goods to the people socially most eligible for them’.7
Titmuss also contributed to Eugenics Review as an author, for example with an important article, ‘Eugenics and Poverty’, co-written with François Lafitte and published in January 1942. This was partly concerned with the impact of the socioeconomic environment on individual and collective health, an approach central to social medicine. However, it also had more general, but equally important, things to say about eugenics, its philosophical underpinnings, and its aspirations. For Titmuss and Lafitte, eugenics was the ‘use of scientific means to attain an ethical end’, the latter being a ‘higher level of mental and physical health’ and ‘an increase in the biological efficiency of human beings’. ‘Eugenists [sic]’ sought a ‘higher level of health – ie of “wholeness”’ as an end in itself for ‘the human personality is an end in itself’, and because they wished to see ‘human beings in the mass become more completely human’. The Nazis, by contrast, were interested in human health, and biological efficiency, ‘only to the extent that they further the immoral purposes of a tyranny whose highest aim is total warfare’. An individual’s genetic endowment, moreover, did not of itself ‘suffice to produce “whole” human beings’. Even those with a good genetic inheritance required a ‘healthy environment’. This embraced factors such as economic opportunities and the ‘psychological and moral atmosphere’. Only then could an individual attain the ‘full mental and physical stature of a “whole” adult’ potentially available to all human beings. Crucially, though, so entangled were the ‘factors of “nature” and “nurture” of which each human being is the end-product’, and so ‘scanty still’ was knowledge of human genetics, ‘that no eugenist can afford to neglect the study of environmental factors – especially of social and economic conditions’. The authors examined the evidence of various social and health surveys. They concluded that while on one level social progress had taken place, the poorest in society were ‘relatively worse off to-day than forty years ago’. The ‘flight from parenthood’, and its implications for the size and structure of future populations, were likewise noted.8 All these were ideas which Titmuss had been propagating since the 1930s.
Three particular points stand out here. First, the notion that eugenicists should take account of environmental factors was provocative, for this was exactly what the movement’s conservatives had argued against from the outset. That they still had influence was indicated by, for example, the Eugenics Society’s debate over the Beveridge Report. Here, Titmuss took other speakers to task for focusing on a tiny minority of the population, the so-called ‘social problem group’, and neglecting the bulk of the population who would benefit by Beveridge’s proposals.9 Titmuss and Lafitte must therefore be seen as part of what Bland and Hall describe as an influential grouping within the Society, ‘growing throughout the 1930s under Blacker’s tenure as general secretary’, which constituted a ‘liberal/leftist progressive tendency’. This group saw eugenics as part of a ‘wider vision of a scientific approach to the management of society as a whole’.10 It is, in this context, likewise notable that Titmuss and Lafitte emphasised the moral underpinnings of their ideas.
Second, the emphasis on the ‘whole’ and ‘wholeness’ deserves comment, given its prominence in the article. It further reflects Titmuss’s adherence to a holistic, organic view of society which we have encountered on various occasions. The sort of holistic standpoint which Titmuss and Lafitte expressed was thus another example of the participation by such social commentators in a broader intellectual movement seeking to critique the perceived problems of modernity. For those on the progressive left, organic metaphors might be employed to ‘focus on self-regulating equilibrium and solidarity’ among society’s constituent parts in order to ‘justify gradualism and piecemeal government interventions in social life’.11 As we saw in the last chapter, the wartime ‘solidarity’ of the British people was central to Problems of Social Policy, and to Titmuss’s aspirations for post-war society.
Third, there is the point about ‘total warfare’. By the time of the article’s publication, Britain had seen off the initial German threat. More than this, though, the Nazi regime had a few months earlier launched its assault on the Soviet Union, and the barbarity of the war on the Eastern Front was already evident. Small wonder that Titmuss and Lafitte distinguished sharply between what they meant by ‘eugenics’ and the immorality of the Nazi regime. Even more recently, Japan had attacked the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, followed by its successful assault on the British base at Singapore. So the war spread to the Far East, with Hitler making the conflict truly global by declaring war on America.
Titmuss also wrote more specifically on population issues. In an April 1942 piece on the birth rate, he concluded that underneath the existing data there was a ‘serious and continuous fall in reproduction’, and that the ‘loss in unborn casualties to the end of 1941 exceeds by 100 per cent the number of civilians killed by enemy action from the air’.12 Titmuss returned to the subject the following year. Here he acknowledged an upward trend, something unexpected given ‘the known effects of previous wars on fertility’. But the rate had certainly fallen from 1939 to the end of 1941, potentially leading a decline to ‘an abnormally low level’. It might be assumed that this recent upswing would give Titmuss cause for hope, although this would have dented his previously unshakeable population pessimism. Not so. He instead finished his article by posing two questions. Did the upswing ‘herald a permanent change? Should we not rather say, after taking account of the remarkable combination of favourable influences, that the time of reproduction, which has been receding for over sixty years, has not yet turned?’13 Demographic gloom remained the order of the day. Titmuss also continued to review books for the journal, for instance Clarice Burns’s study of Durham, Infant and Maternal Mortality in Relation to Size of Family and Rapidity of Breeding. He found this flawed, especially on the impact of social factors, a subject close to his own heart, but ‘otherwise valuable’.14
As well as editorialising, writing, and reviewing for Eugenics Review, Titmuss contributed to Eugenics Society meetings. The following example illustrates this point and, once again, his wartime preoccupations. In autumn 1943 Titmuss received a letter from Blacker, now back from the army, working for the Ministry of Health, and soon to publish an important report on mental health services. Blacker was having problems organising the Members’ Meeting, scheduled for 16 November, and he asked Titmuss if he would be prepared to speak, possibly drawing on his recently published Birth, Poverty and Wealth. He would be grateful for anything Titmuss could do, as it was ‘not easy to get this Society going again properly’.15 Titmuss obliged. He delivered his talk, ‘Social Environment and Eugenics’, to the meeting chaired by Horder, with an abstract released to the press.16 And, as requested by Blacker, Titmuss’s address was duly published in Eugenics Review.
Titmuss did draw on his recent publication, and also took the opportunity to give a historical account of the development of eugenics, and to use this to stress the importance of environment. He started by addressing the legacy of Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, founder of eugenics and strict hereditarian.17 Titmuss argued that it would be wrong to condemn Galton’s hereditarian analysis without understanding the context in which it was formulated. By the same token, however, those who held ‘strongly to-day to the Galtonian viewpoint’ were ‘equally unjustified because
