Part Four: Francis Galton: Inventor of Eugenics

We conclude the story of Francis Galton and explore all the hideous ways his ideas helped inspire eugenic laws around the world, and ultimately the Holocaust. Sources: https://www.historyofdatascience.com/francis-galton-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-of-19th-century-science/ https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/special-collections/kantsaywhere https://unseenhistories.substack.com/p/the-disturbing-visions-of-francis-galton-gavin-evans https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/server/api/core/bitstreams/dfd786fa-2090-4749-bcbe-3cc7159e55b5/content https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/anti-racism/lies-damned-lies-and-racist-statistics/ https://www.scienceaq.com/Article/other/22011.html https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-anthropometric-detective-and-his-racial-clues/ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42042093-superior https://books.google.com/books/about/Francis_Galton.html?id=vL0hq80XXqMC https://galton.org/books/memories/index.html https://victorianweb.org/victorian/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////science/health/insanity1.html https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691825003853 https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PTCw5CJT7cE6Kx9ZR/most-people-endorse-some-form-of-eugenics https://www.balkanweb.com/en/They-are-brother-and-sister-but-have-4-children-together.-German-couple-in-trouble-with-authorities--fighting-to-legalize-incest./#gsc.tab=0 https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/blue-plaques/blue-plaque-stories/eugenics/ https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/78669/pg78669-images.html https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/a-dangerous-calculation/ https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/301897 See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Robert Evans?

  Welcome back once again to Behind the Bastards, 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.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  I tell everybody that all the time.

• 0:22Robert Evans?

  A lot, suspiciously often, actually. Yeah. Shout it out of cars a lot.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I wanted to, sorry, we've covered my shirt with my cats. I would, I do want to describe my pants. Sure. I'm wearing pajama pants with fish on them. And it says, asleep at the reel. It's a fishing joke.

• 0:42Robert Evans?

  Oh, nice. Yeah. Yeah. Asleep at the reel. That's good. That's a good. Yeah.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  I wanted, I wanted people to know about that. And that I'm not racist. Thank you.

• 0:51Robert Evans?

  That, that, and you, you know, a fishing joke. Well, you know, who didn't 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, to figure out. He has 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

• 1:32Robert Evans?

  populations, twin studies, Galton had a lot to do with all of that. You should also note 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 weathermen. In April of 1875, he published what is probably the first weather map ever published in the Times of London. It did show the previous day's weather. I'm not really sure what the purpose was. Like, I don't know.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Hey, you guys are somewhere, man. He's, he's sure not going like, now imagine that for like tomorrow.

• 2:04Robert Evans?

  But tomorrow. Yeah.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I get it.

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• 2:12Robert Evans?

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• 6:15Robert Evans?

  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 again.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  Meetings.

• 6:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, meetings. You gotta have your racism meetings, right?

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Sounds fun. Yeah.

• 6:29Robert Evans?

  The problem with our modern racists is that they don't have enough bureaucracy around the bigotry, you know? Galton and his boys were taking minutes, you know, from multiple different groups as they wrote about why the poor should be sterilized. They're not quite doing that yet, but he, he wants them to be doing that. He's pushing them to do that, right? Um, 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 forensics 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,

• 7:12Robert Evans?

  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 that 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? Like, 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, the science of investigations, right?

• 7:55Robert Evans?

  Like, he, even though Doyle, again, is just kind of like writing books, right? He, he took him seriously as like a scientific thinker on the subject.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  Sherlock Holmes was like the first joker. And what I mean is that, like, the character in a vacuum is fine. It just creates 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?

• 8:23Robert Evans?

  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, uh, uh, 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.

• 8:37Speaker 06

  Oh, man. I couldn't agree more.

• 8:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Galton wants to be the Gregory House of racism. And in a way, he is, right? Um, but he's also getting into forensics at this point. Uh, so in 1888, he had a forensic laboratory that would have made Sherlock Holmes himself drool. And I found a description of this laboratory, uh, in an article by Ava Kofman in the Public Domain Review, quote, "In 1888, a reporter from the Pall Mall 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

• 9:26Robert Evans?

  the reporter, 'what splendid detectives our instruments might prove.' Splendid detectives, the reporter exclaimed. I am not, I hope, in a department of the Criminal Investigation Department, unconsciously yielding convincing proofs of personal identity with some scoundrel hitherto unhung." And, you know, it's, it's obviously an early example of like media hype of like, wow, look at all these, these instruments. This must be like a real, you know, detectives' agency. You, you, you sure could catch, you know, 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, he's barking up the wrong tree.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  Junior detective shit. This is like, yeah.

