Wrong Side Of History

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Get the full End Notes at the end of each series, occasional essays and Q&As, and help support the research behind the show

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In this members only episode we’ll  talk about:

• How Eugenics was practiced differently in different places
• The central anxiety that helped justify the most radical policies 
• More about the religious aspect of the whole movement 
• And wrestle with this moral challenges that surrounded this movement

READ THE BOOKS

Caleb Williams Saleeby, Parenthood and Race Culture (1909) https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42913/42913-h/42913-h.htm

The Eugenics Review, volume 1 (1909–10): https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000529261 

Pauline M. H. Mazumdar, Eugenics, Human Genetics and Human Failings: ⁠https://www.routledge.com/Eugenics-Human-Genetics-and-Human-Failings-The-Eugenics-Society-its-sources-and-its-critics-in-Britain/Mazumdar/p/book/9780415514811 

Music: ⁠El Train⁠

Become a member of Wrong Side of History

Get the complete End Notes at the end of each series, occasional essays and Q&As, and help support the research behind the show.

Join here

What kind of future did the eugenicists believe they were building?

Eugenics did not only promise to prevent human decline. Its supporters imagined a world without hereditary disease, a more intelligent and cooperative humanity, and eventually even world peace.

In Part Two, I follow that promise from one of the movement’s clearest early targets, haemophilia, into its increasingly ambitious visions of human betterment.

Francis Galton tried to measure inherited genius. Caleb Saleeby imagined raising the average person. William Inge proposed an ideal hierarchy of human excellence. And at the movement’s fringe, Nietzsche’s Superman became a prophecy that eugenics might fulfil.

To understand why eugenics became mainstream, we have to understand the future its supporters believed they were creating: not one of death and destruction, but health, abundance, purpose and peace.

Follow Wrong Side of History for the End Notes on September 22. The opening section will be public; members receive the complete episode.

READ THE SOURCES

Parenthood and Race Culture by Caleb Williams Saleeby:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42913/42913-h/42913-h.htm

Hereditary Genius by Francis Galton:
https://galton.org/books/hereditary-genius/

“Probability, the Foundation of Eugenics” by Francis Galton:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_71/August_1907/Probability%2C_The_Foundation_of_Eugenics

Aratra Pentelici by John Ruskin:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25897/25897-h/25897-h.htm

The Eugenics Review, Volume 1:
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000529261

SOURCE NOTES

The John Ruskin passage comes from Aratra Pentelici, a series of Oxford lectures delivered in 1870.

William Inge was Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge and later Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral.

ON THIS EPISODE

Jay Singleton: Writer and host

El Train: Music

JUMP TO:

(00:00) — Introduction and Membership

(00:42) — What Victorians Owed Future Generations

(03:50) — Haemophilia and Preventable Hereditary Suffering

(08:31) — Eugenics and the Birth of Modern Statistics

(10:19) — How Eugenicists Judged a Condition

(12:03) — From Colour Blindness to “Feeble-Mindedness”

(15:14) — The Genie Out of the Bottle

(17:01) — From Preventing Suffering to Improving Humanity

(18:06) — Galton and Hereditary Genius

(19:12) — Saleeby’s “Elevated Humanity”

(24:00) — William Inge’s “Ideal Humanity”

(27:00) — Nietzsche and the Superman

(29:44) — Eugenics as a Religion of Peace

(32:02) — The Organising Principle of Civilisation

(33:05) — Outro

Become a member of Wrong Side of History

Get the complete End Notes at the end of each series, occasional essays and Q&As, and help support the research behind the show.

Join here

Why did eugenics become mainstream among some of the most educated, scientifically minded and socially conscious people of the early twentieth century?

Before eugenics became inseparable in public memory from Nazi Germany, forced sterilisation and racial supremacy, British eugenicists believed modern civilisation had created a serious problem: medicine, sanitation, welfare and charity were saving lives while interrupting the natural selection that had shaped humanity.

In Part One, we try to understand the fear of human decline that gave the movement its urgency, from evolution and heredity to Victorian workhouses, “care and quarantine,” positive and negative eugenics, and the belief that humanity could consciously direct its own future.

This is the story of how a movement remembered for cruelty understood itself as compassionate, enlightened and even religious.

Follow Wrong Side of History so you don’t miss Part Two: The Promise of Human Betterment. September 15.

READ THE SOURCES

Parenthood and Race Culture by Caleb Williams Saleeby:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42913/42913-h/42913-h.htm

The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin:
https://darwin-online.org.uk/converted/published/1874_Descent_F944/1874_Descent_F944.html

Essays in Eugenics by Francis Galton:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/73802

The Eugenics Review, Volume 1:
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000529261

ON THIS EPISODE

Jay Singleton: Writer and host

El Train: Music

JUMP TO:

(00:00) — What Were They Thinking?

(00:55) — Why Eugenics Became Mainstream

(02:25) — Two Observations That Changed Everything

(04:17) — Could Humanity Direct Its Own Evolution?

(05:21) — The Three Questions of Eugenics

(06:38) — Eugenics as a New Religion

(10:34) — The Victorian Problem: Charity and Natural Selection

(14:05) — Care, Quarantine and Human Decline

(18:00) — If Natural Selection Was Broken, What Next?

