• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1954 0

from the ram, increased their activity by four hundred per cent over those fed on the ordinary dried shrimp.” Human goldfish, too, found themselves significantly “toned up” by the treatment; they slept better, had an improved appetite, and were “more active and energetic.”60co Around 1910, a certain Dr. H. J. H. Hoeve, of Chicago, did an autopsy on a “colored murderer” named Junkins, and found incontrovertible evidence that Junkins was a “born criminal”; he had “an enormous mandible, beef-like neck,” and “long upper extremities to which the hands were fitted like the blade of a spade.”62 As late as 1939, the anthropologist E. A. Hooton was arguing vigorously that the born criminal was a scientific reality. Hooton meticulously analyzed the height, weight, noses, ears, and bodies of criminals—“old American” criminals as well as foreigners of various sorts, Italians, “Alpines,” Irish-Americans, and “East Baltic criminals,” capping it off with a study of “Negro and Negroid Criminals.” Hooton was absolutely sure that the criminal betrayed itself physically: for example, with “low and sloping foreheads” (although, somewhat to his embarrassment, Hooton himself had this kind of forehead). The “nose of the criminal tends to be higher in the root and in the bridge, and more frequently undulating or concavo-convex than in our sample of civilians.” It was, moreover, an amazing fact that “bootleggers persistently have broad noses and short faces with flaring jaw angles, while rapists monotonously display narrow foreheads and elongated, pinched noses.”63

All along, to be sure, some voices in the scientific community protested against this quackery, and against sterilizing criminals. Eugenics had a wide racist streak in its makeup. World War II, fought against the racist Third Reich, dealt a severe political blow to the emotional roots of sterilization. In 1942, in the midst of the war, the Supreme Court handed down the case of Skinner v. Oklahoma.64 Skinner had been convicted in 1926 of stealing chickens; in 1929 and 1934, he was convicted of armed robbery. Under the Oklahoma Habitual Criminal Sterilization Act, if a person was convicted three or more times of “felonies involving moral turpitude,” he could be sterilized. The state ordered a vasectomy for Skinner.

The Supreme Court struck down the statute. Legally speaking, what was wrong with it was that it violated (said the Court) the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, in that it drew irrational, unjustifiable distinctions. For example, an embezzler or someone convicted of violating the Prohibition laws could not be sterilized, though a robber could. But Justice Douglas, writing for the majority, also voiced extreme skepticism about eugenics; and sounded a new note in constitutional doctrine. The right to marriage and procreation, he said, were “basic civil rights.” The power to sterilize, in “evil or reckless hands,” could “cause races or types which are inimical to the dominant group to wither and disappear.”65 Over the years, however, it was eugenic sterilization that withered away. cp

National Prohibition

But beyond a doubt, the jewel in the crown of the morals revolution was national Prohibition. The temperance movement had won many local victories in the nineteenth century—and suffered, too, a fair number of defeats—but it came roaring into the twentieth century with a strength that could not be denied. The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution was adopted in 1919, and went into effect on January 29, 1920. Under it, making, shipping, importing, or selling liquor was prohibited. Congress also passed a strong enforcement law, the Volstead Act, over President Wilson’s veto.

Prohibition had a profound effect on the system of criminal justice. Violations of the Volstead Act were, of course, federal crimes, but many states also passed their own “little Volsteads.” In California, the local law was called the Wright Act. It was a short statute, which simply swallowed the Volstead Act into state law.67 “Wets” in the legislature demanded, and got a referendum;