1912 in Boston, via the Nicholsons

Well,  a final piece to the puzzle that will be my ebook Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, the follow up to Threshold Girl - about a college girl in 1911/12, the Titanic Era.

Threshold Girl tells the story of Flora Nicholson, of Richmond Quebec and her year at Macdonald Teachers College and Diary of a Confirmed Spinster will tell the story of her older sister, Edith, already a teacher in Montreal, who loses her ‘great love’ in 1910 in an infamous hotel fire in Cornwall. The two stories overlap – and there`s the trick.

As it happens, Edith and Marion Nicholson, both older sisters of Flora, visit cousin Henry Watters in Newton Center Massachusetts in August 1912.

They visit Norumbega Park and go to a ball game on August 14. I found an ad for the same ball game in a now defunct Boston newspaper, placed under an ad for a Burlesque House.

Baseball wasn’t classy in 1910! Indeed, this newspaper,the Evening Transcript doesn’t cover the games. The sports page has news about tennis, sailing and even lawn bowling.

Now this April 14 newspaper is a real find for me. Because within its pages is a long article on a eugenics conference in London England.

Henry`s House, I think so. Today.

At the end of Threshold Girl I have Edith take Flora to a suffragette meeting in Montreal, where Carrie Derick, suffragist and biologist, is presiding. It’s a meeting of the Montreal Council of Women.

Edith points Derick out and tells Flora “She has many strange ideas.”

You see, Derick, a botanist, was a supporter of the eugenics movement.

So, here I can have Edith read the article and then ask her cousin, Dr. Henry Watters, his opinion.

It’s a great article. Ironically, it begins by saying that the most vocal opponents of this new fad, eugenics, are the Germans.  The Americans aren’t too keen either, (although their President was all for it, I believe.) Anyway there is some wonderfully weird stuff in this article, some of it pertinent to today, I mean with respect to how people view  scientific inquiry. (We have NOT come a long way, Baby!)

And better, right beside is an article about Canada: Our Up and Coming Neighbour: How Canada is Becoming a World Power. (Yea, right.)

The same edition has an advertisement for prime real estate in Montreal, on Ste. Catherine. So it is clear, the border is not as defined as it is today. The Nicholsons had many Massachusetts relations.

The reason the US is more skeptical about the eugenics movement, it is claimed, is because Americans marry for love, while Britons still marry for money and status. (The story of the Nicholson women (a true story based on real letters) reveals that money played a  BIG part in all middle class marriages. In fact, money and marriage is a key theme in my Spinster Story, for Edith`s beau is murdered trying to make enough money to marry her.

All so weird. Henry, if he likes baseball, wasn`t for eugenics. (or at least he won`t be for the purposes of my story).

Hmm. I will have to place them in a box seat though. I can`t imagine Edith sitting with the mob.

Funny, back then (and through the century) poor people went to baseball games. Now only the wealthy can afford to go and pay 10.00 for a hot dog, etc.)

It`s been years since I went to a game. To see the Expos, in the late 80`s I think. The roof was up and we were boiling. I had kids then and it cost a fortune, all the drinks. As a teen I went to Jarry Park and spent about 2.00 max!

I think I will have Edith ask Henry how much baseball players earn. He`will say Ì think they work for the  beer.

Now, I MUST get to writing the new outline of Diary of a Confirmed Spinster.  I still want the book to end when Edith faints in front of a painting of a woman breastfeeding mumbling to herself, I will never marry. I will never have children.

And that takes place on May 6, 1910, the day King Edward dies, (I think) so I am going to go back and forth in time.

Maternity, Mary Riter Hamilton. On exhibit in Montreal in 1912, but I`m making it 1910.

Face-Off 1927 Montreal

Thomas G. Wells and Jules Crepeau, the two men who will be facing off in my story Milk and Water. Thomas is my husband’s grandfather, Jules, my grandfather. Thomas is the President of Laurentian Spring Water, a bottled water company and my grandfather is Director of City Services.

The picture of Fuddy Wells, was a Notman, taken in 1931. I assume the picture of my grandfather is taken at a similar time. He’s graying. Perhaps in 1928 on his 40th year at City Hall. So I will have them wearing these suits in my play. The collars are the same.. my grandfather’s tie is thicker and his lapels much wider and longer.(Fuddy is older, but he looks younger, fewer troubles. My grandfather had a load of them in 1927.)

