Part Four: Francis Galton: Inventor of Eugenics

Welcome back once again to Behind the Basterd's part four of our series on Francis Galton, the inventor of racism, by which I mean eugenics. Here with me to talk about racism is David Bell, who is not racist as far as I can prove. I tell everybody that all the time, a lot, suspiciously often actually. Yeah. Showed his cover. There's a lot. Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to, sorry, we've covered my shirt with my cats. I do want to describe my pants. Sure. I'm wearing pajama pants with fish on them and it's a sleep at the real. It's a fishing joe. Oh, nice. Yeah. Yeah. A sleep at the real. No, that's good. That's a good. Yeah. I wanted people to know about that. And that, and I'm not racist. Thank you. That for that. And you, you know, a fishing joke. Well, you know who did know fishing jokes, Francis Galton, I don't think he got his hands dirty outside of doing surgery as a young man all that often. So this is behind the bastards and I'm not really interested in giving a complete history of all of like the non shitty things Galton did, but he did have a lot of major achievements. We've talked about some of them, the concept of like regression to the mean statistical concept of correlation, a bunch of different like math stuff that Galton did and like either invented or was like the first guy to figure out or like helped to figure ideas a lot of influence and just like the way we do science and conduct scientific studies, particularly those that involve like statistics, the way we survey populations, twin studies, Galton had a lot to do with all of that. You should also know that while he was becoming the first racism nerd in the history of either racism or nerds, he was also becoming the first weatherman or one of the first weatherman. In April of 1875, he published what is probably the first weather map ever published in the times of London. He did show the previous days weather, I'm not really sure what the purpose was, like I don't know. Hey, you guys. I guess some were man. Yeah. It's not going to documentation. No, imagine that for like tomorrow. Yeah. Yeah. I get it. This isn't I heart podcast guaranteed human didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast. Here's what you missed. There should not be a single law enforcement agency that does not have body cameras. It's real. Life farmers have been under attack. This is just the latest example of them just slapping D.I. on anything. It's raw. And I'm sitting here going. They are playing y'all for fools. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the black information networks. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the I heart radio app, Apple Podcasts. Oh, wherever you get your podcasts. By the late 1880s, Francis was spending most of his free time either in meetings with various eugenics groups that had sprouted up all around Britain and he's getting meetings. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, meetings. You got to have your races in meetings, right? The problem with our modern races is that they don't have enough bureaucracy around the bigotry. Galton and his boys were taken minutes from multiple different groups as they wrote about why the poor should be sterilized. They're not quite doing that yet, but he wants them to be doing that. He's pushing them to do that, right? The other thing he's doing during this period of time is helping to invent what we now call forensic science. He's not the inventor of forensic science, but he's like any list of the founding fathers of forensic science has got to have Galton on there somewhere because he is very influential. His interest in forensic seems to have been spurred not just by his related eugenics work. Obviously, that has a lot to do with it, but by the fact that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published his first Sherlock Holmes book, a study in Scarlet in 1887. Galton stated in his autobiography that his interest in forensics was spurred by quote, a sort of Sherlock Holmes fascination. Now, the way that's written in the text, he may have just been saying to like, I'm like Sherlock Holmes, and not I was influenced to want to get into this by Sherlock Holmes. I'm not 100% sure there, but he was a massive fan of Doyle's novels. And regardless of kind of how it timed out, Holmes influenced him because he really wanted to see himself as that kind of a figure, right? And he clearly kind of idolized Sherlock Holmes and took Doyle seriously as like when he would write about like forensics and like science, like the science of investigations, right? Like, even though Doyle is just kind of like writing books, right? He took him seriously as like a scientific thinker on the subject. Sherlock Holmes was like the first choker. And what I mean is that like the character in a van is fine. It just created some of the worst fans, you know what I mean? Like I like Sherlock. I've read all the Sherlock Holmes. It's very entertaining stuff. It's just it's once you start becoming like, I want to be like Sherlock Holmes that things get troublesome, right? Yeah. Well, it's also like, I don't know, when you make the TV show house and then later realize that, oh, wow, I guess a Brian Singer really put a lot of gross stuff into this series that I didn't catch the first time I watched it 20-something years ago. Yeah, man. But it is good. I couldn't really. Yeah, Galton wants to be the Gregory House of Racism, and in a way he is, right? But he's also getting into forensics at this point. So in 1888, he had a forensic laboratory that would have made Sherlock Holmes himself drool. And I found a description of this laboratory in an article by Ava Kofman in the Public Domain Review. Quote, "In 1888, a reporter from the Paul Maul Gazette paid a visit to Galton's anthropometric laboratory in London, where instruments developed by Galton measured the physical and mental characteristics, from keenness of hearing to breathing power of over 10,000 people. The resulting article, titled "A Morning with Anthropometric Detectives," described Galton's laboratory as a world of order and precision and tests of the nicest accuracy. Dumb though they are," Galton told the reporter, "what splendid detectives our instruments might prove. Splendid detectives," the reporter exclaimed, "I am not, I hope, in an apartment of the criminal investigation department, unconsciously yielding convincing proofs of personal identity with some scoundrel, hitherto, unhung. And it's obviously an early example of media hype of like, wow, look at all these instruments. This must be like a real detectives agency. You sure could catch anything with like, has he caught anybody, he never does. He gets actually consulted on with the police a few times. His stuff doesn't like catch criminals, because he's- No, this is wrong. This is wrong tree. Junior detectives, it's like- This is wrong tree. Junior detectives. He's like inventing his own detecting tools and stuff that are like, by measuring hearing and, you know, I don't know, there's some value in it just in that, yeah, it's useful that we started thinking about how to like measure how well