From 1917 into the 1920s, Hoosier movie-goers had a chance to see one of the most controversial and arguably infamous silent films ever produced, The Black Stork, later renamed Are You Fit To Marry? Identified by one film historian as among the earliest horror movies,The Black Stork was based on a real and gut-wrenching medical drama from 1915.

Billed as a eugenics love story, the movies script was authored by Chicago journalist, muckraker and theater critic Jack Lait. Lait worked for news mogul William Randolph Hearst, the very man who inspired the lead figure in Orson Welles great1941 movie Citizen Kane. Hearst, king of American yellow journalism, relished controversies, which sold newspapers and theater tickets. His film company, International Film Service, produced The Black Stork.

Most Americans today have never heard the word eugenics, a once-popular scientific theory spawned by Victorian understandings of evolution and heredity in the wake of Charles Darwin. The word eugenics comes from the Greek for well-born or good stock and refers to the social interpretation of scientific discoveries purporting to show how harmful genetic traits are passed on from parents to children and how healthy children could be bred. Eugenics wasnt strictly the same as science itself, but a social philosophy based on the discoveriesof Darwin, the monk-botanist Gregor Mendel, and Darwins nephew, geneticist Francis Galton. Yet many scientists and doctors got involved with this social philosophy.

Once very mainstream, support for eugenic theories plummeted after the defeat of Hitler, its most notoriousadvocate. Aspects of eugenics like the forced sterilization of repeat criminals, rapists, epileptics, the poor, and some African Americans continued in twenty-sevenAmerican states into the 1950s and even later in a few. The last forced sterilization in the U.S. was performed in Oregon in 1981.

(U.S. eugenics advocacy poster, 1926. The authors rankedjust4% of Americans as high-grade and fit for creative work and leadership.)

Most scientists today would probably consider the social application of genetics to beoutside their own realm, but that wasnt always the case. Indiana played an enormous role in the history of eugenics when the Hoosier State became the first to enact a compulsory sterilization law in 1907 a law that lumped the mentally handicapped in with sex offenders, made it virtually illegal for whole classes deemed unfit to reproduce, segregated many of the disabled into mental hospitals, and enshrined white supremacy. Though the Indiana law was struck down in 1921, those ideas were hugelypopular with many academics and activists all across the political spectrum.

(American eugenic scientists blamed murder rateson heredity, ethnicity, and imaginary racial types like Dinaric and Alpine. Pure Nordic, the type idealized by Hitler, was deemed the least prone to criminal activity. Time would prove that theory wrong.)

Whats especially disturbing is that the Indiana Eugenics Law wasnt pushed by stereotypical white racist hillbillies.Poor white Indianapolis slum-dwellers, in fact, were very much targeted by the eugenicists of the early 20th century. Promoters of these spurious theoriesincluded mainstream biologists, doctors, many reform-minded Progressives, womens rights advocates, college presidents, even a few Christian ministers and Socialists. The list of widely-admired people who spoke out in favor of simplistic eugenic proposalsincluded Helen Keller, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Sir Winston Churchill, Planned Parenthoods founder Margaret Sanger, author Jack London, IU and Stanford University president David Starr Jordan, Alexander Graham Bell, and the civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois. One of the only well-known anti-eugenics crusaders was Senator William Jennings Bryan, a Christian Fundamentalist who lost caste with Progressives in the 1920s foropposing the teaching of evolution.

Eugenics, however, was neither liberal nor conservative. Americans of all political stripes upheld its basic premise the preservation of social order and the engineering of more a humane society. Strong support for eugenics came from Americans concerned about the proliferation of poverty and urban crime and who sought a reason to keep certain nationalities from entering the U.S. Eugenics did not begin to go out of favor until 1935, whenscientists fromthe Carnegie Institute in Washington demonstrated the flimsiness of other scientists work at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. Yet even as eugenicists placed human reproduction on the level of horse- and livestock-breeding, the genetic abolition of any individual deemed feeble-minded andthe destruction of hereditary and sexually-transmitted diseases was packaged as a positive goal, a social benefit to all, even to those who underwent involuntarysterilization and were occasionally killed.

(Better Baby contest, Indiana State Fair, 1931. Eugenicists put reproduction and marriage on the level of agriculture and sought to manage human beings like a farm. Better Baby contests began at the Iowa State Fair in 1911.)

