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JM Turner (an M.D. and a Ph.D.) wrote “Physique and Choice of Career” for The Eugenics Review of October 1954.  He reported on the statistical survey correlating body type and profession, one in a considerable line of such statistical drunkenness which found pseudo-scientific results from closeness of fit between fat, muscle and criminality and professions. I really don’t want to get very much into the details of this story because it just isn’t worth it–simply put, the doctor was finding correlations between some body types and students at an officers’ training academy and Oxford. The military officers in training were heavier than the Oxford students.  The end.  [Interestingly the author references an earlier study from 1939 which found correlations between body types and different sorts of crimes among 17,000 incarcerated juvenile offenders.   Turner uses the results to support his own but also finds fault with the earlier study, stating that it lacked “any very workable classification of physique…his study was more of a high altitude aerial survey than a detailed map of the ground”. This doesn’t prevent the use of the findings, however.]

It was this sort of thinking that the sniffy and in-its-own-peculiar-way venerable The Eugenics Review (1909-1968) its influence, a cancerous spittle which found its way all over the globe. Eugenics was seated in the work of the very formidable work of the polymathic Sir Francis Galton (the word coined in his Inquiries into human faculty and its development
in 1883), and found its way into some deep scientific corners until its
was generally rejected at about the same time of the journal’s death.

The influence of eugenics reached far and deep and wide, finding its place even here near
where I live–deeper here, and later than expected, as it turns out. 
The Human Betterment League, started in 1947 in Winston-Salem (North
Carolina) with the influence and money of James G. Hanes (of the Hanes
hosiery and underwear fortune), instituted a vicious resurgence of
interest in eugenic sterilization just at the time when this practice
was beginning to come to its end in other places.  As you can see, eugenic-based sterilization in North Carolina was sliding into  social consciousness and decline just at the beginning the the Human Betterment reign of terror, spiking to over 700 sterilizations in just a few years after its underwear-y inception.  The majority of the victims of this social cleansing, of this cleaning of the gene pool, of this save-us-from-“them” mentality,were black. SOme of these people were classified as “morons” according to standardized testing that many were never before exposed to; some were classified as deviants and defectives ready for sterilization if they chose to have a baby produced by rape.  The road to  racial purity was a wide one for the Betterment  folks; fortunately, it was not a long road, though they were able to force sterilizations of thousands of unfortunate victims and did so until the late 1960’s.  This is a bad story for the history of this state and one which is not frequently discussed, though reparations discussions are underway, cushioned by a very skimpy installment of 250,000 from the state coffers to establish offices and a board and bureaucrats to study the issue.  This is many millions of dollars off the mark, but it does benefit some mid-level manager somewhere in the state capital at Raleigh… 

[Source for sterilization pamphlet and graph: Against Their Will–the North Carolina Sterilization Program.]

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