soci 138

Chapter Title: Instituting Eugenics in California Book Title: Eugenic Nation

Book Subtitle: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America

Book Author(s): Alexandra Minna Stern

Published by: University of California Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt19631sw.9

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82

From 1935 to 1941, readers of the Los Angeles Times could open their Sunday magazines to the column “Social Eugenics,” written by the vet- eran arts and society contributor Fred Hogue.1 An enthusiast of the American Eugenics Society (AES), Hogue attended the meetings of its California Division, often held at the Los Angeles Public Library, which he then summarized for his audience. He also frequently cited the pub- lications of the Human Betterment Foundation (HBF), organized by the Pasadena citrus magnate Ezra S. Gosney to promote surgical steriliza- tion, and commended the marriage and mate counseling off ered by Paul Popenoe and Roswell M. Johnson, authors of Applied Eugenics, at the American Institute of Family Relations (AIFR) in central Los Angeles. Although by 1940 Hogue was criticizing the “war hysteria” and impe- rialist ambitions gripping Nazi Germany, he never maligned Adolph Hitler’s program of racial hygiene, and in 1936 he had applauded “the movement in Germany and other Nordic countries of Europe for the elimination of the reproduction of the unfi t.”2 That Hogue’s feature found a home in the Los Angeles Times was not surprising, given that the newspaper’s owner, Harry Chandler, was a charter member of the HBF who published a defense of Nazi policies in 1935.3

At once sensationalistic, folksy, and doctrinaire, “Social Eugenics” dwelt on the topics of population, birth control, venereal disease, mari- tal exams, and, above all, sterilization. Refl ecting the viewpoint of an infl uential sector of elite Californians that embraced eugenics as the best

chapter 3

Instituting Eugenics in California

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Instituting Eugenics in California | 83

solution to the state’s perceived problems, Hogue saw sterilization as a “protection, not a punishment.”4 Not only would it save the state thou- sands of dollars by preventing the birth of defective children and allow- ing the release of inmates in overfl owing mental institutions, but most important, it would enable society to shield “itself against the reproduc- tion of the physically and mentally underprivileged, against the contin- ued pollution of the human bloodstream.”5 Without such targeted intervention, Western civilization would collapse, just as Carthage had fallen centuries earlier.6

Hogue encouraged his readers to be competent breeders who consid- ered the “fate of those yet unborn,” and he proff ered advice to corre- spondents worried about the transmission of hereditary blemishes down the family line.7 However, he believed that ultimately it was the “consti- tutional right” and the moral responsibility of the state, not the individ- ual, to safeguard the public welfare by breaking “the chain of hereditary degeneracy.”8 To this end, Hogue advocated the broadening of Califor- nia’s sterilization law to permit operations on people identifi ed as feeble- minded or otherwise unfi t beyond the walls of state hospitals or asy- lums.9 In particular, he supported legislation drafted in 1935 and 1937 to establish a State Board of Eugenics and to expand the applicability of the sterilization law beyond the purview of mental hospitals and feeble- minded homes to encompass prisons, correctional schools, reformato- ries, and detention camps.10 These proposed bills sought to grant super- intendents, wardens, and directors of all such institutions the discretion to fi le a petition to sterilize any patient or inmate, who, once released, appeared likely to “procreate a child or children” with “a tendency to serious physical, mental, or nervous disease or defi ciency.”11 These draft laws also required only written notifi cation to the patient or next of kin, who was allowed thirty days to appeal the order. Seeking to insulate surgeons and state offi cials against litigation, these bills left virtually no room for civil or criminal liability and, furthermore, mandated that the Eugenics Board’s records be sealed from “public inspection.”12

Although these bills failed, their proponents were not fringe rene- gades out of touch with the times but rather prominent doctors, philan- thropists, journalists, academicians, and administrators who wished to extend the reach of an extensive eugenics agenda that dated back to the turn of the century.13 Indeed, the sweep and scope of these attempted statutes illustrate the extent to which ideas about the dangers and costs of hereditary degeneracy pervaded California government and culture. Even with this legislative setback, the number of sterilizations rose

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84 | Instituting Eugenics in California

markedly in the state in the mid- to late 1930s, peaking in 1940, when, according to available records, 967 men and women at nine institutions underwent reproductive surgery.14 In absolute terms, California far out- paced the rest of the country, performing approximately twenty thou- sand sterilizations—or one-third of sixty thousand total nationwide— from 1909 to the 1960s.15 California stood at the vanguard of the national eugenics movement. Although hereditarianism certainly fl our- ished elsewhere, its roots ran exceptionally deep in the Golden State.16 When European Americans such as the horticulturalist Luther Burbank and the doctor Joseph P. Widney migrated to California from the East in the late 1800s, they sought to settle the land and order society accord- ing to the principles of selective propagation and race betterment. By the 1910s, a dynamic network of scientists, reformers, and profession- als were consolidating and launching eugenics projects and endeavoring to make hereditarianism integral to state priorities and practices. Eugen- icists shaped modern California—its geography, inhabitants, and insti- tutions—through agricultural experimentation, nature and wildlife preservation, medical intervention, psychological surveys, municipal and state legislation, and infant and maternal welfare.

In contrast to their counterparts in other states who imitated broader trends, California eugenicists were players on the national scene from the outset. For instance, the Santa Rosa “plant wizard” Burbank and the Stanford president David Starr Jordan were members of the fi rst eugenics body in the United States, the Eugenics Committee of the American Breeders’ Association. Established in 1906 under the direc- tion of Charles B. Davenport, a biologist at the Carnegie Institution’s Station for Experimental Evolution in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, the Eugenics Committee was chaired by Jordan and included Alexander Graham Bell and the physical anthropologist Alès Hrdlicka. Formed to “investigate and report on heredity in the human race, and emphasize the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood,” this committee organized sections to study the hereditary etiology of insanity, criminality, eye defects, and many other conditions.17

The Eugenics Committee of the American Breeders’ Association served as the nucleus for the Eugenics Record Offi ce (ERO). Attached to the Cold Spring Harbor Station and funded by Mrs. E. H. Harriman, the widow of the wealthy railroad baron, the ERO sponsored inquiries into feeblemindedness, family ancestry, and genetic diseases. According to Davenport, the ERO owed much to the reputation of Jordan. When Mrs. Harriman contacted Davenport, seeking an “opinion as to the desirabil-

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Instituting Eugenics in California | 85

ity of the proposed work of studying extensively and intensively the blood lines in the country, both those that have resulted in criminality, imbecility, and poverty and those in which our most eff ective men have arisen,” he immediately requested Jordan’s assistance.18 Jordan, in turn, sent a letter to Mrs. Harriman stressing the enormous value of her poten- tial donation, a missive that roused her to action: “Owing very largely to your letter, in which I gather you spoke some kind personal words, Mrs. Harriman has decided to begin work at once instead of waiting until the fi rst of January as was her original intention.”19 The ERO eventually absorbed the Eugenics Committee and served as the springboard for the AES in the 1920s. This pattern of California eugenicists facilitating national developments while pursuing projects peculiar to the Pacifi c Slope recurred throughout the twentieth century.

Initially, eugenics resonated with the concerns of California Progres- sives, whose shared faith in scientifi c solutions to societal problems often overshadowed discrepant political opinions and approaches.20 For example, to John R. Haynes, a physician and one of Los Angeles’s most outspoken reformers, sterilization, the construction of colonies for the feebleminded, and direct municipal control of resources such as water and electricity were interrelated social endeavors best guided by the laws of physiology and biology. With well-placed adherents such as Haynes and Jordan spearheading eugenics, the movement gained momentum in the 1910s. In the 1920s and 1930s, the radius of eugenics widened, with the founding of, in chronological order, the Eugenics Sec- tion of the Commonwealth Club of California (CCC), the HBF, the California Division of the AES, the AIFR, and the Eugenics Society of Northern California.

