Someday, I'll be talking to my grandchildren (which is what my wife and I will call the creatures cloned from our genetic material, grown in a vat, and raised by robots) and they'll say, "Tell us again about flash mobs!"

And I'll say, "You lazy kids, why don't you just read that interview I did with the guy who came up with flash mobs?"

"You mean the one where you started with that tortured introduction and where it sounded like you were never going to explain what the hell flash mobs were?"

This is why I don't want children.

Anyway, a flash mob is an event where a large group of people, having received instructions in advance, converge upon a place, do something odd there, and leave peaceably within minutes. For instance, at an early flash mob in Manhattan, participants descended upon Macy's rug department and claimed to be members of a commune in Williamsburg shopping for a "love rug." Sounds amusing, yes? Enough people evidently agreed that what started out as a single forwarded email inviting people to join an "inexplicable mob" turned into a sprawling, global fad practically overnight--and then largely faded away almost as quickly as it appeared.

To find out how and why it all happened, Stay Free! talked to the fellow who sent out the first email, Bill -- or, as he is often known to journalists, "Bill."

Stay Free!: How did you first come up with the idea for flash mobs?

Basically, it started with an email. I created an email address--themobproject@yahoo.com--and forwarded an email to myself, and then I forwarded it to about forty or fifty friends on the premise that they would think, "Oh, Bill's heard about this interesting thing."

I didn't realize it had started out as kind of a con job.

Bill: Yeah, I wanted it to appear like one of those things circulating around the internet.

If you'd just sent it from the Mob Project, they would wonder: how did they get my email address?

Exactly. The original idea was to create an email that would get forwarded around in some funny way, or that would get people to come to a show that would turn out to be something different or surprising. I eventually came up with a lazy idea, which was that the thing would just have one simple, in-your-face aspect to it--there wouldn't be any show, and that the email would be upfront about the fact that it was inviting people to do basically nothing at all.

Well, it wasn't nothing. It was inviting people to have the opportunity to confuse other people.

That's true. But the idea was that the people themselves would become the show, and that just by responding to this random email, they would, in a sense, create something.

They become the show and the audience.

Exactly. I had conceived it specifically as a New York thing. People in New York are always looking for the next big thing. They come here because they want to take part in the arts community, they want to be with other people who are doing creative stuff, and they will come out to see a reading or a concert on the basis of word-of-mouth. Partly they want to find out what everybody else is so excited about, but partly they just want to be a part of the scene. You have this in other places too, but I feel like there's something in New York that makes it kind of a city-wide pastime. Part of what I liked about this idea was that it would be very frank about the pure scenesterism of it. What is it that would make people come to the flash mob? Well, it would be the fact that if it went off as planned, lots of other people would be coming. The desire to not be left out was part of what would grow it. I didn't have all of these grandiose notions about it at the time; I mostly just thought it was funny. But I thought of it as a stunt that would satirize scenester-y gatherings.

In a lot of ways it's so much better than other scenester activities because you don't get stuck in a club for an hour and a half. You're in and out in five minutes.

True. There was something purposely cynical even about the five-to-ten minute constraint, in that I wanted the thing to be readily consumable. "Oh, I can do that, it's only ten minutes, it's right after work, and it's near a major subway line ..."

They were all in the midtown Manhattan area?

Some of them were downtown near Broadway-Lafayette; they were all really accessible. The first mob was going to be at Claire's Accessories at Astor Place. I used to walk by places and think: where would it be really funny if one day there just happened to be a mob of people there? And Claire's Accessories fit that description. It's just this little sleepy store, kind of a hole in the wall. So I picked that place.

And then you got ratted.

About ten minutes before the first mob, I get a call from Eugene, and he's like, "There are seven cops and a police wagon out in front of Claire's Accessories." So I get there and they're not letting anybody stand in front of the store. They made it look as if a terrorist had threatened to wage jihad against Claire's Accessories.

Which, in a way, is just as funny.

