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Building the New Man

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Francesco Cassata

Chapter IV. Quality through quantity

Eugenics in Fascist Italy

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  • 1 Raymond Pearl to Corrado Gini, 28 December 1927, Raymond Pearl Papers, American Philosophical Soci (...)
  • 2 ACS, SPD, CO, f. 210.802 “Mjoen, dott. Jon Alfred.” Presidente del Comitato Norvegese per l’Eugeni (...)

1The political rise of Benito Mussolini was followed with enthusiasm and trepidation by many mainline eugenicists. In December 1927, Raymond Pearl wrote to Corrado Gini: “I should like enormously to meet Mussolini. I have a great admiration for him. He seems to me to be the only really big figure of our times.”1 In 1928, thanks to Gini’s intervention, the Norwegian Jon Alfred Mjoen, director of the Winderen Laboratorium in Oslo, obtained an interview with il Duce, during which he ardently admired his demographic policy.2 In 1929 in Rome, during a meeting of IFEO, Eugen Fischer addressed a long memorandum to “the great statesman who, in the Eternal City, shows more than any other leader today, both in deed and word, how much he has the eugenic problems of his people at heart.” Through Fischer, the IFEO appealed to Mussolini, asking il Duce to interest himself not just in the quantity of the population, but also in its quality:

  • 3 Draft with edits by Fischer in: MPG-Archives, Dept. I, Rep. 3, No. 23, pp. 262–65, cited in: Hans- (...)

Here today, in the oldest capital of the world, we beg to express with the utmost solemnity our hope that those great men to whom the desti nies of the highly gifted Italian nation are entrusted, will be first in setting a model to the world by showing that energetic administration can make good the damage which has already been done to our culture, by arresting the fall in population and by preserving the best endowed. We pray that what was denied to earlier cultures may here be achieved in grasping fortune’s wheel and controlling and turning it! Quality as well as quantity! The urgency brooks no delay; the danger is imminent.
Videat consul!3

  • 4 Mantovani, Rigenerare la societa, 261–270; Aristotle A. Kallis, “Racial Politics and Biomedical To (...)

2These hopes were soon to be deluded. Undoubtedly, many fundamental components of fascist ideology were able to justify the elective affinity with eugenics: the myth of the biological and spiritual regeneration of the nation; the technocratic and interclassist vision of social politics; a political language imbued with vitalism and social Darwinism.4

3However, two important political and ideological factors prevented fascism adopting the “Nordic” example of a prevalently “qualitative” eugenics.

  • 5 On Mussolini’s Discorso dell’Ascensione, see Treves, Le nascite e la politica, 126–39; Ipsen, Dict (...)

4On 26 May 1927, with his famous Ascension Day speech, Mussolini introduced the fascist pronatalist population policy.5 It is worth noting the fundamental role that Corrado Gini played in Mussolini’s turnaround. Gini was president of the Central Institute of Statistics (Istituto Centrale di Statistica, known as ISTAT) from 1926, and of the Italian Society of Genetics and Eugenics (Società Italiana di Genetica ed Eugenica, known as SIGE) from 1924. Not only did the Duce repeatedly consult Gini regarding the technical details of the speech, but the relationship also influenced the timing of the natalist policy launch. From 1919, Mussolini had explicitly abandoned his youthful neo-Malthusian sympathies in favor of nationalist natalism. The turning point in 1927 was fuelled by his perception of change in the current Italian demography: Italy had also been hit with a slowdown in demographic growth. This different reading of the Italian demographic situation was probably influenced by Mussolini’s personal relationship with Corrado Gini. On the important public occasion of the inauguration of ISTAT, on 14 July 1926, Gini had in fact emphasized the danger of the “decadence of the white race” and also of the “Latin nations”:

  • 6 Corrado Gini, “Discorso di inaugurazione dell’Istituto Centrale di Statistica (14 luglio 1926),” A (...)

Investigations on the population are always more convincing that the white race, or at least that part of the white race that gave rise to current occidental civilization, is at a decisive turning point in its history. After the marvelous development of the population seen in the previous century, we are now in a more or less stationary situation. [...]
The other Latin nations, and perhaps also the Slavs, do not seem to be unconnected with this general movement, but follow it much more distantly; and naturally, it could be decisive, for the life of a Nation, proceeding through a turning point in history with a speed that is more or less slowed down, also because it is precisely in turning points that the more intelligent and most decisive runners better their position.6

  • 7 Since 1928, Gini referred to Alfred Lotka, Louis Dublin and Robert R. Kuczynski researches in orde (...)

5In the Ascension Day speech, Mussolini indicated that the “discovery” of this new demographic situation implied the introduction of a pronatalist population policy in Italy: “For five years we have been saying that population is overflowing. It is not true! The river is no longer in flood, and is rapidly returning to its bed.” Gini was obviously not the only source of Mussolini’s populationism, but it is very probable that the Duce obtained his statistical evaluation of the growth of the population in Europe and in Italy from Gini, thus justifying the launch, exactly in 1927, of the fascist natalist population policy.7

  • 8 Agostino Gemelli, “Le dottrine eugenetiche sul matrimonio e la morale cattolica,” Vita e Pensiero (...)

6In December 1930, Pius XI radically condemned birth control, premarital certificates, abortion and sterilization in his encyclical Casti Connubii [On Christian marriage]. In the following months, Agostino Gemelli, founder and dean of the Milan Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano) and vice-president of SIGE, actively defended and promoted the themes of the papal encyclical. Between March and October 1931, on the pages of the journal Vita e Pensiero [Life and thoughts], Gemelli responded to accusations of “medievalism” by the Eugenics Review, praising the “incalculable eugenic value” of Catholic sexual morals: chastity as a form of birth control; temperance as a safeguard against the damage of alcoholism; the sacrament of marriage as a remedy to the dysgenic risk of intermarriage and illegitimate births.8 A year later, in October 1932, at the Florence Congress of Catholic Physicians (Congresso dei Medici Cattolici di Firenze), the principles of Catholic eugenics were again justified, not only by Gemelli, but also by Francesco Leoncini, professor of legal medicine at the University of Florence, and Giuseppina Pastori, professor of general biology at the Milan Catholic University.

  • 9 Francesco Leoncini, “Relazione su la procurata sterilità di fronte alla morale e alla legge,” Stud (...)

7Leoncini praised the new penal code, approved in July 1931, which, among the crimes against “the health and integrity of the stock,” also considered the “procured impotence of procreation” through ionizing radiation: in this way, Leoncini believed, fascist juridical code demonstrated its full adherence with the “indefatigable principles of Catholic morals.” Moreover, the penal code condemned any form of “eugenic sterilization,” a measure—Leoncini commented—suggested by “a new civilization, which evidently is not our civilization, shaped by Latin genius and the spirit of Christianity.”9 For Giuseppina Pastori, the Church did not forbid “that we pursue eugenic aims.” On the contrary, Catholic sexual morals were in themselves eugenic: “if one truly lives Christianly—Pastori confirmed—coercive legal dispositions with a eugenic aim would not be necessary.” As for the rest, medicine itself seemed to confirm the eternal truth of Catholic sexual morals:

  • 10 Giuseppina Pastori, “La relazione su l’eugenica e la morale cattolica,” Studium-Quaderno dei Medic (...)

Healing, today, is not amputating, but preserving: tomorrow, it will not be repressing, but preventing; therefore, even scientifically the physicians see in eugenics instructed by Catholic morals a great superiority in the face of immediate and violent means proposed by non-Catholic eugenics.10

8At the end of the event, the Florence Congress of Catholic Physicians approved a resolution on eugenics, organized into three points:

The physicians of Catholic Action (Azione Cattolica) [...]

  1. invite Catholic physicians to keep abreast of scientific progress in genetics and invite Catholic scholars to cooperate with such studies and promote the good and healthy applications of this young and already greatly progressed science;
  2. ask that the civil public authority prevent the diffusion in Italy of foreign propaganda of those eugenic methods that represent a violation of moral laws;
  3. vote that Catholic physicians explain to the profane how the moral and physical improvement of humanity can not be obtained with the hurried and unjustified application of genetics to the human race, and neither with the propagation of those eugenic norms that contradict divine laws and are contrary to human dignity, but rather through the moral laws taught for centuries by the Catholic Church, norms that also govern the real progress of social hygiene and genetics.11

9Undoubtedly, the institutional, ideological and political compromise between the fascist regime and the Catholic Church—sanctioned in 1929 by the signing of the Lateran Treaty—was decisive in the affirmation—in Italy as much as in the international context—of a natalist and populationist “Latin” eugenics.

  • 12 On the defeat of “qualitative” eugenics in fascist Italy, see also Mantovani, Rigenerare la societ (...)

10The definitive adoption of “quantitative” eugenics was first announced by a rapid process of fascistization that in the second half of the 1920s overwhelmed the previous experiences of “qualitative” eugenics, and in particular, Aldo Mieli’s SISQS and Ettore Levi’s IPAS.12

  • 13 See Rassegna di studi sessuali, demografia ed eugenica 8, no. 1 (January–March 1928): 25ff.
  • 14 Starting from 1931, Genesis presented itself as an organ of an Italian Federation of Eugenics, whi (...)

11In 1927, SISQS changed its name to Italian Society of Sexology, Demography and Eugenics (Società Italiana di Sessuologia, Demografia e Eugenica), and in the next year was incorporated into the Fascist Medical Union (Sindacato Medico Fascista).13 In 1924, Rassegna di studi sessuali [Review of sexual studies] became Rassegna di studi sessuali e di eugenica, then Rassegna di studi sessuali, demografia ed eugenica, and finally Genesis,14 surviving a few years, until 1932.

  • 15 See Rassegna di studi sessuali, demografia ed eugenica 8, no. 4 (December 1928): 240.
  • 16 Report of the Divisione Polizia Politica per la Divisione Affari Generali e Riservati, 9 August 19 (...)

12In 1928 Aldo Mieli left his position as director to transfer to Paris as permanent secretary of the International Committee for the History of Science.15 In 1930, a report of the Parisian division of the fascist Political Police named him an “adversary of the Regime and above all of demographic politics.”16

  • 17 See, in particular, Augusto Carelli, “Valore della sterilizzazione eugenica nel miglioramento dell (...)
  • 18 See Ernesto Pestalozza to Levi, 10 January 1930, ACS, SPD, CO, b. 109005/2, “Levi Ettore.” On the (...)
  • 19 The numerous requests for the reintegration of Ettore Levi can be found in ACS, SPD, CO, b. 109005 (...)

13In December 1928, IPAS was made dependant on the National Social Insurance Bank, (Cassa Nazionale Assicurazioni Sociali, or CNAS), later the National Fascist Institute of Social Security (Istituto Nazionale Fascista per la Previdenza Sociale, or INFPS). Struck by nervous exhaustion in 1926, Ettore Levi was replaced by Augusto Carelli, who was hostile to any form of “eugenic sterilization” and trusted in the effectiveness of the eternal mechanisms of nature.17 In 1930, the direction of the review Difesa sociale passed into the hands of Cesare Giannini, who moved the interests of the journal to insurance medicine. In the meantime, guilty in the eyes of fascism of “carrying out propaganda for birth control,”18 Levi was brutally expelled from every role within IPAS19 and committed suicide in 1932.

  • 20 See Pietro Capasso, “Ettore Levi,” Il pensiero sanitario 14 (1932): 11.
  • 21 ACS, CPC, b. 19943, “Capasso Pietro.” In 1941, the Direzione Generale di Pubblica Sicurezza suspen (...)
  • 22 For Capasso’s criticism of the demographic campaign, the regime and the encyclical Casti Connubii, (...)

14The only person to commemorate him with sincere emotion20 was the editor of Pensiero sanitario, Pietro Capasso. Even Capasso was under the watch of the fascist regime from 1925, when he had signed the Croce “Manifesto of Anti-fascist Intellectuals.” Listed in the Register of political offenders (Casellario Politico Centrale) as “antifascist” and “opposer,”21 Capasso was nonetheless able to keep direction of his review, restraining his veiled criticisms of the demographic campaign in the short space of the column Spunti e punture [Pricks and stings], which did not lack irony regarding the ridiculous excesses of fascist pronatalism.22

  • 23 In 1930, Michels praised, for example, Campanella’s eugenic vision, in particular, as regarding th (...)

15From the ashes of “qualitative” eugenics arose “quantitative” eugenics, linked more to the utopia of Tommaso Campanella and Leon Battista Alberti than to Galtonian gospels23 and essentially founded on two scientific and ideological paradigms, influential on a national and international scale: the “integral” demography of Corrado Gini, on one side, and the medical constitutionalism of the endocrinologist Nicola Pende, on the other.

  • 24 Ipsen, Dictating Demography, 205.
  • 25 Vice-president of Commission III was B. Malinowski. Other members were W. Schmidt, R. Pinto, G. Pi (...)

16In the international context, Italian eugenicists expressed their unorthodox position by withdrawing the Italian Committee for Population Problem Studies (Comitato Italiano per lo Studio dei Problemi della Popolazione, known as CISP) from the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems (IUSIPP), and SIGE from the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations (IFEO). At the World Population Conference of Geneva in 1927, the Italian delegation, led by Corrado Gini, clearly revealed its anti-Malthusian hostility.24 Notwithstanding this, in 1928, at the creation of the IUSIPP, directed by Johns Hopkins biologist Raymond Pearl, Gini became vice-president, member of the executive committee and chairman of Commission III (Vital Statistics of Primitive Races).25

  • 26 ACS, PCM 1940–43, b. 2674, f. 1.1.16.3.5.27.000–7, sf. 2. For more details, see Cassata, Il fascis (...)
  • 27 Gini to Pearl, 11 February 1928, Pearl Papers, APS, Box 7.

17The Italian participation in the IUSIPP was mediated by the constitution of CISP, personally supported by Mussolini, who prepared, on instructions from Gini, a circular sent to the ministries and public entities, with the aim of constructing a broad network of financing for the Committee.26 Gini did not hesitate to submit to Mussolini the drafts of the Union’s statute, for the Duce to correct and elaborate.27

  • 28 On this topic, see in particular Edmund Ramsden, “Carving up Population Science: Eugenics, Demogra (...)
  • 29 Gini to Wilson, August 14, 1930; Gini to Pearl, 20 August 1930; Gini to Pearl, 25 August 1930; Gin (...)
  • 30 ACS, SPD, CO, b. 1172, f. 509560/III; see Ipsen, Dictating Demography, 205.
  • 31 ACS, SPD, CO, b. 1172, f. 509560/III.

18The biological determinism of Gini’s demographic theory, and his direct relationship with the Duce, were quickly criticized by American social demographers, led by Harvard University mathematician Edwin B. Wilson. The hostility of the American social demographers was deeply connected with their commitment in New Deal reforming policies and social eugenics, based on family planning and birth control.28 In 1930, Wilson’s hostile activities towards the Union contributed to embittering the collaboration between Gini and Pearl, provoking a break.29 In 1931, the International Population Conference was to be held in Rome, but Raymond Pearl established a separate conference in London to represent the Union. The Italian Committee did not recognize the legality of the decision of the Union and continued to organize the congress, which was held in Rome in September under the honorary presidency of Benito Mussolini. The IFEO and IUSIPP Committees of Argentina, Spain, France and Germany participated in the Rome congress. It was organized into eight sections, demonstrating Gini’s integral,” multidisciplinary approach to the problem of population: biology and eugenics; anthropology and geography; medicine and hygiene; demography; sociology; economy; history; and methodology. The congress was not a meeting of pronatalists, but Wilson’s concerns regarding Italy’s political neutrality were not completely unfounded: Mussolini, for example, edited Gini’s opening speech, instructing the latter to remove a passage praising Thomas Malthus30 and opposed Gini’s decision to invite Marie Stopes to Rome.31

  • 32 Cora B. S. Hodson to Ernesto Pestalozza, 15 February 1932, Charles B. Davenport Papers, APS.
  • 33 Gini to Davenport, 11 June 1931, Davenport Papers, APS.

19The rapport between SIGE and the IFEO, during the second half of the 1920s, was also beset with notable tensions. From 1926, the Italian eugenicists refused to pay the financing fee of the London Bureau of the organization, presided over by Cora B. S Hodson.32 In 1928, at the IFEO meeting in Munich, Gini, member of a commission—also comprising Fischer and Mjøen—for the study of the internal organization of the Federation, proposed the elimination of the London secretary office, which the Italians claimed was only a “source of slowness, confusion and misunderstanding.”33 But SIGE’s hostility to Ms. Hodson was not only a formal and bureaucratic question. The real problem resided instead in the “negative” eugenics proposals publicly supported by the IFEO secretary, above all regarding sterilization. These were clearly denounced in a 1931 letter from Gini to Charles Davenport:

  • 34 Gini to Davenport, 11 June 1931, Davenport Papers, APS.

In the sitting of the Italian Congress of Genetis and Eugenics of 1929, in which M. Pestalozza presented his relation on sterilization, Ms. Hodson did not speak, although I, as chairman, had invited all the congress participants to join in the discussion three times. However, following, Ms. Hodson sent us in the minutes a long declaration that she never made. It was not completely regular. But more seriously was that in this declaration, she affirmed that the Federation, in the meeting in Rome, had voted in favor of sterilization, and it was in the name of the Federation that she made her declaration at the Congress!34

  • 35 Gini to Davenport, 20 August 1932, Davenport Papers, APS.

20On 20 August 1932, Gini communicated to Davenport SIGE’s decision not to participate in the activities of IFEO, as the London secretary had not been abolished, as agreed upon at the Munich meeting in 1928.35

21Therefore, when on 14 July 1933, national socialist Germany launched the most radical legislation on eugenic sterilization ever approved, fascist Italy had already assumed, in the eugenic field, a strongly critical position regarding both the IFEO and the IUSIPP.

22In September 1933, Mussolini’s newspaper Popolo d’Italia clearly indicated the directives against Nazi sterilization law:

  • 36 “Popolo d’Italia,” 14 September 1933.

It could be that wanting to achieve qualitative perfection requires a series of successive sterilizations, which could lead to catastrophic consequences: that is, to the reduction of the race to a handful of men, too pure to remain men and make their living in this low world. Preserving the present and future health of the race is a duty, more, a fundamental duty of the State, this is the hinge of fascist doctrine; but our methods seem more suitable to the aim.36

  • 37 Vincenzo Palmieri, Denatalità. La grande insidia sociale vista da un medico (Milan: Società Palerm (...)
  • 38 Salvatore Ottolenghi,Sterilizzazione del delinquente in rapporto alla medicina legale,” Policlini (...)
  • 39 Letter from the Ministry of National Education to ISTAT Presidency, 26 September 1935, ACS, PCM 19 (...)
  • 40 Franco Savorgnan to Mussolini, 26 September 1935, ACS, PCM 1940–43, b. 2674, f. 1.1.16.3.5.27.000- (...)
  • 41 Kühl, The Nazi Connection, 32.
  • 42 Letter of the Cabinet of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to ISTAT Presidency, 19 June 1934, ISTAT (...)

23The scientific community followed the indications of the regime, stigmatizing the Nazi eugenic extremism as “barbaric” and “anti-scientific” and countering German “Aryan” mysticism with “Mediterranean” and “Latin” equilibrium.37 Sante de Sanctis, at the 2nd European Conference on Mental Hygiene in September 1933, defined coercive sterilization as “catastrophic” (see chapter III). The convention in Rome of the Society of Legal Medicine (Società di Medicina Legale) welcomed the conclusions of Salvatore Ottolenghi, in Sterilizzazione del delinquente in rapporto alla medicina legale [Sterilization of criminals in relation to legal medicine], which condemned sterilization as contrary to the spirit of the new fascist penal code.38 As for demographers and statisticians, a crucial test came at the IUSIPP congress in Berlin in1935. Italy had not in fact definitively abandoned the Union in 1931. Notwithstanding Gini’s opposition,39 in 1935 the fascist government allowed Livio Livi, Gini’s adversary and leader of the Italian social demographers, to become vice-president of the Union.40 Nevertheless, on the eve of the IUSIPP Berlin congress in 1935, which,—Stefan Kühl has claimed—“marked the apex of international support of Nazi race policies and represented a great success for the Nazi propaganda machine,”41 Mussolini ordered that Italy participate “with a delegation composed of few members, in the role of observers,” since the congress would be concerned “also with the problems of the ‘hygiene of the race’ and of those inherent ‘psychological’ problems of the population, which can not be anything but the controversial questions of sterilization and the Aryan.”42

  • 43 “L’eugenica e la morale cattolica,” L’Osservatore Romano (13 August 1933): 2.
  • 44 Catholic University Archive (hereafter AUC), Agostino Gemelli Papers, Correspondence, b. 49, f. 70 (...)

24An identical opposition came, in the same months, from the Catholic milieu. The news of approval of the Nazi “Law on the Prevention of Genetically Deficient Progeny” (14 July 1933) was reported by the Osservatore Romano [Roman observer] on 4 August 1933, with a brief note, which recalled the contents of the encyclical Castii Connubii. On 13 August, the daily paper of the Holy See summarized, in a lengthy article, the speech of Agostino Gemelli at the Florence Congress of Catholic Physicians in 1932: “Catholic morals—the article concluded—have greater eugenic value than all the rules of eugenicists.”43 In October 1933, Gemelli protested strongly against the instrumentalization of his thoughts by the Nazi propaganda, to make it seem as even the dean of the Milan Catholic University was a supporter of the July 1933 laws. Advised of this operation by Father Costantino Noppel, dean of the German College in Rome, Gemelli declared that he had never approved of the “infamous” German laws, and that he had always followed, in his role as “Catholic scientist” the directives of the Holy See in the field of eugenics.44

  • 45 “Una smentita,” L’Osservatore Romano (2–3 October 1933): 2. See also Gemelli’s letter to Giuseppe (...)
  • 46 Gemelli to H. Höfler, 4 October 1933 AUC, Gemelli Papers, Correspondence, b. 49, f. 70.

25In October 1933, a letter of protest from Gemelli was published by the Osservatore Romano. Gemelli wrote: “The fact that many times, in my eugenic writing, I have demonstrated the gravity of moral error, not to mention biological, contained in the various sterilization proposals, should be enough to deny the affirmations [by the Germans].”45 A copy of this denial was sent to the secretary of the Freiburg Caritas, in order to spread the news to German newspapers.46

  • 47 “Vita senza valore,” L’Osservatore Romano (4 November 1933): 2. The review concerned Erwin Baur, W (...)
  • 48 Agostino Gemelli, “La ‘sterilizzazione coattiva e preventiva’ nell’insegnamento degli studiosi ita (...)

26Again in November 1933, the Osservatore Romano attacked the negative eugenics of the Nazi “advocates of death,” reporting the detailed criticism by gynecologist Albert Niedermeyer (1886–1957) of the book Von der Verhütung unwerten Lebens [The prevention of unworthy life].47 In December 1933, in the monographic issue of the journal L’Economia Italiana [Italian economy] dedicated to the theme “Population and Fascism,” Gemelli condemned yet again the Nazi legislation on sterilization, recalling the opposing conclusions reached by the Italian scientific community, at the two national eugenic congresses of 1924 and 1929, and, on a moral and religious side, by the Congress of Catholic Physicians in 1932.48

  • 49 Guido Lami, “Significati e moniti di un Congresso,” Studium 31, no. 6 (June 1935): 362–65.
  • 50 Guido Lami, “Il Congresso Internazionale dei Medici Cattolici a Vienna e il prossimo Congresso-Pel (...)

27In 1935 and 1936, the International Congresses of Catholic Physicians were held in Brussels and Vienna, repeating the condemnation of negative eugenics. In Brussels, French physician Joseph Okinczyc attacked the materialistic logic which formed the basis of the negative eugenics of abortions and sterilizations, proposing instead a holistic medicine that cured the “person” rather than the “individual.”49 In Vienna, Gemelli underlined the importance of the Congress from the point of view of the Holy See: “The Pope expects us doctors to show him that the Catholic Church has not acted amiss when she condemned some eugenic trends. We shall propagate the doctrine among people as contained in the encyclical Casti Connubii.” All participants agreed on the following: 1) The medical profession should reject sterilization as a method by which to eradicate the threat of hereditary disease; 2) Catholic physicians were warned of the “slippery slope” from eugenics to euthanasia; 3) Eugenic and penal castration were rejected outright, with the exception of castration in the cases of “psychopathic sex criminals”; 4) Positive eugenic methods should be reaffirmed, including the creation of Catholic counseling centers; 5) International cooperation by all Catholic medical associations should be favored in order to discuss the questions of eugenics and genetics.50

28In the context of Italy’s ideological, political and scientific opposition to negative and “nordic” eugenics, starting from the last half of the 1920s, it is not surprising that, in 1935, it was SIGE, led by its president Corrado Gini and vice-president Agostino Gemelli, which promoted the constitution of a new organization in the international eugenics arena, an alternative to the IFEO: the Latin Federation of Eugenic Societies.

1. Corrado Gini’s Hegemony: Demography and “Regenerative” Eugenics

29Three factors essentially determined Corrado Gini’s hegemonic role in fascist eugenics, at least starting from 1924. First, Gini was a relevant figure in the international scientific context, as statistician, demographer and sociologist. Secondly, he assumed, almost simultaneously, the presidency of the three most important Italian institutions in the field of population policy and eugenics: ISTAT (from 1926 to 1932), SIGE (from 1924) and CISP (from 1928). Finally, from a theoretical point of view, Gini’s effective synthesis between populationist demography and biotypological constitutionalism provided a comprehensive framework for fascist “quantitative” eugenics, nationalism and pronatalism.

  • 51 Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale (Milan, 20–23 September 1924) (Rome: Stabi (...)

30The First Congress of Social Eugenics, held in Milan from 20 to 23 September 1924 and promoted by SIGE and the Italian Royal Society of Hygiene (Reale Società di Igiene),51 was already marked by the hegemonic presence of Corrado Gini, although the Italian eugenic debate was not at all monolithic.

31Gini opened the first session of the congress, and his theory was presented as a profound critical analysis of the scientific legitimacy of the biological “presuppositions” of “selective” eugenics: the heredity of some characteristics, the different modes of transmission of acquired and germinal characteristics, and the dominance of heredity over the environment in determining individual traits. Gini then remarked indifference of public opinion, in Italy and elsewhere, toward eugenic issues:

  • 52 Corrado Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” iniAtti del (...)

Abroad, as here in Italy, while eugenics is alive and prospering as a discipline that interests the cultivators of biological and social disciplines, some political men, and several philanthropists, it is not however able—it would be in vain to deny it—to capture the conscience of the masses, who consider it with persistent skepticism, if not with evident mistrust.52

  • 53 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 4.

32Faced with such a divergence from public opinion, the eugenicists were forced to “examine their conscience.” They needed to clarify whether people’s indifference was due to their lack of knowledge, or whether it was due to “an appreciation of the reality that many points remain to be clarified and many demands have to be contemplated before being in a position to move on, with a free conscience, to the application of a eugenics program.”53

33Gini did not hesitate to lead by example, listing the “significant doubts” that surrounded the theoretical assumptions of the “selective eugenics” movement.

  • 54 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 7.
  • 55 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 8–9.

34First of all, the “resemblance coming from common descent” might not depend exclusively on heredity, but also “on the common environment during gestation or, earlier, during the development of the germ.”54 It was the so-called phenomenon of “induction”: the germinal characteristics might not be permanent and hereditary across generations, but on the contrary, might be “induced in the germ” from the environmental influence, and be, as a result, temporary. If the germ’s influential inductors of good or bad characteristics were (as with alcoholism or professional hazards) always recognizable, and if the effects of induction were permanent or irreparable, then “selective eugenics would always have a reason for existence and moreover it should complement a preventive eugenic intervention, aimed at impeding or favoring induction.” When the influential inductors were recognizable, but the effects of the induction were shortlived, “selective eugenics faces its most difficult challenge, since the temporary effects of induction must be assessed in conjunction with the effects of heredity.” When finally, as often happened, the influential inductors were not recognizable, selective eugenics was not effective, whilst preventive eugenics “maintained its justification for intervention, if this was facilitated by the understanding of environmental factors that could induce favorable or unfavorable characteristics.”55

  • 56 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 10.