Well, the 4th session of the 16th legislature of the Quebec General Assembly met in Spring 1927 and two debates are relevant to my story.

They debate whether to launch a Royal Commission or Inquiry in the recent Montreal Water and Power purchase. M. Houde, the member for Montreal Sainte Marie calls for it.

And they discuss the importance of Hygiene, I’m guessing in response to the Typhoid Epidemic, for which they don’t as yet know the cause. But not necessarily so.

Of course, the two issues are combined and I will explain this in Milk and Water.

Member Beaudoin of Marie Ste Jacques says “Comme l’a dit l’honorable député de Matane, l’hygiène supprime les épidémies, diminue les maladies contagieuses et par le fait même contribue à faire disparaître la contagion, l’une des causes les plus fréquentes de la mortalité. Mais il est une maladie dont il n’a pas parlé, que l’hygiène n’a pu encore faire disparaître, ni même atténuer et qui semble sévir à l’état endémique du côté de la droite: c’est celle qui consiste à chanter les louanges du gouvernement, afin de faire croire au peuple de cette province que sa santé est excellente et qu’il est heureux.”

As the honorable member from Matane, hygiene suppresses epidemics, diminishes contagious diseases and helps remove the contagion, the most frequent cause of mortality. But there’s an illness of which he doesn’t speak, that good hygiene can’t make go away, or even touch, that where the government sings the praises of the government, saying to the people that their health is excellent and that they are happy.”

I’ve written a great deal about the hygiene movement, from the anglo Presbyterian point of view: where purity and cleanliness means more than a healthy body, it means a healthy mind and spirit -a moral mind and spirit, a Protestant kind of mind that has a sour taint to it, the taint of racial superiority and even eugenics or social engineering. This wasn’t lost on French Canadians and immigrants.

Health-advocates, mostly Anglo, are the ones who tried to bring down the Executive Committee in 1923, forcing the Coderre Inquiry into Police Corruption. Their interest, stamping out the Social Evil or prostitution.

Seems to me, wherever there are  men with money, and women without,  there’s prostitution and it could be construed that up until lately, all women were prostitutes (except for nuns and Old Maids) as all young women were ‘on the market’ prepared to sell themselves and their wombs to the highest bidder.

I’ve read that in London, despite the fact that there’s virtually no taboo against premarital sex, even sex on the first date, that the use of Prostitutes doubled in the first decade of the 21st century.

Lots of high powered men (swinging dicks they are called) with money  and no time for real relationships – and lots of poor (eastern european) women.

In the old days, they thought that by eradicating the haunts of prostitutes and the reasons the haunts existed, (drink, gambling)they could eradicate prostitution.

At least one article in the Delineator Magazine back in 1910 suggested something radical: that to stamp out prostitution, you had to make it taboo for men to have premarital sex,too. As long as there’s this double standard, that young men must have ‘a sexual education’,the  magazine article said, there will be prostitution. Well, duh!

In England, there were plenty of prostitutes, (remember that scene from the French Lieutenant’s Woman with Meryl Streep’s actress character read the statistics?) but well off young men were supposed to get their sexual education on the Continent.

From reading a lot of Zola lately, I think young French men were supposed to get their sexual education from married women.

Alas..Today women are sexually liberated, but there’s still very much a market in female flesh. Indeed, the mass media trades in this commodity.

A woman can’t go around showing her boobs in public, and even breastfeeding in public causes a stir,  but our most respected media companies make a fortune selling pornography to average everyday middle class people. Weird society. Is it a case of “who’ll buy the cow…” I wonder. (Excuse the pun.)

That horrendous expression (spouted by many a 20th century mom and dad) says it all, really.  I wonder who coined it…

My play isn’t about prostitution, but it certainly is key historical factor.  Prostitution is the main reason Montreal Council changed the law  in 1925 or so (my grandfather announced it) forcing dance clubs to close at 12 am and not 1 am….(Sort of symbolic concession.)

So, all very very complicated, what was going on.. And I’m trying to sum it  up in my play.

EXACTLY 100 years ago Today…

Here’s a plate from the August 1911 Delineator Magazine, which I purchased off eBay.

So, exactly 100 years ago, this picture made its appearance… And exactly 100 years ago, Flora Nicholson learned that she was accepted at Macdonald Teachers College.

