Iberian eugenics? Cross-overs and contrasts between Spanish and Portuguese eugenics, 1930-1950

 

 

Richard Cleminson

orcid.org/0000-0002-6241-4888. University of Leeds. R.M.Cleminson@leeds.ac.uk

This paper forms part of the research project HAR2012-37754-C02-01 (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad - Spain). Some of the original research on Portugal was undertaken during the author's Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Fellowship (AH/1026804/1, 2011-2012).

 

 

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ABSTRACT

This article provides the basis for further considerations on the overlap between different expressions of science, in particular psychotechnics, biotypology and eugenics, in Iberia. It sets the reception of and interest in these scientific undertakings within the specific context pertaining in both Iberian dictatorships and considers the importance of the culture of the scientific community, the role of religion and the presence of positivism within each. While the actual traffic of knowledge between the two countries was limited, the contrasts and differences in the uptake of these specialisms within the two countries and their proximity or otherwise to other fascist and authoritarian regimes of the 1930s and 1940s are explored. The article concludes that in the Spanish case, although there were greater proximities to certain forms of fascist and Nazi eugenics, it was the commitment to Catholicism and nationalist regeneration that allowed for concessions to environmental improvements. A more Germanic strain was present in Portugal but this was dislodged by a consistent commitment to social hygiene rather than racial hygiene, again within the constraints provided by overarching Catholicism.

Key words: eugenics, racial hygiene, psychotechnics, professional orientation, Iberia.

Palabras clave: eugenesia, higiene racial, psicotécnica, orientación profesional, Iberia.

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1. Introduction: collaboration between the Iberian dictatorships

Collaboration, whether overt or covert, between the Salazar regime and the Nationalist military rebels in the run-up to the coup d'état against the Spanish republic in July 1936 was an integral part of the plot to install an authoritarian regime in Spain. Even though the pronunciamiento failed in its immediate objectives, resulting in a three-year civil war, Portuguese diplomatic and other assistance for the Spanish generals became important in the consolidation of what would result in the military dictatorship by General Franco¹. Despite the ideological differences between the Salazar and Franco regime, collaboration between the two countries during the late 1930s and early 1940s, although often tentative, developed in numerous directions². One of these was intellectual and scientific exchange.

The gift to the Spanish Higher Council of Research (CSIC) by the Portuguese Instituto para a Alta Cultura (Institute for High Culture) of eighteen volumes recording the proceedings of the Congress of the Portuguese World in 1940 could be taken as a small piece of evidence of this kind of scientific and cultural interaction between the Iberian dictatorships³. The Congress of the Portuguese World, ranging from geographical studies through to analyses of the make-up of the Portuguese race, confirmed for its creators both the nature of the New State as an excrescence of "Portugueseness" and the role of Portugal as a civilizing Christian influence around the world⁴. To what extent can it be said that these eighteen volumes represented more than a merely polite and perhaps expedient political exchange, driven by a mixture of diplomatic protocols, a degree of ideological proximity and pragmatic realpolitik in the early months of the Second World War?.

This article will explore the scientific links between Spain and Portugal from 1930 onwards, with particular emphasis on the period from 1936 and through the lens of one particular expression of socio-scientific endeavour: the eugenics movement of both countries. The cross-overs and contrasts between different expressions of the Iberian eugenics movements and related specialised fields of knowledge, such as biotypology and psychiatry, will be set against a triple framing narrative. First, although the early 1930s are considered, particularly in the Spanish case, as more liberal and progressive, the year 1933 represents the definitive consolidation of the Salazar regime and the approval of the constitution of the Estado Novo, and 1936 represents the beginnings of the establishment of a military regime in Spain, to be consolidated between 1937 and 1939. While both the Spanish and Portuguese regimes were totalitarian in different ways, the late 1930s represents their confirmation as political entities as well as their idiosyncratic proximity to the Axis powers. Second, paradoxical though it may at first sight appear, the knowledge exchange between Spain and Portugal that resulted in the late 1930s and 1940s can be broadly characterized by an absence. This absence has two dimensions. On the one hand, it is expressed in the de facto weakness of institutionalized links between the scientific communities of both countries. On the other hand, in historiographical terms, there is a general lack of comparative studies that have explored the social, political and scientific realities of the Iberian nations in the early twentieth century. As a third framing narrative, it can be stated that there was, in general, a lack of communication between the eugenics movements of both countries during the period studied. Despite this somewhat discouraging initial outlook, however, we can in fact plot a number of similarities and differences between the eugenics movements of both countries as well as a number of institutional and discursive lines of communication.

In order to explore these themes, this article is composed of four principal sections. These are: first, an opening discussion on the scientific linkages between the two countries within a framework that foregrounds debates on science from a transnational perspective and which is attentive to the "peripheral" nature of the Iberian peninsula within these debates; second, the example of the rise of technical and professional orientation as a means of guaranteeing productivity in both states, including the usage of biotypology, itself a technique allied with the science of eugenics; third, a comparison between early Francoist anthropology in respect of notions of the Spanish "race" and those current in Portugal during the 1940s; fourth, an analysis of the development of some aspects of the institutionalized eugenics movement in the 1930s and 1940s. Given the length of this article, the discussion here will be indicative rather than exhaustive and will attempt to suggest future venues for detailed research.

 

2. Trafficking Knowledge

Alison Sinclair has illustrated how the process of "knowledge trafficking" was effective during the first four decades of the twentieth century in Spain with respect to the sexual sciences and general intellectual currents of thought⁵. The "wheels within wheels" that she identified, particularly in the case of republican science and the contacts made between institutions and individuals, both nationally and internationally, functioned in a different way under the Francoist New State. After the "atroz desmoche" performed by the inquisitorial process of "decontamination" established from 1936 in Nationalist Spain, those remaining in Spain in intellectual and scientific circles were cowed into silence, passive in their acceptance of the regime or actively engaged in promoting its values⁶.

For some, the circles of power remained largely uninterrupted, or were consolidated; for others, new vistas of collaboration opened up as Spain, and Portugal, sought alliances with Nazi and Italian fascist science. The Coimbra University professor, Eusébio Tamagnini, for example, addressed the Royal Anthropological Institute in Oxford in April 1946 in order to speak about the progress made in Portuguese anthropology⁷; he had been the principal inspiration behind the Portuguese Eugenics Society, formally established in 1937. Any international linkages Tamagnini had fostered over the years with Nazi "racial science" did not appear to harm his career at Coimbra or internationally; indeed, both flourished. Visits such as that by Tamagnini to England, the extensive research secondments undertaken by Portuguese and Spanish scientists in Germany during the late 1930s and 1940s under the Estado Novo⁸, and, the multiple contributions by German and Italian scholars that appeared in Iberian scientific milieus show how the transnational circuits of certain brands of science operated and how they excluded or displaced other scientific discourses.