Eugenics prospered in California for several reasons. First, for many of the European American settlers who streamed into the Pacifi c West starting in the late 1800s, the act of civilizing what they saw as fertile yet underutilized terrain meant applying modern science, above all, the maxims of heredity and biology, to graft a new polis onto the Spanish and Mexican past. This was most visible in agricultural enterprises, such as large-scale citriculture, but also in other arenas where a premium was placed on selective breeding, such as the better baby contests held at state fairs and monetary inducements for the fi t to have more children.21 Second, there was a strong affi nity between the doctrines of Manifest Destiny and nativism that seized California during and after the Gold Rush and eugenic racism. Sinophobia and discrimination against Latin Americans and American Indians, which permeated California from the

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86 | Instituting Eugenics in California

1860s to the 1880s, off ered propitious ground for scientifi c racism, tar- geted principally at Mexicans and Filipinos, to materialize in the 1920s and 1930s.22 Third, unlike other Western states, such as Oregon or Washington, which also passed sterilization laws, California possessed a dense and multilayered matrix of educational organizations, civic groups, business associations, medical societies, and philanthropies that subscribed to eugenic philosophies. Furthermore, at key points in this nexus stood powerful fi gures, such as Fred O. Butler, the medical super- intendent of the Sonoma State Home; Lewis Terman, one of the fore- most popularizers of intelligence testing; Paul Popenoe, the AIFR’s direc- tor and Ladies’ Home Journal columnist; and John R. and Dora Haynes, who endowed Los Angeles’s fi rst private foundation in 1926 to foster research aimed at the “social betterment of mankind.”23 Although not always in agreement, these individuals and organizations collaborated to make California home to a dynamic eugenics movement. Their eff orts were signifi cantly enhanced by the State Department of Institutions, which implemented anti-immigrant policies, intelligence testing, and mass sterilization.

scientific racism and eugenic exclusions

From his plant nursery, Burbank, who had abandoned Massachusetts for the Mediterranean climes of Sonoma County, espoused an optimistic neo-Lamarckian view of the harmonious outcome of race mixing and open immigration that countered much eugenic thinking at the time. Almost always, xenophobia, most vehemently aimed at Mexican and Asian immigrants, was the explicit or implicit corollary of the eugenic construal of the state’s problems. Nativism was no stranger to Califor- nia, having migrated westward with many of the European Americans who colonized the Pacifi c Slope. At best, California nativism was a par- adoxical brand of racial discrimination, applied by recent East Coast and Midwest transplants to peoples with generations-long connections to the region.

By the eve of the US invasion of Mexico in 1846, white supremacy was poised to become a staple of the postconquest political and legal regime. In 1851, one year after the state entered the Union, a law was passed that taxed any quantity of placer gold mined by foreign nation- als. In the 1870s and 1880s, San Francisco was home to the Working- men’s Party, whose virulently Sinophobic platform set the stage for the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. White mobs repeatedly attacked

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Instituting Eugenics in California | 87

Chinese communities, burning down homes and business, and rallying to drive the “Yellow Peril” out of town. Additionally, like other West- ern states, California passed an antimiscegenation statute in 1850 that forbade unions between whites and “negroes and mulattoes,” adding “Mongolians” to the list in 1880.24 By the 1890s, the californiano and Mexican grip on power at the local and state levels, which had proved quite resilient from the 1850s to the 1880s, had become much more tenuous and was under relentless assault from European American entrepreneurs, lawyers, and politicians.25

At the turn of the century, California nativism was infused with bud- ding eugenic notions of biological diff erence and racial capacity. More often than not, fears about the impending hereditary contamination brought on by racial or immigrant groups were couched in fi scal terms: not only would bad genes defi le the “germ plasm,” but also the demands placed on the state by “defectives” would drastically deplete resources. Following this logic, the state’s principal reform agency, the Department of Institutions, implemented exclusionary racial policies. Originally formed in 1896 as the Commission in Lunacy, this department (renamed the Department of Institutions in 1920) created the Offi ce of the Depor- tation Agent in 1915, whose responsibility was to expel foreigners and nonresidents confi ned in state asylums and mental hospitals, a practice that had begun sub silentio as early as 1905. The deportation agent was partisan to the perception, popular at the time, that California had become the “the greatest sanitarium in America,” luring the mentally and physically ill from far and wide.26 This sentiment was accentuated by worries that the farther one ventured into the Western frontier, the greater the likelihood of a disordered mind.27 In the early 1920s, the deportation agent bemoaned a 120 percent surge in arrivals and blamed ignorant and parochial doctors in the East and Midwest for prompting an exodus of hundreds of the infi rm to the Pacifi c.28 Over a span of about twenty-fi ve years, the Department of Institutions delivered more than eight thousand nonresidents across state lines and, working with federal immigration authorities, repatriated more than two thousand foreign nationals—predominantly to Mexico, the Philippines, and China.29

The year deportations offi cially began, the Department of Institu- tions’ sister agency, the Board of Charities and Corrections, announced that the county hospitals were suff ering from a “foreign problem,” nota- bly a “Mexican problem,” because Mexicans constituted 4.8 percent of the twelve thousand patients treated in 1914.30 In the eyes of the Depart- ment of Institutions, Mexicans cost the state money and, worse, were

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88 | Instituting Eugenics in California

ungrateful for any care they received: “The Mexican does not make a good eleemosynary charge. He will not work and is sullen and surly.”31 From 1915 to the late 1920s, the deportation agent consistently repatri- ated Mexicans at the highest rate. Between 1926 and 1928, Mexicans made up 47 percent of those deported, chiefl y from Southern California, where “the problem of caring for the defective, delinquent and destitute of Mexico” was “most acute.”32 During the Depression, when thou- sands of Mexicans returned across the border under intense pressure and often force, Filipinos and Chinese surged to the top of the banished list. For instance, the deportation agent sent back seventy-six Filipinos in 1930 and fi fty-eight in 1938.33 The deportation agent also ousted scores of poor European Americans who hailed from the East and South, particularly “Okies” who had fl ed the Dust Bowl in search of jobs in California’s fi elds and factories. It was common practice to place depor- tees on trains with attendants to chaperone them and their clinical his- tories, ultimately delivering them to destinations as scattered as Parsons, Kansas, and Little Rock, Arkansas. Departing patients left California with the clothes on their backs and negligible amounts of personal prop- erty. For example, of 21 patients deported from Norwalk in November 1937, one man left with 12 cents, his pocket book and two plates of false teeth; another man possessed no cash but one rosary. Many depor- tees returned to next of kin in previous places of residence with nothing more than a coat.34 Los Angeles replicated the exclusionary techniques of the Department of Institutions in the 1930s, when the mayor set up a Committee on Indigent Alien Transients to bar Mexicans, African Americans, and Okies from entering the city.35 Fiscal justifi cations for such policies loomed large (fi gure 6). In 1942, for example, the Depart- ment of Institutions calculated that the deportation of 10,359 nonresi- dents and foreign nationals over the previous three decades had resulted in an estimated net savings of more than $12 million.36

If the Department of Institutions sometimes emphasized fi nancial over eugenic reasoning, justifi cations for expulsion based on the menace of race degeneracy were touted in other quarters. During the 1910s and 1920s, the CCC, an exclusive fraternal society founded in San Francisco in 1903 to “investigate and discuss problems aff ecting the welfare of the Commonwealth and to aid in their solution,” served as a hub for Pacifi c Coast nativism.37 In its Immigration Section, initiated in 1913, members clamored for more stringent immigration restriction, labeling the Japa- nese and Mexicans as dysgenic. In 1920, after being briefed by this sec- tion, the CCC endorsed California’s second Alien Land Law, which

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figure 6. Calculation of cumulative costs saved by deportations from state institutions, from the California Department of Institutions’ Biennial Report, 1930. Source: California State Department of Institutions, Fifth Biennial Report of the Department of Institutions for the Year Ending June 30, 1930 (Sacramento: California State Printing Offi ce, 1930).

