The Super Race: An American Problem — Background and Themes

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The Art of Life Series

THE ART OF LIFE SERIES

_Edward Howard Griggs, Editor_

BY SCOTT NEARING, Ph.D.

WHARTON SCHOOL, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA AUTHOR OF "SOCIAL ADJUSTMENT," ETC.

NEW YORK B. W. HUEBSCH 1919

Copyright, 1912, by B. W. HUEBSCH

First printing, May, 1912 Second printing, May, 1919

TO THE MOTHERS AND FATHERS OF THE SUPER RACE

For ages men have sought to perpetuate their memories in enduring monuments of brass and of stone. Yet, in their efforts to build lasting memorials they have neglected the most enduring monument of all--the Monument of Posterity. These farseeing ones have overlooked their real opportunity; for in posterity--in the achievements of their children's children, men may best hope to reflect a lasting greatness.

I THE CALL OF THE SUPER RACE 13

II EUGENICS--THE SCIENCE OF RACE CULTURE 26

III SOCIAL ADJUSTMENT--THE SCIENCE OF MOLDING INSTITUTIONS 44

IV EDUCATION--THE SCIENCE OF INDIVIDUAL DEVELOPMENT 55

V THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY 75

THE CALL OF THE SUPER RACE

As a very small boy, I distinctly remember that stories of the discovery of America and Australia, of the exploration of Central Africa and of the invention of the locomotive, the steamboat, and the telegraph made a deep impression on my childish mind; and I shall never forget going one day to my mother and saying:--

"Oh, dear, I wish I had been born before everything was discovered and invented. Now, there is nothing left for me to do."

Brooding over it, and wondering why it should be so, my boyish soul felt deeply the tragedy of being born into an uneventful age. I fully believed that the great achievements of the world were in the past. Imagine then my joy when, in the course of my later studies, it slowly dawned upon me that the age in which I lived was, after all, an age of unparalleled activity. I saw the much vaunted discoveries and inventions of by-gone days in their true proportions. They no longer preempted the whole world--present and future, as well as past, but, freed from romance, they ranged themselves in the form of a foundation upon which the structure of civilization is building. The successive steps in human achievement, from the use of fire to the harnessing of electricity, constituted a process of evolution creating "a stage where every man must play his part"--a part expanding and broadening with each succeeding generation; and I saw that I had a place among the actors in this play of progress. The forward steps of the past need not, and would not prevent me from achieving in the present--nay, they might even make a place, if I could but find it, for my feet; they might hold up my hands, and place within my grasp the keen tools with which I should do my work.

The school boy, passing from an attitude of contemplation and wonder before the things of the past into an attitude of active recognition of the necessities of the present, passed through the evolutionary process of the race. The savage, Sir Henry Maine tells us, lives in a state of abject fear, bound hand and foot by the sayings and doings of his ancestors and blinded by the terrors of nature. The lightning flashes, and the untutored mind, trembling, bows before the wrath of a jealous God; the harvest fails, and the savage humbly submits to the vengeance of an incensed deity; pestilence destroys the people, and the primitive man sees in this catastrophe a punishment inflicted on him for his failure to propitiate an exacting spirit--in these and a thousand other ways uncivilized peoples accept the phenomena in which nature displays her power, as the expressed will of an omnipotent being. One course alone is open to them; they must bow down before the unknown, accepting as inevitable those forces which they neither can understand nor conquer.

Civilization has meant enlightenment and achievement. In lightning, Franklin saw a potent giant which he enslaved for the service of man; in famine, Burbank discovered a lack of proper adjustment between the soil and the crops that men were cultivating--thereupon he produced a wheat that would thrive on an annual rainfall of twelve inches; in pestilence, Pasteur recognized the ravages of an organism which he prepared to study and destroy. Lightning, famine and pestilence are, to the primitive man, the threatening of a wrathful god; but to the progressive thinker they are merely forces which must be utilized or counteracted in the work of human achievement.