The old idea of the "reception" of scientific ideas, whereby one discipline or country passively accrued knowledge emanating from a supposed centre of production of ideas has been displaced by more complex understandings of knowledge as a contested transnational flow⁹. Scientific discourse should not be seen as one-directional, flowing from a supposedly sophisticated centre towards a more primitive or marginal periphery¹⁰, but a process whereby ideas are received, rejected or re-signified in various ways, and where flows can run from the "periphery" to the "centre"¹¹. But flows between Spain and Portugal and other totalitarian states in the 1940s are one thing; another is the interconnection between the two Iberian countries and it is this aspect that has received very little attention.

It has been pointed out above that both the historiographical deficiencies and the absence of actual connections between the science of the two Iberian states can be clearly demonstrated. The reasons behind these two absences are multiple, from a traditional disregard of one country for the other, to the existence of different international circuits in which the two countries were engaged (Portugal often looking to England, France and Brazil and Spain to France, Germany and the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America). Other factors include the different natures of the scientific community in Spain and Portugal and the different political mix that obtained in each country in the 1930s and 1940s. Portugal under Salazar was a conservative, Catholic, traditionalist and rural nation and, beyond some specific collaboration with Spain, kept itself somewhat aloof from the international machinations of the Axis powers. Spain under Franco was virulently repressive, nationalistic and much keener to collaborate with the Axis powers; internally, however, the new regime was beset with conflicts between the supporters of the Catholic Church and those who wished for a more overtly fascistic regime inspired by the Falange. While in Portugal there still prevailed, to some degree, an acceptance of positivism in the 1930s, in Spain science was put to the service of the "national community". Whereby under Nazism this channelling of scientific endeavour was devoted to the exaltation of the "racial community" based on a notion of the Aryan race, in Spain science was subordinated to religion under "National Catholicism"¹².

Despite these differences and despite the fact that strategic and planned international scientific collaboration between the two countries was sparse, there were in fact numerous instances of collaboration. One such example is the on-going series of Congresses for the Advancement of Science. Similar institutions spear-heading such collaborations were common across Europe but were only established in the twentieth century in Iberia¹³. The first effectively joint Spanish-Portuguese Congress took place in Oporto in 1921, organised by the Portuguese Association for the Advancement of Science, as its first congress, and the Spanish counterpart, which celebrated its eighth event¹⁴. The second congress took place in Salamanca in 1923 and the third in Coimbra in 1925. The fourth took place in Cadiz in 1927, the fifth in Barcelona in 1929 and the sixth in Lisbon in 1932 with the Estado Novo becoming established; they continued into the post-dictatorial period¹⁵.

The 1925 Coimbra event welcomed dignitaries from the governments or scientific associations of Brazil, Britain, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain and Venezuela¹⁶. Although it is quite clear that many scientists, particularly in the Spanish case from the late 1930s onwards, were marginalized from their posts and professions for political reasons, we should resist the temptation to suppose an entire rupture between the pre-dictatorship and post-dictatorship period in both countries¹⁷. This overlap continued well into the 1950s, although by then internal regime changes had begun to appear. The 1958 event, which celebrated fifty years of the Spanish Association, the opening of which was given official recognition by the regime as a testimony to the scientific advances of the Spanish nation, captured the joint nature of the Spanish-Portuguese collaboration¹⁸.

 

3. The Scientific Organization of Work, Professional Orientation and Biotypology

The scientific organization of work focused on increasing productivity through mechanization and effective organization of the worker and the workplace. So-called "Taylorism" was malleable enough to be adopted by a variety of political regimes. As it connected with individualized investigations into "biotypology" - the "science" of individual biological and constitutional types - it became a tool for the matching up of workers with particular aptitudes to particular types of jobs supposedly best suited to them and best suited to the interests of the economy. It is in this interest in the scientific organization of work and productivity that the Iberian dictatorships coincided with other totalitarian regimes in the 1930s and 1940s.

There has been little work on the reception of such ideas in either country¹⁹. Specifically, in Spain, the origins of the interest in professional orientation are rooted in the early twentieth century and mid-1910s with the establishment of the Catalan Institut d'Orientació Professional in 1917, which published, under various changing forms, its journal - the Annals de l'Institut d'Orientació Professional (1920-30), the Revista de Psicologia i Pedagogia (1933-37), and, under Francoism, the Anales del Instituto Psicotécnico (from 1945)²⁰. In the words of one of the mainstays of professional orientation in Spain, José Marvá, the purpose and consequence of the scientific organization of work were summarized as follows: "...el resultado inmediato y más esencial de la organización científica del trabajo es aumentar en gran proporción el rendimiento del obrero..."²¹. During the republican period, the Institut became the Institut de Psicotècnica (1932) before its suppression and eventual conversion into a biopolitical tool for the Francoist state in 1945 as the Instituto Psicotécnico.

As part of the attempt to harmonize workers and the interests of their "natural" overlords in the Iberian dictatorships, the insights provided by the scientific organization of work, professional orientation and individualized biotypology conspired to make a sleeker, more efficient and conflict-less set of industrial relations. Although the question of industrialization sat uncomfortably, especially with the ruralist Salazar regime, the advantages in the Spanish case were seized upon notably by the Francoist elites. But even here, there were certain limitations on the uptake of this kind of theory. As Polo Blanco has pointed out, a careful path was trod between professional orientation as selection of the "best" and most apt types at work and the actual scientific organization of work. The former was seen to be in tune with the medieval guild mentality of Francoism within the context of its faithfulness or obsession with "hispanidad"; the latter was seen as a new fangled, possibly even liberal take on workplace organization²².

What, precisely, did the Francoist mode of thought consist of? In order to answer this question, some remarks on the Francoist work ethic are required. What was for the Nationalists the return of normality after the aberration of the Republic allowed for "natural" harmony to reign whereby each man and woman knew his or her place within the organized social hierarchy. This state of affairs was enshrined in the Fuero del Trabajo (1940). Dignity and the restoration of national values could be achieved even by those who had sinned in the past by following "foreign" and disruptive ideologies. In the words of regime acolyte Dr. Antonio Vallejo Nágera in his Política racial del Nuevo Estado, "Como la Nueva España no admite vagos, se pueden recluir en colonias de trabajo para mendigos y vagabundos, donde permanecerán hasta que reeduquen su capacidad de trabajo"²³; work was a way of becoming productive and of expiating one's sins.