35The existence of induction, in its diverse forms (parallel induction, mutual induction, continuation of induction) produced, therefore, a sort of “pseudo-heredity,” which could mislead selective eugenics and favor the spread of hereditarily inferior individuals.56

36As for the second assumption, that is, the diverse transmissibility of germinal and acquired characteristics, Gini posed a question mark, introducing the theme of “transmission of functional diathesis”:

  • 57 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 10.

The intense exercise of a function must have not only a mechanical effect on the development of the organ, but also a more subtle effect, probably biochemical, modifying the entire composition of the organism, even if barely perceptible or imperceptible to our means of observation […]. The germs could in this way receive, due to the intense exercise of the functions, or of particular functions of the organism, biochemical modifications that render the products that derive from it predisposed to exercise the same functions.57

37The transmission of functional diathesis could in this way modify the interpretation of the eugenic hierarchy of nations and social classes. If prolonged and intense exercise of the intellectual faculty on the part of the ascendants did in fact render the descendents more predisposed to exercise such faculties, then Italian, Russian or Greek emigrants could not be considered, as the American legislation would like, as “eugenically” inferior. Consequently:

  • 58 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 11.

the eugenicist who, from the congenital value of the members of various classes and various nations, would like to judge […] their eugenic value, without having first excluded that the congenital superiority of some could derive just from the major exercise of the faculty corresponding to his ascendants, would obtain, through selective action, radically erroneous and damaging consequences, rather than useful ones, for the progress of the race.58

38As for the transmission of diathesis acquired through illness, if the illness produced immunization, then a function of illness could be identified in “evolution of the race,” because the illness functioned in this case as an “immunizer of the germinal plasm”:

  • 59 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 11.

Abolishing illness in the present generations would mean exposing future generations, lacking immunization, to the risk of a serious crisis; eliminating sick people from reproduction would not have a vastly different effect, as reproduction would be left only to plasm that had not been recently immunized.59

  • 60 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 13.

39Arriving finally at the problem of hereditariness of characteristics, Gini believed it did not explain, for example, how nations such as Australia and New Zealand sprung from colonies of deported criminals, or how “the distant descendants of great men vanish or degenerate.”60 It was therefore necessary to hypothesize—as maintained in the theories of Carl Nägeli, Theodor Eimer and Italian zoologist Daniele Rosa—an internal evolution of germinal characteristics:

  • 61 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 14.

Germinal characteristics would evolve, at least for certain species, through internal forces, and the numbers of their population would evolve contemporarily, following a course which many compare to the course of individual development, with a period of gradual growth, a period of maximum development, and a period of decline which often finishes, sooner or later, in the extinction of the species.61

  • 62 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 14.

40From the diverse varieties, races, populations, and families, “some would therefore become more advanced in the biological evolution of their germinal characteristics, but also consequently closer to decline and extinction; others more distant.” The existence of a sort of parabolic evolution in germinal characteristics therefore reconciled the phenomenon of heredity with “the facts of great men coming from families of low origins and the successive decline of the descendants and similarly, those of normal development and excellent products coming from families of low extraction.”62

  • 63 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 15.

41On the whole, the three elements stressed by Gini—induction, transmission of functional and morbose diathesis and evolutionary tendencies of germinal characteristics—contributed to supporting the thesis of the mutability of the germinal plasm, from which he derived an inevitable condemnation of Anglo-Saxon eugenics. The nations, the classes or the families superior by wealth, culture or due to “individual congenital endowments,” were not in fact “necessarily the nations, classes and families in which eugenics would favor proliferation, in view of the well-being of the race.” On the contrary, claiming to improve the race through the selection of the elite would be like “improving a population through favoring the growth of adults, because they were stronger and trained, and opposing the growth of infants because they were weak and necessarily still lacking in all cultivation.”63 According to Gini, “selective” eugenics should not be completely excluded, but its field of action should be particularly reduced:

  • 64 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 15–16.

Among families who in the past lived in the same environment, with an analogous amount of instruction, not yet elevated or elevated only recently from the lower classes, equally disposed to various diseases or immunized against these diseases, comparable from these various points of view, eugenics might yet exercise its selective action.64

  • 65 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 17.

42Failing such conditions, “preventive” eugenic measures could be more effective: for example, “contracting […] marriages at a young age, appropriately combining the characteristics of the spouses, avoiding crossings between unlike races, lengthening intervals between births, breastfeeding offspring, and reproducing preferably in determined seasons.”65 However, even in this sphere, there were many difficulties. What was, in fact, the best way to match marriages?

  • 66 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 17.

Is it preferable to couple homozygotic individuals, and in this way separate the race into two categories, one of healthy homozygotes and the other of sick homozygotes, counting on the progressive decline and disappearance of the latter? Or is it preferable to let people cross, so that the crossings attenuate the damage of the sick forms, and perhaps favor the reproduction of heterozygotic individuals?66

43According to Gini, the great part of the prescriptions of “preventive” eugenics had a consequence of demographic slowdown, and therefore, paradoxically, a reduction of the eugenic efficiency of the social organism. Even crossings between races that were very different should not be discounted, because the hybrids carried a major probability of individuals with “exceptionally favorable characteristics”:

  • 67 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 20.

We must ask ourselves if, and to what point, an on-average inferior population, but with a high frequency of people with exceptionally favorable characteristics might not be preferable, from a point of view of social efficiency, to an on-average superior population, but with more uniformly distributed characteristics.67

  • 68 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 22.

44Additionally, “charitable,” “egalitarian” measures, of prophylaxis, therapy, social medicine and labor medicine, inevitably contrasted with eugenics, because they impeded natural selection and the elimination of the weakest: between eugenics and euthenics it was therefore necessary “to find a compromise.”68

45Finally, from a long list of questions Gini arrived at the most serious. Eugenics implied a rationalization of births, which risked compromising the demographic power of the nation:

  • 69 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 24.

It is here that we find perhaps the most serious doubt that perplexes eugenicists on the advantages of passing, in the current state of awareness and conditions, to practical action. It is the doubt whether the population or the classes, overcoming instinct and practicing eugenics, will rationalize the quantity of their offspring, not only from a point of view of quality, but even from a view of advantage to the parents, and therefore reduce themselves to a number completely insufficient to maintain their place in the world.69

  • 70 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 25.

46But the conclusion of the “long examination of conscience” did not suggest discouragement or surrender, but rather “prudence” and “persuasion.” On one hand, according to Gini, eugenics had to recognize that it was still an “immature” science, not yet ready to go beyond the theoretical; on the other, it had to open up to the natural and social sciences, because from such synergy, eugenicists “could resolve the problems that constitute the basis of their science and the assumption of a future program of action.”70

47In effect, the First Congress of Social Eugenics seemed to faithfully follow Gini’s call to scientific prudence. The final resolution, unanimously approved, was very moderate indeed:

  • 71 See “Nona seduta,” in Congresso Milano 1924, iniAtti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica so (...)

The First Italian Congress of Social Eugenics praises the scientific activities of the experts in genetics and eugenics and recognizes the importance of the resulting achievements. At the same time, we acknowledge that, in the face of the complex and delicate characteristics of the problems of applied eugenics, that which has been done is only little in the face of that which still needs to be done and, without excluding the possibility that from today we could draw useful results regarding the conduct of individuals and the action of public entities, we confirm that the greatest prudence will be imposed, and that in the meantime it is above all in the fields of research and observations that the eugenic specialists must focus their efforts.71

  • 72 Giuseppe De Giovanni and Mario Mazzeo, L’eugenica (Neaples: Pelosi, 1924).
  • 73 Agostino Gemelli, “Religione ed eugenetica,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica so (...)
  • 74 Gemelli, “Religione ed eugenetica,” 66.

48Not surprisingly, this resolution was signed, as well as by Gini and Patellani, by Agostino Gemelli. During the Congress, Gemelli synthesized the Catholic position toward eugenics, reprising the discussion contained in the document published in 1924 by the Secretariat for Morality of the Naples Diocese.72 In this paper, Gemelli listed the reasons for the diffidence of the Catholic Church toward eugenics: particularly, the limited scientific grounds of eugenic precepts; the Catholic safeguard of human spirituality against the reductionist tendencies of science; and the defense of individual liberty against state intervention. This diffidence notwithstanding, Gemelli suggested the possibility of an “alliance” between eugenics and Catholicism, mediated by the assumption of the Catholic moral of chastity, defining this as a “subordination and rationalization of the sexual act,”73 absolute before marriage, and relative after. Chastity would combat the possibility of illegitimate children, the transmission of venereal diseases and the conception of overly numerous or defective offspring. According to Gemelli, Catholic sexual ethics could lead to a progressive peaceful alliance between science and faith, in the name of eugenics: “We eugenicists must align ourselves to Catholicism in the battle against immorality and bad customs, and ask it to help us in our battle for the improvement of the race, availing ourselves of its weapons and making them our own.”74

  • 75 See Ugo Cerletti, “Necessità biologica delle malattie,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eu (...)
  • 76 See Pieraccini’s monumental genealogical study, La stirpe dei Medici di Cafaggiolo. Saggio di rice (...)

49At the Congress, the Catholic rejection of negative eugenics was supported by a theoretical and scientific approach, which opposed rigid Mendelian– Weismannian hereditarianism with neo-Lamarckian faith in the heredity of acquired characteristics and in the modifiability of the “germinal plasm.”75 Only Gaetano Pieraccini’s eugenics, with his deductions on the transmission of traits (in particular psychical ones) among the members of the Medici family,76 could in some way be compared with the biological determinism of Jon Alfred Mjoen, who presented his pedigrees of families of criminals and geniuses. Mjoen wrote:

  • 77 Jon Alfred Mjoen, “Delinquenza e genio alla luce della biologia,” in Atti del Primo Congresso ital (...)

Modern progress has […] placed in doubt that the French revolution dogma of equality is based on incontrovertible circumstances as well as that men are born great or of no merit at random, independent of every law or organic relationship. We have been able to establish that there are families in reality formed by idiots, delinquents, perverts, idle people, and others instead with special attributes, composed of individuals who are eminent because of psychical, intellectual or artistic qualities, without being able to establish the diverse ways in which the conditions of the external world act on either of these.77

  • 78 See Camillo Pestalozza, “La natimortalità nei diversi periodi della vita italiana e milanese,” in (...)
  • 79 Giuseppe Antonini, “Alcoolismo ed Eugenetica,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica (...)
  • 80 See Luigi Bellezza, “Educazione sessuale ed Eugenetica,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di E (...)
  • 81 See Attilio Maffi, “L’educazione fisica delle masse altissimo fattore di Eugenetica sociale,” in A (...)
  • 82 Prassitele Piccinini, “Le fonti d’Italia,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica soci (...)
  • 83 Luigi Devoto, “La famiglia del lavoratore del piombo,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eug (...)
  • 84 See Vito Massarotti, “La profilassi del suicidio in rapporto all’Eugenica,” in Atti del Primo Cong (...)
  • 85 See Cesare Cattaneo, “Influenza della vitaminosi ed avitaminosi sul divenire della razza,” in Atti (...)

50In fact, the four days of the Congress offered a composite picture of Italian eugenics, with several interconnections between social hygiene and social medicine. Eugenicists’ contributions ranged from protection of maternity and infancy78 to the fight against “social” illnesses;79 from sexual education80 to physical education;81 from hydrotherapy82 to the improvement of the work environment;83 from the “prophylaxis of suicide”84 to nutritional care.85

  • 86 See Leonard Darwin, “Eugenics and the Criminal,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetic (...)

51As far as concrete eugenic proposals were concerned, Gini’s moderatism encountered an almost unanimous chorus of confirmation from the other Italian eugenicists. Opposing Leonard Darwin, president of the International Commission of Eugenics and Britain’s Eugenics Education Society, who called for segregation and sterilization of criminals,86 was Leone Lattes, professor of legal medicine at the University of Modena, for whom “asocial tendencies” did not always derive from “heredity in its true sense” as much as from the consequences of some foetal illnesses. More than forbidding reproduction by criminals, Lattes believed that “eugenic practices” must turn their attention to the sanitary protection of pregnancy:

  • 87 See “Quinta seduta,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, XXXVIII.

Eugenic practices can, together with the remedy of impeding the reproduction of criminals and degenerates, be of valid assistance in curing germinal illnesses, in the period in which it is possible. Above all, it is necessary to turn the attention of physicians to the detection of hereditary syphilis in defective parents and the opportunity to cure it specifically during pregnancy, to prevent otherwise irreparable damage to the foetus.87

  • 88 Jon Alfred Mjoen and Jon Bo, “The Norwegian System for Identification and Protection of the Indivi (...)
  • 89 Roberto Michels, “Taluni effetti dell’emigrazione nei suoi rapporti coll’Eugenica,” in Atti del Pr (...)
  • 90 Livio Livi, “Emigrazione ed Eugenetica,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica social (...)

52While Mjoen, defending society from immigrant “parasites,” proposed the institution of an obligatory international identification card with all the relevant data of the subject,88 Italian eugenicists, on the other hand, urged the eugenic value of national emigration. For Roberto Michels, the high qualifications of Italians workers emigrating to France, accompanied by an increasing birth control as a consequence of the improvement of their economic situation, would produce optimal results from a eugenic point of view.89 For demographer Livio Livi, Italian repatriates represented both “rationally and morally a selected product.” He declared: “I believe they and their offspring are more robust, healthier and more prolific examples compared to compatriots who don’t emigrate.”90

  • 91 Ettore Levi, “Le finalità eugeniche del controllo delle nascite,” in Atti del Primo Congresso ital (...)
  • 92 Felice Marta, “Eugenetica e neo-malthusianismo,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetic (...)
  • 93 See Carlo Francioni, “Le anomalie costituzionali e diatesiche dell’età infantile in rapporto coll’ (...)

53During the Congress, only Ettore Levi91 and Felice Marta92 declared themselves in favor of birth control. As for premarital examinations, despite the favorable position of several physicians,93 the Congress voted for a rather moderate resolution, that mirrored the proposal of the Royal Society of Hygiene:

  • 94 See “Nona seduta,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, LXIV.

The First Italian Congress of Social Eugenics approves the institution of a medical premarital certificate as simple eugenic information for the betrothed of the reciprocal conditions of health, and as a means of propaganda for an improvement of popular hygienic awareness. It is not a legal means upon which the permission to marry is granted by an authority, and we hope that, at least in the large urban centers, special public offices will be instituted to issue the certificate.94

  • 95 Eugenio Medea, “Le malattie nervose e mentali in rapporto all’Eugenetica,” in Atti del Primo Congr (...)
  • 96 Medea, “Le malattie nervose e mentali in rapporto all’Eugenetica,” 143.

54The condemnation of sterilization as a eugenic practice was unanimous, although there were also veiled exceptions. The neurologist Eugenio Medea, professor at the Clinical Institutes of Improvement (Istituti Clinici di Perfezionamento) in Milan and leader of the Lombardy section of the League for Mental Hygiene (Lega di Igiene Mentale), was “waiting for our ability to realize the postulate that, as segregation should be imposed (and is already practiced) on those dangerous to society, so should sterilization be imposed on those dangerous to the species.”95 Meanwhile, he declared himself in favor of a “minimum program,” that included the adoption of a premarital certificate and “health records.”96 Equally, law professor Domenico Medugno believed it was only a question of time and consensus:

  • 97 Domenico Medugno, “L’azione dello Stato e l’Eugenetica,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di E (...)

Where education from experts of eugenics and related sciences is able to deeply permeate the social strata of the various classes, even the surgical instruments will be condoned, and sterilizing activities, carried out in accordance with the most recent scientific findings, will be proclaimed necessary and blessed. Currently, there are too many elements of a sentimental nature, too many customs that oppose, at least in Europe, any practice of the kind. This does not take away the fact that this is an aim that we must have, in order to set ourselves on the path to modern civilization.97

55The condemnation of surgical operations was present also in the contribution of gynecologist and ex-president of SIGE, Ernesto Pestalozza:

  • 98 Ernesto Pestalozza, “Le indicazioni operatorie in rapporto all’Eugenica,” in Atti del Primo Congre (...)

What I hope for eugenics is that, in the research of means to achieve its radiant ideals, it does not borrow from medicine any ancient, obsolete and repugnant operations. And, even if we do not believe in leaving the gradual elimination of appalling offspring to nature, the new science of eugenics can find in social hygiene promising rules to allow us to overcome single morbose conditions, focusing on every scientific research that extends the benefits of hygiene, that we are already able to offer to the individual and society, to the entire stock.98

  • 99 Pestalozza, “Le indicazioni operatorie in rapporto all’Eugenica,” 82.
  • 100 Pestalozza, “Le indicazioni operatorie in rapporto all’Eugenica,” 84.

56Even Pestalozza, however, did not want eugenicists to be “driven by sentiment” and admitted “happily that if it was only through these operations that eugenics was able to cancel out, or al least limit, the hereditary transmission of illnesses that threaten the race, then the adoption would be justified without doubt, for the superior interests of humanity versus the individual.”99 In this way, voluntary abortion, although in general a “weapon both ineffective and dangerous,”100 could be justified in the case of pregnancies in “subjects affected by hereditary nervous or mental degeneration,” even if the justification would be limited to specific cases and carried out in public hospitals, after appropriate consultation.

  • 101 See Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, LXVII.

57In connection with the Milan Congress, between 20 and 22 September, the meeting of the International Commission of Eugenics was held, due to the initiative and contacts of Corrado Gini. On this occasion, the International Commission approved the Italian project of constituting an international library of eugenics, which had been proposed during the 1923 Lund meeting by Corrado Gini and Ettore Levi.101 The first volume should have concerned Italian eugenics, but it was never published. The only book published in this series was, in 1930, Le problème eugénique en Belgique, edited by Albert Govaerts.

58With the Milan Congress, Gini achieved complete hegemony over the Italian eugenic movement: starting from 1924 in fact, he was not only elected president of SIGE, but also undoubtedly became the Italian reference name in the international eugenics arena. In the second half of the 1920s, as well as intensifying the battle against birth control and eugenic selection of marriage, Gini specified, always in opposition to Anglo-American eugenics, his own interpretation of racial crossing. Significantly, Gini expounded his view on this topic during two international conferences: in 1927, at the Italian-Brazilian Institute of High Culture of Rio de Janeiro, and in 1929, at the Norman Wait Harris Foundation of Chicago.

  • 102 On the centrality of the theme of racial crossing in 20th century eugenics, see Claudio Pogliano, (...)

59Consistent with the positions expressed at the beginning of the century, Gini did not attribute a necessarily degenerative character to racial crossing.102 In first place, according to Gini, the resurgence, in certain unions, of a pathologically latent character, did not imply in itself the negativity of crossings, but represented only “the necessary product of the gradual purification of the heterozygotes”:

  • 103 Corrado Gini, Le basi scientifiche della popolazione (Catania: Studio editoriale moderno, 1931), 3 (...)

When, in other words, an unfavorable trait appears in bastards, this does not actually signify degeneration, but is simply the effect of a scission typical of Mendelian laws, and is verifiable—given the presence of those unfavorable traits—also in the product of individual heterozygotes within the same race.103

  • 104 C. Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” in Corrado Gini, Shiroshi Nasu, Robert R. Kuc (...)
  • 105 Gini, Le basi scientifiche della popolazione, 309.
  • 106 Gini, Le basi scientifiche della popolazione, 311.

60Crossings, in Gini’s opinion, could not be labeled as uniformly positive or negative, but instead produced—as demonstrated by Davenport and Steggerda, East and Jones, Hankins and others104—a major variability in the descendants, allowing for “products more favorable or more unfavorable, or intermediate as compared to the parent-races.”105 Racial crossing, Gini argued, produced frequent “physical, intellectual and moral disharmonies.” 106 Above all in the case of “disharmonies in the moral sphere,” Gini did not exclude the influence of social stigma:

  • 107 Gini, Le basi scientifiche della popolazione, 310. See also Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of P (...)

We must not forget that, especially in countries where the union between individuals of different races is the subject of general disapproval, if not legal penalties, the mulatto or hybrid derives generally from the illegitimate coupling of a white man and colored woman, both of low class and bad morals.107

61But the reference to social contrasts did not change the priority which Gini gave in his explanation of the biological factor:

  • 108 Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 123.

It is also reasonable to admit that it [moral disharmony] may often be due to the even greater contrast between the psychology of the various races, as, for instance, between the ambition, the love of power, and the adventurous spirit of the whites and the idleness, the inconstancy, the lack of self-control and often adequate intelligence of many colored people.108

  • 109 Gini, Le basi scientifiche della popolazione, 312.

62As for the low fertility of hybrids, according to Gini, the problem regarded only the “crosses of very different races, such as the white and the black, or the black and the yellow,” but even in such cases “the results of observations are not in agreement.”109

63Gini constantly insisted on the need to consider crosses on a case by case basis. In fact:

  • 110 Gini, Le basi scientifiche della popolazione, 312. See also Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of P (...)

While some crosses, such as those between whites and blacks, have mostly damaged products, those between the colonial Dutch and Hottentot women in South Africa—studied with particular diligence by E. Fischer—resulted in several traits intermediate from the parent races and in others superior to both. Analogous results have been observed in the United States in crosses between whites and Red Indians, and in Oceania, between whites or Chinese with the Polynesians.110

  • 111 Gini, Le basi scientifiche della popolazione, 313. See also Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of P (...)
  • 112 Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 116–22.

64Also in Brazil (and for the “Indian hybrids” in Canada) crosses did not, in Gini’s opinion, present “very high quality,” although in the Brazilian state of Cearà there was a population endowed with high fertility, “particular energy” and “physical characteristics of resistance,” that justified the hypothesis that “a new ethnic type, destined to spread across the South- American continent,”111 was developing. According to Gini, it was necessary to consider the multiplicity of factors that determined the eugenic quality of hybrids: the characteristics (physical, mental and moral) of racial crosses, the asymmetry of the relationship between the parent races, the surrounding social environment and the type of physical habitat.112 In general however, with reference to the international literature on hybrids (Davenport–Steggerda, Fischer, Herskovits), Gini considered the “mixture of Whites and Negroes” particularly unfavorable. In Chicago, in 1929, he declared:

  • 113 Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 125.

It cannot be denied that mulattoes are generally intermediate between the Whites and Negroes, consequently superior on the whole to the latter and inferior as regards most of the traits in which the Whites are superior; superior to the former and inferior to the latter in those few traits in which Negroes excel.113

  • 114 Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 126.
  • 115 Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 127.

65In spite of “isolated assertions due probably to unjustifiable generalizations,” mulattos did not manifest any traces of heterosis, that is, “those manifestations of greater strength, precocity or vital resistance which characterize many hybrids in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, and also […] certain human hybrids.”114 On the contrary, while mulattos “present a higher percentage than Negroes of individuals who are unsuccessful at intelligence tests, they do not present an equal or higher frequency than do the Whites of particularly gifted individuals.” Finally, Gini’s conclusion was that “the crossbreeding of Whites and Negroes gives unfavorable results.”115

  • 116 Gini, Le basi scientifiche della popolazione, 316.
  • 117 Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 97.

66But if crosses resulted generally in negative and disharmonious products, how could the fact that it was “historically and anthropologically ascertained that the great races and the great civilizations, just like the most progressive elements in a single nation, generally come from crossing” be explained?116 In reality, the apparent contradiction could be justified with the selective mechanism represented by the struggle for life, sexual selection and emigration: these elements, according to Gini, “account for the fact that the most advanced nations, notwithstanding the fact that they owe their origins to the fusion of anthropologically heterogeneous elements and that they must probably in their beginnings have presented very considerable and marked diversity of forms, grow more and more homogeneous, until in time they present [...] uniformity of type.”117

67Therefore, in Gini’s view, all the “great races” could be seen as anthropological “fusions.” This was the case of the “European races, or those of European origins,” that is, “the best that the human species has so far produced”:

  • 118 Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 97–98

Now among these races the pigmentation of eyes and hair, which display—albeit with varying frequency—all gradations from blue to brown and from fair to black, respectively, and even the form of the hair, which varies from absolute straightness to the thickly curled variety, are indisputable evidence of the fusion of diverse racial elements.118

68Even the “most advanced of the yellow races,” the Japanese, was probably a cross between the Chinese and the Malaysians or Polynesians. In the same way, among the Malaysian races, the Javanese dominated and were a combination of diverse anthropological elements. Meanwhile, “the demographic decadence of many African populations” was contrasted with the expansion of the Bantu group in South Africa, a product of crossings between “Negroes and Hamites,” which “causes anxiety to the white supremacy in South Africa.”

  • 119 See Franz Boas, Helene M. Boas, “The Head Forms of the Italians as Influenced by Heredity and Envi (...)
  • 120 Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 98–99.
  • 121 Gini, Le basi scientifiche della popolazione, 317.

69As far as Italy was concerned, Gini’s 1912 inquiries on the cephalic indices of Italian soldiers, the results of which had been confirmed by Franz Boas in 1913,119 had revealed that “the greatest degree of variability is found in Central Italy, where the fusion between the Mediterranean dolichocephalic and the Alpine brachycephalic races has been very extensive.”120 It was no wonder that the Italian Renaissance had historically developed here. Therefore, as only those combinations that had been victorious in the struggle for existence were known, it was possible to hypothesize that racial crosses only “sometimes” gave rise to “populations endowed with superior characteristics to those so-called pure.”121

70The genetic dynamic of crossbreeding and successive “isolation” would reconcile, in Gini’s view, the cyclical theory of nations with what happened in nature, in the domestication or rational breeding of plants and animals. Nature also gave rise to crossing and selective isolation:

  • 122 Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 136.

Apart from the appearance of mutations, not only the dominating races of mankind […], but all races, derive their origin from crossbreeding. The group feeling determined by physical, or social, or cultural, or administrative factors (race, cast, city, state, etc.) and the hostility of neighboring groups, acts as an isolating factor, and in isolation the complete fusion of races which have been thus mingled gradually takes place. In this consists the biological function of the group feeling.122

71In conclusion, for Gini, “pure” races did not exist, but were instead “purified” races, which however, could not survive indefinitely in their nationalbiological isolation, because, reaching a certain level of homogeneity, they would decline if they were not reinvigorated with new crosses. Consequently,

  • 123 Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 137.

the cyclical process of evolution which occurs in the human races, if at first it may seem a wasteful system, inasmuch as it implies periodical recovery and dispersion of energy, really, under the biological laws governing organic life, corresponds to the ideal system suggested by the most modern results of genetics.123

  • 124 Gini, Le basi scientifiche della popolazione, 318.
  • 125 Gini, Le basi scientifiche della popolazione, 319. See also Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of P (...)

72In the cyclical theory of nations, the explanatory role of crossbreeding was fundamental in justifying both the birth and the “revival” of nations. In the first aspect, the concept of the germinal plasm was again central. If the inter-breeding involved individuals “in whom the germinal plasm has different variations, sometimes opposed, sometimes even complementary,” the plasm of the hybrid could present a “plasticity that allows the start of a new vital cycle, which could lead to the formation of a new race.”124 This would also explain how “many times, new nations arise from the crossing of a superior, civilized and dominating race, with a race still primitive in its mode of life and its culture: that is, from one race specialized […] in an intellectual sense, with one specialized in a physical sense, muscular.”125

  • 126 Gini, Le basi scientifiche della popolazione, 321. See also Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of P (...)
  • 127 Gini, Le basi scientifiche della popolazione, 321–22.

