Hacker Cinema
The Black Stork
1917 · Film · 85 min
Directed by Leopold Wharton, Theodore Wharton
A young man and woman are considering marriage; eugenicist Harry J Haiselden warns that they are ill-matched and will produce defective offspring. He is right; their baby is born defective, dies quickly and floats into heaven.
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Even Rose's article (I haven't read his book yet so I can't really say about that) tiptoes around what was going on here. It wasn't just a naive application of statistics. Rose gets through the Norma story without mentioning eugenics once, but the whole episode is so obviously part of America's pre-WWII eugenics swoon. Beyond specific beliefs about politics, race or genetics, but linked to them, there was a whole Zeitgeist, the collectivist spirit of the age that gave us Busby Berkeley musical numbers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysvQ5MaUbd8 and the IBM company songbook https://www.networkworld.com/article/2333702/a-history-of-singing-the-big-blues.html . This was a time when it was acceptable, indeed it was progressive, to be violently hostile to difference or defectiveness: see for example War Against the Weak https://waragainsttheweak.com/ and, maybe most especially, The Black Stork https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-black-stork-9780195077315 . And of course it's no coincidence that the pioneers of statistics tended to be particular fans of eugenics themselves.
(I am not an expert on anything.)
For context, 1920 is five years after Chicago doctor Harry Haiselden murdered disabled baby John Bollinger to widespread public support from all the best people (Clarence Darrow ofc, Hellen Keller ...), and three years after he released a film about it. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-black-stork-9780195135398