Shortly after the end of the war, the precursor to the 1945 Instituto Psicotécnico, the Instituto Nacional de Psicotecnia, was described as aiming for "un rendimiento social mayor y más acorde con las necesidades nacionales", the overall objective being "formar una España grande, según los deseos del Caudillo"²⁴. In a blend of physiological, psychological and constitutional rationales, derived from a mixture of principles drawn from biotypologists Viola and Kretschmer, one of the main advocates of professional orientation, Dr. Dantín Gallego, argued in the first number of the pre-institute period of the new review, Psicotecnia, that any propensity to hernias in workers was down to a combination of workplace fatigue and failures of constitutional type²⁵. A similar approach was embarked upon by the same author when considering workplace accidents, an area of specialization that characterized the Spanish uptake of "psycho-technics". In a set of studies by Workplace Inspector Eusebio Martí based on 100 workers in the Madrid area who had suffered workplace accidents, indexes of robustness, height, muscular strength and sensorial perception were individually tested and there was an attempt to match up constitutional defects (taras) with the propensity for accidents²⁶.

Later studies debated between the need to select the most apt types for particular tasks rather than diffusing the least apt throughout a particular school or workplace²⁷. Connecting with Vallejo Nágera's desire for selection in the marital relationship, Dr. Ricardo Ibarrola argued in favour of a professional selection process for the new work environment. The family doctor, teachers and parents would all have a say in this process²⁸. One means of finessing this process was through the design of a ficha escolar para la colocación en las empresas, introduced by the Bilbao laboratory run by other prominent figures in the field²⁹.

Most of the authors writing in Psicotecnia from 1939 to 1945 came, not surprisingly, from the field of psycho-technics, medicine, engineering and pedagogy³⁰. Of the 49 authors writing in the Institute's journal, nine were from abroad. In terms of the most cited in these years, by far the most numerous were references to K. Koffka and his research on Gestalt. E. Jaensch, F. Baumgarten Tramer and Kretschmer were also cited³¹. Dantín, for his part, followed the work of the geneticist Von Verschuer in his work on the constitutional traits of those involved in workplace accidents³². Mallart was in favour of introducing programmes along the lines of the Kraft durch Freude (Joy at Work) initiative introduced by the Nazis in Germany³³.

Similar patterns were followed in Portugal. Portuguese specialists followed the work of Kretschmer and the biotypologists and notions of "robustness" percolated diverse fields ranging from the military academy through to models of workplace efficiency. What appeared to be largely absent from the Portuguese interest in these areas, however, was much overlap or communication with their Spanish counterparts. Once again, the knowledge flows were routed directly to Germany and Italy and did not stop for pause in Spain. As pointed out elsewhere³⁴, in the early 1940s in Portugal there was a certain convergence of ideas stemming from concerns over the health of the nation, eugenic notions of fitness, the usefulness of sports and gymnastics as energizing activities and the utilization of biotypological assessments in the workplace. Shortly after the establishment of the INEF (National Institute of Physical Education) in January 1940, the University of Oporto eugenicist, Luís de Pina, commented in a debate in the National Assembly that "O problema do desporto, no fundo, é um mero problema eugénico"³⁵.

Although Mallart had argued in favour of a similar organization to the German "Joy at Work" initiative in Spain, it would appear that the Portuguese Estado Novo took this to heart and created in June 1935 the FNAT (National Foundation for Joy at Work). The FNAT, based directly on the German model and on the Italian fascist Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro³⁶, was established as part of the incipient "welfare state" of Salazarism. The FNAT was not precisely a eugenic endeavour; however, it did promote holiday colonies for workers and sports and gymnastics to be supported by the employers' guilds in true corporatist manner.

The mid-1930s saw the rise of professional orientation in Portugal, a trend that was exemplified in the Institute of Professional Orientation "Prof. Maria Luísa de Barbosa de Carvalho". The Institute worked on tests to determine individuals' performance, height, robustness, reaction time and weight in order to "perfect" their bodies. Intelligence tests following the work of Yerkes and Terman were also implemented³⁷. The cross-fertilization between work on robustness, notions of the "human motor", professional orientation, biotypology and eugenics, shows how mobile such knowledge was and indicates that we should not limit our analysis merely to eugenics organizations per se. While there was evidently a large degree of interaction between these ideas within both Portugal and Spain in the late 1930s and early 1940s, little evidence of interaction between the two Iberian countries on this front can be provided. Both countries' specialists looked to Germany and Italy and, to some degree, Scandinavia. The more open attitude of the Portuguese to theories coming from the United States is evident; a trend that occurred in Spain especially in the 1960s once early anti-Americanism subsided.

 

4. From Racial Anthropology to Eugenics of the Spirit

George Stocking Jr. has argued that nineteenth-century European anthropology followed two principal lines of conceptualization and research: one was involved primarily in the construction of the nation and the other was imbricated in the construction of the empire. In the case of Spain and Portugal, it would appear that the two were mutually intertwined at least from the 1930s and that the concept of the nation was dependent on what was understood as the overseas (the "colonial")³⁸. Within each of these two emphases the demon that haunted European anthropology was the possibility and fear of racial mixing and how to control it; this was an issue that came to be at the heart of eugenics movements too³⁹.

For Spain, Joshua Goode has argued that there predominated a notion of the "racial alloy", the idea that there was no racial purity in Spain as those inhabiting the geographical area derived from Moors, Visigoths, Jews and assorted others⁴⁰. Any Spanish race was, then, a hybrid cluster of cultural and physical attributes rather than anything "pure". This was the dominant view in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and it prevailed into the 1940s. For Franco, racial strength "emanated from bringing races together, not the domination of one pure race over all mixed ones"⁴¹. Such an idea was perhaps inherited from, on the one hand, falangistas-to-be such as Ernesto Giménez Caballero who argued that the "genius" of the Spanish race came not from purity but from fusion⁴². On the other hand, the other ideological side of the Franco regime, Catholicism, argued that precisely what had enabled this fusion and exalted it was the unifying principle of the Church in the fifteenth century.

What united further the two Iberian countries was the role given to the colonies. Although Spain remained a colonial power longer than Portugal and continued to minimize mixing between the European and the colonial races, viewing this as undesirable, some sectors of Portugal's anthropologists began to be more open to such a possibility from the 1930s onwards. Even though there were still evidently voices that opposed miscegenation up to the 1960s and beyond, by this time, at least on paper, fusion between the "European Portuguese" and "African Portuguese" was viewed as less of a problem. Indeed, despite early objections, the Salazar regime sought to utilize notions of supposed age-old Portuguese openness to hybridity and fusion under the guise of Gilberto Freyre's idea of "Luso-Tropicalism" in order to justify its past role in the colonial venture and the post-war continuation of the empire. Importantly, however, such fusion between races was viewed more favourably when it took place away from the metropole and stayed in its "proper place" outside of Europe.

This is the appropriate juncture to examine in detail some aspects of the eugenics movement in Spain under the dictatorship. Studies on eugenics in Spain have been surprisingly piece-meal and there is no single book length monograph on the history of eugenics for this country; a concentration on the pre-civil war period still prevails⁴³. In what follows, some comparisons will be made with the Portuguese case in respect of the understanding of "race" and the acceptance or otherwise of positive and negative eugenics. Such an approximation will be cast through an examination of the book by Antonio Vallejo Nágera, Eugenesia de la Hispanidad y regeneración de la raza⁴⁴. While this author and this particular volume have been the focus of many studies to date⁴⁵, less emphasis has been placed on an international comparative focus and attention has not generally been paid to what is an interesting aspect of early Francoist racial hygiene: the notion that the Spanish race was a hybrid formation and the consequences of this idea for a particular construction of eugenics.