people could hear and try to take some data on people for like health and there's all sorts of purposes, what you want this kind of data. But he is really interested on using it to like, predict and solve crime. It's sort of- You said at the very start of this, we talked about it's- some of this stuff is neat. Like that cap is like neat for some of this stuff, and then he takes it to the next level, right? Where it's like, it becomes this dogma that he wants people to like breed certain ways and more stuff that's at best neat. Yeah, right. And one of the neat things that he has in this anthropometric lab is fingerprinting equipment. He gets really interested in that by the 1880s. And we actually do have an advertisement for Galton's anthropometric lab because he's gathering. He's has like thousands and thousands of people volunteer to let him like measure them in various ways for all of his different like studies and theories. And this advertisement, the reason I find it interesting is I think it has like the first privacy guarantee for biometric data. Take a look at it. It notes- And that's like the words. You can see it on here, but it notes in one portion of the advertisement. We're keeping a methodological register of the principal measurements of each person of which he may at any future time obtain a copy under reasonable restrictions. His initials and date of birth will be entered in the register, but not his name. The names are indexed in a separate book, right? I think that might be the first like- That's amazing. Like the first like promise that like we'll protect your biometric data in history. Yeah. I don't know who else could have been earlier, right? They didn't even know why they were protecting it. So they knew people were going to want to steal it. Yeah. Yeah. You don't have to worry about the wrong hands, you know, like it's already there. They're all the wrong hands. Yeah. This is why I enjoyed like the forensic files show today, right? Is because of this asshole. Like he helped. Yeah. He's a big part of that. Now the use of fingerprinting to identify people had been advocated as early as like 1858, which is when Sir William Herschel of the Bengal Civil Service used fingerprinting to identify individual Indians as part of a fraud investigation. In 1880, a scientist named Henry Fowls published a groundbreaking study on fingerprints that ignited a vigorous debate among the scientists of the day. Francis Galton has always been a interested in trends, right? He's always been either a trend setter or a trend follower and as soon as fingerprinting becomes hip. He gets really interested with it, right? And he becomes obsessed with proving that they're a good way to identify individual people, right? There was theories that these might be a good way to identify individual people, but we didn't have much like today. We know that fingerprints are probably unique to each person, right? Yeah. It's impossible to say 100 percent like that's that's a theory, right? Oh, yeah. You can't guarantee that. The fingerprints are the stupidest thing that is correct. You know what I mean? Yeah, it's really out of their work. Yeah, I think it's really silly that they work as unique. fingerprints and the matchup. How do we match him? I just, everybody gives their finger prints. - Everybody give 'em's up. - Yeah. - I guess that's how I want to file. (laughs) - I don't like stupid. - All of the implications of this, but it's frustrating that it actually does work that way, right? - Right, it sounds like all the other shit he's been talking about, you know? - And Golden is the first guy to show that fingerprints work that way, 'cause we didn't have like a big, no one had ever like taken a bunch of fingerprints from a wide, like subset of the population to see if any of them were the same. And Golden gathers 8,000 fingerprint samples, and for the first time, as it was a none of these 8,000 are copies, which suggests heavily that every fingerprint is unique, right? And that's still the conclusion to this day, right? But he is the guy to establish that, to go from, this might be a good way of identifying people to confirming, no, these are unique individual, like identifying characteristics. - Right, like the moment someone finds a pair that's identical, it all kind of falls. - Oh yeah, oh yeah, that'll fuck some shit up if that ever does happen, yeah? - Right, it's like my no-one-even-for-pre-crime is like the moment you find one pre-crime that wasn't true, the whole system ever made this free. Like that would really happen, yeah. - I'm surprised that there isn't like a Dan Brown novel, Da Vinci Code style, someone learning about fingerprints that matter. - To be honest, as I've talked about in the, we did a series of episodes on how like forensic science is largely nonsense. 'Cause a lot of stuff like gun, like bullet matching to guns is like nearly complete bullshit. Fucking gate analysis is heavily flawed. And fingerprints are real, like and definitely the most real of all the different like forensic science things, but also very flawed. And like the way in which fingerprinting is used by law enforcement. And a lot of like, so it's not perfect, right? And it's not as, it's not as reliable a method for actually because of flaws and like gathering or not. As law enforcement often wants to portray it, that is true. But Gordon's correct here in general, and that it is a good way to identify individual people. And he does more than that. He lays out the eight characteristics of fingerprints. And a lot of his original science is still the standard today. He's the guy who comes up with the classification of like arches and loops and whorls and fingerprints. Like he's the dude who lays all that out for the first time. So this is like legitimately groundbreaking, right? In 1899 and so far, pretty good science. In 1899, he was approached by police in a country that he never named to help with the kidnapping of the heir to a rich family. They wanted to know if fingerprints from a healthy baby would chip from a baby would change over time. Gordon had already shown previously. He documented fingerprints from people from his youngest 30 months. And as they like went up, like grew up in age up to like 80, not the same person, obviously, but he had measured people over a course of years and shown that like, yeah, their fingerprints don't change over time, right? But he had never like gotten data on infants to prove like a baby's fingerprints don't change over time. And so he does that now. There's an American mother who volunteers to document her daughter. And so he's able to show that like, no, baby's fingerprints, it's like the same thing. And by the way, that whole like missing kid, that was probably a lie. Because he never explained if he helped them find her or not, or mentioned it for the most part. And his biographer, Boer Suspects, he just like made that story up when he was giving a speech about his fingerprint research to kind of judge things up a little bit. And maybe make himself seem a little bit more like Sherlock Holmes. I don't know. That said, while this initial research into fingerprinting is pretty good science, especially for