THE BURDEN OF SACRIFICE:

BRITISH EUGENICS AND GENDERCIDAL AUTOGENOCIDE, 1900–1916

A Thesis

Presented to

The Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences

Florida Gulf Coast University

In Partial Fulfilment

of the Requirement for the Degree of

Master of Arts in History

By

Christopher L. Harrison

2015

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APPROVAL SHEET

This thesis is submitted in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts in History

______

Christopher L. Harrison, Student

Approved: April 2015

______

Dr. Paul R. Bartrop, Committee Chair / Advisor

______

Dr. Nicola Foote, Committee Member 1

______

Dr. Eric Strahorn, Committee Member 2

The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline.

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Contents

Dedication and Acknowledgments 3

Preface 4

I. World War I Eugenics and Genocide Studies 8

II. Boer War Muddling and Proposed British Degeneration, 1900–1906 26

III. Class, Conscription, and Eugenics in Debate, 1906–1912 49

IV. Sacrifices of the Less Efficient, 1912–1916 68

V. Gendercidal Autogenocide Policy and Application, 1906–1916 90

VI. Class, Gender, and Sacrifice in World War I 110

Bibliography 113

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Dedication and Acknowledgments

This work is dedicated to the memory of Charles William Harrison, Private of the 15th

Battalion, West Yorkshire Regiment, as commemorated in perpetuity with honor at Thiepval

Memorial, France, and to all those affected by World War I.

I would like to thank Dr. Paul R. Bartrop for his expert advice, guidance, and patience throughout the development of this project. I owe a long list of debts of gratitude to many at

Florida Gulf Coast University, including thesis committee members Dr. Nicola Foote and Dr.

Eric Strahorn, the entirety of the history faculty, FGCU librarians, their colleagues throughout the UBorrow and Interlibrary Loan systems, and the administrators of the Office of Research and

Graduate Studies. I will appreciatively cherish their support allocated to my studies as received from FGCU by way of the Graduate Studies Scholarship.

My research trip of the summer of 2014 profoundly assisted my transition towards becoming a professional educator. Gratefully, I received friendly and professional assistance while conducting archival research in the United Kingdom. I am duty-bound to thank each member of institutional staff that graciously helped me before, during, and after my journey into the archival vaults. For access and reprographic permission I thank owners of private materials, the guardians of public collections, the archivists, and retrievers at the following archival centers; the National Library of Scotland, the Churchill Archives Centre of the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, the National Archives of the United Kingdom, the National Maritime

Museum, the London School of Economics, University College London, the U. K. Parliamentary

Archives, and all the workers who helped to produce this study.

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Preface

Historical analyses on World War I have traditional followed either of the two paths of understanding the diplomatic origins, or explaining the military cut and thrust. Several social historians have produced works on the war which scholars George F. Kennan and A. J. P. Taylor pointed to as a holocaust.1 For British historians, and the peoples of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, World War I was the formative event of the twentieth century. The reason why

British observers place such an emphasis on this war often condenses into the events of a single day, July 1 1916. This date marks the first day of the Battle of the Somme. The advance by

British soldiers followed the heaviest bombardment of artillery to that point in human history.

On the first day alone, British casualties amounted to approximately 60,000, of which 19,240 men died.2 The Battle of the Somme lasted from July 1 1916 to November 13 1916 with no significant victories won over the extensive front line.3 The losses were the highest on record for

British military forces. The battle introduced a new British policy of conscripted mass offense which replaced the limited defense strategy based on volunteer recruitment. This study acknowledges the sacrifice of the conscripted mass offense policy by tracing the origins and enablement of the strategy, with a focus on the civilian and military officials who enacted its devastating brutality.

Prior to this study, historians have documented some ratios of losses between class and rank, from workers to aristocrats. In 1977, Jay Winter noted that the cost of World War I was a

1 George F. Kennan, The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order: Franco-Russian Relations, 1875–1890 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 3; A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 157. Taylor inferred both of the twentieth century’s global wars as holocausts. The expression holocaust as pertinent to World War I remains an accepted term today. See David Reynolds, The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2014), xviii. 2 William Philpott, Bloody Victory: The Sacrifice on the Somme and the Making of the Twentieth Century (London: Abacus, 2010), 207. 3 Reynolds, The Long Shadow, xxv. 5

lost generation in Britain, with national defense paid for through effects he deemed as dysgenic, meaning a loss of demographically advanced persons.4 Of the 6,000,000 British men in uniform, one in eight died in World War I, a figure used to highlight comparisons and contrasting elements by factors of age, nationality, and rank.5 When calculated on a proportionate scale, comparatively heavier losses occurred within professional classes than those lives lost from other

British communities. The highest death rate of almost one in three occurred among alumni from the University of Oxford who had matriculated in 1913.6 The comparison is helpful, but the gross statistics may provide some further insight. Of officers from the elite classes, the compartmentalized losses total hundreds, sometimes thousands. The elite provided early volunteers as too did the industrialized working class communities. 750,000 men, almost ten per cent of the British work force, voluntarily enlisted for military service in the first two months of the war.7 Proportionality aside, the war in total cost 722,782 British lives to military service, with approximately 450,000 men lost in the infantry, from groups almost entirely from outside of the privileged classes.8 Soldiers from wealthy families, who received private education, faced either no risk of frontline combat as staff officers, or fought in the comparatively most deadly leadership positions as subaltern officers in the infantry.9

To compare the two divided categories of men, the wealthy and the worker, in proportional terms avoids the fact that military service was an established career choice for the privileged families of Britain. The figures do not account for the radical introduction of

4 J. M. Winter, “Britain's ‘Lost Generation’ of the First World War,” Population Studies, vol. 31, no. 3 (1977), 449. Readers may recognize the phrase “lost generation” from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (New York: Modern Library, 1926), although the literary meaning concerns misplaced talent traumatized by conflict rather than Winter’s contextual view meaning the lives extinguished by World War I. 5 Ibid., 450. 6 Ibid., 463. 7 Ibid., 452. 8 Ibid., 451, 457. 9 Ibid., 449. 6

conscription in 1916, a policy which caused the vast majority of British losses to occur in the second half of the war, after the volunteers of traditional military families had served and died.

Thereby a closer examination is required of the origins and implementation of the conscription policy. This work attempts to begin the debate on conscription as a method of deliberate destruction in addition to merely disabling less-valued males of a politically volatile population.

Do the ends always justify the means?

In the first chapter a discussion of relevant historiography outlines the two camps of historical thought relevant to this study. British eugenics often raises ideas of the pedigree and breeding of animals and plants as an untrained forerunner to genetics. Genocide studies recognize a list of atrocities and crimes from the past which have left enough documentary evidence to prove prior intent of at least partial destruction. Apparently, no study exists which bridges the gap between British eugenics and genocide studies beyond this thesis. Perhaps some will argue that this is because no direct connection ever occurred; however, the evidence proved herein states otherwise.

Chapter two examines the years 1900–1906, with a focus on the concept of social degeneration and the impact of losses incurred during the Boer War (1899–1902). Reactions to the Boer War included a wide array of nervous and aggressive policy suggestions. For the purpose of this study, a closer examination brings forth the perceived problems of degeneration, variant fertility rates amidst separate classes, and the initial calls for compulsory military service to improve upon the physical fitness of male subjects as resident within the multinational British imperial realm.

The third chapter discusses class, eugenics, and conscription in the years 1906–1912.

Social Darwinists began to organize formal eugenic solutions to proposed problems by 7

segregation, medical sterilization, and compulsory military training. The industrial unrest of

1911 pushed eugenics towards class-based analyses and suggested policies.

Chapter four documents events, from 1912–1916, including the acceptance of eugenics at the highest tiers of the British government, and the effects of specific ideologues towards as wastage conscription and gendercidal autogenocide. Economic eugenics sacrificed supposedly industrially less efficient males, as the government implemented total war through eugenicist and

Social Darwinist advocates. The forced selection of men chosen to fulfil wastage conscription in the change from defensive to offensive military strategy can be explained as gendercidal autogenocide.

The fifth chapter contextualizes information from the archival documents as evidence regarding gendercidal autogenocide in 1916, from the policy statement in April to the change in military strategy on the battlefield in July. The issue of gendercidal autogenocide in World War

I requires discussion of the subsequent constraints of genocide that often focus on intent to destroy by killing at the expense of examining the remaining subsections of the United Nations

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNCG) definition. If prevention remains the key motive for scholars of genocide studies, then this study of gendercidal autogenocide within total war provides another collection of evidence that may assist to abate future potential attempts of mass death. Following the fifth chapter, a brief conclusion summarizes the argument. Exploiting class inequality to sustain war in defense of a supposedly superior group existed prior to the emergence of eugenics. The use of eugenic gradations to decide who should die so others may live predates the Nazi regime. The British government committed gendercidal autogenocide in 1916, when eugenicists selected the targeted victim group for intentional partial destruction due to nationality, gender, and class. 8

I. World War I Eugenics and Genocide Studies

Over a century after the outbreak of World War I, historians still struggle to find answers to adequately understand the multitude of tragic events which the Great War entailed.

Definitions including attrition, mass-scale atrocities, resource battles, and the sport of war have offered scholars glimpses of the initial years of what became a century of conflict. The trend of the last two generations of historians has rejected the great man narrative in favor of microhistories in the emerging tradition of the Annales School, and the new young leftists of the late 1950s.10 Such battles for objectivity sprang from the Cold War era of closed archives, and redacted government documents. In the political shifts since the cultural revolution of the 1960s in the West, World War II received scholarly attention which summarized blame as belonging to many, rather than the previously accepted viewpoint of being Hitler’s war.11 World War I continues to generate studies on diplomatic and military issues. A closer examination of eugenicists active in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century clarifies some of the historical explanations that depend upon attritional and total warfare interpretations.

This study reassesses the terms of understanding World War I in the context of proposed degeneration, class-based eugenics, gendercide, and autogenocide regarding the supposed inefficiency and definitive wastage of British men. The context of eugenic warfare and social reorganization assumed wastage in line with potential military discipline and efficiency.

Eugenicists active in Britain in 1912–1916 developed systemic processes that deliberately installed total warfare, the consequences of which pacified domestic dissent while committing

10 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 420–423. 11 For a comprehensive set of essays which deconstruct A. J. P. Taylor’s revisionist view of World War II, see Gordon Martel, ed., The Origins of the Second World War Reconsidered (London: Routledge, 2008). 9

gendercidal autogenocide in the extension of the enlarged battlefield created in mainland Europe from 1914–1916. The deliberate mass death of working-class males by conscription in 1916 occurred because of eugenic class biases declared in the years of anticipation before the outbreak of the conflict, and implemented by officials influenced by eugenic ideology. Evidence follows here that illustrates the prominence of eugenic ideology in the wartime government and in central administrative positions regarding recruitment and industry.

The category of “gendercidal autogenocide” is one that can be introduced here in order to allow scholars to explain any intentional destruction, in whole or in part, of male or female victims belonging to the same group as the perpetrators. The term gendercide first entered the literature through Mary Anne Warren’s work on organized anti-female destruction relating to infanticide and sex selective abortions.12 Warren acknowledged male populations decimated by conscripted war as de facto gendercide.13 Adam Jones extended the research by examining the evidence of gendercide of what he termed “battle-age males” in recent conflicts including Bosnia and Kosovo.14 Autogenocide was first used to describe the genocidal victims of Cambodia, based on the concept that the targeted groups were of the same identifying category of the perpetrators.15 Further research, however, showed that Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime actually committed genocide against several target groups due to religion, ethnicity, and those people perceived as national allied to the pre-revolution Cambodia of Lon Nol’s rule.16 In view of this, it might be said that autogenocide remains an understudied area of Genocide Studies.

12 Mary Anne Warren, Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection (New Jersey: Rowman & Allanheld, 1985), 2, 22. 13 Ibid., 1–2. 14 Adam Jones, “Gendercide and Genocide,” in Adam Jones, ed., Gendercide and Genocide (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004), 1–2, 10–11. 15 Samuel Totten, Paul R. Bartrop, and Steven L. Jacobs, Dictionary of Genocide [vol. 1] (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2008), 30. 16 Ben Kiernan, “The Cambodian Genocide, 1975–1979,” in Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons, eds., Centuries of Genocide: Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, 4th edition (New York: Routledge, 2013), 322–325. 10

This work defines British developments during World War I as representing a classic case of gendercidal autogenocide. In 1915, the government substituted men and boys in industrial employment with women, as a way to encourage those males to enlist in the Army voluntarily. Britain introduced conscription in January 1916, supported politically by the argument of greater equality of sacrifice across all socioeconomic groups. Less than four months later, in April 1916, the targets of conscription changed when Prime Minister Asquith intentionally selected working-class males, whose work would be given to women, to undertake the burden of destructive attritional warfare. Following British wartime Secretary of State for

War, Earl Horatio Herbert Kitchener’s recruitment increase demands, Prime Minister Asquith orchestrated the conscripted acquisition of 200,000 laborers who were to in his view burden the sacrifice of the anticipated increase of wastage deaths.17 This was the moment, it can be argued, that the British government committed gendercidal autogenocide, with the policy put into practice as the British Expeditionary Force (B. E. F.) switched military strategy from limited defense to mass offense at the Battle of the Somme on July 1 1916.

The concept of mass death for subjective national benefit defines the participating agents as those that caused autogenocide, where a government commits genocide against specific groups within that home population.18 Scholars of genocide studies are duty-bound to tease out the gradations between the actions and perpetrators of mass death. The case study of British military recruiters in World War I offers an example to demonstrate the dividing line between acts of genocide and democide, death or killing caused by a ruling government upon a victim

17 “Prime Minister’s Secret Session Speech 25 April 1916,” April 1916, The Papers of Herbert Henry Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith, Bodleian Library, Western Manuscripts, University of Oxford, MS. Asquith 49, 199, 232–234; “Conference between Prime Minister… and the Representatives of Trade Unions” Board of Education transcript, 26 April 1916, MS. Asquith 90, 194, 196. 18 Totten, Bartrop, and Jacobs, Dictionary of Genocide, 30. 11

group.19 Since Raphael Lemkin’s writings on targeting social groups from the 1930s and his later legally enshrined U. N. ratified definition of genocide law, scholars researching mass death have attempted to broaden the scope of the narrow allocation of victim identities beyond that of the United Nations delineation. The national government targeted the victim group due to nationality and gender, with the intention to destroy the group in part during conscripted offensive warfare, it is appropriate to conclude that gendercidal autogenocide occurred in Britain in 1916.

During the years of 1915–1916, British military tactics undertook a radical evolution from imperial transnational defense to Allied continental attack. How and why did this fundamental change take place? While researching this larger issue, the archives offered a thread of significance. On the day that Britain declared war on Germany, August 4 1914, Arthur

Balfour, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, wrote to the Lord Chancellor, former

Secretary of State for War Richard B. Haldane. In this remarkable letter, Balfour asked Haldane if the battles of the new war could offer a chance for a stalemate between Britain and Germany.20

In years to come, historians and politicians would use the term stalemate to attempt to explain the mass slaughter that occurred throughout the years of 1914–1918. With the realization that elite-level strategists in Britain had written and read about the concept of a stalemate on the day

Britain entered the war, a reassessment of British motives of escalation became appropriate.

A trail of social impacts, specifically the wastage of populations, caused by modern warfare has produced the scholarly field of genocide studies as shown through the works of military strategist Carl von Clausewitz, theologian Richard L. Rubenstein, and the

19 Paul R. Bartrop and Steven L. Jacobs, Fifty Key Thinkers on the Holocaust and Genocide (Oxon, U. K.: Routledge, 2011), 269. 20 Letter from Arthur Balfour to Richard B. Haldane, 4 Aug. 1914, The Papers of Richard B. Haldane, Lord Haldane of Cloan, National Library of Scotland, Haldane MS. 5910, 249–250. 12

contextualization of Rudolph J. Rummel.21 In On War, originally released in 1832, von

Clausewitz aired the concept that war is an act of force expressed through extremes.22

Rubenstein’s work from 1983, The Age of Triage: Fear and Hope in an Overcrowded World, relit the debate on Social Darwinism concerning potential ulterior intentions within deliberate warfare to eliminate perceived unwanted people.23 Rummel moved delegates of the discussion beyond Raphael Lemkin’s landmark effort of defining genocide,24 even while the latter’s intentions became entangled in international bartering at the United Nations.25

In 1990, Rummel introduced the term democide to encompass larger groups of victim identities not legally vouched for within the ramifications of the UNCG, as ratified on December

9 1948.26 The debates on destruction in whole or in part, and preventions of reproduction of targeted sections of populations as identified by nationality, ethnicity, race, or religion, continue in the conference rooms of historians and prosecutors alike. Those debates are valid and necessary as genocide prevention remains the core goal for dedicated members of the academy and beyond.27 The issue of gendercidal autogenocide, in this case wastage conscription of lower socio-economically graded British males in World War I as selected by members of the same nation, has received far less attention.

21 Carl von Clausewitz, with Michael Howard, and Peter Paret, eds., trans., On War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 93; Richard L. Rubenstein, The Age of Triage: Fear and Hope in an Overcrowded World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983), v, 29–30; Rudolph J. Rummel, Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917 (New Brunswick, N. J.: Transaction Publishers, 1990); 16–21; Rudolph J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, N. J.: Transaction Publishers, 1994), 31, 36–39; Bartrop and Jacobs, Fifty Key Thinkers, 272–273; Paul R. Bartrop, Genocide: The Basics (New York: Routledge, 2014), 5. 22 Clausewitz, On War, 77. 23 Rubenstein, The Age of Triage, 222–223. 24 Bartrop and Jacobs, Fifty Key Thinkers, 268–270. 25 Ibid., 185–186; Bartrop, Genocide: The Basics, 3–4. 26 Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons, “Introduction,” in Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons, eds., Centuries of Genocide: Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, 4th edition (New York: Routledge, 2013), 3. See appendix for UNCG legal text, Centuries of Genocide, 578–582. 27 For a scholarly account of evidence of genocide, see Martin Gilbert’s Never Again: A History of the Holocaust (London: HarperCollins Illustrated, 2001). 13

The problem of clarity regarding gendercidal autogenocide case studies, a subcategory within genocide scholarship, requires discussion. The government of the United Kingdom selected British working-class males deemed economically inefficient, at times called the unfit, to fill wastage quotas, positions in the Army that faced the most lethal combat in the attritional warfare of World War I. An uncounted number of these men died, with a statement on exact figures requiring an entirely separate study beyond this examination of motive and policy enforcement. Official government estimates state the number of B. E. F. deaths in France and

Flanders in 1916 as 107,411 men.28 This statistic lists deaths occurring after the implementation of conscription, but the victim table does not account for either eugenic or wastage conscription, selections for the frontline based respectively on physical fitness and supposed economic inefficiency.

As with all case studies relating to genocide law and theory the most appropriate first step is to analyze Lemkin’s words and the U. N. legal code. Killing did take place, yet not at the hands of those that selected the almost inevitable victims. Transgenocide, beyond genocide,29 allows for a useful introduction towards analyzing other groups targeted for killing beyond the limits codified by the UNCG. For example, class and gender fall outside the U. N. definition of genocide. However, transgenocide is at best a generalization. After reviewing the evidence, this case does not meet the evidence of democide as the victims, initially selected as civilians, were eventually armed and active in wartime military maneuvers.30 However, according to two of the five subcategories of the UNCG definition of genocide, these events can be argued as gendercidal autogenocide. The subsections concern “causing serious bodily or mental harm to

28 T. J. Mitchell and G. M. Smith, Medical Services: Casualties and Medical Statistics of the Great War [reprint of original from 1931] (London: Imperial War Museum, Dept. of Printed Books; Nashville: The Battery Press, 1997), 149. 29 Totten, Bartrop, and Jacobs, Dictionary of Genocide, 106. 30 Rummel, Death by Government, 40. Rummel excluded permitted killing, as in military deaths, from democide. 14

members of the group,” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”31

The evidence proves intent to partially destroy a gendered category of a national population. In April 1916, the British government intentionally caused destruction, in part, by selecting male victims of lower economic backgrounds through expanded wastage conscription, meaning the forced recruitment of men to wage war calculated to meet anticipated increases of battlefield deaths. Officials allocated a supply of manpower to meet increased recruitment quotas based on the strategic change from defensive to offensive warfare, enacted by drafting men from industry to fill expected increased casualty and death demands. Expanded death rates occurred, as expected, at the first unleashing of Britain’s mass offensive strategy at the Battle of the Somme on July 1 1916.

Explaining how this case of gendercidal autogenocide occurred relies upon the method of examining wartime bureaucrats and politicians. The opinions, and later actions, of eugenicist individuals who experienced the insecurities of imperial failings during the Boer War (1899–

1902) offer an explanation of why mass slaughter occurred and continued at unprecedented levels. From the end of the Boer War until the first years of World War I, the proposal of class degeneration dominated social and political disputes in Britain and beyond. Daniel Pick’s Faces of Degeneration, from 1989, chronicled the arguments of social decline in Europe with a brief inclusion of demographic changes during the war years.32 The perception of degeneration led eugenicists, often with Social Darwinist ideals, to propagate problems and present solutions.

31 Bartrop, Genocide: The Basics, 3. 32 Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848-c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 231–237. 15

Military organization became the model for national efficiency, as imperial Britons hoped to mirror the militarist orders of Japan and Germany.33

Historians of modern Europe, a century after the outbreak of World War I, have a duty to trace the initial influences of eugenics upon imperial warfare. The subject of eugenics is immense. Positive, preventative, and negative subcategories have helped define some of the characteristics at the core of racial biological movement.34 The need for clarity dictates any discourse on eugenics. To label everyone involved within the eugenics movement as a eugenicist without further explanation could place undue blame for destructive policies onto people such as William Bateson, an early twentieth-century scientist who later dismissed eugenics in favor of genetics. Noted as a cautious Mendelian, Bateson attended the First

International Eugenics Congress, held in London in 1912, as a delegate for both the

Entomological Society of London and the botanical Linnaean Society.35 Although Bateson was a eugenicist it is unhelpful for scholars to place the founder of genetic studies into the same group as Major Leonard Darwin, an endorser of positive eugenic theory as the former crucially advocated and lobbied in favor of adopting negative eugenic law.36

33 Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (New York: Random House, 2013), 249, 274–278. 34 Elof Carlson, The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea, 1, 9–12. Negative eugenics means the application of policy to correct the deterioration of unwanted genetic material upon a human heredity from a designated population mass; also see C. W. Saleeby, “Preventive Eugenics: The Protection of Parenthood from the Racial Poisons,” in Eugenics in Race and State: Papers of the 2nd International Congress of Eugenics, 1921 (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins Comp., 1923), 309–312; Francis Galton explained his term eugenics (good birth) in Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (London: Macmillan and Co., 1883), 24. 35 International Eugenics Congress, Problems in Eugenics: Papers Communicated to the First International Eugenics Congress Held at the University of London, July 24th to 30th, 1912 (London: Eugenics Education Society, 1912), xv; Giuseppe Sergi, “Variation and Heredity,” in International Eugenics Congress, Problems in Eugenics: Papers Communicated, 22. 36 Leonard Darwin, "The Field of Eugenic Reform," The Scientific Monthly 13, 5 (1921), 388–389. Recent scholarship has noted sterilization laws in the United States. See Marvin D. Miller, Terminating the “Socially Inadequate”: The American Eugenicist and the German Race Hygienists, California to Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island to Germany (Commack, N. Y.: Malamud-Rose, 1996). In contrast to the U. S. 1907 sterilization laws, politicians in the United Kingdom debated the merits and practicalities of ending specific biological proliferations as a part of the British Mental Deficiency Act of 1913. 16

Winding back from the Holocaust, the Nazi era, and Hitler’s rise to power, we can examine the roots of a major phase in world history, the eugenic era, from an earlier militarized class perspective. With the change from Victorian to Edwardian rule, the founder of the movement, Francis Galton, waned in health and leadership. Hopes to maintain and increase better breeding for improved social standards gave way to the political realities of a threatened empire. In recent decades, Geoffrey R. Searle has documented political connections to British eugenicists in the lead up to World War I. Searle’s thesis narrowed the focus onto initial eugenic political unity and the ultimate split along party lines, excluding later wartime biometric calculations.37

Historians of Germany have linked Nazi eugenics to the sterilization projects empowered and, on occasion, enacted throughout the United States. Edwin Black’s War against the Weak:

Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race helped push the field back to before

Nuremberg in the popular imagination.38 Scholars accept that Nazi Germany did not develop the race-science doctrines of the Holocaust in isolation. In Davenport's Dream: 21st Century

Reflections on Heredity and Eugenics, Jan A. Witkowski and John R. Inglis followed the scholarly examples of Elof A. Carlson and Hermann J. Muller by addressing the blurred lines of biology and sociology with regard to American eugenicists.39 Germany and the United States receive adequate scholarly attention from historians of eugenics. However, the roots of arguably one of the defining movements of modern western societies lie in largely unchartered British

37 G. R. Searle, Eugenics and Politics in Britain, 1900-1914 (Leyden: Noordhoff International Pub, 1976), 2; Reba N. Soffer’s review of Searle’s work demonstrated the need for a study from the intellectual perspective without noting the next chronological step of wartime eugenic initiatives. See Soffer, “Eugenics and Politics in Britain, 1900-1914 by G. R. Searle,” The American Historical Review, vol. 84, no. 5 (Dec., 1979), 1382. 38 Edwin Black, War against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003), xxiv–xxv. 39 See the third article of this collection of edited works, Elof A. Carlson, “The Eugenic World of Charles Benedict Davenport,” in J. A. Witkowski and J. R. Inglis, eds., Davenport's Dream: 21st Century Reflections on Heredity and Eugenics (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2008), 59–78. 17

histories. Philippa Levine, as co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, is one scholar who currently focuses on eugenics as an influential theme within the British Empire.