Euthanasia was one component of eugenics. Alongside the positive eugenics campaign for Better Babies and Fitter Families, negative eugenics partly revolved around the controversial view that infants born with severe disabilities should be left to die or killed outright. In 1915, a case in Chicago plunged Americans into a heated debate about medical ethics.

That November,Dr.Harry J. Haiselden, chief surgeon at the German-American Hospital in Chicago, was faced with a tough dilemma. A woman named Anna Bollinger had just given birth to a child, John, who suffered from severe birth defects. John had no neck or right ear and suffered from a serious skin ailment, all judged to be the result of syphilis likely passed on by his father. Dr. Haiselden knew that he could save the childs life througha surgical procedure. But since he was familiar with the conditions into which Illinois feeble-minded were thrown after birth, he convinced the childs parents to let John die at the hospital. When the news came out that the doctor wasnt going to perform the necessary surgery, an unknown person tried to kidnap the child and take it to another hospital. The kidnapping attempt failed and John Bollinger died.

(The South Bend News-Times called Baby Bollinger a martyr, but later carried advertisements for the doctors film.)

While the Catholic Church, one of the few vocalcritics of eugenics, was the only major group to initiallyprotest the surgeons decision, Haiselden was soon called before a medical ethics board in Chicago. He nearly lost his medical license, but managed to hang onto it. Public opinion was sharply divided. Chicago social worker and suffragette Jane Addams came out against Haiselden. Short of the death penalty for murder, Addams said, no doctor had the right to be an unwilling persons executioner. It is not for me to decide whether a child should be put to death. If it is a defective, it should be treated as such, and be taught all it can learn, she added.

Many of Haiseldens critics, such asAddams, pointed out that if eugenicists had had their way, they would have killed some of the great defectives in history, like Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevksy, French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, childrens writer Edward Lear, and even the eugenicist Harry Laughlin himself all of them epileptics. (Biologist Laughlin, Superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor and one of the sciencesgreatest advocates, had suffered from epilepsy since childhood.)

Support for Dr. Haiselden, however, came from many famous social activists. Among them was Helen Keller advocate for the disabled, a Socialist, and a eugenics supporter (at least in 1915.) Keller, who was blind and deaf since the age of one but thrived against all odds,published her views on the Haiselden case in The New Republic. She thought that children proven to be idiots by a jury of expert physicians could and perhaps should be put to death. (Keller was an amazing woman, but its hard not to view her trust in the opinions of unprejudiced medical experts as naive.) Chicago lawyer and civil liberties crusader ClarenceDarrow who famously went up against eugenics critic William Jennings Bryan at the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial made no bones about his support for the surgeon: Chloroform unfit children, Darrow said. Show them the same mercy that is shown beasts that are no longer fit to live. Indiana Socialist Eugene V. Debs also supported Haiseldens decision.

(Clarence Darrow and Helen Keller supported Haiselden.)

Harry Haiselden held ontohis job, but bolstered his position and kept the firestorm of public discussion brewing by starring as himself in a silent film based on the Bollinger case. The Black Storkwas produced with the help of William Randolph Hearts International Film Service. Scriptwriter Jack Lait would go on to edit the New York Daily Mirrorand write several plays and novels.

The Black Stork came to hundreds of American theaters, including many Hoosier ones. Because public health workers and eugenicists often gave admonitory lectures before and after the movie, separate showings were offeredfor men and women. Young children werent allowed to attend, but a South Carolina minister encouraged parents to bring their teenage children so they could see what might comefrom sexual promiscuity, criminality, drinkingand race mixing. Some theater bills added the catchy subtitle: The Scourge of Humanity.

(The Black Storkenjoyed several screenings at the Oliver Theater in South Bend. South Bend News-Times, November 9, 1917.)

The movies plot was partly fictional and not entirely based on the 1915 Bollinger euthanasia case.The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette gave its readers the basic story line, which came with an interesting twistnearthe end:

(The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, August 12, 1917.)

The taint of the Black Stork was obviously bad genes and heritable diseases. Haiseldens silent film has been called one of the earliest horror movies, though its promoters billed it as educational and even romantic in nature. It fueled the eugenics movements fear campaign about defectives but also tackled an ethical dilemma thats still alive today: is it ever humane to kill a person without their permission, on the grounds that the victim isdoomedto live a miserable life and be only a burden on society?

