The Golden Age, “The Survival of the Unfit”
“for the science of eugenics has confirmed the instinctive recognition of mankind that leadership is truly in large measure a matter of “divine right”. … Eugenists have ascertained through exhaustive tests that intellectual capacity is inherited, that racial progress is dependent upon the perpetuation of specific individual types who furnish leadership to the masses …”
A signed contributor’s article occupying most of the issue, printed under an editor’s note reading “[An unanswerable demonstration of the hopelessness and impossibility of the dreams of evolutionists.—Ed.]”. Its section headings include “Multiplication of Morons”, “Masses Unfit for Self-Government” and “Moral Bankruptcy of White Humanity”. It states that “the rank and file of the population are themselves morons”, that “contemporary savages linger on in our age of progress as examples of retrogressive peoples whose natural leaders became bred-out”, and on page 84 that “the prevailing world-wide moral laxity may be attributed to two chief factors … the second is racial degeneration”, continuing “If we are to endorse the eugenist view that racial deterioration in human beings is analogous to the breeding [of] scrub cattle in a herd …”
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Provenance and verification note for The Golden Age, The Survival of the Unfit
Confidence note. Read page by page from the item’s djvu.xml on 19 September 2026 and re-checked independently. The article opens on the leaf mapped to printed page 67 with the masthead “Brooklyn, N. Y., Wednesday, November 4, 1925”, the by-line “The Survival of the Unfit By O. L. Rosenkrans, Jr.” and the editor’s note quoted above; the “racial degeneration” passage stands on the leaf mapped to page 84 and the article continues to about page 87. Wording confirmed against the item’s OCR with plain artefacts corrected; the page images were not separately inspected.
Scan provenance. Internet Archive item “Magazines: The golden age, 1925”; printed page numbers from the item's page_numbers.json checked against the masthead “Brooklyn, N. Y., Wednesday, November 4, 1925”.
Notes. The same contributor, O. L. Rosenkrans, Jr., had listed eugenics among “all the latter-days’ fallacies” in his article in the issue of 21 December 1921 (p. 170) and written in his article “The Goal of Evolution” in the issue of 10 May 1922 that “Eugenics would breed men like cattle, and thereby discourage genius” (p. 507). Both of those passages, and the 1923 article “The Sons of Japheth”, carry his by-line, as does this one. The 1925 article takes eugenic premises as established and carries an editor’s note endorsing it as a demonstration against evolutionists.
Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-race-ga-1925-1104-survival-unfit