White mountains
Acadia National Park is in trouble. Trump’s budget cuts and firings and executive order raising ticket prices for foreign visitors have led many to question whether or not the park will survive.
Why is he doing this? What gives him the right? Why does he even care?
The answer begins 130 years ago with Charles Darwin’s drooling doofus of a cousin, Francis Galton, or, as I like to call him, Frankie the Racist.
Inspired by his cousin, Frankie the Racist wanted to be a scientist. Unfortunately, he believed the purpose of science was to justify his bigotry. For example, Frankie the Racist noticed fingerprints and decided these little swirly patterns surely must show racial differences! But his own research eventually proved him wrong, so he settled on the idea that all fingerprints are unique.
Now, despite what you may have seen on your favorite police procedural drama, this has never been proven. It’s junk science, revealed in how it’s presented. For instance, that matching-point system used to measure fingerprints can vary from place to place. One town may require a 20-point match and the neighboring town may only require five. For decades, some federal judges have rejected the entire field of fingerprint analysis.
Unfortunately, we live in a country where falsehoods are often more valuable than the truth, so fingerprint analysis is still widely accepted, legally. It also falls into the “false or misleading forensic science” category, the fourth-leading cause of false convictions. Innocent Black people in the U.S. are seven times more likely than innocent white people to be wrongfully convicted of murder, sexual assault and other serious crimes. So, in the long run, Frankie the Racist got his way, anyway.
Yes, the world is a far worse place because of Frankie the Racist, and were fingerprint analysis his only white supremacist contribution to society, surely that would be tragic enough. But that’s just the beginning. See, Frankie the Racist is also known as the Father of Eugenics.
If you’re unfamiliar, the National Human Genome Research Institute defines eugenics as, “the scientifically inaccurate theory that humans can be improved through selective breeding of populations.”
Now, someone thinking fingerprints could prove racial differences obviously wouldn’t have the slightest clue what human improvement might look like. But Frankie the Racist was born into a world inherited by other weak-minded dipshit bigots possessed of a marrow-deep desire to be celebrated for their depraved refusal to develop.
Can you guess which “populations” eugenicists wanted to breed out? Congratulations, if you guessed the racially marginalized and the poor!
This “scientifically inaccurate theory” was used to justify, accelerate and intensify wealthy white supremacists’ nationwide war on everyone else — and it was embraced by some of our most celebrated historical figures. President Theodore Roosevelt, for example, believed that white people accidentally breeding themselves out of existence (“race suicide”) was “fundamentally infinitely more important than any other question in this country.”
This war on everyone not wealthy, white or male — the movement’s proponents viewed women primarily as incubators — saw no shortage of war crimes. Laws coercing sterilization of “undesirables” were passed in 32 states, Maine being the 25th to pass “An act permitting sterilizing operations in certain cases of mental disease and feeblemindedness” in 1925. Over the next 38 years, 326 people were sterilized in Maine. According to a University of Vermont study, 86 percent of the victims were female. Seventy-two percent of the victims were deemed feeble-minded, 6 percent were considered insane, and 22 percent were deemed neither.
This happened more than a decade after the 1912 ethnic cleansing of the mixed-race community on Malaga Island. That forced removal by the state resulted in community members being institutionalized as well as sterilized.
It sure would be nice if all this were just a thing of the past, but those celebrated eugenicists I was talking about earlier? Well, they created some things that are still around today. The National Park Service, for example, may seem like just another heaven-sent, wholesome institution facilitating outdoor leisure and activity for all people created equal, but it is, in fact, not. The truth is, the creation of this “natural” landscape not only displaced thousands of people who’d already been living there, but was also created by eugenicists seeking to define and preserve nature for the interests of wealthy white male supremacists.
Acadia was co-founded by then-Harvard President Charles Eliot. It gained national park status due to the efforts of oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller and was signed into existence by President Woodrow Wilson. All three men were raging bigots and, naturally, respectable eugenicists.
So, there you have it. Wealthy and powerful white supremacists have a club. Trump is a member and Acadia, like so many other things in this country, is just another perk of membership.
Samuel James also writes “Banned Histories of Race in America” at samuelj.substack.com.
