ClaimRace, women and healthverified1920sContext

Race, women and health · Claim record

The sentence "if the father and mother are of different races the children are sometimes unfit for brain work", circulated as a Golden Age teaching of 1920, is an aside by a named reader, Joseph P. Samek, in a signed contribution about crop rotation and hybrid potatoes in Czechoslovakia, printed in the magazine's agriculture department.

Claim ID claim-attitudes-race-1920-brain-work-misattributedConcerns 7 January 1920Context

A afirmação e as suas provas

Context · 7 January 1920 Verified

The sentence "if the father and mother are of different races the children are sometimes unfit for brain work", circulated as a Golden Age teaching of 1920, is an aside by a named reader, Joseph P. Samek, in a signed contribution about crop rotation and hybrid potatoes in Czechoslovakia, printed in the magazine's agriculture department. Source: The Golden Age, 7 January 1920

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Primary JW publication Verified

The Golden Age, “Czecho-Slovakian Farming”

7 January 1920 · p.241 · Joseph P. Samek · Woodworth, Hudgings and Martin, Brooklyn, New York

“Even in the case of the human family, if the father and mother are of different races the children are sometimes unfit for brain work. Wonderful are the fixed laws of God.”

The two sentences close a paragraph about crossing potato varieties in a signed reader's contribution on farming in Czechoslovakia, printed in the magazine's "Agriculture and Husbandry" department. The writer describes hybrid potatoes that grew large but were hollow and unfit to eat, and draws the human comparison as an aside before returning to Czech farming methods, diet and longevity.

Provenance and verification note for The Golden Age, Czecho-Slovakian Farming

Confidence note. Read page by page from the item’s djvu.xml on 19 September 2026 and read again independently on the same date. The leaf carries the running head "The Golden Age for January 7, 1920", the departmental heading "AGRICULTURE AN[D HUSBANDRY]" and the by-line "Czecho-Slovakian Farming by Joseph P. Samek". The printed folio on this leaf is not legible in the scan, and neither are the folios on the two leaves either side of it; the nearest legible folios are 233, 234, 235 and 238, in an unbroken run on consecutive leaves, and the item’s page-number file gives 241 for this leaf, which is what that run requires. An earlier version of this record said the adjacent leaves carried legible folios in an unbroken run to 248; they do not. Nothing about the writer could be established from the magazine beyond his name and his statement that he left Czechoslovakia twenty years earlier.

Scan provenance. Internet Archive item “Magazines: The golden age, 1920”. Printed page numbers taken from the item's page_numbers.json joined to the djvu.xml leaves and checked against the running head “The Golden Age for January 7, 1920”.

Notes. Critical sites print these two sentences under the bare heading “Golden Age 1920 Jan 7 p.241”, without the by-line or the subject of the article. In the magazine they close a paragraph about hollow hybrid potatoes in a signed contribution on Czechoslovakian farming.

Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-race-ga-1920-0107-samek-brain-work

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