(18:52) — Positive and Negative Eugenics

(20:05) — Why Persuasion Came Before Force

(24:29) — Preventing Predictable Hereditary Harm

(25:31) — Next: The Promise of Human Betterment

Get End Notes at the end of each series, occasional essays and Q&As, and help support the research behind the show.
Join here
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What does it mean to believe something without really understanding why?

John Stuart Mill called this dead dogma: a belief that may be true, but has become little more than a script.
I look at why Mill thought even correct ideas become weaker when they’re never challenged and what happens when certainty replaces understanding.

This is an essay about testing what we think we know, understanding the strongest arguments against us, and keeping truth alive rather than merely repeating it.

Become a member of Wrong Side of History
Get End Notes at the end of each series, occasional essays and Q&As, and help support the research behind the show.
Join here

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Queen Victoria called women’s rights a “mad, wicked folly.”

But unlike their American counterparts, some British anti-suffragists proposed women’s councils, a ministry for women and even a separate women’s chamber of parliament organised around the belief that the sexes had different duties.

To understand how that vision made sense, I compare British and American anti-suffragism, from Queen Victoria and imperial motherhood to suffragette militancy.

READ THE BOOKS

Women Against the Vote by Julia Bush:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/women-against-the-vote-9780199248773

The Freedom of Women by Ethel B. Harrison:
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL32871291W/The_freedom_of_women

The Status Game by Will Storr:
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-status-game-on-social-position-and-how-we-use-it-will-storr

ON THIS EPISODE

Jay Singleton: Writer and host
El Train: Music

JUMP TO:

(00:00) — Introduction and housekeeping
(02:47) — British vs. American anti-suffragism
(03:32) — How large were the two movements?
(05:00) — Suffragette militancy
(07:05) — What British and American antis shared
(08:06) — Queen Victoria: an anti-suffragist icon
(10:22) — Imperial motherhood
(12:18) — Did political authority depend on force?
(14:37) — The anti-suffragist “forward policy”
(15:23) — A separate political sphere for women
(17:51) — End Notes
(18:48) — The danger of defining human differences
(24:09) — Humiliation and political change
(27:41) — Outro

Up until 1916, women’s suffrage was never backed by a majority of American women. In this final episode on the anti-suffragists, we look at why many of them did not see the vote as a natural right, or even as the real source of political power. To them, governments enforced public opinion, men enforced the law, and women’s real influence came through status, moral authority, and shaping the culture upstream of politics.

Sources on ⁠⁠Substack⁠⁠

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In 1895, anti-suffragists in Massachusetts were asked to do something absurd: vote to show they opposed voting. What happened next helps explain one of the strangest ideas in the anti-suffrage worldview; that the vote was only one part...and maybe even the smallest part of the whole political process

In this episode, we look at how anti-suffragists understood indirect political power: shaping legislators before a vote, moving public opinion through clubs and committees, and influencing the culture that produced politics in the first place. If politics is downstream from culture, they believed women were already standing at the source.

Sources on ⁠Substack⁠

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⁠Tik Tok

In the last episode, we looked at separate spheres (ie. gender roles).

In this one, we go deeper into the political role many anti-suffragists thought women already had. Long before the fight over suffrage reached its peak, American women were given a civic calling: republican motherhood.

They were told the republic depended on them not as voters, but as the people who formed citizens, guarded virtue, and held together the moral center of the nation.

To many anti-suffragists, that was not a consolation prize. It was status, purpose, and power. But by the early 1900s, that world felt under attack. Industrialization, capitalism, individualism, and even socialism seemed to point in the same direction: away from the home, away from interdependence, and away from the kind of work that could not be measured, priced, or made efficient.

From their point of view, the vote was never just a ballot. It was a sign that the line between the public and private spheres was collapsing and that the market and the state were moving into places they did not belong. This episode is about why so many anti-suffragists saw themselves not as dupes or victims, but as the last defenders of the moral and relational life that made a republic possible.

Full sources and research notes are on Substack

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Why did so many women oppose women’s suffrage?


Before 1916, suffrage was never backed by a majority of women, and for years men were more progressive on the issue than women were. 



In this episode, we enter the worldview of the American anti-suffragists and begin with their core idea: separate spheres.
 To them, the vote was never just a ballot. It was a sign of a much larger social change, one that threatened women’s moral authority, sex-based protections, and the family as the basic unit of society. 

Many of these women did not see themselves as powerless. They believed they already had influence, just not partisan influence.
 This episode is about what they feared, what they thought they were protecting, and why their position made sense to them at the time.


Sources on Substack

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No one thinks they’re the bad guy. No one wakes up and says, ‘Today I’ll be on the wrong side of history.’

So here’s the question: if nobody thinks they’re the villain… what were they thinking?

The Wrong Side of History is a show about understanding history’s bad guys the way they understood themselves: what they feared, what they valued, and why their worldview made sense to them at the time.

You probably won’t agree with them. But you may start to see that the stories we’ve known of heroes and villains, saints and bigots, reason and ignorance, are often too simple.