G. K. Chesterton’s Fight Against Eugenics

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. So we've had this experience
on the show a number of times where we talk
about somebody that we think in a lot of ways

(00:23):
is really cool, but then we have to talk about
their participation in the eugenics movement yep. I after having
that most recently happened with Ellen Sweller Richards, I just
I wanted to find somebody who was vocally, definitively anti
eugenics to talk about on the show, and especially I

(00:47):
wanted to find somebody to talk about who opposed eugenics
before the Nazi eugenics programs of the nineteen thirties and forties,
because those programs drew a lot from eugenic programs that
were already in place, especially in the United States, but
the horrific elements of them also caused the movement to

(01:09):
fall out of favors. So I was like, I just,
I want to find somebody who opposed eugenics before that.
And the person that I ultimately decided to talk about
was G. K. Chesterton. G K. Chesterton was just a
prolific writer across a lot of genres, including fiction, poetry, journalism,

(01:31):
literary criticism, biography, social criticism, theology, and Christian apologetics. A
lot of his work incorporated elements of more than one
of those things simultaneously. Today, his best known work is
probably the Father Brown series that was adapted for film
in nineteen fifty four and then for TV starting in

(01:54):
twenty thirteen. Coincidentally, it's tenth series on BBC one is
going to be rapping up right around the time that
this episode airs, which I did. I just say it's
a coincidence. That was a coincidence. This is such a
broad collection of work, and there's so much of it
that it's impossible to touch on everything in one episode

(02:15):
or even multiple episodes. Like one of the most recent
biographies of GK. Chesterton is almost seven hundred and fifty
pages long, and that still had to choose which parts
of it to focus on. Today we are really focused
on the highlights of Chesterton's life and work, his vocal
criticism of eugenics. Just because he was a vocal critic

(02:36):
of eugenics, unfortunately does not mean he was a perfect person.
Are we talking about some of that also, and also
I really think there will probably be some neurodivergent folks
in the audience who will see themselves reflected in parts
of G. K. Chesterton's story, or maybe he will remind
you of someone else in your life. As we've said

(02:59):
a bunch of time on the show, it is really
tricky to diagnose somebody who is not here, and there
are ethical questions about even trying to do that. Most
of what I found related to this seemed pretty speculative.
So we are not going to try to armchair diagnose GK. Chesterton,
But if he resonates with you, you're not taking that

(03:20):
away either. Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in London on
May twenty ninth, eighteen seventy four, the second child of
Edward and Marie Grojeene Chesterton. His older sister died when
he was only three, so he didn't have a very
clear memory of her. His younger brother, Cecil Edward, was
born in eighteen seventy nine. The Chesterton's were a comfortable

(03:43):
middle class family, and Gilbert's parents encouraged him to pursue
his interests. Gilbert started talking when he was around three,
and he started reading when he was eight or nine,
so a little later than a lot of his peers.
But once he started learning to read, this really became
a lifelong passion. He was also described as a day

(04:05):
dreamer and kind of messy and disorganized. People thought he
was bright, but he also only did well in the
school subjects that were interesting to him. One of his
teachers described him as quote a great blunderer with much intelligence,
which honestly I kind of love. In eighteen eighty seven,

(04:26):
Chesterton entered Saint Paul's School in London. That is an
independent day school that dates back to fifteen o nine,
and by this point it had a growing reputation for
academic excellence. He became a member of the school's debate
society and found that he really loved to argue. In
eighteen ninety two, Chesterton moved on to the Slade School

(04:47):
of Fine Art at University College London, where he also
took courses in literature, French and Latin, and he seems
to have found this a lot harder than his earlier
education had been, in part because he still was mostly
wanting to focus on what naturally held his interest. He
also went through some kind of spiritual or mental health crisis.

