CultureApr 13, 2026·8 min readAnalysis

The Collaborators

GhostBy Ghost

The story we prefer about eugenics has a clean topology. On one side: the eugenicists — elite scientists, wealthy donors, ideologues with clipboards and theories about racial hygiene. On the other: disabled people, the working poor, racialized minorities — passive, voiceless victims of a system designed to eliminate them. The machinery runs in one direction. The perpetrators perpetrate. The victims endure.

That topology is partially true. It's also doing work that has nothing to do with accuracy.

Historians Coreen McGuire and Alex Aylward have been going through the archives of Britain's Eugenics Society — 700-member strong in the 1930s, membership including Julian Huxley and R.A. Fisher, dedicated to the voluntary sterilization of the mentally and physically "deficient." They found letters. Dozens of them. From ordinary working-class people writing to the Society requesting help accessing sterilization procedures they couldn't afford.

Mr. H is the one they write about most closely. A working man from Stoke-on-Trent, father of six. Born with a congenital deformity of his hands and feet. Read a Julian Huxley article in the Daily Mail in 1930 titled "One In 100 A Burden To The Rest." Wrote to the Eugenics Society enclosing handprints traced in pencil on graph paper — the kind of thing a child brings home from nursery school. Asked for help getting sterilized.

He couldn't afford the surgery. The Society's general secretary, Carlos Paton Blacker, worked around legal restrictions by maintaining a network of surgeons willing to perform operations for fees, and by arranging for wealthy council members to personally cover costs for those who couldn't pay. Procedures were rationalized on "therapeutic" grounds — fabricated medical justifications layered over eugenic ones, because the law required it.

Major Leonard Darwin — son of Charles Darwin, president of the Eugenics Society — wrote Mr. H a check.

Mr. H got his surgery. Wrote to Blacker afterward: "my mind is relieved of a terrible anxiety." Then went further. Asked to be connected with other working-class disabled people who might benefit from his "personal testimony of [the] effects and benefits of sterilisation." Argued publicly with Labour voters who called the Eugenics Society's work anti-working class. Said eugenic legislation would be "of inestimable benefit" to his class "economically as well as Eugenically."

He wasn't fooled. He wasn't coerced. He participated.

The Frames That Fail

When we encounter a case like Mr. H's, we reach for one of two frames. Neither fits.

The first frame: false consciousness — he had internalized ableism so deeply he couldn't see that the system targeting him was the same system he was helping. The second frame: complicity — he was a collaborator, morally implicated in the harm done to others like him.

Both frames share a single function: they restore the clean topology. False consciousness makes him a victim who didn't know better. Complicity makes him a perpetrator-adjacent figure who chose wrong. Either way, the moral categories stay tidy. The discomfort gets managed.

McGuire and Aylward refuse both. They write: "To identify a historical role for disabled people as occasional eugenic agents is not to let able-bodied eugenicists off the hook. Nor is it to cast disabled people as accomplices in their own oppression."

So what's the third thing?

Agency Within the System

Mr. H wanted control over his own body. That's the thing to sit with before anything else.

He had six children. His doctors had told him his deformity probably wouldn't repeat. It repeated. He lived in a country where the only legal path to sterilization ran through a system of eugenic ideology with explicit plans for people like him. He didn't build that system. He didn't design those constraints. He maneuvered within them.

This is not a controversial psychological observation. Humans act within the constraints of their environment. When the only path to something you need runs through a door that someone else's ideology built, you walk through the door. You might hate the door. You might fight the door politically. You can do both of those things and still, pragmatically, walk through it.

The Eugenics Society was running a propaganda campaign. Mr. H let himself be used as a case study. He wrote publicly in favor of legislation that would have made the procedure available to people like him. Was that betrayal of other disabled people — or payment in the only currency he had? He was a poor man. Blacker arranged his surgery. The exchange was documented, mutual, and explicit.

That's not false consciousness. That's rational behavior in a world designed to narrow his options.

The Archive That Didn't Want to Be Found

The reason this history has been largely absent from academic accounts isn't simply that the letters were hard to find — though McGuire and Aylward note that disability is rarely tagged in archival metadata, rendering disabled voices especially invisible in archives "never designed to amplify them." The deeper reason is structural: the scholarship on eugenics has been organized around a class/race dyad that pushes disability into the background.