73But aside from new races, born from crossings between native races with immigrants, or between immigrants of diverse origins, history, Gini underlined, offered many cases of “revival” of nations that had been stagnant for centuries, “without the change seeming to be provoked by an immediate external racial influence.”126 This was the case, for example of the Renaissance in Italy and France, or the transformation of Japan in the second half of the nineteenth century. Even these phenomena of revival could be explained, according to Gini, by crossbreeding, which occurred “not between a subject population and invaders, but between internal stocks that have previously remained more or less separate”:127

  • 128 Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 111.

The populations in which these phenomena occur are, generally speaking, those in which different races have lived side by side, sometimes for long periods of time, whose amalgamation has hitherto been hindered by political barriers, or by psychological resistance, or by legal prohibitions, or by differences of culture or of language. The time comes when these obstacles which kept them apart are eliminated, when they assimilate their respective cultures, intermix [sic] on a large scale, and come to form indeed a single nation.128

74The “fascist revolution” was, in Gini’s view, the result of the “biological unification” of the Italian nation, which had its initial moment in the Risorgimento:

  • 129 Gini, Le basi scientifiche della popolazione, 322.

Our Italy, from the start of the previous century, has finally started to show undoubted signs of revival, which have accompanied the Risorgimento and the reconquest of independence; in the current century, this phenomenon seems to have quickly undergone intensification, accentuated all the more by the last war, from which the fascist revolution is the recent fruit. […] The formation of the Italians that D’Azeglio hoped for from a moral point of view has partly happened and is still progressing, even in the anthropological field; and we are starting to see the fruit.129

75Gini’s eugenic interpretation of crossbreeding and “revival” culminated, therefore, in a theory of fascism as the biological completion of the Risorgimento:

  • 130 Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 114.

Not only from the point of view of political psychology, but also from the racial standpoint, Italians had to be unified, and that unification, now hastened by the centralizing policy of the government, is beginning to bear its fruits. If this be the case, then the hope—and more than the hope, the intimate feeling which many have—that the Italian nation is now reviewing itself to write new and glorious pages in its history is not without biological foundations.130

76The connection between eugenics and natalism theorized by Gini found its consecration between 1929 and 1931 with the organization of two important congresses: the Second Italian Congress of Genetics and Eugenics (1929) and the International Congress for Studies on Population (1931), respectively. In his inaugural discourse in 1929, Gini focused first of all on the new title of the congress, which presented the word “genetics”:

  • 131 Corrado Gini, “Discorso d’apertura,” in Atti del Secondo Congresso italiano di Genetica ed Eugenic (...)

This signifies that the study of factors, susceptible to social regulation, which might improve or worsen the physical and psychical characteristics of the human race—study that constitutes the object of eugenics—is indissolubly connected with the laws of heredity and the variability of all the animal and vegetal world, laws that form the contents of genetics.131

  • 132 Gini, “Discorso d’apertura,”18.

77Five years after the First Eugenics Congress in Milan, Gini declared the low level of improvement in the general situation: in Italy, as in all the “Latin countries,” the problems of eugenics interested only a “small group of scientists” and were not shared by a larger public audience. Certainly, the Italian spirits were not agitated by the “questions of race that worried every part of the Anglo-Saxon world,”132 but eugenics was inevitably important for them, both due to the “contact with different races” in the lives of emigrants, and for the “effects of internal migration and crosses between like racial stocks” within the peninsula.

  • 133 Gini, “Discorso d’apertura,” 18–19.

78According to Gini, the skepticism of Italian eugenics toward theories that were “dear to the Anglo-Saxon and Nordic eugenicists”—“the theory of prevalence of heredity over the environment in the determination of human traits, the theory of the superiority of the Nordic race, the theory of the progressive degeneration of modern nations due to the increased reproductiveness of the lower classes”133 , was clearly “proof of the Latin balance” and was justified by numerous scientific doubts on the mechanisms of heredity.

  • 134 Gini, “Discorso d’apertura,” 20.

79In the face of the “complexity of the laws of heredity” and the difficulty of predicting the effects of crossbreeding, Gini repeated his conviction that time was not yet ripe for the practical application of eugenics.134 Additionally, it was not necessarily true that the development of eugenics was indissolubly linked to a prevalence of heredity over the other factors:

  • 135 Gini, “Discorso d’apertura,” 20.

If eugenics concludes that the factors that, under social direction, can improve or impair the racial characteristics of future generations are a bit less hereditary than was believed, and a bit more of a different nature, no one can say that eugenic science is any less than originally aimed for.135

  • 136 Gini, “Discorso d’apertura,” 21.

80According to Gini, an overly vast meaning had been contributed to the concept of heredity, “comprising, in this denomination, every similarity between parents and children that cannot be attributed to environmental conditions during individual development, or, in other words, every similarity between germinal characteristics of the successive generation.”136

  • 137 Gini, “Discorso d’apertura,” 26.
  • 138 Gini, “Discorso d’apertura,” 26–27.

81As in 1924, Gini once again underlined the importance of environmental influence on individual characteristics and stressed the role of induction and its consequences. Finally, in the last part of his inaugural discourse, he indicated “two directives” for the future development of Italian eugenics.137 The first was “that it was not right to limit the study of similarity to immediate ascendants and descendants, but should be systematically extended to an examination of many successive generations,” so as to distinguish with major precision the influence of heredity from that of induction or the evolution of the “family stock.”138 The second, on the other hand, was directed toward identifying factors that determined “the development and rise of new stocks.”

82In contrast to “conservative” eugenics, such as Anglo-Saxon or German, which focused on the defense of the biological elite and the elimination of defectives, Gini proposed a “regenerative” eugenics (eugenica rinnovatrice), prevalently interested in the study of biological factors of the birth, evolution and death of nations:

  • 139 Gini, “Discorso d’apertura,” 26–27.

How do new stocks grow? Admitting that they definitely come from the obscure mass of population, what are the circumstances that determine their rise? Evidently, this cannot come from the heredity of superior factors, which in the past did not exist. Could the origin be found in fortunate combinations; sorts of crosses between stocks not overly different and favored by natural selection? Could the change of environment caused by migration contribute? And what importance does the selection that operates within migration have?139

83In particular, Gini believed that eugenicists would find in migration and crossbreeding “the key to the generation or regeneration process that allows humanity to perennially renew its hereditary patrimony throughout the centuries.” At the 1929 Italian Congress of Genetics and Eugenics and the 1931 International Congress for Studies on Population, this new paradigm of Italian eugenics assumed an undoubted hegemonic role. The first characteristic of “regenerative” eugenics was a very different approach to the classic issues of European and American eugenics such as racial crossing and sterilization.

  • 140 On Charles B. Davenport, see Kevles, In The Name of Eugenics, 41–56. See also Jan A. Witkowski and (...)
  • 141 Charles B. Davenport, “Sono utili gli incroci di razza?,” in Atti del Secondo Congresso italiano d (...)
  • 142 Cesare Artom, “Costituzioni genetiche nuove per mutazionismo e per incrocio,” in Atti del Secondo (...)
  • 143 Alessandro Ghigi, “Fecondità e sterilità nell’ibridismo e nella consanguineità,” in Atti del Secon (...)
  • 144 Luisa Gianferrari, “Effetti demografici e genetici della consanguineità,” in Corrado Gini, ed., At (...)
  • 145 See Eugen Fischer, “Die gegenseitige Stellung der Menschenrassen auf Grund der mendelden Merkmale, (...)

84Charles Davenport, director of the Eugenics Record Office,140 claimed at the 1929 Congress that there was sufficient “proof of disharmony in human hybrids” and concluded that it was “bad for race crossing to happen on a large scale.”141 But Italian eugenicists had a different opinion. The biologist Cesare Artom saw in “hybridism” and genetic mutations two phenomena able to produce “new organisms with completely new biological and morphological properties,”142 while the zoologist Alessando Ghigi highlighted the importance of “the devastating influence on the human species” of consanguinity. The problem of the “constitutional fertility of the mulatto” did not seem so obvious, but required deeper and more accurate statistical research, which could resolve “one of the most important problems of humanity, because it is linked to the possibility of a regression in the average intelligence of those populations that are being colonized by Africa, and those that have founded their very agricultural richness on the use of Negro workers.”143 Similarly, at the 1931 International Congress for Studies on Population, the positive value of some crosses was stressed by Luisa Gianferrari’s and Giuseppe Cantoni’s paper on the “demographic and genetic effects of inbreeding,”144 while, in the section dedicated to racial crossing, the strongly hereditarian positions of Eugen Fischer—director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Anthropologie of Berlin—and Jon Alfred Mjoen, were contrasted by more circumspect contributions offered by Americans Stanley D. Porteus, based on the application of “Maze tests” on the population of Hawaii, and Harry L. Shapiro, coordinator of a study on Polynesian crossing financed by the Rockefeller Foundation.145 As for the burning issue of sterilization, just as had happened in 1924 in Milan at the First Eugenics Congress, at the 1929 Second Congress, the gynecologist Pestalozza condemned it.

  • 146 Ernesto Pestalozza, “Sterilizzazioni coattive,” in Atti del Secondo Congresso italiano di Genetica (...)

85For “a similar violation of the liberty and physical integrity of the individual” to be justified—Pestalozza declared—“serious social damage” derived from the “free procreation of psychopaths and deficients” would have to be demonstrable, together with a list of the various forms of mental psychopathy that were hereditarily transmissible. But, regarding the latter point, it was “very probable that psychopaths throughout the generations would undergo auto-elimination, due both to their sterility or low fertility, and to the difficulties that would oppose their marriage.” Regarding the former, he declared that “such a demonstration is far from being given, nor is it possible to give it with the current state of our eugenic knowledge.”146

  • 147 Pestalozza, “Sterilizzazioni coattive,” 85.

86This was without taking into account the difficulty of correctly evaluating the consensus of the patient. Considering, rather, the central role of environmental conditions in the transmission of psychical characteristics, “the improvement of the race is to be looked for in the fields of prenatal care and education” rather than in sterilization.147 In conclusion, according to Pestalozza:

  • 148 Pestalozza, “Sterilizzazioni coattive,” 87.

The improvement of the stock is not to be expected from neo-Malthusianism, nor from the limitation of offspring, nor from compulsory sterilization; in sum, not from limitation and prohibition, which represent only the negative part of the eugenic program. It is a program of positive eugenics that we should value, like the program implemented by our national Italian government, with guaranteed assistance aimed at maternity and infancy, with prenatal care, social welfare, and the physical and moral education of the youth.148

  • 149 Augusto Carelli, “Il presunto aumento dei deficienti e malati mentali fra le popolazioni,” in Atti (...)
  • 150 See “Processi verbali,” in Atti del Secondo Congresso italiano di Genetica ed Eugenica, 35.
  • 151 “Processi verbali,” 35–37.

87The paper of neurologist and new president of IPAS, Augusto Carelli, was also in line with Pestalozza’s position: as there was not “any serious proof to support the assumption of an increase in deficients and mentally defectives in current populations,” the alarms regarding a presumed degeneration of the race were unjustified. Therefore, it was important to realize that “legal measures that are the direct consequence of such alarms […] as well as being inhuman, do not have the least justification in the real facts.”149 Carelli proposed the constitution of a commission with the charge of studying the heredity of mental illnesses, their frequency and any eventual practical initiatives. At the 1929 Second Congress of Genetics and Eugenics, while Gaetano Pieraccini limited himself to supporting only the premarital certificate, as an “expedient of defense of the family and community,”150 the physician Felix Tietze, president of the Austrian League for Regeneration and Heredity, and Mrs. Cora B. Hodson, secretary of the IFEO, declared themselves favorable to sterilization, the latter not hesitating to praise the humanitarian characteristics of Californian eugenic legislation.151 But against these declarations, Pestalozza’s reaction left no margins of debate:

  • 152 “Processi verbali,” 37.

To Mrs. Hodson I would say that I reserve my enthusiasm for those surgical operations that tear the ill from their illness or from death, and not for mutilating surgical operations, that I as a surgeon would not deign to carry out, because there is no medical necessity, but only a social interest that has not been demonstrated.152

  • 153 Carlo Foà, “I fattori biologici della diminuzione delle nascite,” in Atti del Secondo Congresso it (...)
  • 154 Carlo Foà, “I fattori biologici della diminuzione delle nascite,” in Gini, ed., Atti del Congresso (...)
  • 155 Silvestro Baglioni, “Funzioni somatiche e genetiche,” in Atti del Secondo Congresso italiano di Ge (...)
  • 156 Agostino Gemelli, “Le vedute della psicologia e della psichiatria nel problema della natalità,” in (...)

88Next to the refusal of the “Anglo-Saxon” model of eugenics, a second characteristic of Italian “regenerative” eugenics was the importance attributed to the eugenic value of fertility and prolificacy. Several Italian contributions at the 1929 and 1931 Congresses focused on this problem: the physiologist Carlo Foa insisted, both in 1929153 and in 1931,154 on the priority of the economic and social causes rather than biological causes of the birthrate decrease. In 1929, Silvestro Baglioni analyzed the parallels existing between the somatic and genetic functions,155 while Agostino Gemelli, in 1931, proposed Catholic sexual ethics as a remedy for the psychological causes of sterility.156

  • 157 See, in particular, Marcello Boldrini, “Biotipi e classi sociali,” in Lucio Silla, ed., Atti della (...)
  • 158 Marcello Boldrini, “Qualità e quantità,” in Atti del Secondo Congresso italiano di Genetica ed Eug (...)
  • 159 Marcello Boldrini, “Qualità e quantità,” Rassegna di studi sessuali, demografia ed eugenica 10, no (...)
  • 160 Boldrini, “Qualità e quantità,” 273.

89The topic of the eugenic value of prolificacy was particularly based on the deep connection between natalist demography and medical constitutionalism. This is quite evident in the works of the statistician Marcello Boldrini, attempting to find a connection between the biology of social stratification and the demography of differential fertility.157 Not surprisingly, it was Boldrini who, at the 1929 Second Congress of Genetics and Eugenics, advocated a synthesis between “quantity” and “quality” of population.158 According to Boldrini, not only did the demographic power of a nation increase its “ethnic and somatic unity,”159 facilitating “mixing and crossing of different groups,”160 but it also contributed to attenuating the dysgenic consequences of the differential fertility of the social classes. Nothing could have been further from “Nordic” eugenics. Boldrini wrote:

  • 161 Boldrini, “Qualità e quantità,” 280.

We are no longer looking at persuading the poorer classes to decrease their fertility, offering them a dream of greater well-being, but rather at resounding, as in the past, that internal voice in members of the higher classes, which encourages them to value paternity by the same standards of moral criteria.161

90The links between “quantity” and “quality,” or between populationism, on one hand, and biotypological constitutionalism, on the other, were clearly expressed, at the Congresses of 1929 and 1931, by the results of the demographic and anthropological study of Italian large families, carried out by Corrado Gini.

  • 162 Corrado Gini, “Prime indagini sulle famiglie numerose,” in Atti del Secondo Congresso italiano di (...)
  • 163 Corrado Gini, “Nuovi risultati delle indagini sulle famiglie numerose,” Atti Istituto Nazionale As (...)
  • 164 Corrado Gini, Angelo Ferrarelli, “Altri risultati delle indagini sulle famiglie numerose,” Metron (...)

91From 1928 onward ISTAT had organized, on the initiative and under the direct responsibility of Gini, a scientific inquiry into Italian families with more than seven children. Based on the data of the registry office and declarations from the heads of families, priorly advised by the Mayor, the research was a census of more than a million and a half large families (exactly, 1,532,206). The analysis of the data was carried out in successive stages: the results of the first 11 provinces were presented in Gini’s contribution to the Second Congress of Genetics and Eugenics in 1929;162 a second analysis, regarding another 23 provinces, was presented at a conference held by the National Institute of Insurance in Rome (27 February 1931)163 and at the University of Geneva (23 March 1931); finally, Gini made the other results public during the 1931 International Congress for Studies on Population.164

  • 165 The list was as follows: Alberto Aggazzotti (Modena, Formiggine, Concordia sulla Secchia), Mario B (...)
  • 166 The “qualitative” aspects included anamnestic traits (name, age, number of children, number of bro (...)

92In January 1931, the demographic inquiry directed by ISTAT was completed with an anthropometric and constitutionalist investigation, coordinated by CISP and aimed at the biotypological study of parents of large families. The teams of physiologists, anthropologists and biologists who joined the initiative dealt with a series of municipalities, subdivided into homogenous regions “from an ethnic and geographical-climatological point of view.”165 The inquiry included a “qualitative” analysis, based on a biotypological card, created by CISP,166 a “quantitative” anthropometric analysis (stature, thoracic perimeter, length of the lower limbs, abdominal diameter, cephalic diameter, etc.) and, in some cases, the examination of blood groups. Every collaborator was required to analyze from 500 to 1 000 families. Thanks to the mobilization of the municipalities, previously alerted by CISP, the examinations were carried out in municipal clinics or in specific locations prepared for the occasion, although home visits were also carried out, particularly in the big cities.

93In June 1931, the first completed records arrived at CISP, while in the successive months most of the single collaborators’ reports were consigned. In August, the inquiry could be said to be already concluded, and its results dominated the section of Anthropology and Geography at the 1931 International Congress.

94A sort of bio-political recording of society, which involved public administrations, medical staff and the national academic system, the ISTAT-CISP inquiry had a double aim. In first place, large families had to become the fulcrum of the demographic and eugenic policies of the fascist regime, as Gini clearly confirmed at a conference held on 16 March 1928, at the Faculty of Law of the University of Bari:

  • 167 Corrado Gini, “Problemi della popolazione,” Annali Istituto di Statistica dell’Università di Bari (...)

The most effective method to re-raise the birthrate, or to contain the decrease, is not to encourage the reproduction of small families and individuals that shun marriage, but rather that of those who have managed to remove every obstacle from their families that opposed their expansion and multiplication, who have preserved the generative power of earlier times intact.
Keeping these families in the country by putting the brakes on emigration, facilitating their natural tendency to reproduce by appealing to the sentiments and considerations that could entice them, executing, wherever necessary, their transplantation to regions that have strong need of prolific elements, constitute the most effective measures.167

95Moreover the scientific observation of large families would help lead to an “anthropological type” of fertility, in order to verify the constitutional theories about the relationship between biotype and “genetic instinct.” Gini once again confirmed in 1928:

  • 168 Gini, “Problemi della popolazione,” 23.

The inquiry could also be useful for science from another point of view, as it could ascertain the scientific grounds of the arguments of the constitutionalist school, or at least of several exponents of such a school, according to which the genetic instinct would be often particularly strong among macrosplanchnic or brevilinear individuals, whose biotype would therefore be favored by selective reproduction, while microsplanchnic or longilinear individuals would be particularly obstructed. If true, this theory would explain the persistence of the brevilinear type, so frequent in the population, compared to the longilinear type, that matrimonial selection should favor.168

  • 169 Alessandro Ghigi, “Costituzione e fertilità,” in Gini, ed., Atti del Congresso internazionale per (...)
  • 170 Nicola Pende, “Costituzione e fecondità,” in Gini, ed., Atti del Congresso internazionale per gli (...)
  • 171 Piero Benedetti, “Contributo alla ricerca dei rapporti tra fecondità e costituzione,” in Gini, ed. (...)

96Not surprisingly, the section of Anthropology and Geography at the 1931 International Congress reserved a significant space for the problem of the relationship between constitution and fertility and the identification of a “maternal biotype.” While the zoologist Alessandro Ghigi insisted above all on the need to study the relationship between male heredity and fertility more deeply,169 Nicola Pende summarized the results of an anthropometric investigation conducted on 250 women from the region of Liguria: “62 % of hyper-fertile women belong to the brevilinear biotype, while 38 % are the longilinear biotype: among brevilinear women 50.7 % were hyper-fertile, while among the longilinear it is 23.5 %.”170 The link between “brevilinear type” and fertility was reaffirmed shortly after by Piero Benedetti, of the medical clinic of the University of Bologna: “The brachytypic category possesses […] in respect to the others, the greatest fertility; the longitypic the least.”171

  • 172 The subcommittee of the study, nominated by Gini, was composed of: Livio Livi, president, member o (...)
  • 173 For a description of the initiative see Duilio Balestra, “La preparazione dell’indagine antropomet (...)
  • 174 Corrado Gini, “Alcuni risultati preliminari dell’indagine antropometrica sui soldati italiani,” in (...)

97In the same section, a vast anthropometric and constitutional inquiry on an entire class of conscripts in the State Armed Forces was described. This research was organized by ISTAT, in collaboration with the Ministry of War,172 and aimed at the identification of a hypothetical “Italian ethnic type,” deriving from increased internal immigration.173 The “anthropological” record adopted included the following titles: full name, criminality, vaccinations, infirmities, anthropometric data (weight, height, skin color, nasal, face and head shape, color and quantity of hair, eye color, profile of the face, nose, and chin, mouth shape, teeth, eyebrows, etc.) indices, blood group, and vocal range. Presenting the first results, relative to 1900 soldiers of the 1907–1909 classes, Gini came to a conclusion that only partly confirmed the biotypological theory, focusing on the centrality, in the relationship between fertility and constitution, of the “intermediate type” instead of the brevilinear.174

98Again in 1933, outlining the comprehensive results of the inquiry on large families in Paris, at the 6th International Congress of the Ligue Internationale pour la Vie et la Famille, Gini went so far as to identify an anthropological and racial type of fertility, which was much closer to Quetelet’s “average man” than Nicola Pende’s “brevilinear” type:

  • 175 Corrado Gini, Enquête démographique sur les familles nombreuses italiennes. Résultats des recherch (...)

The partial results obtained from different collaborators of the anthropometric inquiry carried out on the fathers and mothers of large families lead to the conclusion that the morphological type of the individuals examined, both men and women, for the major part of characters, oscillates around average values, as much for the fundamental measurements as for the index values.175

99Following this, Gini summarized the bio-social characteristics of this “average” man:

  • 176 Gini, Enquête démographique sur les familles nombreuses italiennes. Résultats des recherches, 28.

Environmental and economic conditions generally not very favorable; occupations for the father generally manual and tiring; for the mother, household duties; for the men, little adiposity, agile body shape, long limbs, large chest, normal abdomen, an on-average tall height; for the women, a more squat body shape, tendency to adiposity, narrow chest, average abdomen, short limbs, medium-short height, normal menstrual cycle.176

100In 1932, as head of an Italian delegation to the 3rd International Eugenics Congress in New York, Gini once again presented the prospect of a eugenics based on a harmonic connection between the quantity and quality of the population:

  • 177 Corrado Gini, “Response to the Presidential Address,” in A decade of progress in eugenics: Scienti (...)

In the matter of population, as in other fields, the problems of quantity and quality are indissolubly connected. As I see it, they are indissolubly connected not only because in practice it is difficult to think of a measure affecting the number of inhabitants which does not also affect their qualitative distribution, or of a measure hindering or encouraging the reproduction of certain categories of people which does not also modify, directly or indirectly, the number of the population, but also and above all because population is a biological whole, subject, as such, to biological laws, which show us that mass, structure, metabolism, psychic phenomena, the reproduction of organic life are all indissolubly connected, both in their static condition and in their evolution, so that it would be vain to try to modify some of these characters without taking into account the stage of development attained by the other.177

  • 178 Corrado Gini, “Remarks on the explanation of heterosis,” in A decade of progress in eugenics, 421– (...)

101Not surprisingly, at the 1932 International Congress, Gini’s paper concentrated on one of the main themes of “regenerative” eugenics: the heterosis of hybrids.178 According to Gini, empirical data did not seem to support the American geneticists East and Jones, who theorized a 50 percent diminution of heterosis between the first and second generation of hybrids and a progressive diminution over the successive generations:

  • 179 Gini, “Remarks on the explanation of heterosis,” 423.

Then, granted that on the contrary this reduction does occur, we must conclude that the above explanation is insufficient and that it must either be completed by an additional explanation or replaced by another more in keeping with the facts.
It would appear also, that a 50 per cent reduction of heterosis from the first to the second generation of hybrids is not always in keeping with experience, so that also from this side, the theory is not always confirmed by facts.179

  • 180 Gini, “III Congresso internazionale di Eugenica,” 5.

102In New York, the Italian delegation also participated in the exhibition, organized on the occasion of the Congress, providing exhibits which painted a picture of Gini’s hegemony on fascist eugenics. In fact, the Italian contribution included three series of diagrams and cartograms organized by ISTAT; the proceedings of the 1924 and 1929 Eugenics Congresses published by SIGE; the issues of Genesis and Metron; the volumes published by CISP, and finally, Lidio Cipriani’s African facial masks, exhibited at the American Museum of Natural History.180

103Some years later, under the banner of “regenerative” eugenics and in opposition to the “Nordic” (Anglo-American and German-Scandinavian) component of the IFEO, Gini inaugurated the Latin Federation of Eugenic Organizations (Federazione Latina delle Società di Eugenica). The turning point came, not surprisingly, after the International Population Congress in Berlin, in the summer of 1935. On 26 September 1935, a letter sent by the Ministry of National Education to the Presidency of the Council of Ministers and the Presidency of ISTAT, based on a detailed report by Gini, explicitly stated the intention to draw back from the IFEO:

  • 181 The letter is conserved in ACS, PCM, 1940–43, b. 2674, f. 1.1.16.3.5.27.000-7, sf. 3.

The Italian scholars must abstain from collaborating with the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations, from which our representatives have distanced themselves in consideration of its program, which evidently contrasts with the Italian direction regarding the qualitative population policy.181

104In the speech Gini prepared for the first meeting organized by the Latin Federation, held in Mexico City, on 12 October 1935, the new Latin eugenics was characterized by three elements. First of all, the rejection of birth control and the search for a balance between the “quantity” and the “quality” of the population:

  • 182 Corrado Gini, “Parole inaugurali del Prof. C. Gini, lette alla riunione delle Società di Eugenica (...)

The idea of a league of nations with low birth-rates could not originate among the Latins. Nor is it likely that Latins would ever grasp at the expedient of sending propagandists to countries with high birth-rates to spread the seeds of limitation of the birth-rate and mitigate their demographic pressure in this way. […] This all shows that the fundamental eugenic problem of the relationship between quantity and quality of the birthrate can be objectively studied in the Latin Federation, in all its complexity, without postulating a contrast that needs to be demonstrated and without unilaterally taking into consideration only the facts that seem to bear witness in one sense.182

  • 183 Gini, “Parole inaugurali del Prof. C. Gini, lette alla riunione delle Società di Eugenica dell’Ame (...)

105Similarly, in regard to migratory movements, the variety of situations within “Latin” countries and the absence of a policy that “defended the national market from the competition of foreign labor” favored “an impartial examination of the effects of immigration and emigration on the quantitative development of the population, such as the selective character of the emigrations and therefore their influence on the characteristics of the population of the country of origin and that of destination.”183 Finally, regarding the problem of race, and, in particular, the theme of crossbreeding, Latin eugenics could assume, according to Gini, a more balanced position, avoiding democratic egalitarianism, without however degenerating into national-socialist mixophobia:

  • 184 Gini, “Parole inaugurali del Prof. C. Gini, lette alla riunione delle Società di Eugenica dell’Ame (...)

[Latin eugenicists] are not blinded with national sentiment to the point of believing, against history, that we can speak of a superiority of race for every time and place. It is, on the other hand, probable that, when crosses with another race appear inevitable, they can be kept from falling into the opposite extreme, judging all the races as absolutely equal from the point of view of their intellectual attitudes.184

  • 185 Gini, “Parole inaugurali del Prof. C. Gini, lette alla riunione delle Società di Eugenica dell’Ame (...)