(05:10):
It may have had elements of both of that. His
parents were Unitarian, and his family had never been particularly religious,
but he started breaking away from that during this period
he experimented with spiritualism, including playing with a weegiaboard, and
eventually you started exploring more orthodox Christianity. And that we're

(05:32):
saying that as lowercase Orthodox, meaning conforming to established doctrines
and creeds, not capital o Orthodox like the Eastern Orthodox Church.
Chestertown later described this period of crisis as quote my
period of madness, and whatever exactly it was it was
going on, it was enough that other people in his

(05:55):
life were worried about his well being. In eighteen ninety five,
Chesterton left college and started working in publishing. He had
already written his first novel, Basil Howe, although it wasn't
published until it was rediscovered in a trunk almost a
hundred years later. He was also writing essays, columns and
reviews for various publications, including a journal called The Speaker

(06:19):
that some of his friends had started, and the London
Daily News. In eighteen ninety six, he met a woman
named Francis Alice Blogg, who was a writer as well,
particularly poetry and plays. They got married five years later
on June twenty eight, nineteen oh one, and she played
a huge role in his life and work. When they met,

(06:41):
she was a devout Anglo Catholic. That's a movement that
developed in the nineteenth century and really emphasized the Catholic
roots of the Anglican Church. She was really a big
part of Chesterton's religious exploration. She also encouraged his work
as a writer, eventually to the point of acting almost
as his manner. At the same time, though she was

(07:02):
very private. Toward the end of his life, she encouraged
him to write his autobiography, but she really stressed that
she did not want to be in it. During the
five years between when Gilbert and Francis met and when
they got married, he had started to establish himself as
a writer and he was earning more money from his work.
This included two volumes of poetry published in nineteen hundred,

(07:25):
The Wild Night and Other Poems and Graybeards at Play,
Literature and Art for Old Gentleman. Rhymes and Sketches by
Gilbert Chesterton. I love that title. Yeah, it's a lot
of these things are in the public domain and you
can find them online, and this one had like a
brief little stanzas of poetry opposite sketches that he had done.

(07:50):
During this time, he had also met poet and essayist
Hilaire Bellock, and the two men formed a literary and
journalistic partnership that lasted for the rest of Chesterton's life.
They were close friends who wrote about a lot of
the same subjects, and a lot of the time they
had the same opinions on those subjects. This was to

(08:10):
the point that George Bernard Shaw eventually described them as
one sort of chimera that Chester Bellock. He did this
during an essay writing dispute that involved the two of them,
George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. Chesterton had a
lot of very strong political opinions, although those opinions also

(08:31):
evolved over the course of his life. Like he definitely
was not a pacifist, but he was opposed to the
Boer War, both to the war itself and to the
concentration camps that we talked about in our episodes on
Emily Hobhouse last year. He was what's known as a
little Englander, basically someone who thought that England should focus

(08:51):
on what was going on within its own borders, rather
than expanding the British Empire, and he thought the Boers
had the right to be where they were without British interference.
Later on, though, he supported England's involvement in World War One,
basically seeing Germany's expansion as a greater evil than Britain's.
He was also deeply critical of capitalism for all of

(09:14):
his life, with some aspects of that shifting over time
as well, Like he always thought that capitalism was exploitive
of poor and working people, and that's something that we'll
talk about more when we get to his writing on eugenics,
but over time his opinion changed on what he thought
should be done about it. Initially he advocated socialism as

(09:36):
a more equitable system than capitalism. Later on, though he
came to be very critical of socialism as well, describing
it as another form of tyranny. Eventually, he and Hilare
Bellack advocated distributism. So, in Chesterton's view, capitalism put most
of the wealth and the power under the control of

(09:56):
a few people, and socialism put all that wealth and
power under control of the state. But in distributism it
would be divided up and widely distributed among the people.
By nineteen oh three, Chesterton was respected and well known
enough as a writer that McMillan Publishing asked him to
contribute to its Englishmen of Letters series. This was a

(10:19):
series of literary biographies of prominent English writers written by
other prominent English writers. Beyond exploring a person's life story,
literary biographies are meant to dig into the connections between
a writer's life and their literary work, while also offering
criticism and analysis of that work and how it relates

(10:39):
back to that person's life. Chesterton's contribution to this series
was a biography of Robert Browning. This is a mixed bag,
pretty sure. He never published anything for McMillan again. It
sold really well and it was reprinted several times they
were the following years, and he got some praise for
the literary criticism involved with it, But when it came

(11:02):
to the biographical facts, a lot of them were wrong.
He apparently wrote a lot of this from memory without
double checking details, which we can tell you from doing
this podcast for ten years now, that is not a
great way to wind up with an accurate finished product.
There were also a lot of misquotes in this book,

