gat

legalization of abortion, became visible and active during this period, annually distributing millions
of pieces of literature aimed at controlling lower-class breeding instincts, an urgent priority on the
national elitist agenda. Malthus, Darwin, Galton, and Pearson became secular saints at the
Lawrence and Sheffield Scientific Schools at Harvard and Yale. Judge Ben Lindsey of the Denver
Children’s Court, flogging easy access to pornography as an indirect form of sterilization for
underclass men, was a different tile in the same mosaic, as was institutional adoption. The planned
parenthood movement, in our day swollen to billion dollar corporate status, was one side of a coin
whose obverse was the prospering abortion, birth control, and adoption industries. In those
crucial years, a sudden host of licensing acts closed down employment in a wide range of lucrative
work—rationing the right to practice trades much as kings and queens of England had done.
Work was distributed to favored groups and individuals who were willing to satisfy screening
commissions that they met qualifications often unrelated to the actual work. Licensing suddenly
became an important factor in economic life, just as it had been in royal England. This
professionalization movement endowed favored colleges and institutes, text publishers, testing
agencies, clothing manufacturers, and other allies with virtual sinecures.
Professional schools—even for bus drivers and detectives—imposed the chastening discipline of
elaborate formal procedures, expensive and time-consuming "training," on what had once been
areas of relatively free-form career design. And medicine, law, architecture, engineering,
pharmacology—the blue-ribbon work licenses—were suddenly rigorously monitored, rationed by
political fortune. Immigrants were often excluded from meeting these qualification demands, and
many middle-class immigrants with a successful history of professional practice back in Europe
were plunged into destitution, their families disintegrating under the artificial stresses. Others, like
my own family, scrambled to abandon their home culture as far as possible in a
go-along-with-the-crowd response to danger.
One of the hardest things for any present-day reader to grasp about this era was the brazenness of
the regimentation. Scientific management was in its most enthusiastic public phase then,
monumentally zealous, maddingly smug. The state lay under effective control of a relatively small
number of powerful families freed by the Darwinian religion from ethical obligation to a
democratic national agenda, or even to its familiar republican/libertarian antithesis. Yet those
antagonists comprised the bedrock antinomies of our once revolutionary public order, and
without the eternal argument they provoked, there was no recognizable America.
Eugenics Arrives
Between 1890 and 1920, the percentage of our population adjudged "feeble-minded" and
condemned to institutional confinement more than doubled. The long-contemplated hygienic form
of social control formulated by eighteenth-century German social thinker Johann Frank, "complete
medical policing," was launched with a vengeance. Few intimidations are more effective than the
threat of a stay in an insane asylum. Did the population of crazies really double in those three
decades? The answer given by one contemporary was elliptically Darwinian: "Marriage of these
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