Vallejo Nágera was born into a military family, absorbed German organic psychiatry and became the director of Franco's military psychiatric services in 1936⁴⁶. He is famous for his studies of republican prisoners of war in 1938 on the "psychopathology" of Marxism and was made professor of psychiatry at Madrid University in 1942. Like all those who examined the validity of eugenics and racial hygiene, the work by Vallejo Nágera is complex. As Juárez González has noted, his thought represents a cross-over between the "pensamiento tradicionalista español, una defensa del pasado histórico y un alegato en defensa del catolicismo como fundamento social"⁴⁷. He advocated racial hygiene, the primacy of natural sexual reproduction, considered the sterilization of psychopaths⁴⁸ and argued for the optimization of conditions for the best crianza of new-borns within an ideological and religious environment that was founded on the negation of progressive liberal thought.

We should resist rejecting Vallejo Nágera's thought as mere "pseudo-science". No expression of science is immune from its social context and Vallejo's thought constitutes a clear eugenic and psychiatric justification of a particular intolerant, nationalistic current of racial hygiene available at the time⁴⁹. But his thought was a careful positioning within eugenic constructs mooted nationally and internationally during the period. Although, for example, he advocated the removal of children from leftist families in order to supposedly improve the phenotype (the qualities of the individual as a mix of heredity and environment)⁵⁰, he did not, on paper at least, advocate the exterminatory eugenics of Nazi Germany, a procedure that was held to be incompatible with Catholicism⁵¹. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that his thought contributed to and provided justification for the ideological and physical destruction of the "enemies of Spain" in the 1930s and 1940s⁵². There were similarities to and differences from contemporaneous Spanish authors also attracted to racial politics. While the "anthropologist and Nazi sympathizer" Misael Bañuelos frequently cited Hitler and the National Socialist race theorist H.F.K. Günther in his work⁵³, noting that "el racismo es la concepción biológica más fructífera y más revolucionaria de los últimos tiempos"⁵⁴, Vallejo Nágera, despite citing the Nazi race scientists Von Verschuer and Fischer⁵⁵, was critical of some aspects of Nazi thought.

The thrust of Vallejo Nágera's Eugenesia de la Hispanidad is quite clear from its preface. Having been delayed in its publication by the war, the author inserted some "preliminary words" to signal the heroism of the race that had risen "en holocausto del ideal patriótico" in July 1936⁵⁶. The purifying war against "liberaloid Spain" displayed the vitality of the Spanish race and the virility of its youth: "creará la Guerra la estirpe de caballeros de que está necesitada la Nueva España, y se revalorizarán las ejecutorias de hidalguía espiritual"⁵⁷. In order to prevent any return of Spain's "age-old enemies", select groups of youthful knights bearing the torch of hispanidad would trail-blaze a new spiritual world, promoting a national culture that would weed out degenerate elements.

In order to understand Vallejo Nágera's concept of eugenics, it is important to follow his distinction between, on the one hand, two expressions of eugenics and, on the other, the differentiation made between eugenics and racial hygiene. The psychiatrist argued that any individual and any racial group possessed two sets of influences on their body and psyche: the genetic and the behavioural⁵⁸. This, in turn, had produced two sets of eugenic theories and practice, one form that was "geneticista" and the other a "conductista" form. The first, prevalent among "materialist" eugenicists had, according to Vallejo Nágera, achieved little beyond the limitation of births of the "undesirable" sectors of the population and the segregation and sterilization of certain groups⁵⁹. But because the actual mechanics of inheritance were unclear and there was no automatic passing on of negative traits between families, such measures were destined to remain uncertain in their effectiveness or could even be counter-productive. The hereditary link could not be relied upon for the purposes of racial hygiene⁶⁰. Given these doubts, Vallejo tended towards a second kind of eugenics, the behaviourist variety, which emphasized the phenotype as the principal locus of eugenic intervention rather than the genotype (the basic genetic core of the individual).

The second major point to note is Vallejo Nágera's differentiation between eugenics and racial hygiene. Eugenics, for Vallejo, had become contaminated with the first of the versions of eugenics he rejected - materialist or geneticist eugenics. Such a derivation was typical of liberal approaches to the science and it failed to take into account the "spiritual" aspects of racial improvement. Racial hygiene, in contrast, would be a broader undertaking and would focus on the spirit and the psychological inheritance of values. It would reject a mere concentration on geneticist negative eugenics, thus promoting a programme of positive eugenics⁶¹.

In outlining his thought on eugenics and racial hygiene, Vallejo Nágera identified what he understood to be the more serious limitations of the geneticist model. It was not known, he postulated, whether children inherited their parents' psychic traits or not. Rather than agreeing with the German Dr. Fischer, Vallejo wondered whether Mussolini had been right in asserting that eugenics was not a matter of simple animal husbandry, but a more delicate process of racial crianza⁶². Although the National Socialist specialists appeared to agree with Mussolini, they had concentrated too exclusively on the biological aspects of racial hygiene and had committed "el grave inconveniente de promulgar atrevidas medidas legislativas por mera preocupación antisemita" such as sterilization⁶³.

The route suggested by the Spaniard was different and would follow, in some aspects, the ideas of Joaquín Mestre Medina whereby the concept of racial hygiene was impersonal, focused on future generations, not those of the past, and where the notion of "race" was equivalent to "la población de una nación en un momento cronológico, producto de las más diversas mezclas de genotipos y de nuevos cruzamientos"⁶⁴. But, in Vallejo's view, Mestre had tried to separate the corporal from the spiritual to too great a degree. It was necessary to restore this unity and the work on constitutionalism by Kretschmer would permit this. Such an appreciation allowed Vallejo Nágera to arrive at the heart of his message: "La higiene racial exaltaría las cualidades excelsas de la raza actuando conjuntamente sobre el individuo y sobre el medio"⁶⁵. The phenotype was thus the point of action for racial hygiene.

In this equation, it can be seen that environmental factors were given primary importance. Vallejo's thought therefore had points of overlap with the most progressive thinkers on the left in this sense (but not in the practical implications). He argued, for example, that the phenotype (and in the longer term, the genotype) was so plastic that traits could be modified by the appropriate environment "siendo la misión del higienista de la raza procurar que la modificación resulte beneficiosa para el individuo y sus descendientes"⁶⁶.