106Several Latin nations found themselves at the peak of their economic and cultural power, others were rapidly developing, others, still “having a past superior to the present,” were passing through a “phase of renewal with hopes for a grand arrival”: Only Latin nations, therefore, could observe eugenics “without badly concealed concern,” through the lens of Gini’s cyclical theory of nations, “recognizing […]—as in the evolution of other animal and vegetable species—the fundamental importance of the internal biological forces and mutations coming from variations of environment or crosses.”185

  • 186 Gini, “Parole inaugurali del Prof. C. Gini, lette alla riunione delle Società di Eugenica dell’Ame (...)

107The three cardinal points of “regenerative” eugenics, according to Gini, were very clear: the eugenic value of populationism, the renewing effect of migrations and the phenomenon of heterosis in crossbreeding. This was the Latin model. In Gini’s view, all the eugenic measures, including “the most extreme and, for some of us, highly repugnant,”186 had to be examined and discussed. And this neutral analysis could be provided only by Latin populations, who were in “favorable conditions” to address these problems “with scientific objectivity.” In fact:

  • 187 Gini, “Parole inaugurali del Prof. C. Gini, lette alla riunione delle Società di Eugenica dell’Ame (...)

As the Latin countries have never been used as colonies of deportation, they will not encounter those sources of degeneration that weigh on the economic and moral balance of other nations, nor do sexual perverts assume in their populations such importance as to suggest to scientists to constitute a third sexual category, or give rise to movements because this judgment is juridically recognized. These are circumstances that help to understand how suggestions of radical measures of elimination came to be listened to in other countries.187

108In any case—Gini concluded—the “Latin” scientists would never forget the lessons of ancient Roman civilization and would never accept the practice of sterilization:

  • 188 Gini, “Parole inaugurali del Prof. C. Gini, lette alla riunione delle Società di Eugenica dell’Ame (...)

It is very natural that the descendents of Rome, which […] thousands of years ago imposed the abolition of human sacrifices, and then gradually achieved the abolition of slavery, feel complete reluctance in the face of a measure that deprives man of one of the most essential attributes of his personality and sacrifices one of the most salient manifestations of life.188

  • 189 Members of the Latin Federation of Eugenic Organizations were, in 1937, in addition to Italy, Arge (...)

109It was on this theoretical foundation that two years later, in August 1937, the First Latin Eugenics Congress was held in Paris, due to the strategic alliance between Gini’s SIGE and the eugenic section of the French Institut International d’Anthropologie.189

  • 190 See Raymond Turpin, Alexandre Caratzali and Gorny, “Contributions a l’étude de l’influence de l’âg (...)
  • 191 See René Martial, “Métissage et immigration,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’E (...)
  • 192 See Étienne Letard, “Les leçons de l’expérimentation animale dans le problème du métissage,” in Fé (...)
  • 193 See Alfred Thooris, “Considérations ethnologiques et démographiques sur la population française,” (...)

110French, Romanian and Italian physicians, hygienists and anthropologists participated at the Paris congress, emphasizing an ideological and scientific position markedly opposed to “Nordic” eugenics. The theme of birth control was almost nonexistent, replaced by Italian-French natalism, underlining the “eugenicity” of prolific families.190 As for racial crossing, only René Martial, professor at the Institute of Hygiene of the Medical Faculty in Paris, celebrated the American eugenic fight against miscegenation, judging crossbreeding between the French and the “yellow” or “black” races negatively and calling for the introduction of a eugenic control of immigration.191 Professor of veterinary medicine and agronomy, Étienne Letard, instead claimed that it was not possible to create a “hierarchy” of the biological validity of the human species,192 while the physician Alfred Thooris, scientific consultant of the Fédération Française d’Athletisme, proclaimed the positivity of crossbreeding between the “Celtic race” and all the other stocks, with the exception of the Jews, whom he regarded as totally inassimilable.193

  • 194 Franziska Minkowska, “Eugénique et Généalogie,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d (...)
  • 195 See Georges Schreiber, “Allocations familiales et Eugénique,” in Fédération Internationale Latine (...)

111The attitudes toward the Nazi eugenic legislation differed: the law of 14 July 1933 was severely criticized, for example, by the French physician Franziska Minkowska,194 but Georges Schreiber, vice-president of the Société Française d’Eugénique, highlighted the German example for the French, particularly with regard to the elements of the adoption of matrimonial loans to couples who had their eugenic efficacy certified.195

  • 196 See Edmond-Alexandre Lesné, “Influence des régimes carencés et déséquilibrés, suralimentation et s (...)
  • 197 See Marcello Boldrini, “Constitution et Eugénique,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociét (...)
  • 198 Gheorghe Banu, “Les facteurs dysgéniques en Roumanie: principes d’un programme pratique d’eugéniqu (...)

112In general, “Latin” eugenicists at the Congress rejected rigid Weismannian hereditarianism and its socio-biological determinism. An entire section of the Congress was dedicated to the possible forms of healing the illnesses of the germ plasm196 and several papers stressed the importance of environmental conditions, education and biotypological monitoring.197 Called on to delineate a eugenic program for Romania, Gheorghe Banu, member of the Royal Romanian Society for Eugenics and Heredity, dedicated a large space to the questions of hygiene, the fight against social illnesses, and the protection of maternity and premarital certificates, leaving the proposal of limited sterilization of the chronically mentally ill, with consensus obtained from the families of the subject, to a brief concluding chapter.198

  • 199 See Dino Camavitto, “Premiers résultats d’une recherche anthropologique sur les Zambos de la Costa (...)

113Following Gini’s scientific paradigm, the Italian participants at the Congress focused their papers mainly on the problem of social metabolism produced by the cyclical evolution of nations, explicitly opposing the genetocratic social crystallization of Anglo-American eugenics.199 An example was the relation of Giuseppina Levi della Vida, who criticized Karl Pearson’s eugenic arguments, on the basis of Gini’s theory. The biological decadence of the elite—maintained Levi della Vida—did not bring about the degeneration of civilization, as Pearson had claimed, but on the contrary, was absorbed by the parallel rise of the inferior classes:

  • 200 Levi della Vida, “Le métabolisme social comme facteur de dégénération dans la societe,” 129.

According to Gini’s theories, social metabolism, far from representing a degenerative factor, constitutes a useful mechanism for society, in the sense that, continually renewing the ruling classes, for a certain period of time favors their development, and following this, prevents an overly rapid fall.200

  • 201 Corrado Gini, “Biotypologie et Eugénique,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugé (...)

114Corrado Gini’s contribution to the Paris Congress was centered on the problem of identifying a biological-statistical medietas as the fundamental criteria for racial biotypology. Entitled Biotypologie et Eugenique, Gini’s paper claimed, first of all, the conceptual weakness of the “biotype” from a statistical point of view: since the frequency of the constitutional indices (thoracic index, ponderal index, etc.) were generally not in correspondence with the values that identified type, but rather had a relationship with the arithmetic mean of the same values, the “biotype” as defined by the constitutional school did not have a mathematical-statistical foundation, but represented only a sort of “mental category.” It would therefore be better to define the “biotype” in terms of “constitutional form” or “constitutional morphology.”201

  • 202 Gini, “Biotypologie et Eugénique,” 204.
  • 203 See Corrado Gini, “Une question importante pour la science des constitutions et pour la médecine m (...)

115Despite this criticism, Gini supported the need for a “statistical study of the constitutions” that would fit in the more general framework of the correlations between “the intensity of the same characteristic in two successive generations.”202 Nevertheless, according to Gini, a statistical-demographic approach to biotypology would bring two further problems with it: on one hand, the identification of a criteria of “normality,” which Gini recognized in the geometric mean between linear or monotone relationships (for example, stature and thoracic perimeter);203 on the other, deeper study into the problems of “heredity” of characteristics, aimed at defining the “inter-racial” or “intra-racial” origins of biotypes.

116It was to inform this latter aspect that Gini reconsidered the data from the CISP-ISTAT inquiry on large families. This data showed that the brevilinear form was prevalent in the Po valley and that, on the other hand, the medium form was more frequent in Sardinia: couldn’t the relationship between fertility and the brevilinear form—Gini asked—derive from a different reproductive capacity of the alpine and dinaric (brevilinear) races in comparison with the Mediterranean (longilinear)?

117In conclusion, Gini repeated the necessity of reinforcing the scientific basis of biotypology:

  • 204 Gini, “Biotypologie et Eugénique,” 211.

It is a delicate subject. We need to be clear about the terms, adopt the methods that are least susceptible to criticism and set up the research in a way that responds well to the questions to resolve. The difficulties regarding this last point are multiple, and the progress will consequently be slow.204

118In Italy, “Latin” eugenics, largely shared by demographers and statisticians, nevertheless aroused the resistance of biological racists, who preferred to base fascist eugenics on the Nazi model.

119In the field of colonial racism, for example, Gini’s complex scientific evaluation of the problems of crossbreeding clashed, in 1937, with the introduction of the fascist laws against racial crossing. In 1932, presenting Lidio Cipriani’s book, Considerazioni sopra il passato e l’avvenire delle popolazioni africane [Considerations on the past and future of African populations], published under the auspices of SIGE in the CISP series, Gini tried to reconcile the bio-demographic potential of racial crossings with the need to control them, above all the in Italian colonies:

  • 205 Corrado Gini, preface in L. Cipriani, Considerazioni sopra il passato e l’avvenire delle popolazio (...)

Recognizing the necessity of racial crossings for the conservation of the stock, and acknowledging that, according to the racial elements that are combined, the quality of the products will vary, there will be diversity, from a social point of view, in the value of these crossings in relation to the different environmental demands. However, this does not negate the importance of the eugenic problems of crossings. If anything, it accentuates it, insofar as, recognizing the inevitable characteristic of the phenomenon, the need to control it becomes more evident.205

  • 206 The interview with Gini was published in two successive articles, signed by Genesio Eugenio Del Mo (...)

120Several years later in 1937, in an interview published in the journal L’Azione coloniale [Colonial action],206 Gini explicitly approved the racist measures of the government, but repeated his arguments on the positive value of racial crossings as a factor in revitalizing the nation. The author of the interview, Genesio Eugenio Del Monte, during the purging trial against Gini in 1944–45, in an attempt to underline Gini’s distance from official state racism, provided an interesting retrospective description of the whole affair:

From 1928, I was introduced to studies on racial crossings by Father Mauro da Leonessa, capuchin missionary, currently in Rome at the Convent of the Capuchins of S. Lorenzo Fuori Le Mura.
But only in January 1937 did the Italian press accept my article on the problem of racial crossing, since it was only then that the fascist government officially decided to follow the example that Great Britain, for some centuries, the United States of America since their constitution and the Colony of the Cape successively, had adopted, that is, racist policies, with results that even today are not denied.

  • 207 Declaration by Genesio Eugenio Del Monte, November 7, 1944, ACS, MPI, DGIS, Professori Universitar (...)

In Italy, Prof. Gini had for some years deeply studied these questions, and therefore I decided to ask him, in February 1937, for an interview for L’Azione Coloniale, which as has been noted, was the unofficial organ of the Ministry of Colonies. The interview, which was partly distant from my own ideas, was greeted with much enthusiasm by the Director of L’Azione Coloniale, Dr. Marco Pomilio, but although the first part came out, the following part was published after many difficulties due to an intervention from the government; and, unlike what had happened to similar articles, the Italian press completely ignored the highly important interview that was the synthesis of scientific research that since then has been acknowledged in that field.
In the end, I myself was invited not to cite the studies of Prof. Gini in my writings on crosses, for reasons of appropriateness; I was made to understand that Prof. Gini was unpopular with some authorities, who, moreover, were irritated by his declarations in the interview, that in various points did not seem to be in accord with the racial policies of the fascist government.207

  • 208 Alberto Pollera, a colonial officer who served the colonial administration from his early twenties (...)

121When, in 1939, Del Monte once again collaborated with L’Azione Coloniale for a series of articles on the bibliography of racial crossing, he was “categorically invited” to not cite Gini or the “Jewish” statistician Kuczynski.208

  • 209 Telesio Interlandi, “Cattolici sugli specchi,” Il Tevere (23–24 July 1938).

122In July 1938, the prominent journalist Telesio Interlandi, considered Mussolini’s unofficial mouthpiece, attacked Gini’s eugenics in the pages of the newspaper Il Tevere. After labeling Gini as a scholar “better known as a statistics expert than a pillar of eugenics,”209 Interlandi interpreted the critical attitude toward national socialist racism, which several Italian scientists, symbolically represented by Gini, had adopted, as a “zone of dissidence” to be suffocated in order to obtain “greater political order”:

  • 210 Telesio Interlandi, “Zone di dissidentismo,” Il Tevere (23–24 April 1938).

In this way science perpetuates a divorce that could be damaging to fascist society, denouncing in first place a deplorable political insensitivity. It is our work to signal the most scandalous manifestations of such insensitivity, because this way we can obtain the greatest political control in every zone of culture where dissidence flowers.210

  • 211 Giovanni Preziosi, “Per la serietà degli studi razziali in Italia (dedicato al camerata Giacomo Ac (...)

123Giovanni Preziosi, one of the most prominent Italian fascist anti-Semites, also heavily attacked Gini and his “infamous and antiracist eugenic Congress in Paris,” describing the Latin Federation of Eugenics as an instrument “in the hands of Jews and Masons.”211

  • 212 Giuseppe Montalenti, “I recenti studi sul problema della determinazione del sesso e dei caratteri (...)
  • 213 Claudio Barigozzi, “I nuovi orizzonti della citogenetica,” Genus 3, no. 3–4 (June 1939): 35–72.
  • 214 Adriano Buzzati-Traverso, “I nuovi orizz onti della radiogenetica,” Genus 3, no. 3–4 (June 1939): (...)
  • 215 On SIGE third Congress, see also “Società italiana di genetica ed eugenica. Riunione di Bologna, 5 (...)

124Nevertheless, contrary to what Interlandi and Preziosi claimed, “quantity” once again prevailed over “quality” at the Third Congress of SIGE, held in Bologna in September 1938. In front of Luigi Cesari, delegate of the General Direction for Demography and Race, and Emil Witschi, professor at the State University of Iowa, Gini emphatically inaugurated the SIGE Congress, announcing the organization of a second International Congress of Latin Eugenics, scheduled for 1939 in Bucharest. Regarding communications and relations, the role of Italian genetics was on this occasion more important in comparison to the preceding congresses of 1924 and 1929. The Third Congress of SIGE was in fact characterized by two sections of genetics: general genetics, represented by Giuseppe Montalenti,212 Claudio Barigozzi213 and Adriano Buzzati-Traverso;214 and animal and vegetal genetics, represented by Alessandro Ghigi and the scholars of his Institute of Zoology in Bologna (where, not coincidently, the congress was held).215

  • 216 Corrado Gini, “Prolificità e frequenza dei parti plurimi,” Genus 3, no. 3–4 (June 1939): 279–96.

125The human genetics section was represented by Corrado Gini, Agostino Gemelli and Giuseppe Pintus, but it was above all the fourth session that was dominated by Gini’s “regenerative” eugenics. While Gini’s contribution was aimed at demonstrating that prolific women were no longer exposed to the danger of dysgenic twin births,216 Marcello Boldrini, in opposition to the Anglo-Saxon position, emphasized the eugenic role of differential fertility. Boldrini referred in particular to the research of English neo-Malthusian eugenicist Raymond B. Cattell, according to whom the intelligence quotient was decreasing by one point every decade, due to differential fertility. On the contrary, according to the Italian statistician, the greater fertility of the lowest social classes did not necessarily have a dysgenic effect.

  • 217 Marcello Boldrini, “La fertilità degli individui deficienti e difettosi,” Genus 3, no. 3–4 (June 1 (...)
  • 218 Boldrini, “La fertilità degli individui deficienti e difettosi,” 304.
  • 219 Boldrini, “La fertilità degli individui deficienti e difettosi,” 303.
  • 220 Boldrini, “La fertilità degli individui deficienti e difettosi,” 305.

126In first place, it was worth considering the low reproductiveness of “deficient and defective individuals.”217 Added to this was the fact that “the man immune from defects and the defective man, if not two abstractions, are at the least two relatively rare entities, while most people combine, coordinated in a system, both positive and negative qualities.”218 Human processes of adaptation determined, nevertheless, a “social neutralization of the defects and imperfections, which characterize every type and every non-anomalous combination of attributes.”219 Consequently, if it were true that the growing average number of children, from the top to the bottom of the social hierarchy, would favor, in future generations, both the positive and negative qualities of the inferior social classes, “the more advanced social neutralization of the most common psychical and physical imperfections in the higher and middle classes would cause—as regards negative traits—the opposite tendency.”220

  • 221 Boldrini, “La fertilità degli individui deficienti e difettosi,” 307.

127Finally—and it was Boldrini’s last criticism of “Anglo-Saxon” eugenics—no one could know today the aesthetic ideal of the future: if the Spain of Philip IV had been preoccupied with eugenics, it would probably not have fostered “a good number of those dwarves and buffoons” immortalized by Velazquez. In conclusion, therefore, “eugenic or dysgenic consequences could result from the differential fertility of the social classes; but not necessarily of the type that many eugenicists have foreseen.”221

  • 222 On Nora Federici, see: Treves, Le nascite e la politica, 338–43; 459–65.

128In addition to Boldrini’s contribution, the demographer Nora Federici, a pupil of Gini's,222 provided the first results from the ethnological research studies organized by CISP, of several “primitive” populations in a state of demographic isolation. These results were obviously in absolute agreement with Gini’s “regenerative” eugenics. The data, regarding several anthropometric characteristics (stature, seated stature, weight and biacromial diameter) of populations studied by CISP—Karaites, Dauada and Berbers from Giado—confirmed Gini’s theory on the negative effects of endogamy. Nora Federici wrote:

  • 223 Nora Federici, “La curva di sviluppo individuale presso alcune popolazioni isolate,” Genus 3, no. (...)

All three populations examined behaved—notwithstanding the racial and environmental differences—in an analogous manner as regards development, demonstrating a visible slowing down in the development of all the considered characteristics compared to other populations that were not in a state of demographic isolation. These results therefore confirm the hypothesis that the regime of endogamy would have a detrimental influence on the corporeal development of the individual.223

129Not surprisingly, the proceedings of the Third Congress of SIGE were published by Genus, the organ of CISP directed by Gini with the funds of the Italian National Research Council (CNR).

  • 224 CISP-Commissione di demografia storica, Fonti archivistiche per lo studio dei problemi della popol (...)

130In the late 1930s, CISP’s ethnological investigations represented the most relevant scientific contribution of Gini’s “regenerative” eugenics. From 1928 to 1931, CISP had two principal initiatives: the demographic and anthropological inquiry on large families, and the collection of the archival sources of Italian demographic history, successively published in a monumental work of eleven volumes.224

  • 225 See Carlo Valenziani, Il problema demografico dell’Africa equatoriale (Rome: Tip. C. Colombo, 1929 (...)

131Anthropological and sociological research, financed and published by CISP, appeared massively influenced by Gini’s cyclical theory of nations, focusing on particular issues dear to Gini, such as the mechanisms of social exchange or the different forces of expansion of various populations and social classes.225

  • 226 For a comprehensive synthesis, see Corrado Gini and Nora Federici, Appunti sulle spedizioni scient (...)

132Between 1933 and 1938, CISP organized ten expeditions, personally directed by Gini, which played a central role in Italian “Latin” eugenics: seven of these regarded populations considered “primitive” (the Dauada of Tripolitania, the Samaritans of Palestine, the Mexican populations, the Karaites of Poland and Lithuania, the Bantu of South Africa and the Berbers from Giado); the other three concentrated on the Italian “ethnic islands” (the Albanians in Calabria, the Ligurians in Carloforte and Calasetta in Sardinia).226

  • 227 Corrado Gini, “Le Comité Italien pour l’étude des problèmes de la population,” Bulletin de l’Insti (...)
  • 228 Corrado Gini, “Researches on Population,” Scientia 55, no. 265 (May 1934): 357–73.

133In every presentation of CISP’s activities to the international scientific community, but above all in 1928 at the International Institute of Statistics in Brussels,227 and in 1934 in Cleveland at the Hanna Lecture Foundation,228 Gini explicitly linked the demographic and anthropological inquiries on primitive populations to the empirical testing of several aspects of the cyclical theory of nations, which were deeply connected with “regenerative” eugenics: in particular, the “revival” effect of crossbreeding and the dysgenic effect of demographic isolation.

134“Primitive” populations represented, in Gini’s view, the only anthropological source for a diachronic analysis of the different phases of the evolution of populations, almost a sort of snapshot that could restore the precise image of the mechanisms and causes of two demographic phases otherwise difficult to investigate, that is, the birth and death of the nation-organism. In 1928, Gini declared:

  • 229 Gini, “ Le Comité Italien pour l’étude des problèmes de la population,” 205.

One of the essential aims of the Committee is to gather the broadest data possible on these primitive and decadent populations, and to especially study the modality and, if possible, the cause of the decadence and gradual disappearance of certain races, and in the same way, the formation and blooming of new races, on which our ignorance is almost total.229

135Regarding crossbreeding, CISP’s scientific missions seemed to completely confirm Gini’s theories: while demographic isolation and endogamy favored the senescence and decadence of a population, mixing produced a “revival” of nations.

  • 230 Corrado Gini, “Le rilevazioni statistiche fra le popolazioni primitive,” Supplemento statistico ai (...)
  • 231 Gini, Le rilevazioni statistiche fra le popolazioni primitive, 213.

136During the 1940s, with reference to CISP’s scientific missions, Gini developed a particular interpretation of “primitiveness” from the point of view of “regenerative” eugenics and the cyclical theory of nations.230 For Gini, absence of culture, poverty, and “stationariness” were necessary, but not sufficient, characteristics for the definition of “primitive.” A principle characteristic of “primitives” was technological backwardness, which in its turn impeded “those forms of culture and richness of a cumulative nature that are the essential causes of social progress.”231 But if, from a technological point of view, “primitives” were in an “infantile phase,” from a biological and social point of view “primitiveness” was, for Gini, synonymous with “decadence” and “senescence”:

  • 232 Gini, Le rilevazioni statistiche fra le popolazioni primitive, 215.

From a point of view of etiquette, of customs, social institutions, they are crystallized populations. Crystallized and often decadent. Lacking the capacity to progress, they are endowed with limited faculties of recovery: placed in difficult conditions, their social organization crumbles.232

  • 233 Gini, Le rilevazioni statistiche fra le popolazioni primitive, 215–16.

137Biologically, primitive populations were for the most part “worn, senescent, characterized by little variability, and therefore little adaptability, sometimes by degenerative characteristics, generally by limited and often insufficient reproductive elements that make their demographic equilibrium unstable, or even determine their numerical decline.”233 In his analysis of the causes of primitiveness, Gini distinguished among “racial,” “environmental” and “evolutionary” factors. As for the first, he did not deny the “low intellectual level,” lack of inventiveness and some “physical deficiencies” in primitive populations, but was not disposed to generalize and claim that they were innate. Nevertheless, in a passage dedicated to “psychical deficiencies,” Gini’s discourse concluded with a justification of anti-Semitism as an “understandable reaction”:

  • 234 Gini, Le rilevazioni statistiche fra le popolazioni primitive, 221; italics added.

There are some populations in which individuals spend the major part of their energies in emulative acts, which neutralize each other […].
If individuals of such populations were transplanted to other populations not habituated to emulative acts, they would make their fortune at the other’s expense, even if, in the long run, it causes understandable reactions. This is the case for the Armenians and the Jews.234

138If “racial qualities” did not appear to be necessary and sufficient conditions for “primitiveness,” neither did environmental factors seem to exercise a determining influence. Even when transported “to the environment of civilized populations,” the primitives did not lose their characteristics, and Gini cited, as a sort of apparent exception to the rules, the case of the “Negroes of America”:

  • 235 Gini, Le rilevazioni statistiche fra le popolazioni primitive, 221.

There is—it is true—the example of the Negroes of America, who, introduced into Caucasian civilization several centuries ago, maintain evident characteristics that are inferior compared to the Whites.
While that is undeniable, we must however recognize that the Negroes of America have made great strides on the path of civilization, so that it is difficult today to classify them as primitive.235

  • 236 Gini, Le rilevazioni statistiche fra le popolazioni primitive, 226.

139But the “civilization” of the African Americans was slow enough—Gini continued—to believe that the change was due not so much to environment as to the “progressive infusion of white blood and the progressive selection of individuals who had it.”236 Consequently, the “Negroes that emerge” were, in reality “not true Negroes, but hybrids.” Regarding individual environmental factors, not isolation, nor monetary exchange, not the scarcity of resources, nor even a temperate climate could help to clearly identify “primitiveness.” Instead, it was the “evolutionary” factors, defined in the cyclical theory of nations, which furnished a “plausible explanation.” As a result

  • 237 Gini, Le rilevazioni statistiche fra le popolazioni primitive, 240.

the more primitive populations are studied, the more we are persuaded that not only do they present an arrested development, but that very often they also present a qualitative and quantitative regression. […] Primitive populations are, in the majority of cases, decadent populations, populations in the course of involution, senescent populations.237

140The “primitives” were characterized by a substantial “physiological arrest”: the “arrest of development that naturally waits for every living organism, individual or collective.” Primitive populations were the forebears of “civilized” ones: they still survived and from them, thanks to the revitalizing power of crossings, some new, vigorous scion might arise.

141So while the “primitives” therefore represented, in Gini’s “regenerative” eugenics, the decadent and senile side of humanity, it was the hybrids—whether Bantu, inhabitants of Brazilian Cearà or the Black Americans—who would paradoxically announce, in the socio-biological transfusion between civilized and primitive, the rise of future populations.

2. Constitutionalism and “Latin” Eugenics: Nicola Pende’s Biotypological Institute

  • 238 On biotypology and constitutional medicine, see: Cristopher Lawrence and George Weisz, eds., Great (...)
  • 239 On constitutional medicine in Italy, see: Giorgio Cosmacini, “Medicina, ideologie, filosofie nel p (...)

142The second pillar of Italian eugenics, between the 1920s and 1940s, was medical constitutionalism.238 The Italian constitutional school had been founded, at the end of the nineteenth century, by Achille De Giovanni and Giacinto Viola. Italian constitutionalism was a neo-Hippocratic and holistic medical perspective, which stressed the relevance of “predisposition” in etiology and pathogenesis, shifting attention from causal agents of illness to the body’s responses to such agents (the so-called “terrain”). It was based on three general principles: the primacy of the clinic; the individualized conception of illness; and natural treatment, aimed at aiding the body’s own reaction to illness.239

  • 240 See, in particular, Mantovani, Rigenerare la societa, 225–33.

143Nicola Pende, a student of Giacinto Viola, can be considered as the principle exponent of Italian constitutionalism in the fascist period.240 Born in Noicattaro, a small village near Bari, in 1880, Pende taught pathology and clinical medicine in Bologna, Messina and Cagliari, between 1907 and 1924. From October 1924 to 1925, he was the first chancellor at the Adriatic University of Bari. In 1925 he became the director of the Institute of Clinical Medicine at the University of Genoa. The year before, he had received honoris causa membership of the National Fascist Party. In 1933, he was appointed senator.