Levine shows how significant historiography has recognized the role of Galton’s work in ideas of imperial hierarchies of race and class.40

The list of eugenic studies begins with evolutionary biology, traverses Social Darwinism, and ends with modern genocide. A comprehensive historiographical work on the impact of eugenics remains to be done. This study focuses on the actions of influential eugenicists as

Britain militarily and socially reorganized prior to, and during, World War I. Historians of science have effectively used the archives to demonstrate the differences between objective genetic research and the multitude of subjective eugenic activists sponsored by internationally renowned research institutions. Efforts to avoid appearing as apologists for the actions of outlandish scientists of previous generations frame such researchers as fringe characters, outliers from the established scientific community. However, eugenics was at the forefront of the most prestigious universities and government programs for the first two generations of the twentieth century. Only a small number of systematic studies on eugenic activities from the era prior to the applications formulated in Nazi Germany exist. Exceptional works relevant to the science and scientists of the eugenics movement include Steven Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man,

Eugenics, Human Genetics and Human Failings by Pauline M. H. Mazumdar, and In the Name of Eugenics by Daniel J. Kevles. Gould traced biological determinism, the concept that physical inheritance dictates and restricts future potential achievement, from pre-Darwinist racial theories through to the current problems in education and psychology regarding Intelligent Quotient

40 Philippa Levine, “Anthropology, Colonialism, and Eugenics,” in Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 51–52, 56. 18

assessment.41 Mazumdar examined eugenicists in relation to their targets, namely the pauper class of Britons dependent upon Victorian-era Poor Law subsidies.42 Kevles steeped his work in the ideological concepts grappled with by eugenic pioneers as researchers.43

Beyond science, but also crucially from before World War I, Searle’s Eugenics and

Politics in Britain, 1900-1914 documented the influential role of eugenic ideologues within the elite hierarchy of global power. The author did include the position of the Eugenics Education

Society (E. E. S.) as viewing voluntary enlistment as potentially detrimental to the overall mental and physical average of a nation, termed dysgenic, as fitter men went to war.44 The recent discussion between Richard Weikart and Robert J. Richards on Adolf Hitler’s potential understanding, misunderstanding, and likely ignorance of Charles Darwin’s writings assists with the broader analysis of class, science, and genocide.45

Gladly, scholars contemplate the applications of scientific theory and practice during

World War II. However, fewer scholars remain dutifully dedicated to deconstructing the heralded past glories of modern nationalism. Modernists owe readers a reassessment of the mass destruction ravaged by Europe’s military powers in World War I. Relevantly, one understudied topic of the British historical record is eugenic conscription. Class and sacrifice were the social orders that emerged from apparent industrialized chaos in the early twentieth century, echoed later throughout German-dominated Europe. Before the Great War, biometricians gained favor

41 Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 21–22, 179. 42 Pauline M. H. Mazumdar, Eugenics, Human Genetics and Human Failings: The Eugenics Society, Its Sources and Its Critics in Britain (London: Routledge, 2011), 2–3. 43 Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985), ix–x. 44 Searle, Eugenics and Politics, 37–38. 45 Richards aptly counters Weikart’s useful, yet overly broad assertions. See Robert J. Richards, Was Hitler a Darwinian?: Disputed Questions in the History of Evolutionary Theory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 192–193, 223–224, 240. Richard J. Evans and Edward Caudill are two scholars who have clarified the role of Social Darwinism in Nazi Germany. See Richard J. Evans, Rereading German History: From Unification to Reunification, 1800-1996 (London: Routledge, 1997), 119–144; Edward Caudill, Darwinian Myths: The Legends and Misuses of a Theory (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 114–133. 19

with middle and upper class officials empowered by both meritocratic value and hereditary privilege. Several works on wartime demographic beliefs and statistics have built a strong collection of research materials regarding class divides in Britain.46 Three highly valuable studies on class struggles bring conscription into context as a contentious, rather than accepted, sacrifice made by British men.47

Regarding military history, David French noted British strategic aims in two works that partitioned World War I into two divided categories. His work from 1986, British Strategy &

War Aims, 1914-1916, effectively explains the intertwining forces of civil and military officials, policies, and practices until the resignation of Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith’s coalition government in December 1916. French discussed the arrival of conscription in January 1916 as a carefully considered military calculation, a strategy of deploying manpower that continually threatened the economic stability of Britain.48 The work did not account for the influences of eugenics as expressed by members of Asquith’s government. In French’s study The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition, 1916-1918, from 1995, the author dismissed the sentiment of Joan

Littlewood’s Oh! What a Lovely War that viewed World War I as a futile mass sacrifice of men lost due to the incompetence of upper-class generals.49 This socioeconomic divide has existed for at least one generation of British historians and commentators in examinations of World War

I. French noted how Asquith successfully introduced general compulsion in May 1916,

46 For relevant historiography by social historians, see Alistair Reid, “The Impact of the First World War on British Workers,” in Richard Wall and Jay Winter, eds., The Upheaval of War: Family, Work and Welfare in Europe, 1914- 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 221–234; for Volunteers and classes, see Jay Winter, “Army and society: the demographic context,” in I. F. W. Beckett and Keith Simpson, eds., A Nation in Arms: A Social Study of the British Army in the First World War (Barnsley: Pen & Sword Military, 2014), 192–209. 47 Bernard Waites, A Class Society at War, England, 1914–1918 (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1987), 184–190; Brock Millman, Managing Domestic Dissent in First World War Britain (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 50–73; Keith Grieves, The Politics of Manpower, 1914–18 (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1988), 19–62. 48 David French, British Strategy & War Aims, 1914-1916 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 185–187. 49 David French, The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition, 1916-1918 (Oxford: Clarendon press, 1995), 3. 20

following an extended secret session with the House of Commons beginning on April 25 1916.50

French insisted that class divisions had not sacrificed men in vain, but rather Britons had fought and died to strengthen the British Empire.51 The problem with this view is that, in April 1916,

Asquith determined that working-class males would carry the burden of war through intentional sacrifice, in direct contradiction of the supposed equality concept used to introduce conscription in January and general compulsion in May. Evidence follows herein that documents the intent to destroy, in part, Britain’s wartime working men, actions that support the argument that the

British government committed gendercidal autogenocide in 1916.

Microhistory studies on European urban centers, including the British cities London and

Manchester, have built a useful platform of secondary materials for social analysis of working class people directly affected by World War I. Social historiography from scholars including

Robert Roberts, Richard Soloway, and Jay Winter provides perspectives of home front experiences and consequences.52 The debates on militarism, of government and society dominated by military forces, at times miss the class struggles present in Britain for a generation prior to World War I.53 Gender studies validate the power of female labor as contrasted with the postwar antagonism of unions without fully recognizing the effects of recruitment and conscription upon male workers.54

50 French, British Strategy & War Aims, 189. 51 French, The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition, 3. 52 Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (London: Penguin, 1971), 186– 238; Richard Soloway, “Eugenics and pronatalism in wartime Britain,” in Wall and Winter, eds., The Upheaval of War, 369–388; Jean-Louis Robert and Jay Winter, “Conclusion: towards a social history of capital cities at war,” in Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert, eds., Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914-1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 527–554. 53 See “The Myths of Militarism” and “The August Days: The Myth of War Enthusiasm,” in Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 1–30, 174–211. 54 For balanced studies, see Deborah Thom, “Women and work in wartime Britain,” in Wall and Winter, eds., The Upheaval of War, 297–326; Nicoletta Gullace, The Blood of Our Sons: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship During the Great War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 73–116, 159–160. For comparison, and advocacy, of female labor before, during, and after the war, see Gail Braybon, Women Workers in the First World War (London: Routledge, 1989). 21

British wartime bureaucrats balanced the maintenance of an economic system already hampered by restless workers with the necessities of manpower by engineering gendercidal autogenocide within recruitment policy. Wastage statisticians, anticipating the number of deaths in battle, required persons of apparently expendable eugenic constitutions. Alex Alvarez has produced useful comparative works on genocide to document the overwhelming influence of governments regarding events of mass death. In 2001, Alvarez noted the expendable concept of large bodies of soldiers.55 In his work Death by Government Rudolph J. Rummel outlined the theory that historical evidence showed past governments as enacting mass murder upon members of the home nation, yet in circumstances that fall outside of the U. N. legal and therefore scholarly definitions of genocide as accepted by the academy. The rejection of the first subsection of genocide refers to the fact that conscripting orchestrators did not kill by their own hands, or order fellow nationals to kill their compatriots, but instead assisted the mass death of intentionally targeted victims. British eugenicist bureaucrats, as accessories to mass death, did actively and intentionally conduct selections of men. Specifically two eugenicists, Reginald

McKenna and Bernard Mallet, conducted this selection process. These eugenicists deemed such targets for wastage recruitment as surplus to economic requirements.56 This study recognizes the intention to sacrifice lower socioeconomic males for the perceived benefit of the British Empire as documented in April 1916. The ideological beliefs of eugenic activists and policymakers enabled Asquith to commit gendercidal autogenocide. The policy of economic eugenics, substituting male for female workers, led to the later strategy of wastage conscription with drafts

55 Alex Alvarez, Government, Citizens, and Genocide: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approach (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 32; for genocide studies in the context of criminology, see Alex Alvarez, Genocidal Crimes (London: Routledge, 2010). 56 “Appendix II… A.,” in “Shops Committee.” Report of the Committee (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office; Darling & Sons, 1915), The Papers of Violet Markham, London School of Economics, MARKHAM/3/24, 9; “Appendix II… B.,” in “Shops Committee.” Report of the Committee (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office; Darling & Sons, 1915), MARKHAM/3/24, 10; “Statement from the Home Office. Dealing Particularly with the Substitution of Women for Men,” 20 Sept. 1915, MARKHAM/3/30, 1–6. 22

intentionally expected to suffer partial destruction in the sacrifices of offensive attritional warfare.57

With the origins of war set on diplomatic issues and the British-German arms race, militarism as a mode of modern productivity has divided scholarly opinion. Niall Ferguson rejects heightened German militarism as the core causal factor for World War I. Instead, he views British preparations as spurring aggressive regional reactions, along with ethical and honorable niceties that demanded the maintenance of political oaths and alliances in the form of

Edwardian appeasement and agreements between Britain, France, Russia, and the United

States.58 In The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914, Margaret MacMillan documents the progressive international steps from 1900 until the outbreak of war. She recognizes that

European militaries dominated their own civilian populations, until many residents expected war.59 In Britain, wealthy families had accepted militarism as a method of maintaining discipline, national efficiency, and nationalism in their young.60

Eugenic historiography has most often led to scholarly works on scientific identities and activities regarding changes over time. The need for an applied eugenic study of British government officials before, during, and after World War I appears necessary to clarify some of the misunderstandings regarding current historiographical thought and belief. The following study of the years of 1900–1916 discusses some of the unanswered questions relating to

57 By late 1915, British officials understood the need to supply manpower, to die rather than to work, see “NOTE - For the Conference of 6th December,” 5 Dec. 1915, War Office Memorandum, United Kingdom official government documents, National Archives of the United Kingdom, WO 159/4, 31. Regarding the perceived economically inefficient civilian targeting for “wastage” recruitment see “Memorandum on Recruiting,” 12 Dec. 1915, War Office Memorandum, WO 194/4, 32. For documents on Asquith’s conscripted wastage policy, see “Prime Minister’s Secret Session Speech 25 April 1916,” April 1916, MS. Asquith 49, 99, 232–234; “Conference between Prime Minister… and the Representatives of Trade Unions,” 26 April 1916, Board of Education transcript, MS. Asquith 90, 194, 196. For the first full-length study on democide, see Rudolph J. Rummel, Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917 (New Brunswick, N. J.: Transaction Publishers, 1990). 58 Ferguson, The Pity of War, 52–55. 59 MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace, 249, 279–282. 60 Ibid., 284. 23

intentions, and developments, of administrators active and engaged in eugenic ideologies as a useful device for reassessing British losses in World War I.

Government, journalist, eugenic, military, civilian, and economic organizations began to converge at the First International Eugenics Congress held at the University of London in 1912.

Journalist and author Arnold White was known for advocating compulsory military service for eugenicist, racial, and nationalist improvement. The published minutes and subsequent official report from the international event included the issue of eugenic military organization, as discussed by Colonel Warden,61 the alias of Congress Vice-President Winston Churchill, an attendee as one of Britain’s leading military and rising political figures.62 Leonard Darwin,

President of the E. E. S., enlisted former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour to serve at the event as a distinguished opening speaker.63 Debate on inefficiency and wastage did appear in the contrasting views of efficiency and conservation years before Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, other British military and civilian officials, and later historians, began to embody these connecting themes under the unhelpful heading of wastage.

Inefficiency, wastage, and traditional military recruitment fundamentally changed from defensive imperial battles to offensive total warfare. Enacting gendered eugenics provided the reform platform which sacrificed supposedly degenerate males in war. Inefficiency throughout society emerged as a key political debate in the aftermath of the Boer War, at the beginning of the twentieth century. This work examines ramifications of state, political, military, civilian, and journalistic reactions to the potential of the threatened empire, from 1900–1916. This argument

61 Gerald Pawle and C. R. Thompson, The War and Colonel Warden (New York: Knopf, 1963), 185. Pawle, using a government aid’s personal testimonies from World War II, notes that Colonel Warden was Churchill’s favorite pseudonym. 62 International Eugenics Congress, Problems in Eugenics: Report of Proceedings of the First International Eugenics Congress Held at the University of London, July 24th–30th, 1912, Together with an Appendix Containing Those Papers Communicated to the Congress Not Included in Volume 1. Vol. II (London: Eugenics Education Society, 1913), 48–49. 63 International Eugenics Congress, Problems in Eugenics: Report, 3, 7–11. 24

focuses on the years of action, and reaction, rather than simply preparation and adaption, from before and into the formative years of World War I. Specifically addressed are issues regarding accepted recruitment terminologies and narratives, military and civilian organizational structures including the National Registration Act, the gender dilution process of the substitution scheme as expanded by the register, the change from military to civilian statistical analyses and projections, economic eugenics, and wastage conscription. Gendering economic eugenic reform sanctioned the deliberate sacrifice of working-class males (gendercidal autogenocide) to protect the power of hereditary elites, classes comprised of aristocratic upper ranks and capitalist middle tiers, as

Britain changed military strategy from defense to offense.

Sacrificing British male workers through eugenic wartime policies undermined political dissent throughout much of the Empire as the tactic of bloodshed engendered a rebalance of demographic power back towards hereditary classists by committing gendercidal autogenocide.

Between October 1915 and April 1916, the Secretary of State for War, the cabinet-level government defense forum of the Committee of Imperial Defense (C. I. D.), the Prime Minister, and the Board of Trade in charge of the substitution scheme orchestrated the conscripted recruitment and deliberate sacrifice of male workers in expanded attritional warfare. By expending the reserve of recruits conscripted into the Army to fill projected wastage figures in future enlarged battles, the U. K. government committed gendercidal autogenocide in 1916.

Reorganized gendered social order occurred to undermine and sacrifice working males amidst military demands and opportunities presented by modern warfare. After the industrial unrest of 1911, urban males became the target for economic eugenic policy as seen in the

National Registration Act, the gendered dilution of male workplaces, the substitution scheme, and the stream of public messages of efficiency and progress that contrasted with shirking 25

national duties and cowardice. Inefficiency and wastage offered policymakers, including eugenicist statisticians Bernard Mallet and Reginald McKenna, processes to reorganize a gendered, class-prejudiced social order. Reformers sympathetic to Social Darwinist orchestrators Sidney and Beatrice Webb, for example Violet Markham, constructed a wartime nation peopled by conserved self-appointed elites, loyal and efficient administrators, due largely to their sacrificing of supposedly expendable, inefficient, male laborers in the World War I.

Battlefield events dominate the history of warfare, while a minority of social historians attempts to examine the home front. In total warfare, each front is connected to the base of production. British developments of mass destruction, from before and during World War I, set in motion modern institutional acceptance of inequality unto death of people from both foreign and home nations. Eugenicists active and empowered in wartime created the human, rather than material, bonds of total warfare in the British Empire. The home front remains the first battle for prevention of mass destruction. In this case study, an examination of the prewar tensions is necessary. The major disputes present in British public discourse leading up to August 1914 surrounding the imperial failures suffered in Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century.

26

II. Boer War Muddling and Proposed British Degeneration, 1900–1906

From 1900 to 1906, perceived imperial, military, and social disorder led politicians and national commentators to offer and plan a variety of policies to address the feared decline of the

British Empire. Government officials tasked with dealing with the failures of the Boer War began to have direct contact with eugenic theorists who promoted social divides in support of economically and politically empowered minorities. By 1906, the British government began to implement a military order based on consolidating class divides of the landed gentry, educated managers, and industrial laborers.

The Threatened Empire

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the Boer War challenged British imperial prestige, leading to charges of physical, moral, and intellectual degeneration and calls for social reforms.

The Social Democracy movement understood and opposed exploitation of British workers by wealthier classes, those who owned modes of production. Class prejudices of educational institutions, and biased government officials, deemed the growth of working class industrial populations as degenerate. Francis Galton, founder of the eugenics movement in Britain, responded to the supposed threat to imperial Britain by founding the Eugenics Education Society specifically to study and aid the fertility of preferred classes of loyal imperial Britons. Lower classes received attention mainly to demonstrate degeneration as a threatening potential future for post-Victorian British ruling families, and loyal obedient servants. The example of German military power added both risk and opportunity for imperial elites. Militarism gave order to 27

industrial continental powers, in contrast to Britain’s classical liberal political organization.

Military discipline, paired with eugenics, entered public debate as tools for managing Britain’s growing working-class population. The debate on government power, brought about by Boer fighters in British South Africa, was under way by 1900 from imperialists and socialists alike.64

In the late-Victorian era, British degeneration commentators focused on the dangers of unregulated immigration. In 1892, journalist Arnold White edited and introduced a collection of articles that argued the benefits of selecting entrants designed to avoid increases in proletariat classes.65 With the Russian government reverting to tactics of expulsion of Jews, cited as a practice of the Middle Ages, London’s poorer neighborhoods became overcrowded with refugees.66 Instead of addressing restrictive class constructions, the works in White’s collection examined ways and reasons to deny further immigration. One writer noted that allowing pauperism to exist over multiple generations condemned children to suffer premature death or survive to live in moral and physical ruin.67 Prevention measures included restrictions based on health concerns for the home nation.68

White continued his critique of working-class Britons in a work from 1895. Citing the industrial action of the London Dock Strike, 1889, as a civil war between classes, the prolific author framed working males, Britain’s “hostile majority” as endangering democracy, while thanking government officials for upholding the rights of property owners and capitalists challenged by economic unrest. This argument skewed democracy as protecting the rights of empowered individuals. White compared the disturbance of trade in London to the adequate

64 Letter from Alfred Milner to Lord Roberts, 25 May 1900, The Papers of Sir Alfred Milner, Bodleian Library, Western Manuscripts, MS. Milner 15, 82–93; H. Quelch, Social-Democracy and the Armed Nation (London: The Twentieth Century Press, 1900), Arnold White Collection, National Maritime Museum, WHI/12, 1, 4. 65 Arnold White, The Destitute Alien in Great Britain; A Series of Papers Dealing with the Subject of Foreign Pauper Immigration (London: S. Sonnenschein & Co.; New York, Scribner's Sons, 1892), 1–2, 101–102, 126. 66 Ibid., 3. 67 Ibid., 167. 68 Ibid., 106–107. 28

suppression of peasant complaints in Ireland, a potential uprising quelled by Arthur Balfour’s use of police force to restore economic order.69 Rule by popular consent became synonymous with

White’s views of degeneration.70 He criticized police inaction during the Dock Strike for offering compassion to laborers that included “Celtic Irish.” White noted that the “excitable” ethnic minority from Ireland did not deserve domestic discretion from police officials. He defined Irish people as a distinct “race,” as separate from English, a divide that required a peaceful resolution from British royalty.71 Ethnicity was often classified in racial terms, becoming an academic tradition in the nineteenth century.72

In 1900, Victorian socialite and imperial travel writer Violet Markham’s work regarding imperial developments in South Africa hoped to explain problems of diverse populations, of race and class, living under British rule. Her views noted the likely union of Boer and Briton as common white European cousins. Markham offered evidence that suggested how white conflict was due to black Africans, natives who resisted and suffered Boer and British military advancements, and thereby bringing armed territorial groups of European descent into contact with each other.73 She noted how slavery had produced labor divides. White men had grown lazy, while black manual laborers bore the brunt of farming and factory operations.74 Projecting generational issues, Markham compared the budding threat of native influence as like a “green twig the growth of which depends on the form we choose to give it.”75 Without using the term

69 Arnold White, The English Democracy; Its Promises and Perils (London: S. Sonnenschein & Co., 1895), 197– 199; for an earlier opinion of the strike as civil war fought by Britain’s classes see Henry George, “The Warning of the English Strikes,” The North American Review, vol. 149, no. 395 (Oct., 1889), 385–398. 70 White, The English Democracy, 11, 59, 200–202. 71 Ibid., 102, 147, 200. 72 “Knox on the Celtic Race,” Anthropological Review, vol. 6, no. 21 (April, 1868), 175–191. 73 Violet R. Markham, South Africa, Past and Present: An Account of Its History, Politics and Native Affairs, Followed by Some Personal Reminiscences of African Travel During the Crisis Preceding the War (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1900), 232–234. 74 Ibid., 241–242. 75 Ibid., 276. 29

eugenics, Markham did refer to education as the evolutionary process of developing thoughtful, good citizens.76

At the start of the 1900s, the threat to government by an armed population appeared in

Britain as a direct result from the news of conflict in the Transvaal. The Social Democracy movement included a call for armed self-defense of citizens in order to curb the growing militarism of British government infrastructures. Socialists viewed the war in South Africa as an unjustified attack by a minority group of British volunteer soldiers, adventurers willing to conduct carnage for profit at the behest of the imperial ruling class of exploitative capitalists.77

