I am indebted to a friend for a copy of a recent speech entitled “The Standard Man,” delivered by Dr. William Louis Poteat, the president of Wake Forest College. Dr. Poteat has dared to face an audience of his Baptist brethren and say “that we are ready for the application of negative eugenics, that is, restrictive mating for the elimination of the obviously unfit.” Dr. Poteat said: “The feeble-minded, the insane, the epileptic, the inebriate, the congenital defect of any type, and the victim of chronic contagious diseases ought to be denied the opportunity of perpetuating their kind to the inevitable deterioration of the race.”
When the head of a Southern Baptist college begins to talk like that we may all take courage, for surely there is progress in the race. Too long has society represented by the church and its educational institutions wasted prodigious energy in trying to deny or retrain the sex impulse without concerning itself in the more important matter of directing sex in the reproduction of better offspring. We have reached a point in human history where we must order our sex life. We must breed better human beings or the race will be destroyed by the very machinery of civilization which it has so heedlessly, and yet so thoroly, perfected. The world shudders at the thought of true democracy to-day for no other reason than that the world is alarmingly conscious of the fact that the masses of humanity are hardly fit for democracy or anything else.
From the editorial page of The Independent, Elizabeth City, N.C., Feb. 24, 1922, W.O. Saunders, editor. The campaign for eugenics led to the legislation for the involuntary sterilization of "unfit" people in North Carolina.
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