(11:23):
some of which he also apparently made from memory. He
published a biography of Charles Dickens in nineteen oh six,
Not for McMillan that had a bunch of the same
pattern of pretty good literary analysis combined with some just
error riddled biography. During those years, Chesterton also started publishing novels,

(11:44):
beginning with The Napoleon of notting Hill in nineteen oh four,
followed by The Man Who Was Thursday A Nightmare in
nineteen oh eight. These and other novels are often described
as fantasies or allegories. They drew from his thoughts on distributism,
as well as his other social and political ideas. The
Napoleon of notting Hill is set in London in nineteen

(12:06):
eighty four, and in it, a randomly chosen king decides
to reorganize the city into medieval city states, leading the
Provost of notting Hill to raise an army to oppose
the building of a road. The Man Who Was Thursday
involves a detective recruited to an anti anarchist police force
who infiltrates a council of anarchists that use the days

(12:28):
of the week as their code names, and in addition
to the biographies and the novels and other articles and
things that he was writing, he was also publishing influential
work on religion, theology, and Christian apologetics. This included a
collection of essays called Heretics that came out in nineteen
oh five, and then in a follow up called Orthodoxy,

(12:50):
which came out in nineteen o eight. He described Heretics
as quote a series of hasty but sincere papers. He
said he had written Orthodoxy in response to criticism of
that earlier work. People said he had talked about other
people's views, but he had not laid out his own
thoughts on religion. This really only scratches the surface of

(13:12):
Chesterton's written work. At the start of the twentieth century,
he had become an extremely well known poet, novelist, biographer,
despite those details that were all wrong and essayist, and
he was also a visible figure around London. We're going
to get into event after a sponsor break. By the

(13:40):
time GK. Chesterton reached his thirties, he had become a
very distinctive and recognizable character around London, particularly in the
Fleet Street area, which was home to newspaper offices and publishers,
as well as taverns and pubs. Chesterton spent a lot
of time in all of these places, ring over a

(14:00):
beer and a plate of food, and running up against
his deadlines, and hob nobbing with other writers seeking out stories.
He was a very large man in terms of his
height and his weight, and now that I think about it,
his personality. He also liked to wear a cloak, a
large crumpled hat, pathena glasses, and he carried a sword,

(14:21):
cane and sometimes also a pistol, As had been the
case in his earliest school years. He continued to be
described as disorganized and scatter brained. In one widely repeated moment,
he sent his wife a telegram which read and at
Market Harbor, where ought eye to be? Her answer was home.

(14:45):
I guess if you can't text, you sent telegrams. In
another his newspaper had moved offices and he couldn't remember
where the new location was, so he had to buy
a copy of the paper and look up the address
on the masthead. Who was also a different experience in
a world that has smartphones. In a review of the

(15:08):
biography of Robert Browning that we talked about before the break.
James Douglas described G. K. Chesterton in this way, quote
whatever mister Chesterton is or is not, at least he
is idiosyncratic. He is violently, frantically, riotously, ferociously blasphemously himself.

(15:29):
Later on, Douglas said, quote, most of us spend our
lives in a miserable attempt to harmonize our personality with
the great mass of half harmonized personalities around us. Mister
Chesterton joyously refuses to join in that ancient hypocrisy. He
does not know the meaning of caution or moderation, of

(15:50):
the golden mean, or of any of those other complex
artifices which modify, dilute, and equalize average ideas of inions, views,
and judgments. As we said earlier, Chesterton's wife, Frances, really
encouraged him in his career, acting almost as his manager,
and she also seems to have encouraged his most recognizable

(16:13):
distinguishing treats. But at the same time she was worried
about his health and the effects that all the food, beer,
and relentless work were having on it. So in nineteen
oh nine, when he was thirty five, the Chesterton's moved
to Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire to try to get a little
distance from all that. In nineteen eleven, Chesterton wrote his

(16:34):
first Father Brown story, The Innocence of Father Brown. Something
that Chesterton really loved and incorporated extensively in his writing
was paradox, and this was true of Father Brown as well.
Chesterton had been inspired by a friend of his father,
John O'Connor, who was a Catholic priest. Chesterton had realized

(16:57):
that Father O'Connor, who was a man pursuing a life
of religious devotion, knew a lot more about crime and
depravity than most other people, in part because of his
role as a confessor. The Father Brown stories were by
far Chesterton's most financially lucrative work, and he used them
to subsidize his other writing. Often, when he realized that

(17:19):
he needed money, he would write a Father Brown's story
to earn it. In these stories, along with other stories
that he wrote that featured detectives, mysteries and crime, wound
up influencing the detective story genre. Father Brown solved mysteries
not by deductive reasoning, but by possessing a deep understanding
of human nature by getting into the mind of the perpetrator.

