Until the 1880s, poverty in Europe was seen as the individual’s failure.
Now it became seen as a failure of the physical and economic environ-ment (Bundy 1984: 13). Simultaneously, new threats were perceived.
For many concerned Europeans it began to seem that a way to improve people’s lives was through a state that would implement a eugenic policy.
Before long, the white South African elite followed suite.
In South African social sciences, the 1880s were long accepted as the start of the period in which the number of poor whites grew rapidly. Colin Bundy criticised this belief by pointing out that that there was already a large number of landless and unskilled poor whites in the Cape well before 1890. Even before urbanisation there were considerable differen-tiation and class formation and various types of white poverty existed, es-pecially landless rural poor such as bywoners, agricultural labourers and farm servants. There were also small-town unskilled and low-paid wage earners, and a lumpen proletariat element. The racial relations between these whites and the people of colour were fl uid and interactive. In the 1890s the poverty became ethnicised, and redefi ned as a social problem to be tackled by state action. (Bundy 1984: 2-4.) Eugenic thinking played a large part in these attempts.
Eugenics
During the eighteenth century race became defi ned as a part of scien-tifi c discourse in Europe and the United States. The differences in the representations of the Other were interpreted as biological and natural differences of race. The scientifi c idea of race was then applied to the hu-man species in the framework of already existing power relations. (Miles 1994: 51, 63-64.)
The evolutionist thinkers of the nineteenth century perceived the dif-ferences between races from the viewpoint of biological and cultural evolution. They were pessimistic about the possibility of uplifting the
’child-like savages’, whom they saw as relics that had missed the train of biological and cultural progress. Only an interbreeding with a more evolved race, such as the Nordic race, could save them. But while this miscegenation could perhaps aid the development of savages, it would conversely deteriorate the pure Nordic or white racial stock. (Voget 1975:
178-185.)
At that time it was believed possible to defi ne race on physical grounds with, for instance, skull index measurements (Gould 1981: 30-143). This view presented individuals primarily as representatives of their race.
One’s appearance, talent and character were seen as little more than in-herited racial features (Kemiläinen 1985: 13-15).
These ideas were central for the beginning of the eugenic movement, which gained momentum in Europe and the United States in the early twentieth century when eugenic associations, research centres and jour-nals were established.27 The goal of eugenics was to co-operate with na-ture in elevating all of humanity by promoting ’better’ races. The eugenic movement was thus inclined towards Social Darwinism and population politics. (Hietala 1985: 106-121.)
By the early twentieth century, eugenics had become more than just a belief in the power of the hereditary. There was also a strong environ-mentalist tendency within eugenics that maintained that humans needed favourable social and economic conditions in order to fulfi l their inherent abilities fully (Dubow 1995: 123). This meant inconsistencies regard-ing the eugenic idea of degeneration. Some believed it was curable and preventable under the right circumstances, while some maintained that degeneration was inherited and irreversible.
The decline in the quantity of population everywhere in Europe had raised concerns, and the population was also seen as qualitatively de-clining – particularly in the urban areas. (Hietala 1985: 106-121.) The supporters of racial hygiene/eugenics28 insisted that it was the state’s duty to use ’positive’ or ’negative’ measures to improve the racial qual-ity of the population. Positive methods propagated by eugenics were mostly prophylactic: enlightening, educating and propaganda. Negative methods consisted of marriage restrictions, isolation and sterilisation of
27 The Englishman Sir Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, fi rst used the word
’eugenics’ in 1885. He is saluted as the father of modern eugenics, since his writings (for example Hereditary Genius) were the primus motor of the eugenic movement. A French count, de Gobineau, had preceded him with his famous Essai sur l’ inegalite des races humaines, published in 1798. This is considered the fi rst eugenic publication.
28 Some preferred to separate racial hygiene and eugenics into two different categories since they maintained that eugenics stood for positive measures and racial hygiene for negative measures. However, the assumptions behind both these ways of thinking were the same. The terms can be used synonymously, despite the fact that many sources dif-ferentiate between ‘bad’ racial hygiene, which was known as a Nazi science, and ‘good’
eugenics, which was popular in other Western societies also after the Second World War.
Both these ideologies are bound together by their view that the quality of the offspring in any given population could and should be controlled (Mattila 1996: 14-16).
people (Mattila 1996: 15-16). These methods also became tools of racial discrimination, and one of the outcomes of the eugenic movement was that the elements of populations seen as racially detrimental – such as the Jews in Nazi Germany - became separated, classifi ed and annihilated (Hietala 1985: 107, 161-162). After the World War II ‘racial hygiene’
was thus rejected as a Nazi science (Weindling 1989: 10).
While Franz Boas (1940: 42; 1945) had in the 1940s already demon-strated that a person’s ’race’ cannot be used to assess his mental qualities or capabilities, these ideas have proven persistent since some scientists (Jensen 1998; Brand 1996) still lean on racial premises, echoing the dog-mas of the eugenic movement. Despite all the evidence to contrary, scien-tists keep on theorising on alleged links between ‘race’ and intelligence.