I have finished the first draft of Threshold Girl, (the new name for Flo in the City, after all she only gets to the city at the end.)

I am going to put in more fashion items from the August Delineator in the later chapters… as August is the month they sew Flo up for school. So it’s all very synchroni..synchrynos..appropriate.

And I’m going to start working on Edith’s story…. Where she gets involved with the Montreal Council of Women, the murky eugenics side, and the social reform people, who Julia Parker Drummond rebukes…I think.. and where she meets a woman who is travelling to New York…Elizabeth Arden, Florence Nightingale Something is her real name. She is exactly the same age as Edith Nicholson.

Elizabeth Arden will tell her about all the stenographer jobs in New York City, etc.

But I don’t have to make things up to make Edith’s story compelling: she taught at a Missionary School, where French Canadians were converted to Protestantism.. and I have read a number of accounts of ‘testimonials’ at the Wednesday prayer meeting which are very freaky in themselves!

And I have to figure out why she is so mad at Villard. I think I will have her upset that the youngest children are being converted…She will feel that they are too young…

I know that Edith knew Carrie Derick at McGill, I have a 1917 letter where she is stepping out with her… So I can have her know her earlier..

I already hinted at it in Threshold Girl.

www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf

Eugenics and IQ

My classroom window. The old Royal Vale Elementary.

I once interviewed a person involved with a School Garden initiative and he informed me that schools were built on the same principals as prisons, for optimum containment and visibility. So the kids aren’t crazy, after all!

The news lately is that there will soon be a definitive test for Alzheimer’s. I am not that keen as my father died of this disease and I know there is an hereditary component.

Besides, I can no longer remember much.

McGill University is responsible for this test which measures the amount of a certain hormone in the blood.

I wonder how this test can be exploited…. cause it will be. And perhaps misused and even abused.

Yesterday, I posted a bit about the IQ test, the Stanford Binet test, as it was invented in 1912, the year Flora Nicholson got her teaching degree.

I have long assumed the test was more about keeping people in their place than about creating a level playing field, just because ‘keeping people in their place’ was the mantra of the era. Not mantra, it was the sort-of hidden agenda.

Sure enough, it seems that the person who brought the Binet test to America (this in 1908) was a proponent of Eugenics. HH Goddard, who wanted to use the test to prove that the white race was superior, in a time of rampant immigration.

Alfred Binet, the French psychologist, who died in 1911, did not create the test for these purposes, quite the opposite.

So as history repeats itself, a reason to be worried about this test, for a disease with no cure.

My source: A. Plucker, J. A. (Ed.). (2003). Human intelligence: Historical influences, current controversies, teaching resources. Retrieved [insert month day, year], from http://www.indiana.edu/~intell

PS. My twin brother had the highest or one of the highest IQ’s in the school, above, so my mom was told at parent/teacher interviews. But he was also aspergers, bi-polar and schitzo, later on any way. So what would the eugenicists made of that?

Finding a Mate – by the book – 1914 Style

This following passage I took from a book called Family and Society published in 1914. I dare say, this book pretty well sums up the beliefs of many people of the time.

My gosh, as if it wasn’t hard enough finding a mate! And as if Marriage wasn’t all about money, at that time.

Today, of course, we have those ‘scientific’ studies that are often published in the press about how men are attracted to women with ‘certain proportions’ and women like men who are honest, or something like that. It’s just as much BS as the bit below, but we buy into it and then, of course, female anxiety is ratcheted up and the wheels of commerce go round and round.

Still, reading these Nicholson letters, I can see that some personality traits seem to be passed down. But criminality, how funny, as Herb Nicholson stole from the bank.

Reading this bit from the 1914, I can’t help but think of Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth. She worked as a VAD at the front in WWI and she describes the patients as once superb examples of young male humanity, all mutilated and disfigured and crippled. Well, her words are finer.

“Intelligent selection, however, on the part of would-be parents may accomplish much both positively and negatively for the improvement of the human race. As a positive matter, the woman or man desiring to mate has the power to choose a mate who has the characteristics of a good race stock.

If mates are selected that have the advantage of size, strength, freedom from abnormalites in form and physiognomy, and of mental ability, the assurance is warranted that the offspring that may issue from this mating will be adequate for the undertaking of life.