(17:42):
Chesterton was so influential and respected in this genre that
when a group of British mystery writers established the Detection Club,
Chesterton was selected as its first president, and that was
a role that he held until his death. As Chesterton
started writing the Father Brown series, eugenics movement was gaining
traction in the US and elsewhere, so as a very

(18:05):
quick recap. English polymath Sir Francis Galton had coined the
term eugenics in eighteen eighty three. That was from Greek
terms meaning good stock or good birth. This had drawn
from earlier research on things like heredity and natural selection,
including the work of Charles Darwin. Eugenics was rooted in

(18:26):
the idea that humanity could be improved through good breeding. Initially,
Galton and others focused primarily on what was framed as
positive eugenics, that is, encouraging the so called right people
to have children, but soon people were also advocating negative eugenics,

(18:46):
or preventing these so called wrong people from having children.
In the first decade of the twentieth century, this could
include everything from segregating people who lived in places like
group homes and asylums by sex, to sterilizing people who
were believed to be feeble minded in the parlance of
the day. Eventually after these events were talking about today,

(19:09):
Nazi Germany also used these same ideas as justification to
murder people with mental illnesses or disabilities, which was described
as euthanasia in the UK specifically, Winston Churchill was named
Home Secretary in nineteen ten, and he immediately started advocating
for a eugenics law patterned after one that was already

(19:32):
on the books in the US state of Indiana. Indiana's
law allowed for the involuntary sterilization of quote confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles,
and rapists. This was the first of many such laws
passed in the United States and elsewhere. There were laws
already on the books in the UK that were related

(19:55):
to things like the care and education of disabled people
or people with mental illness, and Churchill had spearheaded the
creation of the Royal Commission on the Care and Control
of the Feeble Minded in nineteen oh four. But as
eugenics really increased in popularity, people were calling for some
kind of law to keep such people from having children.

(20:18):
In May of nineteen twelve, the Feeble Minded Control Bill
was introduced in the House of Commons, which would have
made marrying a so called mental defective or officiating such
a marriage a crime. This bill also included language to
create a registry of purportedly feeble minded people, and it
empowered the Home Secretary to add people to this registry.

(20:42):
Although most of parliaments supported the bill, the critics were
extremely vocal, and in June this was replaced with a
new bill called the Mental Deficiency Bill. The Mental Deficiency
Bill outlined four categories of people, ranging from people whose
disability and support needs meant that they couldn't protect themselves

(21:03):
from common physical dangers, to the feeble minded also called
socially inefficient, who required quote care, supervision, and control for
their own protection or the protection of others. This bill
also covered moral defectives. In its language, these were people
who had some kind of a mental disorder, along with

(21:26):
quote vicious or criminal propensities on which punishment had little
or no effect. Other language in this bill also applied
to people with epilepsy. While it did not include provisions
for sterilizing people against their will, the bill did mandate
that these people be separated from the rest of society

(21:46):
in hospitals, homes, or what it called colonies. The goal
was the same as a sterilization program, to try to
keep them from having children. Several of the bill's proponents
stressed how important it was for it to be applied
to women of child bearing age. As this revised bill
was being debated, the first International Eugenics Conference was held

(22:11):
in London. It was sponsored by the Eugenics Education Society,
which had been founded in nineteen oh seven, and after
this conference, public support for a British eugenics law continued
to increase. Prominent public figures who were vocally in favor
of it included people like HD Wells, and while GK.

