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The strange career of C.C. Little
Our Back Pages I Local History Column
QUOTES OF THE WEEK
sgIf you're going to hell,
register to vote!
The Bible says to register
to vote!"
- Slogans students seek-
ing to register voters used to
compete for bystanders' attentiarn
with an evangelical preacher on
the Diag Tuesday.
"Well, some girl showing a fake
ID? If somebody shows you a
fake ID, you have every reason to
believe that they're that age."
- JOE FRANCIS, producer of the "Girls Gone Wild" vid-
eos, in a "Dateline" interview Monday. Francis has been
ordered to pay a $500,000 fine as part of a plea agree-
ment regarding his videos' potential use of underage girls.
" I got caught up in the moment and
proposed. I then realized it was a
hasty thing to do and I am not ready
for marriage quite yet.
- Pop star AARON CARTER, on his nine-day
engagement to model/actress Kari Ann Peniche.
side from the building
that bears his name,
former University Pres-
ident Clarence Cook Little
hasn't left a very visible legacy
on campus. His signature proj-
ect, the creation of a Univer-
sity College that would teach
a unified curriculum to all
undergraduates for their first
two years, never got off the
ground. The automobile ban
he instituted in an attempt to
keep students from "necking"
and driving to Prohibition-era
speakeasies is a distant mem-
ory, to which anyone who has
ever tried to park in student
neighborhoods can attest.
It's perhaps just as well,
though, that Little's time at
the University was brief and
the impression he made fleet-
ing. On first glance, it's dif-
ficult to see Little's career as
anything but a blemish on our
collective past.
A Harvard-trained biologist
and a cancer researcher by trade,
Little's passion was eugenics,
the scientific effort to improve
the quality of the human gene
pool. Nowadays, eugenics is
invariably described as a "pseu-
do-science," the discipline ter-
minally discredited through its
associations with Nazi doctrines
of racial superiority that called
for the "unfit" to be killed. In
Little's day, however, eugenics
was a legitimate if somewhat
controversial science, an irre-
sistibly logical and beneficial
application of Darwin's ideas
about natural selection.
Little is indeed far from
the only eugenicist associated
with our fair University. Vic-
tor Vaughn, a former dean of
the medical school whose name
remains on a building on Cath-
erine Street, gave a series of
speeches on eugenics that ulti-
mately spurred state legislation
to sterilize those deemed "fee-
ble-minded." Physicians at the
University's hospital carried
out a large proportion of Mich-
igan's court-ordered involun-
tary sterilizations.
But of the eugenicists in the
University's past, President
Little undoubtedly maintained
the highest profile. He was an
officer in the American Eugen-
ics Society, later becoming
its president. He strongly sup-
ported contraception, in part
because of his eugenic beliefs,
and even went so far as to speak
in favor of birth control from
the pulpit, literally, when giving
a guest sermon. He also aided
Dr. John Kellogg - a prominent
eugenicist who with his brother
founded the cereal company
- by serving as the president of
a Race Betterment Conference
held in Battle Creek in 1928.
Eugenics has fallen out of
favor in part because of its all
but inevitable links to other
unsavory ideas. It's a small step
from arguing that the human
gene pool must be protected
from deterioration to argu-
ing that the stock of "better"
races must be protected from
the influx of the inferior blood
of "weaker" ones. Believing
strongly in the power of hered-
ity to determine fate, eugeni-
cists tended to see in poverty
a confirmation that some indi-
viduals simply couldn't com-
pete effectively; those selected
for involuntary sterilization
came overwhelmingly from the
ranks of the disadvantaged and
powerless.
Yet during the Roaring Twen-
ties, in those heady days before
the world had heard much of
Hitler's ideas about the "master
race," a good Christian busi-
nessman like Kellogg could,
and did, safely sponsor a "Fitter
Families Contest." Its winners
were feted at the Race Better-
ment Conference that Little pre-
sided over, where Kellogg told
them, "in this little town of ours
the beginnings of a Better Race
are being developed"
Little's own address at the
conference reflected his long-
standing concern about the
effects of overpopulation - a
subject he had even broached
in his inaugural address after
becoming president of the Uni-
versity. Speaking in Battle Creek
in 1928, Little observed that due
to advances in medicine, "varia-
tions in physiology that would
have been eliminated by Nature
a few decades ago will careful-
ly be allowed and encouraged
to survive." He fretted that by
counteracting natural selection,
there would be greater num-
bers of "the out-and-out public
charge, the out-and-out defec-
tive, the anti-social, the non-
social individual, who has to
be confined and kept at public
expense," until the costs became
so great that society would sim-
ply have to "develop means to
prevent the production of the
unfit, and to spread information
as to how this can be done to all
intelligent people."
Some of Little's comments
at the Race Betterment Confer-
ence would certainly cause a
firestorm today; one can only
imagine what would happen to
University President Mary Sue
Coleman if she repeated Little's
speculation that perhaps "a
number of the interesting crimi-
nal and near-criminal cases that
we find ... represent the results
See LITTLE, page 12B
TALKING POINTS
Three things you can talk about this week:
1. Marc Jacobs and porn
2 Ouroboros
3. Zach Braff
And three things you
can't:
1. Simulated sex in
University libraries
2. Preachers
3. Zack Braff
DRINK OCF
THE WEEK
Kamikaze
There's a reason professional
wrestling legend Ric Flair
claims he'd order literally 100
kamikazes at every bar, after
every show. As punchy as it is
savory (God bless triple sec!),
the kamikaze is an elemental
shooter, an essential block in
an alcohol enthusiast's educa-
tion and the foremost method
to drink normally unpalatable
quantities of vodka. But yet
there's an element of danger.
The triple sec and lime juice
don't so much mask the vodka
as they do surround - the cit-
rus snap dulling vodka's caustic
bear hug. You can down three
and barely flinch. You can
down six and start rambling
about your parents. Or you can
drink a truly heroic amount and
execute your own version of the
infamous Flair flop.
- Evan McGarvey
TREND OF THE WEEK
Cutting sappy scenes from indie movies to include
candy-rap songs like "Tip Drill."
j
Send fiction and
poetry submissions
Sto cyanj~umi chedu.
BY THE NUMBERS
The current seating capacity of the Michigan Stadium.
Bleacher seats added under the the Big House Plan.
Bleacher seats removed if the proposed stadium
renovation goes through.
RANDOM WIKIPEDIA
ARTICLE OF THE WEEK
Chloe O'Brian
"Chloe O'Brian is a fictional character played by actress Mary Lynn
Rajskub on the television show '24.'
Introduced in the third season of the series, Chloe O'Brian is a senior
analyst at CTU. Her other experience at CTU includes previous posi-
tions as intelligence agent and Internet protocol manager. She received
her education at the University of California-Davis, having received her
BSc in Computer Science.
In '24: The Game,' it's revealed that before coming to CTU Los Ange-
les, she worked at CTU: Washington D.C. with Chase Edmunds.
She displays extraordinary mastery of computer hardware and soft-
ware but has horrible social skills, displaying symptoms consistent with
Asperger syndrome.
Spending most of her time behind a computer terminal, she rarely is
sent on field assignments. However, she has demonstrated proficiency
with handguns and semi-automatic weapons in seasons four and five."