Evidences of Race Degeneration in the United States

Prophecies of degeneration to come are as plenty as blackber- ries and have been since the foundation of the republic.But data that would meet the approbation of a Missourian are as abundantly scarce.The unanimous opinion of all foreign and most native observers is that the American race is degenerating, becoming lank, nervous, dyspeptic, frivolous and immoral; their only disagreement being the degree of said degeneracy and the causes which have produced it.The most favorite causes are: Too much rich foods, bolting our meals, fried things, wasting our saliva on the sidewalks instead of saving it for digestion, liberty run to license, too much irreverence and impiety.The general feeling fifty years ago was summed up in the remark of one of Martin Chuzzlewit's contemporaries, that &dquo;everything degenerates in America.The lion becomes a puma, the eagle a fish hawk, and man a Yankee.&dquo;In spite of our alleged &dquo;gude conceit worsels,&dquo; we have been ready to almost apologetically admit that we were dyspeptic, neu- rasthenic, catarrhal, with the worst teeth and complexions in the world.In spite of our abounding ill health, each individual gen- eration managed to jog along after a sort, but it was bound to tell in the long run, and now after from three to five generations, the awful and inevitable results have come.The first line-up which stamped us with the brand of physical inferiority was in the days of the Civil War, and here in the enlistment the full measure of our physical degeneracy was realized.Almost every country in Europe and every degree of American- ization from the German &dquo;forty-niner&dquo; to the descendants of the three brothers who came over in the &dquo;Mayflower&dquo; was represented; not merely in scores, but in hundreds and thousands.When the war was over, some rash person started in to make a comparative study of these measurements, with the mortifying result of finding that the race had become so abnormally elongated in this process of

Degeneration (medical · Pathology · Political science · Race (biology · Sociology · Gender Studies · Medicine · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies

• The trend of the race; a study of present tendencies in the biological development of civilized mankind

  Samuel J Holmes•1921

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