Flying Cars, Zombie Dogs, and Robot Overlords by Charles Pappas

Author:Charles Pappas [Pappas, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2017-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

American Philosophical Society

The First International Eugenics Congress had been held in London in 1912, convening hundreds of international delegates, including Alfred Ploetz, who later spearheaded Germany’s eugenics movement. “Had Jesus been among us,” said Dr. Albert Wiggam, author, psychologist, and member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “he would have been president of the First Eugenic Congress.” (Years later in 1945, Wiggam appeared on the Chase & Sanborn Hour’s “The Charlie McCarthy Show” where he unsuccessfully matched wits with the snarky dummy.)

There were three Eugenic Congresses in all, as well as ongoing shows such as the National Congress on Race Betterment, and the Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference. The AES also exhibited at the 1926 Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia, repeating its messaging with the same flashing lights and scary statistics as it had at the Kansas State Fair.

One of the tactics the AES devised to spotlight this deluge of depraved DNA was Fitter Families Contests. Originally inspired by a “Better Baby” competition at the 1911 Iowa State Fair, the contests were held in conjunction with the AES exhibits. After aspiring families filled out an “Abridged Record of Family Traits,” which tabulated traits such as talking in your sleep or issuing soft bowel movements, a team of physicians performed a battery of physical and psychological tests on them. Once completed, the doctors issued a letter grade to the contestants, with families who earned a B+ or better receiving a medal proclaiming, “Yea, I have a goodly heritage.” The various eugenics shows, the exhibits at fairs, and ERO’s Harry Laughlin helped inspire the Immigration Act of 1924, which throttled the flow of southern and eastern Europeans, aka, “social inadequates.” Often called the National Origins Act, the legislation attempted to restrict new immigration to just 2 percent of what a given group’s U.S. population was in 1890. Since there were many more Nordics and Anglo-Saxons then, and few Asians and Mediterraneans, each group benefited accordingly. For example, the quota for Italians would be hacked from 42,000 per year to just 4,000.

The ambitions of these “intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic,” as the pro-eugenics Wells described his humanity-destroying Martians in The War of the Worlds, didn’t stop with building a legal wall against immigrants. Their malevolent influence poured out of them, like diseased blood from a severed artery. Religious leaders competed in the AES’s popular Eugenics Sermon Contest. At one point nearly 400 institutions of higher learning embraced eugenics in their curriculums, including Harvard University, Columbia University, and Cornell University. Virginia passed its Racial Integrity Act, based on the ERO’s Laughlin’s sterilization act. The Act outlawed sexual congress between whites and blacks and eventually become the model for Germany’s Nuremberg Laws. By 1935, more than 30 American states had enacted sterilization laws.

Among them, California in 1909 became the third state to legalize such treatment. The decree permitted superintendents of state psychiatric institutions to sterilize patients to better their “physical, mental, or moral condition,” a door wide enough to push the Statue of Liberty through.

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