The conflicts between monarchists and classical liberals regarding the issue of continuing or reforming government had led to revolutions on mainland Europe throughout the nineteenth century, but remained relatively peaceful in the industrious, overcrowded United Kingdom.78

British liberals rejected European republicanism in favor of a liberal empire. A political divide formed in liberal Britain on the question of dominion and colonial autonomy. The brute force of militarist colonialism in the Transvaal, inflicted upon an enemy described by Army commander

Field Marshal Lord Frederick Roberts to his fellow landed-gentry military colleague Earl Horatio

Herbert Kitchener as infesting districts,79 began to prompt workers and advocates of working- class Britons into action against tyranny. One strategy included compulsory military training, not service, to avoid suppression by any foreign or domestic armed foe.80

By way of a public lecture and subsequent pamphlet from the summer of 1904, with post-

Boer War reform discussions underway, Arnold White reintroduced his concept of sterilizing the

76 Markham, South Africa, Past and Present, 279. 77 Quelch, Social-Democracy and the Armed Nation, WHI/12, 4–5. 78 John M. Merriman, A History of Modern Europe: From the French Revolution to the Present [third edition, volume 2] (New York: W. W: Norton, 2010), 598, 613, 696–698, 763. 79 Letter from Lord Roberts to Lord Kitchener, c. 1901, MS. Milner 16, 96. 80 Quelch, Social-Democracy and the Armed Nation, WHI/12, 6–7, 16. 30

unfit, his term for segregating people deemed inefficient reproducers.81 He suggested that the national decline demanded comprehensive social reorganization, expanding his earlier prewar ideas of London’s decline into a critique of current national, and future imperial, deterioration.82

Blaming alcoholic men for creating an invalid class, the social commentator defined his targets for reform as degenerate, hopeless Britons that produced both solider and laborer.83 White argued that government agencies should provide children born of the unfit with adequate nourishment, while permanently yet compassionately isolating habitual criminals, the mentally afflicted, and any homeless person still without housing after a period of five years.84 In a remarkably prescient comment predating future crimes of the Holocaust, White rejected calls for murderous death chambers or other similarly barbaric methods.85 In addition to medical and social eugenic concepts, White’s lecture rejected the need for conscription to fight in the armed services, but did demand universal compulsory military training to physically strengthen and mentally discipline the British population.86

Social Darwinism and Eugenic Theories

In the later nineteenth century, evolutionary theories gave rise to Social Darwinism, as propagated by Herbert Spencer’s survival of the fittest mantra. His followers and peers used sociological statistics to usurp scientific research and explain class stratifications. The actions of social reformers Sidney and Beatrice Webb connected Social Darwinism to eugenics. Beatrice

81 Arnold White, The Physical Condition of the Nation. Or “Our Invalid Nation and How to Cure It,” c. 1904, WHI/43, 12. 82 Ibid., 3–4. 83 Ibid., 7–8. 84 Ibid., 9, 12. 85 Ibid., 12. 86 Ibid., 11. 31

corresponded for several years with Spencer, a figure she considered as a central mentor in her political development.87 The Webbs worked to improve living standards for laboring Britons through the Fabian Society and the Coefficients. Sidney, Lord Passfield, served in Parliament for several years. Before her marriage to Sidney, Beatrice’s interest in Spencer’s philosophical perspectives pleased the founder of the survival competitor evolutionary construct.88 The Webbs maintained their politically active groups by contacting and recruiting talent to their social causes, including socialist statistician and future leading eugenicist Karl Pearson.89 Pearson’s view of socialism recognized that evolutionary science had focused on individualist, rather than socialist, benefits.90 He argued to working-class audiences that biology had not determined socialism as a degenerate system, but that individualistic society had allowed the growth of physically and mentally lowest classes. Moreover, Pearson hoped workers would begin to utilize science as well as economics to improve living conditions for laborers.91

Spencer caused a lasting confusion in evolutionary science by building his survival of the fittest construct, as explained in his work Social Statics of 1851, upon targeted people of supposed physical decline. Within the context of imperial land growth, Spencer explained his views and methods of solving the perceived problems associated with indigenous peoples. His view was that if left alone, such populations could become overly troublesome to superior, settler migrants. By using the metaphor of the body politic, Spencer defined sovereign indigenous societies living within larger dominant cultures as potentially becoming “parasitic growths, such

87 See typescript of BBC interview with Beatrice Webb, Feb. 27, 1928, The Papers of Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Lord and Lady Passfield, London School of Economics, PASSFIELD/6/79, 1–9. 88 Letter from Herbert Spencer to Beatrice Potter, Feb. 13, 1883,PASSFIELD/2/1/2/1, 9. 89 Letter from Beatrice Webb to Karl Pearson, July 2, 1894, The Papers of Karl Pearson, University College London, PEARSON/11/1/22/31; Letter from Sidney Webb to Karl Pearson, June 7, 1895, PEARSON/11/1/22/31. 90 Karl Pearson, Socialism in Theory and Practice (London: W. Reeves, 1884), PEARSON/3/2/1/8, 10. 91 Karl Pearson, “Socialism and Natural Selection,” in The Fortnightly Review, no. CCCXXXI (July 1, 1894), PEARSON/3/2/1/7, 21. 32

as cancer.”92 Spencer offered a prescription for the increasingly unstable and variable biological entities newly present within the expanding domain of white Europeans. The British Empire should have established clearly segregated, social divides for all humans, into three classes of

“soldiers, priests, and laboureres.”93 He wanted to install an imperial three-tiered class system.

The misnomer of replacing the ability to fit in, of adaptability, with physiological fitness has been in misuse since Darwin’s inclusion of Spencer’s fittest concept in the widely reprinted sixth edition of The Origin of Species.94 Spencer’s tri-class construct placed educated moderators between, and above, the forces of the international warrior and the domestic worker.

Francis Galton, first cousin to Charles Darwin, introduced eugenics to enable a systemic improvement of the evolving British Empire in 1883.95 Preventive eugenics, an initial step towards genocidal negative eugenics, emerged on the intellectual horizon in 1892. Galton’s eugenic theory described humans with plant biology terminology, in a novel extension of evolutionary science. He specifically cited the role of science as a tool to applying deliberate changes in developing human life.96 He examined hybrid stocks, concluding that supposed racial impurities led to instability. Even “pure blood” marriages of same-race, but different economic backgrounds, would produce a “hybrid offspring” with no reliable right to succeed.97 The same work included Galton’s enquiry of how science may provide the elites of the Victorian era with loyal servant races.98 Eugenics had deep roots with imperialistic settler transitions. One further example from Galton tied eugenic thought, intent, and action with white settlers tasked with

92 Herbert Spencer, Social Statics, or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed, (London: John Chapman, 1851), 449. 93 Ibid., 453. 94 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 6th edition (London: J. Murray, 1872), 77. 95 Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (London: Macmillan and Co., 1883), 25. 96 Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (London: Macmillan and Co., 1892), xix. 97 Ibid., 366–367. 98 Ibid., xix–xxvi. 33

populating global temperate zones. Galton wanted “as much backbone as we can get, to bear the racket… and as good brains as possible to contrive machinery.”99 For many prominent figures in the United Kingdom of the late nineteenth century, evolution offered the potential for designing and growing workers to order, loyal race-based biological groupings, with no comprehensive understanding of their eugenically orchestrated origins.

In 1886, journalist Arnold White promoted the concept of social degeneration by arguing in favor of class-based Social Darwinist policies. White wrote one of the earliest works to state the supposed need to end the reproduction of people perceived as socially unfit through marriage prevention and segregation. White’s argument for reducing informally educated, working-class population growth depended upon attempts to avoid the risks of politically empowering supposed degenerate groups, termed by White as embodying mental and physical deterioration, by way of the benefits of democratic government.100 He argued that the weakening of London’s working classes had caused a decline in productivity. Government statistics reported some neighborhoods as averaging twenty days per year of lost labor.101 White called for criminality of diseases, and the “extermination of the unfit as a class.”102 He listed Rev. S. Singer’s views on the immigration of young Jewish parents and dependents as one cause for poverty in eastern

London.103 His recommendations focused on “sterilization of the unfit,” not through later eugenic practices such as aborting pregnancies or conducting medical operations on adults, but by preventative measures enforced by restrictive marriage laws, and segregation by criminalizing targeted sectors.104

99 Galton, Hereditary Genius, 346. 100 Arnold White, The Problems of a Great City (London: Remington and Co., 1886), 27–28. 101 Ibid., 29. 102 Ibid., 30, 31. 103 Ibid., 54–56. 104 Ibid., 60–61. 34

As early as 1895, White’s belief in the subjective degeneration theory, designed to undermine the economic advancement of British working-class males at the expense of property owners, heralded women as the replacement for men defined as unnecessary malcontent laborers.105 He held that the development of working-class women, if empowered with political equality, as an alternative to increasing suffrage of working males, would present great social benefits over the coming century.106 The threat of armed rebellion within the British Isles from revolutionary working-class males, including socialists, became a preemptive target for imperial advocates.107 White imagined that working-class women, with the proper incentives handed down from social superiors in Britain’s higher classes, would replace and subdue working-class males, extinguishing the threat of a proletarian revolution as experienced on numerous occasions on mainland Europe. It is important to note that the concept of race at this time was imprecise, leading to inconsistent applications.

By 1899, Arnold White accepted the concept of a “Jewish race,” an inclusive band of ethnicities including descendants of Judah and practitioners of relevant cultural rites, as a useful model for immigration law and class stratifications.108 The views of such racial commentators differed from later ideas of race variations as based on skin color. Most categories from this era of racial interpretations have since become recognized as ethnic variations due to regional and linguistic origins. The notable exception, the continued myth of the Jewish race, may have occurred as the Jewish Diaspora has added and adapted ethnic groups to Semitic Jews, while

Jewish culture has included a variety of ethnicities for centuries. The Jews, quite simply, are not a race. White hoped to show the national benefits of educated and industrious Jews in contrast to

105 White, The English Democracy, 187–191. 106 Ibid., 171–175. 107 Ibid., 10, 66–67, 74. 108 Arnold White, The Modern Jew (New York: F.A. Stokes, 1899), viii, 3, 5–8, 296. 35

the degeneration of specific Russian Jewish communities.109 The answer to this “Jewish

Question” was for Europe’s powers to determine a territory in the Near East, statehood to empower and sustain Jewish families suffering antisemitism in Europe.110

In the early twentieth century, as a consequence of growing populations, British statisticians and eugenicists began to assert the Malthusian concept of degeneration, from

Thomas Malthus’s late eighteenth-century belief that continued overpopulation risked immediate civil collapse.111 A century later, imperial Britons calculated values of social class as in decline, leading to pressure for supposedly regenerative policies. Two movements of social statisticians and eugenicists shared common beliefs, while practicing separate attempts to solve the issues present in declining higher-class and increasing lower-class birthrates. The Malthusian League, constituted in 1877 by neo-Malthusian birth-control advocates, promoted economic efforts to dissuade the quantitative growth of poorer demographics.112 In contrast, eugenicists focused on inherent qualities, deemed as in decline due, in part, to advances in medicine and charitable programs.113

For decades before the founding of the Eugenics Education Society (E. E. S.) in 1907, leading members of the eugenics movement including Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, and Major

Leonard Darwin (son of Charles Darwin) recognized eugenics, by way of evolutionary and hereditary studies, as their preferred method to improve the quality of populations. Pearson recognized that with more women of all classes in the workplaces of industrialized Britain,

109 White, The Modern Jew, 12, 22, 74, 201, 297. 110 Ibid., ix, xv, xvii, 278–279. 111 See Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population Or a View of Its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness: with an Inquiry into Our Prospects Respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils Which It Occasions (London: J. Johnson, 1798). 112 Richard Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 86–87. 113 Diane B. Paul, and James Moore, “The Darwinian Context: Evolution and Inheritance,” in Bashford and Levine, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, 28. 36

maternity had declined into competition with economic processes, in turn leading to more births of lower social value.114 Social educators focused on quantity and quality measures, with degeneration perceived as a major threat to maintaining British preeminence.

By 1900, evolutionary eugenicists realized the need for an expansive research project.

Leonard Darwin hoped to turn his casual interest in eugenics into a professional avenue to compliment his political aspirations. He attempted to recruit the future creator of the term genetics, William Bateson, of the University of Cambridge. Bateson responded to Darwin’s request by writing directly to the project instigator and sponsor, the Scottish-born American industrial capitalist Andrew Carnegie. Bateson asked Carnegie if the initiative could include the establishment of a research laboratory to study biological descent, heredity, of animals and plants.115

Amid the Boer struggle against the advance of the British Empire in South Africa in

1901, Arnold White expanded the degeneration theory of moral and physical decline of workers to also accuse government officials of deterioration. White challenged higher state civil servants, emphasizing the failures of the War Office, to accept radical systemic reforms through military administration. Maintaining and promoting fitness required novelty, in line with the continuous change of natural selection in evolution, instead of predictable and unaccountable bureaucratic routine.116 Noting the rise of Prussia at the expense of France in the nineteenth century, White viewed Germany as the major threat to imperial rule as British middle classes

114 Karl Pearson, “Woman and Labour,” in The Fortnightly Review, no. CCCXXIX (May 1, 1894), PEARSON/3/2/1/6, 562, 577; Soloway, Demography and Degeneration, 90. 115 Letter from William Bateson to Andrew Carnegie, 21 Nov. 1900, in William Bateson and Beatrice Bateson, ed., William Bateson, F. R. S., Naturalist: His Essays & Addresses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), 74– 75. Beatrice, wife of William Bateson, noted Herbert Spencer as also requesting the need for evolution experimentation stations, although the citation appears to have been added later by the editor. 116 Arnold White, Efficiency and Empire (London: Methuen & Co., 1901), 14–15, 245–246. 37

wasted the national inheritance in the pursuit of leisure in place of duty.117 He pronounced eugenic concepts when judging the current generation of the “unfit” as doomed, manufactured unemployable men, and sickly women.118 To avoid a decline in the empire, as an expected consequence of individual deterioration and group degeneration, the author implored the British government to utilize military efficiency, including preventing further births of the unfit, and enforce a productive and successful empire.119 White’s survivalist misinterpretation of evolution, a practical pro-capitalist form of Social Darwinism, offered militarized eugenics as a concept, not a stated term, as the solution to several social and imperial questions.

Between 1904 and 1906, Francis Galton began to link prominent figures of notable public authority to the eugenics movement by collecting statistical data directly from willing participating members of the Fellows of the Royal Society, a private scientific community with elite political associations. Galton distributed requests for data in early 1904. Galton’s eugenics research assistant at the University of London, Edgar Schuster, compiled responses from sixty- six Fellows, often through their personal secretaries, into a published compendium, Noteworthy

Families, of human pedigree as constructed by self-defined, well-bred hereditary identities. The family lineages included the names of Arthur Balfour, Leonard Darwin, Richard Haldane, and

John St. Loe Strachey.120 Eugenic tendencies and beliefs to grade the achievements of certain notable Britons permeated the private lives of these individuals.

In an unpublished project, designated as a second volume of noteworthiness, Galton’s assistant received many replies including details from direct private contacts of architect

Reginald Blomfield, Lord Esher, Winston Churchill, and Lord Roberts, while statistician

117 White, Efficiency and Empire, viii–xi, 290–293. 118 Ibid., 116. 119 Ibid., 311–315. 120 Francis Galton and Edgar Schuster, Noteworthy Families (Modern Science): An Index to Kinships in Near Degrees between Persons Whose Achievements Are Honourable, and Have Been Publicly Recorded (London: J. Murray, 1906), ix, 1, 19, 29, 65. 38

Bernard Mallet responded personally to the request to supply genealogical facts of distinction.121

Each of these figures played prominent roles in the next few years regarding the preparation, deployment, and remembrance of British mass-deaths during World War I. Blomfield, an architect, remained unconnected with civil wartime activities until commissioned, in early 1918, to commemorate war graves and design the Cross of Sacrifice. The large Christian cross set upon an octagonal pedestal has since become a recognizable memorial used to honor the fallen soldiers of World War I throughout British Commonwealth nations.122 Eugenic sympathies within Britain’s elite helped to define class-based prejudices in scientific terms, with exclusive public acts of distinction bestowed from above cited as the creditable currency to delineate notable human value.

With eugenics becoming increasingly political for both the progressive left and conservative right, the professional scientist and informed eugenicist William Bateson distanced himself from the increasingly subjective Social Darwinist movement. In 1905, Bateson defined genetics as the scholarly study of genes. The new branch of science used research to differentiate discernible inherent biological traits from the assumed concept of direct hereditary that had justified aristocratic values for centuries in Britain and beyond. He voiced his cautionary vision of the risk of a major national catastrophe, although qualified his concern for eugenic policies as unlikely to occur in England. With tragic foresight of future mass death, the prominent genetic scientist realized the abhorrent potentials of a national policy of negative

121 Correspondences regarding Reginald Blomfield, 1905, The Papers of Sir Francis Galton, University College London, GALTON/2/4/14/8/2, 80–88; correspondences regarding Lord Esher, formerly Reginald Brett, 1906, GALTON/2/4/14/8/2, 113–118; correspondences regarding Winston Churchill, 1906, GALTON/2/4/14/8/3, 49–55; letter and correspondences from Bernard Mallet, 1906, GALTON/2/4/14/8/14, folder 1 of 3, 50–54; correspondences regarding Lord Frederick Roberts, 1906, GALTON/2/4/14/8/18, 48–54. 122 Allen J. Frantzen, Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 252–254; Jeroen Geurst, Cemeteries of the Great War by Sir Edwin Lutyens (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2010), 42–46; Charles Rattray, "JEROEN GEURST, Cemeteries of the Great War by Sir Edwin Lutyens," Architectural Heritage, vol. 22, no. 1 (July, 2011), 158–160. 39

eugenics, stating his fears publically in a book review published in The Speaker. Bateson, after commenting upon G. Archdall Reid’s The Principles of Heredity, noted the reality of such advanced sciences. He cited Galton’s preference to select and support human breeding of the presumed elite of humanity before concluding that the more likely route for such social engineering would begin with the elimination of the lowest ranks of social order.123 Bateson’s efforts caused a split in the eugenics movement as genetics garnered legitimacy by using scientific methodology, while Galton’s movement attracted believers with class and race prejudices thanks to his views on blood, economy, race, and loyalty as documented in Hereditary

Genius from 1892.

Social Darwinist prejudices of superior European evolution through military refinement suffered somewhat by the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), although the assumption of belonging to an advanced civilization supported by science and religion remained popular with

Army publications. Two editions of The Regiment from October 27, and December 1, 1906, defined modern servicemen as imperial Christian soldiers. The October 27 copy detailed a heroic narrative of the Boer War in which British soldiers fought as one body, quoting altruistic shouts from wounded officers doomed to die in battle. The journal contrasted heroism in death to the weakness and cowardice present in each regiment. The summary of the engagement at

Spion Kop, a victory for Boer fighters, included the belief that the British would fight to hold the hill until Judgment Day.124

The following week, the content of The Regiment presented the theme of militarized faith, synchronized with evolution, as an organized construct. A front-page advertisement

123 William Bateson, “Heredity in the Physiology of Nations,” from The Speaker, 14 Oct. 1905, in Bateson and Bateson, ed., William Bateson, F. R. S., 458. 124 “British Soldiers Charged with Cowardice. A Challenge to ‘The Times’,” in The Regiment, [vol. XXII, no. 557] (Oct. 27, 1906), WHI/12, 335. 40

represented the dress of the modern male, depicting change over several stages of time. A caveman dated as living a century before Christ carried his club. The Anglo-Saxon relied upon the spear. A cloaked knight represented the Crusades. The three most recent figures transformed the cavalier swordsman into a suited gentleman of the twentieth century, armed with sturdy round bowler hat and cane, one level on from the top-hat-and-tails of the nineteenth- century gentry.125 A report from the same edition of December 1 1906 quoted Haldane as he linked Christian belief as necessary to raise the moral level of Army men. Haldane formed a committee that included Lord Roberts to install faith in the lower ranks of the service, a necessary prerequisite for men to abandon individuality for group sacrifice and abstain from social indulgences deemed immoral and detrimental to efficiency.126 Self-sacrificing officers in battle, as consistent with preeminent divine progress, demonstrated the post-Boer War conclusion of how to improve lower-ranked and predominantly lower-classed leisurely, weaker, and reluctant fighters.

Military Muddling and Reforms

From 1900, Sir Alfred Milner, High Commissioner of British South Africa, led efforts to maintain control in South Africa by constructing a loyal society based on a new government empowered by military control. Boer fighters, the primary example of imperial disobedience and disloyalty at the time, caused Milner to exploit present and longer-term advantages of martial rule. Observing Dutch populations had led Milner to realize that segregation between

125 The Regiment, vol. XXII, no. 558 (Dec. 1, 1906), WHI/12, 1. 126 Ibid., 427. 41

armed leaders and the general public would stop the rebellion from spreading in spite of common support for armed dissent throughout the British colony.127

During the Boer War, Milner employed militarist administrative methods to target men deemed worthy to fill temporary official roles through selections based on loyalty, establishing government representation based on class. Milner informed Lord Roberts of the need to find an adequate supply of two types of male administrators. The first group would be amenable for permanent positions after the cessation of the military government, such as the demonstrably loyal G. V. Fiddes of Milner’s civil service staff.128 The second type of official would be used to create new systems for public service, but with a preference to return to private business, such as

Samuel Evans of Johannesburg.129 Milner’s preference for loyalty regarding social regeneration is natural in the face of rebellion.130 However, to employ and manipulate a military government over an elongated period of time beyond direct combat for the purposes of civilian reorganization reflected inventive and opportunistic colonial methods of governmental administration by British officials. Milner viewed the clean slate granted by conquest, followed by a proven, loyal government peopled partly by military men, as the best method to reorganize society of the

Transvaal.131

In 1901, Rudyard Kipling reacted to the war in South Africa by asking John St. Loe

Strachey, editor of The Spectator newspaper, to begin demanding conscription in Britain.

Kipling, a proponent of Britain’s commonly held racial hierarchy theory of white European

127 Milner to Roberts, “COPY OF REPORT BY S. AFRICA LEAGUE,” 10 Jan. 1900, MS. Milner 15, 20–22; Ellis Archer Wasson, A History of Modern Britain: 1714 to the Present (Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 188. 128 Letter from Milner to Roberts, 25 May 1900, MS. Milner 15, 122; letter from Milner to Roberts, 6 May 1900, MS. Milner 15, 150–153; Keith Surridge, “An Example to be Followed or a Warning to be Avoided? The British, Boers, and Guerrilla Warfare, 1900–1902,” Small Wars & Insurgencies, vol. 23, no. 4-5 (Oct., 2012), 613. 129 Copy of confidential letter from Alfred Milner to Lord Roberts, 25 May 1900, MS. Milner 15, 96. 130 Gertrude Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 272. 131 Copy of confidential letter from Alfred Milner to Lord Roberts, 25 May 1900), MS. Milner 15, 96, 98, 103. 42

superiority, suggested that working classes were ready to accept additional military influence from government policy.132 Disorder in South Africa began the British debate over compulsion, conscription, training, and service. Strachey later rejected Kipling’s request to fully support mandatory recruitment, although did work for compulsory military service in the form of training in conjunction with Lord Roberts’s post-Boer War mission of the National Service League (N. S.

