THE BABIES IN THE SIDESHOW - A President Dies While Babies Live & The Movement That Wanted Them Dead

👶 THE BABIES IN THE SIDESHOW: When Power Failed & Love Worked 💔

🏛️ Buffalo, September 6, 1901. President McKinley shot at 4:07 PM. 300 yards away: Martin Couney saving premature babies in glass incubators. The president dies. The babies live.

🔍 TONIGHT: 👶 Martin Couney: saved 6,500 babies over 40 years (may not have been a real doctor) 🔫 McKinley assassination complete story + the X-ray machine nobody used 🧬 Eugenics movement at the SAME fairs arguing "weakling" babies should die 🏆 First Fitter Families contest: Topeka, Kansas, 1920 (judging humans like livestock) ⚖️ Buck v. Bell: Supreme Court legalized forced sterilization (never overturned) 💕 Lucille Horn: 2 pounds at birth, lived to 96, five children

Part of White City Series exploring World's Fair dark secrets.

🏠 Kansas connection: First eugenics contest held at Kansas State Fair. Bronze medals for "genetic worth."

From presidential assassination to babies fighting for life—this is about who gets to live and who decides.

Perfect for fans of: True crime, medical history, presidential assassinations, hidden American history, disability rights

#JustKillingTime #MartinCouney #McKinleyAssassination #Eugenics #KansasHistory #IncubatorBabies #Buffalo1901 #ElizabethStanton

👶 Same fairground. Same day. Power failed. Love worked. 💔

🎧 Time Killer Files: JustKillingTimePodcast@gmail.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:16