In light of these conclusions, the principal strategy that the racial hygienist should follow, Vallejo Nágera argued, was "seleccionar y mejorar los genetipos, e impedir que degeneren los fenotipos, evitando o neutralizando los agentes morbosos que puedan actuar sobre aquéllos"⁶⁷. Crucial to this enterprise was Vallejo's understanding of race. In this last section of the article, we analyse Vallejo's concept of hispanidad to focus on how it would be mobilized to promote the self-perfection of the select and the elimination of undesirable traits through a process that was supposedly voluntary⁶⁸.

The key concept in Vallejo's suggested programme of racial hygiene was the relationship between race, history, patriotism and spirituality⁶⁹. Like the anthropologists that Joshua Goode studied for the early twentieth century, Vallejo signalled that the "raza hispana", the "genotipo ibérico" was one that "ha experimentado las más variadas mezclas a causa del contacto y relación con otros pueblos". More interesting for him than this mix was what this situation had permitted the Hispanic race to achieve: "civilizar tierras inmensas e influir intelectualmente sobre el mundo"⁷⁰. In this way, Vallejo coincided with nationalist racial theorists in Portugal whereby the notion of mixture could be combined with an age-old civilizing mission.

Following the elaboration of hispanidad made by Ramiro de Maeztu, the essence of the race would be in its patriotism. Without the existence of the patria there would merely be a "population"⁷¹. This aspect of Vallejo's thought coincided once again with that of Portuguese right-wing nationalist eugenicists such as António Augusto Mendes Correia who foregrounded the differences between population, nation and race⁷². The nation was an imminent yet trans-historical quality, in the making, yet already established as an identity and psycho-biological unity⁷³.

Such appreciations allowed for a sharpened differentiation between eugenics and racial hygiene. Eugenics, as espoused by materialists, wished to improve and conserve the genes of the whole of a particular race while racial hygiene sought to perfect those of the "superior classes" within that population group⁷⁴. Inferior and superior "castes" within the Hispanic race had been and could be mixed but what was at stake was "una supercasta hispana, étnicamente mejorada, robusta moralmente, vigorosa en su espíritu. Para ello hemos de estimular la fecundidad de los selectos..."⁷⁵. Pro-natalism, the regeneration of the family, religion and the guidance of the family doctor to foster ideal marriages between the "select" were all key elements of this programme of racial hygiene⁷⁶. As Richards has observed, all these components could sit very comfortably with the National Catholicism of the Franco state and it was within these parameters that any form of eugenics could be fostered in Spain in the 1940s⁷⁷. A similar scenario entailed in the Portuguese case where a gradual concentration on pro-natalism, child and mother care and basic hygiene prevailed under Salazar⁷⁸.

In asserting this, however, the dovetailing of Vallejo Nágera's ideas with other measures taken by the Franco state cannot be underestimated. As Ricardo Campos has made clear, the "neutralization" of any tendencies, both biological and social, that disrupted the "regeneration of the Hispanic race" was vicious and remorseless. Vallejo himself hinted at such a process in his Eugenesia de la Hispanidad. Even though he argued against treading on the rights of the individual and praised Catholic teachings on respect for individual life⁷⁹, and he may have been genuine in terms of the actual eugenic implementation of any such measures, the destruction of those elements not in tune with Hispanic spirituality was hardly incompatible with Vallejo's thought⁸⁰.

 

5. Conclusion

The form of eugenics envisaged by Vallejo Nágera, "legitimized by religion and anti-communist nationalism"⁸¹, was censorious of attempts to introduce programmes of negative eugenics and was highly sceptical of the efficacy of such programmes. This was due to a number of factors. Vallejo Nágera, politically, was opposed to what he saw as reductionist interpretations of eugenics as primarily materialist and thus tainted with liberal ideological foundations. He also opposed such interpretations on a scientific basis as overly geneticist, thus giving behaviourist interpretations greater purchase. Conceding great moral authority to the Church, Vallejo Nágera's racial hygiene was differentiated from that of the racial supremacist hereditarian "geneticist" and materialist forms of eugenics practised in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. In some senses, the racial hygiene of Vallejo Nágera had more in common with Italian fascist eugenics.

Vallejo Nágera's programme of racial hygiene was also differentiated from most contemporaneous right-wing Portuguese varieties. His emphasis on phenotypes and not biotypes set him apart from both the biotypological strains of eugenics running through the Portuguese eugenics movement and the more racial hygiene oriented eugenics of figures such as Tamagnini. The Coimbra professor had argued that family-based eugenics was insufficient and that a programme of racial hygiene was needed as a more interventionist strategy, which even considered sterilization⁸². Tamagnini's ideas also reflected an ideological propensity towards "National Syndicalism" and philo-Nazi positions, tendencies that were only held by a small minority of race theorists in Spain (Bañuelos, to some degree, fell into this category). In turn, this reflected the more positivist characteristics of the Portuguese scientific community and greater independence from the Catholic Church. But, once again, Tamagnini's ideas within the Portuguese eugenics movement represented only one strain of a diverse array of positions. Finally, few in the Portuguese movement articulated notions along the lines of the promotion of the "select", as had Vallejo Nágera.

These differences not only highlight substantial contrasts between Vallejo Nágera's form of eugenics and some prominent strands in Portugal; they also illustrate how the racial hygienic strand represented by figures such as Tamagnini was not really represented in Spain at the time. Despite the fact that in both Spain and Portugal eugenic legislation was in fact sparse, two main conclusions on the characteristics of eugenics in the two countries can be signalled. First, the differences between Spanish and Portuguese eugenics in the 1930s and 1940s under their respective dictatorships responded to the different relative weight of positivist science in Portugal and that of the Catholic Church in Spain. Second, the dictatorships of the two countries, although connected in many ways, operated differently and harboured scientific communities that drew on each other surprisingly little as the history of biotypology, eugenics and racial hygiene in the two countries shows. In Spain, society and science were very tightly controlled by National Catholicism; in Portugal, Catholicism was prominent but independent scientific endeavour was favoured. In the event, eugenics in both countries in the 1930s and 1940s boiled down to little more than extravagant declarations on the history of the "race", some blood group analysis and a broad swathe of measures devoted to maternity care, pro-natalism and child-centred puericulture.

 

References

¹ For a relatively early study of this collaboration, see Pena Rodríguez, Alberto. El gran aliado de Franco. Portugal y la Guerra Civil española: prensa, radio, cine y propaganda. A Coruña: Edicios do Castro; 1998.         [ Links ]

². On totalitarian and fascist regimes generally, see Griffin, Roger. The Nature of Fascism. New York: St. Martin's Press; 1991.         [ Links ] On the Salazar regime, see Costa Pinto, António. Salazar's Dictatorship and European Fascism: Problems of Interpretation. Boulder: Social Science Monographs; 1995.         [ Links ] For a comparative approach, see Loff, Manuel. Dios, Patria, Autoridad: la iglesia Católica y la fascistización de los regímenes ibéricos, 1933-1945. Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, series V, Historia Contemporánea. 2013; 25: 49-66.         [ Links ]

³. Rollo, Maria Fernanda; Queiroz, Maria Inês; Brandão, Tiago; Salgueiro, Ângela. Ciência, cultura e língua em Portugal no século XX. Da Junta de Educação Nacional ao Instituto Camões. Lisbon: Instituto Camões/Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda; 2012.         [ Links ] The full reference for the publication of the Congress proceedings is Congresso do Mundo Português. Publicações. Lisbon: Comissão Executiva dos Centenários; 1940. The copies of the eighteen volumes consulted in the Madrid CSIC Humanities Library are stamped inside with the words "Oferta do Instituto para a Alta Cultura".