L.).133

At the end of the Boer War in 1902, newspaper publishers produced sensationalist summaries using official government reports by outlining failures in preparation and initial organizational military activities to support the calls for reforming the British Army. The Esher

Report of 1902, completed by Lord Esher, judged the then Secretary of State for War, Lord

Landsdowne, as either negligent or ignorant regarding defensive preparations.134 In addition to supporting organizational reform beginning with the civil leadership, the press noted the concept of greater efficiency as caused by development under military discipline, while lamenting the low intelligence of the average recruit.135 The fallout from the Boer War brought questions regarding physical and mental efficiency, tenets of Social Darwinism and the burgeoning eugenics movement, into the public arena.

From 1903, military observers including Winston Churchill and Leopold Amery of The

Times newspaper began to calculate defensive imperial reforms based on opponent capacities to sacrifice men in pursuit of territorial gains. The death of Herbert Spencer that year significantly

132 Letter from Rudyard Kipling to John St. Loe Strachey, 17 Oct. 1901, Papers of John St. Loe Strachey, Parliamentary Archives, Westminster, STR/33/1/22; Louis L. Snyder, The Idea of Racialism: Its Meaning and History (Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1962), 61. 133 Letter from John St. Loe Strachey to Lord Roberts, 30 April 1907, STR/12/3/32. 134 Muddling into War: Chapter and Verse of the Astounding Revelations of The War Commission (London: "Morning Leader" Pub. Dept., 1903), 40; Barclay, The Empire Is Marching, 28–30. 135 The Ghastly Blunders of the War: A Guide to the Report of the Royal Commission on the South African War, 1899-1900 (London: “Daily Mail” Offices, 1902), 41–42. 43

reduced and weakened the anti-military, pro-individual liberty argument.136 Amery proposed an imperial army for deployment beyond the British Isles, suggesting that a cheaper militia, of either voluntary of compulsory recruitment, should maintain home defense.137 Churchill rejected

Amery’s idea of removing a standing army from Britain in place of continual militia training, suggesting that an enemy could take control of London in exchange for sacrificing 20,000 men in battle.138 Efficient military preparedness depended upon a balanced budget between navy and army spending to procure and maintain enough quality weapons and men to definitively dominate any potential enemy. Lord Kitchener, and Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher, wrote to

Amery in response to the latter’s press statements on military reform. Fisher suggested that

Amery should join Lord Esher in an official reform capacity.139 From among the highest ranks of the British Army, General Ian Hamilton stated to Amery that fifty first-class men would defeat a less efficient force of ten-times as many fighters.140 Leading civilian and military officials, including aristocratic powers within the House of Lords, welcomed Amery’s concept of a uniformed imperial military system to consolidate Britain’s dominions, colonies, and home forces into a cohesive, efficient stratified hierarchy. In addition to government calls for military disciplinary improvements, deterioration theorists increasingly linked martial training, in line

136 Paul D. Crook, Darwinism, War, and History: The Debate Over the Biology of War from the "Origin of Species" to the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1, 47; Levine, “Anthropology, Colonialism, and Eugenics,” in Bashford and Levine, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, 54. 137 Letter from Leopold Amery to Winston Churchill, 14 Jan. 1903, The Papers of Winston Spencer Churchill, The Chartwell Trust, Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, University of Cambridge, CHAR 2/7/1. 138 Letter from Winston Churchill to Leopold Amery, 24 Jan. 1903, The Papers of Leopold Amery, Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, University of Cambridge, AMEL 1/1/14 Part 1 of 4, 2. 139 Letter from Lord Kitchener to Leopold Amery, May 3, c. 1903 AMEL 1/1/14 Part 1 of 4; from Lord Fisher to Leopold Amery, 16 Dec. 1903 AMEL 1/1/14 Part 1 of 4; from Fisher to Amery, 17 Dec. 1903, AMEL 1/1/14 Part 1 of 4. 140 Letter from Ian Hamilton to Leopold Amery, 25 April 1903, AMEL 1/1/14 Part 1 of 4. 44

with continental European social orders, as the method to reverse the perceived trend of degeneration.141

In contrast to praising European national efficiency methods, Winston Churchill wrote a detailed opinion aimed at prompting parliamentary debate on the impracticalities of compulsory military service, preferring to combine and reorganize voluntary imperial forces. Churchill rejected tentative political calls for conscription in Britain by noting how compulsion would attract fierce resistance. The British public, according to Churchill, would only accept such an uncharacteristic abandonment of individual civil liberties as a last resort in response to a highly destructive war.142 If Britain fought on the continent of Europe, then conscription would become inevitable, with thorough training necessary beyond the casual instruction of lower-class militias.143 The influence of eugenic metaphors to describe national systems of the body-politic prompted Churchill to frame reorganized imperial forces as a tree, with branches joined by stem, and falling leaves returning to the earth.144

Reforming the British Army became a paramount issue of imperial efficiency by 1904.

Lord Fisher commented on one option for Army reform by stating the example set by the Navy in training a distinct officer class based on merit in place of aristocratic privileges.145 To demonstrate the thorough organization of the Navy to Army reformers, the First Sea Lord noted that a ratio of two parts brains to three parts brawn described the most efficient warship crew.146

Fisher hoped to leave a legacy of efficiency in the Navy by reducing quantity in an attempt to

141 George F. Shee, “The Deterioration in the National Physique,” in The Nineteenth Century (May, 1903), WHI/43, 797–798, 805. 142 Winston Churchill, “Memorandum on Compulsory Military Service,” [1903], CHAR 2/4/102–144, 117–118. 143 Ibid., 123–124. 144 Ibid., 128. 145 Lord Fisher, “The Future of the Army,” 15 Jan. 1904, The Papers of John Fisher, 1st Lord Fisher of Kilverstone, Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, University of Cambridge, FSHR 8/38/4931, 1–2. 146 Ibid., 4. 45

increase quality, providing a fighting machine ready for war.147 The avoidable lessons of the

Boer War occurred as the Army reacted to problems, in contrast to anticipating preparation experienced in continuously-active naval forces. Fisher asserted the need to keep reform private and confidential until fully constructed, to avoid political interference and diplomatic consequences. Fisher’s method of quiet, complete reorganization had formed through extensive experience. He passed this leadership skill on to the Secretary of State for War, Richard B.

Haldane,148 who later used Fisher’s officer-class model to create a trained reserve of educated men by founding the Officers’ Training Corps in partnership with British universities.149

In 1905, parliamentary officials opened the political debate on conscription to universal peacetime military training by calling for the development of a massive reserve force in addition to the Regular Army. Lord Roberts restated the lessons of South Africa to present a two-tiered system of Army reorganization. The first line of defense of his proposal would maintain the successful professional format of the Regular Army, formed by Volunteer recruits. A national compulsory military training scheme, perhaps maintained by conscription, represented Roberts’s modernized second line of defense. The regular soldier would serve abroad to maintain the

Empire, while the new Reserve would protect Britain from invasion, and offer immediate support for supplying prepared fighters in imperial warfare. The move to organize British males to form the Reserve demonstrated the realization that Leopold Amery’s imperial Volunteer force had failed to enamor the dominion powers.150

147 Admiralty House print, “Part II. Organization for War,” c. 1904, FSHR 8/38/4932, 1–2. 148 Admiralty House print, “Naval Reform. (A Letter to the Rt. Hon. R. B. Haldane, M.P., a pious believer in reform and in the Writer.),” 3 May 1904, FSHR 8/38/4933, 1–3. 149 Richard B. Haldane, “Memorandum of events between 1906–1915,” c. April 1916, Haldane MS. 6109 (ii), 376– 377. 150 Lord Roberts, “IMPERIAL DEFENSE,” 18 July 1905, MS. Milner 16, 118–120. 46

Roberts’s experience in South Africa, as commander during the Boer War,151 likely proved apt in deciding the two-tiered system imperial defense, with Volunteers abroad and domestic universal training. An additional problem of fallout from the Boer War had opened a political rift between London and the Australian government based in Melbourne. In 1902,

Kitchener ordered the executions of two Australian servicemen, Harry Morant and Peter

Handcock, accused of murdering Boer prisoners.152 Australian officials, powerless to intervene against the imperial supremacy of the King’s Regulations, responded by claiming sole authority to exercise capital punishment against Australian men, while also granting soldiers the right to appeal disagreeable British orders by way of their local representatives back home.153 The issue led Australians to construct greater military autonomy in line with the process towards full national independence from Britain. The move to launch domestic military training coincided with several diplomatic efforts including the renewal of the Anglo-Japanese alliance, the informal pact of 1904’s Anglo-French Entente, and initial talks of cooperation between French and British naval forces.154 Organizing the Reserves of Britain offered imperial, racial cousins in

Australia, Canada, South Africa, and New Zealand a diplomatic example of how to freely supply trained men, ready to defend the Empire.

News from the Russo-Japanese War complicated British reform plans. Participants in the early conscription-versus-voluntary recruitment debate did not simplify choices into pro or con arguments. The successful deployment of small numbers of conscripted Japanese soldiers with advanced weaponry, as charging from the line of a larger body of soldier, lent credibility to the pro-conscription perspective, as documented by General Ian Hamilton’s 1905 report on Japan’s

151 Barclay, The Empire Is Marching, 32. 152 Ibid., 40. 153 Ibid., 41. 154 Ibid., 47–48; Peter Hart, The Great War: A Combat History of the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 8. 47

military. Hamilton complimented the fighting efficiency of the conscripted “cream” of the nation. For him, the Japanese system of mass compulsory training paired with selection for small elite units produced the “moral and physical qualities” of the modern warrior.155 With conscription showing demonstrable benefits in Europe and in Asia, British military officials began to see the challenges of affordable voluntary selection in balance with a base of man- power. Hamilton’s comparison of Japanese and Russian forces demonstrated the effectiveness of building a two-tiered force anchored by overwhelming physical weight of weaponry materiél paired with light, fast, selected fighters as exemplified by the Japanese adaptation of German nineteenth-century militarism.156

Between the years 1900 and 1906, degeneration theory had provided the educated and professional classes of Britain with a scapegoat for the perceived decline of the nation.

Efficiency abroad, and the comparative inefficiency at home, had brought the failures of segregated classes to the forefront of social debate for policymakers. Instead of addressing the designed inequality of inherent privileges and the absence of such socioeconomic options for self-advancement, the government began to examine methods to consolidate class divisions. The social order of family caste became extended throughout Britain, transforming informal economic relationships into institutionalized constructs beginning with a modernized military order.

With the fate of the British Empire tied to efficiency and proposed overhauls of domestic government policy to align with the military order present in colonial rule, a list of perceived threats formulated in elite circles. Supposed degenerates and inefficient discipline quickly became enemies. Reform offered options to the government to renew the people of Britain and

155 Ian Hamilton, A Staff Officer's Scrap-Book During the Russo-Japanese War, second impression (London: E. Arnold, 1905), 10, 145. 156 Ibid., 109–110, 144–145. 48

avoid further losses in an increasingly competitive international field of dominant nations. Class divides helped produce imperial success. Fortifying these divides through eugenic reforms became a realistic opportunity as officials soon pondered how they could solve the decline in

British unrivaled predominance.

49

III. Class, Conscription, and Eugenics in Debate, 1906–1912

Recovering from the embarrassing display of military inefficiencies suffered during the

Boer War, British reformers examined the lines between armed forces and domestic physical and mental fitness. Class, conscription, and eugenics dominated debates as imperial Britain began to face extrinsic threats within the United Kingdom. The solution to reverse the degeneration of working class casual laborers was compulsory military training, a method cited by eugenicists as a useful process to improve the quality of the British population and nurture loyal imperial subjects. In 1911, the feared decline of the British Empire manifested in industrial unrest as workers abandoned their jobs to demand better wages and living conditions. By 1912, the

British class conflict experienced during the strikes of the previous year had pushed eugenic discussions to concentrate on economic and military factors. Statisticians and biometricians joined the ranks of politicians and aristocrats that asserted eugenic beliefs. While policymakers had not yet attempted to solve the proposed degeneration of British working classes, by 1912 a coalition of skilled and willing advocates had formed alliances while gaining political and institutional power.

Class Actions

In 1911, an economic dispute to introduce a minimum wage led to massive labor strikes across Britain. The industrial unrest led Haldane to institutionalize pacification through military force in alliance with civil policing. A War Office document sent to eugenicist and compulsory 50

military service advocate, Lord Esher, noted the need to deploy troops to break the strikes.157

Haldane’s briefings on the aftermath of industrial unrest redefined possible future disturbances as riots, while referring to a systematic partitioning of England and Wales into thirteen potential strike regions.158 Haldane used the legitimized state-sanctioned violence of the Army to quell domestic demonstrations.

During 1911, civil analysts attempted to understand and quell industrial unrest. British laborers took to the streets in protest against working conditions and living standards suffered within the world’s richest country. In October, Conservative and Unionist political party members met to discuss and analyze the causes of social unrest in the working classes. The problem in the opinion of these politicians, as outlined in several pamphlets published thanks to this convention, originated with the degeneracy of the urban poor. Several reasons helped show the compounding effects of the slum-resident demographic. Inefficient wages, restricted education, public health hazards contrasted with the rising living standards of many other urban dwellers. The introduction of domestic comforts and entertainment establishments created a severe and increasing divide between the working and unemployed poor as contrasted with the leisure classes stationed above industrious Britons. Politicians realized that by the age of fourteen years poor boys entered the casual labor workforce with the option to secure union protection to maintain wages, while poor girls supposedly became spoilt by domestic life in the potential roles of marriage and maternity.159

To avoid a recurrence of the public outrage exhibited in the strike actions of the summer of 1911, Unionist advocates rallied for four days from October 19 to 23 to discuss the issues,

157 Letter from Richard B. Haldane to Lord Esher, 14 Aug. 1911, Haldane MS. 5909, 132. 158 “Notes for the Secretary of State,” c. 1912, Haldane MS. 6109 (i), 222–225. 159 “SOCIAL UNREST AND ITS CAUSES,” distributed findings to be returned to “J. McKillop, 95, St. Stephen’s House,” c. Nov. 1911, Miscellaneous Collection, London School of Economics, COLL MISC 0952. 51

collectively termed “the problem,” of working class poverty and unrest. Leopold Amery, the military strategist who advocated for a transnational army to quell imperial dissent, appeared first in the list of public signees at the Oxford meetings.160 Archival documents include invitations and organizational materials, as well as evidence of Amery’s leadership role within the group, regarding payments and his definitive acts of naming the report of the event. Amery rejected administrator J. McKillop’s attempts at naming the group the Oxford Circle. Instead of placing the emphasis on the attendees, Amery dictated a vague title for the report to place ownership of unrest upon Britain’s working classes, a categorization that relinquished managers, owners, and politicians of responsibility for the strike.161

In 1911, Bernard Mallet, a key figure in later wartime processes and post-World War I

President of the Eugenics Education Society (E. E. S.), worked as a government statistician by delineating class according to physical, mental, and economic identifications. As Vice-President for the Royal Statistical Society, Mallet’s private group reported on the social and economic problems regarding pauperism. The presidential address of 1910, delivered by Sir George

Hamilton, stated higher rates of adult impoverishment and dependency on relief funds that trended towards unsustainable increases. The decades-old system of workhouses and local unionized public charity had failed to curb poverty with a system result of fiscal mismanagement.162 In his public role as the Registrar-General of the Great Britain Census

Office, Mallet documented twenty-three economic occupational classifications and seventeen

160 “PAPERS ON UNREST AMONG THE WORKING CLASSES read to a few UNIONIST MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT at OXFORD 19th – 23rd October, 1911,” private Unionist circulation, Nov. 1911, COLL MISC 0952. 161 “24: X: 11,” letter from Leopold Amery to J. McKillop, Oct. 1911, COLL MISC 0952; “28: XI: 11,” letter from Leopold Amery to J. McKillop, Nov. 1911, COLL MISC 0952; “PAPERS ON UNREST AMONG THE WORKING CLASSES,” Nov. 1911, COLL MISC 0952. 162 Royal Statistical Society, A Statistical Survey of the Problems of Pauperism, 1911, MS. Milner 604/25, 30–31. 52

subcategories of laborers.163 Staying consistent with the Royal Statistical Society study on impoverishment, Mallet’s census designated one set of paupers as lunatics.164 Within the 1911 census of England and Wales, Mallet listed all people with mental health issues as insane.165 The government analyzed workhouses, as previously studied by the Royal Statistical Society, as providing alternative segregation alongside asylums for people legally defined as lunatics, imbeciles, and feeble-minded.166

From 1911, Arnold White began to conflate socialist-leaning groups and anti- establishment individuals with the concepts of cowardice. A newspaper article titled “Socialism in the Navy,” dated August 26 1911 from the Socialist Democratic Federation weekly publication Justice, survives showing how socialist tendencies became common opinion among the entry levels of naval hierarchy.167 From October 1911, White documented a typewritten copy of an event supposedly reported in the Evening News that demonstrated London’s heated class divides. According to White’s note, a man received a sentence of three months in prison for attacking a police officer in the region of Lisson Grove. The judge branded the man as one of a number of brutes, the most violent member of a crowd of cowards. The mob assisted with the prolonged assault upon the police officer, while some of the onlookers urged the man to kill the constable.168 After 1911, acts of public dissent by physically-dominant working class males, especially those who gained popular support to challenge establishment figures of law and order, became targets for the slur of cowardice.

163 Great Britain Census Office, Census of England and Wales, 1911. (10 Edward 7 and 1 George 5, Ch. 27.) Vol. X. Appendix. Classified and Alphabetical Lists of Occupations and Rules Adopted for Classification (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, Darling and Son, 1915), vii, 1–3, 355. 164 Great Britain Census Office, Census of England and Wales, 1911. (10 Edward 7 and 1 George 5, Ch. 27.) Vol. XI. Infirmities. Persons Returned As Totally Blind, Totally Deaf, Deaf and Dumb, Lunatic, Imbecile and Feeble- Minded (Dublin: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, A. Thom and Co., 1913), xiv–xv. 165 Ibid., x. 166 Ibid., xii. 167 “SOCIALISM IN THE NAVY,” Aug. 1911, WHI/180. 168 “‘Evening News.’ COWARDLY CROWD,” Oct. 1911, WHI/187. 53

Compulsion to Serve

After years of questions asked in the public arena with few answers offered, secrecy bound a British lord with an American sponsor, from 1906 on, concealing the initial funding effort to install compulsory military training in the Empire. Lord Esher, private advisor to King

Edward VII, wrote to American investor J. J. Astor. Esher stated that he would require

£100,000, without conditions or accountability, to install an adapted version of the controversial conscription system. Esher’s model reset the scope of improving fitness by training adult men to target British youth as future imperial defenders.169 Esher simultaneously contacted Lord

Roberts to note that money was necessary to advance the agenda of the compulsory training movement.170 Astor’s reply promised secrecy, expecting far more work necessary in the coming years, and suggesting a meeting in London to discuss further details of Esher’s proposal.171

In 1906, class became a key factor in British military reform, as Richard B. Haldane introduced a middle-class element to militia training. John St. Loe Strachey’s experimental formations led him, as editor of conservative newspaper The Spectator, to compare the benefits of arming reserve forces from the traditional casual labor class to the experimental system of recruitment from men with proven civil worth and discipline. Loyalty and discipline of a large well-trained civilian soldiery mirrored the continental system as militarism crept into British middle-classes by way of the Spectator Experimental Company.172

169 Letter from Lord Esher to J. J. Astor, 30 Sept. 1906, The Papers of Viscount Esher (Reginald Brett), Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, University of Cambridge, ESHR 16/9, 30. 170 Letter from Lord Esher to Lord Roberts, 30 Sept. 1906, ESHR 16/9, 32. 171 Letter from J. J. Astor to Lord Esher, 6 Oct. 1906, ESHR 16/9, 33. 172 Letter from John St. Loe Strachey to Richard B. Haldane, 26 April 1906, STR/8/2/4. 54

In the following year, evolutionary imperial comparisons led to two conclusions of the effects of modern selective military recruitment in wartime. For General Sir Ian Hamilton, the crop of Japan’s selective service had created a rigidly loyal army full of heroism and obedience unto death.173 David Starr Jordan of Stanford University acknowledged opinions on the eugenically beneficial aspects of warfare, while countering such ideas by noting how imperial expansion had historically led to the degeneration and ultimate destruction of the lead nation.174

Jordan presented the idea of modern war as the last resort for survival, rather than a sought after process that produced evolutionary national benefits.175

By 1907, through members involved in imperial civilian and military reform, the

Coefficients group held power from across the political spectrum. The group, founded by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, began in 1902 to bring conservatives such as Leopold Amery to discuss reform initiatives and policies in the same forum as progressives including H. G. Wells and

Bertrand Russell. Additional political elites such as Viscount Alfred Milner and Sir Edward

Grey also regularly contributed to meetings.176 Topics for debate centered on imperial policies regarding race, diplomacy, and the tactic of military sacrifice in the context of conscription and universal compulsory training.177 In 1904, the group advocated national service, training and combat when necessary, to secure the Empire and suggested exemptions for scholars of pro-

173 Ian Hamilton, A Staff Officer's Scrap-Book During the Russo-Japanese War, Vol. 2 (London: E. Arnold, 1907), 16–18, 307. 174 David Starr Jordan, The Human Harvest; A Study of the Decay of Races Through the Survival of the Unfit (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1907), 85–86, 117–120. 175 Ibid., 120–122. 176 Member list 1902–1903, c. 1908, Printed Minutes of the Coefficients, London School of Economics, ASSOC 17; member list 1905–1906, c. 1908, ASSOC 17; member list 1907–1908, c. 1908, ASSOC 17. 177 “IX.– Minute on discussion on February 15th, 1904,” c. 1908, ASSOC 17, 1–2; “XVI.– Minute of discussion on January 16th, 1905,” c. 1908, ASSOC 17, 1. 55

Empire military history.178 The meetings provided an inclusive environment for fervently pro-

Empire voices as left, right, and moderate responded in unity to the challenges of modernity.

In meetings from 1907 to 1908, members of the Coefficients concluded that national advancements, such as military efficiency in the workplace and the creation of a loyal imperial military reserve, could occur by linking compulsory training to the education system of British adolescents. The record documented Leopold Amery and Sidney Webb discussing potential resolutions of industrial objections to universal compulsory military training, defined four years earlier as national service.179 One of the last policies of the group sidestepped the national discontent of adult workers by utilizing local authorities to target Britons aged 15 to 19 years old to carry the burden of an increasingly militarist British Empire.180

Throughout 1907, the efforts of Lord Roberts to introduce national service received mixed responses from the British establishment, mainly due to the increasingly expenses incurred with modernizing naval and army equipment. Richard B. Haldane’s official volunteer stance led to his drafting of a speech for King Edward VII in which the new army would follow the 1906 plan for local associations, the first step required to form the Territorial Force as a separately selected reserve that preemptively avoided inclusion in the labor-based Striking Force.