In 1920, a woman gave birth to twin grooms. One of the twins died at birth. The other was alive. Barely, she weighed two pounds. Her father said later that she was small enough to hold in one hand. The hospital told him there was not a chance in hell she would live. Her name was Lucille Ford, and her father refused to accept what the hospital had told him. He wrapped her in a blanket, he hailed a taxicab, and he took his two-pound daughter to the only place in New York City he knew that might be able to save her. Coney Island. Not a hospital, not a university research center, not a medical clinic funded by the city of New York. Coney Island. The boardwalk past the Ferris wheel and the roller coasters, past the Barkers, calling out for the tattooed lady and the sword swallower. He took her to a building with a sign that read, Living Babies in Incubators. And inside that building, in glass fronted incubators with warm filtered air and nurses who fed the babies every two hours, Lucille Fawn spent the next six months. And then she went home. She lived to be ninety-six years old. Now here's what Lucille Vaughn said to the story cord interview in NPR. She said, You know, there weren't many doctors then that would have done anything for me. Ninety-four years later, here I am, all in one piece, and I'm thankful to be here. The man who ran the incubator show for 40 years, his name was Martin Cooney. He saved 6,500 babies and he never charged their parents a sit. But that's not why I'm starting with Lucille Horne tonight. I'm starting with her because in 1901, 19 years before Lucille was born, Martin Cooney had his incubator babies on display at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. And on September 6, 1901, at 4.07 p.m., while Cooney was feeding premature babies 300 yards away, a 28-year-old mill worker named Leon Chulgotz walked up to the president, William McKinley, in the Temple of Music and shot him twice. The president died eight days later. And the babies lived. Tonight we're in Buffalo, New York, in 1901, where power failed and love worked where the official system couldn't save the president. But an unofficial system was saving babies the medical establishment had written off as hopeless. You're listening to Just Killing Time. I'm your host, Elizabeth Stanton. This is a true crime and conspiracy podcast that bought stories that keep us up at night. We've spent two episodes at the 1893 World's Fair, building the White City, meeting Herman Mudget. Tonight we're gonna fast forward eight years to Buffalo in 1901, the Pan American Exposition, where two stories happened on the same fairground that tells you everything about America at the dawn of the 20th century. One story is about the assassination of the president, and the other is about a man who spent 40 years saving babies at side shows, while the eugenics movement at the same fairs argued those babies should die. This isn't just true crime. This isn't just medical history. This is the question of who gets to live and who decides. So the Pan American Exposition, it opened May 1st, 1901 in Buffalo, New York, and the theme was hemispheric unity, North, Central, and South America coming together in friendship and treat. The reality was the United States was just showing off. So the electrical power generated by Niagara Falls, the largest display of electric lighting ever assembled, buildings designed to showcase American architecture, American engineering, and of course American prosperity. This was America at the dawn of the 20th century dyslexia. President McKinley had been reluctant to attend the exposition at first. His wife Ida was in poor health and she rarely traveled. But the exposition organizers persisted. Having the president attend would legitimize the event. McKinley had finally agreed to a two-day visit September 5th and 6th. He would tour the exhibits, give a major foreign policy speech, and attend a public reception where ordinary Americans could shake his hand. It was supposed to be a trick. McKinley arrived September 4th, and on September 5th he toured the exhibits and gave his speech on foreign policy. It was, by all accounts, brilliant. He talked about America's role in the world, about trade and diplomacy, about the phone and telegraph bringing nations closer together. He said, Isolation is no longer possible or desirable, he said. The period of exclusiveness is past. And in the most important foreign policy speech of his presidency, this would be his last. That evening, his secretary George Cortalayu, approached him about the next day's schedule. There was supposed to be a public reception at the Temple of Music, a chance for ordinary visitors to meet the president. Corteleu recommended canceling it. He said there was too many people. It's too hard to secure, and way too much risk. McKinley refused. Why should I be afraid? No one would want to hurt me, he said. And I just want to pause here on McKinley's faith in the average American person. This wasn't naivete. This was 1901. McKinley had been president for four and a half years. Lincoln had been assassinated in 1865. Garfield had been shot in 1881. McKinley knew the risks, but he also believed something about democracy. That a president needed to be accessible to the people who elected him. And that belief would ultimately kill him. The Temple of Music was designed to hold 2,000 people. In my poor Pien, there were more than 50,000 people were waiting outside. The building was ornate, beautiful, but it wasn't built for crowd control. It had narrow doorways, limited exits, and no real