the day, being Francis Galton, the instant he starts looking into a new field of scientific endeavor, he has to find a racial angle, right? This has to be a way to what-- there have to be-- basically, his immediate belief is, well, there's no way black people and white people and like Indian people all have the same fingerprints, right? White fingerprints have to be better in some way, and non-white people's fingerprints have to be in some way inferior. And they're have to-- not just inferior, they have to be identifiable as not white based on difference. There are more worlds or something. Or less worlds. Whatever's the bad amount of worlds versus a good amount. Something different that he can declare is like a flaw. Because if they all have-- if all everyone's fingerprints are completely identical, then maybe we're all just human beings. Right. Like, maybe all of my whole life is a lie. We can't have that, right? So Galton starts looking into ways in which he can both predict criminal behavior. Like, are there criminal fingerprints? Are there signs of fingerprints that someone's going to be a criminal? And also, can we tell people of different races based on their fingerprints? Now, he's not the only guy who thinks that this sort of thing should be possible. Specifically, not the only guy who thinks that like the characteristics of someone's personality and the things they've done in their life might be reflected in their fingerprints and other immutable biological characteristics. As Eva Kaufman notes in their article, the late 19th century was a time in which increasing numbers of scientific-minded people started looking for, quote, "close unnoticed by others." That's a common way to describe it, right? Once we realize fingerprints are a thing that, like, forever, people have been leaving fingerprints behind, not just on the scene of a crime, but everywhere, and we didn't know what they were, or that we could look for them. That starts a bunch of people who say, well, there's got to be other stuff we're missing, right? And obviously, there is. There's a ton of stuff we're missing, right? That is very important for helping to, like, explain human beings and how we work. This fascination is what's called the semiotic model, right? In human sciences. And this fascination with the semiotic model is noted by historian Carlo Ginsburg, is having risen to prominence alongside, quote, "an increasingly clear tendency for state power to impose a closed mesh net of control on society, which involved attributing identity through characteristics which were trivial and beyond conscious control." So again, you have this good motivation, which is, we've been missing fingerprints for ever many fucking thousand years, and those are pretty important. What else might be be missing to, how can we categorize people and, like, control them by having an understanding of the things, like, how can we categorize and, like, judge them based on these things they cannot control? - It's really funny. - It's really funny. - The whole parts of their character, right? - Right, it's really funny to go like, we have to determine that every human is different and unique in this one specific way. I wonder if there's ways we can put them into categories. - Yeah, yeah, no, to categorize them. - I feel like you're learning the opposite lesson here. It's also, like, it feels like it always gets mixed up when they're like, we want to be able to predict what a person will be. And it's like, it's so clear that that's just not how people work. - That's just not, not, and what they've done, and, like, can we determine, like, the dangerous people by, and lock them away from society, by figuring out these characteristics that are, they can't argue, there's no way to hide it, you know, the fingerprint gave you up or whatever, right? In fingerprints, Galton's 1892 book that is, I mean, this is kind of gives birth to fingerprints as like a forensic science. This book is very important. Galton is forced to conclude against his hopes that, quote, "no peculiar pattern" seems to characterize the fingers of any one race above the other. In other words, he has to admit in this book, I have not found any racial differences between fingerprint types. Now, he refuses to see this as evidence that he had been wrong about everything, and, as Kaufman writes, quote, "despite his admission that hard fact had made a hope no longer justifiable, a closer look at Galton's writings reveals that racial typologies were never far from his thoughts. The conflict and speculation, conjecture and hesitation in Galton's racial rhetoric and fingerprints can be understood as a deliberate strategy, one which allowed him to perpetuate a strong racial and imperial research program, even when it's scientific date, when his scientific data undermined it, right? So he is still, even though he has not found evidence for this, he finds a bunch of ways to point out like, well, but there's might be this difference. So there's this, like, one thing he notes is that when he's analyzing fingerprints of Indian people, 'cause the ink and the paper is of lower quality in India, 'cause the British don't like send the good stuff over there, I guess, the fingerprints are of lower quality. And he's like, well, this is evidence of a difference, you know, and he describes it as like, 'cause the fingerprints are just kind of like blurrier, but like, oh, Indian people are less formed, their hands are like less finished, basically. Like, that's kind of what he's saying. Like, a microcosm for everybody is involved, basically. Yeah. That's his entire scientific method right there is taking a systemic, like, taking like a problem with the data that reflects society at the time, including something like that must be, like in the nature of that person. It's perfect. Exactly. Yeah, it really is, it really is beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. Throughout fingerprints, Walton continued to alternate, sometimes in the space of a single sentence between claiming that fingerprints were and were not marked by racial difference. For example, in a later chapter about race and class, he concluded with disappointment that everyone seemed to have an identical character of fingerprint. He included a table that showed this lack of difference, that there's no real like pattern between the differences, there's nothing that you can really tell, you know, based on like race about fingerprints. But after saying all this and putting up this like, this table, he wrote, quote, their patterns are not so far as I can tell different from those of others. They are not simpler. Still, whether it be from pure fancy on my part or from the way in which they were printed or from some real peculiarity, the general aspect of the Negro print strikes me as characteristic. The width of the ridges seems more uniform. Their intervals more regular and their course is more parallel than with us. In short, they give an idea of greater simplicity due to causes that I have not yet succeeded in submitting to the test of measurement. So I can't measure this And there's no evidence for it. But I feel like their fingerprints are simpler in a way