Pantheon

Chapter Thirty-six

As a young man, James had never had much of a poker face. His parents and their Quaker friends were straightforward, honest people and so he had never learned to dissemble. Only at Oxford did he start to understand that the face of the sophisticated man was opaque, but even then he was not much good at it. It was only after Spain that he became adept at hiding his feelings. Which is what he did now, as he showed what he hoped was no response at all to the words he had just heard from the librarian. Instead, he turned around and walked unhurriedly over to the section of the room where the desks were numbered four hundred and above.

So Lund had been down this exact same path just before his death, investigating the Dean and his ‘latest thinking’. James counted the numbers of the desks as he passed them: four hundred and sixty-five, four hundred and sixty-six…

There it was, four hundred and seventy-three. James hesitated before sitting down, feeling a shudder of the dead man’s presence. On the desk were two books, as if their reader had simply stepped away for a cup of coffee. As James sat down, he felt certain: it was something Lund had found in these books that had made him half-crazed with fear — and set him on the path to his death.

James picked up the first volume, which appeared to be an anthology, a series of short papers on eugenics. He flicked through it, turning the pages fast, desperate to find something he might latch onto. Maddeningly, there was neither a contents page nor list of contributors, nor any kind of printing history. Perhaps this was not a published book at all, but rather a collection of monographs that some institution — maybe Yale itself — had bound together.

There was, however, no shortage of familiar names. Indeed, to James’s surprise, most of the authors seemed to be drawn from socialist circles back home. He had heard half of them lecture in person; the other half he had read. Here was George Bernard Shaw, arguing that if democracy were to be saved it would be by a Democracy of Supermen: The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialization of the selective breeding of man. James skipped over the next bit, picking out only the sentence in which Shaw argued that the overthrow of the aristocrat has created the necessity for the Superman.

There was an editorial from the New Statesman of 1931. The magazine reckoned that the only people who could possibly oppose the eugenic vision were traditionalists and reactionaries, too selfish to see that their desire to have children should take second place to society’s need for an improved breed. Or as the New Statesman put it: The legitimate claims of eugenics are not inherently incompatible with the outlook of the collectivist movement. On the contrary, they would be expected to find their most intransigent opponents amongst those who cling to the individualistic views of parenthood and family economics.

Here was that economist chap, Keynes, whom everyone so admired, putting the case for widespread use of birth control, because the working class was too ‘drunken and ignorant’ to be trusted to keep its own numbers down. And look at this, Grey’s big pal, William Beveridge, Master of University College, arguing that those with ‘general defects’ should be denied not only the vote, but ‘civil freedom and fatherhood’.

Next James came to a short essay by Harold Laski, who had once sat between James and Florence at high table: The time is surely coming in our history when society will look upon the production of a weakling as a crime against itself. And on the very next page, JBS Haldane. Harry Knox was always quoting Haldane, James remembered, chiefly because the eminent scientist and socialist supported the Republic in Spain. Here he was sounding the alarm: Civilization stands in real danger from over-production of ‘undermen’.

James was tearing through the pages now, trying to find a reference to McAndrew or something else that might have caught Lund’s eye. It was as if the dead man were right in front of him, James shaking his corpse, trying to get him to spit out what he had meant to say.

Next there was a paper on the sterilization of those deemed unfit to reproduce, with a long passage on the Brock report on the subject, commissioned by Britain’s health minister in 1934. Apparently the eugenics crowd were delighted that Brock recommended exactly what they had been calling for: a campaign to encourage voluntary sterilization. There was an editorial of warm support from the Manchester Guardian, praising Brock for backing the sterilization ‘the eugenists soundly urge’. On the next sheet was a table of recent statistics, showing which countries were already leading the way. Curtis had been right: Germany apart, the United States was ahead of the pack, having sterilized thirty thousand of the mentally ill and criminally insane by 1939, mostly against their will.

Come on, come on, James thought.

He flicked through a few more pages, coming across Bertrand Russell, star philosopher and another one of the Greys’ high table chums. It seemed the great man had dreamed up a rather elaborate wheeze to improve the quality of the nation’s stock. He wanted the state to issue colour-coded ‘procreation tickets’: anyone who dared breed with holders of a different-coloured ticket would face a heavy fine. That way people of high-calibre could be sure their blood was mixed only with those of similar pedigree. Why risk contamination by those whose blood might be dangerously proletarian, foreign or weak? Just check their ticket!