On the other hand, security for the offspring may be obtained negatively by avoiding mating with persons having diseased, abnormal or undesireable characteristics. Most character traits are transmitted directly from parents to offspring… It is fairly certain that feeble-mindedness, narcotism, syphilis, and of criminality are inheritable…Nothing short of a bill of health based upon physical examination is sufficient to protect the integrity of the race from the scourges which now afflict humanity.”

Unnatural Selection 1910 Style

Isle of Lewis Scot Immigrants. My husband’s ancestors or at least relations.

Hmm. As if finding a husband wasn’t hard enough for Marion, Flo and Edith Nicholson of my Flo in the City story, based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/.

They had to find a good Presbyterian who would not mind that they came to the marriage with only the (homemade) dress on their back.

And let’s face it, they were over-educated for their social standing (financially speaking) and as they couldn’t marry down.. well…prospects were dim.

And now there was the promoters of the eugenics movement to futher muddy the marital waters, suggesting that it was up to women to maintain and increase the purity of the race, to prevent ‘race suicide’, as it was called.

They must make sure their future husbands had good genes, too. No criminal genes, no ‘feeble-minded’ genes, no inferior race genes.

“Women rather than men have always been the conserver of race purity,” says Dr. H. E. Jordon. “In eugenics she will find an intelligent guide to the selection of the father of her children, to the reduction of 3/4ths of all diseases, to the elimination of 1/2 of the morbidity of children.”

(I must admit, I’m fascinated by the eugenics movement. Such nonsense being promoted by such prominent folk. No wonder this chapter of history has been effectively censored. (Hitler didn’t help, either.) According to one source, the movement originated in England in 1867, but didn’t become “powerful”until 1900.

Here are some quotes from a 1912 lecture in Montreal that botanist and social activist Carrie Derick attended. “The incident of ‘genius’ among royalty is 100,000 times higher than that among industrial classes.” “The Upper classes and country folk are fairer and taller than the industrial classes of the city” -and from these people derive all the literary and artistic talent” “Racial elements of southern origin have been the least productive of men. ” Hmm. Take that Pablo Picasso, who in 1912 had just moved to his new digs in Montmartre.

The New York Times has more on the movement than the Gazette, which suggests that it was more popular in the US.

Mendelian science was sometimes invoked by the proponants of eugenics. All screwed up of course. And still Carrie Derick, botanist, bought into the BS.(But who understands Mendel and all that pea-pod business.)

They sort of had it backwards, from what I see, at least with respect to physical health. (The morality aspects of the movement were plain racism and class warfare, disguised as science.) They believed you in-bred people to keep bad genes out, so that European Royalty had it right, as opposed to the opposite, that you mixed the genes to breed strong genes in.

Even the Church got into it. No one could be married in the Church without a blood test.

“In a sermon preached at the Episcopal Cathedral, March 23, 1912, no persons would be married by the clergy of the Cathedral, except upon presentation of a reputable physician, showing that the contracting parties are physically and mentally normal, and that neither has an incurable or communicable disease.”

All very ironic. Of course, the Nicholsons were a case for inbreeding. The Isle of Lewis Scots were a hardy lot, and from what I have read, in the early 1800′s their genes were almost the same as the genes of the Norseman who landed there many centuries before – and that because the population were so isolated.

Natural selection had killed off the weaker ones (I’m guessing) so many of these people lived to a ripe old age, many women into their nineties, on a diet of oatmeal and dire deprivation. Apparently, this group had few health problems, that is until they emigrated to other parts of the world. But that decline likely had more to do with the change of lifestyle.

Norman was a Nicholson, from Isle of Lewis, but by way of Skye, and Margaret was a McLeod from Isle of Lewis. All these immigrants inbred after coming to Canada for a generation or two.

My husband’s family is a good example of how it went. Norman married Margaret, both from Isle of Lewis stock. Marion Nicholson, their daughter, married Hugh Blair, product of lowland? Scotland with a French Canadian mother and Cree grandmother. Marion’s kids married English speaking Montrealers, Marion Hope, her second daughter, married Thomas Gavine Wells, Anglican, sort of, product of Welsh-Canadian and Irish American and I’m guessing African American (Virginia) (cousin of General Douglas MacArthur) and their kids married English and French Canadians (Roman Catholic but not too serious about it) who married, well, people from all over the world, including East Indian (Hindu, sort of) and Franco-Gypsy.

