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Thursday, August 15, 2024

Remove Crime by Not Allowing Mentally Defective People to Breed, Says Dr. C.B. McNairy, Aug. 15, 1924

Dr. C.B. McNairy Talks on Heredity. . . Tells the Kiwanis Club That Crime Is Mental Defectiveness

The Kiwanis Club held its weekly dinner at the Farm Life School, and the event proved unusually interesting as it gave an exhibition of the work a number of the children are doing. The girls of the school sang a succession of songs, and the club replied with others, and a community of good feeling was aroused. Some of the visitors got new ideas of the work the school is doing, and came away more enthusiastic friends than they had been before.

Harry Lewis of Southern Pines was what they call the goat on the occasion, and he told a unique story of starting in life an orphan with a jack knife that his sister had given him as a Christmas present, and trading it and getting a little boot, and trading here and there and working at odd jobs until he grew up to be a dozen years old, and then he began to get into real work and have real experience, and finally he found himself at 21 a merchant, and later a merchant in Southern Pines, and after 11 years int his section he is the head of a business that had total sales last year of almost a quarter of a million dollars. His was one of the best of the personal stories told so far, and that means it was one of a lot of good ones.

Claud Hayes is to tell what he knows about himself next week. He knows a lot more than he will tell.

Owing to a death in his family, Dr. McNairy of Caswell school was not able to be present, but is manuscript was forwarded in the morning mail. Following is the substance of his article:

The proper recognition and correct handling of the mental defective is the basis of all social, religious, and economic betterment. Normal people correctly informed and properly approached want to and will do right 99 times out of 100. A normal or intelligent person will function in the environment in which he is forced to live to the end that he will feed and clothe himself and his own and keep himself from being a monkey wrench in the wheels of progress. Intellect is progressive adaptability, says Dr. Portiers. Webster defines heredity as transmission of physical characters of parents to their offspring.

Science has done much with species, but it has never created any new species. Burbank did much with the potato, but he did not make an apple or a cucumber out of it. You people in the Sandhills have done wonders with the peach; increased its size, etc., yet it is still a peach. We have done much with the fowl. The chicken, for instance; we have developed the size, the qualities of the meat and the egg productive powers, yet they are still chickens just the same. The same has been done with animals. The cow: we have developed the species and made various types—the beef type, the milk producer, the special butter fat type but they are still cows, and so on.

Like produces like. If it were not so then when we wanted milk cows we would breed donkeys; when we wanted bird dogs we would breed greyhounds; when we wanted cabbage, we would sow tomato seeds; when we wanted sweet corn, we would sow celery seed. No two mental defectives or feeble-minded persons have ever produced a normal person. Why question the privilege of the individual criminal to produce his kind when 90 per cent of criminals or repeaters? Why not say three times and out?

We repeat that like produces like. Nature’s laws are very nearly correct; that is, only the superphysical and mentally strong survive—in other words “the survival of the fittest,” all the weaklings physically and mentally fall prey and furnish food for the others. We must prevent the reproduction of certain types. Those we know are insane, those we known are feeble-minded, those we know are unmoral, unhonest, the criminals, the anti-social and the general disturbers must be segregated, sterilized and be forbidden to reproduce their kind. That we can think that we are justified in permitting these types to multiply when we know that they have not a scintilla of a chance to function according to society’s conception of a normal person and they can furnish nothing better than stock or food for our almshouses, jails, and penitentiaries, and meat for our electric bakers, is but folly to say the least. Is this Christianity to encourage fecundity and permit abnormals to be born who would have as much right as we for normal inheritance both phyusically and mentally so that we may be furnished an opportunity to show our revenge by crucifying upon our alters of justice these defectives. In the spirit we damn them because they are not wholly as we, forgetting that the very faults for which we sacrifice them are the results of a defective and criminal inheritance. I do not think that any one man or group of men consider themselves so intelligent or egotistical as to want the responsibility of passing pon the ability of man or his posterity to reproduce his kind. At the same time I believe every court should have the benefits of the joint opinion of a board consisting of an expert psychiatrist, psychologist, neurologist, and social welfare worker, paid by the State. In establishing a degree of responsibility of the individual where there is any doubt as to the mentality, it makes one sick and tired to think that many of our newspaper men, preachers, teachers, lawyers, doctors, and strictly religious people think that all our alienists and scientific men interested in the reasons for human action are governed solely by mercenary influences. It is a reflection upon our Christianity to think that these men are not just as honest and want to see justice done in the spirit of mercy as they.

The brain is divided into two parts: the upper cortex, the seat of intelligence, and the lower brain or basal ganglia, which is the seat of emotions. Crime comes principally from the defects of the lower. The emotional or subnormal man is far more dangerous because he is so quiet that he is seldomly suspected. Intellect and emotions are functions of two entirely different pieces of machinery, so a man may have a thoroughly good machine to think with and a thoroughly bad machine to feel with. Relatively few men of high intelligence commit crime when tempted—they have enough intelligence to act as a brake upon their impulses. On the other hand the man who has only a fair intelligence or a shade below the average intelligence had no balance against wrong impulses. Lombrosa was correct in his theory that men are criminals chiefly because of their physical inheritance. The deadly thing which a criminal inherits is a defective brain. This is the cause of their criminality. They cannot work any other way but backward, so to speak. That is, their brain backfires—when they would go right they go wrong—when they would go forward, they go backward. Oft times they have sufficient intelligence to know that they have come to the cross roads. They know the right but have not the power to do it—that is, their upper brain may be perfectly normal while the lower brain is defective. All intelligence tests are of the upper brain only. They by no means give a correct interpretation of the ability of one to function. It is not possible to test with equal accuracy the man’s power to feel. Crime is a symptom of disease of a structural defect of the lower brain. Ninety per cent of criminals are repeaters, and practically no repeater ever reforms. Now at last we appear to know why. The men who have made these discoveries believe that all crime can be eliminated in a generation or two.

My conception of the purpose of life can be no higher than to fit in a little notch, that is preordained for us by our Creator in the great program of perpetuating our kind contributing our little mite, in perfecting humanity to that degree that it can be returned to him in due time in the same Creative hand, always letting our influence fall on the forward side of the great wheel of progress. It is argued that the human mind is incapable of interpreting the will of God. Then how is it that we give the courts the right to take liberty or life of those who have become antisocial or unable to function according to our conception? Is it more presumptuous of us to prevent than to destroy? We can’t butr believe the subconsciousness back of the opposition of those who advocate the prevention of the reproduction of the mentally unfit is bur that of egotism and fear of interference with their personal privilege. It is a difficult task to teach people new doctrines, especially in a nation that has followed a religious teaching for centuries based upon the doctrine of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” and among a civilization whose government was founded upon the principal that “all men are born free and equal.” Our conception of the Christianity as it is founded and taught by our savior is that of love—the love that prompted Him to give his life that all may be saved—that love that enabled Him to die for the salvation of his murderers and beg his just father to forgive them for they knew not what they did. And again I say it is hard to convince the self-righteous egotistical class who know not themselves, but by some false conception due to some inherited defect that has enabled them to hypnotize themselves into the belief that they are better than other men; that a jail, penitentiary and an electric chair, in our conception, don’t belong to the armament of the Christian who follows Him who went around doing good.

The front page and page 8 of the Pilot, Friday, Aug. 15, 1924

newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073968/1924-08-15/ed-1/seq-1/#words=AUGUST+15%2C+1924 and newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073968/1924-08-15/ed-1/seq-8/

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