James was shaking his head at the arrogance of it all when he came across an essay suggesting that the problem was not that the poor were having too many children, but that they were having the wrong kind of children. The solution was a programme of artificial insemination, aimed at impregnating working-class women with the sperm of men blessed with high IQs. There was a quotation from that queen of the Fabian Society, Beatrice Webb, explaining why her sort were worth reproducing in the greatest possible numbers, describing herself as ‘the cleverest member of one of the cleverest families in the cleverest class of the cleverest nation of the world’. Sounds just like Virginia Grey, James thought.

By the time he came to the end he was trembling with fury and loathing for these people and their contempt for anyone they deemed a lesser mortal than themselves. He pictured them all, sitting together in an Oxford college no doubt, deciding who was fit and who was unfit, who worthy and who unworthy, who shall live and who shall die. He hated them and their eugenic creed with the very core of his being.

He forced himself to focus. What had he discovered, except that Britain’s greatest progressive bigwigs were as steeped in eugenics as the luminaries of Yale? Surely this could not have been what had so agitated Lund? What had the man been trying to tell him?

James had one more flick through the collection of papers. He was looking for pencil marks, some sign, however faint, that would reveal what had caught Lund’s attention.

The funny thing was he saw it so fast he thought he had imagined it. He had to turn back through the pages slowly to pick it up again. He almost smiled to himself at the joke of it. What he was looking for was not in the text at all. It was in the footnotes — and one of James’s greatest vices as a scholar was his aversion to reading footnotes. But there it was, with the faintest pencil mark alongside it.

I am indebted to the enthusiasm and support of two scholars, whose shared interest in this subject is not only a model for further eugenic study but for future academic collaboration across the Atlantic: Prof Bernard Grey of Oxford University and Dr Preston McAndrew of Yale University.

James fell back in his seat as if he had been shoved into it. He let out no sound, but his mouth had fallen open. And then he cursed himself — for not seeing it sooner, for failing to grasp what had been in front of his nose all this time.

He was thinking of Harry. Not the little boy he knew, but the child these people, the authors of these papers, would imagine. They would see him as the offspring of two Oxford fellows, blessed with a genetic inheritance that would doubtless have placed him in the top fraction of the top one per cent in the country. He thought of Curtis and his researchers in the new field of ‘physique studies’. What would they make of Harry’s mother, with her tall, lean, flawless body that had, not long ago, made her the fastest female swimmer in the world? If physique equalled destiny then any child of Florence Walsingham was surely destined for greatness. Too bad Harry’s father had had to ruin his chances. Except that was not how these eugenicists would see it, would they? When Harry had been conceived, James had been just like Florence, an accomplished scholar-athlete, sound — better than sound — in mind and body. To the likes of McAndrew and Grey, Harry was the product of two perfect specimens of mankind.

No wonder Grey and McAndrew were collaborators. Of course they were. That was why it had been so easy for Grey to set James up at Yale, why Grey was the natural point of contact when Yale had offered to take in the Oxford children. That was surely why it had been Yale — rather than Harvard or Princeton or anywhere else in the United States — that had opened its doors to those young Britons in the first place.

James now remembered what Mrs Goodwin had said about the Dean, that he had not only been in charge of running things for the Oxford families once they had got to New Haven, he had been the driving force behind the whole scheme. James didn’t doubt that the families who had taken in little English boys and girls and their mothers had done so out of the goodness of their hearts. But now he could see that McAndrew’s motives — and Grey’s — were very different.

James digested everything he had heard at the American Eugenics Society and what he had read just now and watched the picture as it took shape in his head. What had once been a faint pencil outline was now being filled in, in blocks of solid black. Of course, of course, of course.

What were the Oxford children if not the cleverest members from the cleverest families in the cleverest class of the cleverest nation of the world? All self-respecting believers in eugenics would see it as their duty to protect such children, Harry included. If Britain was going to be bombed, if its people were soon either to be killed or to become slaves to a foreign occupier, who should be saved first? The answer was obvious, at least to all those elitist academics he had just been reading.

And not just to them. To all those people in Oxford he had brushed past or ignored, whose last names he had forgotten. Magnus Hook, wittering on about ‘superior’ social categories and ‘those we might classify as defective’ — he doubtless would have seen the matter the same way too. As would Rosemary Hyde, with her improving walks in the fresh air and the countryside, her zeal for rambling as a way of improving public health and increasing the quality of the national stock. Leonard Musgrove and those other blasted Fabians would have had the same view.

No doubt they had all conspired together in this plan to spirit the children out of Oxford, holding their secret meetings, keeping that unreliable chap Zennor in the dark, even stealing a postcard from his letterbox to ensure he didn’t find out too soon where Florence and Harry had gone and have time to stop them. They were all in on it together, with Bernard Grey in charge of the operation, colluding with his fellow eugenicist across the Atlantic, Preston McAndrew. They all believed that those one hundred and twenty-five Oxford boys and girls were the best and the brightest and had to be saved. They would be returned to England after the war, little saplings to be replanted in the soil. Even if everything — and everyone — they had left behind had turned to rubble, these saplings would take root and grow tall, blossoming into the next generation of the elite: they were the cleverest of the cleverest of the cleverest, to be preserved at all costs.