security infrastructure. President McKinley took his position near the main altar. To his right stood his Secretary George Cortillo, and to his left a Secret Service agent named George Foster. Behind him another agent named Samuel Ireland. Three men protecting the president of the United States in a room with 2,000 strangers. At 407, a young man approached the receiving line. His name was Leon Chokos, and he was 28 years old, he was unemployed and originally from Detroit, but he was mostly living now in Cleveland. He'd been at the exposition for three days, apparently pleading. He was wearing a dark suit, his hair was neatly combed, and he looked like any other young man waiting to meet the president. Except for one thing, his right hand was wrapped in a white handkerchief. The Secret Service agents noticed it. They assumed Choklovs had injured his hand and couldn't remove his glove for the handshake. It seemed polite of him to wrap it rather than force an awkward handshake. They were completely wrong. Under the handkerchief was a thirty-two caliber Ivor Johnson revolver that Cholkovs had purchased in Buffalo three days earlier for four dollars and fifty cents. Cholkov's reached the president at 4.07 PM and McKinley extended his left hand to shake Cholkov's uninjured left hand, a gracious gesture to accommodate what he assumed was an injury. Cholkovs pushed McKinley's hand away and pressed his rat right hand against the president's chest. Two shots, point blade range, through the handkerchief. The first bullet struck a button and glanced off harmlessly. The second entered the abdomen and launched somewhere in the back muscles. That's according to the Buffalo Evening News. McKinley staggered backward. His face went white. He looked down at his white vest now spreading with blood and said, I believe I've been shot. The template music erupted. Agent Foster tackled Cholskov. Iten Jit Ireland drew his gun, and the crowd passed forward, then scattered. Someone screamed, Lynch him! And the brass band, which had been playing during the reception, stopped mid-note. And President McKinley, bleeding and in shock, looked at the crowd pressing towards his attacker and said, Boys, don't let them hurt him. Don't let them hurt him. Multiple witnesses recorded McKinley saying this. Even shot, even dying, McKinley's first instinct was to protect his attacker for mob justice. They carried the president to the ex physician's emergency hospital. It was a small building, barely equipped for anything more than serious heat struck. The doctors on duty were general practitioners, not trauma physicians. And they performed emergency surgery on a folding table with a handheld mirror reflecting sunlight for illumination. They found the first bullet and removed it, and the second bullet, the one that was killing him, they couldn't find it. And for seven days it looked like McKinley might survive. The doctors issued optimistic bulletins, the president was alert, talking, even asking about the exphysician attendance numbers. But the second bullet had torn through his stomach, pancreas, and left kidney, and it had created a path for infection that 1901 medicine just could not heal. And on September 14th, 1901, at 2 15 AM in the morning, President McKinley died of gangrene an infection. At 3 30 a.m. that same morning, Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in as the 26th president of the United States. He was 42 years old, the youngest president in American history. Leon Chalkovs was executed by electric chair on October 29th, 1901, and his last words were, I killed the president because he was an enemy of the good people, the good working people. Leon Chalkovs wasn't the anarchist that newspapers made him out to be. He was born in 1873 in Detroit, the son of Polish immigrants. He'd worked in steel murals around Cleveland, and by all accounts, he was a quiet, reliable, and not particularly political person. The anarchist movement immediately disowned him after the assassination. He wasn't a political radical. He wasn't part of an organized movement. He was an unemployed gunman who decided that the president represented everything that was keeping him down. And he decided to do something about that. There is a through line from Choleskov to every lone wolf attacker who ever wrote a manifesto about how the system failed him. It's not about politics. It's about a particular kind of American narcissism that says if my life isn't working, someone needs to die for it. While President McKinley was bleeding out in the Temple of Music, Dr. Martin Cooney was feeding premature babies 300 yards away. Except he wasn't really a doctor. Martin Arthur Cooney was a German Jewish immigrant who had apprenticed under a real doctor, Pierre Constant Baden, a French obstetrician who had pioneered infant incubator technology in the 1890s. But Cooney had no medical degree, no license to practice medicine, and no official credentials of any kind. What he had was an absolute genius for keeping premature babies alive, and a carnival Barker's understanding of how to fund it. According to Don Raffle, The Strange Case of Dr. Cooney, she wrote this. Cooney's exhibits were called child hatcheries or infant incubator exhibits. He charged 25 cents admission for the public to view premature babies being kept alive in glass incubators, and he never charged the parents a penny. And I will say this, 25 cents in today's money is about eight or nine dollars. So that's what he charged for you to view his babies. And he never charged the parents a Here's how it worked. Hospitals would call Cooney when they had a premature baby, they couldn't say. The technology just didn't exist. The expertise wasn't there. And the hospital would essentially give up. Cooney would take the baby, transport it to his exhibit. It was specifically equipped incubator, set it up with round-the-clock care with trained nurses, and display the baby to paying crowds while keeping it alive with techniques that hospitals had rejected as experimental or impractical. At the Pan American Exposition in 1901, Cooney had 64 premature babies in his incubator exhibit. All of the babies that Buffalo hospitals had pronounced too premature to survive. 