But it made me mad. The first email said "Mob #1" and at the bottom I wrote, "Await instructions for Mob #2," or something like that. But at the time, I wasn't necessarily convinced that there would ever be a Mob #2. But now I see the cops, and I'm like, "I've got to find a way to get around this, because we've got to get a future thing." So for Mob #2, I hit on the notion of meeting in pre-mob locations, and then people would come through at the last minute and hand out flyers with the mob location. That worked fine for the second mob, which was at Macy's.

It's like debugging. You run it through the first time, and you see how it can be broken, and then you make sure it can't be broken that way.

I was sad, though, because I had hoped that the thing could be run anonymously. It's not so much because I cared if people knew who had come up with the idea. The bigger issue is that I didn't want it to seem like there was a leader. The project grew when people took it on as their own and forwarded the emails; that was what made the idea work. So it was sad having to resort to the pre-mob-location, because then there had to be people who were clearly in on the planning, walking around with the flyers. If I had figured out text-messaging . . .

... then you could've had text messages arriving.

Yeah, but by and large, the thing worked well and, in a way, the fact that the first one got broken up by the cops helped the project as a whole, because it felt like there was something actually at stake.

Other than when we handed out the flyers, the mobs basically did become leaderless. Sometimes I wouldn't even get there in time to participate. One flash mob was at a shoe store in SoHo. The idea was that people would suddenly swamp the store and get on their cell phones and pretend to be calling their friends and talking about how awesome the shoes were. But by the time I got there, the store was completely full. The sales clerks eventually shut the doors and the rest of us were all stuck out on the sidewalk, looking in. But that's the way that it should be; I'm not really any more inside to the project than anybody else.

So eventually it took off in other cities as well?

Yeah. Wired News wrote a story about the first successful one, Mob #2, and bloggers picked it up, and the email account started getting messages, people saying, "I'm in Chicago, are you gonna do this here?" You know, "I'm in L.A. -- Can I steal your idea?" I was like, "It's not really much of an idea. Go ahead!" I had imagined it as kind of a parody of New York insiderness, and I didn't anticipate the fact that it would take off other places.

But all the places you're naming are big urban areas, and certainly they have something in common with New York -- that drive toward insiderness. At least in Los Angeles.

Yeah, but there's such a big creative group in New York that you can make a living just making fun of the group around you -- whether you're a writer or comedian or artist. In the art world, for example, there are all of these art projects that make fun of the art world. In New York, you can sort of do that. But one of the first places was in Minneapolis, for example, at a mall. The sensibility of the participants seemed very much to be: we're here to show all you people here in the Mall of America that we're thinking on a different plane.

So it was much less of a cynical in-joke on scenesterism and much more of a genuine self-expression. The New York mob was, in a certain way, about anti-expression. It was kind of like, we're all just going to show up and we're going to chant and be a big physical presence for no reason other than we think that it's funny. Whereas in other places it took on almost a "happening" kind of vibe, to express a certain kind of commonality, and to express, say, a certain opposition to corporate space. It was taken up almost entirely in a politically tinged way, even though it was never explicitly political. When it spread to other cities, there always seemed to be a sense of ,"This is a movement." Like, we know this is absurd, but by taking part we're making a statement about the right of the people to peaceably assemble wherever they want.

As it started to spread and as I saw how people were responding to it, it became clear that it meant something different to them. I might have been the only cynical guy from the beginning! I sort of became persuaded about the political relevance of the idea.

And the potential for getting a message across?

I didn't know how they were going to become genuinely political, but I could tell that everybody wanted them to, and, in a way, I became a sort of sociologist just like anybody in the media who was writing about the phenomenon. I had to ask myself, "What is it that so many people are responding to?" To a certain extent, I became an outsider almost the moment the thing took off. I kept doing them, and I kept putting them on, and I kept trying to intuit my way towards ideas for flash mobs that I thought people would find funny.

Why do you think flash mobs took off in so many other places? What need was it fulfilling?

People have been spending a lot of time in virtual communities since the internet took off, and I think people liked the flash mobs because they had an internet component, yet allowed you to see this virtual community made literal and physical.

The 'net made flesh?

Yeah. If, after you get a funny email and forward it along, you asked yourself, "I wonder what would happen if all the people who got this thing showed up at the same place for five minutes?" you'd want to go just to see how many people there were.