A page appeared in James’s head, popping up as if on a spring. It was the letter he had seen when he rifled through those files in McAndrew’s outer office, the letter from Cambridge declining Yale’s offer, ‘since this might be interpreted as privilege for a special class’. Cambridge had understood what James had not. Except this was not a question of mere interpretation. Given who was behind this scheme, privilege for a special class was precisely its purpose.

He wanted to run out of the library, find the nearest post office and send an urgent telegram to Grey: I know what you’ve done STOP I know how and why you did it STOP

But even if this was the true motivation for the Oxford evacuation, it still did not answer the question that had been devouring James for nearly a month. Where on God’s earth was his wife? Where was his child?

There was still one more book on the table. He picked it up. It was the latest edition of the American Eugenics Society journal, the volume he had requested. He only had to read the contents to see that it included a lecture by Dr Preston McAndrew of Yale University. His fingers rushed to the page, fumbling in their haste. Finally, he read the introductory paragraph, explaining that the talk had been delivered at a colloquium — not at Yale, but at some far more obscure institution — on Charles Darwin, held the previous November to mark the eightieth anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. It was entitled Cleansing Fire. James read every line, carefully and slowly.

The greatest human frailty, common to those of both strong and weak intellect, is sentiment. Perhaps it is this trait, more than any other, that sets us apart from the animals. Watch any collection of beasts and you will soon see displayed a cold calculation of collective self-interest which eludes us humans. A cat with a litter of kittens will immediately identify the weak one and discard it. Not because she is especially cruel, but because she has calculated what is best overall for her litter. Any animal confronted by a runt will be similarly ruthless; the runt has to go for the good of the whole. We like to call ourselves rational, but in this regard it is the animal kingdom which is the domain of reason. It is human beings — who tend to be moved by the sight of a struggling runt or feeble kitten — who are irrational, so clouded by sentiment that they are unable to make the basic calculations of utility.

If we were not so impaired, we would be able to see quite clearly, even automatically, where our best interests lay. It would be obvious to us that the species as a whole would benefit if we were no longer burdened by those who take much and offer little. If the human litter, as it were, were free of its runts, society would no longer have to provide for the weak and dependent, for such people would not exist. It would, instead, consist solely of those able to make their contribution, to carry the load rather than to be carried. What place would there be for poverty in such a society? Why, none at all. For every man would be a driver, with not a passenger to be seen.

It sounds fantastical to imagine such a society, utopian even. And yet in every generation an opportunity to create that very utopia presents itself. The trouble is that, just as regularly, the human race — soft-headed and sentimental as we are — misses that opportunity. Worse than misses; we actively reject it.

What is this opportunity I speak of? I shall answer that with reference to the man whose work we honour tonight. I know the purists among you dislike the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ as an inexact summary of Charles Darwin’s work, but it serves as a useful shorthand for my current purpose and I hope you will indulge me.

Since the dawn of time, different animal species have come and gone. Natural selection has proved remarkably effective — ruthless, but effective — in eliminating those who, by definition, were too weak to survive. When cosmic disaster struck the earth, the dinosaurs were eliminated. It was as simple and brutal as that.

Human beings should be no different. When disaster strikes, the weakest should be eliminated, leaving only the strongest to survive. But we humans have made ourselves the exception. We feel compelled to intervene, to get in Nature’s way, to protect those who would otherwise be discarded. Just as we weep at the sight of that rejected kitten, so we become overwhelmed by irrational pity — and prevent Nature from taking its course.

And what is the disaster I have in mind? It is the same as the opportunity I spoke of a moment ago. I am referring, ladies and gentlemen, to war.

War is the human equivalent of that great meteor striking the earth, separating weak from strong. Or rather it should be. But every time it comes we meddle and get in the way, trying to hold up a shield to stave off disaster.

But what if, just once, we stood aside and let war run its course? What if we let it act as Nature intended, as a cleansing fire that might burn through the entire forest, destroying the deadwood, leaving only those plants and flowers that were beautiful and strong enough to survive? Imagine the human stock that would be left: only the very best.

It sounds fanciful, but I believe it is no such thing. Just such an experiment could soon be played out before us, with a single, island race as its subject. The only task — the only duty — for us as American scientists and as American citizens is to make sure that we don’t get in the way. War is coming to our mother country — Great Britain — like a cleansing fire. But it will cleanse nothing if the United States puts out the flames.