The Genius Factory Read Online Free PDF Page B

Springs. In 2000, three years after Graham’s death, about 160 of Shay’s descendents, all carrying his “exceptionally valuable” genes, celebrated their ancestor at a reunion in Harbor Springs.
    Shay was Graham’s chief inspiration, but not his only one. All around him, Graham glumly observed the triumph of dullards over brains. Graham sold contact lenses to pro football players, and he was repulsed at how women flung themselves at the mountainous morons. Graham would sometimes eat lunch in the cafeteria of his Pasadena factory—sometimes, but not often, because his employees irritated Graham too much. He thought they didn’t want to improve themselves or work harder. All they cared about was milking the government for more benefits. These indistinct resentments clarified themselves in Graham’s mind. He had no religion, but he found a faith in eugenics. He became fixated on the idea that the world needed more intelligent people because the idiots were multiplying too fast.
    It was not surprising that Graham grew fascinated with genetic degradation when he did, as the 1950s turned the corner into the ’60s. The late 1950s had marked the zenith of men like Graham. In the Sputnik-era scientific-industrial complex, technical businessmen were kings. White men just like Graham—intelligent, arrogant, scientific, and self-assured—dominated 1950s America. (Their rationalist ethos didn’t merely pervade business and government, it also spilled over into other, less obviously scientific aspects of human life. Alfred Kinsey’s pioneering studies, for example, helped popularize the notion of sex as a mechanical act, separable from human emotion. Very little separated Kinsey’s scientific sex from Graham’s scientific breeding.) As a titan of industry and prize inventor, Graham felt he had the right, even the obligation, to impose his eugenic ideas on the idiotic masses. Graham’s genetic dread also reflected his fear of the societal change that he sensed was coming. Graham began worrying about the intellectual decline of Americans at the very instant Americans started to decide they didn’t want to listen to men like Graham. The civil rights and women’s movements were overthrowing the white male order. The demand for Wise Men was withering.
    So at this nervous moment, with the Wise Men still clinging to power, Graham wrote a book to sound the alarm. Part pseudoanthropology, part evolutionary biology, all polemic, Graham’s
The Future of Man
throbbed with panic: Act now or humanity will die! The thrust of
The Future of Man
was that prosperity had ruined mankind, because it had reversed human evolution. Graham, undeterred by the fact that more people were living longer, healthier, and richer lives than at any point in history, concluded that man had peaked 15,000 years ago, in the good old days of the Cro-Magnons. These “scourging gods,” as Graham called them lustfully, had been brilliant and mighty because nature was so ruthless. Only the greatest Cro-Magnons had survived to pass on their glorious genes. But then, the tragedy of civilization! The agricultural revolution had softened man and allowed weaker specimens to breed. Since intelligence was 50 to 90 percent inherited, according to Graham, mankind got stupider as these lesser men multiplied. Natural selection waned. After thousands of years of such regression, half the human population was “what might be described as dull.” Graham believed that the spread of half-wits explained the rise of communism, a political ideology that squashed brilliance and rewarded mediocrity.
    Graham anguished that the few smart people who remained were cooperating in their own extinction by using birth control, an “almost wholly pernicious” invention. The refusal to reproduce was “nature’s unforgivable sin,” Graham wrote.

    The disappearance of genes for high intelligence is a defeat for the uniqueness of man, an erosion of the essence of the human condition. The