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The Biological Inferiority of the Undeserving Poor

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The Biological Inferiority of the Undeserving Poor Social Work & Society ▪▪▪ M. B. Katz: The Biological Inferiority of the Undeserving Poor The Biological Inferiority of the Undeserving Poor Michael B. Katz , University of Pennsylvania . if the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin. Charles Darwin (1839) For most of recorded history, poverty reflected God’s will. The poor were always with us. They were not inherently immoral, dangerous, or different. They were not to be shunned, feared, or avoided. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a harsh new idea of poverty and poor people as different and inferior began to replace this ancient biblical view. In what ways, exactly, are poor people different from the rest of us became – and remains – a burning question answered with moral philosophy, political economy, social science, and, eventually, biology. Why did biological conceptions of poverty wax and wane over the last century and a half? What forms have they taken? What have been their consequences? The biological definition of poverty reinforces the idea of the undeserving poor, which is the oldest theme in post-Enlightenment poverty discourse. Its history stretches from the late eighteenth century through to the present. Poverty, in this view, results from personal failure and inferiority. Moral weaknesses – drunkenness, laziness, sexual promiscuity – constitute the most consistent markers of the undeserving poor. The idea that a culture of poverty works its insidious influence on individuals, endowing them with traits that trap them in lives of destitution, entered both scholarly and popular discourse somewhat later and endures to this day. Faulty heredity composes the third strand in the identification of the undeserving poor; backed by scientific advances in molecular biology and neuroscience, it is enjoying a revival. The historical record shows this idea in the past to have been scientifically dubious, ethically suspect, politically harmful, and, at its worst, lethal. That is why we should pay close attention to its current resurgence. (Katz, 2013) This article excavates the definition of poor people as biologically inferior. It not only documents its persistence over time but emphasizes three themes. First, the concept rises and falls in prominence in response to institutional and programmatic failure. It offers a convenient explanation for why the optimism of reformers proved illusory or why social problems remained refractory despite efforts to eliminate them. Second, its initial formulation and reformulation rely on bridging concepts that try to parse the distance between heredity and environment through a kind of neo-Lamarkianism. These early bridges invariably crumble. Third, hereditarian ideas always have been supported by the best science of the day. This was the case with the ideas that ranked “races”; underpinned immigration restrictions; and encouraged compulsory sterilization – as well as those that have written off the intellectual potential of poor children. In its review of the biological strand in American ideas about poverty, this article begins in the 1860s with the first instance of the application of hereditarian thought I have discovered; Social Work & Society, Volume 11, Issue 1, 2013 1 ISSN 1613-8953 ▪▪▪ http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:hbz:464-sws-439 Social Work & Society ▪▪▪ M. B. Katz: The Biological Inferiority of the Undeserving Poor moves forward to social Darwinism and eugenics, immigration restriction, and early IQ testing. It then picks up the story with Arthur Jensen’s famous 1969 article in the Harvard Educational Revie w, follows it to the Bell Curve , and ends with the astonishing rise of neuroscience and the field of epigenetics. It concludes by arguing that despite the intelligence, skill, and good intentions of contemporary scientists, the history of biological definitions of poor persons calls for approaching the findings of neuroscience with great caution. In 1866 the Massachusetts Board of State Charities, which had oversight of the state’s public institutions, wrote, “The causes of the evil [“the existence of such a large proportion of dependent and destructive members of our community”] are manifold, but among the immediate ones, the chief cause is inherited organic imperfection, -vitiated constitution or poor stock .” ([Massachusetts] Board of State Charities, 1866) This early proclamation of the biological inferiority of the undeserving poor arose as a response to institutional failure. Recurrent institutional and programmatic failure has kept it alive in writing about poverty ever since, supported always by scientific authority. