Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Eugenics

Episode Date: August 17, 2017

This week on Sawbones, join Justin and Dr. Sydnee for a timely, tragic history of eugenics. Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers ...

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 Saubones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books. One, two, one, Saul Bones, a metalital turf. Miss guy to medicine. I'm your co-host Justin Macaroy. And I'm Sydney Macaroy.
Starting point is 00:01:12 Well, it's been kind of a crummy week. Kind of a rough week. Yeah. I'm sure for a lot of people. For a lot of people. Not we aren't high on that list. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't want to say that we were but I mean mega bummer, but there are many people for a lot of people not we aren't high on that list. Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to say that we were. But I mean mega bummer, but there are many people for whom it has been a worse week. Absolutely. It's been a bad way for the US. I was all of a sudden racial superiority is like a hot topic again, which I thought we were coming close to a consensus on that not 100% but I thought we were a little bit closer than this. I think a lot of people assumed that. And what's interesting about that Justin, and I think what's
Starting point is 00:01:53 worth talking about, is that you say all of a sudden, and I think it feels that way for a lot of people who just kind of accept that outdated ideas of racial superiority are... nobody buys that, right? Like we're past that. Haven't we moved on? And the truth is, America has a really sketchy history when it comes to eugenics and the pseudoscience behind the superiority of various races. And that's not a new concept. And that's a moment we wanted to try to address the events of the past week. That was the best way we could think of to talk about it because there's a lot of pseudoscience
Starting point is 00:02:38 that gets thrown around connected to this issue. It goes beyond race. It's not just race. Obviously, the genetics touches on, but we thought, well, if you're going to try to spat a bunch of nonsense science, at least solbona can try to smack it down there. So yeah, we are not historians by trade. There's a lot that you could learn from about this kind of American, America's secret eugenics history. It's not a secret. There are books about this. Other podcasts have talked about it. It's a stuffy-miston history class. Talked about it, but for some reason, everybody conveniently forgets it and doesn't want to talk about it
Starting point is 00:03:18 in school. Yeah, I would talk it. It might be useful as something of a cautionary tail Exactly of sorts about where this kind of thinking has let us in the past and Anyway, and medicine was involved doctors were involved. So I feel like it's fair game for us Usually this is we do a fun intro here where it's like I'm dumb about something But I was somewhat cautious about being dumb about eugenics that seems somewhat ambiguous on the funny scale so we're just here and we're going to talk about it so let's go. Well thank you to a lot of people who have suggested this topic before Kathleen, Esther, Alex, Genebel, David, Sarah, Nicholas and Karen. Thank you. Let's let's talk about it. So the root for the word eugenics comes from the Greek for good and
Starting point is 00:04:07 origin or good birth, literally. Now the term eugenics doesn't, as we think of it, doesn't date back to the ancient Greeks. It came much later. And in fact, ancient civilizations didn't have a lot to say on this kind of topic because we didn't understand genetics very well. Right. So, what would they have said? Now, it is kind of weird. You do see this argument from Plato on sort of a selective breeding. I mean, because... Tag, you know, they've always seemed so nice.
Starting point is 00:04:40 What were the different colors, all the fun models and shapes? Not that one. Not that one. Not that one. That's a bold stance right there. what were the different colors, all the fun models and shapes. Not that. Sportly, you wouldn't think that's a bold stance right there. Not that not that one with a T play toe. Play toe. Got it. Toe. Those are the jokes.
Starting point is 00:04:55 It's time for that. That's about as good as we go and get. All right. So the, I mean, and if you think about it, like, as soon as the concepts of like animal husbandry and that kind of thing were understood, I could see where people might begin to put to and do together. Anyway, Plato talked about this concept of a hierarchy of humanity. And again, this doesn't really have anything to do with genes and heredity as we understand it today.