(22:32):
Chesterton was not the only opponent of the bill, he
was definitely one of the most vocal. This was to
the point that Anglican priest William Ing, also called Dean
Ing because he was Dean of Saint Paul's Cathedral, one
of the bill's primary proponents, described it as being opposed
only by quote irrationalist prophets like mister Chesterton. Chesterton published

(22:57):
a series of articles and essays and public lectures condemning
eugenics and this bill, which he collected, edited and published
as Eugenics and Other Evils In nineteen twenty two. We're
going to be reading some quotes from this book, and
as a note upfront, while he is arguing against eugenics,
some of the language he is using is very insensitive

(23:20):
by today's standards. Yeah, I just I left out a
lot of the language in the actual bill because it's
the appalling. Yeah, But some of the quotes I was like,
this is really illustrative of what he was talking about.
So he described eugenics in general as quote the idea
that to breed a man like a cart horse was

(23:42):
the true way to attain that higher civilization of intellectual,
magnanimity and sympathetic insight which may be found in cart horses.
And he described the Mental Deficiency Bill this way after
Parliament had passed it. Quote, the first of the eugenic
laws has all been adopted by the Government of this
country and passed with the applause of both parties through

(24:05):
the dominant house of Parliament. This first eugenic law clears
the ground and may be said to proclaim negative eugenics,
but it cannot be defended, and nobody has attempted to
defend it except on the eugenic theory. I will call
it the Feeble Minded Bill, both for brevity and because
the description is strictly accurate. It is quite simply and

(24:27):
literally a bill for incarcerating as madmen those whom no
doctor will consent to call mad. It is enough if
some doctor or other may happen to call them weak minded.
Since there is scarcely any human being to whom this
term has not been conversationally applied by his own friends
and relatives on some occasion or other, unless his friends

(24:49):
and relatives have been lamentably lacking in spirit, it can
be clearly seen that this law, like the early Christian Church,
to which however it presents points of similarity, is a
net drawing in of all kinds. We'll talk more about
Chesterton's opposition to eugenics and to this bill specifically after

(25:10):
a quick sponsor break. GK. Chesterton criticized eugenics in general
and the Mental Deficiency Bill specifically from a lot of
different angles. One was that the term feeble minded did

(25:33):
not actually mean anything like we've talked on the show
before about how this was used as a catchall to
describe all kinds of people with all kinds of different conditions,
or maybe with no condition people just didn't like their behavior.
He also pointed out that the law itself did not
offer a clear definition of it. In his words, quote,
I know that it means very different things to different people,

(25:56):
but that is only because evil always takes advantage of ambiguity.
And another passage connected to that same idea, he wrote,
quote by one of the monstrosities of the feeble minded theory,
a man actually acquitted by a judge and jury could
then be examined by doctors as to the state of

(26:16):
his mind, presumably in order to discover by what diseased
eccentricity he had refrained from the crime. In other words,
when the police cannot jail a man who is innocent
of doing something, they jail him for being too innocent
to do anything. He also suggested that if a law
really was needed to lock people up, that the purportedly

(26:38):
weak minded were not the right people to target. He
wrote quote, even if I were a eugenist, then I
should not personally elect to waste my time locking up
the feeble minded. The people I should lock up would
be the strong minded. I have known hardly any cases
of mere mental weakness making a family a failure. I

(26:59):
have own eight or nine cases of violent and exaggerated
force of character, making a family hell. He made a
number of points questioning who would be allowed to make
these decisions for other people, and why, and whether those
decision makers could ever possibly be trusted with that kind
of power. He wrote at one point, quote, when I

(27:21):
was at school, the kind of boy who liked teasing
half wits was not the sort that stood up to bullies.
Chesterton also believed that heredity was far more complicated than
the eugenics movement proposed. Quote, there are the three first
facts of heredity. That it exists, That it is subtle
and made of a million elements, That it is simple

(27:43):
and cannot be unmade into those elements. To summarize, you know,
there is wine in the soup. You do not know
how many wines there are in the soup, because you
do not know how many wines there are in the world,
and you never will know, because all chemists, all cooks,
and all common sense people tell you that the soup
is of such a sort that it can never be

(28:04):
chemically analyzed. That is a perfectly fair parallel to the
hereditary element in the human soul. There are many ways
in which one can feel that there is wine in
the soup, as in suddenly tasting a wine specially favored.
That corresponds to seeing suddenly flash on a young face
the image of some ancestor you have known. But even

(28:26):
then the taster cannot be certain he is not tasting
one familiar wine among many unfamiliar ones, or seeing one
known ancestor among a million unknown ancestors. Or, to put
it much more simply, quote, if the child has his
parents nose or noses, that may be heredity. But if

