"That Bliss Thing Keeps On Giving"

William Dodge Stokes may have been a loudly declamatory patriot, but he was no democrat. Intellectually curious, yet perilously ill-informed, his was the voice of a nimble fantasist, a utopian who trafficked in the absurd, committed to an unabashedly bourgeois idealism that was unembarrassed by its explicit commitment to a white supremacy that was quite conscientiously a class-based project of exploitation and control. “The Almighty never intended that any one man or woman should have all the attainments and all the graces, but that each child should have the right kind of inherent mental and physical abilities, which, if properly cultivated, would permit him or her to well fill the station in life to which each is destined.” Situating himself within a long, opulent tradition of American writing concerning the fundamental justice of class difference, Stokes nonetheless professed a vision of common health and characteristic vigor. “Every unborn child has an inalienable right to come into the world free from disease, from hereditary ailments and from mental and physical defects.” While it may have skewed perilously near to the sentimental, Stokes’ interest in the well-being of children had nothing at all to do with support for their health. Not a democrat, Stokes was also a proudly threadbare Protestant, a playboy who had no reservations when it came to the spectacle of his wealth. Moreover, Stokes had no time for the insipid humanitarian solicitude loudly proclaimed by the plaster saints who haunted the gardens and drawing rooms of the upper class. His bleeding-heart hemorrhaged fully anti-social, class- based agendas, the kind that found new and ever-more creative ways to elevate the children of the children of privilege. His humanism was that of the upper-class: cruel, exclusive, unbothered by its own eliminatory fetish with order. By guaranteeing the health of the working class, Stokes argued, the benevolent grandees of American society might best insulate themselves and their interests from the clamorous ingratitude of the labor movement. To promote the health of the working class “will do away with the crying need of…unions, for walking delegates, business agents and bomb throwers to protect the weaklings of their number, for then there will be no weaklings for unions and walking delegates to protect.” Emboldened by the demand occasioned by the war in Europe, Stokes and his sodality of capitalists confronted a labor movement in the ascendant, the everyday work of organizing galvanized through concerns over the personal, physical wreck made of workers, their decrepitude fashioned in tandem with the contraptions and doodads of the industrial line. The promotion of workers’ health—over the course of their lives, the lives of their children, and their ancestors—satisfied the obligations of the better sort to their wards, while repairing the suture binding one class to another, giving workers reason for gratitude, and knitting them into a relation of dependency. In short: he was an unapologetic eugenicist. Stokes’ solutions for the problems of the industrial age were quite openly genocidal. “My sole object is to lead my countrymen to a vision of the need of breeding better men and better women, each superior mentally and physically, free from hereditary ills and defects…” His eugenics were remorseless, comparing the breeding of horses to the breeding of humans. The Right to Be Well Born, or Horse Breeding in its Relation to Eugenics collapsed the rhetoric of a class, confident in itself, and their various eccentricities, with the horror they would unleash upon the people they deigned to govern. Behind the word breeding, one can hear the voice of the Gilded Age speaking to itself, telling itself the tale of its own social superiority through a language of genetic superiority, as in the statement, “We are people of good breeding.” While this might have described the manifest content of their American dream, Stokes’ writing gave voice to its latency: “[B]lind, halt, lame and deformed; many…with large heads…many had long beards; many had running sores at the ear and at the neck; some had goitres…many had short legs and long bodies; and there were men of all shades of color….Everyone…was a foreigner. They were a mass of physical monstrosities.” Studiously cataloguing these discordances, the elimination of these “subnormals,” Stokes argues, is essential to the fortification of society and the preservation of the civic good. “Shall we Americans have a land of our own; or shall we surrender it to the rabble—outcasts of other nations, whose perverted views of life will sooner or later affect our nation and warp our opinions on national and other questions?” Looking upon the terrain of federal immigration policy, Stokes does not deal in metaphor: he foresees battle. “I trust there are enough Americans left to defend the Flag, for which our ancestors fought and died, and to see that laws are passed that will protect the unborn and give them their rights and save this country to the worthy of the American-born.” Heredity is destiny, and while destiny is ambiguous, it is not wholly unpredictable. “When you see a man ofmarked potency, energetic of mind and body and of distinguished family features, carrying well along in life the high breeding of a distinguished ancestor, you may be reasonably sure that it is a case of atavism, and he is very close to Combination I.” The designation Stokes gives to the offspring of two physically perfect specimens, here, ‘Combination I’ names the outcome of a eugenic contrivance. “Some people try to raise children,” he writes, “others, who know their business, breed them.” In the battle over the future of the species, the lines have been drawn. “We can not [sic] forever absorb the scum of the earth, this offscouring, diseased, imported blood, with its evil customs.” Oil your musket, sharpen your bayonet; your huddled masses need not apply. Vexed by the best intentions of the patrician do-gooders, according to Stokes, the working classes suffer the indignity of being taught ambition, one day finding themselves well beyond their capacities, their lives and livelihoods poisoned by a wanting, a striving for something—anything—more. The antidote to this venomous desire, he maintains, is a more vigorously eugenic relationship between the classes, one that foreswears the intemperance of education and the chimera of uplift for sober contemplation of nature, of natural selection, of all that nature gives, and all that she reserves to herself. “Let us breed men and women especially fitted by their mental and physical qualities to best fill the stations in life which they are to occupy….