Starting point is 00:05:26 have anything to do with jeans and heredity as we understand it today. But the thought was that there were like gold souls and silver souls and bronze souls. Okay, listen, I've played the dark soul series. I know what's going on here. Exchange them for leveling up and... No, you would try to mate them to make more gold ones. Okay. And this has nothing to do with like a skin color or any sort of physical feature. It was more just like social kind of like a cast sort of, just not cast, but similar system. So is it like a Zach-Lake Final Fantasy 7 where you try to breed chocobos
Starting point is 00:05:58 and you're trying to create the best chocobo possible? I had a friend try to explain this to me once in drama class in high school and I've never gotten over that description because I still don't understand what he was trying to tell me You need to get the gold sugar bone to be able to get nights of the round What's best done with me this it still sounds just as crazy So Plato said, you know, we should what we should really try to do is get people in this higher social strata that he was going Gold Souls to breed with each other and make more of that and
Starting point is 00:06:22 That would be great except he did say, you know, if the state tried to force people to marry certain other people, nobody would, nobody would like that, like we can't do that. So his idea that he proposed was this sort of fixed lottery. Okay. Where everybody would sign up, would have to sign up for the lottery and you would get randomly matched to someone who you had to marry, do it with, whatever. But it was a fixed lottery.
Starting point is 00:06:50 So the state secretly would pair up, quote unquote, gold souls. Okay. So they had to give me, no, none of this ever happened. It's not more Shirley Jackson than I actually. No, she's. None of this ever happened. But this was one of the first kind of proposals for this kind of thing. And then there were other angelic civilizations who didn't really get into that.
Starting point is 00:07:11 It was much cruder. They just thought, well, we don't want to perpetuate, you know, what they would think of as bad bloodlines. And so you would take care of that after birth. But we won't get into that. The modern Eugenics movement really comes from the 1800s. That's really where we see what we thought, think of now as Eugenics and what we experienced in the early 1900s from Francis Goulton. Goulton, who was, by the way, a cousin of Darwin, and really was impressed with Darwin's theories. Wanted to get a little slice of blind light in himself.
Starting point is 00:07:48 He studied medicine and he studied math and he traveled a lot and he really liked to read obituary's. He would comb through obituary's and look for patterns in families. So like the grandpa died and he was a rich businessman and the dad died and he was a rich businessman and their son died and the rich businessman. Ah, so they, something has been... It's like the fast-forwarded version of a solvance, I was just passing on. Something has been passed down.
Starting point is 00:08:16 Something has been passed down. He was born, he made something up, and then he died. So he came to this theory that traits were passed down through generations. And when I say traits, later this would come to mean genes, but at this point in history, we're not talking about genes. We're talking about broad definitions of traits. So things like poverty or wealth, criminality or lawfulness, promiscuity or fidelity. The application of those genetic traits is what we're talking about. Yes.
Starting point is 00:08:45 Okay. Yeah. Well, I mean, he just assumed all these things were genetic. Okay. Yeah. If somebody was a criminal, it was because it was something, something in, in, parent to them. Got it. And you could predict it by tracing their family tree. So he interviewed a lot of families and developed a lot of kind of family histories and pedigrees and said basically after all of this research we could ensure a higher quality of humanity if we just had people who have all these good traits breed and
Starting point is 00:09:22 not the people with the bad traits. And he came up with these two ideas of positive eugenics and negative eugenics. Positive meaning we would try to find a way to enforce or to encourage or incentivize breeding between these good traits, people who have these good traits. And then people, negative eugenics meaning people who don't have these good traits and then people negative eugenics meaning people who don't have these good traits we would somehow find a way to remove from the gene pool. Now he was not necessarily advocating for murdering people but he was advocating that these people should not continue their bloodline whatever that may mean. His ideas were studied in a couple of schools in the UK, and a lot of people talked about it and thought about it, and there were a lot of doctors and biology experts from the
Starting point is 00:10:12 time, but they really didn't take hold as strongly in the UK at this point in history. There were a lot of people who thought it was interesting, but Galton really treated it as, this is a brand new science. I am just now beginning to understand it, and I want to go about it in a very rigorous fashion. And so it didn't catch the country by storm, so to speak. I think it was only taught in a couple of schools. So it really didn't take hold until it crossed the Atlantic.