⁴. Ramos de Ó, Jorge. Salazarismo e Cultura. In: Rosas, Fernando, ed. Portugal e o Estado Novo (1930-1960). Lisbon: Editorial Presença; 1992, p. 394.         [ Links ]

⁵. Sinclair, Alison. Trafficking Knowledge in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: Centres of Exchange and Cultural Imaginaries. Woodbridge: Tamesis; 2009.         [ Links ] See also Secord, James A. Knowledge in Transit. Isis. 2004; 95: 654-672.         [ Links ]

⁶. Claret Miranda, Jaume. El atroz desmoche. La destrucción de la universidad española por el franquismo, 1936-1945. Barcelona: Crítica; 2006.         [ Links ]

⁷. Tamagnini, Eusebio. Les Études Anthropologiques et Ethnologiques en Portugal. Man. 1947; 47 (52-53): 55-57.         [ Links ]

⁸. Matos, Mário; Grossegesse, Orlando, eds. Zonas de Contacto Estado Novo/III Reich (1933-1945). Perafita: TDP Lda -Edições; 2011.         [ Links ]

⁹. Turchetti, Simone; Herran, Néstor; Boudia, Soraya. Have we ever been 'transnational'? Towards a history of science across and beyond borders. The British Journal for the History of Science. 2012; 45 (3): 319-336.         [ Links ]

¹⁰. Gavroglu, Kostas; Patiniotis, Manolis; Papanelopoulou, Faidra, et al. Science and Technology in the European Periphery: Some Historiographical Reflexions. History of Science. 2008; 46: 153-175;         [ Links ] Papanelopoulou, Faidra; Nieto-Galan, Agustí; Perdiguero, Enrique, eds. Popularizing science and technology in the European periphery, 1800-2000. Aldershot: Ashgate; 2009.         [ Links ]

¹¹. Medina Doménech, Rosa María. Scientific Technologies of National Identity as Colonial Legacies: Extracting the Spanish Nation from Equatorial Guinea. Social Studies of Science. 2009; 39 (1): 81-112.         [ Links ]

¹². Gómez Rodríguez, Amparo. Ciencia y pseudociencia en los regímenes fascistas. In: Gómez Rodríguez, Amparo; Canales Serrano, Antonio Francisco, eds. Ciencia y fascismos. La ciencia española de posguerra. Barcelona: Laertes; 2009, p. 13-47 (p.         [ Links ] 43); Canales Serrano, Antonio Francisco. La política científica de posguerra. In: Gómez Rodríguez, Amparo; Canales Serrano, Antonio Francisco, eds. Ciencia y fascismos. La ciencia española de posguerra. Barcelona: Laertes; 2009, p. 105-136.         [ Links ]

¹³. The British Association for the Advancement of Science was established in York in 1831 and the French Association Française pour le Progrès des Sciences in 1857. On the British Association, see Morrell, Jack; Thackray, Arnold. Gentlemen of Science: Early years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Oxford/New York: Clarendon/Oxford University Press; 1981.         [ Links ]

¹⁴. Leitão Bernardo, Liliana. O Primeiro Congresso Português para o Progresso das Ciências. Master's Dissertation. Aveiro: Universidade de Aveiro; 2006, p. 1.         [ Links ] The Spanish Asociación Española para el Progreso de las Ciencias was created in 1908 (p. 33) and the Portuguese Associação Portuguesa para o Progresso das Sciências in 1917 (p. 29). On the Spanish Association, see Ausejo, Elena. Por la ciencia y por la patria. La institucionalización científica en España en el primer tercio del siglo XX: La Asociación Española para el Progreso de las Ciencias. Madrid: Siglo XXI; 1993.         [ Links ]

¹⁵. Castro Morais, Marta Lúcia de. A Primeira Década dos Congressos Luso-Espanhóis para o Progresso das Ciências. Master's Dissertation. Aveiro: Universidade de Aveiro; 2007.         [ Links ]

¹⁶. Castro Morais, n. 15, p. 63.

¹⁷. Campos, Ricardo. Psiquiatría, raza y represión en el primer franquismo: Antonio Vallejo Nágera. In: Altarriba, Antonio; Buj, Serge; Campos, Ricardo, et al. Los intelectuales y la dictadura franquista. Cultura y poder en España de 1939 a 1975. Madrid: Editorial Pablo Iglesias; 2013: p. 19-45 (p.         [ Links ] 21); Polo Blanco, Antonio. Gobierno de las poblaciones en el primer franquismo (1939-1945). Cadiz: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Cádiz; 2006,         [ Links ] on the population politics of the 1930s and the 1960s (p. 15-16) and on the scientific organization of work (p. 156).

¹⁸. XXIV Congreso Luso-Español para el Progreso de las Ciencias. Madrid: Asociación Española para el Progreso de las Ciencias; 1958.         [ Links ]

¹⁹. Exceptions include, for the pre-civil war period, Medina Doménech, Rosa María; Rodríguez Ocaña, Esteban. La medicina en la Organización Científica del Trabajo. El Instituto de Orientación Profesional (psicotécnico) de Barcelona (1917-1936). In: Huertas, Rafael; Campos, Ricardo, eds. Medicina social y clase obrera en España (Siglos XIX y XX). Madrid: Fundación de Estudios Marxistas; 1992, p. 459-490;         [ Links ] Monteagudo Soto, María José; Chisvert Perales, Mauricio; Pastor Cerezuela, Gemma. Las actividades del Instituto Nacional de Psicotecnia y de los servicios nacionales de psicotecnia desde el año 46 hasta el año 59 a través de la Revista de Psicología General y Aplicada. Revista de Historia de la Psicología. 1998; 19 (2-3): 241-254;         [ Links ] Polo, n. 17, p. 153-190. For Portugal, see Cleminson, Richard. Catholicism, Race and Empire: Eugenics in Portugal, 1900-1950. Budapest/New York: Central University Press; 2014, p. 184-185.         [ Links ] For a transnational perspective related to Italy and Argentina, see Vallejo, Gustavo. Roma-Buenos Aires: Un eje para la expansión de la biotipología y el fascismo (1922-1938). In: Vallejo, Gustavo; Miranda, Marisa, eds. Derivas de Darwin. Cultura y Política en clave biológica. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI; 2010, 71-96;         [ Links ] Beccalossi, Chiara. Latin Eugenics and Sexual Knowledge in Italy, Spain and Argentina: International Networks across the Atlantic, 1916-46. In: Haynes, Douglas; Fuechtner, Veronika; Jones, Ryan, eds. Towards a Global History of Sexual Science, 1880-1950. Los Angeles: University of California Press; forthcoming 2017;         [ Links ] on the reach of Pende's biotypology into other fields, see Turda, Marius; Gillette, Aaron. Latin Eugenics in Comparative Perspective. London/New York: Bloomsbury; 2014, p. 93-94.         [ Links ]

²⁰. Medina Doménech; Rodríguez Ocaña, n. 19, p. 461.