144As regards De Giovanni’s and Viola’s constitutionalism, Nicola Pende introduced two important innovations. The first was the combination between medical constitutionalism and endocrinology. According to Pende, “constitutional hormonology” was based “on studies of the relationship between the endocrinal-vegetative system and biotypical aspects (morphological, humoral-functional, affective-volitive, intellectual).” In this framework, internal secretions became the “real fibers of the soul,” that is, the fundamental connections between morphology and psychology. Pende’s biotypological methods researched the “neuro-humoral” parameters (neuro-vegetative equilibrium, hormonal configuration) in order to define the relationships between corporeal and psychical nature, or, in other words, between, on one side, the anamnestic and biometricdescriptive level, and, on the other, the psycho-sociological and psychometric level.

145Through endocrinology, Pende could provide an “integral biotypological profile” of the individual—the so-called biotype—geometrically defined as a quadrangular pyramid, the base of which represented individual, familial and racial inheritance, and the four sides of which indicated the different aspects of life: morphological individuality, physiological individuality, ethical and affective-volitive individuality, and intellectual individuality.

146In Pende’s theory, the individual was described as a “corporeal factory,” whose structural-dynamic features were defined by four orders of factors: hereditary or conceptional factors, divided into racial factors and individual hereditary factors; post-conception conditional-environmental factors, which acted during the entire period of formation of the being and in the fulfillment of the hereditary program; humoral factors, both those that generated energy (nutritional material) and those that regulated the process of development of energy; and finally, the dominant neuro-psychical factors, that is, the nervous center of the life of relations and vegetative life, and psychical energy.

  • 241 Nicola Pende, Dalla medicina alla sociologia (Palermo: Prometeo, 1921), 7.
  • 242 Pende, Dalla medicina alla sociologia, 72.

147Pende’s second twist to Italian medical constitutionalism—the interconnection between biotypology and politics—was based on his total scientific explanation of individual behavior. Since the hormones of the endocrine gland “influence the constitution and the harmonic form of the body” and were also “essential parts of the constitution and the form of the soul,”241 it logically followed that the guiding principles of politics should be identified in biology. In 1921, Pende outlined an organicist theory of society, in which the “constitution of the State” was based on the collaboration between “the organs and the classes destined by nature to functions of vegetative life, that is, the production and distribution of common pabulum (nourishment) in all social activity,” and “the classes destined by nature to functions of the life of relations, that is to coordinate the relationships between all the elements and the collective relationships with the external environment.”242 The “chain” that coordinated and unified the “nutritive circle” and the “intellectual circle” of the social organism corresponded to that “neuro-hormonal chain that holds all the elements of the cellular state of the individual together.” According to Pende, this chain came from the alliance between “intellectual aristocracy” and the “humble classes of manual workers.” He continued:

  • 243 Pende, Dalla medicina alla sociologia, 74.

Such a chain […] must be both double and single at the same time: on one hand, the influence of connection and control of individual activities, exercised by intelligence, that is, by an intellectual aristocracy; on the other hand, the influence of connection and control of the individualistic and egoistic tendencies […] exercised by the real hormones of society, that is, by the social elements most evolved in the moral sense, more able to act as moral and altruistic restraints […]. And since the great, inexhaustible mine of sentiment is the humble classes of manual workers—from whom the greatest moral genius, Christ, was born—the moral representatives, so to speak, of the government of the State, will rise, we hope, from this social class.243

  • 244 Pende, Dalla medicina alla sociologia, 74–75.

148In this 1921 essay, Pende’s solution to the struggle of the classes lay in the alliance between the “aristocracy of the mind” and the “aristocracy of the heart,” which had to prepare the way for the birth of “a future superior humanity.”244 With the advent of fascism, Pende’s human biotypology soon took on the role of biological justification for totalitarian control of psychophysical individuality.

  • 245 Nicola Pende, Anomalie della crescenza fisica e psichica (Bologna: Cappelli, 1929), 2, 281–84.

149The Orthogenetic Biotypological Institute was inaugurated in Genoa in December 1926. In 1935, with the direct involvement of Mussolini, Pende was named director of the Institute of Medical Pathology and Clinical Methodology at the University of Rome, and in January 1936, the Biotypological Institute was also transferred to the capital. The Institute had organizational links with the Ministry for Public Instruction, the ONB (Opera Nazionale Balilla, the Fascist Party’s youth group) and ONMI. In fact, the Institute carried out periodic examinations of the ONB members and students, acting as a diagnostic filter for youth destined to enter “differential classes,” and was concerned with psychotechnics and professional orientation.245

  • 246 Sellina Gualco and Antonio Nardi, L’Istituto Biotipologico Ortogenetico di Roma (Rome: Stab. Tip. (...)
  • 247 Gualco and Nardi, L’Istituto Biotipologico Ortogenetico di Roma, 26–34.
  • 248 Gualco and Nardi, L’Istituto Biotipologico Ortogenetico di Roma, 35–52.
  • 249 Gualco and Nardi, L’Istituto Biotipologico Ortogenetico di Roma, 52–106.
  • 250 Gualco and Nardi, L’Istituto Biotipologico Ortogenetico di Roma, 106–44.

150Both in Genoa and Rome, the internal structure of the Institute was made up of different sections. The first room was dedicated to the anthropometric study of human morphology: here, the patients were photographed naked, with the photos placed in an archive, described as the richest in the world “as regarded anomalies of growth and constitution, endocrinopathic syndromes, etc.”246 Following this, the patients were weighed on precise scales, and measured using Viola’s anthropometry, Pizzolni’s craniometry, Thooris’ body mass measurement, and Pende’s “growth table.” Finally, the morphological exam was completed with an evaluation of the level of development of the “five fundamental apparatuses”: the muscular and ligamentary system, respiratory apparatus, hemopoietic apparatus and the sexual apparatus.247 The second section was the “dynamic-humoral” section, which aimed at identifying the “individual somatic temperament.” This section carried out the measurement of the basal metabolism, the “neuromuscular quality” (force, speed, resistance to fatigue, ability) and the “neuroendocrinic and electrolytic profile.”248 Psychology characterized the third section, where patients underwent a series of tests (Sante De Sanctis, Binet–Simon, Terman, Banissoni) to evaluate intelligence, memory, character and imagination.249 The fourth section concerned psychotechnics and presented a series of analogical tests that reproduced work situations of different professional categories: drivers, construction workers, mechanics, mill workers. The psychotechnics section provided aptitude tests (proportional sense, combinatorial capacity, activity and motor force, motor skills) and examinations of the organs of sense and sensitivity (sight, hearing, touch, baric and muscular sense, sensitivity to heat and pain).250

  • 251 Nicola Pende, “La scheda biotipologica individuale nella medicina preventiva e nella politica soci (...)

151All the information on heredity, morphology, psychology, and behavior of the subject was collected into a “biotypological card,” a sort of “personality card,” “the revelation […] of the special type of human factory and special type of performance of the human psychical-physical motor, which every individual represents.”251 It was an extremely complex classification that was difficult to apply on a large scale, but Pende recommended it to the fascist regime as a tool for the biological classification of the population. In 1934, a circular from the ONB instituted, for its millions of members, a simplified biological card with only four pages. But in Pende’s hopes his biotypological card would substitute the citizens’ and soldiers’ “health passbook” (libretto sanitario), which was obligatorily introduced into schools in 1936.

  • 252 Nicola Pende, L’indirizzo costituzionalistico nella medicina sociale e nella politica biologica (G (...)

152Pende’s biotypological card, moreover, was conceived to record and monitor the biopsychical state of the population, as well as to identify the symptoms of deviance within individuals, in order to correct them. This correction—the so-called orthogenesis—consisted of “opotherapy and organotherapy, stimulation and inhibition of internal secretion glands through the use of x-rays or phototherapy or special climates and nutrition; psychotherapy, special orthophrenic educational methods, and methods of correction of precocious amoral youth on biological bases, etc.”252

  • 253 Pende, “La scheda biotipologica individuale nella medicina preventiva e nella politica sociale,” 2 (...)

153The biotypological card, moreover, with its “complete diagnosis of the normal and post-illness or pre-illness psychophysical personality,” was a true “individual document of identification, health and evaluation” of “citizens of the fascist regime,” considered as “productive cells harmonically and consensually engaged in the complex cellular whole of Mussolini’s State.”253

  • 254 Nicola Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica (Bologna: Cappelli, 1933), 38.
  • 255 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 39.

154In 1933, in the essay Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica (Rational human reclamation and political biology) this organicistic analogy paved the way for a sort of biotypological totalitarianism. Not surprisingly, the essay was dedicated to Mussolini, the leader who “with the sound principles of a political biology weaves a new physical, moral and intellectual outlook, for a new, grand Nation.” As single cells obeyed the fundamental laws of “cellular altruism,” so—Pende argued—in the fascist state, individual liberty was “conditioned by collective liberty and interests.” As in the human body, where “vital unity” derived from the “compenetration of the systems of organs of vegetative life and the systems of organs of the life of relations,” so in the social organism “the two great classes can not evade the iron laws of fusion of the generating forces of prevalently muscular energy and the generating forces of prevalently creative and moral energy.”254 As “energetically differentiated cellular classes” could be distinguished in tissue, so in the national organism social classes coincided with biotypes and corresponded to the “biologically differentiated classes of workers and producers.”255 In this view, the biological system came to represent a sort of natural paradigm for fascist corporativism:

  • 256 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 40.

[The fascist regime is] a truly biological political system, in which the central idea that individual liberty must be controlled, conditioned and limited by two immanent factors is implicit: that of the necessity and material interest and ideals from the corporative State to use the various forms of energetic value of individual citizens; and that no citizen must be able to cause damage, through his free will, to the collective life of the State.256

  • 257 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 40.
  • 258 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 40.

155In Pende’s biotypological totalitarianism, the deviant was comparable to the “malign cell of a tumor, which is removed for the good of the collective life of the human body, as it menaces its stability and validity.”257 On the contrary, the “biological and moral aristocracy of the nation” would originate from the “breeding ground” of fascist youth, called to carry out, in the social body, that work of “harmonization of the various productive categories of citizens,” comparable to the “neurohormonal” mechanism of the “individual human organism.”258

156Starting from this organicistic analogy between the “vital unit” of the individual and that of the state, Pende went on to deepen the bio-political applications of the “science of orthogenesis,” elaborating a sort of fascist biomedical architecture, structured on biotypological control.

157According to Pende, orthogenetic and biotypological measures had to be systematically applied to the medical and sociological classification of the four principal dimensions of the fascist state: children, women, workers and the race.

  • 259 Nicola Pende, Trattato di biotipologia umana individuale e sociale, con applicazioni alla medicina (...)

158As for schools—“true workshops of the social personality of the individual”—“the study and the repeated testing of the individual biotype under formation” constituted, in Pende’s view, the indispensable premise of an education that aspired to form “the total and harmonic man, that is, made of muscle, heart and brain, normally and harmonically developed, cultivated and oriented by the educator.” Biotypology, above all, led to the “prior knowledge of what the scholar must cultivate,” that is, to his “complete personality.”259 Biotypological anamnesis represented the scientific assumption of four biopolitical objectives connected to the scholastic sphere:

  1. adapt “physical and moral education and instruction” to the different biopsychological phases of educational development: physical education, moral education, sexual “orthogenetic” education;
  2. apply “differential” education to the subjects “who manifest retardation or precocity, defects or excesses, from the somatic and spiritual sides, in respect to the normal mass of companions of the same age”;
  3. correct and “normalise,” with “modern physical, moral and intellectual orthogenetic means, the errors and deviations of normal physical and spiritual development, helping the disabled or mediocre in health, character or intelligence to achieve, as much as possible, the normal mean of the masses”;
  4. finally, select and orientate, that is, “reject those adolescents not suitable for certain scholastic careers capriciously, involuntarily or erroneously chosen, launching them in careers more suited to their capacities and attitudes, and orientating the normal adolescents, after having ascertained the special attitudes and inclinations and their pre-eminent psychophysical qualities, sending them to institutions adapted to introduction and learning of the type of school, trade or profession for which each appears to be best suited by his nature.”260
  • 261 Pende, Trattato di biotipologia umana individuale e sociale, 470.

159In particular, regarding education, in the first phase of the “development of the body and the spirit,” biotypology would evaluate the “instruments of intelligence” (capacity of attention, memory, mental stamina). It would also evaluate the “forms of thought,” with a distinction between “tachypsychic” (speedy mentality) and “bradypsychic” (slow and analytical) individuals. In a second phase, that of puberty (from 15 to 18 years), two more were added to these two first “biotypes”: the “empirical realists” and the “mixed.”261 Four mental types were therefore outlined, corresponding to as many professional orientations:

  • 262 Pende, Trattato di biotipologia umana individuale e sociale, 470. For a project of Pende on the re (...)

From the first, the intuitive tachypsychics, intelligent artists and artisans and certain quick and able qualified workers, and the professionals of the natural, legal, or experimental sciences are more likely to develop. From the second, the analytical bradypsychics, it is more likely that technical professionals, engineers, constructors, mathematicians, philosophers, magistrates, academics, and certain workers of precision, patience and analysis, will develop. From the last, the empirical realist, business men, men of practical action, men of commerce, industrialists, bankers, agriculturalists, and sailors, will develop.262

160In the “moral education” field, biotypology could identify the connection between deviant behavior and biological (endocrinal) or environmental causes, and prepare the appropriate therapy: adolescents with “hyperadrenal temperaments” could become aggressive, those with “hyperthyroidhyperthymus” problems were prone to “lying and small thefts,” and so on. Every anomaly had its own biotypological diagnosis and required a “differential” approach:

  • 263 Pende, Trattato di biotipologia umana individuale e sociale, 472.

We must be warned that the educators of the old mould are accustomed to treating undisciplined, rebellious students, or those of low morals, indistinctly, with the same primitive criteria with which, once upon a time, they beat and tortured the insane instead of curing their illnesses.263

161The biotypological investigation of “individual moral dispositions” must therefore always be the premise of the “moral orthogenesis” of adolescents. As for sexual education, only biotypology could identify the endocrinal modality of sexual development and adequately advise the educators. Therefore, “sexual orthogenesis” had to substitute psychology:

  • 264 Pende, Trattato di biotipologia umana individuale e sociale, 473.

Sexual education must not still be based on moral pedagogy or purely psychological methods, which either achieve nothing or sometimes do ill to future parents: but we must pay heed to sexual orthogenesis, to the necessity that the psychophysical sexual development of adolescents happens normally and is not obstructed by educational inhibitions or moral and religious orders, which do not pay attention to the medical physiological control of the subject, his temperament; in sum, to his special sexual biotype.264

162After childhood selection, the next focus of biotypological control was the hygienic and moral preparation of future mothers:

  • 265 Pende, “La scheda biotipologica individuale nella medicina preventiva e nella politica sociale,” 2 (...)

[This is] carried out during their growth, correcting any possible anomalies of sexual development, and fortifying them according to the needs of the individual organisms, so that they later produce numerous and healthy children. The biotypological card will continue to follow married women and mothers to advise and cure them, preventing that infinite series of organic and psychical unbalances which are often linked to the various phases and activities of female sexual life and to the critical period of cessation of ovarian function.265

  • 266 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 115.

163In Bonifica umana razionale, Pende developed a program of “education of females on bio-psychological bases,”266 which was organized on three levels: the body, the character and the intellect. Regarding the first aspect, after having identified the aesthetic ideal for a woman as the “maternal type”—characterized by the development of the lower abdomen and pelvis—Pende theorized a physical education that harmoniously shaped the “lower half ” of the body and favored the growth of “female fat”:

  • 267 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 115. On Pende’s role in sports medicine, see (...)

In adolescent women, not yet sexually mature, the real beauty of the body can be achieved only by favoring the development of normal sexual proportion and therefore promoting, through physical exercise, with suitable nutrition and hygienic practices […] above all the regulated development of the lower half of the body, and preventing any irrational muscular exercise that arrests that development of the lower half or that exaggerates the largeness and thickness of the neck, thorax, arms and shoulders.267

164While, regarding character, a woman should be constantly educated to have maternal sentiments toward men, the “intellectual pedagogy” of women had to necessarily promote “realistic and practical” thought more than “abstract.” The true female working environment, according to biotypological rules, was nevertheless not represented by the factory or the office, but by primary school teaching, and in particular, by the manual and artistic activities together:

  • 268 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 133–34. On this topic, see in particular: Vic (...)

And above all the so-called professions of the needle that include cutters, seamstresses, lace workers, milliners, doll dressers, and workers with artificial flowers and feathers. Here is the real and narrow field of female work, where women can reign sovereign and be truly in their right place.268

  • 269 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 142.
  • 270 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 162.

165Indeed, work constituted the third field of application of Pende’s bio-politics. Even in the choice of profession, liberty needed to be “severely controlled and regulated by the intervention of the State.”269 The biotypological approach, in this sense, aimed at a triple objective: understanding the psychophysical aptitudes or “individual productive capacities or deficiencies,” in order to “guide every worker to his right place”; ascertaining the “predispositions to illness and constitutional weaknesses that cause accidents and workplace illnesses,” in order to halt them through preventive therapy; and finally, to resolving “in the most fair and rational manner the medicallegal questions inherent in workplace illness and industrial accidents.”270 In the scientific organization of work, the constitutional physician therefore had to support the hygienist and the industrial engineer. Biotypology was, in fact, the “rational premise of every sane and fertile medical-social act of worker protection”:

  • 271 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 163.

Only men whose biotypological qualities are exactly known, and who are rationally oriented toward the office or the work most suitable to their biotype, can fertilize and maximize the productivity of the techniques of modern scientific organization of work. Only men aware of their organic weaknesses, and in time cured and corrected, can easily avoid the assault by infective, toxic and traumatic agents, or of meteorological morbose factors, to which their work exposes them, notwithstanding the efforts of modern hygiene.271

  • 272 Pende, Trattato di biotipologia umana individuale e sociale, 518.
  • 273 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 173–76.
  • 274 Pende, Trattato di biotipologia umana individuale e sociale, 519.

166In a professional biotypological orientation, the evaluation of “varf” (velocity + ability + resistance + force) assumed a primary importance, because the four human biotypes were differentiated in their combination of the four respective qualities: muscular force, together with resistance to fatigue, was prevalent in the “brevilinear type, toned, muscular and sanguine,”272 while the “toned longilinear type” had velocity, together with a sufficient level of muscular force. Finally, the “flaccid brevilinear type” and the “atonic and weak longilinear type,” as they were not able to develop force or resistance, “could be perfect for work that required ability and ingenuity.”273 According to Pende, the evaluation of the biotype was useful not only in the field of “physiology of work,” but also for the foreknowledge of certain predispositions to illnesses and accidents: for example, the “muscular and sanguine brevilinear type” would be exposed to cardiac illnesses, while the opposite longilinear “atonic and asthenic” type would more easily suffer from “tuberculosis of the lungs, pleura, peritoneum, and glands.”274 Consequently,

  • 275 Pende, Trattato di biotipologia umana individuale e sociale, 519.

we see that the knowledge of individual biotype of the worker permits us to carry out his hygienic protection, that is, for the rational utilization of his work according to the physical and mental qualities prevalent in him, and above all to fortify him, through the means of preventive medicine, in those organs in which he appears weakest and least endowed by nature, and therefore more likely to sicken in the work environment.275

  • 276 Pende, Trattato di biotipologia umana individuale e sociale, 519.

167In Pende’s view, the National Fascist After-work League (Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro) had to be utilized for the “constitutional reclamation of workers, founded on biotypological principles”: at the end of their working day, workers had not only to be reassured in the spirit, but also “overseen and helped in the fortification and restoration of their body from the latent alterations of organic functionality that fatigue and the work environment could cause.”276

168The final sphere of application of biotypology was represented by eugenics and racial policy. The first aspect of the “political-biological problem of the race” concerned pronatalism or, in Pende’s words, the demographic “illness of low birthrate.” Not in civilization in general, nor in urbanism, would the causes of the decline of the birthrate be found, but in “occidental Nordic industrialism”:

  • 277 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 201.

Industrial civilization has brought with it the elevation of the quality of life, but also a profound modification of customs, adoption of expensive habits, multiplication of costly needs, abuse of consumption and pleasures of every kind, a false comprehension of social wellbeing, an increase in selfishness, and above all the working of women and children and the decline of the concept of family.277

  • 278 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 202.

169In particular, the working of women, “both manual and intellectual,” had damaging consequences on the organisms of mother and children, creating “states of organic weakness or early stress of the maternal organism and disturbances of the development and constitution of the tender sprouts, suffering from malnutrition, both intrauterine and post-natal.”278 Additionally, certain professions—above all among city-dwelling female manual workers and office workers—directly exercised a “sterilizing influence.” Next to work, the “second scourge” that induced women to limit their number of children and abandon the domestic hearth to satisfy “the craving for massages and sports,” was constituted by the diffused conviction that maternity compromised feminine beauty. On the contrary, according to Pende, a biological future of aesthetic deformation and psychical alteration awaited the childless woman:

  • 279 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 207.

The persistent youthfulness of the body and spirit cannot be obtained through the unnatural limitation of fertility, as the poor woman deceives herself, but rather early senescence and flaccidity of the face and integuments, immediate expression of the ovarian insufficiency.279

  • 280 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 209.

170Since, therefore, it was essentially the “modern woman” who had to “prevent the social illness of the declining birthrate that continues to worsen,” 280 the fascist state had to attain the bio-political objective of the preparation of future mothers, not so much through the campaign against urbanism as through an adequate and constant biotypological education:

  • 281 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 210.

It is necessary to manage, with fascist wisdom, the forming of the Italian woman, starting from childhood, with a new educational direction, obligatory in primary and secondary schools. This education will aim to form the housewife and mother type, more than the science and sporting woman, and will give a new sexual education training, that will lastingly instill in the ingenuous and inexpert soul of the young girl the concept of the real meaning of the somatic and psychical attributes of her sex, destined on the whole by nature to the maternal function.281

  • 282 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 215–16.

171Together with the decline of the birthrate, the second aspect of the biopolitical problem of the race concerned, according to Pende, the preservation and the improvement of the “Italian stocks.” In Bonifica umana razionale, Pende engaged with German biological racism, distinguishing between “physical somatology of the race” and the “psychology or dynamism of the race”: “Within a race,” he argued “physiologically and psychologically diverse stocks exist, and these are biological-social or historical-biological human groups, and not only ethnic or anthropological.”282 It was possible therefore to speak “realistically” only of the psychology of the stock, and not the psychology of the race.

172To identify, in particular, the stock to which the “Romans owed their greatness,” Pende presented the results of his “ethnic biotypological” survey, which he carried out himself in the Institute of Biotypology in Genoa, in collaboration with his assistants Vidoni, Gualco, Tamburri and Landogna-Cassone. In this investigation, in the cities of Sabina and Ciociaria, the population of ancient Rome appeared,

  • 283 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 218.

hypervegetative and vigorous, with rounded and elliptical cranium, almost mesaticephalic, and a long, robust face, caustic, satirical spirit, cutting to the point of aggressiveness, sometimes bloody, with roughness and frankness of manner and language, impassive and unemotional toward events and phenomena of the ideal or abstract order.283

  • 284 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 218.
  • 285 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 220.

173On the Tyrrhenian side of Lazio, in Abruzzo and Sannio, the stock of Campania Felix predominated, in which “a playful spirit, sentimentalism, aestheticism and idealism, serenity and religious mysticism perennially live.”284 Near the lower Adriatic, in Apulia, and partly in Lucania and Calabria, it was possible to trace the Iapygian-Messapian or Apulian stock, similar to the Calabrian-Sicilian. In Tuscany and Umbria it was still possible to find the “inexhaustible artistic-literary scientific sense” of the ancient Etruscans, while in Lunigiana, Garfagnana and Lucchesia, up until Liguria, there was evidence of the Atlantic-Mediterranean branch, visible in the Ligurian stock, with its “tall, dark and strong [men], with their mesaticephalic or subdolicephalic heads.”285 In Northern Italy, three “great psychological types of stock” could be identified, corresponding to the three great families of protohistoric populations that had invaded Italy: proto-Celts, proto-Umbrians and proto-Illyrians. The Piedmontese type stood out

  • 286 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 222–23.

for his rather rough temperament, […] for his attachment to his soil and his homeland, his tenacity and will, his military spirit, his disciplined respect to political and religious authority, the rather melancholic tone of the soul, not disconnected however, from simple serenity and festivity, […] the type of realistic intelligence with little tendency to flights of fancy such as abstract thought.286

174In the Lombard-Emilian type emerged

  • 287 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 222.

gaiety and sociableness and innate joy of living, not disconnected from a certain unrest and mobility of the soul, a great industriousness, and above all a concrete mentality, at the same time associated with an exquisite aesthetic sensibility, artistic attitudes and an analytical type of intelligence.287

  • 288 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 222.

175Finally, the Venetian type was characterized by “indomitable and bellicose […] sentiment, exaggerated by their honor, value […] and frankness.”288

  • 289 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 225.

176In Pende’s view, race was the result of crossbreeding between different stocks. Therefore, the “Latin” race was not exclusively represented by the Romans, but by the “fusion of all the Italian stocks, and above all the stocks of the Mediterranean race, which Rome was able to harmonize and meld with its great realistic and political sense.”289 Following the example of ancient Rome, fascist racism had to pursue the objective of “juridical harmonization” of the Italian stocks.

177On this basis, in 1933, Pende directly and explicitly criticized German völkisch and biological racism (in particular, Rosenberg’s and Günther’s theories):

  • 290 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 227.

Once again we find men of high intelligence ignoring what our Chief does not ignore; and that is that a German race does not exist, and that the German population, like all the populations of the Earth organized into nations, are composed of many distinct biological races, who have lived side by side for millennia and collaborated for the economic and cultural progress of their State. Once again, we fascists, with our stance on political problems of race, demonstrate the realistic Mediterranean balance in the face of Nordic abstractness and mysticism.290

178A racial policy such as the Nazi one, founded on “political prejudices, religious sentiment or a sectarian spirit” and not “on scientific, objective and realistic logic”—Pende argued—could only lead to “comic and illogical consequences”:

  • 291 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 230.

Must they be distanced from cohabitation and crossing with other non-Israelite dolichocephalic blonde Germans? And why must the dark, low brachycephalic Israelites, who are of the same blood as the German citizens of the alpine races, be excluded from crossings and political cohabitation with these other brothers of the race?291

  • 292 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 231.

179Since, racial crossings notwithstanding, original stocks remained “always fixed,”292 an effective racial policy had to value the “ethnic polyvalency of a single nation,” starting from the perspective of biotypology and orthogenesis:

  • 293 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 238.

Fascist Italy, instead of running behind the North-American, German and Scandinavian utopia of pure race, instead of aiming at homogenization and uniformity of the various stocks like the Soviet Republic, must jealously maintain intact this variety and ethnic polyvalency, which has been and will be the principal source of its renewed vitality and resurgent greatness.293

  • 294 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 232.
  • 295 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 238.

180Concretely, according to Pende, the first step was to deepen the knowledge of the “ethnic balance of the Italian State,”294 that is, of the “differential energetic values, in the somatic, moral, and intellectual fields, which most characterize the single ethnic stocks of the nation.” Only starting from these premises would it be possible to develop a “State anthropotechnique,”295 “differential for the various types of Italian people” and based on medical constitutionalism:

  • 296 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 239.

Constitutionalism and hygiene, individual pedagogy, and bio-politics, strictly intertwined in this work of rational human breeding, will form the various selected types of the Italian of tomorrow. These new types will increasingly improve the mechanism of the corporative State, and they will move ever closer to that which we believe is the ideal of a perfectly organized human society […], that is, one in which the unitary state results not from the social classes but from biologically selected classes of citizens.296

181According to Pende, a first experiment in this direction could come from internal colonization and, above all, from the “reclamation of the stocks,” which was being achieved in the swamps of the Agro Pontino:

  • 297 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 241–42. On the projects of “State anthropolog (...)

