Title page of "The Problem of Race-Regeneration."
In the April 1912 edition of Eugenics Review, an E. Schuster wrote about a new series of pamphlets, “New Tracts for the Times”: “We welcome the publication of this series, aiming as it does at awakening ‘an enlightened social conscience’…” (94)
The MHL collection includes at least one of these tracts: The Problem of Race-Regeneration by Havelock Ellis. This particular pamphlet was published in New York in 1911, although the author of the introduction wrote from England and Havelock Ellis was himself English. By 1911, Ellis was well-known for his sexological work and for his pro-eugenics stance; he served at one point as president of the Galton Institute. (As an interesting side-note, the Wellcome Institute is in the process of digitising the papers of the Eugenics Society with the permission of the Institute.)
The opening pages of The Problem follows the usual publishing pattern of listing other titles in the series, including “The Declining Birth-Rate – Its National and International Significance,” by A. Newsholme, “Literature – The Word of Life or Death,” by Reverend William Barry, and “Social Environment and Moral Progress,” by Alfred Russel Wallace. Given the progressive, perfectionist (human life has been working towards a more perfect state and is within reach of it), sometimes even millenarian tone of The Problem these other titles seem to fit the right mold.
Concerns about declining birth rates, the moral implications of literature, and, as in the Ellis pamphlet, racial failure were endemic in Europe and America at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. In Britain particularly such concerns, which can be loosely traced to larger anxieties surrounding the implications of evolutionary theory, were exacerbated after the attempted military draft for the second Boer War which began in 1899. Military forces found that men showing up at recruiting stations were often unfit for military service whether because of size or weight or because of more serious health concerns; some towns were unable to muster more than a few individuals for service.
Pamphlets like those in the “New Tracts…” series reflected more widespread concerns about the possibility that an entire race might “fail” or become so degenerate as to be completely incapable. For those in Britain and America, watching the rise of political powers in Asia and the growing military threat in the newly united Germany, such concerns were directly linked with the political landscape.
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!