that's literally impossible to prove her measure. He's like, "Maybe it's me, but I don't know. I just don't like him. I just don't like him as much." And he did that with his study of like Jewish people I'm London too, where he's like, "Maybe it's me, but I thought they were all just looking to see if I had money." You know? Like, he does this. Again, this is always the underpinning of his science, no matter how much data and statistics he throws in. And that's the reason why despite his is is undeniable achievements and like mathematics and statistics and his contributions to the scientific method in that way, I can't respect him much as a scientist because when push came to shove and he had good data, he always he didn't discard it. He would print it and then argue that it was wrong basically because of something he felt and had no evidence of. And that's just bad science thing. That's really bad being a scientist. In the end of the book, he also concludes it like, "Well, the fingerprints don't let us identify like white people from black people, from Indian people, but I feel like the shapes of hands of non-white people are different from white people." And that might help us identify. He's specifically part of what he wants to do here is identify people who have non-white ancestry but look white and live in an European society because he wants those people to stop to not be able to breed with full white people. So he's looking for if there's something different. The fingerprints that would have been really helpful, but there's not. So maybe the handshape will do it, right? In 1903, Arthur Conan Doyle published the adventure of Norwood Builder and we'll talk a little bit about this and more about Francis Galton, but you know who didn't write any Sherlock Holmes novels? Who? Sponsors of our podcast, I assume. Right. It'd be weird if they had. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast. And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests and they complained about the very thing they were seeing. It's wrong. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin unfiltered. I went off. I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. 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So in 1903, Arthur Conan Doyle published The Adventure of the Norwood Builder, which is a Holmes mystery that hinged around like the big point, like the big twist in this, is that like they find evidence that a guy did a murder based on like a fingerprint. And then Holmes is able to prove that the fingerprint was forged in order to like frame an innocent man, right? That his fingers, that his fingerprints were artificially added to the scene of a murder in order to like frame him, right? Which is like a really at 1903 that was like the year before or after Scotland Yard had started like actually widely using fingerprint. So like law enforcement had started massively using it. It was like, it was a big hype at the time. There was a lot of like news articles about it, right? This is sci-fi, basically. This is sci-fi all, like this is like doing a killer robot movie now where it's like, you know, AI and junk like that. It's weird because like, is there any sources on like what we thought fingerprints were before? Because it's not like fingerprints didn't exist before we realized that. And the the very first like English guy certainly doing that I've read about doing fingerprint research. Like what brought him into it is he was he was in Japan. He was like working, I think in Tokyo as a doctor. And he was looking at he noticed fingerprints on like pottery, old pottery. Right. See people's fingerprint. That's got him interested in the subject. I don't know what they, I guess they didn't just didn't think about them much. Like we've always known because it's obvious that people have that. Yeah. And fairness, I don't think about them much either. You just look at them go like, hey, neat. Oh my. These are on there. That's cool. Weird. I wonder why we got these. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah. So so Conan Doyle has come up with this plot that hinges on like a fingerprint being faked and like a real fingerprint being like put in at the sign of a crime using like a wax mold. And the way in which he envisions this fake fingerprint being transferred, it probably wouldn't have been possible. Right. Cause it's not based on reality. It's a novel. And it Conan Doyle like every author is like, that seems realistic enough. People will buy that. Right. And stuck it in in there and never checked to make sure that it would work because that's just not really a thing you do usually when you're writing. Like if it's good enough, that's fine. You're a liar. Right. All fiction authors are and it's okay. So after but but Golden doesn't think about it that way. Remember, he like idolizes Sherlock Holmes and kind of feels like he's like the real Sherlock Holmes. I get the feeling. And so after reading this story, he writes a letter to Arthur Conan Doyle and starts asking serious technical questions about well, how would a wax mold of a seal be used to leave like a legible bloody fingerprint, you know, because based on my experience, I don't see how this would be possible. But obviously, I know you've done your own research. Could you like, give me the details of your own experiments with fingerprints? Because I think this is really useful scientific data. And Arthur Conan Doyle never responds because obviously he wasn't. He doesn't do it. Exactly. How does the warp drive really work? It's a TV show. Right. And I find this very funny, but also very telling of his character because Francis Galton cannot imagine in a world in which multiple black men who were like either born or raised as slaves have written best-selling novels. Right? That were obviously written by a man of deep intelligence, right? He lives in that world and he cannot imagine an educated black man, but he trusts implicitly that a fiction novelist did research before putting something in his book, right? That's really interesting. I guess it speaks to like, you know, there's writers today. There's people like, you know, you sit down with a Michael Crighton book and you're like, this feels like it's real. Some of this has to be real. Yeah, it feels like I could clone dinosaurs if I just follow the instructions in this book. Like, their writers are very good at making dumb ideas that plausible and smart. By the early 1900s, Francis Galton's ideas on Eugenics had moved well beyond him and beyond a topic of intellectual discussion. They'd started to become law partly because so many men accepted everything Galton wrote as the truth and increasingly took it further even than he'd been willing to dare, but a quote now from an article in Science AQ. Quote, "When Galton gave a lecture on Eugenics in 1904, prominent thinkers were invited to respond. The other H. G. Wells sounded skeptical at first, arguing that the relative genetic superiority of individuals was too hard to quantify, but then he concluded with this shocker. The way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born, it is in the sterilization of failures and not in the selection of successes