When recently, after the Casey Anthony acquittal, legal pundits called for “professional jurors,” they probably didn’t know it, because they probably aren’t well-enough educated to know it, but the idea of a superior class of American individuals who are more-capable than the average American is a concept first articulated in the early 1900s (I won’t say ‘early 20th century,’ because legal pundits think the latter era is right now) by Social Darwinists, and ‘ “[e]litists, utopians and so-called ‘progressives,’”as Edwin Black explains in “Horrifying Roots of Nazi Eugenics,” a chapter from his War against the Weak.

Eugenics

Until very recently I naively believed that eugenics had been thoroughly debunked as quackery decades ago. Then someone very close to me made this chilling statement about a little girl we know:

“You have to understand: some people are just worthless; nothing can save them; nothing can even help them. They’re born that way.”

The person who said this claims to be a scientist, to understand Darwinism and genetics—thus giving him the right to make such statements. (As I have asserted before, many people who claim to be scientists are nothing but very superstitious—their superstitions involve bogus statistics rather than mysticism.)

If you have any doubts that the U.S. has long been a hotbed of eugenics, please read Wikipedia’s article on the topic, which correctly notes that one “darling” of contemporary progressives, Margaret Sanger (promoter of the birth control pill and abortion and founder of Planned Parenthood, which is now a government-funded NGO), was a eugenicist.

Sidebar: I am a proponent of “a woman’s right to choose” as a privacy issue. I’m not arguing against the right to abortion. Nor am I disparaging religious opposition to abortion on moral grounds. What I’m saying is that there have always been a large number of people who favor abortion as a means of genetic engineering. Is it a mere coincidence that, according to the Center for Disease Control in 2000, the ratio of abortions-to-live-births for African-American women is 3 times that of white women?

Eugenics in Law and Literature

Margery Allingham (1904-1966), British author of the Albert Campion mysteries, was also a eugenicist. As late as 1963, she wrote a mystery novel about a series of crimes committed by a genetically flawed child born during the Nazi bombing of London in 1940-1941. The novel is The China Governess.

In The China Governess, the mystery kicks off with a young man’s search for his genetic roots. An orphan (adopted by a gentleman of the landed-gentry, whose roots extend back to the Norman Conquest) learns just before his marriage to a wealthy heiress that he was born in the worst slum in London. Until then, he had thought he was the wealthy adoptive father’s “bastard,” as he puts it. It  panics him to think he might have inherited “tendencies, weaknesses” from an unwed, poverty-stricken mother.

Of course, in the end we learn the hero isn’t a defective after all. His mother and father were married, middle-class, and educated. His mother died in child-birth, and his father was separated from the infant during the London evacuation. The criminal in the mystery is revealed as the true child of the slums, “a poor type. . . not necessarily an imbecile. . . ,” though barely human, more “reptilian” than anything.

Now, since many modern murderers seem barely human to me, too, you might think I would find this attitude acceptable. But, saying that someone doesn’t behave up to the standards of humanity is very different from saying there are classes of humanity, some of which are inherently, grossly inferior to others. No, I would not have thought this villain was genetically inferior just because he was born in a slum or that he was destined for a life of crime.

Worse yet, Allingham also extended her class of genetic inferiors to the working classes. Here’s how the heiress fiancée of the hero describes her unexpected encounter with the masses in a tobacconist’s shop:

“Many of the women were factory workers. . . . They were . . . all hot, and laughing aloud. The brutal noise, meaningless as a bird call, reached an intensity which stunned her. . . . The uniformed factory women were imitating their men folk and swearing as they never did in the normal way when each was as it were a private person. The trickle of dirty fantasy threading through the crackle produced a shocking sound which she had not met before, and which gave her the illusion that there were no individuals present, only a single merciless personality. As the queue fed her relentlessly into the dark shop the stale, sweaty smell of leather and newsprint met her in a wave . . . .”

That’s right. She had never been inside a shop that sold tobacco and magazines before. I repeat: this was written in 1963. John F. Kennedy was President until November of that year—the heyday of liberalism, one would have thought.

Another eugenicist was poet Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950) (The Spoon River Anthology), a lawyer and Clarence Darrow’s law partner in Chicago, when Darrow was accused of jury-tampering (a Los Angeles jury hearing a case of union violence against a newspaper).

Edgar Lee Masters wrote two epic-length, blank-verse works on the subject of eugenics, crime, and juries: Domesday Book (1920) and The Fate of the Jury (1929). In my quest for literature about juries and jurors, several years ago I found copies of these (first and only editions) at an online antiquarian bookseller’s website. Inside the front cover of the Domesday Book was the slip of paper reproduced to the left: it is Masters’ autograph. It reads: “For Alice Woodward’s copy of Domesday Book. Edgar Lee Masters  September 25-1933.” (If I were a graphologist I think I would call his handwriting rigid and say that the cross on his T looks like a whiplash.)

Sidebar: I don’t know why he called it the Domesday Book, rather than the Doomsday Book, but he did. Frankly, my guess is he pompously thought the spelling was more authentic and medieval.

The Domesday Book is a murder mystery in blank verse, which, as far as I know, makes it unique in literary history. A young woman is found dead in Illinois’ Starved Rock State Park (which has had its share of notorious murders, including “The Starved Rock Murders” of 1960.) The detective in the story, so to speak, is a coroner who calls together a jury of the leading professional men of the community to determine whether she died accidentally or as a result of homicide. In the end, it turns out that the young woman was genetically inferior and promiscuous. Her behavior had so horrified her father that the thought she might bear him a genetically inferior grandchild out of wedlock drove him to kill her. In Masters’ mind, the tragedy seems to be what the father was driven to do to save the bloodline from contamination. (Hmm, maybe that’s what George Anthony was trying to do by testifying against his daughter.)

In The Fate of the Jury, Masters follows up on how the jurors were impacted by their experience on the coroner’s jury (something that more writers ought to pay attention to). The coroner himself, unfortunately, ultimately falls in love with a “neurotic” young woman who ought not to have children for fear she would produce equally defective children.

Professional Jurors

The idea of professional jurors is an abomination. Everyone who signed the Declaration of Independence and everyone who wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights would roll in their graves if we permitted a class of professional jurors to decide guilt or innocence. As a consequence, I imagine there would be another earthquake on the East Coast where, as far as I know, all the Founding Fathers are buried.

Just imagine what such a class of people would be like: They would be well-educated in the law and little else, like lawyers. Paid by the state, they would be obliged to side with the state. They would feel duty-bound to make sure justice was meted out to every guilty person, and they would be able to recognize a guilty person from a mile away.

I’ve always thought lawyers were people who chose their profession so they could tell other people what to do. I’ve never been to law school, but I’m beginning to think that Law 101 must be a course in the inborn superiority of people who can tell other people what to do.