(28:48):
he has not, that may be heredity too. And as
was the case with a lot of his other writing,
Chesterton saw capitalism as having created the problems that the
eugenics movement reported to solve. He argued that capitalism had
created a class of poor people who were dependent upon
capitalism for their livelihoods, but also oppressed through capitalism, and

(29:12):
he saw eugenics as a tool to continue to oppress
and even eliminate that class. Quote there is one strong, startling,
outstanding thing about eugenics, and that is its meanness. Wealth
and the social science supported by wealth had tried an
inhuman experiment. The experiment had entirely failed. They sought to

(29:33):
make wealth accumulate, and they made men decay. Then, instead
of confessing the error and trying to restore the wealth
or attempting to repair the decay, they are trying to
cover their first cruel experiment with a more cruel experiment.
They put a poisonous plaster on a poisoned wound. Vilest
of all, they actually quote the bewilderment produced among the

(29:56):
poor by their first blender as a reason for allowing
them to blender again. They are apparently ready to arrest
all the opponents of their system as mad, merely because
the system was maddening. I read that part, and I
wanted to applaud getting the time machine. We're gonna go
hug him only for a little bit. Though. He argued

(30:20):
that rather than trying to eliminate poor people to improve
the hereditary outcomes of everyone else, that working people should
be given quote more money, more leisure, more luxuries, more
status in the community in order to improve their own lives.
He had little hope that such a plan would ever
be put into action, though, writing quote, if they made

(30:41):
the worker too comfortable, he would not work to increase
another's comforts. If they made him too independent, he would
not work like a dependent. If, for instance, his wages
were so good that he could save out of them,
he might cease to be a wage earner. If his
house or garden were his own, he might and an
economic seize in it. The whole capitalist experiment had been

(31:04):
built on his dependence, but now it was getting out
of hand, not in the direction of freedom, but of
frank helplessness. One might say that his dependence had got
independent of control. In a particularly pointed passage on this
same idea, he wrote, quote the eugenist, for all I know,
would regard the mere existence of tiny tim as a

(31:27):
sufficient reason for massacring the whole family of Cratchet. But
as a matter of fact, we have here a very
good instance of how much more practically true to life
is sentiment than cynicism. The poor are not a race,
or even a type. That is senseless to talk about
breeding them, for they are not a breed. They are,

(31:49):
in cold fact, what Dickens describes quote, a dust bin
of individual accidents of damaged dignity and often of damaged gentility.
In spite of Chestertown's vocal criticisms, Parliament passed the Mental
Deficiency Act in nineteen thirteen with only three votes against it.

(32:11):
It stayed on the books until being repealed by the
Mental Health Act of nineteen fifty nine. Chesterton continued to
be a strident critic of eugenics for the rest of
his life. As the Mental Deficiency Act was being debated,
Chesterton was also publicly facing a totally different struggle. His

(32:31):
brother Cecil was convicted of libel during the Marconi scandal.
This was an insider trading scandal which broke in nineteen twelve,
and it involved several high ranking members of the British government.
People who were implicated in this included Godfrey Isaacs, who
was managing director of the Marconi Company, and his brother

(32:53):
Rufus Isaacs, who was Attorney General. Godfrey and Rufus Isaacs
were Jewish, and so Chesterton's reporting on this had anti
Semitic elements, and g K. Chesterton was accused of anti
Semitism as well, both for his writing and other statements
made during this trial and its aftermath and at other

(33:15):
points during his life. Today, there are people who try
to dismiss Chestertown's anti Semitism, noting that he had individual
Jewish friends and colleagues who he seemed to admire in respect,
and that he was one of the first people in
Britain to publicly condemn Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.
But Chestertown unquestionably wrote a lot about Jewish people as

(33:37):
a whole that was inherently anti Semitic. For example, he
wrote a book called The New Jerusalem, published in nineteen twenty,
which chronicled a journey that he took from England to
what was then the territory of Palestine. In the chapter
the Problem of Zionism, he wrote, quote, my friends and
I had in some general sense the policy in the matter,

(34:00):
and it was in substance the desire to give Jews
the dignity and status of a separate nation. We desired
that in some fashion, and so far as possible, Jews
should be represented by Jews, and should live in a
society of Jews, should be judged by Jews and ruled
by Jews. I am an anti Semite. If that is

(34:21):
anti Semitism, it would seem more rational to call it Semitism.
Feel like that statement starts out sounding okay, but then
it becomes like we should separate all of the Jewish
people and put them in a different place. Yeah, yeah,
it seems so reasonable at the outset and then bli.