for breeding that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies." So he's actually not just taking, he's taking the Galton's starting point, but I go, "No, you don't need to encourage smart people to breed. That won't get you anywhere. You have to sterilize the poor and the stupid, right? That's H. G. Wells. We figured it out. We figured it out. It's unclear to me because Galton in his autobiography says that I wasn't initially in favor of sterilizing or like criminally like using the law legal system to make it illegal for undesirable people to breed. I didn't think that was necessary at first, but I came to realize it was the only way to do things over time, right? I think he's probably probably lying because he admitted also that because he admitted like in his autobiography that in 1865 when he first started writing about eugenics, but hadn't named it eugenics, he didn't want to talk fully. He didn't want to like reveal everything he believed yet because he didn't think people were ready. And so I think that that came to realize like he was forced my hand. I have I have to conclude this horrible thing I always believe exactly. I suspect HG Wells kind of going like, no, we actually have to sterilize and otherwise stop the poor for breeding. I think Galton was like, oh, finally, okay, good. They've caught on the thing I've been pushing subtly for a while. And now I can start to be more open about it, right? Because he had been pushing people in this direction. I just don't think he wanted to go out on a limolone because he's fundamentally a little bit of a coward. In 1907, he wrote to his successor and his mentee, Carl Pearson, quote, "except by sterilization, I cannot yet see any way of checking the produce of the unfit who are allowed their liberty and are below the reach of moral control." That same year, an agent Galton stepped down from the Eugenics Record Office, which he'd helped found at University College, London. Carl Pearson took over at his request and named it the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics. It still exists under a different name and it's in the Darwin Center. But yeah, like they just took Galton off of it because Eugenics got a bad rap. By 1908, Galton was openly on-team sterilized the poor and announced this in his autobiography, writing, "I think that stern compulsion ought to be exerted to prevent the free propagation of the stock of those who are seriously afflicted by lunacy, feeble mind andness, habitual criminality and popperism. How to restrain ill-oam and marriages is a question by itself, whether it should be affected by seclusion or in other ways yet to be advised that are consistent with a humane and well-informed public opinion. Obviously, we got to humanely sterilize people, right? We don't want to do it the mean way." At the end of his autobiography, he states his opinion that time had only proven the claims he made in hereditary genius 45 years earlier, even more correct. He reprinted a segment of that book a lot of his autobiography, as him like quoting segments of his earlier books and being like, "Yes, yeah, right, I was. I'm pretty smart." So, he reprinted a segment of that book in which he complained that no one had ever tried to breed dogs for high-general intellect and then suggests someone try and see how well it worked. Immediately after this, he went on to identify himself as a true philanthropist and stated, "Charity refers to the individual, statesmanship to the nation, eugenics cares for both." He then went on to argue that all married couples can be divided between desirables, passables, and undesirables. And given the limitations of available funds, future charity should only go to the desirables, whereas the undesirables should be stopped from breeding. The passables, I guess, we let breed, but we shouldn't be happy about it, right? You know, I don't want to encourage it. Right, we probably can't stop the middle class from having it. Right, right. Yeah, we need someone to work in the restaurants, right? He wrote, quote, "Individual," and this is him, this is kind of his fucking took six tabs at acid period, too, because he starts writing a little bit more philosophically here. He is ancient. He's ancient. 1908. 1908. Yeah. He is becoming an individual. Individuals appear to me as partial detachments from the infinite ocean of being, and this world as a stage on which evolution takes place, principally, hitherto by means of natural selection, which achieves the good of the whole with scant regard for that of the individual. Man is gifted with pity and other kindly feelings. He has also the power of preventing many kinds of suffering. I conceive it to fall well within his province to replace natural selection by other processes that are more merciful and not less effective. This is precisely the aim of eugenics. Its first object is to check the birth rate of the unfit, instead of allowing them to come into being, though doomed in large numbers to perish prematurely. The second object is the improvement of the race by furthering the productivity of the fit by early marriages and healthful rearing of their children. Natural selection rests upon excessive production and wholesale destruction, eugenics on bringing no more individuals into the world than can be properly cared for, and those only of the best stock. So that's his kind of like conclusion about why eugenics is good and necessary. We're all part of this infinite ocean of being, but also pity sort of a mistake, like it's nice that we feel it, but if we don't check the birth rate of the unfit, they're doomed. They'll die. No way to take care of them, right? Alfred Wallace continued to oppose Galt on his entire life, and 18th at the guy who co-invented the theory of evolution, or co-discovered, or whatever, the theory of natural selection. Like Wallace goes after him repeatedly. He continues attacking eugenics and eugenicists in 1890 he writes, "Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent." And in a later article he added, "Leave heredity alone until we have made the environment of every child from conception to death the best possible for its full and free development." And then we can begin to think about the influences of heredity, which may be small, right? Just it's important that you know, as this is not a everyone felt this way, there were no countervales. This guy is the co-discoverer of natural selection, and he's like, "No, we should give kids better schools and like food." Right. Let's not go frees there. