Applied Eugenics

by Paul Popenoe; Roswell H. Johnson

"(5) Parental alcoholism is not the source of mental defect in offspring.

"(6) The relationship, if any, between parental alcoholism and filial intelligence is so slight that even its sign can not be determined from the present material.

"(7) The normal visioned and normal refractioned offspring appear to be in rather a preponderance in the families of the drinking parents, the parents who have 'bouts' give intermediate results, but there is no substantial relationship between goodness of sight and parental alcoholism. Some explanation was sought on the basis of alcoholic homes driving the children out into the streets. This was found to be markedly the case, the children of alcoholic parents spending much more of their spare time in the streets. An examination, however, of the vision and refraction of children with regard to the time they spent in-and out-of-doors, showed no clear and definite result, the children who spent the whole or most of their spare time in the streets having the most myopia and also most normal sight. It was not possible to assert that the outdoor life was better for the sight, or that the better sight of the offspring of alcoholic parentage was due to the greater time spent outdoors.

"(8) The frequency of diseases of the eye and eyelids, which might well be attributed to parental neglect, was found to have little, if any, relation to parental alcoholism.

"To sum up, then no marked relation has been found between the intelligence, physique or disease of the offspring and the parental alcoholism in any of the categories mentioned. On the whole the balance turns as often in favor of the alcoholic as of the non-alcoholic parentage. It is needless to say that we do not attribute this to the alcohol but to certain physical and possibly mental characters which appear to be associated with the tendency to alcohol."

Of the many criticisms made of this work, most are irrelevant to our present purpose, or have been satisfactorily met by the authors. It must be said, however, that as the children examined were all school children, the really degenerate offspring of alcoholics, if any such existed, would not have been found, because they would not have been admitted to the school. Further, it is not definitely known whether the parents' alcoholism dated from before or after the birth of the child examined. Then, the report did not exactly compare the offspring of drinkers and non-drinkers, but classified the parents as those who drank, and those who were sober; the latter were not, for the most part, teetotalers, but merely persons whose use of alcohol was so moderate that it exercised no visible bad influence on the health of the individual or the welfare of the home. Something can be said on both sides of all these objections; but giving them as much weight as one thinks necessary, the fact remains that the Elderton-Pearson investigation failed to demonstrate any racial poisoning due to alcohol, in the kind of cases where one would certainly have expected it to be demonstrated, if it existed.

Much more observation and measurement must be made before a generalization can be safely drawn, as to whether alcohol is or is not a racial poison, in the sense in which that expression is used by eugenists. It has been shown that the evidence which is commonly believed to prove beyond doubt that alcohol does injure the germ-plasm, is mostly worthless. But it must not be thought that the authors intend to deny that alcohol is a racial poison, where the dosage is very heavy and continuous. If we have no good evidence that it is, we equally lack evidence on the other side. We wish only to suggest caution against making rash generalizations on the subject which lack supporting evidence and therefore are a weak basis for propaganda.

So far as immediate action is concerned, eugenics must proceed on the basis that there is no proof that alcohol as ordinarily consumed will injure the human germ-plasm. To say this is not in any way to minify the evil results which alcohol often has on the individual, or the disastrous consequences to his offspring, euthenically. But nothing is to be gained by making an assumption of "racial poisoning," and acting on that assumption, without evidence that it is true; and the temperance movement would command more respect from genetics if it ceased to allege proof that alcohol has a directly injurious effect on the race, by poisoning the human germ-plasm, when no adequate proof exists.

How, then, can one account for the immense bulk of cases, some of which come within everyone's range of vision, where alcoholism in the parent is associated with defect in the offspring? By a process of exclusion, we are driven to the explanation already indicated: that alcoholism may be a symptom, rather than a cause, of degeneracy. Some drunkards are drunkards, because they come of a stock that is, in a way, mentally defective; physical defects are frequently correlated in such stocks; naturally the children inherit part or all of the parental defects including, very likely, alcoholism; but the parent's alcoholism, we repeat, must not be considered the cause of the child's defect. The child would have been defective in the same way, regardless of the parent's beverage.

It follows, then, as a practical consequence for eugenics, that in the light of present knowledge any campaign against alcoholic liquors would be better based on the very adequate ground of physiology and economics, than on genetics. From the narrowest point of view of genetics, the way to solve the liquor problem would be, not to eliminate drink, but to eliminate the drinker: to prevent the reproduction of the degenerate stocks and the tainted strains that contribute most of the chronic alcoholics. We do not mean to advocate this as the only proper basis for the temperance campaign, because the physiological and economic aspects are of sufficient importance to keep up the campaign at twice the present intensity.[23] But it is desirable to have the eugenic aspect of the matter clearly understood, and to point out that in checking the production of defectives in the United States, eugenics will do its share, and a big share, toward the solution of the drink problem, which is at the same time being attacked along other and equally praiseworthy lines by other people.