²¹. Medina Doménech; Rodríguez Ocaña, n. 19, p. 460.

²². Polo Blanco, n. 17, p. 158-159.

²³. Vallejo Nágera, Antonio. Política racial del Nuevo Estado. San Sebastián: Ed. Española;         [ Links ] 138, p. 86, cit. in Polo Blanco, n. 17, p. 153. In English: "As the New Spain does not admit the idle, these people can be retained in work colonies for beggars and tramps when they will remain until they have recovered their capacity for work".

²⁴. Anon. Reportajes. Instituto Nacional de Psicotecnia. Revista Nacional de Educación. 1941; 4: 77-8,         [ Links ] p. 81. In English: "...the immediate and most important result of the organization of this Great Spain, in accordance with the desires of the caudillo (Head of State)".

²⁵. Dantín Gallego, J. Capacidad física y predisposición a la hernia. Psicotecnia. 1939; 1: 7-15,         [ Links ] Quoted in Polo Blanco, n. 17, p. 162.

²⁶. Dantín Gallego, J. La importancia de las taras constitucionales en los accidentados. Psicotecnia. 1943; 15-16-17: 198ff,         [ Links ] Quoted in Polo Blanco, n. 17, p. 166.

²⁷. Polo Blanco, n. 17, p. 171.

²⁸. Ibarrola, Ricardo. Importancia médico-social de la orientación y selección profesional. Ser. July 1943: 87,         [ Links ] cit. in Polo Blanco, n. 17, p. 171.

²⁹. Urrutia Llano, José María; Moneo Díaz, Antonio. La inspección médico-escolar en las escuelas de trabajo. Psicotecnia. 1945; 21-22: 14,         [ Links ] cit. in Polo Blanco, n. 17, p. 175. In English: "high school index card for placement in companies".

³⁰. Sos Peña, Rosa; Calatayud Miñana, Constanza. La psicología aplicada española en tiempos de posguerra (1939-1945). Revista de Historia de la Psicología. 2001; 32 (2-3): 57-68 (62).         [ Links ]

³¹. Sos Peña; Calatayud Miñana, n. 30, p. 64.

³². Polo Blanco, n. 17, p. 168.

³³. Polo Blanco, n. 17, p. 170.

³⁴. Cleminson, n. 19, p. 183-185.

³⁵. Cleminson, n. 19, p. 183. Cf. Domingos, Nuno. Building a motor habitus: Physical education in the Portuguese Estado Novo. International Review for the Sociology of Sport. 2010; 45 (1): 23-37,         [ Links ] and, Vaquinhas, Irene Maria. O Conceito de "decadência fisiológica da raça" e o desenvolvimento do desporto em Portugal (Finais do século XIX/Princípios do século XX). Revista de História das Ideias. 1992; 14: 365-388.         [ Links ] In English: "The problem of sport, deep down, is essentially a eugenic matter".

³⁶. Cleminson, n. 19, p. 184.

³⁷. Cleminson, n. 19, p. 185. See, for example, the work of the Lisbon eugenicists Faria de Vasconcelos. O valor físico do indivíduo. Sua medição e avaliação. Lisbon: Livraria Clássica Editora; 1935,         [ Links ] and, Álvaro Eduardo Guimarães de Caires. A biotipologia na orientação profissional. 1^o Congresso da Indústria Portuguesa (Indústria Continental), Lisboa, de 8 a 15 de Outubro de 1933: sumário, p. 22.         [ Links ]

³⁸. For the debate, see Stocking, George W. Jr. Afterword: A view from the centre. Ethnos. 1982; 57: 172-186;         [ Links ] Cleminson, n. 19, p. 204; Medina Doménech, n. 11.

³⁹. On the connections between eugenics and colonialism, see Philippa Levine. Anthropology, Colonialism, and Eugenics. In: Bashford, Alison; Levine, Philippa, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2010, p. 43-61.         [ Links ]

⁴⁰. Goode, Joshua. Impurity of Blood: Defining Race in Spain, 1870-1930. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press; 2009.         [ Links ]

⁴¹. Goode, n. 40, p. 1.

⁴². Goode, n. 40, p. 4, cites Ernesto Giménez Caballero. Genio de España. Madrid: Ediciones de "La Gaceta Literaria"; 1932.         [ Links ]

⁴³. The following can be consulted for a broad twentieth-century view: Álvarez Peláez, Raquel. Origen y desarrollo de la eugenesia en España. In: Sánchez Ron, José Manuel, ed. Ciencia y sociedad en España: De la Ilustración a la Guerra Civil. Madrid: Ediciones El Arquero/CSIC; 1988, p. 179-204;         [ Links ] Álvarez Peláez, Raquel. La eugenesia española a lo largo del siglo XX. In: Romeo Casabona, Carlos María, ed. Eugenesia hoy. Bilbao/Granada: Cátedra Interuniversitaria Fundación BBV/Diputación Foral de Bizkaia/Universidad de Deusto; 1999, p. 87-121;         [ Links ] Nash, Mary. Social eugenics and nationalist race hygiene in early twentieth century Spain. History of European Ideas. 15 (4-6); 1992: 741-748,         [ Links ] where some comments are also made on Francoism. Specifically on Francoism, see Polo Blanco, n. 17, p. 191-236, and, more recently, Cayuela, Salvador. Por la grandeza de la patria. La biopolítica en la España de Franco (1939-1975). Madrid: FCE; 2014.         [ Links ] The work by Sinclair, A. Sex and Society in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: Hildegart Rodríguez and the World League for Sexual Reform. Cardiff: University of Wales Press; 2007,         [ Links ] contains important details on the Spanish eugenics movement of the 1920s and 1930s.

⁴⁴. Vallejo Nágera, Antonio. Eugenesia de la Hispanidad y regeneración de la raza. Madrid: Editorial Española; 1937.         [ Links ]

⁴⁵. Of the most recent, Cayuela, n. 43, p. 129-142.

⁴⁶. Richards, Michael. Spanish psychiatry c. 1900-1945: Constitutional Theory, Eugenics, and the Nation. Bulletin of Spanish Studies. 81 (6); 2012: 823-848,         [ Links ] p. 839.