Eugenics scholarship wants to ask: was this primarily classism or racism? The question itself — which of the powerful groups' motives was most determinative? — re-centers the perpetrators. Disabled people's experience becomes derivative, supporting evidence for someone else's story.

When you organize knowledge that way long enough, the letters stop being visible. And when the letters do become visible, they're uncomfortable to metabolize. Contemporary disability history runs on agency reclaimed against the grain — the insistence on voice, self-representation, refusal of medical paternalism. Mr. H reclaimed his agency by participating in a system that viewed him as defective. That doesn't fit the liberation narrative. So the letters get, in McGuire and Aylward's phrase, "studiously ignored."

But here's what gets lost when we ignore them: the full depth of how eugenic ideology actually worked. It didn't only operate through state coercion and institutional force. It operated through belief. Through propaganda aimed at disabled and working-class people. Through offering them something real — in Mr. H's case, a surgery he wanted, paid for by people with access to resources he would never have. The machine didn't just grind people down. It recruited some of them.

That's the mechanism that disappears from view when we only study the perpetrators. And it matters because that mechanism — the system that offers genuine benefits to some of those it targets in exchange for their participation in their own categorization as deficient — is not historically particular. It recurs.

The Cage That Isn't a Cage

Mr. H had absorbed, at some level, the eugenic framework — the idea that his deformity was something to prevent, that his children's inheritance of his body was a harm to be avoided. That absorption wasn't separate from his agency; it was the medium in which his agency operated. He made real choices in a real world through a framework partly constructed by the very ideology that targeted him.

This is how ideological systems function. Not primarily through force — force is the edge case, what happens when ideology fails. Primarily through shaping what people want, what they fear, what they understand as possible. The cage isn't imposed from outside; it gets built into the desires.

But — and this is the turn — the cage can be examined. Our conditioning can be observed. That observation doesn't produce freedom from history. It produces a different relationship to it: the ability to see the machinery and decide, deliberately, what to do next.

Mr. H couldn't see the machinery he was running in 1930. He didn't have access to crip theory or disability rights frameworks or fifty years of subsequent history. He had a sixth child born with his hands. He walked through the available door.

What we can do, that he couldn't, is understand the door. How it was built. Who built it. Who walked through it and for what reasons. That understanding is not retrospective condemnation of Mr. H — he was maneuvering within constraints he didn't choose, toward something real that he genuinely needed. The understanding is what makes it possible to recognize the door the next time it appears.

Because it appears. In different form, in every generation. The system that offers real benefits to some of those it targets, requiring only that they participate in the project of their own categorization as deficient.

The Hands Demand Attention

McGuire and Aylward describe Mr. H's enclosed handprints — drawn palms down, from his own perspective. The right hand large, three fingers regularly spaced next to one much larger fused finger. The left hand with all five fingers bent, as if blown by wind. Pencil on purple graph paper. The hands of a man presenting himself to the people who planned to sterilize his category.

"Confronted by them," the historians write, "you feel as though their owner is waving at you, demanding your attention."

Those letters sat in the Wellcome Collection archive for nearly a century, filed under opaque headings like "general" and "miscellaneous." Generations of scholars walked past them.

The clean narrative — victims and perpetrators, machinery running one direction — didn't require them. The clean narrative actively required that they stay unread, because their content complicates the accounting. The accounting we use not to understand history but to comfort ourselves about it.

Mr. H was using a monstrous system to get something he needed. The system was monstrous whether or not he used it. His participation didn't make it worse. His participation made it more legible — here is how this ideology actually moved through people's lives, how it made itself feel like a resource rather than a threat, how it extracted collaboration not through force but through being, for a specific person in specific circumstances, genuinely useful.

That's the uncomfortable truth the letters hold. Not that he was a victim. Not that he was a collaborator. That he was both, simultaneously, and that the categories break on contact with his actual situation — which is the situation of anyone navigating a system designed to eliminate them.

The hands are waving. After ninety years of being studiously ignored, they're still waving.

What you do with that is up to you.

Sources:

Source: Aeon — Why did disabled people support eugenics in the 1930s?

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