Eugenic Nation

by Stern, Alexandra Minna

  One of the CBJR’s inaugural surveys helped to set the tone. In the 1920s, as part of an effort to standardize the Stanford-Binet, bureau psychologists undertook an extensive and multiphased study of hundreds of boys at various sites, arriving at a mean IQ of 69.4 for Mexicans (although this figure rose to 74.6 for American-born Mexicans). Whites, on the other hand, averaged 83.6, the Chinese 74, and “Negro” children 79.2.92 For all but the white boys, who appeared to become smarter by the year, these numbers were mirrored in study after study.93 Analogous scores were extracted again and again by CBJR psychologists and ERO field workers in almost every institution holding children—public schools, orphanages, the juvenile court, and specialty clinics. For the most part, their investigations found that IQs varied dramatically between racial groups, and with few exceptions, Mexicans always fared the worst.

  Kimball Young, another of Terman’s disciples, started to test Mexicans 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 fixed at the bottom rungs, followed by the Portuguese, and lastly, 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 intelligence. Relying on a “Latin” versus “American” dichotomy, he proclaimed that the IQ of the former reached only 83, with that of Mexicans slightly less.94 Young was convinced that mental ability was transmitted in a strict Mendelian manner from parent to offspring and dismissed English literacy as a factor in test comprehension. Instead, he asseverated 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, “although hybridization might produce an occasional genius, the overall tendency is downwards, this miscegenation means race suicide.”95

  Pyschometricians 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.96 In a study of 341 girls at Ventura, using the Stanford-Binet, Julia Mathews arrived at the figure of 68 for the average IQ of Mexican girls, which 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.97 One study in Roswell, New Mexico, using a version of the Binet, calculated an IQ of 89 for Mexicans and 105 for whites.98 A five-year survey of one thousand young Mexicans in Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado produced a mean IQ of 78.1 and confirmed, “the retardation of the Mexican children is very high.”99 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, psychometricians consistently recorded scores for Mexicans in the 70 to 90 range, usually right around 80, exactly the borderline zone described by Terman in The Measurement of Intelligence. When pyschometricians did not encapsulate intelligence with a number, they still frequently categorized 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.”100

  The implications of the stupefaction of Mexicans were far-reaching. Eugenicists and restrictionists who wished to exclude Mexicans from the United States and sought to enact exceedingly low quotas against them constantly 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 America, a region that had produced none of the world’s 7,955 “men of genius.”101 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 congressman John C. Box at immigration hearings during the push for quotas in the late 1920s.102 In sum, eugenicists rallied around differential 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.103 Don T. Delmet, the superintendent of schools in Norwalk, California, echoed Garth. After administering intelligence tests to students ages six to twelve, he resolved that Mexicans’ mental backwardness constrained their occupational opportunities. He recommended that young Mexicans enroll in English classes, manual training, domestic arts, music, and social studies, and asked vocational counselors working with Mexicans to “take into consideration their social background and future economic status.”104

  If educators did not employ IQ scores to cast Mexicans as dull or borderline, criminologists brandished them to demonstrate that Mexicans 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 defined criminality as a product of defective heredity and identified Mexicans as the greatest offenders.105 An examination of arrests of Mexicans in the 1920s induced one participant to emphasize that “the Mexican whom we find in Los Angeles is, as a class, of relatively low mentality; he is probably best fitted for work demanding of an inferior grade.”106 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 acculturation, stereotypes of Mexican boys as prone to malfeasance remained common to the point of ubiquity in Southern California.107

  It is no coincidence that the 1946 class action lawsuit Mendez v. Westminster was filed by parents whose children were forced to attend separate schools in Orange County, a district where the CBJR’s IQ testing program had galvanized the construction of Mexican-only classrooms and the tracking of Mexicans into industrial education beginning in the late 1910s.108 In this case, the court ruled that the segregation of Mexicans in the public school system was unconstitutional—based, ironically, on the fact that Mexicans were technically classified as white and hence were not subject to the laws that affected Japanese, Chinese, and Indian students. Nevertheless, this verdict prompted Governor Earl Warren to sign legislation overturning segregation in California in 1947.

  STERILIZATION: “PROTECTION, NOT PENALTY”

  In 1909, two years after Indiana and a few weeks after the state of Washington, California passed the third sterilization bill in the nation.109 Envisioned by F. W. Hatch, the secretary of the State Commission in Lunacy, this legislation granted the medical superintendents of asylums and prisons the authority to “asexualize” a patient or inmate if such action would improve his or her “physical, mental, or moral condition.”110 The law was expanded in 1913, when it was repealed and replaced, and updated in 1917, when clauses were added to shield physicians against legal retaliation and to foreground a eugenic, rather than penal, rationale for surgery.111 The 1917 amendment, for example, reworded the description 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.”112 More encompassing than its predecessors, the 1917 act targeted inmates afflicte
d with “various grades of feeblemindedness” and “perversion or marked departures from normal mentality or from disease of a syphilitic nature.”113 Performed sporadically at the outset, operations began to climb in the late 1910s, and by 1921, 2,248 people—more than 80 percent of all cases nationwide—had been sterilized, mostly at the Sonoma and Stockton hospitals.114

