The Burden of Sacrifice: British Eugenics And
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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 1 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. 2 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 3 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. 4 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.