⁴⁷. Juárez González, Francisca. Eugenesia en España. Entre la ciencia y la doctrina sociopolítica. Asclepio. 1999; 51 (2): 117-131,         [ Links ] p. 124. In English: "traditionalist Spanish thought, a defence of the historical past and a commitment to Catholicism as a social foundation".

⁴⁸. See Vallejo Nágera, Antonio. La higiene de la raza. La asexualización de los psicópatas. Madrid: Editorial Medicina; 1934.         [ Links ]

⁴⁹. On Vallejo Nágera's political roots in the ultra-conservative Acción Católica, see Campos, n. 17, p. 26, 29.

⁵⁰. Álvarez, R. Marañón y el pensamiento eugénico español. In: Gómez Rodríguez; Canales Serrano, n. 12, p. 192.

⁵¹. Richards, n. 46, p. 841.

⁵². On these questions, see Campos, n. 17, p. 20; Sosa-Velasco, Alfredo J. Médicos escritores en España, 1885-1955: Santiago Ramón Cajal, Pío Baroja, Gregorio Marañón y Antonio Vallejo Nágera. Tamesis: Woodbridge; 2010, p. 145-182.         [ Links ]

⁵³. The description is from Goode, n. 40, p. 215.

⁵⁴. Juárez González, n. 47, p. 124, citing Bañuelos, Misael. Cuestiones de mi tiempo y de mi patria. Vol. I. Valladolid: Librería Santarén; 1936: 69.         [ Links ] Álvarez Peláez, n. 43, p. 120, views the work by Bañuelos on blood group types one of the few instances of actual eugenic work undertaken in Spain. In English: "racism is the most fruitful and most revolutionary of biological concepts of recent times".

⁵⁵. Otto von Verschuer was cited as O. v. Verschaner (sic). Soziale Umwelt und Vere(r)bung. Leipzig; 1930, a volume on social environment and genetic heritage (Vallejo Nágera, Eugenesia, p. 26). Fischer was mentioned on p. 81 in the context of the need to elaborate precise laws of heredity in planning racial hygiene programmes.

⁵⁶. Vallejo Nágera, n. 44, p. 5.

⁵⁷. Vallejo Nágera, n. 44, p. 5-6. In English: "War creates the strain of knights that the New Spain needs and acts of spiritual nobility will once again be valued".

⁵⁸. Vallejo Nágera, n. 44, p. 12.

⁵⁹. Vallejo Nágera, n. 44, p. 48-49.

⁶⁰. Vallejo Nágera, n. 44, p. 51. Like many authors at the time, Vallejo questioned the absolute demonstrability of the transmission of certain traits from one generation to the next. The contrast between his right-wing expression of racial hygiene and that of the Nazis is evident.

⁶¹. Vallejo Nágera, n. 44, p. 75.

⁶². Vallejo Nágera, n. 44, p. 81.

⁶³. Vallejo Nágera, n. 44, p. 82. In English: "the serious misdemeanour of passing legislative measures deriving from pure anti-Semitism".

⁶⁴. Vallejo Nágera, n. 44, p. 82. Vallejo cites Joaquín Mestre Medina. Herencia y Eugenesia. Bilbao; 1935.         [ Links ] On Mestre see Álvarez Peláez, n. 43, p. 114-116. In English: "the population of a nation at a particular chronological juncture, the product of the most varied mixture of genotypes and new crossings".

⁶⁵. Vallejo Nágera, n. 44, p. 83. In English: "Racial hygiene will exalt the highest racial qualities by acting on the individual and on the social environment".

⁶⁶. Vallejo Nágera, n. 44, p. 85. In English: "the mission of the racial hygienist being to seek that the modification will be beneficial to the individual and his descendants".

⁶⁷. Vallejo Nágera, n. 44, p. 85. In English: "to select and improve genotypes and to impede the degeneration of phenotypes, thus preventing or neutralizing the effects of morbid agents on these".

⁶⁸. Vallejo Nágera, n. 44, p. 119, 127, 121.

⁶⁹. Campos, n. 17, p. 39-43.

⁷⁰. Vallejo Nágera, n. 44, p. 108. In English: "to civilize vast tracts of land and to influence the rest of the world intellectually".

⁷¹. Vallejo Nágera, n. 44, p. 113.

⁷². Cleminson, n. 19, p. 50-56.

⁷³. Vallejo Nágera, n. 44, p. 114.

⁷⁴. Richards, n. 46, p. 842.

⁷⁵. Vallejo Nágera, n. 44, p. 116-117. In English: "a Hispanic super-caste, ethnically improved, morally robust and vigorous in spirit. In order to achieve this, we must stimulate the fecundity of the select...".

⁷⁶. For Vallejo's idea of the best matches for marriage, Vallejo Nágera, Antonio. Eugamia. Selección de novios. San Sebastián: Ed. Española; 1938.         [ Links ]

⁷⁷. On pro-natalism, see Nash, n. 43. On the maternity-oriented and puericulture aspects of the Asistencia Social under Franco, see Cenarro Lagunas, Ángela. La sonrisa de Falange. Auxilio Social en la Guerra Civil y la posguerra. Barcelona: Crítica; 2006.         [ Links ] The biotypological elements of Vallejo's thought, as Richards has pointed out, were present from the 1930s. Vallejo Nágera, Antonio. Biotipologia ilustrada. Con cuarenta figuras fuera de texto. Barcelona: Modesto Usón; 1947.         [ Links ]

⁷⁸. Pimentel, Irene. O aperfeiçoamento da raça. A Eugenia na primeira metade do século XX. História. 3; 1998: 18-27.         [ Links ]

⁷⁹. Vallejo Nágera, n. 44, p. 48.

⁸⁰. Three authors have remarked that Vallejo Nágera created a "pseudo-philosophy" latched on to by the regime "de la inferioridad y la degeneración social e histórica del adversario político que justificaba y amparaba acciones, instituciones y políticas de segregación" (Vinyes, Ricard; Armengou, Montse; Belis, Ricard. Los niños perdidos del franquismo. Barcelona: Plaza y Janés; 2002, p. 42,         [ Links ] cited in Cayuela, n. 43, p. 142). In English: "of inferiority and of the social and historical degeneration of the political adversary, which justified and harboured actions, institutions and politics of segregation".

⁸¹. Turda; Gillette, n. 19, p. 111.

⁸². For a discussion on the issue of sterilization in Portuguese circles, see Cleminson, n. 29, passim; Flunser Pimentel, Irene; Ninhos, Cláudia. Salazar, Portugal e o holocausto. Lisbon: Temas e Debates -Círculo de Leitores; 2013, p. 209-231.         [ Links ]

 

 

Fecha de recepción: 10 de diciembre de 2015
Fecha de aceptación: 4 de marzo de 2016