The creation of the associations called for the subordination of subjects to royal authority, regardless of class or political background.181 Lord Esher continued his initiative to raise funds.182 Lord Milner claimed membership in the National Service League (N. S. L.), documenting his support for universal military training while noting that fears of invasion offered a practical method to persuade the British people to accept continental styled militarism

178 “IX.– Minute on discussion on February 15th, 1904,” c. 1908, ASSOC 17, 1–4. 179 “XXVI.– Minutes of discussion on May 21st,” c. 1908, ASSOC 17, 10–12. 180 Ibid., 11. 181 Draft speech for King Edward VII, Oct. 1907, Haldane, MS. 5907, 246–248. 182 Letter from Lord Esher to Lord Roberts, 28 Aug. 1907, ESHR 19/6, 40–42. 56

in the United Kingdom.183 The following summer, Milner again wrote to Roberts to define

Haldane’s volunteer concept as inadequate.184 John St. Loe Strachey agreed with the compulsion policy, but declined Roberts’s personal offer of membership in the N. S. L. by explaining the advantage for the national press editor to remain a peripheral ally outside of the group.185

The political attempt to install compulsory military training for the benefits of both home defense and removing men deemed by Parliament as “weaklings”186 collapsed peacetime conscription efforts. Lord Roberts and Lord Milner produced a bill to enforce training of all young, untrained men.187 The idea that no class divisions should exist in National Service led the

Duke of Northumberland to voice his objection to uniting Britain’s social and economic classes.188 The House of Lords deliberated on the issue for two days, with many peers noting that compulsion seemed unnecessary as Haldane’s voluntary system had not yet failed. The attempt lost by a margin of eleven votes, with 123 lords against and 103 in favor.189

Patriotic sacrifices, made by British men and women, became the mantra of the N. S. L. in 1910. Arnold White built his career on the degeneration theory by supporting pro-compulsion eugenics. White, a documented E. E. S. member from 1909,190 echoed the official appeal of his host that British women needed to prepare their male family members for war. His colleague at the event, a Mr. Leonard of the N. S. L., warned that mass slaughter would occur if women did not adequately compel their male relatives to train in preparation for patriotic sacrifice in a future

183 Letter from Lord Milner to Lord Roberts, 2 May 1907, MS. Milner 16, 133–136. 184 Letter from Lord Milner to Lord Roberts, 26 June 1908, MS. Milner 16, 153–157. 185 Letter from John St. Loe Strachey to Lord Roberts, 30 April 1907, STR/12/3/32. 186 The Annual Register: A Review of Public Events at Home and Abroad for the Year 1909 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1910), 162. 187 Memorandum and draft of National Service (Training and Home Defense) Bill, 1909, MS. Milner 593/2. 188 The Annual Register, 161. 189 Ibid., 163. 190 “Members of Council,” The Eugenics Review, vol. 1, no. 1 (April, 1909), n. p. 57

major conflict.191 White followed this warning by citing natural selection through adaptation to inevitable war as a cogent method to secure the British Empire. White’s address at the N. S. L. meeting evoked Darwinian adaptation, urging women to recognize and retain the three causes of war; sex, food, and religion.192 Citing the sacrifices of Japanese soldiers, he defined modern war as death for the first-line attack.193 The new model required greater assistance from women, and from higher classes, in addition to the traditional process of sacrificing the regular army abroad, before sending the recently disbanded militia.194 As the N. S. L. had considerable backing within government, the mobilization of these nontraditional supporters for military reform had at least a voice in debate, although such fundamental changes to British society did not occur through policy until World War I.

Journalist, army veteran, and rising politician Leopold Amery’s position of installing militarist policies within civil authorities in Britain matured due to his experiences of the Boer

War era at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1910, international newspaper editor

Geoffrey Dawson wrote to Amery to congratulate him on the upstanding loyal and imperial character of the latter’s fiancée. In this jovial note, the editor of The Star of Johannesburg, and future wartime chief of The Times, reiterated Amery’s apparent policy of conserving loyal imperialists, military conscription, and bloodshed.195 The collective losses incurred by conscripted killings had two likely benefits. Britain would profit through either shared grief consolidating power by mass sacrifice, or through exhausting potentially rebellious populations by transforming conscripted males into obedient allies within the imperial hierarchy, an alternative option to Hamilton’s method of building loyalty through voluntary enlistment.

191 “National Service League. Report of Meeting,” July 1910, WHI/145, 1. 192 Ibid., 2–3. 193 Ibid., 11–12. 194 Ibid., 1, 5, 13–14. 195 Letter from George G. Robinson to Leopold Amery, 6 Nov. 1910, AMEL 2/1/34. 58

On January 5 1911, former U. S. President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to British General

Sir Ian Hamilton in support of the inefficient concept of peacetime conscription for the maintenance of a continental style army. Roosevelt noted his reading of Hamilton’s work

Compulsory Service: A Study of the Question in the Light of Experience, released in 1910. He informed Hamilton that the book had changed his opinion from assuming Britain’s need for compulsive military recruitment to rival the modern capacities already present in France and

Germany. The argument of Hamilton’s book documented the need for quality professional servicemen and a legal option of latent conscription, rather than any expensive maintenance of a massive peacetime army.196

Hamilton’s views, along with a conversation with Secretary of State for War Haldane, convinced Roosevelt that his British contacts had realigned his own judgments of his military organizational experiences in the Spanish-American War. Roosevelt noted that the statistical split between inefficient part-timers contrasted to the professional loyal regulars. Once U. S. command abated the immediate need for fighters, approximately ninety percent of the volunteer recruits instantly lobbied to return home, while the regulars patiently and loyally awaited their orders from above.197 The American leader also expressed the percentages of American losses per volunteer and regular regiments during the Battle of Santiago in 1898.198 Roosevelt offered statistics to Hamilton, along with the assertion that volunteers had only provided a potential value of one consistently obedient solder for every ten amateurs. The method demonstrated the pervasiveness of impersonal numerical analyses, and debates, within recruitment, training,

196 Ian Hamilton, Compulsory Service: A Study of the Question in the Light of Experience (London: J. Murray, 1910), 146–148. 197 Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Ian Hamilton, Jan. 1911, Haldane, MS. 5909, 74. 198 Ibid., 74–75. 59

conscription, and mortality throughout professional military circles in the build-up to World War

I.

In May 1911, the Committee of Imperial Defence (C. I. D.) developed a comprehensive line of protection by extending the recruitment and training of military-age males from primarily the British Isles to include Dominion populations. Needs for military efficiency demanded that ranking officers find convenient processes to establish and follow an imperial command system during times of peace. The committee understood challenges of an international armed force in transit, at peace, and in port in both friendly and potentially hostile waters. Rank gave preference over nationalism as senior officers would lead multinational fleets, while respecting the direct orders issued to junior officials by their respective dominion superiors. The last paragraph of the redrafted agreement published in June 1911, from the meeting of May 30 that year, gave full powers of control to the Admiralty in time of war over all the Dominion fleets.

The C. I. D. knew that a simplified, disciplined command structure would assist in any multi- continental conflict that may occur in the foreseeable future.199 The military outlook of inter-

Dominion relations contrasted radically with the political furor that occupied the treaties and bargains brokered in the wake of concessions to Boer forces. One example of the political fallout concerned legitimizing former rebels by empowering Boers with political status and leadership positions in the compromised Dutch-Anglo nation of British South Africa.

Stirrings of Army reform at the end of 1911 instigated diverse reactions within the Navy,

Britain’s leading armed force. In November, Lord Fisher wrote to Winston Churchill to define efficient development as dependent upon favoritism. Fisher noted how the British fleet was ready to mobilize because the system recruited from below to develop specialists based on intellect, as well as physique while avoiding total corruption to classist ideals embedded in

199 “Cooperation between the Naval Forces,” 14 June 1911, FSHR 8/48. 60

government and the Army. In Fisher’s opinion accountability, even to the point of hanging if necessary, kept the Navy honest as promotion of favorites also carried the counter action of demotion through a process of what the head of Britain’s naval forces called devolution.

Prejudice in the Navy worked on individual favors in informal relationships likely due to the international basis of the institution. Fisher rejected the rottenness present in other systems as he did not follow the classist social hierarchy prevalent in Britain.200 Fisher reiterated his favoritism policy to Churchill in June of 1912, while also acknowledging that Arnold White had in effect plagiarized his words regarding individualized preferences for promotion and efficiency. Fisher sympathized with White’s enthusiasm, leaving Churchill with a direct request to spread the message of selective recruitment and training investments far and wide.201

Throughout 1912, as Churchill reached out to officials find a compromise between Navy and Army, he opted to support compulsory service to rapidly train British males as soldiers to catch up with the efficiency already demonstrated by sailors. N. S. L. stalwart Lord Roberts hoped to gain Churchill’s support by appealing to him in January.202 The closed circles of elite military command soon brought a counter appeal from Fisher to Churchill with the advice to steer clear of compulsion. The head of the Navy recognized the phrase as nothing more than a doorway leading to conscription. Fisher believed that whoever would take up the role of pushing through into law the first step towards a draft would ruin that individual’s political career.203

Economic Eugenic Targets

200 “10/11/11,” letter from Lord Fisher to Winston Churchill, Nov. 1911, CHAR 13/2/108–109. 201 “Naples 6/1/12,” letter from Lord Fisher to Winston Churchill, June 1912, CHAR 13/16/4. 202 “25th January 1912,” letter from Lord Roberts to Winston Churchill, Jan. 1912, CHAR 13/8/34; “27.1.12.,” letter from Winston Churchill to Lord Roberts, Jan. 1912, CHAR 13/8/35. 203 “31/3/12,” letter from Lord Fisher to Winston Churchill, March 1912), CHAR 13/21/7. 61

From 1906, eugenicists debated the merits and impracticalities of the three branches

(positive, preventative, and negative) of their social engineering methods. Positive eugenics aimed at improving the fertility of privileged classes. Preventative eugenics negated avoidable losses of privileged classes. Negative eugenics attempted to avoid and exterminate the fertility of unprivileged classes. These methods for social advancement of higher classes replaced the nineteenth-century argument of racial degeneration factors. The myth of the Aryan race produced multiple works in the nineteenth century, including statements of inferiority and superiority from Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Francis Galton, and Karl Pearson. Race divisions within evolutionary science empowered Anglo-Saxons, viewed as the dominant form of the Indo-European so-called Aryan races, as the superior human collective.204 The effects of imperial success through colonial coercion appear to have led Darwin, and to a greater extent

Social Darwinists, to excuse the violence of the British Empire even though the eighteenth- century Aryan linguistic studies of Sir William Jones had hoped to establish equality in human thought across language divides.205 With biological determinist explanations for white supremacy fading in light of eugenic and genetic studies, early twentieth-century British interpretations acknowledged class as the key factor in place of race for projecting individual and group potential success.206

Arnold White’s earlier calls for segregation of the unfit, termed sterilization, carried through to a later social debate that suggested the need to create a civically-worthy middle class.

A meeting held in 1906 by the Sociological Society at the University of London acknowledged the concept of murdering unwanted people, as rejected by White in 1904. The speaker viewed

204 Léon Poliakov and Edmund Howard, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1996), 290–293. 205 Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 26–30. 206 W. McDougall, “A Practicable Eugenic Suggestion,” 1906), The Papers of William Beveridge, London School of Economics, BEVERIDGE/7/38, 55–56. 62

the tactic as socially detrimental not on moral objections, but because lower groups sustained the necessary platform of variability upon which higher groups existed.207 The options of negative, preventative, and positive eugenics led to a realization that preventing losses through unnaturally conserving admirable, preselected, economic classes of people would produce greater amelioration of preferred social traits.208 The upper classes would receive government subsidies to sustain survival.209 The redefined consolidated middle classes would maintain civic institutions loyal to the upper classes.210 The working classes would be left to fend for themselves in the struggle for survival under the influences of natural selection, an exhaustible recruitment pool tolerated for the benefit of adding subservient support to higher social classes.211

Eugenic debate became increasingly nationalistic and political, from 1908, as a European commentator supported the argument of degeneration by examining the perceived decline of

England. In “The Degeneration of English Character” the anonymous German author noted how

Britons had won the Empire through sacrifice and self-restraint, customs that were enforced by social elites in Germany. Britain risked losing the Empire because democracy traded abstinence for indulgence. The source of such decline, the critic maintained, was the proletarian working classes, spoiled by visions of unattainable wealth until envious and wasteful. The article cited

Lord Roberts as a great military man, and complimented him for recognizing the duty of compulsory military-manhood. The conclusion compared the superior physicality of German workers to that of supposed shirker Britons who avoided military service in favor of disloyal

207 McDougall, “A Practicable Eugenic Suggestion,” 1906, BEVERIDGE/7/38, 56–57, 62–64, 80. 208 Ibid., 57–58. 209 Ibid., 58, 72–77. 210 Ibid., 77–79. 211 Ibid., 80. 63

self-preservation. Without reformative discipline and training the unpatriotic worker would likely bring an end to the outdated Empire.212

The Eugenics Education Society, founded in 1907, grew into an effective platform for politicizing the prevention of further assumed decline in correlation to military training of British men. The organization began by protesting the closure of a public facility that housed inebriate women, citing the decision as racially detrimental.213 In 1909, the fledgling group launched The

Eugenics Review. The movement gained attention from Sidney Webb, Lord Passfield, of the

Fabian Society and the Coefficients, a strategic club recently disbanded due to increasing political partisanship. He wrote to fellow socialist and unofficial eugenicist Karl Pearson regarding the persistent question of whether to kill off Britain’s lowest tiers, with Webb concluding the idea as secondary to the goal of social reforms against childhood malnutrition, parental neglect, slum-housing, and casual labor.214 Understanding Pearson’s abstract academic position, Webb suggested that no rift should occur in public between progressives, socialists, and reformers regarding their alliances with the eugenic movement.215

Compulsion for imperial benefits dominated both military and eugenic forums in 1910.

Haldane and Hamilton argued against conscription in print. The process levelled class and race variances, an undesirable effect that the Army General countered by citing the development of loyal subjects. Voluntarily enlistment created civil, moral, and physical improvements in poor, unemployed young men.216 A publication of the E. E. S. defined the “sacrifices” of sons in military service as inadequate measures to reverse imperial decline.217 Mrs. Hawkes, Master of

212 “The Degeneration of the English Character” from the Pall Mall Gazette, 5 May 1908, MS. Milner 604/18, 1–4. 213 “Eugenics Education Society: Its Origin and Work,” The Eugenics Review, vol. 1, no. 1 (April, 1909), 51–54. 214 Letter from Sidney Webb to Karl Pearson, 16 Nov. 1909, PEARSON/11/1/22/32, 1–3. 215 Ibid. 216 Hamilton, Compulsory Service, 44–45. 217 R. J. J. Hawkes, What Is Eugenics? A Plea for Racial Improvement (London: Eugenics Education Society, 1910), 8–9. 64

Science, from Birmingham introduced a novel concept to reduce degeneration by constructing segregated, industrial colonies.218 The document, printed in the local press and republished nationally by the E. E. S., recognized the appropriate measure of medical sterilization before calling for new laboratories to open in the industrial centers of Britain to simultaneously advance local studies of both eugenic experimenting biologists and statisticians.219

In the years prior to Francis Galton’s death in 1911, the head of the E. E. S. developed an economic eugenic template to assist in reforming Britain. His drafted notes included “A” graded persons, and monetary values for infants based on class variables.220 Galton’s extension of eugenics from biological studies to include, and consolidate, economic class divides left a lasting impression on the E. E. S.

After Galton died in 1911, science, mathematics, statistics, and military analyses converged in the E. E. S. as the group approached Major Leonard Darwin to serve as president.

The former military and public servant had earned his stripes over a twenty-year career in the

Royal Engineers, along with a three-year term in Parliament.221 In February, Darwin wrote to an established Social Darwinist polymath of the scientific community, Karl Pearson, to demonstrate the need to work with the E. E. S. to avoid damaging forays within eugenicist policy. Darwin aired hesitancy to lead the group, as well as skepticism of the association, a reluctance that he posited as shared by Pearson. The former military leader stated his intentions to maintain the machinery of Galton’s grand vision of a eugenically-engineered Empire.222 Over several months, Darwin repeatedly wrote to Pearson for guidance while assuming leadership as E. E. S.

President. He requested advice on who should join the next E. E. S. Council to maintain close

218 Hawkes, What Is Eugenics?, 1, 10. 219 Ibid., 11–12. 220 Francis Galton, “Worth defined by class place,” c. 1900–1909, GALTON/2/4/19/1/5, 10–14. 221 Soloway, Demography and Degeneration, 34. 222 Letter from Leonard Darwin to Karl Pearson, 11 Feb. 1911, PEARSON/11/1/4/17. 65

contact with biometricians in order to stay relevant with debates on hereditary science.223 In one of his first acts as leader of the E. E. S., Darwin informed Pearson of a future International

Conference on Eugenics by inviting him to attend. Acknowledging the disorganized state of the

E. E. S., Darwin outlined biology, education, legislation, and statistics as the four main event categories.224

White’s archival materials document his respected position within the eugenics community in 1911. Minutes from the E. E. S. discuss preparations for the First International

Eugenics Congress. Members outlined a plan to integrate the E. E. S. into a new international body in alliance with the Race Hygiene Congress to practice applied racialized eugenics within white nations, answering White’s multiple warnings against further degeneration.225

Additionally, a review in the Navy trade magazine The Islander, circa 1911–1912, complimented his work The Navy and Its Story.226 The establishment respected White’s opinions and work with the same level of confidence given to him by the E. E. S. This evidence counters the inflammatory outlier profile projected upon White by later historical views.227 Rather than being an opportunist demagogue, White was a linchpin that held the confidence of both elite eugenicist classifiers and military classists.

From 1912, the statistical reformation of the eugenics movement focused on class distinctions of fitness, grading, and median quality. An article in The Eugenics Review linked the social science to economics by examining Arthur Balfour’s rejection of the concept of the fit as economically successful higher classes that self-segregated from the unfit poor.228 The author of the article, C. J. Hamilton, crystalized the deterioration perils of the earlier degeneration

223 Letter from Darwin to Pearson, 25 Feb. 1911, PEARSON/11/1/4/17. 224 Letter from Darwin to Pearson, 17 May 1911, PEARSON/11/1/4/17. 225 “Council Meeting, October 2nd,” Oct. 1911, WHI/55; “Council Meeting, November 3rd,” Nov. 1911, WHI/55. 226 “THREE BOOKS FOR ISLANDERS,” article from The Islander, c. 1911–1912, CHAR 13/14/7. 227 Pick, Faces of Degeneration, 215–216. 228 C. J. Hamilton, “The Relation of Eugenics to Economics,” The Eugenics Review, vol. 3, no. 4 (Jan., 1912), 302. 66

theory by calling for precise measurements to list stratified levels of British society in order to accelerate the segregation, and sterilization, process of social, in place of natural, selection.229

The previous year Balfour had presented his views on failing social policies at the National

Conference on the Prevention of Destitution. Balfour summarized the efforts of British segregation as the separation by selection of the efficient and the inefficient.230

Britain’s leading eugenicist biometrician of the time, Karl Pearson, validated classist prejudices to shift the eugenics movement from sociology towards statistical biology. His work

The Groundwork of Eugenics, from 1912, attacked the progressive politics of charities and public welfare spending programs while suggesting the potential national benefit of administered selective reproduction.231 Pearson explained natural death-selection before calling for a civil process to counter the survival of the weakest. He tasked the eugenics movement to design a method to cull the weak, the poor, and any documented members of the unfit. The sacrifice would require a form of presentation to procure acceptance from the public. Pearson perceived a way to gain support for his proposed destruction of the unfit by calling the culling an act of national martyrdom.232

From the degeneration theory of the late nineteenth century, the early twentieth century brought forth the concept of applied eugenics. Class, eugenics, and military service emerged as central topics vital for the efficiency and survival of the British people and nation. Conscription, a method seen as assisting in training and maintaining a competitive and successful population, grew in popularity from universal dismissal to a potential future option.

229 Hamilton, “The Relation of Eugenics to Economics,” 305. 230 National Conference on the Prevention of Destitution, Report of the Proceedings of the National Conference on the Prevention of Destitution: Held at the Caxton Hall, Westminster, on May 30th and 31st, and June 1st and 2nd, 1911, President: the Rt. Hon. the Lord Mayor of London (London: P.S. King & Son, 1911), 11–12. 231 Karl Pearson, The Groundwork of Eugenics (Cambridge: University Press, 1912), 19, 21–23. 232 Ibid., 23–24, 32–33. 67

The following chapter documents how theories for reform to generate fit and loyal subjects became replaced with demographic analyses in preparation for negative eugenics practices in wartime. Once devastation became a common occurrence and mass destruction seen as the method to success against a foreign enemy, the British government employed eugenicists to extract certain men as sacrifices while sparing others due to class prejudices and the ability to replace the target victims in the name of efficiency and loyalty.

68

IV. Sacrifices of the Less Inefficient, 1912–1916

The First International Eugenics Congress, held in London in 1912, increased the credibility of the Eugenic Education Society (E. E. S.) thanks to participation from international scientists and several notable British officials. In response to industrial protests that stalled

British production in 1911, economic divisions became synonymous with eugenic gradations of peoples either unfit or fit to reproduce. When the British government declared war on Germany, in August 1914, the wartime cabinet included multiple attendees from the 1912 eugenic convention. Within the first year of war, officials developed the substitution scheme to take men out of industrial employment with strong encouragement to enlist in the British Army. The

National Registration Act of 1915 allowed economic policy officials Bernard Mallet and

Reginald McKenna, both eugenicists, to assess the number of males present in Britain that could be replaced in industry and placed into the military. In 1915, women received training through official policy to release men for military service. National loyalties became increasingly strained for working men, while women supported the war effort in exchange for political and economic empowerment. By 1916, the mechanisms of total warfare had developed the civil and military understanding for the proposed need of wastage conscription, the forceful deployment of men selected to fill expected death quotas in expanded offensive conflict.

Legitimizing Economic Eugenics

An agenda report from the E. E. S., dated November 1911, listed a study of infant mortality within Liverpool as the residents of industrial cities came under increased scrutiny by 69

eugenicists. This region in northern England hosted some of the largest industrial protest crowds of 1911. There is no explicit mention as to why the E. E. S. chose to sponsor a study into infant death rates in Liverpool.233 The E. E. S. minutes documented the direction of the study as being under Dr. Edward William Hope, Medical Health Office of the City of Liverpool. Hope was an internationally respected expert who had previously noted eugenic problems between large and small families by tracking the variable mortality rates of infants fed with artificial products as compared to the children of nursing mothers.234 Without further evidence to note the rationale of this specific investigation of 1911, default reasoning points to the common purpose of the E. E. S to improve national efficiency by affecting British policy regarding perceived degenerative demographics in industrialized regions.

In 1912, Arnold White broadened his suspicions of working-class dissenters into a crusade to label social unrest as treachery against the nation. In articles from The Daily News,

White countered George Bernard Shaw’s appeal that armed government forces should not fire against public demonstrators. Shaw noted the Biblical commandment not to kill. White’s responding argument suggested that the transport strikers of 1911 had stopped milk supplies to infants, resulting in their deaths.235 He framed protestors as murderers of innocent subjects in an attempt to justify government-sanctioned violence. His debating skills, erroneous and illogical as they appear today, worked well enough to enter into the public debate. White recast government agents that used force against workers as victims in need of public support. The E. E. S. agenda, including the Hope report on infant nutrition from 1911, resides in White’s archival record. As he was a registered member of the E. E. S. Council from 1910, the conclusion stands that White used his exclusive access to contemporary eugenic research to support his demagogic journalism.

233 “Council Meeting, October 2nd,” Oct. 1911, WHI/55. 234 Helen MacMurchy, Infant Mortality Special Report (Toronto: L.K. Cameron, 1910), 33–34. 235 “‘DON’T SHOOT.’ Mr. Arnold White Replies to G. B. S.,” March 1912, WHI/187. 70

Biometrician Karl Pearson, of the Galton Laboratory, used mathematical applications of eugenic variances to influence medical opinion towards accepting poorer classes as the key social problem in Britain in 1912. Attendees at the First International Eugenics Congress noted that Pearson was an outlier of the movement because of his mathematical applications, termed biometrics.236 The statistical analysis of demographic data placed social faults on impoverished communities without accounting for access to, or lack of, political and economic opportunities.

