Today -100: August 8, 1915: So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye

The Italian submarine Nereide is sunk by the Austrian u-boat under the command of George von Trapp.

At the National Conference on Race Betterment, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of the corn flake and weirdo, calls for eugenics to create a “real aristocracy made up of Apollos and Venuses and their fortunate progeny” instead of the growing “aristocracy of lunatics, idiots, paupers, and criminals”. And “Every one of these lunatics possesses the right to vote even in States where women are not given the right of franchise.” Um, “even”? He wants the creation of a “eugenic registry” based on presumably compulsory annual medical inspections and connected in some unspecified way to marriage restrictions, because as we all know, without marriage people are physically incapable of becoming pregnant, that’s just a medical fact.

Emma Goldman is arrested in Portland for distributing illegal literature. The NYT doesn’t elucidate, but it was birth control literature.

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