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Book Review: The Legacy of Malthus — The Social Cost of the New Scientific Racism

by Joseph Alper

‘Science for the People’ Vol. 14, No. 2, March/April 1982, p. 30

Joseph Alper works in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, MA. He is a member of the Science for the People Sociobiology Study Group.

The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Cost of the New Scientific Racism

by Allan Chase, Knopf, New York, 1977.

Since the early nineteenth century, theory after theory has been proposed purporting to show the genetic inferiority of women, non-Nordic peoples, and the poor. Allan Chase’s The Legacy of Malthus is a historical study of such theories.

Chase begins with Thomas Malthus, who argued that the poor are poor because they are genetically unfit. In succeeding chapters Chase discusses many of the nineteenth and twentieth century genetic theories for feebleminddedness, poverty, crime, lack of intelligence, moral degeneracy, and disease. The proponents of these theories argued that welfare and public health programs were a waste of money since they did not attack the root cause of the problems—namely bad genes. Only eugenics programs involving the sterilization of the unfit and strict immigration laws to keep the unfit out of the United States would prevent the degeneration of the “American” people.

One of the great strengths of Chase’s book is that he sets these racist theories in their social, economic, and political context and shows that they were not an aberration, but served to legitimize the policies of the ruling class. To make his point Chase employs a much broader definition of racism than is normally used. For him racism involves the persecution and suppression of any group in society—especially the poor. In fact, for Chase scientific racism is “free of all racial, religious, and cultural biases. It is not concerned with people but simply with … the maximization of profits and the minimization of taxes on those profits, especially when those taxes are earmarked for promoting the health, education, and personal welfare” of working people. Thus, hookworm and pellagra were labeled genetic diseases so that money would not have to be spent on public health or in providing a living wage, just as Jensen’s 1969 article proposing that blacks are genetically ineducable was used to justify the elimination of costly head-start programs.

Chase’s central theme is that scientific racism is responsible for the sorry state of American public health and social welfare. The US ranks 16th in infant mortality among the nations of the world because scientific racists have persuaded a succession of all-too-willing Congresses and Presidents that the poor are biologically unfit and are poor because they are unfit, and their problems are irremediable. Millions of children are not immunized against polio, measles, German measles, diphtheria, and tetanus, and suffer from mental retardation as a result of malnutrition, while millions of others lack adequate schools and housing.

Perhaps the most important lesson of Chase’s book is that scientific racist theories of the past were put forward by leading scientists and academics of the day. These scientific racists were not the ancestors of the Ku Klux Klan or the Birchers, but of E.O. Wilson, the most prominent of the human sociobiologists, who is a Professor of Zoology at Harvard University, and of Arthur Jensen, Professor of Psychology at the University of California. Carl Brigham, a Professor of Psychology at Princeton, wrote A Study of American Intelligence (1923) in which he stated that “the Nordic type is superior to the Alpine” and that the average Russian (a euphemism for Jew) had a mental age of 11.34 years. In Is America Safe for Democracy? (1921) William McDougall, chairman and Professor of Psychology at Harvard wrote: “The superiority of White literates to White illiterates is due … not wholly or mainly to their schooling but rather to an inborn greater capacity for intellectual growth.” In 1937, Ernest Hooten, Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University, identified certain “criminal racial types” and concluded: “We must abandon hope of social palliatives and face the necessity of dealing with biological realities.”

Chase labels the theories of these men and the dozens of others he discusses as “pseudo-science.” I believe that this characterization is misleading. The works of the old scientific racists were published in the most reputable and prestigious scientific journals of the day, were taken seriously by the other scientists and were treated as science. Where these theories were challenged by other scientists of the time, the differences were regarded as scientific disputes; it was not a question of one set of theories being scientific and the other not. One such challenge came from Joseph Goldberger, who showed in 1915 that pellagra is not genetic in origin but simply a nutritional deficiency disease. Goldberger’s findings were not put into practice until nearly twenty years after he published them because in 1917 a 444 page report of the Pellagra Commission of the New York Postgraduate Medical School and Hospital discounted his work as demonstrating only “false correlations” and not a causal connection between poverty and the disease.

Labeling the theories of scientific racists as “pseudo-scientific” is unproductive for two reasons. First, it is unconvincing to the majority of the “educated public,” who believe that science is whatever is published and accepted by scientists. (This definition of science is not silly, in fact, since there is no other “objective” definition of science.) Second, characterizing these theories as pseudoscience plays into the hands of a Wilson, who claims that his theories are the first which deserve to be termed scientific. We must remember that each succeeding theorist of scientific racism believed that his work provided a scientific foundation for his views and attacked his critics for being “unscientific.” Sixty years ago McDougall was accusing those who rejected his theory on the inheritance of intelligence of “denying also the theory of organic evolution … For the theory of the heredity of mental qualities is a corollary of the theory of organic evolution. The latter cannot be true if the former is not true.” The words might be Wilson’s.

Chase’s book is unique among those on this subject because of its wealth of quotations from the writings of scientific racists and because of its extensive (60 pages) documentation and bibliography. It is flawed by being overly long and somewhat repetitious and, most importantly, because it makes no mention of women as an oppressed class and the object of an enormous literature justifying sexism. Despite these limitations, this book should be read by everyone concerned with the social and political implications of biological theories and with the role they have played in our society.

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