when he held the rank of Wing Commander in the RCAF and he took part in a multi-agency assessment of nutrition in several First Nations communities. They were supposed to take blood samples and other tests to look at vitamin deficiencies, but were struck almost immediately by the amount of chronic malnutrition they were seeing in native communities.

At both Norway House and Cross Lake, they reported that, “while most of the people were going about trying to make a living, they were really sick enough to be in bed under treatment and that if they were white people, they would be in bed and demanding care and medical attention.” Following a visit to the homes of some of the elderly residents of Norway House at the request of the Chief and Council, moreover, researchers found that “conditions were deplorable where the old people were almost starved and were plainly not getting enough food to enable them to much more than keep alive.”

(This quotation comes form Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942-1952 

by Ian Mosby Phd., which I obtained from his personal website.  P-146, reprinted from 

Histoire sociale / Social History.)

What these researchers were seeing was the result of both capitalism and government policy.

The communities in the central subarctic region that were the subjects of these major nutrition studies during the 1940s had been hit disproportionately hard by the economic collapse of the Great Depression. To a certain extent this was because incomes within the fur trade had plummeted, dropping by 66 per cent in the Prairies between 1924 and 1935 and by 38 per cent in Northern Ontario between 1925 and 1935. To make matters worse, many areas had seen steadily declining populations of fur-bearing and food animals during the interwar years, in no small part due to over-hunting by unscrupulous non-Aboriginal trappers throughout the preceding decades.

Hunger in these communities was not simply a product of declining incomes and disappearing fur-bearing animals, however. The 1930s also saw Indian Affairs actually cut back on its provision of unemployment relief. Between 1922 and 1934, the government’s total relief payments fell by 32 per cent, from $242,000 to $164,000. As Hugh Shewell has shown, much of this was done through orders prohibiting relief payments to able-bodied men, reducing sick relief rations, and other forms of so-called “austerity” and “restraint” within Indian Affairs. (Mosby, p-149)

One would think that the normal person's response to seeing a situation like this would be to make a fuss in advocacy of increasing the amount of money being spent on rations for the First Nation's communities. But instead, they decided that this would be an excellent opportunity to study the effects of food supplements on the health of people who are suffering low-grade, chronic starvation!

As Moore [Indian Affairs Branch Superintendent of Medical Services Dr. Percy Moore]  would tell a House of Commons Special Committee in May 1944, “As a result of the survey one of the first steps considered necessary in any program to improve the health of the Indian through better nutrition was to demonstrate whether provision of some of the food substances or food factors found to be lacking in their diet would result in an improvement in their health.” Moore and the rest of the research team therefore almost immediately set about organizing a scientific experiment on the effectiveness of vitamin supplements conducted primarily by the resident physician for the Indian Affairs Branch at Rossville, Dr. Cameron Corrigan. (Mosby, p-151)

There were several nutritional studies, but it needs to be remembered that what the researchers were after wasn't just information about how specific vitamins and essential elements help people suffering from chronic malnutrition. As a result, some of the studies also included anthropologists who did work on the psychology of First Nations people.

That's because they also wanted to find out how they could engineer the behaviour of aboriginal people so they would be more easily molded into mainstream Canadians. That's how euthenics manifested itself in Canadian society. It's important to realize that there is a "nub" of value in the idea that it might be a good idea to select out and remove specific hereditary diseases from the gene pool, but that is nowhere near the same thing as supporting social Darwinism---which is based on very sketchy ideology. In the same way, there is something to the idea that how we treat people has an impact on the way they develop---but that's not the same thing as using social policy to engineer an entire people's culture out of existence. 

Mosby quotes Tisdall speaking to a Parliamentary committee in 1947:

We do not know as much as we should as to what motivates the Indian. We have to find out what incentive we can place in front of him. The Indian is very different from us. We have to find out how the Indian can be encouraged, how his work can be diversified, his efforts diversified, so he can make himself self-supporting, so he can obtain the food he needs. (Mosby, p-154)

As I've mentioned before, I'm trying to not make these articles super long anymore. So I'm going to stop right here. I'll see what I can come up with more information about the dark side of Canadian, Ontario, and, Ontario Agriculture College culture for a future story---.

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At the present time there is a lot of friction being created in society over the place of the First Nations in Canadian society. Knowing about things like the nutrition experiments that were done at isolated aboriginal communities helps people understand the anger that is manifested against "settler" society. (It's certainly helped me---.) That's why I put out the Back-Grounder, and that's why people read it. If you can afford it, why not support me? As little as $1/month would show me that you care about the news. And, it's easy to do using Patreon or Pay Pal. 

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Furthermore, I say onto you. We have to deal with the Climate Emergency!