[Eugenics] means the elimination of sufferings from hereditary ills and the saving from over-straining the unfit, who attempt to do things which they were not ordained by nature to perform…” Depravity might have been part of the common lot, but acceding to the trappings of station—to relish the clarity afforded by the trappings of station—was a sign of superiority, a mark of elevation. For Stokes, the trappings of station are irresistible: they are the residue of our genetic heritage. From the perspective of genetics, the only democracy is the democracy of the dissipate; within the order of the well born, everybody has a place, and every place has its body. “All have heard of the Indian baby that was reared and educated from birth in a family of culture and refinement; and, when the first opportunity came, heredity prevailed and he took to the woods—and of the Eskimo baby, reared in the same way, who longed for ice and cold weather.” Implicitly castigating the centuries-long effort to, in Richard Henry Pratt’s inimitable phrase, “save the man” by “killing the Indian” Stokes’ invocation of the Indian baby assumes the immutability of racial character, as well as the futility of any effort at its subornation. Education has no advantage over heredity. “The boy who has not the natural powers to secure an education, when he reaches manhood, cannot give to his children that which he, himself, does not possess. It matters not how you may work upon the fellow to cover up his lack of talent by long training, he only can transit that which he inherited from his ancestors.” For Stokes, all were equally prone to degeneracy and disease, all were equally subject to the rule of nature, of entropy and decay. Stokes’ vision may have been that of an elite—blinkered and pinched, given to incuriosity and insensitive to the delicacy of the flesh—but he had little tolerance for distinctions of race or species. He did, however, enjoy indulging in paradox. “The laws of heredity [that] govern the production of horses govern the production of men.” Stokes maintains a similar distaste for the gross distinctions of class. “The laboring classes are constantly interfered with by having thrown into their ranks the weaklings of the upper classes. Who is there that has not been importuned by this and that person to use as a laborer a relative or somebody of the upper classes?” To presume, to persist in the belief that one might, by virtue of education, eliminate all that is innate to those who are not just subordinate but subnormal is to embark upon a thankless, pointless mission. “[T]he most uncivilized human instinctively [knows] how better to care for themselves, to secure food, or to avoid injury….But, when you start to train them, you will find that the better and higher bred…yield to training as the others do not.” To surrender, to accede to one’s station is to reveal one’s superiority, to demonstrate one’s recognition that there is value in training, should one be capable of comporting oneself to the course of study; and to the obligations thrust upon us by history, by heredity. “When you see a man of great activity of mind, body and energy, and with an iron constitution, carrying his life giving powers well on in years, you may be sure of one thing—his parents were wise in the selection of their ancestors.” Here, the iron constitution offers the most potent defense against the democracy of the dissipate, as the capacities of the physical body establish opportunities and limits that reflect those of the law, of the Constitution, lending flesh and bone to otherwise undead provisions of political structure, of social order. Stokes goes further, evoking the specter of disordered bodies as expressions of perversion, manifestations of gender and sexuality corrupted; and of corrupted gender and sexuality as parasites eating away at the body of the nation. Against these perverse expressions of self, the attempt to educate, to civilize, is more than folly: to violate the parameters of one’s constitution, the constitution of those who are “subnormal” “weaklings,” is to invite a suppurating infection upon the body, to corrupt the body—and the body politic—with unwelcome aberrations, perverse dispositions toward life and labor. The relationship between nature and gender, for Stokes, has only one viable mode of expression. “In every big sales stable, you will find horses called ‘Dummies.’ They…are easily known by their lack of intelligence and physical vitality; and among humans, we have our “Sissie” and our “Tom-boy.” Likening the ostensible exchange of gender roles in humans—the reversal of male for female and female for male—to the genetic ersatz genetic posturing that gives life to inferior breeds of horse, Stokes makes a case for sterilization. “If all stallion colts of this combination were castrated and all fillies from this combination never bred, it would be a good thing.” Likewise, the sissy and the tomboy are best precluded from the rituals of social and biological reproduction, lest their inversion find new avenues of expression, new sites from which to illustrate its abnormality as unexceptional. “A ‘Sissie’ has a soft voice and prefers to play with girls….A ‘Tom-boy’ has a man’s voice and prefers to play with boys….How many children have you ever known a ‘Sissie’ or a ‘Tom-boy’ to have?” Inartful euphemisms describing those who indulge same-sex desire, Stokes promises that eugenic research on the genetic factors contributing to the enactment of gender heralds a world without sissies or tomboys and, as such, that much closer to a world without “defectives.” “[N]o more ‘sissies,’ no more ‘tom-boys,’ and our vigor as a nation, in mental and physical stamina, will be on the ascendency…” Identifying the health of the nation with the pursuit of eugenic research, Stokes commends the future to the philanthropy of capital, to Rockefeller and Carnegie, and to their generously endowed foundations. “I do not know whether or not Andrew Carnegie was interested in horses, but his greatest monument will be the Carnegie Institute for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island…” At this point it may be worth mentioning: His grandfather gave the money to found the Syrian Protestant College. His sister founded its school for nurses. So they might have life, and so forth.