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is Galton died in 1911 of being an old piece of shit. Yeah. Finally fucking dead. Jesus Christ. My God. Sir. I was waiting for you to be like, "He now lives in Southern California." He's still alive. Yeah. No, he works with the White House right now. Yeah. You just seemed immortal, unfortunately. His ideological enemy Alfred Russell Wallace lived two more years, which is at least a nice little moral victory, the Wallace last couple years longer. Before he died in 1913, he published one last article insisting that over the course of his career, he had found, quote, "No marked superiority in any race or country." Furthermore, he argued that even if Galton's ideas had something to them, society was far too corrupt and fucked up to allow anyone to decide who was fit or unfit to breed. Like, even if you had a point, nobody who might be in a position to do that should be able to do that. Right. This guy is so right. This is super right. There are her red pepper rings. There are people more prone to certain diseases than others and it is linked to race. That's why, again, it always goes back to neat where it's like, "Yeah, there are things to know that's worth knowing." But it shouldn't dictate who you're right with. How do you treat people, what the laws necessarily is? It's also like, again, what some of these EA people would say, like, "Well, everyone's a little into eugenics," which I agree it's not eugenics is about improving, like, trying to direct the growth of a race. That's different. Right. Just not like not. Anyway, we've gotten off topic, but yeah, that is, that is, it's messy, but I just fundamentally don't agree that that's all eugenics, right? So, year after he died, 1912, the first eugenics congress was held in London and dedicated to Francis Galton, who had passed away the year before. Leonard Darwin, the son of his cousin Charles, was the chair. The welcome address was given by Arthur Balfour of the Balfour Declaration. One prominent delegate was Sir Winston Churchill, who had come to agree with Galton that feeble-minded people were breeding too much and causing cultural degeneration. As Gavin Evans wrote in a piece for unseen histories about Churchill, "As home secretary, Churchill promoted a plan to forcibly sterilize 100,000 mental degenerates, with this was blocked he backed the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act, which established that those defined as idiots or embecils could be placed in an institution against their will at the prompting of parents or guardians. This became law for 46 years and led to the enforced confinement of tens of thousands of people." Churchill's views on race were no less rabid than Galton's. In 1902, he called for further colonial conquest because the Aryan stock is bound to caught to triumph. After the First World War, he wrote in favor of using poison gas on uncivilized tribes to spread a lively terror. Minions were brutish children, Palestinians, barbaric horns who ate little but camel dung and Indians abeously people with abeously religion. He added, "I hate Indians." On red Indians and black people in the United States and Australia, he said in 1927, "I do not admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, has come in and taken their place." In 1954, he said, "I hate people with slit eyes and pigtails. I don't like the look of them or the smell of them." I don't like the look of them or the smell of them. Galton has a lot to do with Winston Churchill's beliefs about the world. He certainly has an influence on the man. Now I'm not going to be able to give a comprehensive list here of every figure and every law that was influenced by eugenic thought. Not all of these guys agreed with Galton's conclusions, though. And not all of the people who started who became eugenicist agreed with his fundamental conclusions. There are like left-wing eugenicists who are still pretty problematic, but in a very different way. One of these guys was a British politician, the labor politician named Ramsey McDonald, who in 1909 complained that "Natural selection by death has been set aside, but the state can set sexual selection and operation again by an education in good taste." And he argued that the way to do this, because that's pretty problematic sounding, right? But his argument was that if we push environmental reform and we can eliminate poverty, that will create a "healthily, healthy and comely race of people without the need to segregate or punish the unfit." Right? He is making it with a different set of beliefs, because Wallace doesn't believe in eugenics. at all, but he is making a similar argument that we're like, well, all we need to do, we do need to improve the quality of the race, but we'll do that as like feeding people and giving them better schools and cleaner neighborhoods, right? So it's like we're getting some race stuff that's bad, but like, okay, right, yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's like trying to, it's like, hey kids, super ran eats as vegetables. You know, like, you're just trying to like make it sound more appealing to me. Yeah, or it's, you know, honestly, it's like those, it's like there are a bunch of abolitionists who are still racist against black people. They just do slavery was evil. And it's like, yeah, you know, it's, it's 1860, whatever, whatever gets you there, right? Right. If you're, if you're shooting at confederates, I guess we can forgive the fact that like, you didn't quite get all the way to the right answer. Like, I still like them, but I don't want to be slaves. And it's like, okay, for right now, that's probably, that's probably, okay, in 1912, the mental deficiency bill was introduced to parliament to prevent feeble minded people from having kids, despite opposition from the Catholic church among others. And one thing you gotta say is that like, the Catholics and like, particularly, are really always against this stuff. For the same reason, they don't think condoms are good or abortions, unfortunately, but they do oppose this stuff, you know? The bill becomes law in 1913. For the website English Heritage, the law quote, "establish the means to segregate mental defectives and asylums, but reject in sterilization." As a result of the backlash and the protests against this bill, they had to take out sterilization. In fact, English eugenicists seem to be heading away from sterilization until 1931, when a new sterilization bill was introduced to parliament to legalize voluntary sterilization of mental defectives. This failed as well. And the introduction of sterilization policies by the Nazis, policies Galton would have supported, curtailed progress in his homeland, right? So Great Britain never sterilizes people for eugenic purposes and mass. I'm sure some happen, but like, they don't succeed. Like the eugenicists pushing for laws to formalize that do not succeed in Great Britain, right? They do succeed in the United States. Eugenics first came to this country courtesy of a guy named Charles Davenport. Davenport was a trained mathematician who read Carl Pearson, that's Galton's mentee, read his papers on evolution in the 1890s, and was selected by Pearson and by Galton himself to be the American editor of the Eugenics Journal Biometrica. Davenport, once he gets selected for this job, he goes to England and he meets with Galton and Pearson in 1902, and he reports returning home, quote, "full of renewed courage for the fight for qualitative study of evolution." He received a Carnegie grant in 1904 and in 1910, a huge donation allowed him to establish the Eugenics Record Office, patterned after the British version that had been founded by Galton. There's Eugenics Record Office in the UK that Galton founds and heads for a while. Davenport wrote back to Francis Galton during this period of