Starting point is 00:10:44 So Charles Davenport, a biologist from Connecticut in the late 18 and early 1900s, was hugely inspired by Galton's ideas and decided this is not just a new science that should be explored, this is the science that will define the rest of humanity and we really need to put our feet on the gas pedal and make this happen and get this message out. So he opened the Eugenics Record Office and Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory in 1904. And the entire basis of this laboratory
Starting point is 00:11:20 was to study Eugenics and figure out how we can take these theories and apply them actively on humanity to, in his mind, improve the human race. So he mainly used math to do this. Math? Math. Okay.
Starting point is 00:11:38 He understood biology, but he was probably better at math and statistics. And so he used a lot of mathematical formulas to try to predict patterns of inheritance, again, for everything from, I mean, very basic stuff, like eye collar, two things like alcoholism, pelagra, which of course we know is not a genetic disease. It means B1 deficiency, vitamin B1 deficiency. We've done an
Starting point is 00:12:05 episode about it before. To bad tempers. So he was using science, but in sort of measuring the wrong stuff, basically. Applying this concept to things that are much more complex. He was simplifying something that is infinitely more complicated. And as part of that study, he also focused a lot on the expression of various traits as it was brought about by interracial marriages. His inherent theory being that more variability was seen in interracial marriages and their offspring and that somehow this was bad, which was not. That's not genetics, right? No, in any way, but that because he saw more variability
Starting point is 00:12:51 that this was, anyway, there was a lot of focus on this as well. So my point here is that this research is already fundamentally biased from the beginning. He founded the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations in 1925, worked with a Eugen Fisher who was a German professor of medicine and a Nazi by the way, and became chairman of the Commission on Bastardization and misidination. What's misidination? That means
Starting point is 00:13:20 in racial marriage. Ah, okay. So his eyes, the science seems to have taken kind of an aftytown. Yeah, well, it does. I mean, we know it does, right? So his, oh, okay, I see where you're going with this bar, I figured out the rest of this particular story, but please go on. Just now, just now coming to me, yes. So his ideas, as I said, they were already based a lot on racial bias and social bias too. I say racial bias, but you've got to understand he was probably biased against anybody
Starting point is 00:13:55 who didn't look like him. Right, yes, right. White, you know, northern or western European descent. And this is the thing that's frustrating about this. I mean, obviously lots, but from a historical perspective, like science doesn't mix with bias. Like science doesn't mesh with bias. Anytime, if you see bias introduced like this, it's never, it's not science anymore,
Starting point is 00:14:21 right? No, it poisons the science. Poisons the science. It does. Because science doesn't care what you like and don't like. Science doesn't care what you want the answer to be. It just is that. And if you come at it with a goal already in mind,
Starting point is 00:14:39 to prove a point that you've already decided is true, you could try to bend and twist facts until they seem to support your hypothesis, but you haven't really, that's not science. So anyway, he began, you know, based on these biases that he had, he began to develop these, like I said, these concepts of inheritance that had nothing to do with actual genes as we understand them today. And to give you kind of an example, he was really building on, you remember Gregor Mendel and the P plants?
Starting point is 00:15:11 Oh, yeah, that monk. Yes. Now that was actually done in the 1800s. It's make peas do it. He's nasty. Gregor Mendel. Peas don't. You do you Gregor.
Starting point is 00:15:25 You do you. Do it, honey. Uh-huh, I got you. It's all right. Gregor's not here. You don't have to. Okay. Sugar coated.
Starting point is 00:15:34 Anyway, that research was actually done in like the mid 1800s, but it wasn't until like the early 1900s that it was kind of rediscovered and built upon. And it made a lot of geneticists really excited. Like people said, genetics like look at this mental stuff this pea plant stuff is great so you know he really wanted to build on this stuff. Davenport really wanted to take Mendels pea plants and expand it to everything so you probably remember from high school science Punnett squares. Yeah can't be lowercase B and you figure out your eye color. Exactly, exactly.
