These posters were displayed on Yale bulletin boards. I have little doubt we'll look back 50 years from now in wonder at Global Warming posters and be astonished how anyone could believe Global Warming was "settled science", and that universities always taught the right way of thinking.
 Eminent Yale economist Irving Fisher founded the American Eugenics Society, which supported displays like this one.
Irving Fisher, educated at Yale and a member of its faculty for nearly a half-century, is considered America’s greatest economist ever. He was also one of the country’s leading eugenicists—employing pseudoscience to promote the notion that American policy should “breed out the unfit and breed in the fit,” lest “the Nordic race … vanish or lose its dominance.”
Fisher’s idea were popular in the academy and across the nation between the world wars. An adviser to congressmen and presidents, he “made eugenics a major focus of his life,” Richard Conniff ’73 writes in the May/June issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine:
he helped found the Race Betterment Society; was an active member of the Eugenics Research Association, a group of scholars in the field; and served as founding president of the American Eugenics Society, which organized research, lobbying, and propaganda for the movement.
And, Conniff notes, “Yale figured prominently in this work”:
Proponents of eugenics included Yale president James R. Angell, celebrated football coach Walter Camp ’80, primatologist Robert Yerkes, and Yale medical school dean Milton Winternitz. Stewart Paton, who pioneered mental health services for college students during a two-year stint at Yale in the 1920s, was a eugenicist. So was Rabbi Louis L. Mann, a lecturer at Yale.
The American Eugenics Society was even housed on the Yale campus for a time. Yerkes, the primatologist, campaigned for restricted immigration, based on “intelligence” tests he designed that quizzed people on their knowledge of American sports and automobiles.
archives.yalealumnimagazine.com |
