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"Robert F. Kennedy Jr." by Gage Skidmore

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” by Gage Skidmore
via Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC by SA 3.0

Charles Fremont Dight has been reincarnated in the worm-gnawed brain of Bobby Kennedy, Jr. A medical professor at the University of Minnesota, Dight hoped to rid society of its unfit members. Dight, an eccentric who lived for a time in a treehouse, wrote about these unfit people in such publications as “Increase of the Unfit, A Social Menace,” and “A Proper Function of Society is to Control Reproduction.” Like other eugenicists, Dight believed in stronger immigration laws to keep the unfit aliens, but emphatically not people of Anglo-Saxon “stock,” out of the country. In 1933, Dight wrote a letter to Adolf Hitler praising the Fuhrer's efforts to "stamp out mental inferiority."

Eugenics, a mainstream science in the early 20th century, sought restrictive marriage laws, isolation of the "unfit" in special colonies for the "feeble minded," and forced sterilization to shield society from the cost of caring for its most vulnerable citizens. Recent immigrants with poor English, children who had what are now recognized...