In this way, the internal colonies of Fascism will become, bit by bit, the true human breeding grounds of the nation, true centers of regeneration of the purest and most innate qualities of our ancient stocks […]. And such breeding grounds, which today are humble, will perhaps create tomorrow the artistic, literary and political geniuses, and at any rate, truly aware citizens, because they are being raised in schools of work and sacrifice, to laboriously conquer, and not exploit, the earth that feeds them. And so from such breeding grounds, the nation will obtain new pure blood for its needs in peace and in war.297

  • 298 See the documentation in ACS, MPI, DGIS, Professori Universitari Epurati, b. 26, f. Pende.
  • 299 Nicola Pende, Biologia delle razze ed unità spirituale mediterranea, in ACS, SPD, CO, b. 1005, f. (...)
  • 300 Alexis Carrel, Man the Unknown (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935), 288. On Carrel’s eugenics, see (...)

182It was on the opposition between “Latin” and “Nordic” that Pende based the cultural strategy with which, during the 1930s, he promoted the international diffusion of Italian biotypology. In particular, France and Argentina constituted the international network of Pende’s “Latin science.” In France, the Italian endocrinologist had contacts in the fields of Christian medical neo-humanism, homeopathy, neo-Hippocratism and cosmobiology: in particular, at the Paris Faculty of Medicine, Maurice Loeper, professor of therapeutics, and Maxime Laignel-Lavastine, psychiatrist and professor of history of medicine; Marcel Martiny, physician at the Leopold-Bellan Hospital in Paris; Georges Jeanneney, professor at Bordeaux Faculty of Medicine; and Maurice Faure, president of the Nice Society of Medicine and Climatology.298 In 1934, in a conference at the Nice Mediterranean Academy, Pende praised the “Latin-Mediterranean spiritual unity,” highlighting the physical robustness and fertility of the three “brunette” races (Mediterranean, Adriatic, Alpine) against the “civilization of machines and economic individualism” incarnated in the two “blond” races (Germanic and East Baltic).299 Not surprisingly, Alexis Carrel, in Man, the Unknown, cited the Biotypological Institute as a model,300 and in July 1936, in a letter to Pende, underlined the importance of the defense of “Latin civilization”:

  • 301 Carrel to Pende, July, 9, 1936, ACS, MPI, Professori Universitari Epurati, b. 26, f. Pende.

Nowadays the torch of Latin civilization has passed in Italy’s hands. The Latins who live in the other nations of Europe and America put their trust in Italy. Thus, it is a happy circumstance that you in Rome will study one of the most important subjects for the future of mankind.301

  • 302 Nancy Leys Stepan, “The Hour of Eugenics,” 119. See also Andrés H. Reggiani, “La ecologia instituc (...)
  • 303 Pende to Osvaldo Sebastiani, July 14, 1936, ACS, SPD, CO 1922–43, b. 1005, f. 509057/509059

183As for Argentina on the other hand, in 1930, Pende held an important series of conferences, upon the invitation of Mariano Castex, professor of clinical medicine at the University of Buenos Aires. In the same year, the Argentinian President, General Uriburu officially sent the physicians Arturo Rossi and Octavio Lopez on an assignment to study Italian eugenic policies. Upon their return to Argentina in 1932, the Asociación Argentina de Biotipologia, Eugenesia y Medicina Social was created, directed by Rossi. In 1933, the Council on Education and the Schools Department for the Province of Buenos Aires adopted, at Rossi’s initiative, the school biotypological identity card.302 On the basis of these international relations, Pende, in 1936, presented Mussolini with a project for a “Mussolinian University of High Latin and Mediterranean Culture in Rome,” which would be a true “breeding ground for future creators of thoughts” for the Latin world.303

184Pende’s biotypology-based eugenics, like his racial theory, was very critical toward the “Nordic” model. Already in 1933, restating his doubts on compulsory premarital examinations, Pende proposed “orthogenesis” instead of negative eugenics:

  • 304 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 246–47.

There is only the constant penetrating work of the physician, supported, as it is today in Italy thanks to the fascist State, by admirable laws of individual preventive hygiene, to create a somatic and psychical reclamation of the individual from infancy until the age of marriage; there is only the moral obligation on the part of parents to ascertain, commencing some time before marriage, the state of the future procreators. […] Hygienic propaganda will be intensified by the registry office for the families that request a marriage […]. Such propaganda, helped by the appropriate laws and State institutions of preventive medicine, such as the State biotypological-orthogenetic institutions, is the most rational and effective that the medical science and juridical conscience of a civil nation can provide.304

  • 305 Nicola Pende, “La profilassi delle malattie e anomalie ereditarie,” in Lucio Silla, ed., Atti dell (...)
  • 306 Pende, “La profilassi delle malattie e anomalie ereditarie,” 70.

185In 1938, at the annual reunion of SIPS, Pende criticized German negative eugenics, with its pretension to “liberate the race forever from those sorts of transmittable pests represented by hereditary illness.”305 Pende had two objections on this point: first, the major part of “subjects dangerous to the race are […] carriers of latent defects that are apparently healthy and would therefore escape coercive anti-conceptional eugenics”; second, as German psychologist Walter Jaensch had also maintained, “the environment is more decisive than genetic factors, when we speak of superior strata of our psychical personalities, [that is] the most fleeting and the most recently acquired.”306

186In opposition to “Nordic, anti-conceptional selective eugenics,” Pende proposed, in the first place, “familial or matrimonial eugenics,” and in the second place, “post-conceptional orthogenesis” and the “constitutional reclamation of the individual.” In respect to “matrimonial eugenics,” Pende repeated (referring to the theories of Paolo Enriques) the positivity of crossbreeding between Italian ethnic stocks, but did not hesitate to base the racist and anti-Semitic fascist legislation on the principle of racecrossing among Italians (Italiani con Italiani):

  • 307 Pende, “La profilassi delle malattie e anomalie ereditarie,” 71. See also Nicola Pende, Concetto e (...)

All this makes us believe that crossings between human races different not just in color, but also in level and type of mentality and different millennial environmental adaptations, even if they are both European populations, could instead produce degenerate descendents, or at least disharmonized ones, above-all mentally. And so, it seems to me possible to conclude that we Italians must value the principle Italiani con Italiani, in order to preserve and further improve the pure civilized characteristics of the progeny of Rome and the different ethnic components that in one sense or another have made a contribution of indisputable value to our supremacy.307

187As for “post-conceptional orthogenesis” or “environmental eugenics,” Pende stressed the relevance of the biotypological “natural” therapies, like sunshine, mountain air and mineral waters:

  • 308 Pende, “La profilassi delle malattie ed anomalie ereditarie,” 11. See also Nicola Pende, “La scien (...)

Having refused, from both a practical and ethical point of view, prohibitive racist eugenics […], we will give the preventive orthogenetic naturist and educative eugenic direction an increasingly greater value in achieving the glorification and continuity of the biological patrimony of the nation. We are aware that human reproduction can not be treated with the same means used in the selective breeding of beasts, and that the evolution of the body and above all the spirit of man obeys the physical chemistry of the genes only to a certain point, which is a part, but not all of the emerging evolutionary creator of man.308

  • 309 See Maiocchi, Scienza italiana e razzismo fascista, 237–41.

188Initially boycotted by Mussolini and the Ministry of Popular Culture, because of its distant position from the “Manifesto of the racial scientists” (July 1938), Pende’s spiritualistic and biotypological interpretation of eugenics and racial policy emerged victoriously from the academic-scientific dispute for the management of fascist state racism, assuming an official character, above all in the period between 1939 and 1941.309 In 1939, in the introduction to his essay La scienza dell’ortogenesi [The science of orthogenesis], Pende proposed a complete break between orthogenesis and “infamous,” “Nordic” eugenics:

  • 310 Nicola Pende, La scienza dell’ortogenesi (Rome: CNR, 1939), 8. See also Nicola Pende, “Il principi (...)

Orthogenesis means regular, healthy and harmonious formation of men. What it must not be confused with is the infamous eugenics of certain eugenicists who believe that the race can be improved or purified by grafting the blood of individuals of distant or primitive races onto the trunk of decadent populations, or surgically sterilizing individuals of both sexes who have hereditarily transmittable illnesses.
We propose—and here we find all the moral, scientific and social value of the Italian science of orthogenesis—instead of this utopia of creating better descendents through crossings with distant races or of selecting the fittest generators and excluding the unfit for the improvement of the race, the practice of putting the human being under scientific control from the moment of conception, from the beginnings of intrauterine life […]; then, after this first postconception and prenatal orthogenetic work, based on the hygiene of the gestating mother, we proceed with the protection and correction of development from the first days of birth, that is, the realization of post-natal orthogenesis.310

  • 311 See Maurizio Calvesi, Enrico Guidoni and Simonetta Lux, eds., E42. Utopia e scenario del regime. 2 (...)

189In 1940, Mussolini named Pende Chancellor of the Academy of Italian Youth of Littorio (GIL, Gioventù Italiana del Littorio). In 1938 the project for the Central Institute for Human Reclamation, Orthogenesis and Naturist Therapy (Istituto Centrale di Bonifica Umana, di Ortogenesi e di Terapia Naturista), desired by Pende from 1934 and financed by the Pio Istituto di S. Spirito and the Ospedali Riuniti of Rome, was approved by Mussolini, as part of the Universal Exposition E42. The architectonic profile of the model—a stronghold with four towers—symbolized the main pillars on which Pende’s human reclamation was founded: children, women, workers, and race.311 Within the stronghold, there was a green area for walks, and a naturalistic park of two to three hectares. In April 1939, Mussolini participated in the placing of the cornerstone. The works were carried out until 1943, and were then continued after the war.

  • 312 Mario Barbera, Ortogenesi e Biotipologia (Rome: La Civiltà Cattolica, 1943) (collected from articl (...)
  • 313 See, among others, Nicola Pende, Corpo e anima (Rome: SAET, 1947); Nicola Pende, Il medico di fron (...)

190Between December 1942 and May 1943 the Jesuits praised the “originality” and “ingeniousness” of Pende’s biotypology, dedicating several articles in the review Civiltà Cattolica [Catholic civilization] to the exposition of the numerous affinities existing between orthogenesis and Catholic doctrine.312 After the second world war, Pende reciprocated the attention, placing his biotypology, by now orphaned by fascism, at the service of Catholicism.313

3. Demography and Biotypology: the Laboratory of Statistics at Milan Catholic University

  • 314 For a brief profile of Marcello Boldrini and a bibliography, see in particular Giuseppe Locorotond (...)

191A sort of synthesis between the two branches of fascist “Latin” eugenics—the demographic and the constitutional—seemed to come, in the last half of the 1920s, from the Laboratory of Statistics of the Milan Catholic University, and particularly from the contributions of the director of the Laboratory, the statistician and demographer Marcello Boldrini.314

  • 315 See, for example, Marcello Boldrini, “I cadaveri degli sconosciuti. Ricerche demografiche e antrop (...)

192After a first period still influenced by the typical sociobiological approach of the positivist anthropological tradition,315 Boldrini progressively neared the constitutionalist school, attempting to verify, on a biometrical basis, the validity of the concept of “biotype” as a total explanation of the whole individual dimension: from the biological to the psychical aspects; from the demographic characteristics to the placement in the social stratification. In Boldrini’s definition, the demonstration of the explanatory value of “constitutional type” came from the intercorrelation between different disciplinary approaches, summarizable in the following way:

  1. Morphological-anthropometrical: this was the classical distinction between brevilinear type and longilinear type, based on the inverse correlation between dimensions in length of the human body and relative somatic mass.316
  2. Biological-endocrinological: influenced by Pende’s biotypology, Boldrini shared the idea of a connection between morphological structure and specific biological property. In particular, the brevilinear types presented, compared to the longilinear types, “a stronger biochemical activity, a higher blood pressure, a greater physically active attitude, a prevalence of processes of accumulation over consumption and […] a super-attitude to reproduction.”317
  3. Pathological: based on the intuitions of the ancient humoralists, Boldrini318 and his students (Costanzo, Colloridi and Alberti)319 proposed a necessary link between constitution and “morbose predisposition”: the causes of illness had to be looked for not in external agents, but in the characteristics of biotypes.
  4. Psychological: biotypes were distinguishable not only by their somatic aspects, but also by their psychical qualities, that is by “character,” “temperament” and intelligence.320 The Boldrini school (in particular, Mengarelli and Uggé) greatly developed these aspects, explicitly reconnecting them to the studies of the psychiatrist Kretschmer321 and, in Italy, to Pende and Gemelli. In synthesis, the “brevilinear sthenic” variety presented “an open, frank, expansive, strong-willed, optimistic, malleable, achieving, euphoric character,” while the longilinear type would be more “asthenic,” that is “solitary, meditative, haughty of character,” obstinate in temperament and with a “logical, hypercritical, profound, analytical” intelligence.322

193Up to this point, Boldrini’s analysis, although a systemization of the biotypological classification of the constitutional school, was not particularly original. The innovative contribution could be seen rather in the next conceptual step, that is, in the attempt to connect Pende’s medical constitutionalism with Gini’s biological demography, through the study of the relationship between constitutional structure and social class:

  • 323 Boldrini, “Biotipi e classi sociali,” 71.

Evidently, since they [the biotypes] differ in infinite points of view, from the pure form to the highest manifestations of personality, and as on such differences […] natural, sexual and social selection is based, we understand that, due to the variety of external circumstances, from medical knowledge, tastes, social organization, certain types in different classes will be preserved over others, some constitutions and not others will be elected above all by the current that feeds the ruling classes.323

  • 324 For a collection of works, see Contributi del Laboratorio di Statistica. Serie IV.

194This “biotypological” theory of social mobility had its scientific consecration in 1935 in Brussels, in the Italian section of the 12th Congress of the International Institute of Sociology—led by no other than Corrado Gini.324

195During the Congress, the conclusive results of a research program were presented, which had been undertaken by the Milan Laboratory of Statistics almost ten years earlier. Boldrini’s investigation at the end of the 1920s focused on a group of 715 people from Padua, measured at twenty years of age, together with a respective “personal and family history.” Regarding the relationship between constitution and social class, the results seemed to show a very strong connection. The longilinear types were found for the most part in the superior social classes, with the brevilinear types in the inferior ones:

  • 325 Boldrini, “Biotipi e classi sociali,” 73.

In 100 members of the superior category, there were 21.6 brevilinear types, 37.8 mesolinear types, 40.6 longilinear types. The percentages corresponding to the city’s manual workers were different: 29.7 %, 34.0 %, 36.6 %. The longilinear types were again in the majority, as in the superior class, but with a less intense occurrence. The situation was completely inverted for the following percentages relative to the countryside workers and farmers: 37.2 % brevilinear types, 38.8 % mesolinear types and just 28.5 % longilinear types.
There is no need for doubt, therefore, in considering this investigation as a confirmation of the high frequency of longilinear types in the superior classes, compared to the intermediate and inferior categories.325

  • 326 Boldrini, “Biotipi e classi sociali,” 75.

196The successive investigation on the “physical characteristics of the scientific personnel of Italian universities,” conducted by Boldrini and Mengarelli, and presented at the 1931 International Congress for Studies on Population in Rome, constituted a confirmation: “the university body, taken as a whole, is tall and slim.”326 In the following years, the Laboratory of Statistics of the Catholic University in Milan continued to gather data and numbers to demonstrate the “biotypological” dimension of social stratification.

197Mengarelli, for example, conducted broad research on the “physical characteristics of the Italians who have reached hegemonic positions in intellectual, artistic, political and economic-financial Italian life,” confirming the biological difference between “active genius” and “contemplative genius”:

  • 327 Boldrini, “Tipi e attitudini costituzionali,” 14. See also Carlo Mengarelli, “I caratteri costituz (...)

The most longilinear style of body are those who Mengarelli calls “men of theoretical life” and, in particular, the experts of the abstract disciplines. He considers these men, with their excess stature and low weight, as generally asthenic longilinear. Following them, with higher stature but also greater relative weight, and therefore a less outstanding longilinearity, are those who excelled in naturalist and technical research, and, at a notable distance, the “men of practical life” (political and economic-financial). These last […] gravitate toward a brevilinear sthenic type.327

  • 328 Carlo Mengarelli, “Su i caratteri fisici della nobiltà,” in Contributi del Laboratorio di Statisti (...)

198A second investigation of the “physical characteristics of nobility” demonstrated the “asthenic longilinear” constitution—a stature superior to the average, weight inferior, lighter pigmentation—of Italian aristocrats.328 And while Mengarelli studied the “contemplative aristocrat,” another student of Boldrini, Albino Uggé, was concerned instead with athletes, underlining their “brevilinear sthenic” constitution:

  • 329 Boldrini, “Tipi e attitudini costituzionali,” 15–16; Albino Uggé, “Sul tipo morfologico degli atle (...)

In general, the sporting constitution is sthenic-brevilinear. It is comparable, therefore, with the physical form of men of practical life, but with a more accentuated body mass. The robust man, with a stout and brevilinear body, tends to emerge in sporting life, as well as in the political and business ones, according to whether he revolves his attitude of achievement toward purely physical activity, or intellectual.329

  • 330 Raffaello Maggi, “La costituzione degli attori dello schermo,” in Contributi del Laboratorio di St (...)

199Finally, Maggi’s research presented data on the “new” aristocracy, such as the cinematographic artists: according to his survey, for example, the actors were part of the “sthenic longilinear” (stature and weight above average), while the actresses were of the “medium asthenic longilinear type.”330

200Closely connected to such analyses of the relationship between constitutional structure and social stratification, was the other problem dear to the eugenics of the Milan Laboratory of Statistics: that of the “differential fertility” of biotypes. For Boldrini, the difference in fertility between social classes did not depend in the first place on economic or social motivations (the sociological theory supported by the majority of Italian demographers), nor on the biological variations of reproductive capacity (Gini’s cyclical theory), as much as on the biotypological composition of the social pyramid (the constitutional theory) with the less fertile longilinear types dominating the elite, and the highly sexually reactive brevilinear types crowding the lower classes:

  • 331 Boldrini, La fertilità dei biotipi, 203–04.

Since the longilinear type is proportionally frequent in the population, and more represented in the higher classes, and the natural, sexual and social selection in today’s cycle favors it, it follows that the current members of the elite and those who would like to become members, elevated from the lower categories, are frequently hyper-evolved and, for this reason, possess an inferior fertility to the average population and above all less than the fertility of the middle and lower social classes.331

201Compared to the sociological and biological theories of differential fertility, the constitutional theory—Boldrini stated—did not have an evolutionary dimension and could rather be conceived as a static image of a demographic “conjuncture”:

  • 332 Boldrini, La fertilità dei biotipi, 213.

It [the constitutional theory] starts from the presupposition that the reproductiveness of the biotypes, linked to the morphological-functional structure, can be considered, over a brief period, as fixed, and that the differential fertility of the classes rises simply from the manner in which the biotypes, of which the population is formed, are divided among the classes. The phenomenon, in its intimate essence, has been caught in an “ontogenetic” moment, at a “conjuncture” that produces it, and does not admit, as a rule, an evolutionary process.332

202Boldrini’s constitutional theory did not completely negate the possibility of identifying an evolutionary tendency in the development of human society. It nevertheless placed the primum movens of such a process not in the biotypes themselves, but in the fluctuating selective mechanisms that derived, time after time, from the interaction between the external environment and the social system. In particular, Boldrini proposed a sort of philosophy of history, distinguished by a constant oscillation between two cycles: the phases of crises, change and revolution selected an elite of brevilinear types; the successive phase of stabilization and consolidation favored instead an elite of longilinear types. The “active genius,” revolutionary and brevilinear, left his post to the “contemplative genius,” intellectual and longilinear, and vice versa:

  • 333 Boldrini, “Tipi e attitudini costituzionali,” 11.

If it is true that history assists in a rhythmic succession of phases of activity and of contemplation; that the craftsmen of one and the other are men of genius, who put, with their thoughts and their works, a personal seal on the political, social and religious life; finally, that the attitudes of creative activity are linked with the sthenic brevilinear structure and the theoretic predisposition with asthenic longilinearity, then we can conclude that the supreme power and superior direction of society are necessarily transmitted without pause by one type or the other.333

  • 334 Boldrini, “Tipi e attitudini costituzionali,” 10.
  • 335 Boldrini, “Tipi e attitudini costituzionali,” 10.
  • 336 Boldrini, “Tipi e attitudini costituzionali,” 10.

203The “first contemplative period” of the modern era was the Renaissance, and in fact, Erasmus, “the most eminent and pure representative of humanism,”334 was a “pure asthenic longilinear” type. A blow to Erasmus’ theory however came from the “religious revolutionaries Luther, Zwingli, and Henry VIII, all well known as being of sthenic brevilinear structure.”335 Two centuries later, the Enlightenment saw the initial return of the “pure longilinear type” (Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, d’Alembert, Rousseau, Wolff, Mendelssohn), soon dethroned “for a lack of practical capacity,” by “true revolutionaries, such as Mirabeau, Danton, Robespierre, of the more or less sthenic brevilinear type.” In the 1900s, the end of the First World War marked a new affirmation of activism: communism and fascism, although political adversaries, appeared to Boldrini to be united by the “brevilinear constitution of the leaders.”336

  • 337 Amintore Fanfani, “I mutamenti economici nell’Europa moderna e l’evoluzione costituzionalistica de (...)
  • 338 Marcello Boldrini and Aldo Alberti, “Il patriziato italiano nelle categorie dirigenti,” in Contrib (...)

204Many research studies by the Laboratory of Statistics—such as the analysis of the relationship between biotype and social class—were produced to give statistical solidity to the hypothetical evolutionary tendency of the elite. Amintore Fanfani, for example, hypothesized a probable connection between the economic changes in Europe from the fifteenth century, and the formation of a new longilinear aristocracy.337 Boldrini and Alberti’s investigations into the transformation of the Italian elite in the last eighty years seemed to confirm the biotypological movement of the Italian ruling classes from a theoretical and longilinear type to a more active, practical brevilinear type.338

205In Boldrini’s view, the social stratification of biotypes and the constitutional theory of the elite represented the so-called “documentary or passive eugenics,” which focused on the relationship between the constitutional characteristics, transmitted hereditarily, and the respective social and demographic consequences:

  • 339 Boldrini, “Costituzione ed eugenica,” 204.

Contrasting forces at the same time conserve and eliminate the types and the constitutional characters. As for the fundamental structure, the recessive is favored by homogamy. The longilinear type is additionally advantaged by the aesthetic evaluation, which facilitates marriage, but is impeded in diffusion by its lower natural fertility. Nor must we disregard, for the longilinear types, the disadvantage deriving from their frequent occurrence in the middle and higher classes, in which matrimonial rates are lower, the age of marriage higher, making the procreative will even weaker; and, by extension, offers the benefit of greater prosperity and a more comfortable and tranquil existence. […] Nor must we disregard the negative sides of the constitution. The average duration of life, the mortality at various ages, the morbose propensities, are different for the two fundamental types, and as they are of a hereditary character, as is normal, their diffusion is positively or negatively influenced by the same factors that work to preserve or diffuse, or even eliminate the two typical opposing structures.339

  • 340 Boldrini, “Costituzione ed eugenica,” 208.

206Although he was a firm supporter of the hereditary nature of constitutional characteristics, Boldrini did not go so far as to accept the negative measures of what he called “active eugenics” (Anglo-American, German and Scandinavian eugenics). Not only for the reasons already listed—the natural harmony between the social system and human organism, the historical variability of eugenic ideals—but above all, for the recognition of the theoretical limits of a science that still had much to investigate and understand: “That the current world is the best, no one wishes to support; but no human mind is today capable of inventing another, at least not unless we talk of the mind of a novelist, such as Aldous Huxley, which we would not, however, aspire to realize.”340

  • 341 Boldrini, “Costituzione ed eugenica,” 209.

207If therefore, in the future, the scientist had to content himself with continuing his studies, the politician could, in the meantime, “trust in the old instruments of hygiene, medicine, assistance, charity, and social legislation, with which defects, imperfections and illnesses are prevented, cured and rendered socially innocuous.”341 This cautious and moderate position, therefore, had not to induce pessimism about the eugenic hopes, but on the contrary, had to be interpreted, in Boldrini’s words, as an honest scientific recognition of an immense field of work, which reserved “places and honors for all.”

Notas

1 Raymond Pearl to Corrado Gini, 28 December 1927, Raymond Pearl Papers, American Philosophical Society (hereafter APS), Box 7.

2 ACS, SPD, CO, f. 210.802 “Mjoen, dott. Jon Alfred.” Presidente del Comitato Norvegese per l’Eugenica.

3 Draft with edits by Fischer in: MPG-Archives, Dept. I, Rep. 3, No. 23, pp. 262–65, cited in: Hans-Walter Schmuhl, The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, 1927–1945. Crossing Boundaries (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), 116. See also Allan Chase, The Legacy of Malthus. The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism (New York: Knopf, 1977), 345–46.

4 Mantovani, Rigenerare la societa, 261–270; Aristotle A. Kallis, “Racial Politics and Biomedical Totalitarianism in Interwar Europe,” in Turda and Weindling, eds., Blood and Homeland, 389–416; Roger Griffin, “Tunnel Visions and Mysterious Trees: Modernist Projects of National and Racial Regeneration, 1880–1939,” in Turda and Weindling, eds., Blood and Homeland, 417–56.

5 On Mussolini’s Discorso dell’Ascensione, see Treves, Le nascite e la politica, 126–39; Ipsen, Dictating Demography, 84–85.

6 Corrado Gini, “Discorso di inaugurazione dell’Istituto Centrale di Statistica (14 luglio 1926),” Annali di Statistica. Serie VI, 2 (1929): 18–19.

7 Since 1928, Gini referred to Alfred Lotka, Louis Dublin and Robert R. Kuczynski researches in order to legitimize, on statistical grounds, the fascist pronatalist turning point marked by the Ascension Day speech: see Corrado Gini, “Il numero come forza,” Critica Fascista 6, no. 19 (1928): 363; Corrado Gini, “The Italian Demographic Problem and the Fascist Policy on Population,” The Journal of Political Economy 38, no. 6 (1930): 682–97.

8 Agostino Gemelli, “Le dottrine eugenetiche sul matrimonio e la morale cattolica,” Vita e Pensiero 22, no. 3–4 (March–April 1931): 195–99; Agostino Gemelli, “Ancora della condanna della eugenetica. Echi e critiche alla enciclica ‘Casti Connubii’ sul matrimonio cristiano,” Vita e Pensiero 22, no. 10 (October 1931): 603–14.

9 Francesco Leoncini, “Relazione su la procurata sterilità di fronte alla morale e alla legge,” Studium-Quaderno dei Medici. Il II Convegno dei medici cattolici (Firenze, 16–18 ottobre 1932), suppl. no. 3 (March 1933): 38–64.

10 Giuseppina Pastori, “La relazione su l’eugenica e la morale cattolica,” Studium-Quaderno dei Medici: 70.

11 “Le deliberazioni del Convegno,” Studium-Quaderno dei Medici: 100–101.

12 On the defeat of “qualitative” eugenics in fascist Italy, see also Mantovani, Rigenerare la societa, 285–303.

13 See Rassegna di studi sessuali, demografia ed eugenica 8, no. 1 (January–March 1928): 25ff.

14 Starting from 1931, Genesis presented itself as an organ of an Italian Federation of Eugenics, which comprised SISQS, directed by Silvestro Baglioni, CISP and SIGE, both under the presidency of Gini. See Genesis 10, no. 1–2 (January–June 1931): 1.

15 See Rassegna di studi sessuali, demografia ed eugenica 8, no. 4 (December 1928): 240.

16 Report of the Divisione Polizia Politica per la Divisione Affari Generali e Riservati, 9 August 1930, in ACS, CPC, b. 24106, “Mieli Aldo.”

