This is CBS Eye on the World. I'm John Batchford with Marilyn Brooke with the author of the

new book, The Orphans of Davenport, Eugenics, The Great Depression, and The War Over Children's

Intelligence. The controversy in the early part of the 20th century has to do with our

children, our children born with the intelligence they'll have their whole lives and is

been important that who their parents are. If their parents are socially unacceptable, does

that mean they have low intelligence? What does it mean for child rearing? We go now

to a school called Eugenics. Eugenicists are present at the presentation by Harold

Skills and the presentation by George Stoddard. Eugenics begins, however, in the 19th

century, a man named Francis Galton. Marilyn, who is Francis Galton? And what did he

intend by inventing the science or the observation or the cult of Eugenics?

Francis Galton is a cousin of Charles Darwin's. And he listened to Darwin's ideas about how

evolution changes his species. And he extrapolated from Darwin's information, an idea that children

inherit from their parents as single traits, things like barbarism, sense of humor, criminality,

promiscuity, and so on. And Galton put these ideas out into the English intellectual atmosphere.

And they were very much believed. He thought that it would be possible to create a society

of the able if you kept people with those poor traits from reproducing. And he tried to do that

by encouraging people like himself and other prominent people to have more children. Interestingly,

Galton didn't have any children. But it didn't really do the trick. And even though he tried to

put through some laws for institutionalizing people with poor traits through Parliament,

Parliament would not do that for him. Galton died before he saw that his ideas jumped upon

and became institutionalized in the United States in a period around the turn of the century when

between 1880 and 1920, about 20 million immigrants arrived in the US. And there grew up an objection

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