Exposing the Dark Underbelly of History

Emma LaJeunesse, Opera Star, known as Madame Albani.

I happen to have a paper theatre bill on hand for a performance of Madame Albani, unknown year. It is from the Nicholson Collection. Maybe one of the Nicholson women attended…Well, very likely. They attended operas in Richmond, so their letters reveal.

Madame Albani wasn’t Italian, she was a French Canadian from Chambly, (last epoque’s Celine Dion) who made it big and was performing at Covent Garden in the late 1800′s.

The Nicholson girls liked fine things, and I assume Italian Opera, was one of these fine things.

Italian lace too. Italian cheese, too. And in 1910, Edith mentions in a letter that she went to see Creatore and his Italian band, where she met Marion. That would be Giuseppe Creatore, an Italian American bandleader who was devoted to Italian opera.

This morning, as I continued researching background to Flo in the City, my book about a girl coming of age in the pivotal 1910 era in Montreal, based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ I decided to enter the term “Italian” into Google News Archives, to see what came up for the Montreal Gazette.

I wanted to find out what feelings and images and ideas the word “Italian” evoked in the Nicholson girls in 1910.

(You see, a few blogs back I wrote about how the Immigration Policy of 1911 deliberately tried to dissuade Italians form immigrating to Canada . Despite this, they came, about 60,000 in the 1900-1910 and the same amount for 1910-1920. And they came to Montreal, mostly.)

The articles I read from 1908-1913, revealed a world of gangs (there was a sweep of an immigrant neighbourhood in 1908, where police randomly searched young Italian men for razors, knives and guns) and hard, life-threatening work. (Italian men, it seemed, worked at manual labour in dangerous jobs, where they sometimes (often) were injured or died. And if they went on strike or protested, they were fired en masse. Once 100 men were fired for protesting money being deducted off the paycheques, ostensibly medical charges.)

There were a lot of murders associated with Italians reported in the paper, usually gang or work related, but sometimes crimes of passion. And at least one Italian woman ( a recent arrival of 26 who worked first in a restaurant and then as a domestic) killed herself because her boyfriend’s wife came over from Italy to join him.

Dr. Louis Laberge of the Montreal Health Department (who I have written about extensively) explained that this Italian (and Chinese) crime wave was cause by the stresses of tenement living. The Italians were living “Oriental style” with too many people crammed into one house. He wanted forced inspections.

So, Italians in Montreal had it hard, it seems. But still they came and became an integral part of our city.

And, then, once again I was led to a dark period in history (one that has been erased from the books). I found an interview with Maria Montessori, which led me to look up more on the “eugenics” movement.

Remember, the Italians who came here to start a new life, weren’t the “elite.” Immigrants never are. (The Nicholsons were descendants of the lowest of the low, Isle of Lewis Scots, cleared from the land.)

The Eugenics Movement, to put it crudely, was about eliminating inferior beings, mental defectives, criminals and even those swarthy Southern types. (No kidding.)

Some people say the inherent weaknesses in this position. One writer asks, “Would Shakespeare’s illiterate parents have been permitted to procreate? And another person has an interesting take: “As long as men are attracted by beauty and women by strength, we need no eugenics movement.” It’s true, even in today’s techno-age, the ideal couple isn’t Bill and Melinda Gates. It’s alway a super jock married to a super model.)

But many people, many people of social stature including one US President, thought the idea of sterilizing the inferior and testing would be couples was a great idea.

I suspect that the eugenics movement got moving because of the ‘scary’ wave of immigration to North America.

Anyway, here’s a link to a 2003 book that tries to bring this story into the light.

I find it suspicious that the Stanford Binet test (IQ TEST) was invented in 1912, at the height of the eugenics craze. So does the author of this book.

http://www.popmatters.com/books/reviews/w/war-against-the-weak.shtml

The idea of IQ is sacred today. (Just the other day a news report said that manganese in Quebec water may be lowering children’s IQ by six points. Oh my!)

But maybe IQ is a load of BS designed to promote the interests of one group over another. Maybe we’ve all been had…Of course, we’ll never know, as it is the people with high IQ’s who run the world by virtue of having done well in the school system, with the exception of very rich men who are given a pass… HMMMM.