17 See, in particular, Augusto Carelli, “Valore della sterilizzazione eugenica nel miglioramento della razza umana,” Difesa sociale 7, no. 10 (October 1928): 341–45; Augusto Carelli, “A proposito di sterilizzazione eugenica,” Difesa sociale 7, no. 11 (November 1928): 398; Augusto Carelli, “Quanti e quali individui dovrebbero essere sottoposti alla sterilizzazione eugenica?,” Difesa sociale 12 (1928): 436–40; Augusto Carelli, review of Charles Wicksteed Armstrong, The Survival of the Unfittest (1927), Difesa sociale 8, no. 3 (March 1929): 124–25.

18 See Ernesto Pestalozza to Levi, 10 January 1930, ACS, SPD, CO, b. 109005/2, “Levi Ettore.” On the issue, see also Mantovani, Rigenerare la societa, 300–303.

19 The numerous requests for the reintegration of Ettore Levi can be found in ACS, SPD, CO, b. 109005/2, “Levi Ettore.”

20 See Pietro Capasso, “Ettore Levi,” Il pensiero sanitario 14 (1932): 11.

21 ACS, CPC, b. 19943, “Capasso Pietro.” In 1941, the Direzione Generale di Pubblica Sicurezza suspended the surveillance given the subject’s good conduct and the “sincere and effective contrition.” In 1944, Capasso became undersecretary of State for Domestic Affairs during Badoglio government. See also Mantovani, Rigenerare la societa, 296.

22 For Capasso’s criticism of the demographic campaign, the regime and the encyclical Casti Connubii, see Mantovani, igenerare la societa, 295–97.

23 In 1930, Michels praised, for example, Campanella’s eugenic vision, in particular, as regarding the political order, with “the direction and the government of the State guaranteed of the high value of its principles, but also of the racial fusion that gives consistency and solidity to the population”: see Roberto Michels, “Nei primordi della scienza eugenetica. Le utopie di Tommaso Campanella,” Rivista internazionale di filosofia del diritto 10, no. 25 (1930): 8–9, offprint. On the “myth” of Leon Battista Alberti, precursor of eugenics, see Mario Barbàra, “Leon Battista Alberti precursore di Galton,” Le Opere e i Giorni 7, no. 11 (November 1928): 86–92.

24 Ipsen, Dictating Demography, 205.

25 Vice-president of Commission III was B. Malinowski. Other members were W. Schmidt, R. Pinto, G. Pitt-Rivers, O. Schlaginhaufen, R. Goldschmidt, E. Fischer, F. Boas, R. B. Dixon, H. B. Lundborg. The complete list is available in Raymond Pearl Papers, American Philosophical Society.

26 ACS, PCM 1940–43, b. 2674, f. 1.1.16.3.5.27.000–7, sf. 2. For more details, see Cassata, Il fascismo razionale, 130.

27 Gini to Pearl, 11 February 1928, Pearl Papers, APS, Box 7.

28 On this topic, see in particular Edmund Ramsden, “Carving up Population Science: Eugenics, Demography and the Controversy over the ‘Biological Law’ of Population Growth,” Social Studies of Science 32, no. 5–6 (October–December 2002): 857–99.

29 Gini to Wilson, August 14, 1930; Gini to Pearl, 20 August 1930; Gini to Pearl, 25 August 1930; Gini to C. E. McGuire, 16 January 1931; Gini to Pearl, n.d., but June 1931; Pearl to Gini, 13 June 1931. Pearl Papers, APS.

30 ACS, SPD, CO, b. 1172, f. 509560/III; see Ipsen, Dictating Demography, 205.

31 ACS, SPD, CO, b. 1172, f. 509560/III.

32 Cora B. S. Hodson to Ernesto Pestalozza, 15 February 1932, Charles B. Davenport Papers, APS.

33 Gini to Davenport, 11 June 1931, Davenport Papers, APS.

34 Gini to Davenport, 11 June 1931, Davenport Papers, APS.

35 Gini to Davenport, 20 August 1932, Davenport Papers, APS.

36 “Popolo d’Italia,” 14 September 1933.

37 Vincenzo Palmieri, Denatalità. La grande insidia sociale vista da un medico (Milan: Società Palermitana Editrice Medica, 1935; Lorenzo Ratto, “La sterilizzazone coattiva in Germania,” Avvenire Sanitario 50 (1934): 1.

38 Salvatore Ottolenghi,Sterilizzazione del delinquente in rapporto alla medicina legale,” Policlinico-Sezione Pratica 43 (1933): 171.

39 Letter from the Ministry of National Education to ISTAT Presidency, 26 September 1935, ACS, PCM 1940– 43, b. 2674, f. 1.1.16.3.5.27.000-7, sf. 3.

40 Franco Savorgnan to Mussolini, 26 September 1935, ACS, PCM 1940–43, b. 2674, f. 1.1.16.3.5.27.000-7, sf. 3.

41 Kühl, The Nazi Connection, 32.

42 Letter of the Cabinet of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to ISTAT Presidency, 19 June 1934, ISTAT Archives, b. “Congressi internazionali. Partecipazione funzionari Istat.”

43 “L’eugenica e la morale cattolica,” L’Osservatore Romano (13 August 1933): 2.

44 Catholic University Archive (hereafter AUC), Agostino Gemelli Papers, Correspondence, b. 49, f. 70, August 28, 1933. On Gemelli’s eugenics, see: Maiocchi, Scienza italiana e razzismo fascista, 75–76; Roberto Maiocchi, “Agostino Gemelli critico dell’ ‘eugenica’ tedesca,” Vita e Pensiero 83, no. 2 (2000): 150–69; Maria Bocci, Agostino Gemelli rettore e francescano. Chiesa, regime, democrazia (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2003): 421–24.

45 “Una smentita,” L’Osservatore Romano (2–3 October 1933): 2. See also Gemelli’s letter to Giuseppe Dalla Torre, editor of “L’Osservatore Romano,” 29 September 1933, AUC, Gemelli Papers, Correspondence, b. 49, f. 70.

46 Gemelli to H. Höfler, 4 October 1933 AUC, Gemelli Papers, Correspondence, b. 49, f. 70.

47 “Vita senza valore,” L’Osservatore Romano (4 November 1933): 2. The review concerned Erwin Baur, W. E. Mühlmann, Friedrich Karl Walter, Paul Althaus, Ernst Heinrich Rosenfeld, Hans Meyer, Hans Duncker, Von der Verhütung unwerten Lebens (Brema: Halem, 1933). On Niedermeyer, see: Monika Löscher, “Eugenics and Catholicism in Interwar Austria,” in Turda and Weindling, eds., Blood and Homeland, 310–12.

48 Agostino Gemelli, “La ‘sterilizzazione coattiva e preventiva’ nell’insegnamento degli studiosi italiani,” L’Economia Italiana 11–12 (December 1933): 117–28.

49 Guido Lami, “Significati e moniti di un Congresso,” Studium 31, no. 6 (June 1935): 362–65.

50 Guido Lami, “Il Congresso Internazionale dei Medici Cattolici a Vienna e il prossimo Congresso-Pellegrinaggio a Roma,” Studium 32, no. 11 (November 1936): 628–631. See also: Löscher, “Eugenics and Catholicism in Interwar Austria,” 311.

51 Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale (Milan, 20–23 September 1924) (Rome: Stabilimento Poligrafico dello Stato, 1927). In the executive committee, as well as Gini, were Luigi Mangiagalli (rector of the university and mayor of Milan); Icilio Boni, head physician at Milan’s Ospedale Maggiore and president of the Royal Italian Society of Hygiene; Ernesto Pestalozza, senator and first president of SIGE; and Serafino Patellani. The promotional committee was made up prevalently of directors of university clinics of obstetricsgynaecology, neuropsychiatry and dermo-syphilology and by directors of the institutes of zoology and comparative anatomy, and of hygiene. There were also economists, such as Attilio Cabiati, Luigi Einaudi, Maffeo Pantaleoni and Angelo Sraffa. Among the foreign guests participating in the conference, there was Leonard Darwin, president of the International Commission of Eugenics and the Eugenics Education Society; Lucien March, director of the Statistique Générale de la France (SGF) and representative of the Société Française d’Eugénique; Jon Alfred Mjoen, director of the Winderen Laboratorium (Oslo) and representative of the Consultive Eugénics Committee of Norway; Nikolai K. Koltsov, director of the Institute of Experimental Biology in Moscow and president of the Russian Eugenics Society.

52 Corrado Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” iniAtti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 4.

53 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 4.

54 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 7.

55 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 8–9.

56 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 10.

57 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 10.

58 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 11.

59 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 11.

60 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 13.

61 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 14.

62 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 14.

63 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 15.

64 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 15–16.

65 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 17.

66 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 17.

67 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 20.

68 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 22.

69 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 24.

70 Gini, “Le relazioni dell’Eugenica con le altre scienze biologiche e sociali,” 25.

71 See “Nona seduta,” in Congresso Milano 1924, iniAtti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, LXIII.

72 Giuseppe De Giovanni and Mario Mazzeo, L’eugenica (Neaples: Pelosi, 1924).

73 Agostino Gemelli, “Religione ed eugenetica,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 65. Gemelli’s contribution was expressly requested by Gini in the organisational phase of the Congress, as demonstrated by Gemelli’s reply of 25 April 1924: “At your insistence, I can do nothing but consent,” in ACS, Gini Papers (hereafter AG), b. b4.

74 Gemelli, “Religione ed eugenetica,” 66.

75 See Ugo Cerletti, “Necessità biologica delle malattie,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 387–90.

76 See Pieraccini’s monumental genealogical study, La stirpe dei Medici di Cafaggiolo. Saggio di ricerche sulla trasmissione ereditariadei caratteri biologici (Florence: Vallecchi, 1924).

77 Jon Alfred Mjoen, “Delinquenza e genio alla luce della biologia,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 170. See also N. Roll-Hansen, “Norwegian Eugenics: Sterilization as Social Reform,” in Broberg and Roll-Hansen, eds., Eugenics and the Welfare State, 158–61.

78 See Camillo Pestalozza, “La natimortalità nei diversi periodi della vita italiana e milanese,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 191–98 and 251–52; Emerico Biondi, “Il parto podalico e sua influenza sulla vita dei bambini,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 202–10; Vittore Baldassari, “Alcuni dati statistici della Clinica ostetrica della R. Università di Genova,” Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 253–56; Giulio Calderini, “Sulla sorte dei feti nati da gravide albuminuriche,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 273–80; Francesco Landucci, “Sul nuovo regolamento riguardante l’assistenza degli esposti,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 415–18.

79 Giuseppe Antonini, “Alcoolismo ed Eugenetica,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 117– 20; Lanfranco Maroi, “Alcoolismo ed Eugenetica,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 121–38; Eugenio Centanni, “La eredità dei tumori,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 211–24; Andrea Pagani Cesa, “Dati statistici sull’influenza dell’ambiente famigliare come fattore di contagio tubercolare,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 293–94; Giovanni Galli, “L’Eugenetica di fronte all’ereditarietà delle malattie cardio-vascolari,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 307–10; Raffaele Jona, “Considerazioni cliniche e profilattiche sui rapporti fra tubercolosi ed Eugenetica,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 311–18; Guido Rigobello, “L’ereditarietà nella tubercolosi,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 319–24; Agostino Pasini, “La sifilide latente nei suoi rapporti con l’Eugenica,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 325–32; Luigi De Berardinis, “La profilassi anticeltica nell’esercito,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 333–40; Angelo Bellini, “Effetti vicini e lontani della blenorragia nell’uomo e nella donna,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 345–54; Gaetano Dossena, “Il peso dei feti nati da madri tubercolose,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 365–66; Giuseppina Pastori, “Sulla frequenza dell’eredolues nei fanciulli anormali,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 425–30.

80 See Luigi Bellezza, “Educazione sessuale ed Eugenetica,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 281–84; Emma Modena Camporini, “Eugenetica ed istruzione igienico-sessuale della donna,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 363–64.

81 See Attilio Maffi, “L’educazione fisica delle masse altissimo fattore di Eugenetica sociale,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 355–62.

82 Prassitele Piccinini, “Le fonti d’Italia,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 419–22.

83 Luigi Devoto, “La famiglia del lavoratore del piombo,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 409–10; Luciano Ermolli, “Un problema di Eugenetica operaia,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 411–14; Giovanni Allevi, “Lavoro ed Eugenetica,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 395–400.

84 See Vito Massarotti, “La profilassi del suicidio in rapporto all’Eugenica,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 435–38.

85 See Cesare Cattaneo, “Influenza della vitaminosi ed avitaminosi sul divenire della razza,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 347–50.

86 See Leonard Darwin, “Eugenics and the Criminal,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 151–58.

87 See “Quinta seduta,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, XXXVIII.

88 Jon Alfred Mjoen and Jon Bo, “The Norwegian System for Identification and Protection of the Individual,” Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 179–84.

89 Roberto Michels, “Taluni effetti dell’emigrazione nei suoi rapporti coll’Eugenica,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 199–201.

90 Livio Livi, “Emigrazione ed Eugenetica,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 50.

91 Ettore Levi, “Le finalità eugeniche del controllo delle nascite,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 257–72.

92 Felice Marta, “Eugenetica e neo-malthusianismo,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 455.

93 See Carlo Francioni, “Le anomalie costituzionali e diatesiche dell’età infantile in rapporto coll’Eugenetica,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 87–110; Romolo Costa, “Opportunità della reazione novocaino-formalinica prima del matrimonio,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 295– 96; Agostino Pasini, “La sifilide latente nei suoi rapporti con l’Eugenica,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 325–32; Gian Angelo Ambrosoli, “Le malattie della pelle in rapporto all’Eugenetica,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 341–44; Giuseppe Corberi, “L’ereditarietà nella epilessia,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 431–34.

94 See “Nona seduta,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, LXIV.

95 Eugenio Medea, “Le malattie nervose e mentali in rapporto all’Eugenetica,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 141.

96 Medea, “Le malattie nervose e mentali in rapporto all’Eugenetica,” 143.

97 Domenico Medugno, “L’azione dello Stato e l’Eugenetica,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 147.

98 Ernesto Pestalozza, “Le indicazioni operatorie in rapporto all’Eugenica,” in Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, 85.

99 Pestalozza, “Le indicazioni operatorie in rapporto all’Eugenica,” 82.

100 Pestalozza, “Le indicazioni operatorie in rapporto all’Eugenica,” 84.

101 See Atti del Primo Congresso italiano di Eugenetica sociale, LXVII.

102 On the centrality of the theme of racial crossing in 20th century eugenics, see Claudio Pogliano, L’ossessione della razza. Antropologia e genetica nel xx secolo (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2005), 211–68.

103 Corrado Gini, Le basi scientifiche della popolazione (Catania: Studio editoriale moderno, 1931), 308.

104 C. Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” in Corrado Gini, Shiroshi Nasu, Robert R. Kuczynski, and Oliver E. Baker, Population (Chicago: Harris Foundation Lectures, The University of Chicago Press, 1929), 116–17. The Italian version was Corrado Gini, Nascita, evoluzione e morte delle nazioni (Rome: Libreria del Littorio, 1930).

105 Gini, Le basi scientifiche della popolazione, 309.

106 Gini, Le basi scientifiche della popolazione, 311.

107 Gini, Le basi scientifiche della popolazione, 310. See also Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 122.

108 Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 123.

109 Gini, Le basi scientifiche della popolazione, 312.

110 Gini, Le basi scientifiche della popolazione, 312. See also Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 117.

111 Gini, Le basi scientifiche della popolazione, 313. See also Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 102.

112 Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 116–22.

113 Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 125.

114 Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 126.

115 Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 127.

116 Gini, Le basi scientifiche della popolazione, 316.

117 Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 97.

118 Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 97–98

119 See Franz Boas, Helene M. Boas, “The Head Forms of the Italians as Influenced by Heredity and Environment,” American Anthropologist 15, no. 2 (April–June 1913):163–88. See also Gini to Boas, 6 September 1913, APS, Franz Boas Papers.

120 Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 98–99.

121 Gini, Le basi scientifiche della popolazione, 317.

122 Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 136.

123 Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 137.

124 Gini, Le basi scientifiche della popolazione, 318.

125 Gini, Le basi scientifiche della popolazione, 319. See also Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 106.

126 Gini, Le basi scientifiche della popolazione, 321. See also Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 110.

127 Gini, Le basi scientifiche della popolazione, 321–22.

128 Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 111.

129 Gini, Le basi scientifiche della popolazione, 322.

130 Gini, “The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Population,” 114.

131 Corrado Gini, “Discorso d’apertura,” in Atti del Secondo Congresso italiano di Genetica ed Eugenica (Roma, 30 settembre – 2 ottobre 1929) (Rome: Failli,1932), 17–18.

132 Gini, “Discorso d’apertura,”18.

133 Gini, “Discorso d’apertura,” 18–19.

134 Gini, “Discorso d’apertura,” 20.

135 Gini, “Discorso d’apertura,” 20.

136 Gini, “Discorso d’apertura,” 21.

137 Gini, “Discorso d’apertura,” 26.

138 Gini, “Discorso d’apertura,” 26–27.

139 Gini, “Discorso d’apertura,” 26–27.

140 On Charles B. Davenport, see Kevles, In The Name of Eugenics, 41–56. See also Jan A. Witkowski and John R. Inglis, Davenport’s Dream. 21st Century Reflections on Heredity and Eugenics (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2008).

141 Charles B. Davenport, “Sono utili gli incroci di razza?,” in Atti del Secondo Congresso italiano di Genetica ed Eugenica, 60.

142 Cesare Artom, “Costituzioni genetiche nuove per mutazionismo e per incrocio,” in Atti del Secondo Congresso italiano di Genetica ed Eugenica, 77.

143 Alessandro Ghigi, “Fecondità e sterilità nell’ibridismo e nella consanguineità,” in Atti del Secondo Congresso italiano di Genetica ed Eugenica, 172.

144 Luisa Gianferrari, “Effetti demografici e genetici della consanguineità,” in Corrado Gini, ed., Atti del Congresso internazionale per gli Studi sulla Popolazione (Roma, 7–10 settembre 1931) (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1934), vol. 2, 295–308; Giuseppe Cantoni, “Su la consanguineità nelle valli alpestri della Venezia Tridentina,”in Gini, ed., Atti del Congresso internazionale per gli Studi sulla Popolazione, vol. 2, 309–14.

145 See Eugen Fischer, “Die gegenseitige Stellung der Menschenrassen auf Grund der mendelden Merkmale,” in Gini, ed., Atti del Congresso internazionale per gli Studi sulla Popolazione, vol. 3, 179–88; Jon Alfred Mjoen, “Biologische und biochemische Untersuchungen bei Rassenmischung,” in Gini, ed., Atti del Congresso internazionale per gli Studi sulla Popolazione, vol. 3, 199–202; Stanley D. Porteus, “Race Crossing in Hawaii,” in Gini, ed., Atti del Congresso internazionale per gli Studi sulla Popolazione, vol. 3, 203–12; Harry L. Shapiro, “Race Mixture Studies in Polynesia,” in Gini, ed., Atti del Congresso internazionale per gli Studi sulla Popolazione, vol. 3, 213–20. On these contributions, see also Pogliano, L’ossessione della razza, 50–52.

146 Ernesto Pestalozza, “Sterilizzazioni coattive,” in Atti del Secondo Congresso italiano di Genetica ed Eugenica, 83.

147 Pestalozza, “Sterilizzazioni coattive,” 85.

148 Pestalozza, “Sterilizzazioni coattive,” 87.

149 Augusto Carelli, “Il presunto aumento dei deficienti e malati mentali fra le popolazioni,” in Atti del Secondo Congresso italiano di Genetica ed Eugenica, 105.

150 See “Processi verbali,” in Atti del Secondo Congresso italiano di Genetica ed Eugenica, 35.

151 “Processi verbali,” 35–37.

152 “Processi verbali,” 37.

153 Carlo Foà, “I fattori biologici della diminuzione delle nascite,” in Atti del Secondo Congresso italiano di Genetica ed Eugenica, 173–94.

154 Carlo Foà, “I fattori biologici della diminuzione delle nascite,” in Gini, ed., Atti del Congresso internazionale per gli Studi sulla Popolazione, vol. 2, 9–56.

155 Silvestro Baglioni, “Funzioni somatiche e genetiche,” in Atti del Secondo Congresso italiano di Genetica ed Eugenica, 153–60.

156 Agostino Gemelli, “Le vedute della psicologia e della psichiatria nel problema della natalità,” in Gini, ed., Atti del Congresso internazionale per gli Studi sulla Popolazione, vol. 2, 343–46.

157 See, in particular, Marcello Boldrini, “Biotipi e classi sociali,” in Lucio Silla, ed., Atti della SIPS. XX riunione (Milano, 12–18 Septtembre 1931) (Rome: SIPS, 1932), vol. 1, 63–73.

158 Marcello Boldrini, “Qualità e quantità,” in Atti del Secondo Congresso italiano di Genetica ed Eugenica, 379–404.

159 Marcello Boldrini, “Qualità e quantità,” Rassegna di studi sessuali, demografia ed eugenica 10, no. 4 (October– December 1930): 262 (the article reproduces the text of the paper from the 1929 Congress).

160 Boldrini, “Qualità e quantità,” 273.

161 Boldrini, “Qualità e quantità,” 280.

162 Corrado Gini, “Prime indagini sulle famiglie numerose,” in Atti del Secondo Congresso italiano di Genetica ed Eugenica, 289–338.

163 Corrado Gini, “Nuovi risultati delle indagini sulle famiglie numerose,” Atti Istituto Nazionale Assicurazioni 4 (1932): 7–46.

164 Corrado Gini, Angelo Ferrarelli, “Altri risultati delle indagini sulle famiglie numerose,” Metron 11, no. 1 (June 1933), then in Corrado Gini, ed., Atti del Congresso internazionale per gli Studi sulla Popolazione, vol. 8, 355– 98. Two other papers from the conference linked to the inquiry on numerous families were: Corrado Gini, “Sulla nuzialità differenziale delle varie classi sociali,” Metron 11, no. 1 (June 1933), then in Corrado Gini, ed., Atti del Congresso internazionale per gli Studi sulla Popolazione, vol. 7, 357–62; Corrado Gini, “Un nuovo fattore di selezione matrimoniale? L’ordine di generazione,” Metron 11, no. 1 (June 1933), then in Corrado Gini, ed., Atti del Congresso internazionale per gli Studi sulla Popolazione, vol. 2, 245–60.

165 The list was as follows: Alberto Aggazzotti (Modena, Formiggine, Concordia sulla Secchia), Mario Barbàra (Genoa), Carmelo Cafiero (Nola, Bacoli), Angelo Caroli (Bari, Monopoli, Mola, Polignano), Luigi Castaldi (Cagliari, Ales, Aritzo), Cristoforo Cuscunà (Nicolosi, Paternò),Umberto D’Ancona (Sienna, Grosseto, Monteroni d’Arbia, Abbadia San Salvatore), Filippo Dulzetto (Catania), Carlo Foà (Milan), Fabio Frassetto (Bologna, Imola, Riccione, Ferrara), Giuseppe Genna (Trapani), Carlo Jucci (Sassari, Tempio), Alberto Marassini (Parma), Aldobrandino Mochi (Florence), Osvaldo Polimanti (Perugia, Terni), Angelo Rabbeno (Camerino), Giuseppe Russo (Catania), Arturo Sabatini (Crotone, Catanzaro, Soverato, Chiaravalle, Cirò), Massimo Sella (Rovigno d’Istria, Pisino, Canfanaro, Dignano, Lussimpiccolo, Sanvincenti, Pirano, Gimino), Emilio Sereni (Naples, Vietri, Scafati), Sergio Sergi (Roma), Mario Tirelli (Olevano Romano, Bellegra), Gaetano Viale (Genoa, Imperia, Diano Marina), Velio Zanolli (Padua).

166 The “qualitative” aspects included anamnestic traits (name, age, number of children, number of brothers and sisters, level of education, number of people in the residential complex, illness contracted, current state of health, menstruation, etc.) and natural descriptive traits (quantity and color of hair, form of the face and profile, dimensions of the head, aspect of the eyebrows, eyes and coloration of the iris, profile and dimensions of the nose, dimensions of the lips, development of the hair, state of the teeth, color of the face, etc.).

167 Corrado Gini, “Problemi della popolazione,” Annali Istituto di Statistica dell’Università di Bari (Bari: Tip. Cressati, 1928), 19–20.

168 Gini, “Problemi della popolazione,” 23.

169 Alessandro Ghigi, “Costituzione e fertilità,” in Gini, ed., Atti del Congresso internazionale per gli Studi sulla Popolazione, vol. 3, 75.

170 Nicola Pende, “Costituzione e fecondità,” in Gini, ed., Atti del Congresso internazionale per gli Studi sulla Popolazione, vol. 3, 86.

171 Piero Benedetti, “Contributo alla ricerca dei rapporti tra fecondità e costituzione,” in Gini, ed., Atti del Congresso internazionale per gli Studi sulla Popolazione, vol. 3, 116.

172 The subcommittee of the study, nominated by Gini, was composed of: Livio Livi, president, member of the High Council of Statistics; Marcello Boldrini, Milan Catholic University; Pio Cartoni, the General Headquarters for drafted non-commissioned soldiers and troops, (Direzione Generale Leva Sottufficiali e Truppa) of the Ministry of War; Medical Captain Alfredo Corsi, the General Headquarters of Military Health (Direzione Generale di Sanità Militare) of the Ministry of War; Medical Colonel Giovanni Grixoni, director of the School of Military Health; Medical Lieutenant Colonel Gabriele La Porta, the General Headquarters of Maritime Military Health (Direzione Generale di Sanità Militare Marittima) of the Ministry of Marine; Aldobrandino Mochi, director of the Institute of anthropology and paleontology at the University of Florence; General Fulvio Zugaro, director general of logistical services at the Ministry of War; Medical Lieutenant Colonel Luigi De Berardinis, head of the ISTAT department of demography and vital statistics.

173 For a description of the initiative see Duilio Balestra, “La preparazione dell’indagine antropometrica sugli iscritti in una classe di leva in Italia,” in Gini, ed., Atti del Congresso internazionale per gli Studi sulla Popolazione, vol. 3, 7–34.

174 Corrado Gini, “Alcuni risultati preliminari dell’indagine antropometrica sui soldati italiani,” in Gini, ed., Atti del Congresso internazionale per gli Studi sulla Popolazione, vol. 3, 98.

175 Corrado Gini, Enquête démographique sur les familles nombreuses italiennes. Résultats des recherches (Paris: Gembloux Imprimerie - J. Duculot Éditeur, 1933), 28.

176 Gini, Enquête démographique sur les familles nombreuses italiennes. Résultats des recherches, 28.

177 Corrado Gini, “Response to the Presidential Address,” in A decade of progress in eugenics: Scientific papers of the Third International Congress of Eugenics (Baltimore: The Williams & Wilkins Company, 1934), 25–26. The Italian version of Gini’s contribution was: Corrado Gini, “III Congresso internazionale di Eugenica (New York, 21–23 agosto 1932),” La ricerca scientifica 3 (1933).

178 Corrado Gini, “Remarks on the explanation of heterosis,” in A decade of progress in eugenics, 421–24. (The Italian version was: Corrado Gini, “Osservazioni sulla spiegazione dell’eterosi,” Genesis 1–2 (January–June 1932).

179 Gini, “Remarks on the explanation of heterosis,” 423.

180 Gini, “III Congresso internazionale di Eugenica,” 5.

181 The letter is conserved in ACS, PCM, 1940–43, b. 2674, f. 1.1.16.3.5.27.000-7, sf. 3.

182 Corrado Gini, “Parole inaugurali del Prof. C. Gini, lette alla riunione delle Società di Eugenica dell’America Latina tenutasi a Città del Messico il 12 ottobre 1935,” Genus 2, no. 1–2 (June 1936): 78.