• 10:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah. He's like inventing his own detecting tools and stuff. They're like, by measuring hearing and, you know, I don't know. It's, it's, there's some value in it. 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, on people for like health. And there's all sorts of purposes where you want this kind of data. But he is really interested on using it to like predict and solve crime.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  It's sort of, we said at the very start of this, we talked about, it's, some of this stuff is neat. Like, the cap is like neat for some of this stuff. Yeah. 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 of, of stuff that's at best neat.

• 10:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah, right. And one of the neat things that he has in this anthropometric lab is fingerprinting equipment. He started to get really interested in that by the 1880s. And we actually do have an advertisement for Galton's anthropometric lab because he, 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.

• 11:24Speaker 03

  Take a look, Dave. And Netflix viewers.

• 11:28Robert Evans?

  You can see it on here, but it notes in one portion of the, the advertisement, "For 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,

• 11:47Speaker 01

  That's amazing.

• 11:47Robert Evans?

  Like, the first, like, promise that, like, we'll protect your biometric data in history?

• 11:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:52Robert Evans?

  I don't know who else could have been earlier, right?

• 11:54Speaker 01

  They didn't even know why they were protecting it.

• 11:57Robert Evans?

  But they knew people were gonna wanna steal it.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, and let me tell you, like, giving it to a eugenicist

• 12:03Robert Evans?

  Not a great call.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  From the start, it's like, well, it's, how bad can it get? Like, it's just, yeah, you don't have to worry about other, the wrong hands, you know?

• 12:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  It's already there.

• 12:13Robert Evans?

  They're all the wrong hands, yeah.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  This is why I enjoyed, like, the forensic files show today, right? Is because of this asshole, like, he helped?

• 12:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's a big part of that, right? Now, the use of fingerprinting to identify, fingerprints 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 Fowles published a groundbreaking study on fingerprints that ignited a vigorous debate among the scientists of the day. Francis Galton has always been interested in trends, right? He's always been either a trendsetter or a trendfollower, 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 individual, like, to identify individual people,

• 13:07Robert Evans?

  but we didn't have much, like, today, we know that fingerprints are probably unique to each person, right?

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:15Robert Evans?

  It's impossible to say 100%, like, that's, that's a theory, right?

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:19Robert Evans?

  You can't guarantee that, but probably.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Fingerprints are the stupidest thing that is correct. You know what I mean? Like, as far as we know.

• 13:27Robert Evans?

  It's really dumb that they work. Yeah, I think it's really silly that they work, yeah.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Everybody has unique fingerprints and then we match them. How do we match them? Like, just everybody gives their fingerprints?

• 13:35Robert Evans?

  Everybody give 'em's up, yeah.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, we just have them on file.

• 13:41Robert Evans?

  I don't like all of the implications of this, but it's frustrating that it actually does work that way, right?

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Right, it sounds like all the other shit he's been talking about, you know?

• 13:49Robert Evans?

  And, and Galton is the first guy to show that fingerprints work that way, because 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 Galton gathers 8,000 fingerprint samples, and for the first time, as it was said, 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? Like, but, and, 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, these are unique individual, like, identifying characteristics."

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Right, like, the moment someone finds a pair that's identical, it all kind of falls apart.

• 14:31Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, that'll fuck some shit up if that ever does happen, yeah.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Right, it's like Minority Report, pre-crime is like, the moment you find one pre-crime that wasn't true, the whole system, everybody goes free. Like, that would really, that would be.

• 14:45Robert Evans?

  But it hasn't happened yet.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  I'm surprised, like, there isn't, like, a Dan Brown novel Da Vinci Code style, someone learning about fingerprints that match.

• 14:52Robert Evans?