I have a theory about why it took off as a vehicle for political statement. I used to go out with someone who was much more politically active, and so I'd go to meetings, and--Christ Almighty!--those things are boring; nothing ever gets decided. The flash mob affords an opportunity for doing something and yet completely sidesteps the whole process of discussing how it's going to happen. It's just, "Here's this opportunity, and if you agree with it, you can come be in on it, and it's going to be very quick."

I think that's true. When people asked me for advice on doing a flash mob in their city, I was basically, like, "Look. It should spread around through email. The gatherings should be less than ten minutes long. And they should be absurd or funny, they shouldn't be explicitly political." But then, people still saw the absurd things as being political.

In wanting to be a part of a flash mob, you're not really expressing anything with content, you're expressing a vague feeling: "I'm unhappy with the way things are going and I want to be out there with people showing our numbers." If you went to the Iraq war protest, you would see tons of people holding signs that you disagree with. But you want to be out there with these people who on some level feel similarly ...

You can't stay home because of the nutjobs.

One thing a lot of people really liked was the fact that the mobs were generally taking place in some kind of commercial space. People wanted the mob to be disruptive.

Was that the first inkling of politicizing it -- a sort of anticonsumerism?

I think that was part of it. Commercial space is quasi-public space. You're welcome to come in so long as you are considering buying something.

So if you do something crazy ...

Once you try to express yourself in a way that indicates that you're not interested in buying anything, you're suddenly a trespasser. And so, when you think in those terms, the idea that all these people who seem to be shoppers show up at a Toys 'R' Us and do something completely out of their minds ...

Like worshipping a dinosaur.

Like worshipping a dinosaur -- there was a big political component to that, even though the literal statement that was made didn't have one.

So flash mobs seem to have mostly quieted, although when the Republican National Convention was here, there were a lot of flash-mob-style protests.

I've seen two strains of flash mobs that still seem to be persistent. One of them is explicitly political -- organizers using flash mobs as a tool for getting people together. They've been doing this First Amendment mob down near Ground Zero --

That's Reverend Billy?

I'm not sure if it's Reverend Billy himself, but somebody in his coterie has been organizing First Amendment mobs.

Yeah, they go to various locations and mill around. It looks like they're just talking on their cell phones, but if you walk around, you notice that all these people on cell phones are reciting the First Amendment, and it's sort of subliminal. Then they get louder and louder.

There are still die-hard flash-mobs-for-the-sake-of-flash-mobs movement people out there. I got an email the other day from a Polish flash mobber who sent me to a website where they're planning a global flash mob day. The idea of flash mob solidarity is fascinating to me. On the one hand, I kind of admire it, because the flash mobs for flash mobs' sake is much closer to my original idea. And yet, I conceived of the flash mobs as a very local phenomenon.

I liked it when people who did flash mobs in other cities would pick places in those cities that made a lot of sense; it would reframe a place as the site of a mob. The idea of a global flash mob does strike me as a little weird. I don't really know what flash mobs mean in other countries, especially in countries with more real public space than we have here.

What's an example of a way people reframed a space in a city?

In San Francisco, they went down into the center of the financial district, on Market Street, and twirled through the crosswalks; they took a show of absurdity to a non-absurd part of town. They also did an event where they rolled out red carpet in front of a BART station and applauded people coming off the subway. That's a funny idea anywhere, but it's even more powerful in San Francisco, because fewer people use the public transportation system there. They're more worthy of applause.

This brings us back to the idea of flash mobs as political protest. You can question whether things like this are useful as political protest, but you could say that about any political protest.

Well, sure. But take, for example, the fact that flash mobs were less than ten minutes long. You don't go and make a political statement and then wilt into the background. That doesn't really work symbolically.

True, but to some extent visibility is defined by whether something is covered by the media. And how many more journalists wrote about people buying a "love rug" than some of the political protests that have happened in New York? Groups try their damnedest to get coverage, and often whether they get coverage depends on whether writers consider it interesting.