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90 | Instituting Eugenics in California

stripped Japanese farmers of their land by making ownership contin- gent on American citizenship, a legal status that virtually none could attain.38

In the mid-1920s, the Immigration Section turned its attention to the “Mexican problem” when the Berkeley professor Samuel J. Holmes and the Sacramento realtor Charles M. Goethe began to press for a quota akin to the 2 percent cap placed on southern Europeans and Asians in the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act. A zoologist by training, Holmes taught eugenics at the University of California, produced a family pedigree inventory of Berkeley undergraduates, and espoused the idea of monetary incentives for white female students and faculty wives to produce more children.39 In an article titled “Perils of the Mexican Invasion,” Holmes assailed Mexicans as undemocratic, mentally retarded, and wildly pro- creative carriers of plague, typhus, and hookworm. Enjoining his readers to back extreme limits on immigration from the south, he identifi ed Mex- icans as the “least assimilable” of the “foreign stocks” and urged that it was imperative to “exclude all people who do not measure up to the aver- age level of our own American stock.”40 For Holmes, the racial hybridity of Mexicans, who “may be anything from a descendent of pure Castilian stock to an Indian peon without a trace of Caucasian blood,” rendered them unfi t for inclusion in the American body politic.41 Many of Holm- es’s CCC associates shared this perspective, voting overwhelming in club polls for a ban on Mexican entry, stricter enforcement of deportation laws, and a national registry of “aliens.”42

The growing stature of hereditarianism among CCC members inspired Goethe, who frequently harangued members of the Immigration Section on the dangers of bad “germ plasm,” to propose a Eugenics Section in 1924. In a letter written to the Board of Governors, Goethe praised the activities of CCC nativists and submitted the question, “What next in race improvement?”43 Goethe opined that a Eugenics Section would pro- vide the ideal forum in which to discuss how to combat the underbreed- ing of the “fi t” and the overbreeding of the “unfi t,” what Teddy Roo- sevelt had termed “race suicide” two decades earlier. Goethe thought the section could evaluate strategies for the elimination “from our popula- tion by preventing their reproduction, of the, say, perhaps 2 per cent thereof who are notoriously unfi t to propagate.”44 Holmes, who had already conferred with Goethe about establishing a eugenics group in Northern California, agreed to preside over the section, which Terman, Haynes, and Jordan also joined.45 Holmes was upbeat that the section would mature into a “center of infl uence” in California, a hope reiterated

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Instituting Eugenics in California | 91

by Goethe, who prophesied in 1925, “With the work of Dr. Holmes you have now a section on Eugenics that is going to have a profound infl u- ence. It is developing into the one great center of eugenic thought here in the West, just as they have in the East the Galton Society and the Eugenic Research Society and the Eugenic Society of America [sic].”46

Holmes swiftly pinpointed California’s two overriding eugenic issues: the “restriction of the propagation of defectives,” and “immigration, especially from Mexico.” Holmes was of the opinion that “from the standpoint of the future inheritance of the people of our State, there are few matters of greater importance than those presented by the rapid increase of migrants across the Mexican border.”47 Meeting at times with the Immigration Section, CCC eugenicists pushed to shut the gates to Mexicans, Filipinos, and the Japanese. Echoing the Department of Institutions, they reprimanded Mexicans for abusing public aid. In 1928, for example, Stuart Ward presented the results of a three-year survey of Mexicans in California.48 Complaining about the more than ten thousand legal and illegal immigrants crossing the border each week, Ward conceded that Mexicans made good parents and agricultural lab- orers because they could withstand “the intense heat of the Imperial Valley which the white man cannot endure.” Despite these virtues, how- ever, Mexicans were rarely endowed with IQs over 85, came from a “mongrel” nation, and exploited free clinics.49 In another meeting, the invited speaker charged that Mexicans in Los Angeles availed them- selves of 78 percent of the county’s charity.50

Gaining in intensity in the 1920s, scientifi c racism was bluntly expressed by some of the state’s most prominent Progressives. In 1925, for instance, Jordan wrote to Davenport that Mexicans were to blame for California’s waning tourist economy, as they bring “with them bubonic plague, small pox, and typhus fever. While these diseases do not touch the clean living part of the south, they have still kept the health offi cers very busy, and probably diminished by half the chief crop of Southern California, winter tourists.”51 Three years later, on the letter- head of the Immigration Study Commission he had formed to raise alarm about the dangers of entrants from the Western Hemisphere, Goethe wrote, “The intelligent Mexican of white stock does not come here. The peon, who is an Amerind, has an average intelligence quotient of only 60.”52 In short order, dispatches such as these, sent by Jordan, Goethe, Holmes, and other Californians, found their way into the country’s fl ag- ship eugenics journal, Eugenical News, and by the late 1920s Pacifi c Coast nativism had become a national aff air: “The Mexican peon does

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92 | Instituting Eugenics in California

more than bring into the United States smallpox. With his numerous off spring he tends to dilute our old American blood. Thus he is giving us a new color problem.”53

From the 1910s to the 1930s, the Deportation Agent, the Eugenics Section of the CCC, and nativists with university credentials vilifi ed Mexicans as defective, diseased, and overly fecund and urged that they be barred from the state, even as industry and agribusiness thrived pre- cisely because of their labor. California eugenicists crafted an intransi- gent and tenacious xenophobia that resurfaced throughout the twenti- eth century, most notably with Proposition 187, which sought to deny public services, including medical care and education, to “illegal aliens.”54 Passed by a majority of California voters in 1994, this propo- sition was ruled unconstitutional in 1998 for overstepping the bounds of state authority.55

psychometrics and juvenile research

The same year that the deportation agent began his rounds, the Depart- ment of Institutions created the California Bureau of Juvenile Research (CBJR). The fi rst unit in the country devoted exclusively to research into the “causes and consequences of delinquency and mental defi ciency” among children and adolescents, the CBJR functioned until 1941, when it was discontinued and replaced by the California Youth Authority.56 From 1916 to 1938 the CBJR published the Journal of Delinquency (renamed the Journal of Juvenile Research in 1928).57 Headquartered at the Whit- tier State School, a facility for boys younger than age sixteen, the CBJR, which treated the state’s correctional homes, schools, prisons, and deten- tion halls as its domain, pioneered the introduction of psychometrics into the arena of juvenile welfare. For many bureau psychologists and Journal contributors, the answer to delinquency was rehabilitation, through the inculcation of discipline and the acquisition of skills suitable to one’s cog- nitive level, as weighed by psychometric exams. At the Department of Institutions’ three homes—Whittier, the Ventura Home for Girls, and the Preston School of Industry—rehabilitation was linked, for boys, to mas- tering a trade; for girls, to achieving profi ciency in sewing and home eco- nomics; and for immigrant children, to “Americanization” exercises.58

The creation of the CBJR refl ected an increasing national preoccupa- tion with children and young adults, as illustrated by the formation of separate juvenile courts and justice systems, which began in Chicago (Cook County) in 1899 and was soon replicated across the country. By

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Instituting Eugenics in California | 93

the early twentieth century, California maintained several such institu- tions, including the Los Angeles Juvenile Court, founded in 1909.59 Children, especially adolescents, were gaining an autonomous identity in the fi elds of pediatric medicine, developmental psychology, and evo- lutionary science, and they frequently served as the projection screen for adults’ unease about the present malaise and future cohesion of modern society.60 In the case of young women, reformers’ anxieties revolved principally around reproduction and sexuality; it was common for girls who rejected chastity and middle-class gender norms to be labeled way- ward or immoral. For boys, worries generally centered on perceived incorrigible or antisocial tendencies that might impede their employ- ment prospects or tempt them to break the law. In California, where physicians had long anguished over steep rates of institutionalization and insanity, the mental and physical well-being of the youngest gen- eration was of paramount importance.61