One speaker cited Pearson, a notable absentee from the event listings, as correlating casual labor to feeble-mindedness, criminality, and pauperism. The speaker, Dr. F. W. Mott, physician of

London’s Charing Cross Hospital and pathologist of the London County Asylums, redefined

Britain’s working classes as disenfranchised, burdensome members of degenerate and negligent peoples constraining the advances of modern civilization.237

The link between class divides and eugenic solutions presented at the First International

Eugenics Congress attracted economic and military government analysts. As previously noted,

Winston Churchill attended and commented on quantity and quality concerns regarding Britain’s armed forces. Reginald McKenna, Secretary of State for Home Affairs, served as Vice-President at the event,238 his role changing just a few years later from one of building social infrastructure to one of spending British resources. McKenna, documented as a eugenicist in 1912, worked during World War I as a fellow Liberal politician and trusted colleague of Churchill, with the latter joining the Liberal party after abandoning the Conservatives in 1904.239 McKenna’s war

236 G. Sergi, “Variation and Heredity in Man,” in International Eugenics Congress, Problems in Eugenics: Papers Communicated, 22; V. Giuffrida-Ruggeri, “The So-Called Inheritance in Man,” in International Eugenics Congress, Problems in Eugenics: Papers Communicated, 41. 237 F. W. Mott, “Heredity and Eugenics in Relation to Insanity,” in International Eugenics Congress, Problems in Eugenics: Papers Communicated, 400, 404. 238 International Eugenics Congress, Problems in Eugenics: Papers Communicated, xi. 239 Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 86–88. 71

service balanced the expenditure of Britain’s men, money, and munitions in the key resource role of Chancellor of the Exchequer.240

A connection between women’s suffrage and eugenicist anti-proletarian efforts became strengthened in 1912, as suffragists began to analyze the economic value of male physicality. A pamphlet recording a public address noted the injustice of industries closed to women without due cause. Some occupations were justly the domain of men, such as the Army and Navy, as cited by the suffrage advocate as inappropriate for female employment for reasons of physical incapacity.241 Technological aids, and the incentive of economic competition, would increase the number of two million female employees in the manual labor sectors.242 The well-received speech concluded by assessing that working women aged thirty were on average more efficient, and of higher social value, than laboring males.243 The following year, an article titled “The Old

Adam and the New Eve,” noted the masculinity of female suffragists, as women challenged manhood in pursuit of political and economic equality.244

At the First International Eugenics Congress Leonard Darwin presented Britain’s dysgenic (i. e. births and lives of poor quality) perspective to an international audience. A generation before, Herbert Spencer reformed evolution in his own image in the wake of the death of Leonard’s father, Charles Darwin, in 1882. In a similar generational transition, after Galton’s death in 1911 Leonard Darwin developed the eugenics movements into an international body. In the report on the Congress proceedings, discussions referred to the strength of character needed to fulfil the duties of serving national interests, projecting Galton as a peer of Moses, Bismarck,

240 Grieves, The Politics of Manpower, 1914–18, 20. 241 Rowland E. Prothero, Women's Suffrage: An Address to a Re-Union of the Women's Suffrage Societies, Held at Bedford, on Thursday, March 14th, 1912 (London: National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, 1912), WHI/201, 5, 9. 242 Ibid., 5–6, 10. 243 Ibid., 13. 244 J. E. Harold Terry, “The Old Adam and the New Eve,” The Onlooker and Throne, 19 July 1913, WHI/201. 72

and Napoleon.245 Darwin chaired several discussions at the event, including an exchange between a social worker identified as Miss Johnson, and Professor Samuel Smith. The latter, from the University of Minnesota, suggested that most births were eugenic, a point countered by the London social worker with the figure of 300,000 children registered as feeble-minded.246 An unnamed delegate then summarized the relevance of the meeting by suggesting that the movement should petition the government to pass the Mental Deficiency Act, a proposed sterilization bill in debate at that time.247 The law attempted to legally sanction physical sterilization of the feeble-minded, through surgical intervention.248 The political activism of citing the bill occurred in the presence of one Member of Parliament, also a Vice-President of the

Congress, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill.249

In 1913, the E. E. S. pushed Parliament to endorse political legislation in an attempt to conclusively deal with the problem of overpopulation of poorer classes. The Mental Deficiency

Act gained support across the both Houses, and throughout multiple parties, as the E. E. S. began to introduce U. S. practices of negative eugenics of sterilization (i. e. physical surgery to incapacitate reproduction) of minorities and other unwanted peoples. Eugenicists targeted members of the British public deemed feebleminded as constituting an urgent issue of public health. The bill stated sterilization as the solution to end the national blight of impoverished sufferers of mental illnesses. The concept did not become law as politicians failed to agree on how to define feebleminded people. For some eugenicists, the term included a wide array of subcategories including subjects of alcoholism, venereal disease, and public promiscuity along with Britons classified as insane, morons, and idiots. As the debates continued throughout 1913,

245 International Eugenics Congress, Problems in Eugenics: Report, 38. 246 Ibid., 37. 247 Ibid., 37–38. 248 Editorial, “The Mental Deficiency Bill,” The British Medical Journal, vol. 2, no. 2707 (Nov., 1912), 1397. 249 International Eugenics Congress, Problems in Eugenics: Papers Communicated, xi. 73

sterilization remained in the bill until the process demanded a standardized legal definition of the feebleminded. No one could agree what the term meant. The act soon fell away from the halls of Parliament once the idea of restricting marriage licenses became a second option for eugenicist sponsors. Representatives recognized the act as an attempt to address social prejudices, rather than a legitimate process to heal those afflicted by mental illnesses.250

Debates on reproduction continued in 1913, leading to a reassessment of the value of upper-class females within debates relating to suffrage. Rather than unsuccessfully lobby against the targets of sterilization and marriage restrictions of both sexes within lower classes, eugenicists focused on literate women engaging in socialism. Suffrage offered a route for

Britons with class prejudices to gain untapped support for extinguishing obstinately degenerative dissenters. Educated women and their supporters within the Christian Socialist movement noted the benefits of free love, reproductive relationships outside of marriage, for dismissing marriage as a patrilineal institution. Anti-socialists attempted to use the concept of free love as a slur against poorer, less-educated women. The attacks upon women’s morality defined sections of the suffrage movement into either free love degenerative, bondless socialists or potentially useful militant suffragettes. Personal views of the actual women across the political divides remained outside the focus of conservatives. Instead, as Christian Socialists targeted marriage laws and reproduction rights as a counterpoint to eugenicist legislation attempts, conservatives recognized that the threat to their privileges lay in socialism. The willingness to work became the ethos that would defeat the striker as gender entered into the class disputes between workers and owners.251

Prior to the Britain declaration of war against Germany in 1914, the E. E. S. leadership confirmed their intentions to directly institutionalize class prejudices by way of Parliament,

250 Soloway, Demography and Degeneration, 106–109. 251 Guilford Molesworth, “The Danger of ‘Christian’ Socialism” (St. Stephen’s House, London: St. Stephen’s Press, 1913), COLL MISC 0952, 4, 10–11. 74

income tax law, and local politics. E. E. S. members intended to continue their work in education, while also extending into local political administration.252 Leonard Darwin, as

President of the E. E. S., lobbied the government to double rebates for married men as compared to single males. Income tax would not only bring a certain amount of money to the government, but also legislate how burdening different sections within each class could produce eugenic effects.253

Preventative eugenics (i. e., the conservation of privileged groups) continued into the war as explained in the journal of the E. E. S., The Eugenics Review. One of the few wartime articles relating to combat losses projected that the nation’s best would lay down their lives. To prevent the loss of such a superior class of men, the country should encourage them to marry before departing, while supporting their wives and offspring to offset the potential eugenic, racial loss.

Lower classes had received some form of systemic instruction, while middle and upper classes had been left out of wartime government initiatives.254

Karl Pearson, entrusted with operating the Galton Laboratory, proved a valuable government asset in World War I thanks to his ability to process large amounts of statistical information into practical analytical summaries. The Galton Laboratory received substantial financial support from the highest rungs of British society, including the Earl of Rosebery

Archibald Philip Primrose, multiple other aristocratic lineages, and the Dean of St. Paul’s

Cathedral.255 Pearson received political approval from The Central Committee for National

252 Letter from E. E. S. to Arnold White, 27 May 1914, WHI/55, 2. 253 Copy of letter from E. E. S. to all Members of Parliament, 19 May 1914, WHI/55. 254 “Eugenics and the War,” The Eugenics Review, vol 6, no.3 (Oct. 1914), 197–199. 255 “University of London. Galton Laboratory Appeal Fund. First List of Donations,” 23 Oct. 1911, PEARSON/4/17. 75

Patriotic Organizations, a propagandist communications outlet authorized by Prime Minister

Asquith, and two former prime ministers, the eugenicists Balfour and Primrose.256

By 1916, Pearson’s reputation and expertise as a biometrician proved vital for Britain’s recruitment methodology. The Central Medical War Committee asked Pearson to advise on how to judge British demographics using the variables of population density, wealth differentials, and approximate medical coverage. The committee had begun to calculate how many medical assessors were necessary to adequately examine recruited males. Tasked with calling men to service equally per region, the committee deferred to Pearson’s eugenic, biometric, population analyses.257

Class divides, at times stratified by government eugenicists, defined many British soldier experiences during World War I. Medical grades, based on eugenic biometrics, determined which males were fit enough to serve, which were to stay in Britain for home defense, and which were to serve abroad in military offensives. Examinations sent the nation’s fittest men, Grades I and II, to serve abroad in the British Expeditionary Force (B. E. F.).258 Eugenic, biometric grades theoretically traversed class. However, the Territorial Army (T. A.) and the B. E. F. were military institutions that followed class conventions, as according to Richard B. Haldane’s organizational restructuring from 1906. Kitchener’s efforts lasted from the early days of the war until his death, lost at sea, in the summer of 1916.259 His leadership avoided Haldane’s plans to expand the Territorial Force, as Kitchener built the armed forces on professional, not part-time, training. Haldane asked for Territorial volunteers to serve abroad while conceding their purpose

256 Letter from Henry Cust, Chairman of The Central Committee for National Patriotic Organizations to Karl Pearson, 10 Oct. 1914, PEARSON/11/1/3/37. 257 Letter from Central Medical War Committee to Karl Pearson, 2 April 1916, PEARSON/11/1/3/39, 1–2. 258 Winter, “Army and society: the demographic context,” in Beckett and Simpson, eds., A Nation in Arms, 200. 259 Peter Simkins, Kitchener's Army: The Raising of the New Armies, 1914-16 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 321; Peter Simkins, “Kitchener and the expansion of the army,” in I. F. W. Beckett and John Gooch, eds., Politicians and Defence: Studies in the Formulation of British Defence Policy, 1845-1970 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), 106. 76

as reserved for home defense.260 In Haldane’s view, Kitchener had confused and delayed the government’s duty to employ the prewar strategy to utilize skilled-labor males at the front, replaced by sequential lines of recruited home-based Territorials and the foreign-deployed

Striking Force.261 Although by no means an exact social science, eugenic conscription saved many trained Territorials from the carnage at the front, a burden carried overwhelmingly by

Britain’s laboring classes as according to Haldane’s planned Striking Force.

From 1915–1916, recruitment processes inadvertently developed eugenic conscription as less fit men became targeted at work for recruitment to the Army with their labors replaced by women. Substituting male labor with female workers, once understood as occurring deliberately to extract men for military recruitment, demonstrated the power of the state over citizens. When conscription continued to select working-class males, by combing industries, the government refined the modes of production for the benefit of national production and destruction demands.

The National Service Medical Boards continued eugenic recruitment examinations after conscription targeted working-class males in 1916.262

Class, Gender, and National Loyalties

Journal literature aimed at workers, from 1912, countered anti-proletariat sentiments, as the intellectual discussion provoked the British government to adapt application of civil law with the support of institutionalized force. A strike by British miners, numbered by some as much as

260 Simkins, Kitchener's Army, 40–45. 261 Richard B. Haldane, “Secret. Second Memorandum,” 1 Feb. 1906, PASSFIELD/14/21, 5; Richard B. Haldane, “Memorandum of Events between 1906–1915,” c. April 1916, Haldane MS. 6109 (ii), 385, 403. 262 Winter, “Army and society: the demographic context,” in A Nation in Arms, 192, 199–201. Winter analyzed class and recruitment with postwar consequences, not conscripting labor. 77

one million men, asked for a standardized minimum wage.263 Socialist commentators in Britain urged workers, attacked by police and army forces, to defend their lives with arms. Blood-letting of workers by violent, state employees had become the pivotal issue for strikers at odds with industrialist owners.264 Cited as an issue of public safety, a February 1912 edition of socialist weekly publication The Dawn became a tool of legal precedence to entrap, process, and pacify members of the public that disseminated succinct views in favor of improving working-class living standards through the political economy of collective bargaining. Several expertly prosecuted steps detailed interactions between local police and the Home Office. On the day of publication, the Derbyshire Police Constable classified socialist writers as criminals by archiving a copy of The Dawn, defining the publication as inflammatory and undermining police recruitment. The report card received acknowledgement from the Home Office on February 13

1912. Within three days an official response listed dated minutes and official stamps upon the same report card. The Home Office, in conjunction with the Director of Public Prosecutions, recognized the potential path for prosecution against the supporters of socialist literature, deemed scurrilous and seditious by British officials.265

Public safety measures in Britain’s class-divided society provided an avenue to inflict punishment by segregating workers fighting for greater economic compensation as according to the eugenic method of social selection. The national bureaucrat who signed off on the local report card with the initials H. B. S. corresponded on February 15 1912, with one A. J. B., the authoritative initials of eugenicist Arthur Balfour.266 On July 26 1912 this emerging administrative infrastructure became coordinated as local and national security officials enforced

263 “BRITISH MINERS’ STRIKE,” in Coast Seamen’s Journal (6 March 1912), 6; “Editorial,” The Dawn, no. 4 (Feb. 1912), United Kingdom official government documents, National Archives of the United Kingdom, HO 144/1192/220104. 264 Jim Morley, “How shall we work out our own salvation?,” The Dawn, no. 4 (Feb. 1912), HO 144/1192/220104. 265 Home Office report card criminalizing The Dawn, 1912, HO 144/1192/220104. 266 Home Office hand-written note regarding criminalization of The Dawn, 1912, HO 144/1192/220104. 78

intentional predetermined responses against targets that supported working-class rights. Three men had distributed The Dawn on June 22 1912. The men pled guilty to an unreferenced

Common Law misdemeanor and vowed that they would not repeat the offence. An administrator from the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions sent the completed report card on to the

Under Secretary of State to store the record as legal precedent, a clear example of institutionalized prejudice against working-class men.267

In 1913, the suffragist movement pushed Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith to concede ground regarding female electoral enfranchisement. A meeting between the Prime

Minister and the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Society opened with the understanding that politicized suffragists held considerable sway over the actions of working-class Britons.268

The non-militant suffrage representatives compared delaying the right for women’s votes to the earlier stalled enfranchisement of working-class males. Asquith noted that his Liberal government had not purposefully deferred the suffrage process, while the self-defined leadership of working-class women suggested a Conservative cabinet could prove more useful for the cause.269

In contrast to working-class suffragists, in 1913 the Independent Labour Party (I. L. P.) produced a pamphlet that recognized the dangers of conscripting male laborers for attacking imperial rivals. Male workers increasingly challenged government efforts to establish Haldane’s skilled-labor Striking Force as the National Service League became interpreted as an attempt to conscript British laborers for foreign offensive action in pursuit of idealistic, loyal imperial subjects. The I. L. P. noted that social inequality left eighty per cent of Britons living in poverty,

267 Home Office report card criminalizing The Dawn, 1912, HO 144/1192/220104; Home Office correspondence of Arthur Balfour regarding criminalization of The Dawn, 1912, HO 144/1192/220104. 268 “Deputation to the Prime Minister,” 8 Aug. 1913, MS. Asquith 89, 49. 269 Ibid., 83. 79

a fate that viewed defending the nation as pointless and counter-productive.270 After lambasting

Lord Roberts as a militarist, the official resolution as maintained for several years, stated that increasing militarism stalled social progress, incurred a “blood-tax” on British labor, and threatened to install conscription. The solution for the I. L. P. to deny further profiteering wartime capitalism was the creation of a federation of European States.271 The division of

British labor into politicized, gendered factions failed to spare working-class males from militarist misfortunes of martial labor and higher suicide rates already levied upon French and

German males.272

After the outbreak of hostilities, skilled female workers in Britain became a highly valued and promoted wartime economic asset. Christabel Pankhurst’s lecture tour speech The War called for a state-sanctioned support network of non-combatants to furnish fighting men, adding that women would also enlist if asked. Women would keep the nation at home from collapsing.273 Working on an official government assignment regarding munitions calculations,

Karl Pearson’s request for voluntary administrative assistance received a firm counteroffer from the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies to provide female clerks for statistical bookkeeping, if paid.274

In the summer of 1915, the issue of women workers became pivotal to the war. Through the National Registration Act, the government installed women to train in wartime manufacturing thanks to the reorganization of unionized factories, a process labelled by

270 Harry Dubery and James Keir Hardie, A Labour Case against Conscription (Manchester and London: The National Labour Press, Ltd, 1913), 9–10. 271 Ibid., 14. 272 Ibid., 3, 12. 273 Christabel Pankhurst, The War (London: The Women's Social & Political Union, 1914), WHI/201, 12. 274 Letter from K. D. Courtney, Hon. Secretary of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies to Karl Pearson, 21 Aug. 1914, PEARSON/11/1/14/9, 1–2. 80

government officials as the dilution of working-class male economic strongholds.275 The government divided working classes by gender, with men separated further into two categories of either fit or unfit for military service. Dilution quickly developed into substitution as the government replaced men with women workers, to fulfil military conscription demands with the perceived oversupply of males present within Britain’s industrial sectors.276

Developing Wastage Conscription

Arnold White bridged journalism, government, and eugenic militarism by representing the National Service League (N. S. L.), the pro-compulsion group informally supported by

Strachey, at the First International Eugenics Congress held at the University of London in 1912.

White became publically involved with the internationalized E. E. S. White added to discussions on fitness, preparation, and biometric standards of recruitment. One Vice-President of the event,

Winston Churchill, under the alias of Colonel Warden, spoke alongside White in support of investigating tailored application of eugenic methods to construct Britain’s military hierarchy.

Churchill tactfully stepped away from supporting either position for or against conscription by stating at the Congress the need to investigate improvements in both recruiting quality and quantity.277

Former Prime Minister, and keynote speaker at the First International Eugenics Congress,

Arthur Balfour’s letter from the day Britain declared war on Germany on August 4 1914, urged

275 Braybon, Women Workers, 51. 276 Ibid., 45, 55. 277 International Eugenics Congress, Problems in Eugenics: Papers Communicated, xi, xvi; International Eugenics Congress, Problems in Eugenics: Report, 48–49. 81

the government to somehow construct a stalemate against Germany,278 a process that instigated militarist demands of female labor and conscripted mass death of male workers. The letter to the

Lord Chancellor, former Secretary of State for War, Richard B. Haldane compels historians to reassess their fundamental understanding of Britain’s involvement in World War I, as the term stalemate continues to summarize the default narrative that defines the mass carnage as an arguably unavoidable consequence of an unexpectedly elongated conflict.279

This new evidence offers historians a number of investigative avenues. We know the outcome of the stalemate strategy. Prior conflicts had been settled through wastage, in this context obliteration, of enemy resources as documented extensively by nineteenth-century military strategist Carl von Clausewitz. Postwar treaties between Europe’s great powers had occurred due to overwhelming dominance, often by occupation of enemy government institutions, such as the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) which led to the creation of the

German nation. To lobby for a stalemate demonstrates that Balfour believed the Entente of

Britain, France, and Russia, as underprepared to rapidly defeat the Central Powers. The problem for historians is to question why the literature since World War I has used Balfour’s term stalemate while being unaware of its origin from the day Britain entered the war. The term itself means to produce a draw in competition after exhausting all other resources. The word remains apt for a brief description of the years of increasingly severe sacrifices, but the examination should not stop there. This evidence prompts historians to challenge the largely accidental, yet simultaneous, inevitability arguments that attempt to explain mass death as somewhat unavoidable.

278 Letter from Arthur Balfour to Richard B. Haldane, 4 Aug. 1914, Haldane, MS. 5910, 249–250. 279 Reynolds, The Long Shadow, xxiv. 82

The British government declared war while members of the cabinet understood that extended attritional conflict would favor the Entente. Conservatively, the Balfour stalemate letter proves that he wanted an extended conflict. The question of why he planned for a stalemate extends beyond military strategy. Government power became strengthened due to the combat deadlock. The wartime cabinet gained the ability to reorganize British civil order in line with the modernized military and industrial societies of France and Germany. The intent for reorganization is not investigated here. Instead, in the context of Balfour’s letter of August 4

1914, the initial stance of limited defense soon became untenable. By 1915, rather than withdraw from the war, the planned change to expanded offense enabled the economically eugenic British elite an opportunity to partially destroy working-class males in attritional warfare. Whether eugenicists in government wanted to have workers die because they belonged to lower classes is open for debate. The evidence presented in this argument supports the prior intent to destroy in part. Without further evidence, the conclusion is that workers were selected for partial destruction to preserve other privileged men and the remainder of the national population, although even this caveat fulfils the definition of gendercidal autogenocide. The tactic to sacrifice eugenically perceived lower value males became policy in April 1916, a process described in detail in the next chapter.

In 1914, male workers became targeted as the key hurdle to military and social reforms.

Prior to the conflict, Lord Roberts rejected a legislative effort in favor of conscription, citing working-class suspicions of upper-class attempts to gain control over military organization.280 A call from Unionists suggested ending casual labor as a solution to the problems of industrial

280 Letter from Lord Roberts to Lord Willoughby de Broke, 4 March 1914, Papers of Richard Greville Verney, 19th Lord Willoughby de Broke, Parliamentary Archives, Westminster, WB/9/7. 83

unrest, termed a bitter industrial war, in preparation of an additional general strike.281 Sidney

Webb, Lord Passfield of the Coefficients and Fabian Society, suggested a united front in wartime throughout the Empire. Men, money, and material resources of British territories had stalled

Germany’s adaptation into the leading global power. The Great War, for Webb, was inevitable in the same apparently predictable manner that preceded the outbreak of the Boer War.282 In hindsight Webb’s view does not appear that unusual, but believing that war against Germany was inescapable prior to the outbreak of conflict was an opinion primarily held by imperialists.

Socialists, the socioeconomic and political demographic groups that the Fabian Society hoped to empower, had attempted to bypass the bellicose warmongering of European elites by establishing a global forum to promote the rights of workers. Only after the war did such an entity exist in the form of the International Labor Organization.283 Once the war began, Webb chose to spout the establishment line of inevitability without attempting to protect workers or search for an end to hostilities.