A well-known recent example of this is a discussion around Herrnstein and Murray’s book The Bell Curve: intelligence and class structure in American life (1994).29
In South Africa, eugenics became known at the end of the nineteenth century when Social Darwinism became fashionable. At the beginning of the twentieth century there were already several societies concerned with racial hygienic issues.30 The philosophy and agenda of these societies were adopted from the United Kingdom and from the United States. Con-sequently, South African racial thinking was linked to the mainstream of eugenic thought in the Western world. (Dubow 1995: 130-131.) Through-out the twentieth century SThrough-outh African racial policy and social engineer-ing drew on eugenic principles (while they were never completely guided by them, see Posel 2001).
Worden et al. mention the fact that while in the 1880s the nature of poverty changed and became more visible in Cape Town, this develop-ment was greeted with urban phobias and fears of degeneration (1998:
218, 248). Bundy argues that the sudden surfacing of the ‘poor white problem’ in the South African consciousness was the new way of per-ceiving white poverty, and that ”a set of awarenesses and anxieties may have crystallised in the form of the poor white question” (1984: 2-3).
One of these awarenesses was the rise of eugenics. Eugenics suited the
29 The study raised stormy responses, which were published as a book called The Bell Curve Wars (for a review of these positions see Gould 1994; Gardner 1994; Fraser 1995).
30 Two of these were the Fortnightly Club, established in 1906, and the Native Affairs Society of the Transvaal, established in 1908. The development of eugenic thought was also boosted by the appointment of the South African Native Affairs Commission in 1903.
(Dubow 1995:130.)
South African society in which most social phobias were connected with urbanisation and industrialisation, and which eugenics too saw as injuri-ous to humankind and the racial quality of Europeans. The South African whites, particularly Afrikaners, were seen as degenerating as the result of the environmental factors and miscegenation. Simultaneously, the pre-sumed natural superiority of the whites made the upliftment of the poor whites a potentially worthwhile effort. (Dubow 1995: 139-140.)
However, biological determinism that was included in the eugenic dis-course was a politically sensitive issue from the start. Since the majority of poor whites were Afrikaners, it would have stigmatised a large portion of them as biologically (and thus irremediably) inferior. This was unac-ceptable to the Afrikaner nationalist movement. Therefore, the environ-mentalist aspects of eugenics, which emphasized the reversible nature of degeneration, were favoured. Racial degeneration was seen as something that developed in a bad environment, and could be cured in a good envi-ronment. (Dubow 1995: 170-175.)
This did not mean that the biological aspects of eugenics were pletely discarded. In public debates they were often visible, and com-bined and confl ated with social and environmental explanations (Dubow 1995: 180). Even during my fi eldwork in South Africa (1997-2001), I was often offered biological explanations, such as inbreeding, to explain the existence of poor whites.
These interrelated biological and environmental concerns, combined with the South African native question (die Swart gevaar), characterised South African eugenics. After World War I, the country’s knowledge of eugenics also became professionalised and institutionalised. In this process eugenics became a tool for social engineering. In the 1930s the eugenically inclined Race Welfare Society was committed to fi ghting feeble-mindedness, hereditary diseases, poverty and the degeneration of the poor whites.31 The Society set out to infl uence opinions that would encourage birth control for lower-class women. These endeavours always had a eugenic concern as a hidden agenda. (Dubow 1995: 136-137, 170-180.)
The dangerous feeble-minded were seen as a grave threat to the future of the race. The feeble-minded were prone to crime, prostitution and social irresponsibility. According to eugenic theories they were only slightly below normal and thus often undetectable. Theories on
feeble-31 It is noteworthy that later some of this society’s prominent members (such as H. Britten and Dr. A.M. Moll) established careers in the housing of the poor whites.
mindedness assumed that it was concentrated within the white poor.
(Chisholm 1989: 168-172.) As invisible entities, they could easily impair the social body from the inside.
From the 1930s onward poor whites increasingly became the targets of eugenic concerns. There were also doubts about their racial purity. A popular eugenic statement of the time argued that racially mixed people were in a state of physical, mental and moral disharmony. The poor white problem had to be solved and their supposed racial degeneration had to be reversed, if the whites were to utilise their hereditary powers.
An effi cient way to incorporate the poor whites socially, politically and racially in the mainstream society was to direct the attention towards the education and training of the children. At the beginning of the twen-tieth century a free and compulsory school system was formulated. This system was attached to institutions, such as the reformatories and indus-trial schools for the maintenance and discipline of children of dangerous classes. (Chisholm 1989: 9-10.)
Racial segregation was another presumed cure for the problem. The idea of forced racial segregation implied that some people – such as ra-cially weak poor whites – were vulnerable to racial intermingling, and would cease racial miscegenation only when forced to do so – preferably in a remedial environment.
POOR WHITES AS AN INTELLECTUAL,