Terman and his protégés paved the way for the CBJR in the early 1910s. From his base at Stanford, Terman set out in 1910 to revise the Binet-Simon mental test, newly minted by Alfred Binet and his appren- tice Theodore Simon in France. Unlike Binet, however, who regarded intelligence as too complex to be captured by a number alone, Terman thought that intelligence was quantifi able and innate, a tenet that prompted the German psychologist William Stern to invent the concept of the intelligence quotient in 1912.62 This belief, namely that intelligence was hereditary and immutable, was buttressed by simplistic Mendelian theories of ratios and genes, which posited a one-to-one correlation between “unit characters” and mental, emotional, and physiognomic traits. It merged comfortably with hierarchical evolutionary schemes that posited that each “race” was a biological group with distinct attributes and faculties.63 In his 1916 book The Measurement of Intelli- gence, Terman outlined just such a formulation, expounding on the sci- entifi c accuracy of IQ tests and their ability to impartially identify delin- quent, retarded, diseased, and otherwise unfi t individuals.64 Exhibiting an undying faith in numbers, Terman devised a quantitative scale that categorized test takers as idiots, imbeciles, morons, borderline defi cients, feebleminded, dull normal, normal, superior, very superior, or geniuses.65 The IQs of morons fell between 51 and 70, geniuses topped the charts at 140 or higher, and people of average IQ deviated not more than 10 points on either side of 100. Following a self-fulfi lling logic of racial aptitude, Terman’s “Normal Curve” located the IQs of Mexicans, Indi- ans, and “negroes” in the borderline range of 71 to 90, with Mexicans

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94 | Instituting Eugenics in California

hovering between borderline defi ciency and somewhat more able groups “usually classed as normal but dull.”66

In order to recalibrate the Binet-Simon for use in the United States to gauge the extent of the “menace of feeblemindedness” in California, Ter- man began to administer hundreds of exams throughout the state.67 In 1911 he studied four hundred children in a school near Stanford; in 1912 he focused on the small coastal town of San Luis Obispo; and in 1914 he and his graduate student J. Harold Williams brought their testing book- lets to Whittier.68 In 1914, Stanford’s education department, under Ter- man’s direction, received a substantial endowment from the Buckel Foun- dation for the “psychological and pedagogical study of backward and mentally defective children.”69 These funds enabled Williams to conduct a survey at Whittier with Terman’s revamped Binet-Simon, the Stanford- Binet. Williams examined 150 “delinquent boys,” in order to ascertain their IQs and cluster them into four categories: “defi nitely feebleminded,” “borderline,” “dull normal,” or “normal or above.” Only 25 percent were determined to be “normal or above,” an outcome that delivered proof of the “plainly seen” correlation between delinquency and defective heredity and that provoked apprehension about the mental vigor of Cali- fornia’s youth.70

This study, along with several others, compelled Whittier’s superin- tendent, Fred C. Nelles, to back a bill requesting the foundation of the CBJR, which was approved in 1915 and expanded and clarifi ed in 1917.71 Williams was appointed the director, and Whittier the home, for a “department for the clinical diagnosis of inmates of the school and other state institutions, and to inquire into the causes and consequences of delinquency and mental defi ciency, and related problems.”72 With Dav- enport’s blessing, the CBJR was designated “the offi cial Western Repre- sentative of the Eugenics Record Offi ce” and was licensed to employ the ERO’s diagnostic and classifi catory methods.73 Shortly after a visit from the ERO’s superintendent, Harry H. Laughlin, to Whittier in 1913, the Department of Institutions arranged for the installation of ERO-trained fi eld workers in California’s homes and hospitals.74 In 1915 the “excep- tionally successful” Karl M. Cowdery arrived at Whittier to apply what he had learned at the ERO, and in 1918 Mildred S. Covert followed in his footsteps, becoming a bureau fi eld worker.75

As the CBJR grew, it continued to rely on the ERO for personnel and forms and reciprocated by sending copies of all of its case histories to Cold Spring Harbor for review and archiving.76 In 1920, the bureau started to educate “a limited number of persons for fi eld-work” in

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Instituting Eugenics in California | 95

accordance with the ERO model, and the following year it published the Whittier Social Case History Manual, which drew from Davenport’s Trait Book and Laughlin’s How to Make a Eugenical Family History.77 In keeping with the eugenic nomenclature of the era, bureau psycholo- gists assigned alphabetic “unit characters”—A for alcoholic, F for fee- bleminded, and W for wanderer—encasing them in squares or circles (depending on the relative’s gender) as they traced back the familial line- age of the child in question.78 For instance, in the case of an eleven-year- old male truant, Williams fi rst traced the youngster’s paternal side, fi nd- ing wanderlust and tuberculosis, and then his mother’s lineage, which revealed excitability, alcoholism, and immorality, and then assessed his subject’s “inferior mentality.” Having received an IQ score of 82, or dull normal, this boy was judged incapable of advancing “beyond a routine or semi-skilled worker or artisan,” and Williams recommended that his “evident tendency to wanderlust [should] be recognized in his voca- tional placement by providing employment which would give some out- let to this inherent trait.”79

In 1921, Covert completed Social Case History no. 351, a twenty- page evaluation of a fi fteen-year-old Mexican male truant who had been declared a ward of the court and committed to Whittier. Classify- ing him as a moron, Covert then reviewed his proclivity for bad behav- ior and purported lack of interest in school, underscoring his “inferior mentality” and “low intelligence.” On the basis of her impressions from meeting this boy’s parents, who lived in a poor section of San Diego and supported seven children with income from a tamale stand, Covert con- cluded that the mother and, at a minimum, two siblings were feeble- minded. Even though this boy had exhibited foresight and volition by asking to “learn some trade while in Whittier State School so that he can be self-supporting when released,” Covert closed the report by highlighting his inauspicious heredity and off ered that, if kept under “close supervision,” he could do adequately in the manual trades.80 It is possible that this Mexican boy, with an IQ of 67, was moved to a men- tal hospital, given that minors with IQs of 70 or below (and hence, at the very least labeled feebleminded) were frequently institutionalized. In 1925, the CBJR’s director proudly proclaimed that the percentage of feebleminded boys housed at Whittier had plummeted from 28 in 1914 to 2 in 1924 because of increased transfer rates to the Sonoma State Home and the Pacifi c Colony.81 Once so interned, these young inmates were prime candidates for sterilization, done with or without parental consent, a procedure that the Journal countenanced from its fi rst to its

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96 | Instituting Eugenics in California

fi nal issue.82 Indeed, most CBJR psychologists viewed reproductive sur- gery as a mandatory precondition for release from a state institution.83

In addition to its pivotal role in the state’s juvenile facilities, the CBJR was instrumental in the explosion of IQ testing in California classrooms in the 1920s.84 The bureau propelled the rapid expansion of psychomet- ric testing that became pervasive in the Los Angeles public schools, which had recently acquired a Division of Psychology and Educational Research.85 This district administered the National Intelligence Test, a cousin of the Stanford-Binet, to more than eighty thousand pupils in 219 elementary schools, approximately half of the total enrollment of the city.86 The mushrooming of IQ testing coincided with the infl ux of roughly three hundred thousand Mexicans to the Southwest between 1910 and 1930, many fl eeing the chaos of revolution and civil war.87 Upon arriving in California, these newcomers and their children, if attending school, encountered an environment where segregation had been intensifi ed by scientifi c racism and intelligence testing.

Psychometrics, as pursued by the CBJR, carried forward the nativist and exclusionary policies of education boards that dated back to the 1850s.88 Starting in the late nineteenth century, African American, Chi- nese, and Japanese schoolchildren faced de jure segregation in public education; in response, these communities waged protracted legal battles on the municipal and state levels.89 Mexicans, who were considered white according to census and juridical standards, were instead subjected to a pervasive and insidious de facto segregation that was often framed by eugenic arguments about mental and procreative fi tness. In Southern California in particular, separate schools were part of a broader dynamic of spatial division between European Americans and Mexicans, as the former moved to the burgeoning suburbs and the latter constructed com- munities in urban barrios near the factories where they worked.90 The fi rst “Mexican” school was established in Santa Ana in 1912, and by the 1920s more had sprouted in Pasadena, Ontario, Riverside, and the San Fernando Valley.91 When not instituting divided classrooms in urban Los Angeles, the school board “manipulated attendance zones to produce segregation” in the 1920s and 1930s.92 IQ testing off ered a putatively scientifi c reason for this two-tiered system and vindicated the channeling of Mexican children into vocational instruction.93 Every psychometric study that corroborated Terman’s claims about Mexican retardation worked to reinforce educational segregation in California.