183 Gini, “Parole inaugurali del Prof. C. Gini, lette alla riunione delle Società di Eugenica dell’America Latina tenutasi a Città del Messico il 12 ottobre 1935,” 78–79.

184 Gini, “Parole inaugurali del Prof. C. Gini, lette alla riunione delle Società di Eugenica dell’America Latina tenutasi a Città del Messico il 12 ottobre 1935,” 79.

185 Gini, “Parole inaugurali del Prof. C. Gini, lette alla riunione delle Società di Eugenica dell’America Latina tenutasi a Città del Messico il 12 ottobre 1935,” 79.

186 Gini, “Parole inaugurali del Prof. C. Gini, lette alla riunione delle Società di Eugenica dell’America Latina tenutasi a Città del Messico il 12 ottobre 1935,” 80.

187 Gini, “Parole inaugurali del Prof. C. Gini, lette alla riunione delle Società di Eugenica dell’America Latina tenutasi a Città del Messico il 12 ottobre 1935,” 80.

188 Gini, “Parole inaugurali del Prof. C. Gini, lette alla riunione delle Società di Eugenica dell’America Latina tenutasi a Città del Messico il 12 ottobre 1935,” 80.

189 Members of the Latin Federation of Eugenic Organizations were, in 1937, in addition to Italy, Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Spain, France, Mexico, Perù, Portugal, Romania, Switzerland. See Bureaux des Sociétés Fédérées, in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique. Rapport (Paris: Masson et C., 1937), 381–83.

190 See Raymond Turpin, Alexandre Caratzali and Gorny, “Contributions a l’étude de l’influence de l’âge et de l’état de santé des procréateurs, du rang et du nombre des naissances, sur les caractères de la progéniture,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique, 240–61; Corrado Gini, “De quelques recherches sur les variations que présenteraient certains caractères suivant le nombre d’enfants de la famille,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique, 262–69; Benjamin Weil-Hallé and M. Meyer, “La survie des enfants dans les familles nombreuses et restreintes,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique, 270; Raymond Turpin, Alexandre Caratzali and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, “Influence de l’âge maternel, du rang de naissance et de l’ordre de naissance sur la mortinatalité,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique, 271–77; Nora Federici, “Mortalité infantile et mortalité prénatale chez les familles nombreuses italiennes,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique, 278–82; Raymond Turpin and Alexandre Caratzali, Influence de l’âge maternel sur la mortinatalité des jumeaux, in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique, 283–85.

191 See René Martial, “Métissage et immigration,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique, 16–39.

192 See Étienne Letard, “Les leçons de l’expérimentation animale dans le problème du métissage,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique, 61–71.

193 See Alfred Thooris, “Considérations ethnologiques et démographiques sur la population française,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique, 214–27.

194 Franziska Minkowska, “Eugénique et Généalogie,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique, 341–50.

195 See Georges Schreiber, “Allocations familiales et Eugénique,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique, 91–100.

196 See Edmond-Alexandre Lesné, “Influence des régimes carencés et déséquilibrés, suralimentation et sousalimentation, sur la natalité et la mortalité des petits rats,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique, 144–46; Oddo Casagrandi, “Tentatives microscopiques et biologiques en vue de l’identification de certaines tares organiques séminales, héréditaires et acquises,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique, 147–49; Christian Champy, “L’importance des variations raciales de sensibilité aux hormones dans l’appréciation de la valeur sexuelle de l’individu,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique, 150–53; Raymond Turpin, Alexandre Caratzali and H. Rogier, “Étude étiologique de 104 cas de mongolisme et considerations sur la pathogénie de cette maladie,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique, 154–64; Henri Vignes, “De l’influence de l’intoxication alcoolique des procréateurs sur leur progéniture,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique, 165–70; Gustave Roussy and René Huguenin, “Vues sur le rôle de l’hérédité dans le cancer humain,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique, 171– 86; Albert Brousseau, “De la viabilité et de la fécondité des insuffisants intellectuels,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique, 187–97.

197 See Marcello Boldrini, “Constitution et Eugénique,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique, 228–31; Georges Heuyer, “Constitution et Eugénique,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique, 232–38; Giacomo Tauro, “La transmigration des classes sociales par l’éducation,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique, 320–21; Giacomo Tauro, “Eugénique et pédagogie,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique, 379–80.

198 Gheorghe Banu, “Les facteurs dysgéniques en Roumanie: principes d’un programme pratique d’eugénique,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique, 296–319.

199 See Dino Camavitto, “Premiers résultats d’une recherche anthropologique sur les Zambos de la Costa Chica (Guerrero, Mexique),” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique, 40–60; Paolo Fortunati, “Le métabolisme social d’après des recherches sur les étudiants de l’Université de Padoue,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique, 79–90; Vincenzo Castrilli, “La nuptialité et la fécondité des diplômés de l’enseignement secondaire en Norvège,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique, 110– 19; Giuseppina Levi della Vida, “Le métabolisme social comme facteur de dégénération dans la societe,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique, 120–31.

200 Levi della Vida, “Le métabolisme social comme facteur de dégénération dans la societe,” 129.

201 Corrado Gini, “Biotypologie et Eugénique,” in Fédération Internationale Latine des Sociétés d’Eugénique, Ier Congrès Latin d’Eugénique, 200–04.

202 Gini, “Biotypologie et Eugénique,” 204.

203 See Corrado Gini, “Une question importante pour la science des constitutions et pour la médecine militaire: comment juger si les proportions d’un individu sont normales?,” Revue de l’Institut International de Statistique 5, no. 2 (July 1937): 107–14; no. 3 (October 1937): 203–11.

204 Gini, “Biotypologie et Eugénique,” 211.

205 Corrado Gini, preface in L. Cipriani, Considerazioni sopra il passato e l’avvenire delle popolazioni africane (Florence: R. Bemporad & F., 1932). This text of Cipriani’s summarised the much larger volume by the author, edited by the same publisher in 1932, with the title In Africa dal Capo al Cairo, published under the auspices of the Italian Geographical Society; Cipriani’s racist ideas were expressed in chapter XI (Alcune considerazioni generali sull’Africa e le sue popolazioni negre in rapporto al problema della colonizzazione). Cipriani was one of the signatories of the Manifesto of Racial Scientists, in 1938. On Cipriani, see Paolo Chiozzi, “Autoritratto del razzismo: le fotografie antropologiche di Lidio Cipriani,” in Centro Studi F. Jesi, ed., La menzogna della razza. Documenti e immagini del razzismo e dell’antisemitismo fascista (Bologna: Grafis, 1994): 91–95; Luigi Goglia, “Note sul razzismo coloniale fascista,” Storia contemporanea, 19, no. 6 (December 1988): 1244; and Gianluca Gabrielli, “Prime ricognizioni sui fondamenti teorici della politica fascista contro i meticci,” in Alberto Burgio and Luciano Casali, eds., Studi sul razzismo italiano (Bologna: Clueb, 1996): 80–82; on his activities as director of the Institute of Anthropology in Florence, see the interesting references in several essays contained in Enzo Collotti, ed., Razza e fascismo. Le persecuzioni contro gli ebrei in Toscana (1938–1943) (Rome: Carocci, 1999), in particular those by Camilla Bencini, Francesca Cavarocchi and Alessandra Minerbi.

206 The interview with Gini was published in two successive articles, signed by Genesio Eugenio Del Monte with the pseudonim “Eudemon”: “Il fenomeno degli incroci nel pensiero di Corrado Gini” and “Il fenomeno degli incroci,” in L’Azione Coloniale respectively on 25 February and 4 March 1937. L’Azione Coloniale, founded in 1931, was the official organ of the Fascist Colonial Institute, and was directed by Marco Pomilio.

207 Declaration by Genesio Eugenio Del Monte, November 7, 1944, ACS, MPI, DGIS, Professori Universitari Epurati, 1944–1946, b. 16, f. “Gini”.

208 Alberto Pollera, a colonial officer who served the colonial administration from his early twenties until his death in 1939, quoted the interview with Gini in an attempt to oppose, in his way, the introduction of the racial colonial legislation, to support the legitimacy and goodness of racial crosses: see Treves, Le nascite e la politica, 306–07. On Pollera, see Luigi Goglia, “Una diversa politica razziale coloniale in un documento inedito di Alberto Pollera del 1937,” Storia contemporanea 16, no. 5–6 (December 1985): 1071–92; Barbàra Sòrgoni, Etnografia e colonialismo. L’Eritrea e l’Etiopia di Alberto Pollera 1873–1939 (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2001).

209 Telesio Interlandi, “Cattolici sugli specchi,” Il Tevere (23–24 July 1938).

210 Telesio Interlandi, “Zone di dissidentismo,” Il Tevere (23–24 April 1938).

211 Giovanni Preziosi, “Per la serietà degli studi razziali in Italia (dedicato al camerata Giacomo Acerbo),” La Vita Italiana 28, 328, (July 1940): 74–75.

212 Giuseppe Montalenti, “I recenti studi sul problema della determinazione del sesso e dei caratteri sessuali secondari negli animali,” Genus 3, no. 3–4 (June 1939): 193–214.

213 Claudio Barigozzi, “I nuovi orizzonti della citogenetica,” Genus 3, no. 3–4 (June 1939): 35–72.

214 Adriano Buzzati-Traverso, “I nuovi orizz onti della radiogenetica,” Genus 3, no. 3–4 (June 1939): 73–130.

215 On SIGE third Congress, see also “Società italiana di genetica ed eugenica. Riunione di Bologna, 5–7 settembre 1938,” Genus 3, no. 3–4 (June 1939): 369–70.

216 Corrado Gini, “Prolificità e frequenza dei parti plurimi,” Genus 3, no. 3–4 (June 1939): 279–96.

217 Marcello Boldrini, “La fertilità degli individui deficienti e difettosi,” Genus 3, no. 3–4 (June 1939): 301.

218 Boldrini, “La fertilità degli individui deficienti e difettosi,” 304.

219 Boldrini, “La fertilità degli individui deficienti e difettosi,” 303.

220 Boldrini, “La fertilità degli individui deficienti e difettosi,” 305.

221 Boldrini, “La fertilità degli individui deficienti e difettosi,” 307.

222 On Nora Federici, see: Treves, Le nascite e la politica, 338–43; 459–65.

223 Nora Federici, “La curva di sviluppo individuale presso alcune popolazioni isolate,” Genus 3, no. 3–4 (June 1939): 343.

224 CISP-Commissione di demografia storica, Fonti archivistiche per lo studio dei problemi della popolazione fino al 1848 (11 vols. Rome: Tip. Luigi Proja, 1933–1941).

225 See Carlo Valenziani, Il problema demografico dell’Africa equatoriale (Rome: Tip. C. Colombo, 1929); Paola Maria Arcari, Le lingue nazionali della Confederazione Elvetica ed i loro spostamenti attraverso il tempo (Rome: Tip. C. Colombo, 1930); Enrico Haskel Sonnabend, L’espansione degli Slavi (Rome: Failli, 1931); Reuben Kaznelson, L’immigrazione degli Ebrei in Palestina nei tempi moderni (Rome: Failli, 1931); Cipriani, Considerazioni sopra il passato e l’avvenire delle popolazioni africane; Dino Camavitto, La decadenza delle popolazioni messicane al tempo della Conquista (Rome: Failli, 1935); Enrico Haskel Sonnabend, Il fattore demografico nell’organizzazione sociale dei Bantu (Rome: Arti Grafiche Zamperini e Lorenzini, 1935); Radhakamal Mukerjee, Le migrazioni asiatiche (Rome: CISP, 1936); Wilton Marion Krogman, L’antropologia fisica degli Indiani Seminole dell’Oklahoma (Rome: Failli, 1936); Giuseppe Genna, I Samaritani – 1. Antropologia (Rome: CISP, 1938).

226 For a comprehensive synthesis, see Corrado Gini and Nora Federici, Appunti sulle spedizioni scientifiche del Comitato Italiano per lo studio dei problemi della popolazione (febbraio 1933 – aprile 1940) (Rome: Tip. Operaia Roma, 1943).

227 Corrado Gini, “Le Comité Italien pour l’étude des problèmes de la population,” Bulletin de l’Institut International de Statistique 23, no. 1 (1928).

228 Corrado Gini, “Researches on Population,” Scientia 55, no. 265 (May 1934): 357–73.

229 Gini, “ Le Comité Italien pour l’étude des problèmes de la population,” 205.

230 Corrado Gini, “Le rilevazioni statistiche fra le popolazioni primitive,” Supplemento statistico ai Nuovi problemi di politica, storia ed economia 3, no. 1–2 (1937); Corrado Gini, “I ‘tradimenti’ dei primitivi,” Genus 5, no. 1–2 (1941); Corrado Gini, Le rilevazioni statistiche fra le popolazioni primitive (Rome: Manuali Universitari - Facoltà di Scienze statistiche, demografiche ed attuariali, 1940); Corrado Gini, “Caratteristiche e cause della primitività,” Genus 5, no. 3–4 (1942).

231 Gini, Le rilevazioni statistiche fra le popolazioni primitive, 213.

232 Gini, Le rilevazioni statistiche fra le popolazioni primitive, 215.

233 Gini, Le rilevazioni statistiche fra le popolazioni primitive, 215–16.

234 Gini, Le rilevazioni statistiche fra le popolazioni primitive, 221; italics added.

235 Gini, Le rilevazioni statistiche fra le popolazioni primitive, 221.

236 Gini, Le rilevazioni statistiche fra le popolazioni primitive, 226.

237 Gini, Le rilevazioni statistiche fra le popolazioni primitive, 240.

238 On biotypology and constitutional medicine, see: Cristopher Lawrence and George Weisz, eds., Greater than the Parts: Holism in Biomedicine, 1920–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); see also J. Andrew Mendelsohn, “Medicine and the Making of Bodily Inequality in Twentieth-Century Europe,” in Jean-Paul Gaudillière and Ilana Löwy, eds., Heredity and Infection. The History of Disease Trasmission (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 21–80. On biotypology in United States, see: Sarah W. Tracy, “George Draper and American Constitutional Medicine, 1916–1946: Reinventing the Sick Man,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 66, no. 1 (1992): 53–89; and Heather Munro Prescott, “I was a Teenage Dwarf: The Social Construction of ‘Normal’ Adolescent Growth and Development in United States,” in Alexandra Minna Stern and Howard Markel, eds., Formative Years: Children’s Health in the United States, 1880–2000 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 153–82. On biotypology in Germany, see Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). On biotypology in Latin America, see Yolanda Eraso, “Biotypology, endocrinology, and sterilization: the practice of eugenics in the treatment of Argentinian women during the 1930s,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 81, no. 4 (2007): 793–822.

239 On constitutional medicine in Italy, see: Giorgio Cosmacini, “Medicina, ideologie, filosofie nel pensiero dei clinici tra Ottocento e Novecento,” in Corrado Vivanti, ed., Storia d’Italia. Annali, vol. 4, Intellettuali e potere (Turin: Einaudi, 1981), 1159–94; Giorgio Cosmacini, “Scienza e ideologia nella medicina del Novecento: dalla scienza egemone alla scienza ancillare,” in Franco Della Peruta, ed., Storia d’Italia. Annali, vol. 7, Malattia e medicina (Turin: Einaudi, 1984), 1223–67.

240 See, in particular, Mantovani, Rigenerare la societa, 225–33.

241 Nicola Pende, Dalla medicina alla sociologia (Palermo: Prometeo, 1921), 7.

242 Pende, Dalla medicina alla sociologia, 72.

243 Pende, Dalla medicina alla sociologia, 74.

244 Pende, Dalla medicina alla sociologia, 74–75.

245 Nicola Pende, Anomalie della crescenza fisica e psichica (Bologna: Cappelli, 1929), 2, 281–84.

246 Sellina Gualco and Antonio Nardi, L’Istituto Biotipologico Ortogenetico di Roma (Rome: Stab. Tip. Luigi Proja, 1941), 25. See also Pende, Anomalie della crescenza fisica e psichica.

247 Gualco and Nardi, L’Istituto Biotipologico Ortogenetico di Roma, 26–34.

248 Gualco and Nardi, L’Istituto Biotipologico Ortogenetico di Roma, 35–52.

249 Gualco and Nardi, L’Istituto Biotipologico Ortogenetico di Roma, 52–106.

250 Gualco and Nardi, L’Istituto Biotipologico Ortogenetico di Roma, 106–44.

251 Nicola Pende, “La scheda biotipologica individuale nella medicina preventiva e nella politica sociale,” in Lucio Silla, ed., Atti della SIPS. XXVI riunione (Venezia, 12–18 settembre 1937) (Rome: SIPS 1938), vol. 5, 284–85.

252 Nicola Pende, L’indirizzo costituzionalistico nella medicina sociale e nella politica biologica (Genova: Le Opere e i Giorni, 1926), 5.

253 Pende, “La scheda biotipologica individuale nella medicina preventiva e nella politica sociale,” 283.

254 Nicola Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica (Bologna: Cappelli, 1933), 38.

255 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 39.

256 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 40.

257 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 40.

258 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 40.

259 Nicola Pende, Trattato di biotipologia umana individuale e sociale, con applicazioni alla medicina preventiva, alla clinica, alla politica biologica, alla sociologia (Milan: Vallardi, 1939), 466–67.

260 Pende, Trattato di biotipologia umana individuale e sociale, 466–67.

261 Pende, Trattato di biotipologia umana individuale e sociale, 470.

262 Pende, Trattato di biotipologia umana individuale e sociale, 470. For a project of Pende on the reform of the scholastic system, see Nicola Pende, La scuola fascista preparatrice dell’uomo totale ed orientatrice del cittadino produttivo (discourse of Senator Pende in the sitting of 25 March 1938) (Rome: Tip. del Senato, 1938).

263 Pende, Trattato di biotipologia umana individuale e sociale, 472.

264 Pende, Trattato di biotipologia umana individuale e sociale, 473.

265 Pende, “La scheda biotipologica individuale nella medicina preventiva e nella politica sociale,” 285.

266 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 115.

267 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 115. On Pende’s role in sports medicine, see Gigliola Gori, Italian Fascism and the Female Body: Sport, Submissive Women and Strong Mothers (New York: Routledge, 2004); Lucia Motti and Marilena Rossi Caponeri, eds., Accademiste a Orvieto: donne ed educazione fisica nell’Italia fascista, 1932–1943 (Orvieto: Quattroemme, 1996).

268 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 133–34. On this topic, see in particular: Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 48.

269 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 142.

270 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 162.

271 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 163.

272 Pende, Trattato di biotipologia umana individuale e sociale, 518.

273 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 173–76.

274 Pende, Trattato di biotipologia umana individuale e sociale, 519.

275 Pende, Trattato di biotipologia umana individuale e sociale, 519.

276 Pende, Trattato di biotipologia umana individuale e sociale, 519.

277 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 201.

278 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 202.

279 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 207.

280 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 209.

281 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 210.

282 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 215–16.

283 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 218.

284 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 218.

285 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 220.

286 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 222–23.

287 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 222.

288 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 222.

289 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 225.

290 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 227.

291 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 230.

292 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 231.

293 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 238.

294 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 232.

295 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 238.

296 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 239.

297 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 241–42. On the projects of “State anthropology,” linked to the zone of the Pontino swamps, and in particular the city of Littoria, see Sergio Sergi, “Antropologia di Stato. L’archivio comunale delle famiglie,” Razza e Civiltà 1, no. 2 (April 1940): 183–89.

298 See the documentation in ACS, MPI, DGIS, Professori Universitari Epurati, b. 26, f. Pende.

299 Nicola Pende, Biologia delle razze ed unità spirituale mediterranea, in ACS, SPD, CO, b. 1005, f. 509057/509059.

300 Alexis Carrel, Man the Unknown (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935), 288. On Carrel’s eugenics, see Andrés Horacio Reggiani, God’s Eugenicist. Alexis Carrel and the Sociobiology of Decline (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007)

301 Carrel to Pende, July, 9, 1936, ACS, MPI, Professori Universitari Epurati, b. 26, f. Pende.

302 Nancy Leys Stepan, “The Hour of Eugenics,” 119. See also Andrés H. Reggiani, “La ecologia institucional de la eugenesia: repensando las relaciones entre biomedicina y politica en la Argentina de entreguerras,” in Miranda and Vallejo, eds., Darwinismo social y eugenesia en el mundo latino, 273–309; Gustavo Vallejo, “Males y remedios de la ciudad moderna: perspectivas ambientales de la eugenesia argentina de entreguerras,” Asclepio 59, no. 1 (January–June 2007): 203–38.

303 Pende to Osvaldo Sebastiani, July 14, 1936, ACS, SPD, CO 1922–43, b. 1005, f. 509057/509059

304 Pende, Bonifica umana razionale e biologia politica, 246–47.

305 Nicola Pende, “La profilassi delle malattie e anomalie ereditarie,” in Lucio Silla, ed., Atti della SIPS. XXVII riunione (Bologna, 4–11 September1938) (Rome: SIPS, 1939), vol. 6, 70.

306 Pende, “La profilassi delle malattie e anomalie ereditarie,” 70.

307 Pende, “La profilassi delle malattie e anomalie ereditarie,” 71. See also Nicola Pende, Concetto e prassi della razza nella mentalità fascista (discourse at the Cremona section of the Institute of Fascist Culture, 15 October 1938) (Cremona: Tip. Cremona Nuova, Cremona, n. d.)

308 Pende, “La profilassi delle malattie ed anomalie ereditarie,” 11. See also Nicola Pende, “La scienza dell’ortogenesi. Principi e finalità,” La ricerca scientifica 10, no. 4 (April 1939): 1–6, offprint.

309 See Maiocchi, Scienza italiana e razzismo fascista, 237–41.

310 Nicola Pende, La scienza dell’ortogenesi (Rome: CNR, 1939), 8. See also Nicola Pende, “Il principio biotipologico unitario,” Gerarchia 11 (November 1940): 569–72.

311 See Maurizio Calvesi, Enrico Guidoni and Simonetta Lux, eds., E42. Utopia e scenario del regime. 2: Urbanistica, architettura e decorazione (Venice: Marsilio, 1987), 506ff..; Adolfo Mignemi, “Profilassi sanitaria e politiche sociali del regime per la ‘tutela della stirpe’. La ‘mise en scène’ dell’orgoglio di razza,” in Centro Studi F. Jesi, ed., La menzogna della razza. Documenti e immagini del razzismo e dell’antisemitismo fascista (Bologna: Grafis Edizioni, 1994), 65–72; Mantovani, Rigenerare la societa, 330–31.

312 Mario Barbera, Ortogenesi e Biotipologia (Rome: La Civiltà Cattolica, 1943) (collected from articles published in Civiltà Cattolica from 19 December 1942 to 15 May 1943).

313 See, among others, Nicola Pende, Corpo e anima (Rome: SAET, 1947); Nicola Pende, Il medico di fronte al Vangelo (Milan: Il Giorno, 1948); Nicola Pende, Medicina e sacerdozio alleati per la bonifica morale della societa, (Ancona: Tip. Flamini, n. d.)

314 For a brief profile of Marcello Boldrini and a bibliography, see in particular Giuseppe Locorotondo, “Boldrini, Marcello,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1988), vol. 34, 465–67. On Boldrini’s eugenics, see also Maiocchi, Scienza italiana e razzismo fascista, 124–36.

315 See, for example, Marcello Boldrini, “I cadaveri degli sconosciuti. Ricerche demografiche e antropologiche sul materiale della Morgue di Roma,” La Scuola Positiva 1, no. 7–8 (July–August 1920), 323–47; Marcello Boldrini, “Gli studi statistici sul sesso. Le traviate,” Rassegna di studi sessuali 1, no. 2 (March–April 1921), 69–81.

316 Marcello Boldrini, “Tipi e attitudini costituzionali e sostituzione delle aristocrazie (XII Congresso dell’Istituto Internazionale di Sociologia, Bruxelles 25–29 August 1935),” in Contributi del Laboratorio di Statistica. Serie IV (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1936), 5, offprint; Marcello Boldrini, “Costituzione ed eugenica,” in Contributi del Laboratorio di Statistica. Serie V (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1939), 185–89.

317 Boldrini, “Tipi e attitudini costituzionali,” 5; Boldrini, “Costituzione ed eugenica,” 189–90.

318 See Marcello Boldrini, Sviluppo corporeo e predisposizioni morbose (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1925); Boldrini, “Costituzione ed eugenica,” 191–92.

319 Alessandro Costanzo, “Costituzione e mortalità,” in Contributi del Laboratorio di Statistica. Serie III (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1934), 403–30; Alessandro Costanzo, Costituzione e mortalità (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1935); Franco Colloridi, “La donna media lombarda come campione antropometrico per le indagini ostetrico-ginecologiche in Lombardia,” Annali di Ostetricia e Ginecologia (1934); Franco Colloridi, “Il tipo costituzionale nelle donne portatrici di fibromiomi uterini,” Annali di Ostetricia e Ginecologia (1934); Salvatore Alberti, La mortalità antenatale (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1934).

320 For Boldrini’s view on the measure of intelligence, with reference above all to the American psychological school (Sante Naccarati and H. E. Garrett), see, in particular, Marcello Boldrini, La fertilità dei biotipi (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1931), 167–70.

321 For a discussion of Kretschmer’s theories, see Boldrini, La fertilità dei biotipi, 187–92.

322 Boldrini, “Tipi e attitudini costituzionali,” 6.

323 Boldrini, “Biotipi e classi sociali,” 71.

324 For a collection of works, see Contributi del Laboratorio di Statistica. Serie IV.

325 Boldrini, “Biotipi e classi sociali,” 73.

326 Boldrini, “Biotipi e classi sociali,” 75.

327 Boldrini, “Tipi e attitudini costituzionali,” 14. See also Carlo Mengarelli, “I caratteri costituzionali delle aristocrazie italiane,” in Contributi del Laboratorio di Statistica. Serie IV, 157–82.

328 Carlo Mengarelli, “Su i caratteri fisici della nobiltà,” in Contributi del Laboratorio di Statistica. Serie IV, 239–72.

329 Boldrini, “Tipi e attitudini costituzionali,” 15–16; Albino Uggé, “Sul tipo morfologico degli atleti,” in Contributi del Laboratorio di Statistica. Serie IV, 65–75.

330 Raffaello Maggi, “La costituzione degli attori dello schermo,” in Contributi del Laboratorio di Statistica. Serie IV, 79–136.

331 Boldrini, La fertilità dei biotipi, 203–04.

332 Boldrini, La fertilità dei biotipi, 213.

333 Boldrini, “Tipi e attitudini costituzionali,” 11.

334 Boldrini, “Tipi e attitudini costituzionali,” 10.

335 Boldrini, “Tipi e attitudini costituzionali,” 10.

336 Boldrini, “Tipi e attitudini costituzionali,” 10.

337 Amintore Fanfani, “I mutamenti economici nell’Europa moderna e l’evoluzione costituzionalistica delle classi dirigenti,” in Contributi del Laboratorio di Statistica. Serie IV, 137–56.

338 Marcello Boldrini and Aldo Alberti, “Il patriziato italiano nelle categorie dirigenti,” in Contributi del Laboratorio di Statistica. Serie IV, 183–230.

339 Boldrini, “Costituzione ed eugenica,” 204.

340 Boldrini, “Costituzione ed eugenica,” 208.

341 Boldrini, “Costituzione ed eugenica,” 209.

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