I know -- in a way, flash mobs became really a media phenomenon above everything else. I had to make the decision early on as to what to do about the media. At the very first mob, the one that got broken up by the cops, an NPR reporter actually tracked me down. It was sort of fateful, because they had somebody on tape saying, "This was organized by my friend Bill." So when they found me at the bar afterward, I gave them an interview. Given that they already had my name on tape, I had to go by Bill, and so that set the tone from the beginning. Then I decided that I was going to give interviews to every single person who wanted to write about flash mobs. I decided that I had to have a rule, because the mob was an experiment and I had to play the thing out to its end, and so the rule was that the mob exists to grow.

"And if I do as many interviews as possible, it will grow the mob."

Exactly, and I developed a slogan: "anything that grows the mob is pro-mob." I would say that sometimes as a joke, but then at a certain point, I would use it in a serious way to my friends. But I also understood that as the Mob Project got bigger, and as it spread to more and more cities, there was inevitably going to be a backlash, and that, in the end, growing the mob was going to make the mobs less cool, and that thereby the mobs would become less popular. But I had to play the thing out to that end.

Because if there's never a backlash, were you ever popular enough in the first place?

Right, and then I would just have to keep doing the things in perpetuity. So if I could play the thing out to the point where it exploded and then became uncool, then I could just stop, which was basically what happened. The backlash took less than two months. All the different wire services had done stories on us -- the New York Post did a big story, Time Out did a big story, and the New York Times hadn't. So when the woman from the Times called me, she said, "we've sort of gotten in late on this, so we're going to do a story for the Week in Review about it." We do the interview, and it becomes very clear that she is writing the backlash story ... The flash mob phenomenon was such a light thing; there wasn't really a movement to begin with! The movement was a creation of the media.

But how much was the movement a creation of the media? It was aided by the media, but it wasn't created by them. They didn't create the desire in people, though perhaps they prodded them.

The media spread the mob. The media said, "This is the next big thing," and then the New York Times ran the first mob backlash story less than two months after the first mob, which I thought was awesome. I knew that there was going to be a backlash story, but I couldn't have dreamed it would happen that fast.

And in such a great venue!

Yeah, and so that was, on some level, the beginning of the end.

Did you do the last one thinking, "This is going to be the last one?"

Yeah, I told everybody it was the last one. And I actually think if I really had wanted to play it out, I should have kept doing it until the mobs were so lame that no one would come, but I guess my pride got in the way. Really, I should have played the experiment out to the point where I was having mobs and it would just be me saying [in a sad voice], "I guess nobody likes flash mobs no more."

For the movie version, though, that's a good wrap-up.

And they pretty much died out soon after that in other places, with the exception of these places overseas.

Well, I have to say -- good job picking such a self-replicating meme. Lots of people forward email jokes, but nobody knows which one is going to be the next thing.

True. You come up with these ideas that you think are really going to spread, and nobody picks up on them. Eugene and I tried to do this thing at the Republican Convention called "Conservative Children for America." The premise was to have a bunch of children in three-piece suits handing out bizarre pro-conservative tracts using child-related examples about, for example, not being forced to share. It would be pro-conservative propaganda written by children and distributed by children, but their parents would kind of disavow it: "It's just a phase we hope he grows out of." Anyway, I sent this email around trying to recruit children, or parents with children, and the thing just didn't get anywhere. It didn't even get derided, it just went into the atmosphere and plummeted to earth. I thought it was such a good idea.

It is funny, but you've got to have something easy to do. You've got to have a kid and the kid has to have a suit ...

I was prepared to purchase suits for the children. But, yeah, the whole meme-making thing is weird. I have friends who basically make memes for a living -- for art projects that involve spreading ideas through the internet. But things spread for reasons that are unknown to all of us.

Imagine yourself in the heart of Kansas, at the annual state fair, in 1928. Past the dunking booth and Ferris wheel, the stands selling corn dogs and cotton candy, farmers from around the state have gathered to show off the year's yields. Amid the horses, cattle, and hogs, a blue-eyed blonde family of four is displayed on an elevated platform. Over their heads is a large banner: fitter families contest.

Not unlike dog shows today, Fitter Family contests pitted American citizens against one another in a battle to determine whose facial characteristics, posture, health, and habits judges deemed the most fit. The winners were usually Aryans who, if not Christian themselves, could pass as models of godly living – which isn't to suggest that the contests were strictly a rural phenomenon. Fitter Family and similar contests were popular throughout the U.S., a visible face of a long-burgeoning movement that was quickly coming to a head: eugenics.