time. We have established very cordial relations with institutions for imbecils, epileptics, insane, and criminals. So he's starting to do the same stuff, Galton. He's making connections with these insane asylums and prisons and starting to like document people as a way to like further this Eugenic research. The Eugenics Records Office becomes the most influential organization of the American Eugenics Movement for decades, until like the end of the 1930s. And the work of Davenport has followers. And like the first time it really bore fruit is when Indiana passed the US's first compulsory sterilization law in 1907. So Indiana is the first state to have a law that allows the government to forcibly sterilize people who are unfit. The preamble to this law claimed, "Heredity plays a most important role of the transmission of crime." A decade later, 15 states had similar laws allowing compulsory sterilization. Now, that's, yeah, very quickly. - You let them not spoil it for us, huh? - No, no. The Nazis copy us to an extent. - They're like, "Oh yeah, yeah, that's so much." - Right, some of the Nazis' racial laws are based on the US laws, which are directly based, like the US laws were partly written and heavily lobbied for by Charles Davenport, who was a direct disciple of Francis Galton, right? And the Nazis copy a lot of those eugenic laws to make their own eugenic laws. You know, Galton has a very direct influence on the Third Reich and the Holocaust. The Holocaust could not have happened in the way that it happened without Galton. I'm not saying the Nazis, 'cause they're anti-Semitism, it's much older, but not so much of the Holocaust was not just the death camps. It was, you know, the T4 Euthanasia program have disabled people, it was sterilization programs and stuff like that, all of that stuff at least, like would not have happened the same way without eugenics. And Galton created eugenics, right? Actual sterilizations were uncommon in the US until after 1924, when Virginia passed the first eugenics law that was actually like well-written enough to pass legal muster. Most of these early laws, they kind of used them sparingly and only on people who don't like have anybody or any resources. 'Cause they know that if it's challenged and it goes to the Supreme Court, the laws are not very well written for that. This Virginia law is the first one that, I'm not a law guy, but this is the first one that they feel could like pass constitutional muster. And it does. There's a Supreme Court case in 1927 over this Virginia eugenics law because they're sterilizing someone who doesn't want to be sterilized. - Right, this feels like, it really feels like this role. - A girl like sterilizing people in this country, trying to pretend like we're the land of the free, means that like something like this feels like it could be easily countered by someone going, "No, you can't." - Like you know. - That's what should have happened. - Fuck you, no, but if they could have held the law, then they would have anyone stand up for them. - Yep. - Then, you know. - Well, in this case, you know, like there is a challenge, but the Supreme Court overwhelmingly decides that eugenics is perfectly constitutional. Oliver Widdell Holmes wrote the majority opinion, and I'm gonna read a selection from that majority opinion here. We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices in order to prevent our being swapped with incompetence. It is better for the world if instead of waiting to execute a degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their immacility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbecils are enough. You know what else is a crazy argument? Anyone who argues you shouldn't buy these products advertised on our podcast, they're crazy. - Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? - Here's what you missed. - And the argument is, do you want to win? 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And I was like, well, they're gonna figure out this is not me, they're gonna do their police job. - Listen to examined the backfire effect on the iHotRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. - 30 years ago, an island off Manhattan almost brought down New York City. - Who will you trust? - This is a story about neighbors turning on each other. And what happens when I've forgotten place decides it's had enough. - We reached for a feeling that exists in this city, but we're not stopping, are we? - I'm Ben, that of Half Freight. And for my new series on revisionist history, I took a deep dive in the Staten Island's attempt to secede from New York City in the 1990s. Listen to revisionist history, the Staten Island problem on the iHotRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - And we're back. So, by 1927, you know, when this hits the Supreme Court, about 3,000 Americans had been sterilized, under various eugenic laws. After this, this 1927 case, Buck V. Bell, rules in favor of eugenics, people like the speed at which people are being sterilized increases massively. And this mostly occurs over a period of a couple of decades. But in the years to come, more than 60,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized in multiple US states. You want to guess what the last of these procedures was carried out? The last forcible sterilization, as a result of eugenics law in the US. Because it's America, I'm going to say 2024. Not that bad. It was 1981. And one guess asked to the city. Just like racism. Think, right? It's Portland, Oregon. Microplastics. We're still all getting sterilized. Yeah. We sure are. We sure are. It just shows up all over Portland, the history of eugenics. Very fun stuff. I've never been there. All I know is what they say. It says hippie stuff and then like Nazi stuff. And hippies, anarchist, Nazis, eugenics, free preschool. I don't know. Yeah. We're a real grab bag of stuff here at Portland. Great trees. So before we finish, I should say something about the Nazis, right? Because obviously, that's the greatest death toll that you can associate with. The sentence was just incredible. I would say of all of the people who did not live to see the rise of fascism and the Third Reich and who were not German, he might be the one most responsible for Nazism, right? Maybe. There's some other guys in that. But he sees a lot of a meaningful percentage of the Holocaust is due to his ideas or heavily influenced by his ideas, right? A meaningful chunk of it. So the German eugenics movement was like all other eugenics movements, inspired by Francis Galton. The concept first came to Germany in the form of a guy named Alfred Ploetz, who early in life was a, he like is a German guy, Alfred Ploetz, who like moves to the US as a utopian socialist. He moves to the US because there's all these communes that have started up in like the late 1800s, early 1900s, where people are doing free love and like practicing like communism, like actual literal communism in a commune. And so he moves to one of these communes in Iowa and he spends six months there and he concludes like most people who live in communes that communes are a bad idea, right? Specifically because people, he doesn't actually, doesn't