gat

ighteousness. The first requirement would be to force the dangerous classes into schools. Laws
were on the books, time to enforce them.
A covert American sterilization program managed by trusted administrators in the brand new
hospital network took place during the same years that forced schooling was being brought along.
This sterilization initiative occasionally broke silence in highly specialized journals whose reader
discretion was taken for granted. Thus Charles V. Carrington, writing in the Journal of Criminal
Law, Criminology, and Police Science (July 1910), reported on two interesting cases of successful
involuntary sterilization. One involved an "epileptic masturbator" who, after vasectomy, "ceased
masturbating altogether." The other was a black man also given to masturbation and general
deviltry. After sterilization, he became "a strong, well-developed young Negro, nicely behaved,
and not a masturbatory sodomist," Carrington reported. Surgical intervention as social policy was
given its precedents in America long before the Nazi era.
Advocates of Yaleman Gesell’s "eugenic violence" offensive against the underclasses swung from
every point on the scientific compass. William McDougall, the eminent social psychologist,
announced himself a champion of Nordic superiority; Ellsworth Huntington, prominent Yale
geographer, wrote The Character of Races, showing that only one race had any real moral
character. Henry Fairfield Osborn, president and founder of the American Museum of Natural
History, gave the "Address of Welcome" to the Second International Congress of Eugenics;
Osborn’s close friend Lothrop Stoddard wrote The Revolt Against Civilization: Menace of the
Underman; and psychologist James McKeen Cattell, a force in the rise of standardized testing,
wrote to Galton, "We are following in America your advice and example."
The famous humanitarian anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber remarked acidly to a newsman that
anti-eugenic protests came only from the "orthodoxly religious," rarely from the enlightened camp
of science. So there it was. Keep them all in mind: Kroeber, Gesell, Ripley, McDougall,
Huntington, Osborn, great scientific humanist names whose work underscored how important a
role forced schooling was designed to play. Scientific studies had shown conclusively that
extending the duration and intensity of schooling caused sharp declines in fertility—and sterility in
many. Part of school’s stealth curriculum would be a steady expansion of its reach throughout the
century.
Two more examples will drive home the relentlessness of this long scientific campaign against
American tradition. J.B.S. Haldane, a distinguished Fabian geneticist from England, issued a lurid
warning about what might happen if blonde women bred with human demi-apes like Italians,
Jews, and other kinds of retrograde biology: "A new type of submen, abhorred by nature, ugly as
no natural product is ugly" would emerge. The new hypothesis held that female offspring of such
unions would be too repulsive to look upon.
In Daedalus, or Science and the Future, Haldane said there were really only four fundamental
biological innovations of prehistory: 1) Domestication of animals; 2) Domestication of plants; 3)
The use of fungi for the production of alcohol; 4) The invention of frontal copulation "which
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