With roots reaching from the mid-1800s, eugenics was an attempt to apply science – in the form of Mendelian genetics – to improve the human race. Using Mendel's pea-plant experiments as a jumping-off point, eugenicists argued that society should consciously work to breed the best genetic traits in its citizens. There were two main approaches: positive eugenics encouraged persons with desirable traits to breed, and negative eugenics barred "undesirables" from breeding.

Though steeped in the kind of racist and anti-immigrant beliefs generally associated with right-wingers, eugenics ideas were at least as likely to be advocated by social radicals and progressive thinkers as by conservatives. Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Woodrow Wilson, H.G. Wells, Emma Goldman, and Margaret Sanger (the founder of Planned Parenthood) were among its fans. Some, like Sanger and the English critic Havelock Ellis, saw eugenics as a way to liberate women through its promotion of birth control. For those with socialist leanings, eugenics reflected a privileging of society's interests over those of the individual.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about eugenics was its widespread popularity among middle- and upper-class Americans. Popular literature from the late 1800s up through the 1930s was littered with eugenics-inspired language about bettering the human race. Although such language squarely fit progressive ideals at the time, some of the underlying mechanics were downright grisly.

Charles Davenport headed the eugenics movement in the U.S. with the Eugenics Record Office, a group funded largely with Rockefeller and Carnegie dollars. Davenport pushed negative eugenics remedies to prevent births among those deemed genetically undesirable (in order of priority): the "feebleminded," paupers, alcoholics, criminals, epileptics, the insane, the constitutionally weak, people predisposed to specific diseases, deformed persons, and those born deaf, blind, or mute.

Few of these problems could be scientifically tied to genes, of course, but Davenport was seldom troubled by such facts. The "feebleminded" diagnosis alone was so vague and elastic – applying to anyone deemed stupid or immoral – as to be meaningless. Nonetheless, Davenport and his cronies called for segregating, incarcerating, sterilizing and castrating all such persons. (Why castration? Some eugenicists argued that, though sterilization prevented people from breeding, the operation would encourage the unfit to have more and more sex, and spread disease, once reproduction was no longer an issue. Castration, needless to say, solved that.)

Such harsh remedies were deemed necessary to prevent the unfit from polluting the gene pool and were surprisingly well-received by government officials. The U.S. Department of Agriculture was closely aligned with the American Breeders Association, a prominent supporter of eugenics. And in 1907, states began sterilizing citizens they considered a problem. Indiana was first, followed by Washington, Connecticut, Virginia, and California. Often surgery was performed without the victims' knowledge. Poor women admitted to a hospital for a minor illness might leave with their tubes tied, only to discover later that they couldn't get pregnant.

The vast majority of sterilizations were carried out on the underclass: poor people, immigrants, those in jails or public mental hospitals. (Delaware even managed to criminalize marriage between poor people!) Making matters worse, the institutions set up to serve these populations were in some cases the very forces that enslaved them. As Edwin Black notes in his book War Against the Weak, eugenics infected many reform movements, from child welfare to public health. The New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration was founded to help immigrants but employed investigators to screen out "defectives." The National Committee on Prison Labor expanded its mission to include documenting hereditary criminality. New York State's Commissioner of Public Health advocated a plan by Lucien Howe to investigate hereditary blindness. The investigation never happened, but if it had gone according to Howe's plan, the state would have ultimately rounded up blind people and imprisoned them, an effort to save taxpayers' money.

Men like Howe were eugenics extremists, but even he found some mainstream support. As a committee chair within the American Medical Association, Howe got the AMA to endorse a law that would allow taxpayers to issue injunctions against others' marriages if one person had eye defects – including nearsightedness.

And these are just the negative eugenics efforts! Attempts to push positive eugenic remedies were equally far-out, with calls for polygamy, systematic mating, and even marriage among cousins – all in an attempt to multiply desirable bloodlines. Some argued that the government should offer genetic superiors financial incentives to have children, a tactic later used by Nazi Germany. As one Dr. Sharp of Indiana Reformatory argued in 1902: "We make a choice of the best rams for our sheep ... and keep the best dogs. ... How careful then should we be in the begetting of children?"

