reinventing the jukes and the kallikaks
TRANSCRIPT
Reinventing the Jukes and the Kallikaks:
Heredity, Environment, and the Social
Parasitism of James Wyatt Marrs
Dr. Ry Marcattilio-McCracken
The cognoscenti of American eugenics were, undoubtedly, the nation’s
intellectuals, research scientists, and professors. They came from medicine,
biology, zoology, genetics, economics, and psychology. And they came from
sociology—one of the disciplines which most wholeheartedly embraced the
eugenics movement during the first half of the twentieth century.
Historians of eugenics must look more closely at individual voices and in fields
removed from medicine and the hard sciences, and especially after 1945, in
order to fully understand how the movement transformed itself in preparation for
the second half of the twentieth century lest we elide the wealth and texture of
individual voices and miss critical threads of discussion that persist today.
THESIS
1928 Eugenic Sterilization Form, Kansas
A narrative of human history sprung from the ether, driven by a biological
engine (one that was Darwinian) rather than one that was sociopolitical,
economic, cultural, or technological (Lockean, Marxist, Goethe-esque,
Veblenian, etc.).
There always has been and always will be in every country a number of
individuals who cannot be saved but who must go down in the struggle
for existence. To attempt to save these would bring distruction [sic] to a
larger number than those in peril. In endeavoring to rescue some from
poverty, we may so cripple the industries of the country as to increase
the number in the breadline. We take the wherewithal away from
intelligent, struggling families for the purpose of giving extravagantly
beautiful homes to mentally deformed and deficient children, at public
expense we nurse and support the aged and the destitute, who have
spent their lives and their substance in debauchery of themselves and
their fellows . . . The law by which we have progressed from a mere brute
existence to our present high state, is the law which decrees that the
least fit should be eliminated and that the race shall propagate only
from the most fit.
James Marrs
“Society’s interests are naturally best served
when the socially and biologically most fit
mate with their like and the definitely unfit
fail to mate at all.”
For possibly a million years or more, man has had to contend with
enemies of every conceivable sort, but as his knowledge and defensive
capabilities have developed through the ages, he has gradually freed
himself from most of these dangers and handicaps. This struggle has now
become so successful that, with the exception of destructive pests and
disease-producing bacteria, which are rapidly being brought under control,
the only remaining serious danger is from certain elements of the human
population itself. It is more and more evident that in the modern world
man’s most formidable enemy is man.
James Marrs,
Professor of Sociology, 1958
The social heritage is as real and, in its effects upon the individual, as important as the
biological heritage. Both come primarily from the parents . . . Social parasitism, as a
pattern of life, tends to be transmitted, if not as an outgrowth of inherent inadequacy,
then certainly as a part of the social heritage of the affected individuals. If reproductive
selection favors the increase of the burdensome at the expense of the productive, this
multiplication of continually useless types is therefore as real and often as certain as
though the inheritance were of an altogether biological nature . . . The conclusion can
hardly be avoided that if this malignant tendency of the parasitic to replace the
productive should continue indefinitely, the results would be disastrous. It would lead not
only to certain social disintegration, but progressively towards an increasing racial
degeneration as well. James Marrs,
Professor of Sociology, 1958
Reinventing the Jukes and the Kallikaks:
Heredity, Environment, and the Social
Parasitism of James Wyatt Marrs
Dr. Ry Marcattilio-McCracken