Starting point is 00:16:07 There's little squares that help you figure out headers, I guess, and homozygous traits and all that kind of stuff and how why your blood group is something or why your eye color or something. Well, he made these sort of like Frankenstein Punnett square type diagrams based on those ideas for all kinds of traits like I said so So he has these weird things where he's like here's some somatic traits of the father and here's some from the mother and you've got things from like curly hair versus straight hair and then he put some together to see like how they cross and what ends up coming out of that
Starting point is 00:16:41 But like it also included things like shorter tall Extrato or no extra toe, not musical or actually in both of these cases, both these parents were not musical. And so you can go into the next generation and find that there is a musical inhibitor that has been inherited because the parents were not musical.
Starting point is 00:17:09 So anyway, my point with this is that this isn't science. This is all just, you're just making this up. You can't observe that. You can't trace musical directly through a family and decide, you know, I mean that's, that, my point is that there's no science there. Okay. Okay. Does that make sense? Yes. Absolutely. Okay. So, so can't you kind of, I mean, some of that stuff, right? Like parents who are gonna music and then their kids are gonna music, but I guess there's a lot more, what you're saying is there's a lot more factors, there's music in the home,
Starting point is 00:17:41 for example, so the kids get more exposure to it. You got it. So, that's one of the big things he missed here is that, first of all, these are a lot more complicated traits than one gene. There is not a gene for musical ability. There's not a magic musical gene that you either have or you don't have. It's much more complex than that. Again, because he made these models for everything from basic stuff like eye collar to feeble mindedness, which whatever that means, which was a diagnosis that could mean many things depending on who you wanted to persecute at various times in history.
Starting point is 00:18:17 Psychosis, popperism, so if you were poor, that was thought to be inherited. Stature, syphilis, and thalasophilia, do you know what that means? No. A love of the sea. Okay. He found that commonly in naval officers. All right, it's me. In addition, he completely eliminated external factors and socialization.
Starting point is 00:18:37 So exactly what you just brought up, Justin, he took the nature versus nurture debate and said, screw nurture, it doesn't exist. Everything comes down to a bunch of inherited genetic factors, period. It doesn't matter who raises you or what the environment is or how many pianos you have in your house. You're either musical or you got the musical inhibitor and that's it. He also contradicted himself a lot. He would say things like criminality is really hard to define because what's illegal in one country might not be illegal in another country, but that on the flip side at the end of his essay in this exact same essay, he said, but here's some heritable criminal activity that I'm still
Starting point is 00:19:13 going to prove you can predict who's going to be a criminal and who's not, and then we don't let them get married. Also, his statistics were bad. I'm not going to get into all the wise, because that can be kind of boring. Maybe a little boring, but it's statistics. Take it for granted. Anyway, he was widely criticized. Even by others in the Eugenics movement, a lot of the UK eugenicists were like, dude, you are ruining this for us. We are trying to build something here and your making us look like idiots. Please stop what you're doing. This is Davenport.
Starting point is 00:19:42 This is Davenport. But he didn't care. He wrote a ton of essays. His wife, who was a zoology professor, helped him with all of this. And together, the two of them wrote these essays on hair and eye and skin color. It paved the way for these theories to be taught in schools. So they started to be taught in schools all over the US. He wrote a book, Heredity in relation to eugenics, which was taught on college campuses all over the US. And a lot of famous people got on board and worked at or through, whereas part of his laboratory, including Margaret Sanger and Teddy Roosevelt and Alexander Graham Bell and John Kellogg. That last one does not seem right.
Starting point is 00:20:19 That actually didn't seem right. That last one makes perfect sense. And let me say, all these people had different degrees of inclusion in this. I'm not saying that they were all on the same level and that they all agreed with what you should do with this information, but they all at least believed in some part in eugenics and in what we were learning from these pseudoscience theories. He also worked with the American Breeders Association, which a group that later would become the American Genetic Association and just completely run away from its roots as fast as possible and have nothing to do with that.