According to Black, British eugenicists even argued that the military should issue eugenic stripes to the "meritorious wounded," presumably to "offset the injuries that might make such men less attractive to women." War was considered dysgenic – it killed off society's best. Eugenicists therefore opposed it. (By the same measure, eugenicists would have supported war today; today's military is disproportionately made up of ethnic minorities and immigrants, groups once widely considered to be genetically unfit.)

The eugenics movement finally started to crumble with the rise of Nazi Germany. Partly inspired by eugenics efforts in the United States, Hitler's government began a national program to round up and sterilize the unfit. Many leading eugenicists in the States watched in awe. A prominent Virginia doctor, dismayed at the rapid growth of undesirables, urged the state legislature to broaden its sterilization law by warning, "Hitler is beating us at our own game!" Such true believers held to their guns with the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, applauding Hitler and seething with envy as their utopian fantasies played out across the Atlantic. But public support for eugenics withered rapidly, funding dried up, and serious scientists did everything they could to distance the study of genetics from its horrible cousin. By the end of World War II, the eugenics movement was dead – so dead, in fact, that in this era of gene splicing and cloning, we seldom hear of it.

Daniel Kevles published what may be the best history of eugenics to date in 1985, In the Name of Eugenics (Harvard University Press). Kevles is also the author of The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (Harvard), The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science, and Character (W.W. Norton); and co-author of The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project (Harvard) and Inventing America: A History of the United States (W.W. Norton). In addition, Kevles has written for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. Kevles is the Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale University and has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, and Princeton. Though currently immersed in a new project – a history of intellectual property in living organisms – he took time to talk to Stay Free! by telephone. – Carrie McLaren

STAY FREE!: People who pushed negative eugenics argued that the genes of dark-skinned people are inferior and that unless the state prevented them from multiplying, the inferiors would take over and pollute the human race. How did this idea fit their Darwinist beliefs? It seems to contradict the idea of "survival of the fittest."

DANIEL KEVLES: That's an excellent point. There's an inherent contradiction in eugenic doctrine in relationship to evolutionary theory. Evolutionary theory holds that the definition of fitness is your ability to reproduce and have your children survive. In eugenic doctrine, the definition of fitness is the opposite. They define fitness by who thrives in society socially. Educated, wealthy people actually reproduce at a slower rate, but eugenicists want them to have as many children as possible. Their charge that lower income groups are proliferating too rapidly is in a sense anti-Darwinian.

STAY FREE!: Did they ever address that contradiction?

KEVLES: No, not really.

STAY FREE!: There's an interesting quote by Margaret Sanger about Charles Davenport in your book. You write: Sanger recalled that Davenport, in expressing worry about contraception of elites, "used to lift his eyes reverently and, with his hands upraised as though in supplication, quiver emotionally as he breathed. 'Protoplasm. We want protoplasm!' " How important was religion to eugenics?

KEVLES: Well, I don't think it was fundamental. Eugenics was essentially a secular religion. In the late 19th century, evolution posed a serious challenge to Christianity, so people began searching for some kind of substitute and a number of them found it in science.

STAY FREE!: But weren't some eugenicists religious and enthusiastic about science?

KEVLES: I wouldn't say that they were religious in a conventional Christian sense. A lot of them were agnostic, some were atheist. Even clerics felt that they had to reconcile their own beliefs with science.

STAY FREE!: You wrote that business talent wasn't seen as a genetically desirable trait and that there were few businessmen in the movement. Why do you think that is?

KEVLES: The main proponents of eugenics were white, middle-class folks whose criteria for achievement were fundamentally scholastic – getting good grades in school, getting ahead in one of the professions. They felt threatened by industrial corporate power and didn't particularly identify with the materialism of business success.

STAY FREE!: In War Against the Weak, Edwin Black argues that eugenicists were mostly elites, not middle-class.

KEVLES: I think he's mistaken; his book was fundamentally a polemical one. They were elites in the sense that they included philanthropic elites and university elites. But there was very broad middle-class support for eugenics. The important thing is to ask why.

