IN MY RECENT READING VACATION into the Library of America volume of Robert Frosts' poems and prose, there is this 1951 half-rhyming-limerick that demonstrates even as the news about the Nazi death camps and other Axis genocidal atrocities was sinking in, eugenics was still being pushed by some of the best and brightest among us.
Pares Continuas Fututiones
Says our Harvard Neo Malthusian
"We can't keep the poor from futution;
But by up to date feeding,
We can keep them from breeding."
Which seems a licentious conclusion!
Of course, being a sworn enemy of eugenics and Malthusian economics and the "best and the brightest" who push those as "a benefit to humanity and the world," and a long time hater of Harvard (we get lots of them here North of Boston, as Frost would have known better than most), I had to find out who the Harvard boy who was pushing that in 1951 was. Luckily the book provided that answer in the many very helpful notes in the back of the book.
Harvard Neo Malthusian] In the letter to [Louis Henry] Cohn [dated September 21, 1951], Frost wrote that James B. Conant, a former professor of chemistry and the president of Harvard University (1933-53), as a "mouthpiece" for science had "undertaken for it to make a the planet less uncomfortably crowded with a new kind of manna . . . a contraceptive to be taken by mouth so we can stop breeding without having to stop futution."
No doubt tricking them into it or forcing them into eating it was the clever scheme. The elite, especially the elite in science and the "science" that really matters, economics, never seem to ever tire of thinking of ways of eliminating large numbers of People from the human future. And to find ways to insult or belittle their own intelligence in their monumental arrogance.
Conant was a great progressive who decided to push for a meritocracy as an alternative to the traditional American elite but never seemed to really understand that equality was the real cure for what was wrong with the world. He opposed real equality, equality in results, for that guarantee of the elite always remaining elite, "equality of opportunity." I'd love to find out if he ever tried to stop legacy admissions to the college he led, though it doesn't seem to have happened. As I recall he did vote for the cap of 15% of Jewish students at Harvard, instituted by the previous president. It's largely due to him that we got the college board examinations that merely reinforced the status of those with wealth whose parents sent them to better schools. He really was kind of a pudding-head about how the reforms he instituted would actually work out. Perhaps he saw opening up admissions to a wider section of the already wealthy and, so privileged as progress. Maybe it's just he wanted more regional diversity of the elite at Harvard.
Unfortunately I can't find out where he made the suggestion, though I suspect it is in the Terry Lectures at Yale, he was the 1951 honoree. Unfortunately, I don't have a copy to look at to find out.
I don't imagine he imagined feeding his contraceptives to the most dangerous families in the world, those who he, no doubt, would see as meritorious, many of them Ivy League grads and others like them. I could take the time and research and give you a list of such dangerous people born around that time and after who I'm sure Conant wouldn't have considered the world would be better off without. The majority on the Supreme Court and many in the Congress, for a start.
As I most recently mentioned around the centennial of America's most evil war criminal at large, Henry Kissinger, it was in contemplating his evil that I first realized there were many extremely intelligent People the world would be better off without but there was no such thing as a good one that you could say that about. And a lot of them are certainly not on any list Conant would have had about who should not be allowed to have offspring. I'd certainly put the children of George H.W. Bush on a list of those the world would probably be better off if George and Babs had been fed contraceptives. I could go for the idea of having prevented those lists of Ivy Leaguers and their ilk who have duped Americans into believing there was "a right to lie." And Ron Desantis who is not as far removed from them as they'd ever want anyone to notice.
And it's such a pudding-headed idea that was bound to not happen. For a start it would mean feeding the poor and the best and brightest aren't, on balance, big on that. And it wouldn't have worked. Of course, if People have economic security, if they have a decent life with prospects of being able to live out their elder years in security, most People opt for choosing a smaller family for themselves, that's pretty much what experience has shown.
I don't know, maybe those rhymes work better in the old style of pronouncing Latin, my teacher, from the generation right after Frost, taught me the more up-to-date reconstruction of Latin pronunciation. Or maybe Frost pronounced the English differently. In the notes on it Frost pointed out that he was referencing a particularly blue verse by Catullus, poem no 32 that includes these lines,
. . . sed domi maneas paresque nobis
novem continuas fututiones . . .
The note translates that as,
but stay at home and prepare yourself
for nine consecutive copulations
I'd have thought "prepare ourselves" would be more accurate.
It's all a far cry from the popular imagination of Frost, that boy improbably swinging from those friggin' birches.
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