Author: JF Ptak

JF Ptak Science Books LLC

I know that this was supposed to be just a bit of sciencey/geekoid
humor or attempt at it, but, really, the design for the cover of The Story of Cactus  (1937) is just
plain stupid.  There’s another example of putting children in harm’s
way for the sake of attracting attention to some sort of sales unit,
but this one I think is worse in a category that is made up of things
that are just “worse or worst”.  Just cringingly bad.  I guess some
people might see it as “funny”, like some people will laugh at those
captured videos on the television showing
kids-doing-the-darndest-things and maybe getting getting hurt (as the
audience churtles). Its just stupid.

JF Ptak Science Books, LLC  Post 256
                                                            

 

The answer to the question of this pamphlet, Is Opinion a
Crime (published by the League for the
Amnesty of Political Prisoners, 1919), is “yes”, and yes by a 7-2 decision by
the U.S. Supreme Court (in Abrams v United States  250 U.S. 616 (1919).  The case involved political speech which was
deemed to be criminal act –rather than an expression of free speech guaranteed
under the First Amendment—by violating the 18^th amendment to the
Espionage Act of 1917. Earlier in 1919  the court found again against the defendant in
a similar case, Schenck v.

United States

, 249 U.S. 47 (1919), the majority opinion famously stated by Justice Oliver Wendell
Holmes Jr.:

“The question in every
case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a
nature as to create a clear and present
danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that the United States Congress has a right to
prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree. When a nation is at war many things that
might be said in time of peace  are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance
will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them
as protected by any constitutional right….”

 

It was in the Abrams case though that Holmes sided with Justice
Louis Brandeis in ten minority opinion, siding with the defendants in this case
who were distributing printed material which urged people not to support the
American military—with the sole aim, really, of trying to get food to starving
Russians. The case was brought against Mollie Stimer “a slip of a girl”, Jacob
Abrams, Samuel Lipman, and Hyman Lachowsky, who dumped their leaflets from tall
buildings, urging that people not support the  governments’
decision to send troops to Europe to defend Czarist Russia against the
Bolsheviks, and to allow the Russian revolution to proceed unhindered by
American interests and allow “the people of Russia to pursue their own
destinies. 

The Court found that
the pamphlets were in violation of the Espionage Act and sentenced the four to
between 15 and 20 years in jail. Holmes,
in another landmark piece of judicial thinking, held that the defendants
threatened no one and no thing, and should not have been found guilty. His contribution is reproduced in full in the
continue reading section, with the content given its landscape by the good folks
at Wordle.  (Click on the image to for a larger and clearer picture.)

Incidentally this decision was overturned by Brandenburg v.
Ohio (395 U.S. 444, 1969), in which the Court found that government cannot
punish inflammatory speech unless it is directed to inciting and likely to incite
imminent lawless action.—in this
instance defending the 1^st and 14^th Amendment rights of a
KKK spokesperson.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 255

The arithmetical purity of the eugenic response to social excellence was hardly “advanced” when the pamphlets appearing here were printed.   The flavor of  its mathematics, particularly in the nineteen ‘teens and ‘twenties, was watery and milky, and concerned itself pretty much with “pluses” and “minuses”, as in “as a social defective or prostitute” (um, yes, this is true, at least for California) “it is best for the societal gene pool if you just stayed out, on land”.  Vagrants, vagabonds, minor social criminals and “some poor”, could very well be placed in this category and subjected to forcible castration or sterilization. Mainly though  the  big legal guns of “human sterilization” were generally aimed at the truly vulnerable parts of society, the “insane and the feebleminded”.  The pamphlet Sterilization for Human Betterment, published by the Human Betterment Foundation (Pasadena, California),  states that 13,000 people in this category had been “asexualized” between 1909 and 1939 in California. (I should point out that California was the sterilization capital of the United States, with a third of all the national eugenics procedure performed in this state for this period of time) It defends this practice, saying emphatically that “eugenic sterilization is not an experiment”, and that “sterilization in this form represents one of the greatest advances in modern civilization”. 

