If one had to draw up a balance sheet of the social Darwinist arguments at the turn of the century, one would have to say that the ardent Spencerians (who included several members of Darwin’s family, though never the great man himself) had the better of it. This helps explain the openly racist views that were widespread then. For example, in the theories of the French aristocratic poet Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), racial interbreeding was ‘dysgenic’ and led to the collapse of civilisation. This reasoning was taken to its limits by another Frenchman, Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854–1936). Lapouge, who studied ancient skulls, believed that races were species in the process of formation, that racial differences were ‘innate and ineradicable,’ and that any idea that races could integrate was contrary to the laws of biology.20 For Lapouge, Europe was populated by three racial groups: Homo europaeus, tall, pale-skinned, and long-skulled (dolichocephalic); Homo alpinus, smaller and darker with brachycephalic (short) heads; and the Mediterranean type, long-headed again but darker and shorter even than alpinus. Such attempts to calibrate racial differences would recur time and again in the twentieth century.21 Lapouge regarded democracy as a disaster and believed that the brachycephalic types were taking over the world. He thought the proportion of dolichocephalic individuals was declining in Europe, due to emigration to the United States, and suggested that alcohol be provided free of charge in the hope that the worst types might kill each other off in their excesses. He wasn’t joking.22
In the German-speaking countries, a veritable galaxy of scientists and pseudoscientists, philosophers and pseudophilosophers, intellectuals and would-be intellectuals, competed to outdo each other in the struggle for public attention. Friedrich Ratzel, a zoologist and geographer, argued that all living organisms competed in a Kampf um Raum, a struggle for space in which the winners expelled the losers. This struggle extended to humans, and the successful races had to extend their living space, Lebensraum, if they were to avoid decline.23 For Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), the renegade son of a British admiral, who went to Germany and married Wagner’s daughter, racial struggle was ‘fundamental to a “scientific” understanding of history and culture.’24 Chamberlain portrayed the history of the West ‘as an incessant conflict between the spiritual and culture-creating Aryans and the mercenary and materialistic Jews’ (his first wife had been half Jewish).25 For Chamberlain, the Germanic peoples were the last remnants of the Aryans, but they had become enfeebled through interbreeding with other races.
Max Nordau (1849–1923), born in Budapest, was the son of a rabbi. His best-known book was the two-volume Entartung (Degeneration), which, despite being 600 pages long, became an international best-seller. Nordau became convinced of ‘a severe mental epidemic; a sort of black death of degeneracy and hysteria’ that was affecting Europe, sapping its vitality, manifested in a whole range of symptoms: ‘squint eyes, imperfect ears, stunted growth … pessimism, apathy, impulsiveness, emotionalism, mysticism, and a complete absence of any sense of right and wrong.’26 Everywhere he looked, there was decline.27 The impressionist painters were the result, he said, of a degenerate physiology, nystagmus, a trembling of the eyeball, causing them to paint in the fuzzy, indistinct way that they did. In the writings of Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and Friedrich Nietzsche, Nordau found ‘overweening egomania,’ while Zola had ‘an obsession with filth.’ Nordau believed that degeneracy was caused by industrialised society – literally the wear-and-tear exerted on leaders by railways, steamships, telephones, and factories. When Freud visited Nordau, he found him ‘unbearably vain’ with a complete lack of sense of humoura.28 In Austria, more than anywhere else in Europe, social Darwinism did not stop at theory. Two political leaders, Georg Ritter von Schönerer and Karl Lueger, fashioned their own cocktail of ideas from this brew to initiate political platforms that stressed the twin aims of first, power to the peasants (because they had remained ‘uncontaminated’ by contact with the corrupt cities), and second, a virulent anti-Semitism, in which Jews were characterised as the very embodiment of degeneracy. It was this miasma of ideas that greeted the young Adolf Hitler when he first arrived in Vienna in 1907 to attend art school.
Not dissimilar arguments were heard across the Atlantic in the southern part of the United States. Darwinism prescribed a common origin for all races and therefore could have been used as an argument against slavery, as it was by Chester Loring Brace.29 But others argued the opposite. Joseph le Conte (1823–1901), like Lapouge or Ratzel, was an educated man, not a redneck but a trained geologist. When his book, The Race Problem in the South, appeared in 1892, he was the highly esteemed president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His argument was brutally Darwinian.30 When two races came into contact, one was bound to dominate the other. He argued that if the weaker race was at an early stage of development – like the Negro —slavery was appropriate because the ‘primitive’ mentality could be shaped. If, however, the race had achieved a greater measure of sophistication, like ‘the redskin,’ then ‘extermination is unavoidable.’31
The most immediate political impact of social Darwinism was the eugenics movement that became established with the new century. All of the above writers played a role in this, but the most direct progenitor, the real father, was Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton (1822–1911). In an article published in 1904 in the American Journal of Sociology, he argued that the essence of eugenics was that ‘inferiority’ and ‘superiority’ could be objectively described and measured – which is why Lapouge’s calibration of skulls was so important.32 Lending support for this argument was the fall in European populations at the time (thanks partly to emigration to the United States), adding to fears that ‘degeneration’ – urbanisation and industrialisation – was making people less likely or able to reproduce and encouraging the ‘less fit’ to breed faster than the ‘more fit.’ The growth in suicide, crime, prostitution, sexual deviance, and those squint eyes and imperfect ears that Nordau thought he saw, seemed to support this interpretation.33 This view acquired what appeared to be decisive support from a survey of British soldiers in the Boer War between 1899 and 1902, which exposed alarmingly low levels of health and education among the urban working class.