Is America safe for Democracy? Six lectures given at the Lowell Institute of Boston, under the title "Anthropology and history, or The influence of anthropologic constitution on the destinies of nations,"

by William McDougall

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218 pages, Hardcover

First published December 10, 1921

About the author

William McDougall was an early 20th century psychologist who spent the first part of his career in the United Kingdom and the latter part in the United States. He wrote a number of influential textbooks, and was important in the development of the theory of instinct and of social psychology in the English-speaking world.

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm not sure why my library has crackpot books like this, yet gets rid of works by Yvor Winters to free up precious shelf space. Anyway, this eugenics treatise is of some value as a historical document.

The author, a professor of psychology at Harvard, argues (in 1921) that intelligence is innate, and that education, training, and culture add little or nothing to a person who begins with no innate advantages. White people are more intelligent than other races, particularly Negroes and Indians, the upper classes are more intelligent than the lower. He knows that the intelligence of the wealthy can't be attributable to education and training at young ages because the children of the English aristocracy are raised in their nurseries by servants of low intelligence, or merely wheeled around the parks in their baby carriages. (The Deweys were arguing at the time that early childhood education was critical to developing intelligence and aptitude.)

America was in a serious decline, he wrote. As a nation it was getting dumber. This was partly due to immigration of the more feeble-minded stocks (e.g. from southern Italy). Britain was seeing a similar decline, partly because it had lost so many of its best and brightest young men in the Great War, partly because of feminism, which siphoned off intelligent white women to be independent and perhaps pursue careers, rather than become breeders. The great nations follow a parabolic path, rising to a high point and then beginning a decline, as the complexity of civilization makes greater demands on society's intelligence and aptitude, at the same time that the breeding stock weakens as the birthrate among the intelligent decreases while that among the feeble-minded increases.

Nordic races (which included the English) were introvert, Mediterranean races, extrovert. This had consequences for the types of art and architecture they made, their rates of suicide and divorce, and more importantly for their acumen to explore the world and colonize it. The red race (Indians) were assertive, but Negroes were docile, born followers (interestingly, he thought, so were Germans). He proves this with "a true story of a Negro maid, whose Northern mistress, after treating her with great forbearance for a time, in spite of shortcomings, turned upon her and scolded her vigorously. The maid showed no resentment, but rather showed signs of a new satisfaction, and exclaimed: "Lor', Missus, you do make me feel so good." Is this not a typical and significant incident? I will even venture to suggest that, in the great strength of this instinct of submission, we have the main key to the history of the Negro race."

He proposes that government pay the better classes (middle class strivers on up) a bonus of 10% of the family's annual income for each child born, to encourage the birthrate among this advantageous stock.

The first appendix is titled "All Men Are Created Equal" (presumably ironic) with the subtitle "Portraits of three men all of whom in their youth were denied the advantages of schooling and the refinements of civilization." The first portrait is of Abraham Lincoln. The second is of "my friend Tama Bulan, the chief of a small village in the heart of Borneo", who "by reason of his high intelligence, his humane feeling, his firmness of character, and statesmanlike foresight...acquired a great moral influence" over his tribe and many other tribes in the area. The third portrait shows an unknown African man, "a representative specimen of the inferior type of the Ila-speaking people." "We are told nothing of his moral and intellectual qualities," wrote McDougall, "but the most resolutely optimistic humanitarians will hardly claim him as a "mute inglorious Milton" or even as a "village Hampden.""

Another appendix contains, astonishingly, a photo of the author's five children. They look to range from about ages four to sixteen and are lying stomach-down in the grass, presumably in front of his pleasant home, so that we can see their hair (ranging from blond to brown) and their little pug noses in profile. The eldest looks like some maiden out of an Edward Burne-Jones painting, and although he seems to be suggesting that the photo's purpose is merely to prove that as a eugenicist he's practicing what he preaches - breeding a large family - it's hard to avoid concluding that we're meant to contrast this vision of Aryan loveliness with the Ila speaker a few pages back.