Historian Gail Braybon’s detailed study on female employment in Britain during World

War I argued that women took the jobs left open by absent men;284 however, documents chronicling statistical work through 1915 show that the British government urged employers to substitute women for men specifically to move males into the armed forces. In April 1915, former attendee of the First International Eugenics Congress, Home Secretary Reginald

McKenna called for the expansion of the small-scale temporary voluntary replacement of male workers with men outside of military age limits and unemployed women. Formal institutionalization occurred as a direct response from Secretary of State for War Kitchener’s

281 Industrial Unrest: A Practical Solution (London: John Murray, 1914), MS. Milner 605/4, 33–39. 282 Sidney Webb, “England and the War,” 1914, PASSFIELD/2/4/F, 1–4. 283 Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2003), 95. 284 Braybon, Women Workers, 61. 84

request for a surge of recruits to push for victory.285 An appended document from a government report included a questionnaire sent out to the shopkeepers of England and Wales. The survey asked employers to assess how many of their employees were men of military age, how many could they release, and how many substitutes of either older men or women they would require as replacements.286 McKenna became wartime Chancellor of the Exchequer immediately after implementing the survey of Britain’s remaining employed manpower. By September, effects of suggesting female labor as replacements for male workers had produced mixed results. A summary of the initiative requested by the Committee of Imperial Defence (C. I. D.), in February

1915, included the realization that protective Factory Act law would likely need to change to bring about desired results of increased numbers of women workers, and male recruits.287

The plan to swap men for women to foster more military recruits continued throughout

1915 as the demands of modern warfare pressed the government to arrange conscription. The substitution plan remained unchanged throughout a five-month inspection period that assessed

696 of Britain’s factories. Four hundred and seventy-two of the sites used substituted labor of

13,759 newly employed women and girls. The summary offered an estimate, admittedly inaccurate due to the pioneering nature of the program, of the number of displaced male workers from these substitutions as totaling 11,529.288 The novel organizational tasks had not included keeping track of the discharged males, but the result of substitution had successfully released manpower from industry. That summer, Leopold Amery wrote to a friend from his time in South

Africa and prominent wartime substitution scheme committee member Violet Markham. Amery

285 “Appendix II… A.,” in “Shops Committee.” Report of the Committee (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office; Darling & Sons, 1915), MARKHAM/3/24, 9. 286 “Appendix II… B.,” in “Shops Committee.” Report of the Committee (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office; Darling & Sons, 1915), MARKHAM/3/24, 10. 287 “Statement from the Home Office. Dealing Particularly with the Substitution of Women for Men,” 20 Sept. 1915, MARKHAM/3/30, 1–6. 288 Adelaide Anderson, “Substitution for Women. Summary of Factory Inspectors’ Reports on cases noted during their Inspections July to Nov., 1915,” 8 Dec. 1915, MARKHAM/3/30, 1. 85

noted the likelihood of stalemate unless compulsion netted 1,000,000 men in 1916.289 His plan estimated a total of 2,500,000 further recruits with deployments of an initial 1,000,000 soldiers with an equal number to serve as replacements for casualties, leaving a reserve for home auxiliary defense of 500,000.290 The first group of laboring men would be sent abroad by government officials who had prepared for their losses with ready replacements, a method of mass recruitment that engendered the increased rate of losses incurred by British forces after

1915.291 Amery added that women should replace male laborers at work in preparation for the overhaul from voluntary to conscripted military service with exemptions for some, extensions to postpone service for others, and orders to enlist without recourse for the remainder of military- age working-class males.292

In March 1915, British Army General Sir Douglas Haig, wrote to his political ally

Leopold Rothschild, noting critical reports in the press that questioned the efficiency of current tactics. Haig rejected the cynicism of the press that asked whether the losses at Neuve Chapelle were too great for that particular territorial gain. Instead, Haig used the term wastage to describe the both the number of deaths due to battling as well as the consequential losses of active soldiers due to physical ailments such as frostbite and illnesses. The definition of wastage, for

Haig, referred to the loss of manpower as compared to the potential fulfilled quota expected to serve as active and able military personnel.293

Haig, who later became leader of British forces in France, assumed mass losses of human life and limb, while also documenting the needlessness of such damages as a consequence of inadequate arms manufacturers. The significance beyond the regular perspective of a “war is

289 Typescript copy of letter from Leopold Amery to Violet Markham, 20 Aug. 1915, MARKHAM/25/2, 34–37. 290 Ibid., 36. 291 Gerard Oram, Worthless Men: Race, Eugenics and the Death Penalty in the British Army During the First World War (London: Francis Boutle, 1998), 52. 292 Typescript copy of letter from Leopold Amery to Violet Markham, 20 Aug. 1915, MARKHAM/25/2, 36. 293 Letter from Douglas Haig to Leopold Rothschild, March 1915, Haldane, MS. 28020, 23–24. 86

hell”-type conclusion regarding high casualties is that the next point of debate raised in the letter to Rothschild highlighted the need for gun ammunition and high explosive shells. Haig realized that massive levels of armaments would assist in the developing conflict of attrition, or resource warfare. By at least as early as March 1915 Haig knew the solution to end the high levels of deaths and halt the slaughter, yet became frustrated with the unresponsive actions of government officials. For-profit concerns had stalled the production of adequate ammunition supplies as necessary to submit the German offensive to open negotiations towards ending the war. Haig cited the stalling of ammunition production due to the concerns of potential economic losses as treachery, suggesting that the official at the root cause of the hold up of ammunition be executed in Whitehall by hanging. Haig linked the unengaged ammunition producers as a causal factor to the high losses of what he termed valuable lives as well as enabling the perhaps avoidable continuation of the war.294

In April 1915, a Scottish immigrant to Ottawa wrote a congratulatory letter to Haldane soon after the British statesman passed through Canada on government business. The Canadian civilian thanked Haldane for his service, and honored his achievements from 1906, the date which this supporter cited as the beginnings of wartime preparation. To conserve the Empire with appropriately accounted-for expenditures gave this particular enthusiast a clear understanding of the need to spill Canadian blood in the wholehearted defense of British imperialism. The issue of blood alliances for the preservation of the British Empire is thus recorded here from at least as early as April 1915.295

294 Letter from Douglas Haig to Leopold Rothschild, March 1915, Haldane, MS. 28020, 23–24. For discussion on War Office failures regarding inadequate shell supplies historically perceived as being the fault of the inflexible outdated strategies of Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, see A. J. P. Taylor, English History: 1914–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 20–22. 295 Letter from complimentary Ottawan, a Scot from Inverness, to Richard B. Haldane, April 1915, Haldane, MS. 5911, 30–32. 87

Returning to the issue of efficiency, military tactics based on intelligence captured from the battlefields of June 1915, add the international dynamic to the issue of alliances and strategic mass warfare. Inefficiency within the new scale of warfare held sway over the winners and losers who participated in modern industrialized conflict. Based on a continuously expanding battlefield, efficiency became the key method towards sustaining the British imperial hierarchy while simultaneously defeating the threat from the next rival nation of Germany. In June 1915,

British military personnel examined two translations of German intelligence documents concerning efficiency for both strengthening positions and organizing attacks. Having the detailed knowledge for German tactics within less than a year into the war challenges historians to examine the reasons why the same high-casualty methods continued for years of unprecedented destruction.296

German, French, and British military strategists were all aware of much of their opponent’s likely actions on the battlefield. German strategies declared the importance of machine gun placements and the protective tactics needed to avoid losses during enemy bombardments. Documents from June 1915 in the possession of the British military commanders in France described German strategies in detail. A sketch of battlefield tactics and defensive layouts also gave the British a clear picture of German defensive lines. The documents demonstrated German planning in preparation for attack, defense, and counterattack. A separate

German memorandum citing the supposed best plan of attack originated from studying French continental army instructions of mass scale attack. For Germany and France, the continental method of large armed forces had developed throughout the nineteenth century from the rise of

Napoleon, and the actions of Otto von Bismarck. By 1915, Britain’s military elites knew how to

296 “I.a. 6341 (B.1.),” June 1915, The Papers of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, National Library of Scotland, Acc 3155/215i; “I. (a) 5143,” June 1915, Acc 3155/215i. 88

construct a subservient social order, a militarist blueprint that had the potential to save the British

Empire from foreign enemies, and as demonstrated by the cases of nationalistic consolidation in both Napoleon’s France, and Bismarck’s Germany, also domestic opposition to militarist rule.297

In July 1915, British military estimation duties remained under the direction of the Army, but a civilian agency questioned the utility of this strategic system. The assessment, dated July

15 1915, written by A. W. Watson of the National Health Insurance Joint Committee analyzed the fitness, preparedness, potential numbers of recruits for allied and opponent nations, and challenged the legitimacy of the mathematic accuracy of military calculators. Attritional resource calculations by Britain’s warring officials regarding German, Austro-Hungarian,

French, and British males would from this time onwards fall under the civilian branch of the war effort. Statisticians led the second line of bureaucracy, in support of the professional military class safely at work behind the trenches of Flanders, and throughout World War I conflict zones.298

Just as later inefficiency and wastage issues targeted German destruction, Watson, a government insurance bureaucrat, incorporated economic warfare as a contributing significant factor for the appropriate calculation as the battlefield spread beyond combat and into the home nation. He targeted workers as recruitment resources, and women as vital statistics within the evolving practice that historians later named total warfare.299

In the years immediately prior to the war until the introduction of conscription, the eugenics movement grew into a fundamental process regarding population analyses and classification. Statisticians, biometricians, and eugenicists all assisted the British government in

297 “I.a. 6341 (B.1.),” June 1915, Haig, Acc 3155/215i; “I. (a) 5143,” June 1915, Haig, Acc 3155/215i. 298 Letter from A. W. Watson to Claud Schuster, July 1915, Haldane, MS. 6109 (i), 268–270, 273–274. 299 Ibid., 271–272; here total warfare is defined as militarized statehood for perceived generational benefit. For examples in modern European nations see Alan Kramer’s Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 329–333. 89

formulating tools to process the efforts of fighting World War I. Crucially, eugenicists developed the substitution scheme to enable more working class men to join the military, initially through pressured voluntary measures, and then through conscription to meet the expanded demand of the new policy of mass offense. By 1916, younger working men were objectified into sacrificial losses, either already lost or soon to face the destruction of modern warfare.

Having covered many of the relevant events from the years from 1900–1916, the next chapter aligns the evidence of this argument from the emergence of mass destruction wartime strategy in 1906 to the application of the same plan in 1916. The original theoretical policy culminated in reflecting British class divides in males into two groups. The enactment of the policy began in 1915, with the first British mass destruction battle occurring in July 1916. The following evidence proves that eugenicists assisted with the formulation of several issues regarding military reorganization before war, and implemented the selection process of a part of the British nation in expectation that the targets would suffer wastage in the most destructive battle arenas. Eugenicists influenced the decision to commit gendercidal autogenocide by selectively conscripting working-class men, a process which caused the intentional partial destruction of the British nation.

90

V. Gendercidal Autogenocide Policy and Application, 1906–1916

Historians have comprehensively analyzed the gendered issued of female political activists in relation to class in modern Britain.300 Arguments developed the narrative that the outbreak of war stalled the vote for women while giving greater employment rights as women took jobs vacated by male workers already sent to battlefields. According to Erika A Kuhlman, the effort to shame men who chose peace over war empowered some feminists during World

War I. Younger, fitter, men were sent white feathers with accusatory messages of male cowardice. Petticoats became the imagined effeminate choice of clothing for battle-age male non-participants, young adult pacifists and workers alike.301 Gail Braybon’s widely-read expert study Women Workers in the First World War offers useful content that correctly shows the undervalued wartime production of female laborers.302 However, Braybon discusses dilution and substitution without examining the motives, beyond production, of the bureaucratic committees that installed pathways to increased female employment. The replacement of male workers by female labor, a process expedited by politicized suffragists, specifically to meet recruitment demands for offensive war has received less attention in academic literature. The concept of women filling the labor gap of 1914–1915 by volunteering recruits is honorable, but does not focus on the destructive orchestrated government program that replaced working-class men with laboring women through substitution in 1915, and conscription into the British Army in 1916.

Braybon’s comment on replacing unskilled men with women while exempting skilled male labor

300 For two examples, one from before and one from during World War I, see Gullace’s The Blood of Our Sons, and Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 301 See “Mustering Support for War: Gender, Culture, and Language,” in Erika A. Kuhlman, Petticoats and White Feathers: Gender Conformity, Race, the Progressive Peace Movement, and the Debate Over War, 1895-1919 (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1997), 1–20. 302 Braybon, Women Workers, 13. 91

by conscription, in her words sorting sheep from goats, is important. Replacement demonstrates the order of events correctly. The author’s comparison of men forced into combat to animals, with an uncounted number marched to their deaths, did not progress her study on women wartime workers.303

Class, gender, and eugenics culminated into policy through the organizational structures designed in 1906 and installed in 1916. As Secretary of State for War from 1905–1912, Richard

B. Haldane targeted working-class males to fight and die in repeated recruitment waves. When the war occurred, industrial unrest had divided British society and challenged the authority of the government. The National Registration Act began the process to move away from a deeply unpopular volunteer recruitment policy. Instead of selecting men from across socioeconomic divides, Prime Minister Asquith chose working-class men to bear the burden of sacrifice. The choice to extend British involvement in the war did amount to the fact that there were more working class males than any other subgroup from the nation. After the initial months of enthusiastic enlistment of 1914 and prior to conscription in 1916, British workers had not enlisted in as many numbers as other combatant nations. The cost to stay in the war was paid for by partially destroying the nation. Being of more numbers as a group than other subcategories of the British population did not decide their fates. The empowered government, influenced by eugenicist officials, dictated the radical policy of conscription for workers who would serve by risking their lives. British male laborers were singled out as a perceived replaceable and partially expendable group.

Burden of the Striking Force

303 Braybon, Women Workers, 55. 92

On January 1 and February 1 1906, Haldane initiated the process that led to gendercidal autogenocide in 1916, by drafting a secret official policy to prepare Britain for attritional warfare. The policy split the Army into a two-tiered hierarchy that intentionally selected militia men to replace wastage (dead and maimed) wartime losses.304 The plans called for the reintroduction of an earlier Cromwellian method of Army organization through recruitment by county associations.305 Haldane outlined the theoretical reorganization of Britain’s wartime military gradation into two distinct formations of first-line attackers for deployment abroad, the

Striking Force, and second-line defenders of the home nation, the Territorial Army.306 Expecting further recruitment needs to replenish heavy losses of the large Striking Force in combat against a continental power, Haldane chose the militia as the pool of manpower from which the government would draft wastage replacements. The Territorial Army, trained over several years, would protect the island nation behind the near-impenetrable Royal Navy, before being sent overseas only at the end of the next large-scale war.307

The plans from 1906 acknowledged class regarding the formation of the Striking Force as an attritional tactic in tandem with the militia, but argued against conscription legislation.

Compulsion was, for Haldane, unnecessary and inflammatory because volunteers would respond to a severe national emergency as long as the Army remained a popular institution.308 Skilled labor would produce the mass of men needed to build the Striking Force.309 Haldane’s military figures listed available men ready to serve in the Striking Force as 9,100 officers and 333,031 males of lower ranks. From the larger group, 114,914 men belonged to the militia and yeomanry

304 Richard B. Haldane, “Secret. Second Memorandum,” 1 Feb. 1906, PASSFIELD/14/21, 5. 305 Ibid., 1. 306 Ibid., 1–5. 307 Ibid., 5. 308 Richard B. Haldane, “Secret. An initial Memorandum on the present Situation,” (Jan. 1, 1906), PASSFIELD/14/21, 2. 309 Haldane, “Secret. Second Memorandum,” 1 Feb. 1906, PASSFIELD/14/21, 5. 93

ranks of professional volunteer soldiers, the former being the stated group tasked with replacing wastage losses of death and injury.310 The Secretary of State for War redefined military efficiency as the expenditure of the Striking Force, a large group of volunteer soldiers with basic training sent abroad to weaken a continental enemy, followed by repeated waves of the militia forces recruited as preselected replacements of wastage losses, that once exhausted if necessary would receive support from the highly-trained professional fighters of the Territorial Army, unleashed to defeat the comprehensively damaged rival.311

Haldane’s reforms centered on creating a new officer class that would manage a distinctly industrial soldier class. His reorganization strategy came, in-part, from the unfortunate and short-lived efforts of his predecessor as Secretary of State for War, H. O. Arnold-Forster.

Haldane rose to the leadership position, in December 1905, with the mission to improve recruitment and retention quality, while also reducing spending. Arnold-Forster left due to political pressures regarding Britain’s ballooning military expenses of securing imperial territories incurred since the Boer War.312 Haldane received an informative letter from Arnold-

Forster, stating the need to introduce a new officer rank into the Army. However, the method of recruitment would detour the usual antiquated channels within military bureaucracy, and go straight to the source of valued men by enticing family members of targeted potential officers with the significantly improved pay rates of the post-Boer War Army. Lobbying the wider society as to the economic benefits of military service, a basis of class distinctions and divisions

310 Haldane, “Secret. Second Memorandum,” 1 Feb. 1906, PASSFIELD/14/21, 6. 311 Ibid., 5. 312 Ian Beckett, “H. O. Arnold-Forster and the Volunteers,” in Beckett and Gooch, eds., Politicians and Defence, 60–66. 94

present in feudal Britain, reemerged as a tool to reform ranks in the Army to represent the supposedly modern, undoubtedly industrialized, and economically stratified classes of Britain.313

In June 1906, John St. Loe Strachey assisted Secretary of State for War Haldane’s reorganization efforts in small-scale, experimental military training under aristocratic leadership.

Strachey wrote to Haldane on the eve of an official inspection from the Secretary of State for

War at the former’s rifle club in Surrey. Strachey’s group ran trials to aid preparation and development for Haldane’s new Territorial Army system.314 Strachey’s typewritten letter contained corrections added by hand in ink. The editor, if not Strachey’s own hand then likely authorized by dictation to a clerk attached to his staff at The Spectator, replaced the word inferior with inefficient when describing the projected amount of 400,000 volunteers.315 Strachey compared the larger mass of less-trained fighters to a highly efficient group of 100,000 soldiers, preferring to arm the larger quantity. He argued that later improvements remained possible without running the risk of exhaustion that accompanied the lower quantity, higher quality option.316 Strachey concluded his note of welcome with a postscript addendum that listed the titles and names of two local ennobled military figures scheduled to perform alongside Haldane at the inspection the following day.317

Haldane’s voluntary system developed a method of statistical analysis that included class stratifications defined by employment thanks to the organizational activities of John St. Loe

Strachey during the summer of 1909. Strachey wrote to Haldane in April to ask permission to begin a register to collate descriptions and contact details of British veterans.318 He realized that any mobilization in the near future would require experience and leadership to orchestrate the

313 Letter from H. O. Arnold-Forster to Richard B. Haldane, 18 Dec. 1905, Haldane MS. 5906, 273. 314 Letter from John St. Loe Strachey to Richard B. Haldane, 14 June 1906, STR/8/2/7, 3. 315 Ibid., 2. 316 Ibid., 1–2. 317 Ibid., 3–4. 318 Letter from Strachey to Haldane, 22 April 1909, STR/8/2/17. 95

anticipated enlarged number of British Army recruits. In August the initiative showed promise, as between ten to fifteen soldiers per day sent details. Former servicemen responded to local press advertisements by listing their current occupations, details Strachey pointed out to Haldane as included in the informal military statistics.319 Realizing the immensity of the task of tracking all members of the British forces, Haldane asked the successful reformer of India’s military,

Lord Kitchener, to take up a command closer to home in either Egypt or the Mediterranean as part of the development of an Imperial General Staff. Kitchener declined the invitation at first, only to accept a short-term appointment after receiving cables from King Edward VII reiterating

Haldane’s request.320

Parliamentary statisticians documented the preference to prepare and train Britain’s professional Territorial Force while leaving the National Reserve as a mass of comparatively less efficient fighters. A government report from 1913 examined the efficiency of the Territorial

Force, citing 78,655 men, excluding officers, as prepared without the need for further musketry training.321 The National Reserve totaled 157,605 enlisted officers and men under fifty-five years of age.322 The government extensively listed training statistics for Territorial men and officers, including a total of 124,015 trained men tested,323 while acknowledging the lack of preparedness within the National Reserve with no training efforts noted. The report conceded that no estimate existed regarding the number of unfit Reservists, although a revised analytical process would soon yield an estimate on National Reserve efficiency.324

319 Letter from Strachey to Haldane, 11 Aug. 1909, STR/8/2/18. 320 Correspondences of Richard B. Haldane, Lord Kitchener, and King Edward VII, 8 July to 2 Aug. 1909, Haldane MS. 6109 (i), 108–116. 321 “Army. Territorial Force and National Reserve. Statistics Related to Strength and Efficiency,” (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office; Harrison and Sons, 1913), MS. Milner 593/23, 3. 322 Ibid., 5. 323 Ibid., 2. 324 Ibid., 5. 96

Destruction by Intentional Sacrifice

On the issue of class the evidence proves that drafted British men were chosen by the

British government to suffer partial destruction in the new strategy of offensive attritional warfare. Eugenicists Mallet and McKenna, while working in official recruitment positions, completed the National Register in 1915. The concept of surplus labor enabled the War Office to theorize how to meet Kitchener’s expected military demands of increased wastage of battle deaths projected to occur in the offenses of 1916.325 As civilians, the selected victims qualify as those of Rudolph J. Rummel’s term democide (i. e. deaths caused deliberately by government action), but became disqualified from this definition once drafted into the British Army prior to the mass death and partial destruction, as intended, of the selected group.

Beginning in 1915, the government policy of substituting male workers for women acted as a facet to introduce compulsory military service, culminating with gendercidal autogenocide committed in 1916. By nominating males to fulfil wastage quotas through an economic allocation of priority, the argument holds that British officials did intentionally cause the partial destruction of working-class male Britons as gendercidal autogenocide. An examination of the origins of the war, along with hypothetical discussion on the personal motives of the historical figures involved throughout 1900–1916, remain beyond the scope of this study. With this research on British militarized eugenics, the field of genocide studies will hopefully grow and produce greater understanding of eugenically stratified classes and sacrifices by gendercidal autogenocide in the modern age.

325 “War Policy,” 6 Sept. 1915, United Kingdom official government documents, National Archives of the United Kingdom, CAB/24/1, C. I. D. Report, 9–10. 97

Bernard Mallet, of the Royal Statistical Society, served from 1915 during World War I as head of the National Registration Act Committee. The Committee sorted all participating subjects into prioritized categories as resources of various values in relation to war supplies and demands, on the battlefield and at home. Mallet became a publically recognized eugenicist by joining the E. E. S. Council in 1918.326 He is on the record, in June 1906, participating in an incomplete project regarding hereditary lineage as organized by the originator of modern eugenics, Francis Galton.327 The role of professional statisticians became central to the progression of Britain’s war efforts towards greater efficiency at the expense of those deemed as characterizing wastefulness.

The National Register of 1915 allowed eugenicist Mallet to present to the government a potential number of male recruits that the military could extract from Britain’s industrial population, the first official step to prepare Haldane’s Striking Force of laborers. Instructions from Mallet in August directed bureaucrats to fulfill National Registration Act obligations.

Mallet, in his role as Registrar-General, ordered registration authorities to send occupational details to either their local recruitment officer or the nearest regimental commander, a system designated in conjunction with the War Office.328 The statistician excluded men of three categories; those employed in reserved occupations, any male not of military age, and an approximate figure of unfit men. Marriage became a significant dividing factor, as many more single men filled the ranks than husbands. Mallet’s completed report from October estimated a total of 1,413,000 males available for future recruitment.329

326 G. M. Chambers and Leonard Darwin, “Sir Bernard Mallet: Two Appreciations of His Work and Character,” The Eugenics Review, vol. XXIV, no. 4 (Jan., 1933), 271–272. 327 Letter and correspondences from Bernard Mallet, 1906, GALTON/2/4/14/8/14, folder 1 of 3, 50–54. 328 Bernard Mallet, “Instructions to Local Registration Authorities (B. 1),” 27 Aug. 1915, United Kingdom official government documents, National Archives of the United Kingdom, RG 28/11. 329 Bernard Mallet et al, “Men Available for Military Service in England and Wales,” 6 Oct. 1915, RG 28/11, 1–2. 98

Conscription law outlined from the formation of the coalition government of May 1915, constituted in 1916, employed the statistical analysis of Mallet’s National Register work to procure sacrifices of lower-classed males in offensive attritional warfare in accordance to

Kitchener’s expanded military demands. To bring more bodies to a breakthrough effort and end trench warfare, Secretary of State for War Kitchener requested 300,000 more troops.330 The government assessed that only compulsion could supply the enlarged figure. Managed sacrifices balanced civil industrial demands with military expenditures of bodies in the unelected wartime regime. With suffragists offering to lead British women into workplaces, the government prepared to conscript males of lower economic classes as the nation adopted a method of offensive warfare with the prior knowledge that death-rates would rise, and that recruiting more working-class men would be necessary to maintain deadlier offensive maneuvers. The expansion plans to commit to conscription, including compulsory labor, for the purposes of changing from defensive to offensive warfare began in May 1915, and continued until installed.

