We’ve been talking the last two days about the American master race.
Fastidious, these people.
Above the fray.
Distant from the people they hate.

Oops! A fly in this bland-blond ointment.
Mixed in with their superior genes is a hatred and abhorrence of the impure bred.
Snuck in somehow.

How to describe these innate feelings?

Prejudice? Such a jaundiced word.
Meaningless in this context.
Bland and blond, actually.
Conveys nothing of the seething loathing America’s second-immigrant wave
(considering the American first-wave to be who the old cowboy movies called ‘redskins’) bears towards so many of us.

Nazism says it so much better. More better. More betterer. Most best.

The Aryan Race.
Who are they?

The Oliver  Wendell Holmes.
The Harry Laughlins.

They who relegate God’s decisions to themselves.

Ever notice, like vampires, the pure-breds are born with an aversion to garlic?
To garlic, and to those who like garlic?

A law allowing for the sterilization of repeat criminals was overturned in 1942, in Skinner v. Oklahoma, but sterilizations of mental patients continued into the 1970s.
Virginia repealed its sterilization law in 1974.

Altogether more than 60,000 Americans were sterilized.

Laughlin, Harry, that is, also supported the passage of Virginia's Racial Integrity Act, which outlawed miscegenation.
In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that law in Loving v. Virginia.

Oliver Wendell not on that Court.
He might have added a plausible dissenting voice.

Although the opinion in Buck v. Bell remains controversial, the decision in this case still stands as law of the land. 

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Tagging Today
Wednesday, October 24, 2018
My 197th consecutive posting.
Time is 12.01am.
Boston’s temperature will reach a high of 50* and it will be cloudy and breezy.

Dinner is a potpourri of leftovers: Chicken Soup and Chicken with mushrooms. Yummy.

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Quiz Question of the Day:
Who was Harry Laughlin?

Hint:

Left:
Panorama of Imperia 
Photo by Wikipedia
CC BY-SA 3.0 

Second from left:
View of Porto Maurizio and westernmost Oneglia from the sea. 
Photo was taken by Böhringer Friedrich. 

Second from right:
The Autostrada dei Fiori (A10) crosses the valley above Oneglia.
Photo by Wikipedia
Jk4u59 - Own work

Right:
The harbour of Menton, with the basilica of Saint-Michel-Archange beyond, viewed from the Quai Napoléon III
Menton in Easten France, neighbors Imperia, in Northwestern Italy

Photo by Wikipedia
Le poulpe ambidextre - Own work

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Short Takes
Life in the city:

Here is a gallery of photos of an art installation on the Greenway in Boston.

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Answer to Quiz Question: Who was Harry Laughlin?
Harry Hamilton Laughlin was born March 11, 1880 in Oskaloosa, Iowa.
He graduated from the First District Normal School (now Truman State University) in Kirksville, Missouri. In 1917, he earned a Doctor of Science from Princeton University in the field of cytology.

He worked as a high school teacher and principal before his interest turned to eugenics.
This led to his correspondence with Charles Davenport, an early researcher into Mendelian inheritance in the United States.
In 1910, Davenport asked Laughlin to move to Long Island, New York, to serve as the superintendent of his new research office.

There, Harry H. Laughlin, director of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, developed a keen interest to aid in the proliferation of compulsory sterilization legislation in the United States, which would presumably sterilize the "unfit" members of the population.
By 1914, twelve states had already passed sterilization laws, beginning with Indiana in 1907 and Connecticut in 1909.
However, in his estimation, the laws were not employed with significant vigor, with the exception of California.

In his study of this "problem," Laughlin deduced that much of the state sterilization legislation was poorly worded and left it open to questions of constitutionality and confusion over bureaucratic responsibility.
As a result, Laughlin drafted the Model Eugenical Sterilization Law, a model act for compulsory sterilization, intended to satisfy these difficulties.
He published the proposal in his 1922 study of American sterilization policy, Eugenical Sterilization in the United States.
It included as subjects for eugenic sterilization: the feeble-minded, the insane, criminals, epileptics, alcoholics, blind persons, deaf persons, deformed persons, and indigent persons.
An additional eighteen states passed laws based on Laughlin's model, including Virginia in 1924.

Laughlin provided extensive statistical testimony to the United States Congress in support of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, (the law applied national-origin quotas on immigrants, which stopped the large Italian and Russian influx of the early 1900s).
Part of his testimony dealt with "excessive" insanity among immigrants from southern Europe and eastern Europe.
He was eventually appointed as an expert eugenics agent to the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization.
At least one contemporary scientist, bacterial geneticist Herbert Spencer Jennings, condemned Laughlin's statistics as invalid because they compared recent immigrants to more settled immigrants.

In 1927, the Eugenics Research Association, of which Laughlin was an officer, began a study of the heritage of U.S. Senators. Some senators were enthusiastic, others reluctantly complied, while Senator William Cabell Bruce questioned whether eugenics was even a science and refused to participate. Laughlin wrote to Bruce's hometown newspaper in an attempt to get the information.

The Nazi government of Germany, Adolf Hitler at the helm, applauded Laughlin’s work and Laughlin was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Heidelberg in 1936 for his work behalf of the "science of racial cleansing." (Five other Americans received honorary degrees the same year).

However, reports about the extensive use of compulsory sterilization in Germany began to appear in US newspapers.
By the end of the decade, eugenics had become associated with Nazism and poor science.
Support for groups like the American Eugenics Society began to fade. In 1935, a review panel convened by the Carnegie Institute concluded that the ERO's research did not have scientific merit.
By 1939, the Institute withdrew funding for the ERO, and the office was forced to close.

Laughlin was a founding member of the Pioneer Fund, and was its first president, serving from 1937 to 1941.
The Pioneer Fund was created by Wickliffe Draper in order to promote the betterment of the race through eugenics.
Draper had been supporting the Eugenics Research Association and its Eugenical News since 1932.
One of the first projects that Laughlin pursued for the Fund was the distribution of two films from Germany depicting the success of eugenic programs in that country.
A biographer has described Laughlin as "among the most racist and anti-Semitic of early twentieth-century eugenicists."

As well as his interest in eugenics, Laughlin was fascinated by the idea of establishing a world government.
He worked on his plans for this institution throughout his adult life.
The world government model that he devised was loosely based on the U.S. Constitution and the League of Nations.
The allotment of representation in the body was heavily biased in favor of Europe and North America, particularly Great Britain and the United States.
Laughlin believed that his world government model would promote the eugenicist aim of preventing the intermixing of different races.
Many leading internationalists expressed interest in Laughlin's world government plan, including Edward M. House, Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy adviser.

He was married to Pansy Laughlin in 1902, and they did not have children.
After his retirement from the Eugenics Record Office they returned to Kirksville, Missouri in December 1939.
Laughlin died January 26, 1943, and was buried near his father and mother in Highland Park Cemetery in Kirksville.

He died a bum.
Not poor and downtrodden.
Just a bum.

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And so, Good Morning.

We’ve talked about Harry Laughlin, a traitor to mankind, the master race in America, life in the city by way of a gallery of illuminated signs, and a nice trip to Imperia, Italy and Menton, France, with an accompanying gallery.

Have a good day, my friends.
See you soon.

Love

Dom