JF Ptak Science Books Post 1301
Sometimes I need to make a post about a book simply to get it out of my system–once I’ve said something about a numbingly bad book, it usually just goes away, falling off the edge of the flat Earth rather than having its mast sink peacefully below the horizon. Such is the case with these pamphlets, one of which is so bad that its badness could not be contained in just one “volume” that it needed another. I almost wrote ” ‘little’ pamphlets” because they are, well, little–but little in size only, their badness easily transcending their size, and the idea of “size” in general.
[Note: all pamphlets pictured here are available at our blog bookstore.]
I never really liked the word “colossal” in the title of any book other than say a joke or magic book for children–outside that, I think the author is asking for trouble. And trouble is the seat of reason in this work, which was published in 1939. It is too painful to quote much from the text, but, right from the outset the reader gets a taste for what is ahead, being told that the New Russia (the Russians being “the most elemental of all white peoples”) is one way of saving the Nordic race, quoting The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception as a part-source, saying that “this race will collectively make up the sixth of the seven sub-races tat will constitute the present Aryan or Fifth Root Race” and it will “be expected to develop certain attributes that will contribute toward humanity’s ultimate perfection”.
The author is enamored of the free voting system in the Soviet Union. “No one visiting the Soviet’s pictorial Exhibit at the World’s Fair om New York could fail to be impressed by the dignity and attractiveness of the pictured polling places and the freshness and eagerness animating the faces of those figures who entered t perform their civic duty…” An incredible statement, validating the democratic freedom of the Soviet Union at a particular time in it history when millions of people had recently been starved to death, among other things. The photographs of the coming genetic masters was proof enough of freedom than anything else.
The pamphlets grow heavier and more dense with each paragraph, the edges of the pages bending under their own filthy weight of vast stupidity and understated racial hatreds. God and the superiority of whiteness and the gross disabilities of Catholics and Black people come along after a bit. Jewish people aren’t even mentioned. But the author states that it is a genetic “tick”, some sort of “genetic conscience” that comes into play that has prevented the “inferior races” (like Catholics or Blacks) to have come anywhere near attaining the presidency. It is a spiteful, hateful pamphlet that is completely myopic about the rich, savory goodness that is the highest attainment of spiritualism/intellectualism/modernism and civilization that was the Soviet Union. There would be little left to say about this work ten years hence, when the real stuff of the Soviet Union became more publicly common knowledge, and it became more difficult–I would think–for the author to reconcile his witches’ brew of Biblical nonsense, genetic debauchery and Cool-Whip history.
The next assortment–all written just after WWII–asks some questions that one probably has never heard before. “Should married lovers fight?” and “Is sexual castration easy?” are probably a pair of interrogatories that would never be heard in conversation in a hundred years of boring parties. The contents of the pamphlets are a genuine struggle to get through–I picked my way through each for about 20 minutes before declaring defeat, except that I know enough to not have to think about these works again.
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.)
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.
The Sparton TV ad (from LIFE 1954) dares us to believe that it will get us to the thing that we are watching–a tremendously invasive lie, a Big Lie, buffeted by placing the TV in the middle of a desert from the scene it was/is projecting, along with the toys of a child. And in glorious black and white. We can obviously see that the television can’t get us there, not really, not at all, not better than a book (an enormous creative implement compared to the television), by the tv-set’s absurd appearance in the desert. Plus, well, the TV isn’t getting “you” to the place, it is getting itself there. 
