HOOTON CALLS FRANCE AND RUSSIA "SICK NATIONS," BLASTS NAZI REGIME

When Earnest Albert Hooton, professor of Anthropology, talks about either apes, men, or politics, he generally makes news. Last week at a convention hold at the University of Michigan he combined all three to turn out a speech which has hit front pages all over the country. In it he declared that Germany, by his definition a "sick nation," should be eradicated as we would eradicate a plague spot.

Compares Sick Nations and Humans

In an amplification of his ideas concerning the health and sickness of nations, Professor Hooton has made a number of observations about other European nations as well. He is fond of comparing nations and their diseases to humans and their allments. "In some, national discase manifests itself mainly in lethargy, stagnation, and general debility. In others, unfortunately, it takes the form of frenzy, and the entire state rums amok wreaking world wide havoc."

When a man murders his wife to get her money, the crime may be labelled 'social pathology'," Hooton remarked. "But if a man takes an axe and chops Iris wife and all of his children into bits, he is commonly adjudged to be crazy or mentally deficient." The same definitions might well be applied to national states as well, he suggests.

Swinging into what he admits to be "map diagnoses and prognoses of sick nations," Professor Hooton had a lot to say on almost every important European country. Russia, he maintains, has adequate raw material with which to form a good and peaceable society. "The trouble is that it is too raw," he added. The severity of the Czarist-regime forced of liquidation of the powerful elements of pre-Communist Russia he asserted. The result of this process has been the rise of "paranoid and sadistic dictators who have created a despotism far worse than was that of the Czars--more bloody and even less efficient."

Speaking of France, Hooton declared that a "process of biological deterioration has been responsible, in considerable measure, although not exclusively, for the collapse of the French nation." This, he maintains, has resulted from the country's loss of its best man-power in successive and exhausting wars. In France "loyalties of a national character shrank to a vanishing point and were replaced by class antagonisms," selfishness, and greed became outstanding manifestations of French national behavior."

To Hooton, Germany is "the regue elephant of the herd of national pachyderms, and it baffles veterinary skill to discover the basic cause of its homicidal mania." It evils have so permeated the present generation of the country that "nothing short of a complete obliteration of the German state" can destroy its influence.

Sees Hope for Germans

Professor Hooton ended on a some-what more optimistic note, though. "Removed from their national environment and scattered in small groups among the civilized peoples of the world. I have little doubt that the descendants of these Germans would prove themselves as constructive, socially-minded, peaceable and intelligent members of society as the Germans of '48 have been in the United States," he concluded.