(34:42):
In this same chapter, he also argues that Jewish people
should be allowed to do any job and go anywhere
they wish, up to and including being named Archbishop of
Canterbury if the religion expanded to the point that that
made sense, but also that they should all be dressed
quote as an Arab quote. The point is that we
should know where we are, and he would know where

(35:04):
he is, which is in a foreign land. Chesterton argued
that Jewish people were loyal only to themselves, not to
any nation where they might be living, to the point
that they should be ineligible for public office. The idea
that Jewish people are inherently disloyal or have dual loyalties
is of course anti Semitic. Chesterton also acknowledged that the

(35:27):
same argument had been used to try to keep Catholics
out of office in Protestant countries, but he argued that
this was not the same thing. Yeah, like, oh no,
mine is different. Yeah, I mean, if you learn about
anti Semitic tropes like dual loyalties is just a it's

(35:48):
a key one. So anyway, Chesterton continued to publish poetry, articles, books,
and Father Brown stories for the rest of his life.
In nineteen eighteen, his brother died of an illness that
he contracted while serving in World War One, and then
afterward Chesterton took over a publication that he and his
brother and Hilarabella had started together that had originally been

(36:10):
called The Eyewitness. He renamed it Gk's Weekly and kept
it going. Also, in nineteen eighteen, Parliament passed the Representation
of the People Bill, which allowed women over the age
of thirty to vote as long as they were married
or a member of the local government register. Chesterton opposed
women's suffrage as well. He thought women's political involvement would

(36:33):
lead to the destruction of the family, and he often
wrote about suffragists and other campaigners for women's rights in
a way that was insulting, like he described suffragists as
chaining themselves to a tree and then complaining that they
were not free. Another frequently repeated quote quote ten thousand
women marched through the streets shouting we will not be

(36:54):
dictated to and went off and became stenographers. Then nineteen
Chesterton formally converted to Roman Catholicism, and then his wife
Francis did as well a few years later. The year
that Chesterton converted, he also published a book on Saint
Francis of Assisi. Other biographies he published later on in
his life included one on Chaucer in nineteen thirty two

(37:17):
and one on Thomas Aquinas in nineteen thirty three. In
the last several years of his life, Chesterton worked with
a secretary named Dorothy Collins, who helped manage his business
and literary affairs, and also acted as a chauffeur. That
first novel that we mentioned was in a trunk found
in her home after she died in nineteen eighty eight.

(37:38):
Sometimes Dorothy is described almost as a daughter to the
Chesterton's who never had children. After both Gilbert and Francis died,
Gilbert's sister in law, Aida Chesterton, wrote a cruel description,
suggesting that they had no children because their marriage had
never been consummated. This wound up being picked up by
other biographers, but it doesn't appear to have been true.

(38:01):
Among other things, at one point Francis underwent medical treatment
for infertility. Yeah she seems to have wanted to have
children and not been able to, and if their marriage
had never been consummated, she would not have been pursuing
fertility treatment. G. K. Chesterton died on June fourteenth, nineteen

(38:21):
thirty six, and Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, of heart and kidney failure.
He was sixty two. His wife, Francis, died two years later.
His autobiography, which he had written shortly before his death,
was published posthumously. In addition to serving as the president
of the Detection Club, he was also serving as President
of the Royal Society of Literature. Beyond his influence on

(38:45):
the detective story genre, Chesterton is also discussed as tangentially
connected to the literary discussion group known as the Inklings,
whose members included both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.
Chesterton was not officially a member, but he did influence
many of them. I feel like we could have done

(39:06):
so many episodes about because this, in a lot of
ways only scratches the surface. But I did want to
focus on the eugenics part and also touch on some
of the other major points of his life. I have
a listener mail from Christy. It came about after we

(39:27):
talked about some pronunciation things on the show. The subject
line of the email is you say pecan, I say pecan,
and Christie wrote, Hi, Tracy and Holley, I just had
to write in about your discussion on pronunciations, specifically of
the word bocan. I grew up in New Mexico and
pronounced that word the way you did in your episode. However,