  To be honest, as I've talked about in the, the, we did a series of episodes on how, like, forensic science is largely nonsense, because a lot of stuff like gun, like, bullet matching to guns is, like, nearly complete bullshit. Uh, fucking gait analysis is heavily flawed, and fingerprints are, are real, like, and, and definitely the most real of all the different, like, forensic science things, but also very flawed in, like, the way in which fingerprinting is used by law enforcement, and a lot of, like, so it's, 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, not as law enforcement often wants to portray it, that is true, but Galton's correct here in general, in that it is a good way to identify individual people, and he does more than that.

• 15:36Robert Evans?

  He lays out the, 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 in fingerprints, like, he's the dude who lays all that out for the first time. So this is, like, legitimately groundbreaking, right? Uh, in 1899, and it's 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 cha, from a baby would change over time. Galton had already shown previously, he documented fingerprints from people from as young as 30 months, and, and as they, like, went up, like, grew up in age, up to, like, 80.

• 16:18Robert Evans?

  Um, not the same person, obviously, but he had, like, 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 that, 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, uh, and so he, he's able to show that, like, no, baby's fingerprints, it's like, the same thing. There, 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, Bullwer, 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.

• 17:01Robert Evans?

  Um, 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, I, there have to be, basically, his, his, 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 their fingerprints.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  More whorls or something, or less whorls, whatever's the bad amount of whorls versus the good amount.

• 17:40Robert Evans?

  Something different that he can declare as, like, a flaw, because if they all have, if all, everyone's fingerprints are completely identical, then maybe, like, we're all just human beings.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:49Robert Evans?

  Like, maybe, like, all of, my whole life is a lie. We can't have that, right? So, Galton starts looking into, like, ways in which he can both predict criminal behavior by, like, are there criminal fingerprints? Are there signs of fingerprints that someone's gonna 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, this sort of thing should be possible. He's specifically not the only guy who thinks that, like, the characteristics of someone, like, of someone's personality, and, like, 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

• 18:32Robert Evans?

  started looking for, quote, 'clues unnoticed by others.'" That's a common, like, way to describe it, right? There, they're starting to, once we realize fingerprints are a thing, that, like, forever, people have been leaving fingerprints behind, not just on the suit, 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 upset, "Well, there's gotta 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, is what's called, this is called the semiotic model, right? In human sciences. And this fascination with the semiotic model is noted by historian Carlo Ginsberg as having risen to prominence alongside, quote, "An increasingly clear tendency for state power

• 19:17Robert Evans?

  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, "Well, we've been missing fingerprints for every 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, these, like, like, how can we categorize and, like, judge them based on these things they cannot control, right?

• 19:50Speaker 01

  It's really funny.

• 19:51Robert Evans?

  Things that are immutable parts of their character, right?

• 19:52Speaker 01

  Right, it's really funny to go, like, "We have determined that every human is different and unique in this one specific way. I wonder if there's ways we can put them into categories in another way."

• 20:03Robert Evans?

  No, to categorize them.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  And it's like, 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 wanna be able to predict what a person will be."

• 20:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  And it's like, it's so clear that that's just not how people work.

• 20:18Robert Evans?

  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, uh, 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,

• 21:02Robert Evans?

  "Despite his admission that hard fact had made hope no longer justifiable, a closer look at Galton's writings reveals that racial typologies were never far from his thoughts. The conflicted 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 its scientific, when his scientific data undermined it," right? So, he is. Still, even though he has not found evidence for this, he keeps, he finds a bunch of ways to point out like, well, but there's might be this difference or there's this, like, one thing he notes is that when he's analyzing fingerprints of Indian people, because the ink and the paper is of lower quality in India, because the British don't like send

• 21:46Robert Evans?

  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, the, and he describes it as like, because 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.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Like a microcosm for everything.

• 22:06Robert Evans?

  They're not as evolved, basically.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, it'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.

• 22:19Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  And concluding something like, that must be, like, in the nature of that person.

• 22:25Robert Evans?

  Exactly. It really is, it really is beautiful. Yeah. Throughout Fingerprints, Galton 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

• 23:09Robert Evans?

  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 courses 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 like, 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 or measure.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  He's like, maybe it's me, but I don't know, I just don't like them. I just don't like them as much.

• 23:40Robert Evans?

  And he, he did that with his study of, like, Jewish people in 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, a- a- 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, his undeniable achievements in 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 sciencing. That's really bad being a scientist.