Since American eugenics was definitely supported by known racists and would later be directly cited by the Nazis as inspiration for their bogusracial science, its uncomfortable to look deeper into it and realize how much turf it shares with Progressivists real concern for the treatment of the poor and of mothers, some of whom would have been forced to raise severely disabled children. The problem is that some Americansthought the best way to eradicate poverty and disease was toeradicate the poor themselves by restricting their right to pass on the human germ plasm to the next generation. Eugenics and even euthanasia became, for some, a way to avoid social reforms. Nurture vs. nature lost out to inescapable hereditary destiny.

The Black Storkstitle was eventually changed to Are You Fit To Marry? It ran in theaters and roadshows well into the Roaring Twenties. Its hard to believe that eugenicists begged Americans to ask themselves honestly if they were fit to marry. One wonders how many Americans voluntarily abstained from having children after deeming themselves unfit?

Ads show that thefilm was screened at at least three theaters in Indianapolis (including Englishs Theatre on Monument Circle) as well as at movie halls in Fort Wayne, East Chicago, Whiting, Hammond, Evansville, Richmond and probably many other Hoosier towns.

(The Fort Wayne Sentinel, January 27, 1920.)

The eugenics photo-drama reminded Americans of the dangers that bad heredity posed not onlyto their own families, but to the nation. When The Black Storkshowed in Elyria, Ohio,justa few months into Americas involvement in World War I, it clearly drew fromthe well of fear-mongering that linked crime and disease to alcohol, immigration, prostitution and rumors about German traitors and saboteurs all clear threats to Anglo-Saxon ideals. Eugenics and euthanasia, by saving our nation from misery and decay, clearly got hitched to the wagon of nationalist politics. Viewing The Black Stork,like supporting the war effort, became a solemn duty.

(The Chronicle-Telegram, Elyria, Ohio, December 17, 1917.)

Germanscientists were promoting racial hygiene long before the Nazis came to power in the 1930s. Fascisms scientists and propagandists would also draw heavily on the work of British and American eugenicists and point out laws like Indianas when opponents criticized them. Racial Hygiene, in fact,was the title of an influential textbook by Hoosier doctor Thurman B. Rice, a professor at IU-Bloomington, a colleague of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and one of the founders of IU Medical School in Indianapolis. In April 1929, Rice wrote an editorial in the Indiana State Board of Healths monthly bulletin, entitled If I Were Mussolini, where he supported compulsory sterilization of defectives.

(If I Were Mussolini, Monthly Bulletin of theIndiana State Board of Health, April 1929.)

The Black Storkwasnt the last filmabout euthanasia and eugenics. In 1941, Hitlers Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, commissionedoneof the classics of Nazi cinema, Ich klage an (I Accuse). The plot revolves around a husband who learns that his wife has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He gives her a drug that causesher death, then undergoes a trial for murder. The films producers argued that death was not only a right but a social duty. A tearjerker, Ich klage an was createdto soften up the German public for the Nazis T4 euthanasia campaign, which led to the deaths of as many as 200,000 adults and children deemed a burden to the nation. (Theres some further irony thatIch klage ans cinematic parent, The Black Stork, was based onevents at Chicagos German-American Hospital.)

The charms of eugenics bewitched Americans and Europeans for a few more decades after the Bollinger case. British writer G.K. Chesterton, a Catholic convert and a fierce opponent of eugenics, probably deserves the last word here. Chestertoncalled eugenics terrorism by tenth-rate professors.

(G.K. Chesterton in South Bend, Indiana,October 1930, when he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Notre Dame. Dr. Harry Haiselden himself once gave an address to South BendsFork and Knife Club in May 1916.)

In his 1922 book Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State, Chesterton quipped that society has never really had all that much to fear from the feeble-minded. Rather, its the strong-mindedwho hurt society the most. Tearing into eugenicsadvocates in Britain, Germany and America, Chesterton spotlighted their frequent class prejudices thenskewered them brilliantly:

Why do not the promoters of the Feeble-Minded Bill call at the many grand houses in town and country where such nightmares notoriously are? Why do they not knock at the door and take the bad squire away? Why do they not ring the bell and remove the dipsomaniac prize-fighter? I do not know; and there is only one reason I can think of, which must remain a matter of speculation. When I was at school, the kind of boy who liked teasing half-wits was not the sort that stood up to bullies.

Dr. Harry J. Haiselden was involved in the deaths of at least three more disabled infants. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage while on vacation in Havana, Cuba, in 1919.

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