One of the CBJR’s inaugural surveys helped set the tone. In the 1920s, as part of an eff ort to standardize the Stanford-Binet, bureau

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Instituting Eugenics in California | 97

psychologists undertook an extensive and multiphased study of hun- dreds of boys at various sites, arriving at a mean IQ of 69.4 for Mexi- cans (although this fi gure rose to 74.6 for American-born Mexicans). Whites, on the other hand, averaged 83.6, the Chinese 74, and “Negro” children 79.2.94 For all but the white boys, who appeared to become smarter by the year, these numbers were mirrored in study after study.95 Analogous scores were extracted again and again by CBJR psycholo- gists and ERO fi eld workers in almost every institution holding chil- dren—public schools, orphanages, the juvenile court, and specialty clin- ics. For the most part, their investigations found that IQs varied dramatically between racial groups and that, with few exceptions, Mex- icans always fared the worst.

Kimball Young, another of Terman’s disciples, started to test Mexi- cans in the early 1920s, completing a dissertation that compared a cross section of twelve-year-old students in central and Northern California. Young tacitly colored “Americans” as white and described a competence ladder in which Mexicans were fi xed at the bottom rungs, followed by the Portuguese, and fi nally, Italians, who most closely approximated “Americans.” Along the lines of eugenicists such as Madison Grant and Carl C. Brigham, author of A Study of American Intelligence, Young presumed parity between the degree of Nordic blood and intrinsic intel- ligence. Relying on a “Latin” versus “American” dichotomy, he pro- claimed that the IQ of the former reached only 83, with that of Mexicans slightly less.96 Young was convinced that mental ability was transmitted in a strict Mendelian manner from parent to off spring and dismissed English literacy as a factor in test comprehension. Instead, he claimed that a lack of racial homogeneity and distance from Nordic or Alpine stock doomed Mexicans to a permanently reduced IQ: “Biologists and anthropologists both look with little favor on a violent mixture of races so divergent as some of these elements are.” Young disparaged Mexicans as an “unfortunate hybrid race, and for good measure reminded readers that “although hybridization might produce an occasional genius, the overall tendency is downwards, this miscegenation means race suicide.”97

Psychometricians gleaned matching scores from classrooms across California and the Southwest. In one survey of orphan children given the revised Binet-Simon, the psychologist obtained an IQ of 77 for “Spanish-Mexican” girls, twenty points below other racial groups, and surmised that she had discerned a pronounced racial variation.98 In a study of 341 girls at Ventura, using the Stanford-Binet, Julia Mathews arrived at the fi gure of 68 for the average IQ of Mexican girls, which

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98 | Instituting Eugenics in California

was 13 points below their white counterparts and 4 below their black counterparts. Additionally, she reported that her scores mirrored those gathered for Mexican boys at Whittier and Preston.99 One study in Roswell, New Mexico, using a version of the Binet, calculated an IQ of 89 for Mexicans and 105 for whites.100 A fi ve-year survey of one thou- sand young Mexicans in Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado produced a mean IQ of 78.1 and confi rmed that “the retardation of the Mexican children is very high.”101 Other studies, many of them done by students of Terman and Norman Fenton, the CBJR’s director from 1928 to 1941, generated similar results. From San Jose to San Antonio, psychometri- cians consistently recorded scores for Mexicans in the 70 to 90 range, usually right around 80, exactly the borderline zone described by Ter- man in The Measurement of Intelligence. When psychometricians did not encapsulate intelligence with a number, they still frequently catego- rized Mexicans as mentally inferior by one or more years to whites, a divergence that was explicated through racial composition: “Not more than 20 to 25 percent of Mexican germ plasm is white and this includes, of course, that in the mestizos as well as that in the pure whites.”102

The implications of these fi ndings for Mexicans were far-reaching. Eugenicists and restrictionists who wished to exclude Mexicans from the United States and tried to set exceedingly low quotas for them con- stantly invoked the magic numbers of IQ and referred to psychometric surveys. In a pamphlet titled What Will Your Greatgrandchildren Face? Goethe inveighed against “low-power” immigration from Latin Amer- ica, a region that had produced none of the world’s 7,955 “men of gen- ius.”103 Comments about the “dullness,” the lower “animal capacities,” and the retardation of Mexican immigrants saturated the statements given by Thomas Jenkins, Roy L. Garis, and the East Texas congress- man John C. Box at immigration hearings during the push for quotas in the late 1920s and early 1930s.104 In sum, eugenicists rallied around dif- ferential IQ scores to urge a lockdown on the southern border.

Furthermore, scores from mental tests were mobilized to condone segregation and the channeling of Mexican children into vocational training, unskilled labor, and agricultural occupations. Thomas R. Garth, a psychometrician who concentrated on evaluating Mexican competence, concluded in 1926 that Mexicans would do well in mining, steel working, and farm work.105 Don T. Delmet, the superintendent of schools in Norwalk, California, echoed Garth. After administering intel- ligence tests to students ages six to twelve, he concluded that Mexicans’ mental backwardness constrained their occupational opportunities. He

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Instituting Eugenics in California | 99

recommended that young Mexicans enroll in English classes, manual training, domestic arts, music, and social studies, and he asked voca- tional counselors working with Mexicans to “take into consideration their social background and future economic status.”106

If educators did not employ IQ scores to cast Mexicans as dull or borderline, criminologists brandished them to demonstrate that Mexi- cans possessed innate tendencies toward vagrancy and malefaction. At a 1924 crime symposium convened by August Vollmer, an interim chief of the Los Angeles Police Department who traveled in eugenic circles, most of the presenters defi ned criminality as a product of defective heredity and identifi ed Mexicans as the greatest off enders.107 An examination of arrests of Mexicans in the 1920s induced one participant to emphasize that “the Mexican whom we fi nd in Los Angeles is, as a class, of rela- tively low mentality; he is probably best fi tted for work demanding abil- ity of an inferior grade.”108 Even with the criticism of the cultural biases of IQ tests articulated in the 1930s by some psychologists who started statistically controlling for the variables of language, poverty, and accul- turation, stereotypes of Mexican boys as prone to malfeasance remained common to the point of ubiquity in Southern California.109

It is no coincidence that the 1946 class action lawsuit Méndez v. Westminster was fi led by parents whose children were forced to attend separate schools in Orange County, a district where the CBJR’s IQ test- ing program had provided the rationale for constructing Mexican-only classrooms and tracking of Mexicans into industrial education begin- ning in the late 1910s.110 In this case, the court ruled that the segrega- tion of Mexicans in the public school system was unconstitutional—a conclusion based, ironically, on the fact that Mexicans were technically classifi ed as white and hence were not subject to the laws that aff ected Japanese, Chinese, and Indian students. Nevertheless, this verdict prompted Governor Earl Warren to sign legislation overturning segre- gation in California in 1947.

sterilization: “protection, not penalty”

In 1909, two years after Indiana and a few weeks after the state of Wash- ington, California passed the third sterilization bill in the nation.111 Envi- sioned by F. W. Hatch, the secretary of the State Commission in Lunacy, this legislation granted the medical superintendents of asylums and pris- ons the authority to “asexualize” a patient or inmate if such action would improve his or her “physical, mental, or moral condition.”112 The