• 24:23Robert Evans?

  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, specifically, part of what he wants to do here, is identify people who have non-white ancestry but look white and live in a European society, because he wants those people to stop, to not be able to breed with

• 24:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:47Robert Evans?

  Full, full white people.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Sneaky ones.

• 24:49Robert Evans?

  Right? So, he's looking for, if there's something different in the fingerprints, that would have been really helpful, but there's not, so maybe the hand shape will do it, right?

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:57Robert Evans?

  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?

• 25:09Speaker 01

  Who?

• 25:10Robert Evans?

  The sponsors of our podcast, I assume. It'd be weird if they had.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. I'm Melissa Jelton, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide.

• 25:57Speaker 06

  She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety.

• 26:04Speaker 03

  Stories of survival. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, because by all rights, I should be dead. Cases that everyone else called closed.

• 26:16Speaker 06

  They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence.

• 26:20Speaker 03

  These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies.

• 26:32Speaker 06

  She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year.

• 26:38Speaker 03

  You never know who that devil is, because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. Listen to What Happened to Her on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 26:51Speaker 05

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• 27:35Speaker 05

  12 seats, those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground, going hard in the south now. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 27:51Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So, in 1903, Arthur Conan Doyle published The Adventure of the Norwood Builder, which is a Holmes mystery that hinged around, like, like, the big point, like, the, the big, like, twist in this, is that, like, they, 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? Um, which is like, a really, at 1903, that was like, the year before or after Scott Lindy Art had started, uh, like, actually widely using fingerprint, so like, law enforcement

• 28:33Robert Evans?

  had, 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?

• 28:40Speaker 01

  This is sci-fi, basically.

• 28:42Robert Evans?

  This is sci-fi, almost, yeah.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  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

• 28:58Robert Evans?

  No. Well, 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, you can see people's fingerprints. 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 them, but...

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, in fairness, I don't think about them much either. You just look at them and go, like, hey, neat, all mine look like little anuses. That's cool.

• 29:30Robert Evans?

  Weird. I wonder why we got these?

• 29:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Uh, 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? Because it's not based on reality, it's a novel, and Conan Doyle, like, every author's like, eh, it seems realistic enough, people will buy that, right? Uh, and stuck it 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, you're a liar, right? All fiction authors are, and it's okay. So after, but, but Galton doesn't think about it that way. Remember, he, like, idolizes Sherlock Holmes, and kind of feels like he's, like, the real

• 30:18Robert Evans?

  Sherlock Holmes. I, 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 wasn't doing experiments, he just wrote a book.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  Like, this is like, the first nerd writing to...

• 30:50Robert Evans?

  Exactly. How does the warp drive really work? I don't know, man, it's, it's, it's a TV show, right? Um, 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 had, who were, like, either born or raised as slaves, have written bestselling 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.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  I guess it speaks to like, you know, there's writers today, there's people like, you know, you sit down with a Michael Crichton book and you're like, this feels like it's real.

• 31:38Robert Evans?

  Some of this has to be real.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it feels like I could clone dinosaurs if I just follow the instructions in this book. Like, there are writers who are very good at making dumb ideas sound plausible and smart.

• 31:50Robert Evans?

  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 author 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

• 32:35Robert Evans?

  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 arguing, 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?

• 32:49Speaker 01

  They finally got to it.

• 32:51Robert Evans?

  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 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-

• 33:31Speaker 01

  I came to realize, like, you forced my hand. I have, I have to conclude this horrible thing I always believed.

• 33:38Robert Evans?

  Exactly. I suspect H.G. Wells kind of going like, no, we actually have to sterilize and otherwise stop the poor from breeding. I think Galton was like, oh, finally. Okay, good. They've caught on to 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 limb alone 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

• 34:21Robert Evans?

  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, uh, 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 Sterilize 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-mindedness, habitual criminality, and pauperism. How to restrain ill-omened 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."

• 35:05Robert Evans?

  Obviously, we've 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 has only proven, had only proven the claims he made an hereditary genius 45 years earlier even more correct. He reprinted a segment of that book, a lot of his autobiography, is him like quoting segments of his earlier books and being like, yeah, see how right I was? I'm pretty smart, huh? So he, 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

• 35:45Robert Evans?