  The state’s aggressive attempts to control the procreation of committed persons deemed insane, feebleminded, or otherwise unfit, as well as the clinical and ideological contributions of several ardent medical superintendents to sterilization procedures and policies, makes California 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 violation of equal protection and due process.115 This impelled some states to draft legislation that avoided punitive terminology, a tactic that underpinned the approbation of revised, or original, sterilization laws in the 1920s. During the Great Depression, the strain of shrinking state budgets and the vindication of eugenic justifications for sterilization in Buck v. Bell, the 1927 Supreme Court decision upholding Virginia’s statute, spurred additional sterilization legislation, especially in the South.116 In 1932, twenty-seven states had laws on the books and the number of operations nationwide peaked at just over thirty-nine hundred.117 Significantly, California’s statute—although reworked over the decades—remained in force without interruption 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 first half of the twentieth century, physicians, reformers, psychologists, and some patients and their parents looked favorably at reproductive surgery as a procedure that could better the fitness of society, potentially cure the sterilized individual, and result in early parole. As with the other two faces of eugenics in California, scientific racism and intelligence testing, the Department of Institutions supplied much of the administrative scaffolding for the state’s sterilization program. At the same time, it fortified the professional networks of sterilization crusaders, imbuing their mission with the aura of officialdom and the stamp of governmental legitimacy. As was the case with related health and reform initiatives, a handful of influential advocates played a decisive role in advancing the cause. These proponents launched investigations into the prevalence, effects, and impact of reproductive surgery, and marshaled their findings, which were wrapped in the mantle of medical authority, to widen the ambit of the law and its application. Although many eugenicists 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 efficiency. A member of the AES, 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 semi-arid 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 gynecology at hospitals and universities, and eventually setting up a bustling clinic in downtown Los Angeles.118 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 efforts, 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.”119 He believed that through the oversight of eugenicists and other scientifically enlightened experts, society could become “organized for well-being” and escape the destructive and purposeless drifting that had gone on for eons.120 Weaving a cosmology from German physiology and the sociology of Herbert Spencer and Emile Durkheim, Haynes envisaged a regulated and streamlined Los Angeles. In this urban wonderland the boss machinery erected by the Southern Pacific Railroad and the Los Angeles Times would be disassembled, the municipality would control resources through boards elected by informed citizens, and the enforcement of labor laws would attenuate antagonisms between workers and capitalists. He fought for these changes on 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 first blush, was actually quite consistent with his eugenic creed and intellectual reliance on physiological doctrines of homeostasis.

  A devout Malthusian who equated overpopulation with social disorder, 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.”121 He also countenanced birth control, 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.122 But Haynes did much more than orchestrate municipal housekeeping. During his thirteen-year appointment to the State Board of Charities and Corrections, 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 sterilization procedures they had performed, their opinions of the surgery, and whether they considered feebleminded patients released without surgery 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 questions because their states either lacked such a law or it had been overturned. 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 feeble-minded, particularly the Moron type and the defective delinquent of the female sex, would be a great benefit 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 financial standpoint.”123 And G. A. Smith, of the Central Islip State Hospital on Long Island, who regretted the cumbersomeness of New York’s law, evinced, “personally, I am very much in favor of the sterilization of certain defectives, especially cases of dementia praecox, epileptics, chronic alcoholics, and subnormal mental individuals. I believe this procedure would be to the best interests of society and that every inmate as indicated above should be sterilized before discharged.”124 Almost all of Haynes’s California respondents praised sterilization, which they were confident would lead eventually to the elimination of deleterious germ plasm from the populace. John A. Reily, the medical superintendent at the Department of Institutions’ Patton Hospital in San Bernardino, declared, “the primary benefit from sterilization” was “the ultimate results in improving the standard of the human race,” adding that the occasional denial of the pleasures of parenthood was a “small consideration as compared with the vast benefits accruing to society in the prevention of the propagation of the unfit.”125

  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 incorporated the replies into a report titled “Care of the Insane,” in which he insisted that Americans “make it our business to awaken the peopl
e 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 offspring. The whole stream of human life is being constantly polluted by the admixture of the tainted blood of the extremely defective.”126 As he traversed California lecturing to welfare, correctional, and medical groups, Haynes repeatedly marshaled his data to exalt the state’s sterilization program and campaign for its extension into untapped institutional and extra-institutional domains.127

  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.”128 Haynes was especially worried about morons, whose mental functioning surpassed that of imbeciles and idiots and who possessed enough 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.”129 To contain this risk, Haynes beat the drum for a hospital expressly for morons, and, largely owing to this lobbying, an act was approved in 1917 authorizing the building of the Pacific Colony. In spite of a rocky start in the early 1920s, the colony was fully operational by 1927 and in 1930 housed 528 patients, mostly transferred from county and state homes. Showing Haynes’s admonitions at work, about 20 percent of these 528, or 107, had been sterilized; of these, 64 percent, or 69, were female.130 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, 6,250 had been performed by 1929.131 These developments bolstered Haynes’s eugenic convictions, and, ever conscious 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.”132