….It could be any Wisconsin river town. But for a brief while in the early 1900s, Alma became notorious as the centerpiece for the misguided and now-discredited campaign to better society through eugenics, or the improvement of the human race by encouraging so-called desirable genetic traits.
Research by a University of New Hampshire psychology professor has brought to light an odd and unsettling article in which a well-known scientist of the time labeled nearly a quarter of Alma?s residents “hereditary defectives.”
(The scientist, famed child psychologist Arnold Gesell, received a graduate degree from the University of Wisconsin, where he studied under Frederick Jackson Turner.)