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100 | Instituting Eugenics in California

law was expanded in 1913, when it was repealed and replaced, and was updated in 1917, when clauses were added to shield physicians against legal retaliation and to foreground a eugenic, rather than penal, rationale for surgery.113 The 1917 amendment, for example, reworded the descrip- tion of a diagnosis warranting surgery from “hereditary insanity or incurable chronic mania or dementia” to a “mental disease which may have been inherited and is likely to be transmitted to descendants.”114 More encompassing than its predecessors, the 1917 act targeted inmates affl icted with “various grades of feeblemindedness” and “perversion or marked departures from normal mentality or from disease of a syphilitic nature.”115 Performed sporadically at the outset, operations began to climb in the late 1910s, and by 1921, 2,248 people—more than 80 per- cent of all cases nationwide—had been sterilized, mostly at the Sonoma and Stockton hospitals.116

The state’s aggressive attempts to control the procreation of commit- ted persons deemed insane, feebleminded, or otherwise unfi t, as well as the clinical and ideological contributions of several ardent medical superintendents to sterilization procedures and policies, make Califor- nia stand out when compared to the rest of the country. In New Jersey and Iowa, for instance, sterilization laws were declared unconstitutional in the 1910s, judged to be “cruel and unusual punishment” or in viola- tion of equal protection and due process.117 This impelled some states to draft legislation that avoided punitive terminology, a tactic that under- pinned the approbation of revised or original sterilization laws in the 1920s. During the Great Depression, the strain of shrinking state budg- ets and the vindication of eugenic justifi cations for sterilization in Buck v. Bell, the 1927 Supreme Court decision upholding Virginia’s statute, spurred additional sterilization legislation, especially in the South.118 In 1932, twenty-seven states had laws on the books, and the number of operations nationwide peaked at just over 3,900.119 In 1937 Georgia passed the last of the sterilization statutes, bringing the total number of state laws to thirty-two.120 Puerto Rico, a US colony, also approved sterilization legislation that same year. Signifi cantly, California’s stat- ute—although reworked over the decades—remained on the books from 1909 until it was repealed by the state legislature in 1979.

California’s sterilization program had a very forceful contingent of champions from the 1910s into the 1950s. During the fi rst half of the twentieth century, physicians, reformers, psychologists, and some patients and their parents looked favorably at reproductive surgery as a procedure that could raise the fi tness of society, potentially cure the sterilized

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Instituting Eugenics in California | 101

individual, and result in early parole. As with the other two facets of eugenics in California, scientifi c racism and intelligence testing, the Department of Institutions supplied most of the administrative scaff old- ing for the state’s sterilization program. At the same time, it gave profes- sional sterilization crusaders more legitimacy, imbuing their mission with the aura of offi cialdom. As was the case with related health and reform initiatives, a handful of infl uential advocates played a decisive role in advancing the cause. These proponents launched investigations into the prevalence, eff ects, and impact of reproductive surgery and marshaled their fi ndings, which were wrapped in the mantle of medical authority, to widen the ambit of the law and its application. Although many eugeni- cists dedicated themselves to this campaign, John R. Haynes and Paul Popenoe were critical to bringing sterilization into the mainstream.

Haynes epitomized the Progressive Era’s idealization of science and effi ciency. A member of the AES, the HBF, and the Eugenics Section of the CCC, Haynes had been trained as a physician at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1887 he decided to relocate to semiarid Los Angeles to relieve his chronic bronchitis. After less than one decade of treating patients and pursuing a lucrative career in real estate, he had become one of the city’s leading physicians, practicing and teaching surgery and gyne- cology at hospitals and universities, and eventually setting up a bustling clinic in downtown Los Angeles.121 Haynes brought his understanding of the human sciences to bear on Southern Californian politics and culture. Viewing the municipal body as an organism that needed regulation to reach equilibrium, in the early 1900s he created the Direct Legislation League. Fueled by his eff orts, initiative, referendum, and recall measures were incorporated into the city and later the state charter. At one point Haynes described society as a colony of siphonophores (free-swimming hydrozoans with discrete functions) that was “now federated and on the road to integration.”122 He believed that through the oversight of eugen- icists and other scientifi cally enlightened experts, society could become “organized for well-being” and could escape the destructive and pur- poseless drifting that had gone on for eons.123 Weaving a cosmology from German physiology and the sociology of Herbert Spencer and Émile Durkheim, Haynes envisaged a regulated and streamlined Los Angeles. In this urban wonderland the monopolistic control exercised by the Southern Pacifi c Railroad and the Los Angeles Times would be broken up, the municipality would control resources through boards elected by informed citizens, and the enforcement of labor laws would lessen antag- onisms between workers and capitalists. He fought for these changes on

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102 | Instituting Eugenics in California

the Los Angeles Civil Service Commission and, for many years, the Water and Power Board. Haynes’s unique blend of socialist leanings, nativism, and civic philanthropy, which may seem contradictory at fi rst blush, was actually quite consistent with his eugenic creed and his intellectual reli- ance on physiological doctrines of homeostasis.

A devout Malthusian who equated overpopulation with social disor- der, Haynes passionately backed California’s sterilization law, declaring in the 1910s “that no patient should be discharged from the state insane asylum without being sterilized.”124 He also countenanced birth con- trol, acting as treasurer of the Los Angeles Mothers’ Clinic Association and the Los Angeles Chapter of the American Birth Control League. Working alongside her husband, Dora Haynes pursued a parallel agenda of maternal and infant care through the Friday Morning Club, the city’s premier group of European American female reformers.125 But Haynes did much more than orchestrate municipal housekeeping. During his thirteen-year appointment to the State Board of Charities and Correc- tions, he laid the foundation for broadening eugenic sterilization and institutionalization in California.

In 1916, on the letterhead of the Board of Charities and Corrections, Haynes sent out 517 questionnaires to asylums, reformatories, and homes in nearly every state. Gathering information in anticipation of a welfare conference, Haynes asked superintendents how many steriliza- tion procedures they had performed, their opinions of the surgery, and whether they considered feebleminded patients released without sur- gery to be a hazard to society. He received about 275 responses. Given the contested status of sterilization statutes in the courts, the majority of physicians noted that they were unable to answer thoroughly the ques- tions because either their state lacked such a law or it had been over- turned. Many, however, longed for such programs and endorsed their therapeutic, moral, and eugenic value. For example, J. Percy Wade, of the Spring Grove State Hospital in Maryland, told Haynes, “I think the sterilization of a certain class of the insane and feebleminded, particu- larly the Moron type and the defective delinquent of the female sex, would be a great benefi t to the patients themselves, to the happiness of their families if any exists, and to the community at large, not only from a moral, but a fi nancial standpoint.”126 And G. A. Smith, of the Central Islip State Hospital on Long Island, who regretted the cumbersomeness of New York’s law, declared, “Personally, I am very much in favor of the sterilization of certain defectives, especially cases of dementia prae- cox, epileptics, chronic alcoholics, and subnormal mental individuals. I

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Instituting Eugenics in California | 103

believe this procedure would be to the best interests of society and that every inmate as indicated above should be sterilized before dis- charged.”127 Almost all of Haynes’s California respondents praised ster- ilization, which they were confi dent would lead eventually to the elimi- nation of deleterious germ plasm from the populace. John A. Reily, the medical superintendent at the Department of Institutions’ Patton Hos- pital in San Bernardino, declared that “the primary benefi t from sterili- zation” was “the ultimate results in improving the standard of the human race,” adding that the occasional denial of the pleasures of par- enthood was a “small consideration as compared with the vast benefi ts accruing to society in the prevention of the propagation of the unfi t.”128

This survey unequivocally convinced Haynes of the pressing need for broader provisions in California and the comprehensive legalization of sterilization throughout the country. In October 1918, Haynes incorpo- rated the replies into a report titled “Care of the Insane,” in which he insisted that Americans “make it our business to awaken the people to a realization of the fact that it is as foolish to permit human defectives to reproduce themselves as to permit defective domestic animals to beget off spring. The whole stream of human life is being constantly pol- luted by the admixture of the tainted blood of the extremely defec- tive.”129 As he traversed California lecturing to welfare, correctional, and medical groups, Haynes repeatedly marshaled his data to praise the state’s sterilization program and campaign for its extension into untapped institutional and extrainstitutional domains.130