STAY FREE!: What are the signs that there was broad middle class support?

KEVLES: Eugenics doctrines were widespread in mainstream magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and newspapers. The people who organized eugenics activities on a local level were the solid middle class of their communities, both in Britain and the United States.

STAY FREE!: Eugenics language was common among ad men and people who worked in public relations. In the 1920s, they would constantly refer to the public's "twelve-year-old" mind and refer to immigrants as barnyard animals.

KEVLES: These were common tropes of popular culture. This isn't business culture as such; advertising people aren't the captains of industry.

STAY FREE!: What kind of economic arguments did the eugenics movement make?

KEVLES: There was one fundamental economic argument: if we could rid ourselves of the genetically inadequate, who were burdens on society – requiring asylums for the feebleminded or homes for the poor – we could reduce the cost to taxpayers. You see this again and again.

STAY FREE!: Do you think extremists like Davenport were seriously concerned about money or was it more of a rhetorical strategy to win popular support?

KEVLES: Davenport was concerned about keeping taxes down; his position was both rhetorical and real. The two are not inconsistent. I don't think that these folks were just deliberately manipulating that rhetoric in order to advance a kind of subtextual doctrine.

STAY FREE!: Was there any connection between the eugenics movement and libertarianism? Ayn Rand, "greed is good," "Abolish the government" – that sort of thing?

KEVLES: Quite the opposite. Even though there were conventional political conservatives in the eugenics movement, they never took the position that government should interfere in, say, human reproduction. That was a departure in laissez-faire for them. At the same time, they were consistent with eugenicists on the left who found it natural to evoke the powers of the state in advancing eugenics doctrine.

STAY FREE!: I guess I'm thinking of Herbert Spencer, the English philosopher who influenced eugenics – and how he argued that giving to the poor harms society by interfering with Darwinism.

KEVLES: Eugenicists are not talking about giving to the poor – they're talking about eliminating their ability to reproduce.

STAY FREE!: Right. But I'm asking whether eugenicists would be opposed to giving, or opposed to charity.

KEVLES: Eugenicists on the right were by and large reluctant to provide the poor with relief. Those on the left were not; in fact, they tended to endorse environmental improvement along with sterilization.

STAY FREE!: Retarded women were considered sources of debauchery. What was that about?

KEVLES: This was Henry Goddard's theory: that the sexual impulses of feeble-minded women were not restrained and as a result they became prostitutes and illegitimate mothers. Basically, this is an uncritical interweaving of middle-class morality with the metaphors of science.

STAY FREE!: After World War II, scientists backed away from studying eugenics to studying genetics. Eugenics organizations and publications renamed themselves. Human Betterment League of North Carolina changed its name to the Human Genetics League. The Annals of Eugenics became the Annals of Human Genetics. The Galton Eugenics Laboratory became the Galton Laboratory of the Department of Genetics. How much of this was a sincere attempt to get away from the horrors of eugenics verses a public relations effort?

KEVLES: Scientists stayed away from human genetics between the wars because, first of all, human beings are not the best subjects for studying heredity; we reproduce slowly and have fewer children than, say, fruit flies. There are profound methodological problems. But another reason was that eugenics was the principal arena in which human heredity was studied – eugenics gave human genetics a bad name. So scientists faced a double task. One was to get rid of the race and class bias; that's why people like James V. Neel focused on traits that were purely physically determined, such as sickle-cell anemia. And second was solving the methodological problems. As far as scientists were concerned, I don't think public relations had anything to do with it.

STAY FREE!: The critics you write about were mainly intellectuals. Was there a popular critique of eugenics?

KEVLES: There were certainly popular dissents, which took the form of resistance to sterilization laws and other eugenics policies.

STAY FREE!: Was there organizing around these issues?

KEVLES: First, you've got to remember that the sterilization laws are local and state laws. They're not national. So the opposition is at the state level. Dissent was cast initially in both civil libertarian terms – you know, "this is just wrong, the state shouldn't have the power to sterilize men or women." And secondly on constitutional grounds. States were charged with violating equal protection of the laws, due process, and the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Once Hitler got going in the 1930s, a growing number of people turned against eugenics and eugenic sterilization because they saw what Hitler was doing with it.