  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 undesirable should be stopped from breeding. The passables, I guess we let breed, but we shouldn't be happy about it, right? You don't want to encourage it.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Right, we gotta frown while we watch them breed.

• 36:15Robert Evans?

  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 of acid period too, because he starts writing a little bit more philosophically here.

• 36:29Speaker 03

  How old is this guy now?

• 36:30Robert Evans?

  He's ancient.

• 36:32Speaker 03

  He's aged-

• 36:33Robert Evans?

  1908, yeah.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  He's becoming an edgelord.

• 36:37Robert Evans?

  "Individuals appear to me as partial detachments from the infinite ocean of being, and this world is a stage on which evolution takes place, principally hitherto by means of natural selection, which achieves the good of the whole with scant regard to 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 national, 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

• 37:21Robert Evans?

  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, that's his kind of like conclusion about like why eugenics is good and necessary. We're all a part of this infinite ocean of being, but also pity's 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. There's no way to take care of them, right? Alfred Wallace continued to oppose Galton his entire life. At 18, that's the guy who co-invented the theory of evolution or co-discovered or whatever, the theory of natural selection.

• 38:02Robert Evans?

  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, it's important that you know, as, this is not a, everyone felt this way. There were no counterbels. This guy is the co-discoverer of natural selection. And he's like, no, we should give kids better schools and like food.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Right, let's not go freaking out here.

• 38:45Robert Evans?

  Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe we start there. Francis Galton died in 1911 of being an old piece of shit. Yeah, finally fucking dead.

• 38:55Speaker 03

  Jesus Christ.

• 38:55Robert Evans?

  My god.

• 38:57Speaker 03

  Sir.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  I was waiting for you to be like, he now lives in Southern California.

• 39:01Robert Evans?

  He's still alive. Yeah, no, he works in the White House right now, yeah.

• 39:03Speaker 03

  He just seemed immortal, unfortunately.

• 39:07Robert Evans?

  His ideological enemy, Alfred Russell Wallace, lived two more years, which is at least a nice little moral victory, that Wallace lasted a couple of 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?

• 39:42Speaker 01

  This guy is so right, because that's the thing, it's like, there are hereditary things. 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, um, but it shouldn't dictate who you breed with.

• 40:03Robert Evans?

  How you treat people, what the laws necessarily- 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 improve it like trying to direct the growth of a race. That's different from just like not like, anyway, let's, we've gotten off topic, but yeah, that is, that is, there's, it's messy, but I just fundamentally don't agree that that's all eugenics, right? Uh, so the 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

• 40:48Robert Evans?

  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. When this was blocked, he backed the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act, which established that those defined as idiots or imbeciles 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 conquests because the Aryan stock is bound to triumph. After the First World War, he wrote in favor of using poison gas on uncivilized tribes

• 41:31Robert Evans?

  to "spread a lively terror." Kenyans were brutish children, Palestinians barbaric horns who ate little but camel dung, and Indians a beastly people with a beastly 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."

• 42:04Speaker 03

  I don't like the look of them or the smell of them.

• 42:08Robert Evans?

  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 eugenicists, 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 Ramsay McDonald, who in 1909 complained that "natural selection by death has been set aside, but the state can set sexual selection in operation again by an education in good taste." And he argued that the way to do

• 42:51Robert Evans?

  this, because that's pretty problematic sounding, right? But his argument was that if we, if we, if we push environmental reform and we can eliminate poverty, that will create a quote, "healthy and comely race of people without the need to segregate or punish the unfit," right? He is making, 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 again, he still believes some race stuff that's bad, but like, okay, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  It's like trying to, it's like, hey, kids, Superman eats his vegetables, you know, like, you're just trying to like, make it sound more appealing to the races.

• 43:39Robert Evans?

  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 knew slavery was evil. And it's like, yeah, you know, it's, it's 1860, whatever, whatever gets you there, right?

• 43:50Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 43:51Robert Evans?

  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.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Right. They're like, I still like them, but I don't want them to be slaves. And it's like, okay.

• 44:02Robert Evans?