During the 1920s, Haynes became more and more dismayed with what he perceived to be a marked upsurge of mental incompetents in California. Beholden to rudimentary Mendelian theories of hereditary transmission, he wrote, “It is a fact obvious to every intelligent observer, whether layman or specialist, that feeble-bodied parents beget feeble- bodied children; and that feeble-minded parents beget feeble-minded children.”131 Haynes was especially worried about morons, whose men- tal functioning surpassed that of imbeciles and idiots and who possessed suffi cient interpersonal skills and curiosity to pursue sexual relations and engage in other untoward behavior. If not sterilized, morons—above all, moron girls—would bring into the world the next “generation of feeble-minded.”132 To contain this risk, Haynes urged the founding of a hospital expressly for morons, and, largely owing to this lobbying, an act was approved in 1917 authorizing the building of the Pacifi c Colony. In spite of a rocky start in the early 1920s, the colony was fully opera- tional by 1927 and in 1930 housed 528 patients, mostly transferred

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104 | Instituting Eugenics in California

from county and state homes. About 20 percent of these 528, or 107, had been sterilized; of these, 64 percent, or 69, were female.133 These operations were part of a marked increase in sterilization in the 1920s. Whereas fewer than 1,000 operations had been carried out between 1909 and 1920, over 6,000 had been performed by 1929.134 These developments bolstered Haynes’s eugenic convictions, and, ever con- scious of the looming specter of lawsuits against fellow physicians who performed surgeries, in 1922 he tried “to set up a $100,000 defense fund for state hospital directors who might be sued if sterilizing patients was ruled illegal.”135

If Haynes’s 1916 survey put sterilization center stage in California, then the study by Popenoe, commissioned by the HBF a decade later, did the same for a much larger national and international audience. The HBF was the brainchild of Ezra S. Gosney, a lawyer who had worked for the St. Joseph and Council Bluff s Railways in Missouri during the 1880s and had moved to the dry climate of northern Arizona in 1888 to recover from malaria. There he organized the Arizona Wool Growers’ Association, acting as its president for ten years. His familiarity with the livestock industry attuned Gosney to nascent doctrines of selective breeding.136 When he relocated to Pasadena in the early twentieth cen- tury, Gosney purchased more than three hundred acres of prime land, where he planted more than twenty-four thousand lemon trees as well as oranges and juice grapes.137 Selling his products through the Sierra Madre–Lamanda Citrus Association, which was affi liated with the monopolistic California Fruit Growers Exchange, Gosney grew rich off Southern California’s bountiful citrus industry. With his substantial holdings, Gosney would have earned about $70,000 annually, or forty times the average per capita income in the United States at the time.138

Already aware of the writings of Davenport and other eugenicists, Gosney became very enthusiastic about a book called Eugenical Sterili- zation in the United States and decided to travel to Cold Spring Harbor to confer with Laughlin, its author. Keen to invest in a eugenics organi- zation, Gosney asked Laughlin for guidance, and shortly after their reunion Gosney received a memorandum that Laughlin had written expressly for him. Laughlin trusted that his “Plan for Practical Work in Family-Stock Betterment” would “be of some service,” assuring Gos- ney, “I should be very glad if, after further discussion, I could aid in any manner in perfecting a practical outline for the consummation of your work in family-stock betterment.”139 This ambitious proposal recom- mended that Gosney assemble a board of representatives from the fi elds

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Instituting Eugenics in California | 105

of genetics, law, business, and education and that he hire able research- ers and a clerical staff . Laughlin told Gosney that the group would need to stay abreast of current research in eugenics, encourage legislation by drafting bills, and oversee the administration of existing laws.

Gosney was temporarily stalled by a freeze, which damaged his crops, and by bad weather in 1924. Nevertheless, the following year he reported to Laughlin that he was still eager to embark on the project: “This is just a line to say that I hope to get a start in the work discussed with you in the very near future. The plan outlined by you seemed sound and I am now getting in closer touch with a few prominent men who will be valu- able in a small committee or council to direct the work.”140 Seeking a well-known scientist, Gosney asked several eugenicists who, in their estimation, would be the fi nest candidate to carry out the foundation’s research.141 This quest led him to Paul Popenoe, who had spoken at the Second National Conference on Race Betterment in San Francisco in 1915. Raised in California, Popenoe had studied biology at Occidental College and Stanford University, had worked as an editor at a Pasadena newspaper, had managed the Journal of Heredity, had served as an army health offi cer on the US-Mexican border during World War I, and most recently had been executive secretary of the American Social Hygiene Association. Like Gosney, Popenoe also held vast fruit acreage, in his case date palms, which he cultivated at his family’s Coachella ranch according to lessons learned through his own experiments with the species.142

Without delay Popenoe drafted a blueprint for a “race-hygiene foun- dation.”143 Providing more detail than Laughlin, Popenoe proposed public lectures; the screening of motion pictures; closer contact with newspapers and magazines; collaboration with civic, infant welfare, and women’s groups; the creation of programs in high schools and col- leges; the stocking of local libraries with eugenic materials; the mount- ing of museum exhibits; the sponsorship of annual physical examina- tions at the YMCA; and the installation of psychometric laboratories in police departments and courts. As his lecture on race betterment at the Panama-Pacifi c International Exposition in 1915 had illustrated, Pope- noe believed that charity had furthered the survival of the unfi t and that the moment to put an end to the propagation of defectives had long since arrived. Convinced that extreme measures were necessary, Pope- noe opined, “The fi rst project taken up might well be sterilization, for which the data exist in California to an unusual extent. A thoroughgo- ing and impartial investigation, which would doubtless occupy at least

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106 | Instituting Eugenics in California

a year or two, should serve to reveal what the actual results have been from the four or fi ve thousand operations already performed.”144

Gosney wholeheartedly agreed and resolved to underwrite the inquiry.145 By spring 1926, Gosney and Popenoe had visited fi ve state institutions to procure access to medical records, a hurdle overcome by the patronage of the Department of Institutions, whose director sent instructions to the medical superintendents at Norwalk, Patton, Stock- ton, Napa, and Sonoma to accommodate these two eugenic investiga- tors: “Mr. Gosney is a man of considerable wealth, as I understand it, and is desirous of using some of his money for the purpose of dissemi- nating proper information regarding this matter, to the end that all of the states of the Union will enact sterilization laws and carry on the work the same as we are here in California.” He continued, “I would ask that you give him and Mr. Popenoe whatever assistance you can along such lines as you feel would be proper.”146

For about two years, Popenoe gathered statistics, demographic pro- fi les, and clinical case histories, regularly updating Gosney on his progress. While on the road, he consolidated and enlarged California’s network of eugenicists by speaking before civic clubs, meeting with the likes of Goethe, Holmes, and Jordan, and consulting with the juvenile courts.147 Popenoe was warmly welcomed at all the state institutions. At Stockton, he was impressed with the zeal of physician Margaret Smyth, who, he noted, had “sterilized more women than any other surgeon in the world, no doubt,” and at Mendocino he was pleased that such a small facility managed to handle about two operations a week.148 At Sonoma, medical superintendent Butler unreservedly put all the hospi- tal’s records at Popenoe’s disposal.149 In charge of Sonoma for more than thirty years, Butler was a vociferous sterilization campaigner, who rec- ommended that “all defectives who are capable of propagating, espe- cially the hereditary class,” “be asexualized before leaving the institu- tion” and who was adamant that discharge be contingent on surgery.150

Popenoe’s research culminated in dozens of papers, which he pre- sented as lectures around the state and the country; articles, appearing in periodicals such as the Journal of Social Hygiene, Journal of Heredity, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of the American Medical Asso- ciation, American Sociological Review, and American Journal of Obstet- rics and Gynecology; and a book, Sterilization for Human Betterment, which he coauthored with Gosney.151 This treatise was a glowing appraisal of sterilization as a surgical solution for the serious troubles facing the nation. Holding California up as the paragon, Gosney and