(39:48):
my husband here grew up in Central Texas, pronounces it pecan.
It was funny to me that your Tracy's question mark
friend believes that people who live in the area where
the tree as native don't pronounce it that way. I
also attended a university in East Texas, and I would
say that pcn is the primary way I heard Texas
Natives in that area pronounced the word. Sounds like the

(40:11):
pronunciation varies even within the Southern US. As I mentioned,
I grew up in New Mexico, as did my parents,
but my dad's parents moved there from Oklahoma and my
mom's parents moved there from upstate New York. As a result,
even between my brother and five sisters, the pronunciation of
words like caramel and caribbean vary from person to person,

(40:35):
sometimes maybe just to stand out from the pack, ha ha.
My husband has mostly ditched his Texas accent after twelve
years of active duty military service, I e. The great homogenizer,
But every once in a while he will say a
word like crayon, which he pronounces crown, and his Texas
roots are exposed. After traveling throughout the country, living briefly

(40:57):
in Asia and in the Middle East, and learning more
about the ways that raises them and classes them sneak
into society, I've begun to appreciate that the variety of
pronunciations make a language beautiful, that dialects are intrinsically linked
to culture, and of course, the diversity of cultures creates
the beautiful tapestry of humanity. I still catch myself quote

(41:18):
correcting my husband when he says something that it doesn't
sound quite right to my ears. But I am making
a conscious effort to stop listening to early twentieth century
audio in speeches and movies. Reminds me that English as
I know it is transitory and evolution as a natural
part of language. Unfortunately, I'm allergic to cats, but I've
included pictures of our dogs Gus Gus the white poodle

(41:40):
mix and Milo, the tan terrier mix, and one that
includes my sister's Shitsu Suki. Milo inexplicably prefers to sit
on Gus Gus, and Gus Gus inexplicably doesn't mind it all.
They are both great snugglebugs and they bring us much joy.
Thank you so much for all the great work you
do researching, organizing, and presenting history in a way that

(42:01):
is interesting and relevant. You have completely shifted my perspective
of human and especially US history just by covering the
topics and people that I missed in all my history classes.
Thinks again, Christie. Christie also included a sort of assortment
of other like funny pronunciation quirks. I wanted to read
this for a couple of reasons. One, the story about

(42:21):
Pecan versus Pecan and where people lived remind me of
a story that I know I told in a live
show Q and A one time, but I can't remember
if I've told it on the podcast. Before. We were
in the Finger Lakes area of New York for a
live show in Seneca Falls, and there was a restaurant
that had a sandwich on the menu that is a
regional sandwich that is called beef on and then the

(42:46):
name of the bread W E c K. So you
would probably look at it and say beef on weck.
My husband grew up in western New York and told
me that everyone where he grew up called it beef
on wick, not weck wick, like it was spelled with
an eye. And I told this story in our live

(43:08):
show q Anda, and two different people came up to
me afterward, and one of them said, I grew up here.
Your husband is totally correct. That's how we all say it,
And the other one was like, I grew up here.
Your husband is punking you, right, And I had actually Weirdly,
this came up again recently in a conversation with another

(43:30):
friend of ours who grew up in that part of
the US, and he also was like, yeah, we said
it wick. Also the crayon comment and pronouncing it like crown.
Years ago, we had a thing on our Facebook that
was about how different pronunciations and boy did people just
get in the Facebook version of a fistfight about people

(43:53):
saying crayon as though it's crown. People were there was
also cran was a big yeah, and wow, people were
viciously upset. It was a lot of I had no idea.
I thought I had picked that topic and I thought,
what a lovely, easy breezy, make everybody happy kind of

(44:13):
thing to talk about how crayons were invented and little
did I know, I'll have yeah yeah. So anyway, I
love how this email brought so many things together. Thank
you for sending it in these adorable dog picks. If
you want to send us a note about this or
any other podcasts or history podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com

(44:37):
and we're all over social media at missed in History.
That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.
And you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio
app and wherever else you want to get your podcasts.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.

(44:58):
For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Stuff You Missed in History Class News

Follow Us On

Hosts And Creators

Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}G. K. Chesterton’s Fight Against Eugenics