A War Office memorandum quoted the need to raise the average number of replacements for net losses at the front, with martial law in control of labor for munitions production and conscripted manpower.331

The debate on conscription fostered a divide in British society with devastating consequences. Perhaps due to the government promise to spare married men from compulsory service, more British men became betrothed in 1915 than in any prior year.332 The promise to protect married men was broken in May 1916.333 The establishment and press slandered single men as shirkers of national duty, cowards in the white feather and petticoat vein of disloyal

330 Simkins, Kitchener's Army, 143. 331 “Preparation for Compulsory Service,” 19 May 1915, War Office private office paper, WO 159/3, 35–37. 332 Roberts, The Classic Slum, 191. 333 Ibid. 99

individuals. Robert Roberts documents one attack on supposed shirkers from as early as April

1915 which defined men who chose not to volunteer as more treacherous than German spies.334

Economic domination became increasingly militarized as conscription became policy.

The relative successes of armed force used to suppress strikers in 1911 provided the impetus to coax volunteers from urban centers starting in 1914, and later draft supposedly inefficient workers for destruction at the front in 1916. Brock Millman’s work from 2000, Managing

Domestic Dissent in First World War Britain, detailed the actions of vocal miners on the move throughout Britain from 1911 onwards, spreading the resistance message against repression that held sway over working-class males. Millman comprehensively explained the tussles on the streets, in the factories, along the railway lines, and in the debating rooms of workers and politicians during the World War I. This scholar noted the sheer mass of anti-draft sentiments that pulsated through working-class networks in direct contrast to the optimistic concept that suggested public enthusiasm in favor of military service. In January 1916, a leaflet titled

“Conscription” lambasted the Military Service Bill and its advocates. The publication, with perhaps as many as 2.5 million copies,335 recognized strikers and laborers as the targets for forced recruitment into the Army, adding that workers risked enslavement and death if the public accepted the law on compulsory military service.336

The introduction of compulsory military service, in January 1916, entrenched the class dynamics of Britain’s previous economic recruitment efforts. Lord Derby’s resource analysis of recruitment needs, termed the Derby Scheme, hoped to balance production and military demands during the volunteer system. As conscription became law, munitions official William Beveridge

334 Roberts, The Classic Slum, 192. 335 Millman, Managing Domestic Dissent, 93n6. 336 Ibid., 71. 100

altered the definition of compulsory industrial service to mean work of national importance.337

The Military Service Bill and total warfare in effect established a dictatorial regime in 1916.

Women, girls, boys, and older men outside of military age limits worked to produce resources of wartime Britain. Younger men from all economic backgrounds served military and civil institutions of the class-divided nation.

In April 1916, inefficiency and wastage became questioned as effectively forming a sustainable British military structure at the front, while the infrastructural support system developed to match the burgeoning German Empire. The British command assessed French and

German resources and reactions through the lens of German military documents. Such an objective understanding of German perspectives empowered British military and civilian officials. The captured intelligence documents and subsequent translations enabled leverage for the battlefield, and most crucially evidence for the construction of an itinerary towards any eventual future settlement. The accumulation of bartering leverages including military data from the major powers later became the fuel for the slur of economic warfare as lobbied against

Germany by British diplomats and statesmen.338

Resentment against the National Register reflected the increasing divide between mainland Britons and Irish residents working for independence from the United Kingdom.

Statements issued by an early formation of the Irish nationalist political party Sinn Fein clearly supported the war, a fact backed up by volunteer recruitment into the Army at the outbreak of the conflict. Enthusiasm for prolonging the continental war fell sharply with the declaration of

337 “HEADS OF SCHEME FOR THE COMPULSORY TRANSFER OF MEN FROM UESSENTIAL WORK TO WORK OF NATIONAL IMPROTANCE,” 1916, BEVERIDGE/4/12, 48–50. For further reading on controlled, nationalized factories see Waites, A Class Society at War, 188–189. 338 Board of Trade memorandum, April 1916, MS. Asquith 133, 71–79. 101

independence and Easter Revolt of 1916. Attempts of conscription, of mass sacrifice deemed as without reward,339 accelerated Ireland’s march towards autonomous home defense.340

The power of an influential member of the press rivaled Haldane, in July 1916, when

John St. Loe Strachey, editor of The Spectator and private supporter of compulsory military service, wrote to the former Secretary of State for War as he continued to deflect accusations of having pro-German sentiments. Haldane had attended university in Germany as a young man.

Prior to the war, in 1912, he had toured Germany in the hope of establishing a trade agreement between the two empires. His association and fondness for German culture caused political rivals in Parliament to undermine him by challenging his patriotism.341 The pressure on Haldane had, in 1915, caused Prime Minister Asquith to dismiss him from his role as Lord Chancellor.

Strachey rejected the accusations, noting his recognition of Haldane’s loyalty. He then outlined his views on efficiency with regard to preparation leading up to war. He cited the volunteer issues up until 1909, as well as his own experiences within the pro-compulsion National Service

League (N. S. L.), difficulties encountered by improvising armed mobs in South Africa at the turn of the century. Strachey’s letter noted his financial costs paid to form efficient options for imperial defense. As a shrewd negotiator, Strachey ended his polemic chastising and complimenting tone by offering to meet with Haldane in person. The reformer of the British

Army received notice that his obligations included service to extrapolitical figures in the press such as Strachey.342

Sacrifice became directly connected to success in 1916. Strachey’s correspondences with

Haig and the eugenicist Lord Rosebery documented the acceptance to sacrifice lives in the

339 "Report of one of our ablest Organisers - sent in shortly before Insurrection," 1916, David Lloyd George Papers, Parliamentary Archives, Westminster, LG/D/15/1/23, 1–4. 340 Taylor, English History, 16, 56–57. 341 John Gooch, “Haldane and the ‘National Army,’” in Beckett and Gooch, eds., Politicians and Defence, 84. 342 Letter from John St. Loe Strachey to Richard B. Haldane, July 1916, Haldane, MS. 5913, 30–35. 102

pursuit of victory against a supposedly racial enemy.343 The inequity of sacrifice based on class prejudices led to some published commentary without redress during the war.344 The notion of racial differences between Britain and Germany justified the increasingly aggressive and destructive fighting,345 while forming a useful distraction from analyzing class divides within military service.

After the initial voluntary hubris for battle, later conscripted British labor supplied the resources of both industrial and military wartime necessities. Kitchener’s New Army divisions and the Pals Battalions of the B. E. F. became embroiled in stalemate as hoped for by Balfour.346

In 1914, recruits went willingly to fight. By the start of 1915, the number of volunteer recruits fell short of monthly expectations.347 Workers took pride in servicing the safe havens of wartime industries deemed national necessities with valid exemptions and protections against calls for recruitment.348 In 1916, compulsory National Service, by way of the Military Service Bill, the

Man-Power Distribution Board, and the Reserved Occupations Committee required men of military age to work for the nation as either laborers of wartime manufacturing or as soldiers in attritional warfare.349 The efficiency of female workers enabled the government to draft perceived surplus male labor into the Army. Industrial selections, termed combing, of male labor for military recruitment continued throughout 1916 to supply working-class men as

343 Letter from John St. Loe Strachey to Douglas Haig, 28 Aug. 1916, STR/8/1/2; copy of letter from Douglas Haig to John St. Loe Strachey, 4 Sept. 1916, STR/8/1/2. 344 Lord Esher, “Equality of Sacrifice,” reprinted letter to the editor of the Glasgow Herald, 8 Aug. 1915, ESHR 16/15, 1–4. 345 Letter from John St. Loe Strachey to Lord Rosebery, 5 Jan. 1916, STR/12/7/35. 346 Letter from Arthur Balfour to Richard B. Haldane, 4 Aug. 1914, Haldane, MS. 5910, 249–250. 347 Simkins, Kitchener's Army, 104–106. 348 Waites, A Class Society at War, England, 1914–1918, 188–190. 349 Grieves, The Politics of Manpower, 1914–18, 40–42, 49–50. 103

sacrifices of expected increases in battlefield losses, beginning in the summer campaigns of

1916.350

Analyzing the overall value of military forces led British officials to strategize recruitment and deployment based on class distinctions. A statement from intelligence services, issued in April 1916, assessed 500,000 German recruits prepared to attack Verdun as unimportant nobodies, while the report defined 200,000 French defensive personnel as having some domestic value.351 The discernment of troops as nobodies or somebodies may have reflected the class prejudices within recruitment and deployment practices of Britain’s militarist government. By identifying males as of higher or lower values, the losses incurred while proceeding to victory equaled either a more efficient victory, or conversely a less costly defeat.

The switch from defensive stalemate to offensive attrition spurred the British government to conscript workers to die in waves of mass attacks, committing systemic acts of gendercidal autogenocide in 1916. Intentional sacrifices based on national gendered classes selected by an authority of the same nation equals gendercidal autogenocide. The official battle death rate calculations of British Expeditionary Force (B. E. F.) soldiers lost in France and Flanders during

1916, totaling 144,290 men, did not account for conscription or voluntary service status.352 Due to the lack of relevant sources, a further detailed examination appears unlikely to produce a conclusive statistic of conscripted British workers killed during World War I. Historians from a generation ago through to contemporary writers focus on casualties of higher-classed Britons from within the approximate figure of 723,000 deaths.353 Beyond heralding the losses of elitist minorities, sources confirm intentional partial destruction of conscripted male Britons, selected

350 “Actual strength and requirements,” c. April 1916, AMEL 1/3/26, file 1 of 2, 12. 351 “Roumania,” Secret War Committee memorandum, 4 April 1916, CAB/42/12/1. 352 Mitchell and Smith, Medical Services, 149. 353 Taylor, English History, 120; Ferguson, The Pity of War, 202, 294–295. 104

due to the perception of being less efficient for industrial employment when compared to women, and more valuable to serve military quotas in expected increased offensive losses, explained in this study as gendercidal autogenocide. Following Kitchener’s recruitment increase demands, Prime Minister Asquith orchestrated the conscripted acquisition of 200,000 laborers who were to in his view carry the burden of war by fulfilling the sacrifices of the anticipated increase of wastage deaths.354 In a secret session of the Prime Minister and government officials,

April 25 1916, Asquith defined appropriate calculations regarding higher wastage in active conflict arenas as an essential factor, before citing the expected necessary figures for the future expanded offense.355 The next day, Asquith told national labour union representatives that the burden of war and sacrifices fell to British male laborers.356 Prior to the summer and autumn campaigns, government leadership defined the projected losses as necessary, acceptable wastage figures in offensive maneuvers abroad.

Wastage defined the loss of munitions, money, and missed recruitment opportunities, but also included the deliberate expenditure of men conscripted based on class sacrificed during

Britain’s tactical switch from defense to offense that started at the Somme, on July 1 1916. The full accounting of losses to gendercidal autogenocide can only occur after the acceptance of governmental intent to allow increased likelihood of death to a group identified by nation, gender, and in this case also by economic class. The conscripted lives lost, selected specifically for sacrifice due to belonging to a perceived lower national worth, deserve recognition.

Understanding systems of mass death, while respecting the sensitivities of posited honorable commemorations, allows scholars to break through the apathy of inevitability, the bitterness of

354 “Prime Minister’s Secret Session Speech 25 April 1916,” April 1916, MS. Asquith 49, 199, 232–234; “Conference between Prime Minister… and the Representatives of Trade Unions,” Board of Education transcript, 26 April 1916, MS. Asquith 90, 194, 196. 355 “Prime Minister’s Secret Session Speech 25 April 1916,” April 1916, MS. Asquith 49, 232–233. 356 Board of Education transcript, “Conference between Prime Minister… and the Representatives of Trade Unions,” 26 April 1916, MS. Asquith 90, 194. 105

collective losses, and begin to understand how and why Western societies became defined by the outcomes of World War I.357

In April 1916, Britain’s wartime Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, planned to meet military demands by committing gendercidal autogenocide through implementing conscription based on gendered classes, specifically to cause partial destruction of a group within the nation through attritional warfare, with 200,000 working-class males deemed less efficient for industry targeted to fulfil increased military wastage quotas. How many men did the government conscript by force that died in World War I from 1916 onwards remains unattainable without additional study, as the official casualty records list British deaths in 1915, but collate Britons together with imperial soldiers in 1916.358

The remaining years of the war likely contain further events relevant to gendercidal autogenocide by conscripting sacrifices based on gendered classes, but arguing the reality of such events fall beyond this study. Cases of mass destruction appear to counter the proposed legitimacy of state-sanctioned violence as asserted by Max Weber.359 Government use of force against others leads to the debate of legitimate violence, while the perpetrators of such force remain largely ignored. A central part of the concept of the gendercidal autogenocide of soldiers concerns consent.

Compelling men to fight or risk the penalty of execution removed consent.360 To arm a soldier with a rifle or pistol before ordering them to charge against artillery and machine-gun fire highlights the disproportionality of opposing forces present during attritional warfare. The cause

357 Hart, The Great War, 475–476. 358 Mitchell and Smith, Medical Services, 135–137, 148–149. 359 Max Weber, with David S. Owen, Tracy B. Strong, and Rodney Livingstone, eds., trans., The Vocation Lectures (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub, 2004), 84–85. 360 Oram, Worthless Men, 37–38. 106

of the deaths of conscripted men occurred due to the negligence of government recruiters that selected infantry as wastage supplies.361

Deaths of conscripted men did occur, as expected, as a report from 1917 confirms the practice of wastage recruitment continued after 1916. Comments from Adjutant General Nevil

Macready reported the sense of injustice caused by the conscription of less efficient workers, as the government persisted in selecting men from industrial employment by deeming them as more valuable to supply the increased wastage projections. Macready disagreed with the government method, calling on general conscription based on age with Britain’s youngest men allocated to enlist first.362

Bernard Mallet was a leading eugenicist after the war, a hopeful participant in a study of

Galton’s before the war, and a respected statistician who analyzed poverty demographics for the

Royal Statistical Society before the outbreak of World War I. Violet Markham’s class prejudices favored a society built by segregated economic military delineations. Markham, who worked to install the government adoption of substituting men for female workers in order to send working- class males to war, publicly aired her belief in the degeneration theory institutionalized by imperial concessions in South Africa.363 She enabled civil committees to embed gendered eugenic divisions between Britain’s working classes. During the war, the government selected men to fulfil wastage, military death expected figures. The filtering process that substituted working men with women caused intentional destruction because of nationality, gender, and also class, acts of gendercidal autogenocide committed in 1916.

361 Bartrop and Jacobs, Fifty Key Thinkers, 269. 362 Nevil Macready, “Memorandum by the Adjutant-General to The Army Council Regarding the Position and Prospects of Recruiting. 31st May, 1917,” June 1917, Haig, Acc 3155/216d, 8. 363 Violet R. Markham, Return Passage: The Autobiography of Violet R. Markham (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 55–56, 66–67. 107

The British government, with the aid of reserved wartime occupations management, expelled conscripted men from their workplaces, and forcefully deported them to the place of their anticipated deaths on the battlefields of Europe. These acts fulfil the definition of democide as set out by Rudolph Rummel’s detailed listings. The British government caused the deaths of people selected by class, fulfilling Rummel’s subsection 1.1 of the definition of democide that lists class alongside other identifying constructs including ethnicity, language, opposing social policy, politics, race, religion, and speech.364 Forceful deportation that caused death occurred in two stages. The first event shipped conscripted males from Britain to the European mainland.

The second forced deportation demanded working-class males to leave their trenches to die on the battlefield in first-wave attacks fulfilled by British soldiers from July 1 1916, and in later offenses. To assist in advancing the discussion, this process could be seen as meeting subsection

2.6 of Rummel’s definition of democide, forced deportations and expulsions that cause death.365

Certainly, this idea is highly debatable, as Rummel focused on causing the death of non- combatant civilians, leaving the causation of death of conscripted civilians unstudied. While fulfilling several of the requirements of definition, arming the group members intentionally selected for destruction in part leads to the rejection of the group as victims within the construct of democide as the deaths occurred in circumstances accepted at the time by international law on the battlefields of war.366

The scope of this study requires evidence to demonstrate practical intentionality to cause mass death due to class distinctions, a process documented in archival sources. The British government prepared for the unprecedented level of losses experienced at the Battle of the

Somme, a system of selecting sacrificial soldiers that continued until at least the end of 1916 as

364 Rummel, Death by Government, 36. 365 Ibid., 37. 366 Ibid., 40–41. 108

documented by Asquith’s full conversion, from April 1916, to class-based conscription to maintain an efficient wartime economy with sufficient numbers of males from the industrial classes to meet increasing wastage demands. This example from the British system of managed death amidst wartime production in World War I can be argued as being a case of gendercidal autogenocide. Public and private eugenicists active in Britain worked to install the apparatus to conserve the Empire, to conscript the potentially disloyal, and sacrifice working-class males through the gendercidal autogenocide of those British men deemed less efficient for working for the war effort. From the muddled efforts of the Boer War, British male laborers who elites often viewed as degenerate fell victim to the political construct of modernized total war unleashed at the Battle of the Somme.

Even with the scholarly advances of the exemplary works cited, the need for further debate towards consensus remains as eugenicists and Social Darwinists conducted more than simply peripheral or secondary actions in the lead up to, and during, the destruction of World

War I. While working for the War Office during the unprecedented and somewhat expected mass conflict, British eugenicists Mallet, McKenna, and Churchill, classified human resources and ordained who may die so that others could live. After completing the National Register, expanding the substitution scheme, and codifying conscription, Asquith placed the burden of increased wastage conscription upon British working-class males.

The focus of genocide studies came in part through advocacy for peace. Tracing statistics is necessary, as too is analyzing motive.367 Mass atrocities against civilians cannot occur when governments no longer have the option to coerce residents into centralized units of

367 Jacques Sémelin with Cynthia Schoch, trans., Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide (London: Hurst & Company, 2007), 255. Sémelin’s focus on theory defines Rummel’s quantitative work as simplistic, although both identifying premeditation and accounting victims completes any debate on mass death. 109

force. In Rummel’s words, power kills, absolute power kills absolutely.368 When a destructive force changes from defense to offense and simultaneously demands lives taken without consent to meet the demands of increased death, an additional specific category of genocide emerges.

The British Army command had previously learnt the lesson of mass losses from offenses launched by French forces at Verdun.369 Further studies will likely yield other examples of strategized gendercidal autogenocide to maintain war. The attempts of scholars of genocide studies to bring peace succinctly counter the slaughter of the Western Front.370 On statistics,

William Philpott’s laudable work has dug deep to cite 19,240 British lives lost in one day, July 1

1916, although again scholars should note that this figure does not differentiate between conscripted and consenting soldiers.371 The summer offensive occurred according to plan when

British officials chose to prolong participation in war by ordering conscripted workers to advance, wave after wave, upon continuous machine-gun fire at the Somme on July 1 1916.372

368 R. J. Rummel, “From the Study of War and Revolution to Democide—Power Kills,” in Samuel Totten and Steven L. Jacobs, eds., Pioneers of Genocide Studies, (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Pub, 2002), 162. 369 Philpott, Bloody Victory, 13. 370 Ibid., 629. 371 Ibid., 207. Although Peter Hart’s attempt of a comprehensive study on World War I has questionable methods of advocacy, he too recognizes that the loss of British victims at the Somme was a massacre of innocents. See Hart, The Great War, 222. 372 “Summary of Events and Information,” [entry for 1 July 1916] in War Diary, 15th Battalion, West Yorkshire Regiment, March 1916 to Dec. 1917, WO 95/2361/3. 110

VI. Class, Gender, and Sacrifice in World War I

Genocide theory and law allows scholars to investigate the actions of eugenicists working in official recruitment roles regarding the category of mass death as democide. Rummel’s term democide distinctly rejects deaths in military combat as acts of murder in accordance with specific legal codes.373 However, this point relates to the killing of one military combatant by an opposition fighter as not falling under the description of murder. In his full definition of democide, Rummel states that the term does include government actions “designed to kill or cause the death of people… because of their… class.”374 Rummel excludes unarmed non- combatants killed during military combat, as a part of the definition of democide.

Eugenicists in official recruitment positions committed gendercidal autogenocide by designing eugenic conscription based on gendered class roles, specifically to cause death through attritional warfare when in 1916 they selected working-class males deemed inefficient for industry to fulfil military wastage quotas. An argument could be made that the decision to conscript working class males as proposed necessary sacrifices within the enlarged and increasingly destructive British Army was democide. However, the eventual combatant status of the civilian victims rules this definition as inconsistent with the evidence. The subsection of the

UNCG that lists intent to destroy by killing a targeted group is also not proven by the documents.

As such, an examination of the remaining subsections within the UNCG is necessary to assess whether genocide took place when the British government switched from a volunteer army using defensive strategies into a conscripted offensive force in 1916. According to two of the five subcategories of the UNCG definition of genocide, these events can be argued as gendercidal

373 Rummel, Death by Government, 36. 374 Ibid., 36–37. 111

autogenocide. The British government caused serious bodily or mental harm to members of the male working class group, and deliberately inflicted on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.375 In contrast to this study, the justification for the sacrifice, to continue to fight in the war, has dominated historical discussion.

Scholars of military and diplomatic history have covered many pressing issues relating to

World War I, while the prewar ideological positions of major wartime civil servants have often escaped closer analysis. The names of fallen conscripted workers either received indirect attention through Haig’s red poppy emblem used to raise money for veterans or had their names chiseled into walls erected nearby graves. This case of gendercidal autogenocide relates to genocide studies as scholars have a duty to at the very least identify the victimized groups of forced wartime sacrifices, and to remember the long-forgotten of Europe’s wartime losses.

Remembering those who lived and died in the later global conflict of World War II is apt.376

Organized destruction of civilians sets the precedent for scholars to investigate the social impacts of mass violence and return to the archival documents of World War I.377

Rummel’s theoretical work allows scholars to question whether the actions of eugenicists working in official recruitment roles equaled democide. When the war began, and selecting men for death at the front became an administrative choice, several eugenicists worked in government roles to orchestrate the sacrifice of perceived degenerate males, termed less efficient workers in the years prior to, and during, conscription in wartime Britain. The definition of democide distinctly rejects deaths in military combat as acts of murder, in accordance with specific legal codes. The killing of one military combatant by an opposition fighter does not, for Rummel, fall

375 Bartrop, Genocide: The Basics, 3. 376 Judith Dribben, And Some Shall Live (Jerusalem: Keter Books, 1969), 275. 377 John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 430–443. Horne and Kramer examined the shocking effects of soldiers killing civilians in 1914. In historical context, recognizing conscripted men as forced wastage sacrifices offers scholars an additional measure of morality regarding wartime atrocities. 112

under the description of murder.378 Rummel stated that the term does include government actions designed to kill or cause the death of people selected to die because of their class.379 The definition of democide excludes unarmed non-combatants killed during military combat, armed mobs attacked by government forces, and armed government combatants. As such, this investigation into the theoretical construct proceeds to additional explanatory concepts of genocide studies.

Gender and gendercide scholars have described the processes by which societies accept the destruction of men during wartime. Political scientist Adam Jones noted the ancient roots of gendercide from at least as early as classical Greece and continuing into the 1990s.380 Nicoletta

F. Gullace deftly acknowledged how the British public quickly reformed their previous gender prejudices to welcome women as workers specifically because such employees caused the releasing of men from work to go to war.381 Historical perspectives on women wartime workers is useful, as too are studies into the destruction of men replaced by female laborers.

The intentional destruction, in part, of this group occurred due to nationality, gender, and class. The sacrifices of British working-class males happened as intended, with the group suffering partial destruction, serious bodily and mental harm, and experiencing deliberately inflicted living conditions calculated to bring about its physical destruction during the offensive conscripted campaign of total warfare in 1916. The evidence supports an argument that the

British government committed gendercidal autogenocide during World War I.

378 Rummel, Death by Government, 36. 379 Ibid., 36–37. 380 Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (Oxon, U. K.: Routledge, 2006), 326–328. 381 Gullace, The Blood of Our Sons, 160. 113

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