63 of them lived. That's a 98 survival rate in 1901 for babies that the medical establishment had written off as hopeless. So let me put that into context for you. In 1901, the infant mortality rate in the American cities was around 140 deaths per thousand births, and that's 14%. For premature babies, it was much higher. Hospitals didn't attract survival rates because so few premature babies survived. And here's this guy with no medical degree working out of a carnival exhibit, achieving a 98% survival rate for babies that doctors had given up. That's not just impressive, that's revolutionary. And he was doing it while charging admission to fund the operation. But of course, the medical establishment, they wanted nothing to do with Martin Cooney. Before Martin Cooney, the standard treatment for a premature baby in an American hospital was this: a warm blanket, perhaps a hot water bumble, and very little less. Most premature infants died. The medical establishment largely accepted this as inevitable. Some physicians went further than acceptance. They argued actively that intervention was a mistake. This is what they said. Doctors had long labeled premies as weeklings that couldn't be saved. That feeling promoted a question in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in 1901 regarding whether it was even worthwhile to try. These runs might pollute the gene pool, and it was inferred. And one Chicago doctor even went so far as to make a film with the tagline Kill Detect sorry Kill Defectives Save the Nation. Kill defectives, save the nation. That wasn't a fringe position. That was a film made by a practicing physician and distributed as part of a broader cultural moment in which the idea of letting the weakest infants die was treated as reasonable public health policy. The incubator itself wasn't Cooney's invention. It came from a French obstetrician and who saw in the 1870s a device warming baby chickens and a Parisian zoo and thought, why not babies? His student, Dr. Pierre Bunin, refined the design and was convinced that technology could save the enormous number of lives. He was also convinced the medical establishment wouldn't adopt it without a dramatic public demonstration. So in 1896, he sent his associate, a young man named Morgan Martin Cooney, to the Great Industrial Exposition in Berlin with six incubators and permission to borrow six premature babies from a Berlin hospital. Cooney asked the Berlin Charity Hospital to borrow some premature babies for this experiment, and they granted his request, thinking that the children had little chance of survival anyways. And that's according to the Columbia University Department of Surgery, the History of Medicine. The hospital lit the babies because they expected them to die regardless. What did they have to lose? Well, all six survived. The exhibit was called Kinderbrust and Schnot, the child hatchery, and it was a wild success. Cooney had found something the public would pay to see the premature babies in incubators. Not because they were freaks, because they were miraculous. Because a two-pound human being fighting to live was one of the most compelling things a person could watch. And that public fascination could fund the medicine. Martin Cooney told a consistent story about himself throughout his life. He was French born, he studied medicine in Berlin and Leipzig, and he'd apprenticed under Pierre Boudin at the Paris Maternit Hospital, and he had a medical degree. Well, researchers who spent years investigating his background found a different story. 1869 in the town of Krotozin, which was then part of German Prussia and is now Poland. Koone's cultural and professional background remain contested as Cooney repeatedly changed the details about his personal background throughout his life. Although he said he studied medicine in Leipzig and Berlin, there was no evidence he actually was enrolled there in the 1910 census, and as Cooney reportedly listed his occupation as surgical instruments, but in 1930 his occupation on the census was physician. Thus, Cooney's entire background history may have been a fraud. And that's according to Fibonacci MD, the history of the Coney Island incubator babies. His entire background may have been fraud. The man who saved 6,500 premature babies over 40 years may have been a showman who taught himself neonatal and then studied and invented a medical pedigree to give his work credibility. I've been sitting with this for a while and I want to tell you where I land on it. First, it's entirely possible that Cooney wasn't a licensed physician, and also his medical practice was excellent. The two things are not mutually exclusive. He hired real doctors and real nurses, and he maintained exacting standards of hygiene. His survival rates were documented and demonstrated better than hospitals of the era. The outcomes speak for themselves. And second, there's something almost appropriate about the fact that