Probably going to get in trouble here (university building names, eugenics, and Nazis)
As many of you know, Montana State University-Billings is going to rename a building named after its first president, Lynn Banks McMullen, because he is now known to have spoken in favor of Nazi eugenics policies.
Although I’m going to add some context around McMullen’s statements, I am NOT defending what he said. Not even close. It was bigoted, repugnant, and ignorant. I fully support MSU-Billings’ decision to re-name this building. Adding context, in this case, no more justifies what he said than adding context can justify slave ownership prior to the Civil War. It was wrong then, and it’s wrong now.
That being said, some context –
I’m concerned that people are focused on only one aspect of what McMullen said – namely, that he approvingly acknowledged Nazi German policies in 1935. He did, but leaving it at that oversimplifies the situation, and it does so in a way that prevents us progressives from learning an important cautionary tale – that just because anti-scientific attitudes are more closely aligned with the Republican Party today, liberals are not immune to the allure of pseudoscience, and we must remain vigilant to ensure neither we nor our political allies never again follow such a dark path. For we were once leaders on some parts of that trail.
McMullen’s comments were directed in support of eugenics – the idea that we could improve the human condition and society in general by encouraging people with desirable characteristics to have children and discouraging, or even preventing, those lacking these characteristics from doing so. This arose in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as acceptance of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, followed by its merger with the new science of genetics (the “modern synthesis”), began to take root in intellectual circles.
This may be a distinction without a value, but although the quotes I’ve seen attributed to McMullen decry what he saw as the mixed blessing of immigration – that not everyone who came here was good and virtuous – I couldn’t find anything explicitly anti-semitic. I’m not saying he wasn’t anti-semitic; only that I couldn’t find anything demonstrating that in what he said. It’s entirely possible he was, and that I simply haven’t found the right quote. But his support for Nazi German eugenics wasn't necessarily anti-semitic, either, because eugenics in Germany in the 1930’s wasn’t single-mindedly directed at Jewish people. Sterilization and euthanasia were being applied to those deemed mentally ill and/or physically handicapped. It’s possible McMullen was expressing agreement with this, and not with anything explicitly racist or antisemitic.
The moral repugnance of this idea is self-evident, but it also arose from a very deeply flawed assumption. When it came to such things as criminality, intelligence, mental illness, and anti-social behavior, the nature-vs-nurture pendulum was way over on the nature side. One’s behavior and intelligence were seen as largely the product of your genes. If you tended toward criminal activity, you were a born criminal. If you want fewer criminals, the reasoning went, make sure those who would pass along criminality-promoting genes didn’t contribute to future generations. Fewer children being born to criminals meant fewer criminals and, thus, less crime.
This is, of course, straight-up bullshit. A lot of what was targeted for eugenic elimination had far more to do with poverty and institutional racism than biology. But too many people at the time believed otherwise.
This almost certainly arose from the ambient bigotry surrounding those expressing these thoughts, but it also reflected the newness of evolutionary biology and genetics. They were the Next Big Thing! The internet was supposed to level the information playing field back in the 1990’s. Nuclear power was going to make energy too cheap to meter back in the 1950’s. There was no end to what electricity and magnetism might achieve in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which led Mary Shelley to suppose a collection of sewn-together body parts could be jump-started to life. Same thing.
As a result, many states passed laws intended to further the cause of eugenics. In their extreme, they mandated forced sterilizations for certain classes of people - and these sterilizations actually happened. At least three states that I know of have agreed to pay reparations to those who were forcibly sterilized under these laws.
Given the correlation between race, poverty, and the social problems arising from poverty, you’d suspect that such laws were mostly in the Jim Crow South- but they weren’t. They were passed all over the US. And this is because much of the early impetus behind eugenics came not from racists or reactionaries, but from the intellectual left.
Many of these people were operating from a sense of improving society. They either blinded themselves to the inherently racist core of their ideals or found some way to accommodate it. They might argue, for example, that by preventing people of color with criminal histories from having kids, they were promoting the progress of races often thought to be at some sort of lower evolutionary status. It’s scientific bologna, but it wasn’t an uncommon perspective for a progressive prior to the Second World War.
By no means was eugenics limited to the left. Those who openly embraced white supremacy obviously weren’t interested in improving anything beyond their own goal of keeping the white power structure in place. It also found favor among ardent imperialists and social Darwinists. (Indeed, the seeds of eugenics predate the publication of Origin of Species; Thomas Malthus, whose arguments on reproductive excess influenced Darwin, would have been called a social Darwinist had they not been published 11 years before Darwin was born.)
But it would be intellectually dishonest to pretend that, like the most virulent science denialism of today, eugenics was an exclusively right-wing concept.
Progressives did eventually abandon eugenics. Partly, it’s because the nature-nurture pendulum was moving toward nurture. But it’s also because the world saw what can happen when eugenics is taken to an extreme when the facts of the Holocaust came to light. The moral consequences of eugenics were shoved in their faces.
I actually cover this point in my large-enrollment undergraduate courses. I state that although there is nothing inherently anti-scientific about conservatism, and although there are certainly anti-scientific attitudes to be found in some liberal circles, the Republican Party is far more beholden to its anti-scientific constituents than the Democratic Party. We don’t see too much effort by Democrats to abolish all forms of animal-based research, foods made from transgenic crops, or market-based approaches to conservation and sustainable use that actually work. But laws preventing the teaching of what modern science teaches us about evolution, climate, human sexuality, and public health? From Republicans? All the bloody time.
But I also make the effort to point out that while conservatives have the harder row to hoe these days – they have to bring their party away from leaders who deny physical reality – us progressives aren’t excused from vigilance. The history of eugenics is a big part of that. It happened to us before. It can happen again.
Anyway – MSU-Billings is doing the right thing by renaming that building. But let’s understand the full context of the reason to ensure dead concepts stay dead.
ADDED ON EDIT: In case anyone accuses me of both-sides-ism, that's nowhere near what I'm saying. In fact, there's a profound difference between the kind of anti-science we see on the left and on the right. Left-wing anti-science is usually expressed as opposition to some sort of application of science. Right-wing anti-science is steeped in denial of the underlying science itself. I might disagree with a fellow progressive over the safety of GMO crops, but we would both agree on how evolution, hybridization, and gene splicing actually work. A right-wing blowhard is likely to deny that evolution even happens.
We also see more concentrated efforts on the right to distort scientific reality to support a policy opinion. Hard-core abortion opponents frequently claim, for example, that abortion increases breast cancer risk. Except that it doesn't.
And like I said, the Republican Party is wholly in the thrall of those who refuse to accept the world around them for what it is.
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