An Embarrassing Bit of History -Eugenics Movement

As I peruse more Montreal Gazette archive articles while researching Flo in the City, my novel about a girl coming of age in the 1910 era in Canada, based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ I am forced to revisit a sketchy topic I touched upon on my website: Eugenics.

Carrie Derick (or Derrick) Canada’s first female full-time professor, a botanist, and a President of the Montreal Council of Women 1909-1912 and founder of the militant Suffrage Movement was, at least at one time, a proponent of ‘unnatural’ selection as promoted by the Eugenics Movement.

So, apparently, was Emily Murphy, a famous Canadian suffragist.

Now, how could a person who supported suffrage, in large part because women were seen as better suited to tackle the grave social problems of the city, support sterlizing the feeble-minded and the weak? I mean, that was the argument made by men to keep women down, that women were naturally feeble-minded and gentle-hearted and spiritually fine.

Before we judge, however, we must keep in mind that eugenics was a trendy belief among the educated in 1910. Theodore Roosevelt was a proponent as was Tommy Douglas, our Greatest Canadian, as well as Alexander Graham Bell, whose wife was deaf. So imagine!

In Derick’s case, well, in 1909 she presided over a lecture by a gentleman, a Professor Witmore, who was endeavoring to improve the lot of the feeble-minded (I’m just using their term)by understanding them and taking care of them, thereby promoting the “useful citizenship of the imbecile.”

Then in 1913, Derick gives a lecture in favour of sterilizing such people. Her argument seems ludicrous, it almost makes you laugh. She’s supposedly lecturing on genetics and the nature/nurture debate, something of interest to all who are concerned with ‘the improvement of the human race.” She gives two real life examples to illustrate her point: A man named Jukes, ‘a lazy drunken wastrel’ who is the first in a line of thousands of such degenerates. Then she names another man, who is respectable, hardworking and god-fearing, I presume, who begets a huge line of superior “clergymen, physicians, college professors (sic) distinguished army and navy officers and good, pure women (sic again).(No poets, though

And, then, the political side of this eugenics issue rears its ugly and predictable head: “In the shipbuilding of Canada, unguarded immigration isone of the greatest dangers. Not only should the health and character of immigrants be known, but the record should also embrace his or her parents and grandparents and should a taint of degeneracy be disclosed, rejection should follow. Remember, Canada was experiencing a huge increase in immigration.

Well, I guess I’m not going to get to be alive: my Yorkshire ancestors were sheep-stealers. My French Canadian ancestors were Filles du Roy (prostitutes and otherwise imprisoned women sent to the New World as breeding stock.)And the Nicholsons, well, they are descended from Norseman, the mother of all pillagers and rapists.

(Which brings to mind something my son likes to say: A low class sociopath ends up in prison. A high class one ends up a CEO of a large corporation or working for Wall Street)…but I digress.

Well, this part of our history has been glossed over, largely because eugenics got associated with the Nazis. But one aspect is still with us and is highly respected. The IQ test. The IQ test was created in 1912, (as a tool of the eugenics movement?…Something to replace the science of phrenology?) Even back then, they tried to give these tests to immigrants, who didn’t even know English. So I guess they failed and were deemed imbeciles.

One of the odd things Derick says is that ‘alcoholism doesn’t cause degeneracy, it’s the other way around, degeneracy causes alcoholism.’ And although that sounds ridiculous, today alcoholism is considered a disease by some and there is a proven? genetic factor underlying addiction. (Or is there?)

And just yesterday, the news media was abuzz with the story that a spinal fluid test can prove conclusively if a person is going to get Alzheimer’s. As a fifty five year old who can’t remember anything and whose father died of Alzheimer’s I was a little freaked out to hear this. But I was especially concerned with the GIVEN that Alzheimer’s Disease was genetic. I mean heavy metals and other environmental issues must be behind the rise in Alzheimer’s disease. Or the numbers would be stable.

And my first thought was, yea, find out early and your husband leaves you and you get fired or at least not given tenure,(well no one gets tenure anymore) or your insurance stops covering you… EWWWW.

This genetic testing (for any disease) whatever the rationale, smacks of the eugenics movement.

And if the eugenics movement proves anything, it’s that otherwise intelligent, thoughtful, good people, can be terribly WRONG about certain things.