the person who saved babies the medical establishment had written off was himself someone the medical establishment would have written off. An uncredentialed Jewish immigrant from Prussia operating a baby sideshow. This wasn't the man the American Medical Association was going to listen to, regardless of his credentials. The credentials may have been the only way he could get anyone to pay attention. And third, we're in a series about people who use unconventional methods to accomplish things the official systems refused to do. Tesla used the world's fairs to demonstrate wireless electricity. Cooney used sideshows to save babies. Both died broke, both changed the world. I'm not saying deception is acceptable, I'm saying look at what he actually did. Whether or not Cooney was a credential physician, the operation he ran was genuinely sophisticated. When a premature baby arrived at his exhibit, the ipith received a bath, and if able to swallow a small dose of brandy to serve to stimulate uh circulation, and then it was placed in one of the glass froted incubators which maintained constant, consistent warm temperature with filtered air. Cooney employed teams of wet nurses who lived on site. He had strict rules about the Their diet, nothing that might affect the quality of their milk. The babies were fed every two hours around the clock. Nurses took the infants out of the incubators and held them, huddled them in front of audiences because Cooney understood that formal medical science confirmed it was human touch was part of what kept premature infants alive. That's beautiful. He never charged the parents, not once. He covered all costs through the 25 cent admission fee. According to Open Culture, the incubated babies of Coney Island, they said Cooney took in babies from all backgrounds, regardless of race or social class. A remarkably progressive policy. Especially when he started out, he did not take a penny from the parents of the babies. So what a fact right there. All races, both classes, no charge. On a boardwalk in the early 1900s, in a country with institutionalized racial segregation, Martin Cooney ran a neonatal unit that didn't turn anyone away. Now, while Cooney was saving babies at world's fairs across America, something else was happening at those same fairs. Something darker. Eugenics. The word comes from the Greek for good birth. I'm so sorry my dachshunds were barking. And my labrador, because of course, why wouldn't they? Eugenics was coined in 1883 by Francis Golden, a cousin of Charles Darwin, who believed that human desirable traits were heredable and that society could improve itself by encouraging the quote unquote fit to reproduce and discouraging or preventing the quote-unquote unfit from doing so. By the early 1900s, eugenics wasn't just at fringe theory. It was mainstream science. It was taught at universities, and it was funded by the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation. Just hang on to that one for just a second. So the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation. It was taught there. And it was supported by Theodore Roosevelt, the Supreme Court, and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and the W.E.B. Du Bois. So prominent Americans, among them being Theodore Roosevelt, Stanford University President, David Starr Jordan, W. E. B. Dubois, and Margaret Sanger supported the eugenics movement, as did such organizations as the National Federation of Women's Clubs, the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, and various religious organizations. This is according to Teaching America History Chapter 19, the Progressive Pair of Eugenics. And if you remember, Margaret Sanger, she was the one that uh created Grand Parenthood. So that's just another little tidbit. This I want to be very careful here because this is the most important thing I'm gonna say in this entire series. The eugenics movement is usually taught, if it's taught at all, as something that happened in Nazi Germany, as something that America helped defeat. And that's framing is a lie. The Nazi eugenics program was explicitly modeled on American law. The Germany's forced sterilization programs were inspired by what was being done in California. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were drafted with reference to American item misgenation statutes. When Nazi lawyers were looking for legal precedents to support racial hygiene legislation, they cited American state law. This is documented. This is not a conspiracy. This is the record, and I want you to know that. The most visible public face of American eugenics at the state fair level was the Better Babies and the Fitter Family Contests. These weren't secretive or shameful. They were popular family entertainment that drew large crowds. Better Baby Contests began in 1908 at the Louisiana State Fair. Babies between 6 and 48 months were judged by physicians and nurses on a 1,000-point scale. Points were deducted for defects, and the baby with the most points won a trophy. A physician scores a baby in precisely the same way as a judge of experience in livestock scores cattle, horses, and hogs, and a gym expert scores diamonds. That's according to the Pensacola Journal of 1913, describing the Better Babies Contest judging process. So by 1913, the Women's Home Companion magazine was sponsoring Better Baby Contests at fairs across 40 states. By the 1920s, they devolved into fitter families for future fire science contests, which judged not just individual babies, but entire family lineages. And this makes me say. Not to feel