Starting point is 00:20:59 Now, Breeder? No, not us. Well, you've been talking about findings. Like, do you want to talk a little bit more about the specific sort of findings from Eugenics at this point? Yes, but first, Justin, let's go to the billing department. Let's go. The medicines, the medicines that ask you let my cards before the mouth. So, Sid, you were going to, we're going to talk about some of the specific findings and suggestions of eugenics.
Starting point is 00:21:25 So, so through this eugenics record office, there were many kind of recommendations and programs and stuff that arose from it. The first, as I mentioned, was this concept of positive eugenics. So how can we try to convince people that we think should do it and have babies to do it and have babies. So throughout the 1920s, you see this thing called fitter family contests. They were sort of based on, there were these better baby contests that had started prior to World War I, which actually had a lot of, there was actually a good reason they did this.
Starting point is 00:22:01 They did these better baby contests where you would compare your babies, but also they would teach you a lot about taking care of babies. So it was like a public health effort. Well, they where you choose the best baby. Well, but you also learned about like hygiene and nutrition and rest feeding and. Yes. But just there was more to it. Now, the fitter family contests are a whole other thing, but since they seem to fit that same model, a lot of people went to them. They were held at state fairs, and basically it was a way to try to reward people who had the best genetic traits and then make them aware of this idea of genetic traits and good and bad.
Starting point is 00:22:38 So basically you would bring your white Midwestern, Northern European heritage family to the fair to be judged alongside the livestock that was already being judged for its genetic superiority. Excellent. You had to bring like records of your family's health issues. You had to register ahead of time so that you could develop, answer all these questionnaires about everybody and your family and their jobs and you know what kind of illnesses they had and how successful they were and all that kind of stuff, what your position in society was. And then you would undergo a complete physical exam and psychological testing and interviews.
Starting point is 00:23:13 And I mean, a really in-depth profile on every member of your family, lab testing, blood test, urine test, the whole deal. And at the end, you and all of your family would get scored and they would average out your score and whoever has the highest average would win a trophy. And then like a trophy to pay on how big your family was. Like if you had a, if you had really good genes and you had a lot of kids, you got a big trophy. If you just had a few kids, you still got a trophy, but it was smaller. Okay. And then everybody who came close would get these bronze medals that say,
Starting point is 00:23:48 yay, I have a goodly heritage. And then while you were going through this three hour long process, they would also educate you on genetics. So you would watch these movies about marrying people with good traits and good genes and good bloodlines and the dangers of allowing unfit, so-called people to breed. They had this whole demonstration they did with light bulbs where one light bulb goes off and then all these other goes off around it and they tried to use it to talk about humans and sex and children.
Starting point is 00:24:17 So it was also kind of brainwashing. So that was being done on one end of the spectrum. As I mentioned there was also negative eugenics. And this is where everything gets much darker. This is a lot more upsetting, I think, than a family fair where you judge kids like Cal. Judge the best white people. Many of these ideas, when put into practice, led to sterilization laws.
Starting point is 00:24:42 Because in the US, we weren't necessarily advocating for killing people who we didn't want to breed. So that's good. But we also didn't want them to have kids. And now we had doctors who could do things like tuple ligations or vasectomies. What were they targeting? So it varied state by state, because every state had their own, not every state had this
Starting point is 00:25:06 law, but the majority of states did have some kind of long place. But generally, people with disabilities were often targeted, physical disabilities, any kind of mental illness. Epilepsy was specifically targeted very often. And then unmarried women, people who were poor, people in prison were definitely targeted. And then eventually specific racial and ethnic groups, immigrants were targeted very often, poor immigrants, or not poor immigrants, it didn't matter. Obviously African-Americans were targeted. There was this kind of hierarchy of immigrants where people, again, from like Northern or Western
Starting point is 00:25:45 Europe were usually allowed to let slide, but from Asian countries or from Latin America, they were definitely targeted. And again, from state to state, it just depend on if somebody could declare you any of these things that meant unfit and a doctor was willing to do the procedure that was enough. The same ideas also led to Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which is what initially prevented interracial marriage. The Immigration Restriction League, which had formed in the late 1800s, also used these concepts to further its argument that we shouldn't let certain immigrants in because they were
Starting point is 00:26:26 you know degrading our genetic pool and that led to in part not the only factor but these ideas led in part to the immigration act of 1924 that selectively like it created a hierarchy. Right. Keep out immigrants from certain parts of the world and let immigrants from others. So American. Yeah. Yeah, I know. Does this sound familiar? Yeah, right?