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, reformers sponsored an array of new institutions designed to reform delinquents, rehabilitate criminals, cure the mentally ill, and educate children. Crime, poverty, and ignorance, in their view, were not distinct problems. The “criminal,” “pauper,” and “depraved” represented potentialities inherent in all people and triggered by faulty environments. Poverty and crime, for instance, appeared to cause each other and to occur primarily in cities, most often among immigrants. This stress on the environmental causes of deviance and dependence, prominent in the 1840s, underpinned the first reform schools, penitentiaries, mental hospitals, and, even, public schools. (Katz, 1968 [2001], 115-160, 170-185) By the mid-1860s it had become clear that none of the new institutions built with such optimism had reached their goals. They manifestly failed to rehabilitate criminals, cure the mentally ill, reeducate delinquents, or reduce poverty and other forms of dependence. The question was, why? Answers did not look hard at the failures in institutional design and implementation or at the contexts of inmates’, prisoners’, and patients’ lives. Rather, they settled on individual-based explanations: inherited deficiencies. The Massachusetts Board of State Charities supported its belief that the inheritance of acquired characteristics (later known as Lamarkianism) reproduced the underserving poor as well as criminals, the mentally ill, and other depraved and dependent individuals with scientific evidence from physiologists which emphasized the toxic impact of large amounts of alcohol on the stimulation of the “animal passions” and the repression of “ will ”. (Schwartz, 1956; Dain, 1965; Lewis, 1965; Davis, 1957; [Massachusetts] State Board of Charities, 1866, xxii-xxxviii) The State Board’s gloomy emphasis on heredity did not lead it to pessimistic conclusions, however. It believed, rather, in the body’s recuperative power over time. Vice had a standard deviation that, if not exceeded, could be eradicated by the body’s natural capacity for healing. In fact, the Board still believed that the persistence of crime and poverty was “phenomenal- not essential in society . their numbers depend on social conditions within human control.” The Board had revealed the source of social pathologies through the scientific study of heredity; through the scientific study of society it would excavate the laws governing its prevention. The Board started out with an ideology prefiguring eugenics and ended with one anticipating Progressivism. Its early bridge between heredity and environmentalism, or biology and Social Work & Society, Volume 11, Issue 1, 2013 2 ISSN 1613-8953 ▪▪▪ http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:hbz:464-sws-439 Social Work & Society ▪▪▪ M. B. Katz: The Biological Inferiority of the Undeserving Poor reform, remained one crossed by reformers for only a relatively short time until it was broken by social Darwinism. It was rebuilt in the early twentieth century until demolished once more by eugenicists and their successors and then reconstructed yet again in the early twenty-first century by the proponents of epigenetics. By the 1920s, two initially separate streams – social Darwinism and eugenics - converged in the hard-core eugenic theory that justified racism and social conservatism. Social Darwinism attempted to apply the theory of Darwinian evolution to human behavior and society. Social Darwinists - whose leading spokesperson, Herbert Spencer, enjoyed a triumphant tour of the U.S. in 1882 – insisted on the heritability of socially harmful traits, including pauperism, mental illness, and criminality and on the harmful effects of public and private charities that interfered with the survival of the fittest. They viewed the “unfit” not only as unworthy losers but as savage throwbacks to a primitive life. Hereditarian beliefs thus fed widespread fears of “race suicide” giving an urgency to the problem of population control. The “ignorant, the improvident, the feeble-minded, are contributing far more than their quota to the next generation,” warned Frank Fetter of Cornell University. (Bender, 2009, 202; Hofstadter, 1955) The English scientist Francis Galton originally coined the term eugenics in 1883 to denote the improvement of human stock by giving “the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.” In the United States, eugenic “science” owed more to the genetic discoveries of Gregor Mendel, first published in 1866 but unrecognized until the end of the century, than to mathematical genetics as practiced by Galton and his leading successor Karl Pearson. In 1904 Charles Davenport, the leading US eugenics promoter, used funds from the newly established Carnegie Corporation to set up a laboratory at Cold Springs Harbor on Long Island. Davenport
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