shame. None of us chose what happened at a fair before we were born, but just to know it because knowing it is the first step towards understanding what the eugenics movement actually was and where it actually led. So Indiana passed the first compulsory sterilization law in 1907, and it permitted the forced sterilization of people deemed by the state to be mentally defective, criminal, or otherwise unfit to reproduce. And by the time the movement peaked, 27 other states had passed similar laws. In 1927, the United States Supreme Court upheld compulsory sterilization in Buck versus Bell, Justice Oliver Dwindle Palms wrote the majority opinion. He said, It is better for bald of wound if instead of waiting to execute deliberate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their career. He wrote, Three generations of imbeciles are enough. Buck vs. Thel has never been formally overturned. More than 60,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized under laws upheld by that ruling. Most were poor, most were women, disproportionate numbers were people of color, immigrants, and the disabled. The tension between Cooney's work and the eugenics movement wasn't obstruct. It was a direct and it was documented. The eugenics movement was reaching its peak at the beginning of the 20th century, and the Cooney's inventoriates were often showcased in the same fairgrounds as exhibitions supporting the eugenics movement. Articles in medical jurors at this time condemned Cooney's treatment of premature babies saying the babies would pass on their deficiencies, deformities, and vices to the next generation. So same fairgrounds, same year, one exhibit saying, come see the babies, they're fighters, they deserve to live, and another exhibit saying these babies are weaklings who will pollute the gene pool. And 6,500 times Cooney's answer turned out to be right. For 40 years, Martin Cooney fought the medical establishment to recognize what he was doing. The New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children repeatedly accused him of exploiting babies. Medical journals objected to the proximity of infant incubators to animal exhibits. In 1911, the Dreamland Amusement Park at Coney Island burned down. All of the babies were safely evacuated, but critics used the fire as evidence that premature babies should be in hospitals, not amusement parks. What those critics didn't mention was that the hospitals didn't have the equipment or willingness to care for those babies. The choice wasn't between Cooney's Hide Show at a proper hospital and IQ. The choice was between Cooney's side so and death. But what'll be fair here to the critics, though, because I think the discomfort they felt was real, even if their conclusions were wrong. There's something genuinely uncomfortable about watching a premature baby in a glass box while people pay admission to see it. It feels like it's violating something about what medicine should look like, about dignity, and about the late the line between patient and spectacle. Cooney himself wrestled with this. He told the New Yorker in 1939, all my life I have been making propaganda for the proper care of premies who at other times were allowed to die. Propaganda. He used that word. He understood exactly what he was doing, but the spectacle was the point. That the spectacle there was no spunding. And without the funding, there was no medicine. The discomfort is real, and the 6,500 lines are real. And both can exist simultaneously. The closest thing to the turning point came at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair. For the first time, Cooney had the explicit support of a major establishment physician, Dr. Julius Heiss, who co-ran the exhibit with him. The medical community could no longer entirely ignore what Cooney had been demonstrating for 37 years at that point. Of the 58 babies Cooney and Hess had cared for in 1933, 41 returned with their mothers for the reunion. That's according to the Smithsonian Magazine. Forty-one of 58 returned to a reunion at the fair the following summer, alive and healthy, their mothers walking with them down the midway where they'd spent their first weeks of life in a glass box. Now, after the Chicago fair closed, the city became the first in America to create public health policy specifically for premature infants. The medical establishment was finally, slowly moving towards what Cooney had been doing for four decades. In 1939, New York World's Fair nearly destroyed Cooney financially. The exhibit cost $75,000 to build and ran at a loss. His wife died during this period and he was in his 70s and he was broke. In 1943, Cornell Hospital in New York City opened the first dedicated premature infant station in the country. Cooney closed his New York Coney Island exhibit that same year. He'd said for decades that he wouldn't retire until city hospitals opened proper incubator wards. And he finally got what he. He died in 1950 at age 80. The New York Times called him the incubator doctor. And he died in relative obscurity, and he died broke. In 1960s, it was Mail New Yale New Haven Hospital, opened up America's first true neonatal intensive care unit. The Mar NICU, the standard of care for premature babies in every hospital in the developed world, is the descendant of what Martin Cooney started in a tent at the Berlin Exposition in 1896. And like I said, there was a woman named Lucille Ford who was born in 1920, weighing only two pounds, and was told there wasn't a chance in hell she would live. She went to a sideshow on the Coney Island boardwalk and stayed