Starting point is 00:26:48 Yeah. The widespread sterilization laws that resulted from this ended up with 65,000 forced sterilizations in the United States of America. Jesus. The majority of these happened in California. Really? About 20,000. So not the majority of that number, but they by far had the highest proportion of state. I mean, I was a long time
Starting point is 00:27:13 ago, like, so this sort of can change me to believe, think of that as such a progressive state. One, their laws were just very stringent, and they were very, they were able to enact them very quickly. They were largely on institutionalized people and they just, they weren't challenged and so they had very efficient programs for it. And then a lot of it had to do with race and social status. They had a lot of Asian American immigrants.
Starting point is 00:27:42 They had a lot of people of Hispanic descent and they were targeted disproportionately at that time. And so it resulted in a lot of people being sterilized in California. The practice was challenged at the Supreme Court level in 1927 and of course in a case called Buck v. Bell. And the court found that it was fine. They supported it. It was a Buck.
Starting point is 00:28:08 Kerry Buck was a young woman in an institution. The director of the institution wanted to challenge this specifically so that he could make sure he was able to sterilize as many people as possible. So he took this kind of landmark case all the way to the Supreme Court. And they let him sterilize forcibly this 18-year-old girl
Starting point is 00:28:25 that he accused of multiple different things that probably weren't true. And they basically said, if it's in the greater interest of the state, I think the exact words of homes were three generations of imbicels is enough. This is like staggering to me. I guess it shouldn't be. I'm feel very naive because of how sort of surprising I find all this. But and these this was never really overturned. By the way, Bucky Bell, it's still referenced in case law.
Starting point is 00:28:54 It made things more complicated like they made more complicated cases out of it in the 40s. There were some some cases that kind of made it not so easy to do, but the concept did not stop. The laws generally fell out of favor in the 60s. A lot changed as I'm going to go into World War II, as you can imagine. But the practice persisted, especially among the poor, especially among minority groups, in marginalized populations. Young black women in the south were victims of this practice,
Starting point is 00:29:26 often being performed on them without their knowledge, especially by doctors and training, I'm ashamed to say, residents learning procedures were allowed to do these on women who were anesthetized and didn't know what was being done to them, or they were given consent forms that they couldn't read. And they were lied to, and so they signed them, so it was done with consent, but not with
Starting point is 00:29:52 consent. And this was done similarly to Native American women in the 70s, huge numbers. Some people estimate up to 25% of Native American women were sterilized under the guise of receiving appendectomies. made up to 25% of Native American women were sterilized under the guise of receiving appendectomies. And I'm saying a lot of women, a lot of the history of this focuses on women. This was done to men too. Institutionalized men, men who were in jail, men who had all of these same things that I
Starting point is 00:30:18 just mentioned physical and mental disabilities. I should clarify, men also were victims of this, of forced vasectomies and you know, castration or you know, whatever. So, and there are still cases of coerced sterilization procedures in prisoners up into the 2000s, where it's not necessarily forced, but there's definitely coercion occurring. So, the overt eugenics movement that allowed all this, as I mentioned, lost traction in the US, largely in the wake of World War II, because this all sounds well and good. And I think the only thing that,
Starting point is 00:30:55 to a lot of Americans, a lot of white Americans, it wasn't harming them. They didn't mind going to fairs and showing off their... Yeah, right. ...their livestock. Their milk fed, bosses. Exactly. the fairs and showing off their, your life stock, their milk fed bosses. Exactly. But then when they were faced with the reality
Starting point is 00:31:10 of where true eugenics will take you, which is to mass killings in genocide, then finally, imagine, there's a scene quite as appealing. You know what, we don't really like this. But to be fair, the US-Ugenics movement and the subsequent sterilizations that followed were so widespread that they
Starting point is 00:31:29 were cited by Adolf Hitler as part of his inspiration. He wrote, there is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception of citizenship are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German republic, but the United States. It was largely referencing California at the time. And the Buckverse bell case was cited by the defense at Nuremberg. So this history contributed to the history of the Eugenics movement, the white supremacy movement, and I think you have to say to the racial purity movement and Nazism across the Atlantic.
