Eugenic Nation
Page 13
If the Department of Institutions sometimes emphasized financial over eugenic reasoning, justifications 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 affecting the welfare of the Commonwealth and to aid in their solution,” served as a hub for Pacific Coast nativism.36 In its Immigration Section, initiated in 1913, members clamored for more stringent immigration restriction, labeling the Japanese and Mexicans as dysgenic. In 1920, after being briefed by this section, the CCC endorsed California’s second Alien Land Law, which stripped Japanese farmers of their land by making ownership contingent on American citizenship, a legal status that virtually none could attain.37
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.38 In an article titled “Perils of the Mexican Invasion,” Holmes assailed Mexicans as undemocratic, mentally retarded, and wildly procreative carriers of plague, typhus, and hookworm. Enjoining his readers to back extreme limits on immigration from the south, he identified Mexicans 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 average level of our own American stock.”39 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 unfit for inclusion in the American body politic.40 Many of Holmes’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.”41
Figure 5. Chart showing the 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 Office, 1930).
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?”42 Goethe opined that a Eugenics Section would provide the ideal forum in which to discuss how to combat the underbreeding of the “fit” and the overbreeding of the “unfit,” what Teddy Roosevelt had termed “race suicide” two decades earlier. Goethe thought the section could evaluate strategies for the elimination “from our population by preventing their reproduction, of the, say, perhaps 2 per cent thereof who are notoriously unfit to propagate.”43 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.44 Holmes was upbeat that the section would mature into a “center of influence” in California, a hope reiterated 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 influence. 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].”45
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.”46 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.47 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 laborers because they could withstand “the intense heat of the Imperial Valley which the white man cannot endure.” Despite these virtues, however, Mexicans were rarely endowed with IQs over 85, came from a “mongrel” nation, and exploited free clinics.48 In another meeting, the invited speaker charged that Mexicans in Los Angeles availed themselves of 78 percent of the county’s charity.49
Gaining in intensity in the 1920s, scientific 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 officers very busy, and probably diminished by half the chief crop of Southern California, winter tourists.”50 Three years later, on the letterhead 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.”51 In short order, dispatches such as these, sent by Jordan, Goethe, Holmes, and other Californians, found their way into the country’s flagship eugenics journal, Eugenical News, and by the late 1920s, Pacific Coast nativism had become a national affair: “The Mexican peon does more than bring into the United States smallpox. With his numerous offspring he tends to dilute our old American blood. Thus he is giving us a new color problem.”52
From the 1910s to the 1930s, the Deportation Agent, the Eugenics Section of the CCC, and nativists with university credentials vilified Mexicans as defective, diseased, and overly fecund, and urged that they be barred from the state, even as industry and agribusiness thrived precisely because of their labor. California eugenicists crafted an intransigent and tenacious xenophobia that resurfaced throughout the twentieth century, most recently in Proposition 187, which sought to deny public services, including medical care and education, to “illegal aliens.”53 Passed by a majority of California voters in 1994, this proposition was ruled unconstitutional in 1998 for overstepping the bounds of state authority.54
PSYCHOMETRICS AND JUVENILE RESEARCH
The same year that the Deportation Agent began his rounds, the Department of Institutions created the California Bureau of Juvenile Research. The first unit in the country devoted exclusively to research into the “causes and consequences of delinquency and mental deficiency” among children and adolescents, the CBJR functioned until 1941, when it was discontinued and replaced by the California Youth Authority.55 From 1916 to 1938 the CBJR published the Journal of Delinquency (renamed the Journal of Juvenile Research in 1928).56 Headquartered at the Whittier State School, a facility for boys younger than age sixteen, the CBJR, which treated the state’s correctional homes, schools, prisons, and detention halls as its bailiwick, 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 cognitive 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 masterin
g a trade, for girls, to achieving proficiency in sewing and home economics, and for immigrant children, to “Americanization” exercises.57
The creation of the CBJR reflected an increasing national preoccupation 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 the early twentieth century, California maintained several such institutions, including the Los Angeles Juvenile Court, founded in 1909.58 Children, especially adolescents, were gaining an autonomous identity in the fields of pediatric medicine, developmental psychology, and evolutionary science, and frequently served as the projection screen for adults’ unease about the present malaise and future cohesion of modern society.59 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 wayward or immoral. For boys, worries generally centered on perceived incorrigible or antisocial tendencies that might impede their employment 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 generation was of paramount importance.60