It continues:  “(sterilization) has been continuously used by American institutions since 1899, when the first sterilizations were performed in Indians”.  What?

“Patients, relatives of patients, state officials, physicians,parole and probation officers, social workers, agree on the value of this practice” which was actually the “prevention of producing defective and handicapped children”.  I’m relieved that the probation officers were consulted.

The Betterment people shed more light on the role of sterilization and sex offenses by women. (My bold.)  “Of 304 feebleminded girls sterilized and paroled, 9 out of every 12 had been sex offenders before commitment.  After sterilization, only one out of every 12 became a sex delinquent on parole”. 

If this wasn’t such an awful story, “sex delinquent on parole”, a phrase I’ve never seen before, might make for a great 1950’s trashlit title. (It could’ve been a series, too:  all you need to do is take the title “Sex Delinquents on Parole” and add something to it, like “…on Parole from Outer Space” or “…on Parole:  Queenie the Slip Crown Breaks Her Knuckles” and so on.)

The sorry story that I’ve interrupted with this bit of frivolity is that the “sex offenses” that are being discussed here is actually “prostitution”.  These young women weren’t committing violent acts of sexual savagery, they were just prostitutes, which meant that in most state they were “depraved”.  The “feebleminded” girls I would guess were poor or working poor, without the best education, and didn’t do well on whatever test was being administered to them to determine their test-taking intelligence. It seems to me that if  the goal was to liquidate prostitution that perhaps the men “seeing” these women should’ve been the ones faced with the operation. But that isn’t how the dominant culture viewed the situation, and that the best way to approach the problem was to remove the reproductive capacities from the weakest members of society.

(Click on this table for a larger, clearer version of the number of forced sterilizations by state.)

 

Germany;This pamphlet was the co-authored
spawn of Paul Popenoe (1888-1979) and E.S. Gosney (1855-1942) while both were
on the board of the Human Betterment group. In addition to a strict diet of
superior morality and race,  Gosney seems
to have been the money behind the organization. Popenoe had a background in
agricultural genetics with an overdrive taste for eugenics and race, somehow
intersecting them with social hygiene and marriage relations. The “dr.” that
Popenoe loved to insist attaching to his name was an honorary, unearned degree,
which he must have felt he needed in order to secure the proper amount of
intellectual identification necessary to write on intellectual identification.
The Nazis wasted little time in translating and publishing this work, adding it
to their official publications list in 1939. It was one of a significant number of intellectual
imports that came into poor, besotted Germany; the imports came nowhere
close to the amount of information banished, exported to the necessarily
beautiful non-Aryan non-Nazi inferno. It
was just the sort of thinly distributed stain that interested people like the
Nazis.

I wonder what “Dr.” Popenoe thought of this Nazi honor?

The second pamphlet by the same people, Human Sterilization Today,. is in a swift eight pages in which the Betterment Foundation makes it case to use sterilization to check “the misery spread through the community by the unchecked reproduction of the human unit” (italics mine)..  They are closing in on the Big Picture in this work, aiming at the 5,000,000 “who will be at some point committed to state hospital as insane” and the other 5,000,000 “who are so deficient intellectually (with less than 70% of average intelligence) as to be, in many cases, liabilities rather than assets to the race”.

This is exhausting reading, but it is a story that shouldn’t be forgotten, and could remind us that what we’re doing or practicing today might look  like the Human Betterment stuff 25 years down the road. 

What is also deeply unsettling about Popenoe is that from this vast miasmaic idea set of misguided and forced statistics, philosophical racial extremism, “social hygiene”, eugenic sterilization of the enfeebled and socially undesirable, he managed to create the very first marriage counseling service/practice in the United States.  The American Institute of Family Relations opened its doors in 1930 (in L.A.!) with this dizzying philosophical semi-brew of sterilization and marriage talk-therapy, happily correlating the whole thing with exploding axis of divorce, love, social failure, racial impurity and castration.  And somehow it all seemed to make sense to allot of people, back there in the past.