STAY FREE!: You are currently working on a book about engineering and the ownership of life. Do you see any connections between this and your eugenics research?

KEVLES: No. Eugenics took some inspiration from plant and animal breeders but the influence didn't run the other way. The historian Harriet Ritvo argued in her book The Animal Estate that the emphasis in the nineteenth century given by breeders to so-called pure breeds of, say, Holstein cows was an expression of their commitment to a social aristocracy. I think there may be some truth to that. But there are other good biological and economic reasons why breeders wanted to emphasize pure breeds.

STAY FREE!: One of my pet peeves is the amount of time and money spent on finding, say, a "breast cancer gene" while comparatively few resources are put into eliminating carcinogens and other pollutants from the environment. I remember once reading that people with a certain gene can't tolerate NutraSweet, as if the problem is their genes, not the product.

KEVLES: I think that we as a society are more inclined to focus on the individual susceptibility to disease than we are on public health measures. It's understandable why we do that. Partly, you have companies that are financially motivated to produce NutraSweet or to make gene discoveries. But at the same time we are disinclined to pursue public health measures because they can be very expensive. It seems to me that a wise society would pursue both. That is, I don't think NutraSweet should be taken off the market, because millions of people want it. So you find out who's susceptible to adverse reactions. People are allergic to any number of things, but that doesn't mean that they should be removed from the market. What's the frequency of allergic reactions to this stuff?

STAY FREE!: I don't know. What bothers me is that the onus is placed on the individual. It's not my fault if I have a reaction from consuming NutraSweet; I'm supposed to go get a genetic test to find out?

KEVLES: Both sides should be responsible. But here's my question: If a tenth of a percent of the population has a bad reaction, do you deprive the rest of the population of it? Or do you put a warning label on it?

STAY FREE!: Well, I think that's a question that really needs to be asked.

KEVLES: The FDA asks that kind of question all the time. It's just too easy to write off these things as corporations forcing themselves and their products on people. They wouldn't work if people didn't want to use them.

STAY FREE!: But more people wouldn't use them if they knew they are associated with health problems.

KEVLES: I think that publicity of these side effects is important. I certainly support that. But we have a tendency in our society to attribute a lot to environmental causes rather than to things that are inherent within ourselves. Take cancer, for example. Cancer is a joint product of environmental causes, your own genes, and also accidents. Genetic accidents. A mutation in a gene that controls cell growth can make the cell cancerous. These mutations can arise from carcinogens in the environment or in your diet, but they can also arise from accidents in cellular replication. To say all this is a result of environmental carcinogens is just wrong.

STAY FREE!: Well, most people may assume environmental toxins cause cancer, but it seems to me that very little is done about it. I guess this says something about where I sit on the political spectrum.

KEVLES: I'm not saying that corporations that pollute ought not be held to account. They should. But we also have a tendency to believe in environmental perfectionism in the United States; it's in our culture. That leads us to expectations that are unrealistic about what we can accomplish for our health. The fact of the matter is that we're all mortal.

STAY FREE!: What kind of eugenics laws exist now? If I had a retarded son could I legally have him sterilized?

KEVLES: It would depend on the state and the circumstance. A number of states have gone far in the other direction and made it very difficult; I think there are good reasons why you might want to have a retarded child sterilized. When my book came out in the mid-'80s there was a case in California where a woman was concerned that her young daughter, who was severely retarded, might become pregnant in a hospital; being affectionate and unknowing, the girl might submit to some orderly's advances. The mother ran up against state law in California that wouldn't allow her to sterilize her daughter. So she eventually took her case to the California Supreme Court and won there. I'm not an expert on the laws, but I know generally that it has been difficult.

STAY FREE!: The fear that people are getting stupider seemed to come in cycles throughout the 20th century, at least in the U.S. and Britain. Every so often, there's an outcry about the decline of national intelligence – even in the 1950s and 1970s, long after the decline of eugenics. What do you think is behind this?

KEVLES: I think these things come from a variety of sources. One of the main sources is racism in American culture. The folks who are usually the target of these charges are minority groups and, in more recent years, recent immigrants.