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 apprentice 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 quantifiable and innate, a tenet that prompted the German psychologist William Stern to invent the concept of the intelligence quotient in 1912.61 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.62 In his 1916 book, The Measurement of Intelligence, Terman outlined just such a formulation, expounding on the scientific accuracy of IQ tests and their ability to impartially identify delinquent, retarded, diseased, and otherwise unfit individuals.63 Exhibiting an undying faith in numbers, Terman devised a quantitative scale that categorized test-takers as idiots, imbeciles, morons, borderline deficients, feebleminded, dull normal, normal, superior, very superior, or geniuses.64 The IQs of morons fell between 50 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-fulfilling logic of racial aptitude, Terman’s “Normal Curve” located the IQs of Mexicans, Indians, and “negroes” in the borderline range of 70 to 90, with Mexicans hovering between borderline deficiency and somewhat more able groups “usually classed as normal but dull.”65
In order to recalibrate the Binet-Simon for use in the United States to gauge the extent of the “menace of feeblemindedness” in California, Terman began to administer hundreds of exams throughout the state.66 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 booklets to Whittier.67 In 1914, Stanford’s education department, under Terman’s direction, received a substantial endowment from the Buckel Foundation for the “psychological and pedagogical study of backward and mentally defective children.”68 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: “definitely 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 California’s youth.69
This study, along with several others, compelled Whittier’s superintendent, Fred C. Nelles, to back a bill requesting the foundation of the CBJR, which was approved in 1915 and expanded and clarified in 1917.70 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 deficiency, and related problems.”71 With Davenport’s blessing, the CBJR was designated “the official Western Representative of the Eugenics Record Office,” and was licensed to employ the ERO’s diagnostic and classificatory methods.72 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 field workers in California’s homes and hospitals.73 In 1915, the “exceptionally 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 field worker.74
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.75 In 1920, the bureau started to educate “a limited number of persons for field-work” in 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.76 In keeping with the eugenic nomenclature of the era, bureau psychologists assigned alphabetic “unit characters”—A for alcoholic, F for feebleminded, and W for wanderer—encasing them in squares or circles (depending on the relative’s sex) as they traced back the familial lineage of the child in question.77 For instance, in the case of an eleven-year-old male truant, Williams first traced the youngster’s paternal side, finding 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 vocational placement by providing employment which would give some outlet to this inherent trait.”78
In 1921, Covert completed Social Case History no. 351, a twenty-page evaluation of a fifteen-year-old Mexican male truant who had been declared a ward of the court and committed to Whittier. Classifying him as a moron, Covert then reviewed his proclivity for bad behavior and purported lack of interest in school, underscoring his “inferior mentality” and “low intelligence.” Based on 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 concluded that the mother and, at a minimum, two siblings were feebleminded. 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 offered that, if kept under “close supervision,” he could do adequately in the manual trades.79 It is possible that this Mexican boy, with an IQ of 67, was moved to a mental 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 Pacific Colony.80 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 first to its final issue. Indeed, most CBJR psychologists viewed reproductive surgery as a mandatory pre
condition for release from a state institution.81
In addition to its pivotal role in the state’s juvenile facilities, the CBJR was also instrumental to the explosion of IQ testing in California classrooms in the 1920s.82 The bureau propelled the psychometric boom that enveloped the Los Angeles public schools, which had recently acquired a Division of Psychology and Educational Research.83 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.84 The mushrooming of IQ testing coincided with the influx of roughly three hundred thousand Mexicans to the Southwest between 1910 and 1930, many fleeing the chaos of revolution and civil war.85 Upon arriving in California, these newcomers and their children, if attending school, encountered a segregated universe that had been intensified by scientific 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.86 Starting in the late nineteenth century, African American, Chinese, and Japanese schoolchildren faced de jure segregation in public education; in response, these communities waged protracted legal battles on the municipal and state levels.87 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 fitness. 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 communities in urban barrios that neighbored the factories where they worked.88 The first “Mexican” school was established in Santa Ana in 1912, and by the 1920s more had sprouted in Pasadena, Ontario, Riverside, and in the San Fernando Valley.89 When not instituting divided classrooms in urban Los Angeles, the school board “manipulated attendance zones to produce segregation” in the 1920s and 1930s.90 IQ testing offered a putatively scientific reason for this two-tiered system and vindicated the channeling of Mexican children into vocational instruction.91 Every psychometric study that corroborated Terman’s claims about Mexican retardation worked to reinforce educational segregation in California.