"Better Baby" and "Fitter Family" Companions

[Atreyu69 (imported)]

I was reading that in the US during the 1920's and 1930's when interest in eugenics was at it's highest county fairs would sometimes hold what amounted to human livestock contests called "Better Baby" and "Fitter Family" companions. The contestants were toddlers or young boys who would each be awarded 1000 points on entry. A panel of judges would then examine the contestants for physical beauty, intelligence, hygiene, size, proportions, temperament and so on. For any imperfections points would be deducted and the contestant with the highest number of point at the end would win. Since this was all based on the science of animal husbandry the idea was that the boys who scored highest were the ones most fit to reproduce and the boys at the other end were, well you get the idea.

I'm thinking about writing a story along those lines but I need more information. Does anyone have any idea why parents would enter their boys in these contests?

Thank You.

[Arab Nights (imported)]

That all sounds hunky dory except the characteristics you list (and as judged at that age) are really not many of the ones needed to succeed in life. Hitler was hardly the blonde Teutonic god. I would start off with the idea that the people who have succeeded in life and run the contests would themselves have been losers in their youth. They use the contests to work thru some of their old wounds.

[C&TL2745 (imported)]

....

'm thinking about writing a story along those lines but I need more information. Does anyone have any idea why parents would enter their boys in these contests?....

The motivation may be the same as the motivation little girls' parents have for entering their preschool daughters in beauty contests (c.f., the most famous case of that, JonBenet Ramsey) or insisting that their boys go out for sports or encouraging their kids to cheat on tests to make the Honor Roll. My suspicion is that they're fulfilling their own dreams vicariously through their kids or compensating for their own feeling of failure by pushing the kid to succeed. But that's just a guess. If you know someone whose kid is on the Little League team when his heart really isn't in it, you might interview them. Just a thought. I could be all wet.

A story centering on eugenics run amok does sound promising. I believe around that time kids labeled "mentally defective" were sometimes sterilized. Maybe anybody with a score less than 750 is "defective"???

Sandi

[JesusA (imported)]

The Better Baby contests and Fitter Family contests grew out of the American eugenics movement and became a feature of state fairs in rural states. They first appeared at the Louisiana State Fair in 1908 and flourished into the early years of the Depression. If one could judge pigs and pies at the fair and award blue ribbons to the very best, why not to humans as well? John Harvey Kellogg (yes, the Kellogg of Kellogg cereals), a founder of the Race Betterment Association, termed them "human stock shows" and advocated "tacking human pedigrees to every perfect individual" with "blue ribbons for the most perfectly developed."

Throughout the 1920s there were better baby judgings at state and county fairs across the entirety of the rural part of the United States and Canada. From what I can gather, only rural White families were involved in the contests, though the eugenics ideas permeated the general culture--especially that directed at youth. One of the articles on my shelf has it:

Adolescent popular culture was also filled with eugenic messages. On a given Saturday evening in the 1920s, for example, school students could go to the movies to see the pro-euthanasia film The Black Stork. The following morning, while attending church services, they might listen to a eugenically oriented sermon recommending marriages of “best” with “best.” On Monday, the newspaper might warn of a “rising tide of feeblemindedness” and recommend restricting immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe. On Tuesday, the press could report on the attractive winners of “better babies contests.” Sitting in class on Wednesday, these same students might open their biology textbooks to a chapter on eugenics. Finally, on Thursday and Friday, while visiting a state fair with their hygiene class, they could participate in a Fitter Families competition. If they were judged as having superior heredity, they might return home bearing a medal with a biblical inscription (Psalms 16.6), “Yea, I have a goodly heritage.”

A scorecard that I have for Douglas James Young, who won 99 out of a possible 100 points and was awarded a ribbon at the Provincial Exhibition in British Columbia at the age of 26 months in 1927, shows his score in each of 25 categories, worth 2 to 8 points each. He lost a quarter point each for weight and "Expression" (one of the judged categories of intelligence). He also lost a half point for not having perfectly formed genitalia.

The Better Baby and Fitter Family contests of North America owe their rise to the initial efforts of Sir Francis Galton in the 1880s, who believed that "the quality of the human race could be improved by selective breeding, as had the quality of such domestic animals as cattle and horses." The state, he believed, should manage procreation through the issuing of "eugenic certificates" to those judged fit to breed. The unfit would be restricted from breeding by the "deliberate intervention of medical science."

Families entered their children in these contests for the same reasons that rural women entered their canned goods or pies or that men entered their prize bull or hog.

There is plenty of real history as background for a story.

[C&TL2745 (imported)]

A few more thoughts on a story line:

Reproduction is a privilege like a driver's license, not a right.

Any judged defective are sterilized: For women, the tubes are tied; for men, the penis is removed.

The judges become more influential than politicians and begin taking bribes.

The judges realize that the amount of bribes they can extract increases if they make the sterilization public and humiliating.

Anyone challenging the judges' authority is automatically "defective".

Got possibilities.

Sandi

[JesusA (imported)]

Any judged defective are sterilized: For women, the tubes are tied; for men, the penis is removed.

A penectomy does not produce sterility.

When we look at the actual statistics for "eugenic sterilization" that can be found (most records are missing), most of the females had tubal ligations. Only about ONE percent (1.2% in the figures I have for North Carolina between 1929 and 1946) had an ovariectomy.

For males, about FOURTEEN percent were castrated (14.2% of those in my files). The rest had a vasectomy. Of those castrated in North Carolina, the youngest was 9 and there was also one 10 year-old. Fourteen seems to have been the most common age with thirteen not far behind. Over 50% of the total sterilized were under the age of 20 at the time.

Castration was sometimes used for rather minor offenses. One case documented in 1930 for a 32 year-old castrated in Salem, Oregon notes that, "He did not really commit a crime, although he would purchase groceries, etc. and never pay for them." The last case that I could find for California was a teenage boy castrated for arson. He burned down an unoccupied chicken coop. Eugenics was interpreted rather broadly....

[C&TL2745 (imported)]

A penectomy does not produce sterility....

Right. I was thinking in terms of what would produce the greatest bribes for the judges.

Interesting history. I don't know how much of that would fly today, except maybe in Texas.

Sandi

[Dave (imported)]

..

. Eugenics was interpreted rather broadly...

Eugenics was a scourge and an atrocity perpetrated on the world.

[C&TL2745 (imported)]

Eugenics was a scourge and an atrocity perpetrated on the world.

Precisely why the fictional account suggested by Atreyu69 at the start of this thread could be so compelling. It could have the chilling impact of Aldous Huxley's classic novel Brave New World, which was written during the time period when eugenics was considered acceptable (1931), but it could actually be more credible if done right. It would require far less power to be given to the "judges" than Hitler's Nazis had and nothing like Huxley's transformation of human society. Rather, it would be a natural consequence of the acceptance of eugenics coupled with greed and a few sociopaths in positions of power. Done right, the story could be not just a great read for EA readers who are into forced penectomies but might, in fact, be considered good literature in the social commentary genre for readers in general.

Sandi

[Dave (imported)]

I think that is THE ISLAND (the movie from a few years ago) or THE HUNGER GAMES.

A book club picked THE HUNGER GAMES and from the first chapters I thought it was appalling.