include communes are a bad idea. He concludes that people suck too much for communes to work, right? You know, very common conclusion. As a commune guy myself, happens every time pretty much. Unlike most people who have this realization that decide like, I don't know, maybe we all need private bathrooms and kitchens, you know, maybe we can't, maybe we need to dial back the communal level a little bit, right? Instead of doing that, he decides that eugenics is the answer that that will make commute living, like realistic quote, he concluded that the plans we wish to execute would be destroyed as a result of the low quality of human beings. For this reason, I must direct my efforts not merely toward preserving the race but also toward improving it. My view is immediately led me to the field of medicine, which appeared to be relevant to the biological transformation of human beings. So he gets into eugenics so that because people are too mean in his commune and yeah, most of them in a shitty commune. That's a command of it going like we need eugenics. So he concludes that because people are too selfish and like dicks in the commune, he visited that like, yeah, we need eugenics to get rid of inferior human beings. He coins the term rassen hygiene or race hygiene. And this is, he creates this as a synonym for eugenics, right? And race hygiene is the term the Nazis are going to use as well. He argues that like Francis, that protecting the weak and the poor would degenerate the German race unless they also use selective breeding. Now one thing that floats does get correct. One thing where like he diverges from Goulton is he realizes Goulton is an elitist, right? And he doesn't believe that like only rich people deserve to breed. He thinks that only like Aryan people deserve to breed, right? So he does advise more egalitarian methods to allow the best to breed. So he's not based on like who your dad was in that like he is based on who your dad was, but not because your dad had a good job. It's because of your dad's race and your mom's race, right? As opposed to he doesn't care so much about like, well, what is your family line done, right? All he cares about is your blood. And that is a real difference between kind of the Nazi eugenics attitudes and what Goulton had proposed. When you say you got it correct, you mean like he really honed in where he's like, if we're going to be fucking racist. Please, he was correct that Goulton was an elitist, right? Obviously, the eugenics stuff is very wrong. But he was like, well, Goulton just thinks that rich people deserve to breed. And that's silly. I think that only Aryan should be able to breed, right? Yeah. Alfred founded the first German eugenics journal in 1904 and the racial hygiene society in 1905. Michael Bullwear describes the racial hygiene society as quote, the world's first professional eugenics organization. And he restricted its membership to the most eugenically fit people from the middle class, right? So he's restricting it to the most eugenically fit, but not basing it on like wealth or anything like that. And as soon as he found the society, he makes Francis Goulton the honorary vice president of the very, the world's first professional eugenics organization. For years, there was a conflict in the German eugenics movement between what we might call race and class based eugenicists. You've got these left wing eugenicists who are kind of more like the British guy we talked about earlier. And obviously the less racist side loses. And while the German eugenics movement fails at pushing through any laws to allow them to sterilize people during the Myanmar years, they become suddenly much more influential after 1933. And you all broadly know the rest, right? Yeah. The T4 Euthanasia program, the all of these different fucking restrictions on like who can marry and like what constitutes a Jew and obviously the eventual Holocaust. All that's downstream from old Francis Goulton. But now you understand where he came from and what his life was like. So how do you feel? Dave at the end of this. I know who like there's worse things to be bugged about, but the monkeys man. The monkeys that he killed. It's just that it's it's how poetic it is that he also just sounds like a real asshole. Yeah. Like he sounds like one of those guys that like you wouldn't let him borrow your car these days. You know, like he doesn't know. He just seems like a rich dirt bag who used like his weird little rich dirt bag passed to to conclude like so much bad science. Oh yeah. And he got lucky and fell into some good science along the way, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Look, it's more than his particular fascinations occasionally led him to discover useful things generally while doing something non-useful, right? Like his figure printing is he makes a lot of massive gains to the science of figure printing while he's trying to prove there are like racial differences. He comes up with a lot of the rules for what we now understand are like good scientific studies and like statistical analysis to try to prove stuff that his own data shows is untrue and he just kind of has to lie about to himself and everyone else. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't like the guy. I don't like him. Yeah. It's weird. Like every episode I've been a guest on. I never liked the guy at the end. I was a big ole thumbs down. Maybe one of these days. I'll like him, but. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'll introduce you to that guy as maybe a bastard. Is that why you would like? Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to like that guy. Well, I don't like you're got behind him. Wow. It's like that scene of the movie when they say the title of the movie. Yeah. Usually this work well. This probably didn't either. Anyway, Dave. Bloggables. Bloggables. Uh, gamefully unemployed. That's my podcast and work with Tom Rhyman where we talk about movies and TV and that is it. Those are the two things we talk about. Uh, I think sometimes comics. I don't know. Man, I don't. You have to go listen to find out. Yeah. But it's, uh, yeah. You want, you want some, uh, some light, some light podcasting? Uh, we, we got it, baby. We got it. And we're good. It's good. You know, it's a good. It's a good network. It's not just a good network. It's like the most. No, I'm not going to make a racial purity joke. That's a problem. Thank you, bad taste. Anyway, Dave. They've played good. Good. Good stuff. Good stuff. Listen, good. Dave. Good. Yeah. Dave. Good. You like bad. Yeah. Good night and good luck. Bye. Behind the bastards is a production of cool zone media from more from cool zone media. Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Behind the bastards is now available on YouTube new episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel youtube.com/at behind the bastards. You missed there should not be a single law enforcement agency that's not have body cameras. It's real black farmers have been under. attack. This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything. It's raw. They are playing y'all for foals. 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