Starting point is 00:32:10 And it's just wrong. It's just made up. It's all made up. It's all made up. It's all made up. And I think a couple of things to remember about this is, first of all, it is still happening today in different forms, especially the coerced sterilization that I was talking about. They do things like payoffs or plea bargains with criminals. Like, listen, we'll let you off. We'll do this if you also agree to have a tubal ligation performed or have a vasectomy or something like that. In addition, just coercion, just kind of forcing people to by doctors. And this is not just legal personalities, you know, and law enforcement personalities are doctors telling people like you really need to do this.
Starting point is 00:32:56 And the rhetoric that was used to fuel this movement involved demonizing immigrants, people who didn't speak English, people who didn't share, necessarily what your personal cultural values are, whatever they are. All that rhetoric is something that we should not be shocked to hear happened then because it's happening now. It's the same thing that you're hearing now. They used manipulated scientific facts to try and support it. They took advantage of the fact that this was a new science, genetics, I mean by this. Genetics was a new science.
Starting point is 00:33:30 It was really hard to understand. It was difficult for the scientists, let alone a lay person to understand. And so if that's the case, it's really easy for someone to come along, manipulate it to make it sound simple. Well, you just inherit your criminality. You just inherit whether you're poor or rich. If you're a bad person, it's just your genes. So we just got to get rid of the bad people
Starting point is 00:33:52 and keep the good people and then we'll be okay. And when you put it like that, it sounds so easy. It sounds fixable. It sounds like something we can do, but it's lies. It's all lies, but they're easy lies to tell. And if you're not paying attention and you don't take the time to follow up and listen to the more complicated truth, then you can get snowed really easily. And then the other reason that this persisted is because, as I mentioned, Davenport was widely criticized. I mean, in his time, just as he is now, for his theories. People
Starting point is 00:34:24 said at the time, this is wrong. What he's talking about is ridiculous. You can't predict criminal behavior based on a gene. It has to do with so many different things and has nothing to do with skin color, has nothing to do with if you're Jewish, it has nothing to do with, you know, what country you came from. It's so much bigger than that.
Starting point is 00:34:39 But all this criticism was in the form of strongly worded letters to him personally, or journal articles published in scientific journals that lay people weren't reading. Nobody was calling the media, nobody was calling the government, nobody was standing on the street corner with a megaphone until it was too late. And I think that's the other take home point is that rhetoric and that kind of twisted thinking and pseudo science has to be called out publicly because it doesn't do any good to silently disagree until after the fact. Folks, that's going to do it this week for us on sobhones.
Starting point is 00:35:24 Sorry that I stepped out for the last 15 minutes I was trying to look for a joke to say and I couldn't find any so I'm sorry I've been balancing my chat no that was just really um get smart start talking start reading start talking to people you disagree with It's okay to get a little angry sometimes I don't mean violent I just mean angry. Yeah, maybe a lot of Feels right to Thank you the maximum fun network for letting us be a part of their podcasting family. There's a lot of great shows there Thanks to taxpayers for letting us use their strong medicines as the intro and outro of our program.
Starting point is 00:36:06 And that is going to do it for us this week folks. Be sure to join us again next week when Sidney promises me that the show will be about tickling. Yeah, we're going to talk about tickling next week. My name is Justin McRoy. I'm Sidney McRoy. And as always, don't drill a hole in your head. Maximumfund.org
Starting point is 00:36:45 Comedy and Culture, Artistone Listener Supported

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