there for six months. And then she went home. She had five children, and she worked as a crossing guard and a legal secretary, and she lived to 96 years old. When she was 95, she returned to the boardwalk where she'd spent her first summer, and she told her daughter, you know, there weren't many doctors that would have spent her first that would have done anything for me. And 94 years later, here I am in one piece. And I'm thankful to be here. And I think about her when I think about this series about what it means that the person who saved her life was operating a sideshow, about what it means about the uh medical establishment and what was publishing articles, whether it was worthwhile to even try, and about what it means with the uh eugenics movement that was being celebrated at the same fair grounds. Lucille Forrent's five children have children, and those children have children. The lives that exist because of that Coney Island sideshow are uncountable now. So before we close this episode, I need to draw a line. In the space series that were episodes seven through ten, we documented a operation paperclint, the program that brought more than 16,000 Nazi scientists to America after World War II, scientists who built rockets using slave labor, and scientists whose expertise was built on part on the infrastructure of the Nazi state. The Nazi state that explicitly modeled its racial hygiene laws on American eugenics legislation. The thread runs from the Better Babies Contest at the Kansas State Fair in 1920 to the Fitter Family Eugenics Building in Topeka to the forced sterilation and laws in 27 American states to the Nuremberg laws in Germany, to the concentration camps, to Operation Paperclip, to Huntsville, Alabama, to the Saturn B rocket, and to the I'm not saying all of those things are morally equivalent. I'm saying they're connected. And I'm saying that connection is hidden. And most Americans who can name all the Saturn V missions can't tell you about the Twitter family's contest in Topeka or the 60,000 Americans who were forcibly sterilized under laws that the Supreme Court upheld. This is what the White Series is actually about. Not just the fairs, not just Holmes being a monster, not just Tesla. It's about what was built in this era and what it cost. The White City was real, the eugenics movement was real, the incubator babies were real. They were all part of the same American movement, the turn in the of the 20th century where the country was deciding what it wanted to become. Martin Cooney chose a side. He chose it in a sideshow, without credentials, without institutional support, against the medical consensus of his era, and he turned out to be right. When the medical consensus is wrong, and it has been wrong before, badly wrong. What gives a person the standing to say so? What's the right way to fight that kind of wrong? Cooney's answer was put the babies in a glass box and charge admission. Show people what's possible and let the outcome speak. Satan killers, I know this one had a lot in it. And I want to hear from anyone who has family connections to the eugenic movement, either as participants in the contests or people whose families were affected by the sterilization laws. That history is closer than we acknowledge. And it's within living memory for some of these families. And for my Kansas time killers, the first Fitter families contest was held at the Kansas State Free Fair in Topeka. If you've ever been, um, and there's a lot to be proud about with the Kansas State Fair, um, I want you to know this is part of it. Just for your information. And it's because history. And we don't learn anything without studying our history. And for everyone, the NPR story core interview with Lucille Foreign is publicly available and it's two minutes long. Listen to it. You won't forget it. So if you have a story to tell me, send it to Just KillingTime Podcast at gmail.com in the subject line Time Killer file, and I will read them. I read every single one. So we talked about what happened at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, the two things that happened 300 yards apart. In the Temple of Music, the president of the United States was shot at 300 yards away in a carnival exhibit. A man with no medical degree was saving premature babies that the entire American medical establishment had written off as hopeless. The president died, the babies lived. And both operated on the same fair grounds as the eugenics movement. The eugenics movement, which argued that those babies should die, produce forced sterilization laws that the Supreme Court upheld that inspire Nazi Germany that were applied to 60,000 Americans who had no say in the market. All of these happened in the same country at the same time, often at the same fair. Next episode, we're going to 1904, to the St. Louis World's Fair, where they displayed actual human beings in a human zoo and called it anthropology, where they invented the ice cream cone and the hamburger and iced tea, and where they showed America what empire looked like up close. The fairs were never just about the future. They were always about who got to decide what the future looked like. I'm Elizabeth Stanton. This has been Just Killing Time. Thanks for killing time with me. And look up the story court interview with Lucille Bourne.

SPEAKER_01 42:19

Chemtrails. Trails left by aircraft are actually chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed at high altitudes for a purpose undisclosed to the general public in clandestine programs directed by government officials.