  Okay, for right now, that's probably, that's probably okay. Um, 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? Uh, the bill becomes law in 1913. Per the website English Heritage, the law, quote, "established the means to segregate mental defectives in asylums, but rejected sterilization." As a result of the backlash and the protests

• 44:43Robert Evans?

  against this bill, they had to take out sterilization. In fact, English eugenicists seemed 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 en masse. I'm sure some happened, but it 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

• 45:25Robert Evans?

  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 person 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 found and heads for a

• 46:10Robert Evans?

  while. Davenport wrote back to Francis Galton during this period of time, "We have established very cordial relations with institutions for imbeciles, epileptics, insane, and criminals." So he's starting to do the same stuff Galton has. 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 and his 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

• 46:53Robert Evans?

  who are unfit. The preamble to this law claimed, "Heredity plays a most important role in the transmission of crime." A decade later, 15 states had similar laws allowing compulsory sterilization. Now, that's, yeah, very quick.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  We didn't let the Nazis spoil it for us, huh?

• 47:11Robert Evans?

  No, no. The Nazis copy us to an extent.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  We're like, oh, yeah. Oh, that's a bummer.

• 47:17Robert Evans?

  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 would not, could not have happened the way that it happened without Galton. I'm not saying Nazis, because they're antisemitism is much older and whatnot.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  They would have found a way, yeah, they would have gotten there.

• 47:51Robert Evans?

  But so much, so much of the Holocaust was not just the death camps. It was, you know, the teeth for euthanasia program of 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? Um, 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 use them sparingly and only on people who don't like have anybody or any resources, because 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

• 48:33Robert Evans?

  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. Uh, 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?

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Right. This feels like, it really feels like

• 48:49Robert Evans?

  A girl, yeah.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  Sterilizing people in this country, trying to pretend like we're the land of the free, means that like, that something like this feels like it could be easily countered by someone going, no, you can't. Like, no.

• 49:03Robert Evans?

  That's what should have happened. Instead, the Supreme Court upheld the law 8 to 1.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  Have anybody stand up for them.

• 49:08Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Then, you know.

• 49:11Robert Evans?

  Well, in this case, you know, they, like, there is a challenge, but the Supreme Court overwhelmingly decides that eugenics is perfectly constitutional. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the majority opinion, and I'm going to 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 swamped with incompetence. It is better for the world if instead of waiting to execute a degenerate offspring for crime or to let them star for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle

• 49:52Robert Evans?

  that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles 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.

• 50:09Speaker 03

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  She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety.

• 50:57Speaker 03

  Stories of survival.

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  The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, because by all rights, I should be dead.

• 51:06Speaker 03

  Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like, She has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies.

• 51:25Speaker 06

  She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it and he got a year.

• 51:31Speaker 04

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 51:37Speaker 03

  Listen to What Happened to Her on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 51:47Speaker 04

  Here's what you missed.

• 51:48Speaker 05

  And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power.

• 51:56Speaker 03

  It's real.

• 51:57Speaker 05

  Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests and they complain about the very thing they're receiving.

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  It's raw.

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  I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men.

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  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

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  I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all gonna scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein.

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  Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network.

• 52:28Speaker 05

  12 seats, those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground, going hard in the south now.

• 52:38Speaker 03

  And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

• 52:42Speaker 04

  or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 52:47Robert Evans?

  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, uh, this 1927 case Buck v. Bell, uh, 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 when the last of these procedures was carried out? The last forcible sterilization as a result of the eugenics law in the US?

• 53:25Speaker 01

  Because it's America, I'm going to say 2024.

• 53:29Robert Evans?

  Not that bad. It was 1981 and one guess as to the city. Just think racism, think race. Ah, it's Portland, Oregon. It's Portland, Oregon.

• 53:38Speaker 03

  Portland.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  I mean, we have the microplastics, we're still all getting sterilized.

• 53:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we sure are. We sure are. It's, it just shows up all over Portland, the, the, the history of eugenics.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, Portland's so weird. I, I've never been there. All I know is that.

• 53:55Robert Evans?

  That's what they say.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  It's associated with like hippie stuff and then like Nazi stuff.

• 54:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, hippies, anarchists, Nazis, eugenics, uh, free preschool. I don't know. Yeah. It's, we're a real grab bag of, of stuff here in Portland. Great trees, though.

