Our Own Master Race Eugenics in Canada, 1885-1945

232 Pages·1990·13.16 MB·English

by  Angus McLaren

Our Own Master Race
Was Canada immune to the racist currents of thought that swept central Europe
in the 1920's and 1930's? In this landmark book Angus McLaren, co-author
of THE BEDROOM AND THE STATE, examines the pervasiveness in Canada
of the eugenic notion of "race betterment" and demonstrates that many Cana-
dians believed that radical measures were justified to protect the community
from the "degenerate" The sterilization of the feeble-minded in Alberta and
British Columbia was merely the most dramatic attempt to limit the numbers
of the "unfit." But in the decades prior to World War Two, eugenic preoccu-
pations were to colour discussions of immigration restriction, birth control,
mental testing, family allowances, and a host of similar social policies.
Doctors, psychiatrists, geneticists, social workers, and mental hygienists
provided an anxious Canadian middle class with the reassuring argument that
poverty, crime, prostitution, and mental retardation were primarily the products
of defective genes, not a defective social system. In explaining why biologi-
cal solutions were sought for social problems McLaren not only provides a
provocative reappraisal of the ideas and activities of a generation of feminists,
political progressives, and public health propagandists but he also explores
some of the roots of our not-so-latent racist tendencies.
(The Canadian Social History Series )
Angus McLaren, the author of a number of books on the history of fertility
control, is Professor of History at the University of Victoria.
Our Own Master Race
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Our Own Master Race:
Eugenics in Canada, 1885–1945
Angus McLaren
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
Originally published by
Oxford University Press Canada 1990
© Angus McLaren 1990
University of Toronto Press 2014
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
Printed in Canada
ISBN 978-1-4426-5964-3 (paper)
Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with
vegetable-based inks
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
McLaren, Angus
Our own master race: eugenics in Canada, 1885–145 / Angus McLaren.
(Canadian social history series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4426-5964-3 (pbk.)
1. Eugenics – Canada – History – 20th century. I. Title. II. Series: Canadian social
history series.
HD3616.C32N47 2013 338.971009'041 C2013-903486-2
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing
program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of
Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.
Contents
Preface 7
1 The Birth of Biological Politics 13
2 Public Health and Hereditarian Concerns 28
3 Stemming the Flood of Defective Aliens 46
4 Sex, Science, and Race Betterment 68
5 Creating a Haven for Human Thoroughbreds 89
6 The Eugenics Society of Canada 707
7 Genetics, Eugenics, and Human Pedigrees 727
8 The Death of Eugenics? 746
Epilogue 765
Notes 772
Index 279
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Preface
In the depths of the Great Depression a number of Ontario's most
respectable citizens came together to establish what they chose to call
the Toronto League for Race Betterment. That such a name, conjuring
up as it does today memories of the Nazis' horrific campaign of racial
purification, should have been given to what was simply a birth control
society might seem strange. In the interwar years, however, the em-
ployment of ethnic, nativist, and racist labels occasioned little public
comment. The term "race" was casually employed by social commen-
tators of every stripe and most assumed that the race could and should
be "improved." Some thought progress would be made by changing
the environment; others thought it could be best accomplished by
encouraging the reproduction of the hereditarily superior and inhibit-
ing that of the inferior. In practice there were few who completely
denied the powers of either nature or nurture. But though a good deal
has been written about Canadian social reformers' environmentalist
arguments, next to nothing has been said about the eugenic theories
advanced by the hereditarians.
Have the deeds and ideas of the eugenically minded escaped serious
investigation simply because their influence was negligible? Some
colleagues have assumed this was the case and on hearing of this study
have protested that surely those who toyed with pseudo-scientific
concepts of racial fitness must have never accounted for more than a
tiny fringe group of kooks. Why devote a book to eccentrics who were
inevitably doomed to failure? The ideas they played with were signif-
icant in the sad history of central Europe, but were not intelligent
Canadians somehow immune to such concepts?
In way of response one might begin by asking where one would
place the twenty-nine-year-old prairie student who in 1933 received
an M. A. from McMaster University for a thesis on social hygiene and
public health, which he later described as a topic in "Christian sociol-
7
8 OUR OWN MASTER RACE
ogy." It was in fact a typical eugenic study that began with the popular
hereditarian argument that the mentally and physically subnormal were
not so much the victims but rather the causes of a good deal of the
distress of the depression. They could be identified, asserted the author,
as the low achievers on IQ tests, the delinquent, the venereally diseased,
and the improvident. To determine the menace they posed society the
student turned to the local asylum, where he traced the family trees of
what he called twelve "immoral or nonmoral women." Whereas most
decent citizens had two or three offspring, these dozen prostitutes and
mental defectives had spawned ninety-five children and 105 grandchil-
dren. The researcher was shocked that such misfits were caught in a
wretched cycle of immorality, promiscuity, and improvidence, but he
was more alarmed that in spreading disease, clogging up the school
system, promoting crime and prostitution, burdening hospitals, and
overwhelming charitable institutions they threatened the smooth func-
tioning of society. The burden of the taxes that supported such degen-
erates was borne by the respectable. If they, too, were not to be pulled
under by the economic crisis engulfing Canada the reproduction of the
unfit had to be checked. How?
The author fell back on the remedies already popularized by here-
ditarians, who claimed that social problems had a biological basis -
restriction of marriage to those holding certificates of health, segrega-
tion of the unfit on state farms where the sexes would be separated,
limitation of some subnormal families by doctors' discreet provision
of birth control information, and finally sterilization of the defective.
The student was not indifferent to the necessity also of improving the
environment, but the central thrust of his argument was that to protect
itself society had to recognize that mental and physical misfits war-
ranted no better treatment than that once reserved for lepers and
criminals. Such a thorough exercise in victim-blaming sounds remark-
ably "un-Christian" to the modern ear, but in the 1930's this researcher
was far from being the only Protestant who saw eugenics and Christi-
anity complementing one another. He appeared to believe that the
projected victims of the policies he advanced would not be affronted
but actually would find some comfort in the notion that, "When
education and legislation have failed there is still One who can take
the broken earthenware from life's garbage heaps and make them
vessels of honor in His temple of love."1
The research for this graduate thesis was carried out in Weyburn,
Saskatchewan, by a young Baptist minister concerned as much with
this life as with the next. The student was not some insignificant,
heartless hereditarian; it was Tommy Douglas. The same year Douglas