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Instituting Eugenics in California | 107

Popenoe sought to dispel misrepresentations of sterilization as damag- ing to sexual pleasure and individual morale, or as a viable excuse employed by young women to enter prostitution. Above all, Sterilization for Human Betterment strove to impress upon readers the impervious- ness of eugenic logic and the immense urgency of the task at hand. Con- tending that at least 5 percent of the American population were border- line or feebleminded, and that hundreds of thousands more were aff ected by devastating mental and physical diseases rooted in bad heredity, they cast the elimination of defectives yet unborn as one of the fi nal saving hopes for modern civilization and the human race. Eager to rid steriliza- tion of any punitive connotations and to disassociate it from castration, Gosney and Popenoe clarifi ed that “eugenic sterilization of the heredi- tary defective is a protection, not a penalty, and should never be made a part of any penal statute.”152

During the 1930s, Popenoe was America’s sterilization guru, and his message was not one of moderation. In 1937, repeating Butler’s calls for more extramural operations, Popenoe penned a short piece for Eugeni- cal News sketching what he limned as the overarching trends in human sterilization. Like his writings for the HBF, this was part journalistic fact-fi nding and part wish list. Popenoe described a general move toward sterilization for “social as well as eugenic indications,” evalua- tion of the entire (not only committed) population for potential surgical intervention, the targeting of recessive carriers of undesirable traits, the inclusion of criminals, and exceptions for religious objectors (as long as they paid for their own institutional segregation).153 This article was informed by a follow-up study that Popenoe had just completed with the CBJR’s director, Fenton, in which they assessed national develop- ments and drew attention to a Nebraska statute that entailed the regis- tration of all the feebleminded in the state and was predicated on overtly social, not hereditary, considerations.154 By this point, Popenoe’s vision, and the state’s sterilization program, had inspired Nazi Germany, whose 1933 Law on Preventing Hereditarily Ill Progeny was partially modeled on California’s statute. During the 1930s, the Third Reich and the Golden State maintained strong ties. In 1934, the HBF’s hometown, Pasadena, hosted a “Public Health and Eugenics in New Germany” exhibit, and throughout the decade California and German eugenicists traded ideas, statistics, and protocols and complimented each other’s escalating sterilization programs.155

Besides disseminating his fi ndings in the United States and abroad, Popenoe collaborated with Gosney to further better breeding in California.

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108 | Instituting Eugenics in California

In 1928, Gosney incorporated the HBF, whose charter members included Terman, Goethe, and Jordan, as well as many other local physicians and reformers. In 1929, the HBF helped to spawn the AIFR and the California Division of the AES, both headed by Popenoe. The HBF dictated the agenda of the Eugenics Section of the CCC starting in 1930, when it turned from Mexican immigration to the “elimination of the unfi t” and set out to uncover “what steps might be taken to stem the rising tide of idiots, imbeciles, epileptics, cretins and the like who are burdens to them- selves and relatives and the State.”156 Section members listened to lectures by medical superintendents, such as Butler and Smyth, who persuaded them of the myriad benefi ts of reproductive surgery.157 Taking direction from the HBF, this section backed the 1935 and 1937 draft bills to estab- lish a State Eugenics Board and spread sterilization to all state facilities. By that point, the HBF was aware of the over six hundred vasectomies performed on inmates in San Quentin by medical superintendent Dr. Leo Stanley. These operations pushed the limits of the law, which stipulated that, to be sterilized, inmates had to have been convicted twice for a sex- ual off ense or three times for any other kind of off ense. To navigate around these obstacles, Stanley contended that inmates had volunteered and fur- thermore could be classifi ed as feebleminded.158 Surely aware that Stanley was fl outing the law, Gosney and the HBF expressed concerns about his “over-enthusiastic” approach.159 From the HBF’s perspective, the broad- ening of the state’s sterilization program into prisons and other state facil- ities would assuage such anxieties and would shield superintendents like Stanley from any legal attack.

The HBF also promoted sterilization in private doctors’ offi ces around California. In the 1920s it maintained rosters of sterilizations carried out by eugenically minded obstetricians and gynecologists and affi liated with county clinics and in private practice. These numbers rivaled those in the smaller state institutions. During this decade, doc- tors at the Pasadena, Hollywood, Angelus, Methodist, and County General hospitals in Los Angeles as well as other facilities in Santa Bar- bara and Oakland sterilized over one thousand women, according to most of the patient records with the consent of the patient or her hus- band or both.160 These records end in the late 1920s; it is quite conceiv- able the rate of these private operations rose in tandem with the quick- ening pace of sterilizations in state institutions the 1930s and 1940s.

Even without the passage of new laws or the eff orts of private physicians, California’s sterilization program had become the most aggressive in the

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Instituting Eugenics in California | 109

country. From the early 1900s into the 1950s, thousands of people were subjected to compulsory sterilization. The state’s program fl ourished in a bureaucratic and political culture of institutional insularity that sharply curtailed the possibility of oversight in mental hospitals or feebleminded homes. At the same time, civically and medically active eugenic organiza- tions played an instrumental role in legitimizing sterilization as a pana- cea for many of the Golden State’s perceived social problems.

Eugenics fl ourished in California from 1900 into the 1940s, during which time an infl uential web of individuals and groups endorsed, fi nanced, and directed eugenic projects. These included physicians such as Haynes in Los Angeles, businessmen such as Goethe in Sacramento, and biologists such as Jordan in Palo Alto, all of whom infused hereditarian- ism into state, city, and county concerns and policies. Eugenics also bol- stered doctrines of white supremacy and Manifest Destiny that dated back to the 1840s, providing new and seemingly modern grounds for racial segregation and stereotypes. Particularly novel was the way in which eugenicists linked biological inferiority to the abuse of state resources, a connection reinforced by the deportation agent and during the exclusion- ary purge of the Great Depression. Finally, the implementation of eugenic programs would not have reached such extremes in California without the active involvement of the Department of Institutions, which led the coun- try in the expulsion of foreigners and undesirables, the development of large-scale intelligence testing, and the sterilization of those deemed unfi t.

Many groups, including immigrant and working-class European Americans, especially young girls classifi ed as immoral or delinquent, African Americans, and Asian Americans, were aff ected by the eugenics movement in the fi rst several decades of the twentieth century. Yet Mex- icans and Mexican Americans bore the brunt of eugenic racism. It was Mexicans who most perturbed the quota seekers of the Eugenics Sec- tion of the CCC and who were transported en masse across the south- ern border. The implementation of IQ testing programs provided a rationale for racial segregation and a two-tracked school system, help- ing to lay the foundation for deep educational inequities that were not overcome by psychologists’ intensifying focus on cultural and linguistic variables in the 1930s and 1940s. Furthermore, Mexicans, and more generally Spanish-surnamed patients, at state institutions were sterilized at disproportionate rates. For example, at Pacifi c Colony, an institution envisioned by Haynes as the answer to growing menace of “morons,” Spanish-surnamed patients—most of whom were of Mexican origin—

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110 | Instituting Eugenics in California

were 2.4 times more likely to be sterilized than the general patient population.

Even as California had its own homegrown movement, it supplied national leadership, presaging many of the trends that would reconfi g- ure hereditarianism in the second half of the century. Starting in the 1940s, for example, Popenoe helped to reorient eugenics away from public and legislative arenas and into the intimate domain of domestic- ity and the family, as the AIFR counseled thousands of people on their career, marital, and reproductive choices using revamped theories of human heredity and personality. Powerful tropes of Mexican inferiority continued to guide eugenicists’ beliefs and were evident when young Americanized Mexican boys were derided as mentally incompetent and Mexican women were caricatured as hyperbreeders dependent on wel- fare handouts and medical care. For these and many other reasons, California’s eugenic genealogies demand a reperiodization of the over- arching history of American eugenics and disrupt the rise-and-fall nar- rative that has interpreted the 1940s as a time when hereditarianism evaporated in response to the heinousness of Nazism.

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