• 54:13Speaker 03

  Trees.

• 54:15Robert Evans?

  Before we, we finish, I should say something about the Nazis, right? Because obviously that's the greatest death toll that you can associate with Francis Galton.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Not, not the Nazis.

• 54:26Speaker 03

  The phrasing of that sentence was just incredible, Robert. Before we go though, a little bit more of the Nazis.

• 54:35Robert Evans?

  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's, he's 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, uh, in the form of a guy named Alfred Ploetz, who early in life was a, he, he like, is a German guy, Alfred Ploetz, who like moves to the US as a utopian socialist.

• 55:19Robert Evans?

  And 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 like free love and like living, practicing like communism, like actual like 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 he doesn't conclude 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, uh, 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, maybe we

• 56:02Robert Evans?

  need to dial back the communal level a little bit, right?

• 56:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:06Robert Evans?

  Instead of doing that, he decides that eugenics is the answer, that that will make commune living, uh, like realistic. Quote, "He concluded that the plans we wished 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 views 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.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  Must have been a shitty commune. Come out of it going like, we need eugenics.

• 56:44Robert Evans?

  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 Rassenhygiene 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 Ploetz does get correct, one thing where like he diverges from Galton is he realizes Galton 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?

• 57:26Robert Evans?

  So he, 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, it's 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 eugenic attitudes and what Galton had proposed.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  When you say you got it correct, you mean like, he really honed in where he's like, if we're gonna be fucking racist, let's be racist, folks.

• 58:00Robert Evans?

  He was correct that Galton was an elitist, right? Obviously the eugenic stuff is very wrong, but he correctly was like, well, Galton just thinks that rich people deserve to breed and that's silly. I think that only Aryan should be able to breed, right?

• 58:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:13Robert Evans?

  Alfred founded the first German Eugenics Journal in 1904 and the Racial Hygiene Society in 1905. Michael Bullwer 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, 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 founds the society, he makes Francis Galton 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.

• 58:56Robert Evans?

  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 Weimar years, they become suddenly much more influential after 1933 and you all broadly know the rest, right? The T4 euthanasia program, the, 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 Galton. But now you understand where he came from and, uh, what his life was like. So how do you feel, Dave, at the end of this?

• 59:33Speaker 01

  I know like, there's worse things to be bugged about, but the monkeys, man.

• 59:39Robert Evans?

  The monkeys that he killed?

• 59:41Speaker 01

  It's just that it's, it's how poetic it is that he also just sounds like a real asshole. 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, he just seems like a rich dirtbag who used like his weird little rich dirtbag past to, to conclude like so much bad science.

• 1:00:06Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  And he got lucky and fell into some good science along the way, I guess.

• 1:00:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, luck is, it's more that his, his particular fascinations occasionally led him to discover useful things, generally while doing something non-useful, right? Like his, his fingerprinting is, is, he makes a lot of massive, you know, gains to the science of fingerprinting while he's trying to prove there are like racial differences and fingerprints, you know? He, 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.

• 1:00:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't like the guy. I don't like him.

• 1:00:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  It's weird, like every episode I've been a guest on, I, I never liked the guy at the end. I have a big old thumbs down. Maybe one of these days I'll like him, but.

• 1:01:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, I'll, I'll introduce you to that.

• 1:01:05Speaker 03

  Would you describe the guy as maybe a bastard? Is that, is that why you would like, I don't know, I don't like that guy?

• 1:01:10Robert Evans?

  Well, you sure got behind him.

• 1:01:13Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:01:14Robert Evans?

  Like that scene in the movie when they say the title of the movie.

• 1:01:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:18Robert Evans?

  Usually doesn't work well. This probably didn't either. Anyway, Dave, bluggables?

• 1:01:22Speaker 03

  Bluggables.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  Uh, Gamefully Unemployed, that's my podcast network with Tom Ryman, 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.

• 1:01:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:01:54Robert Evans?

  It's, 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 probably in bad taste. Anyway, Dave, Gamefully Unemployed, good, good stuff, good stuff. Listen.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  Good, Dave, good.

• 1:02:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Dave, good, racism's bad. Yeah. Good night and good luck.

• 1:02:14Speaker 03

  Bye.

• 1:02:19Speaker 03

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedi.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards.

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