Eugenic Nation

by Stern, Alexandra Minna

  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 Bluffs Railways in Missouri during the 1880s and 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.133 When he relocated to Pasadena in the early twentieth century, 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.134 Selling his products through the Sierra Madre–Lamanda Citrus Association, which was affiliated 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 seventy thousand dollars annually, or forty times the average per capita income in the United States at the time.135

  Cognizant of the writings of Davenport and other eugenicists, Gosney became very enthused while reading Eugenical Sterilization in the United States and decided to travel to Cold Spring Harbor to confer with Laughlin, the book’s author. Keen to invest in a eugenics organization, 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 Gosney, “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.”136 This ambitious proposal recommended that Gosney assemble a board of representatives from the fields of genetics, law, business, and education, and hire able researchers 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 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 valuable in a small committee or council to direct the work.”137 Seeking a well-known scientist, Gosney asked several eugenicists who, in their estimation, was the finest candidate to carry out the foundation’s research.138 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 officer on the U.S.-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.139

  Without delay Popenoe drafted a blueprint for a “race-hygiene foundation.”140 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 colleges, the stocking of local libraries with eugenic materials, the mounting of museum exhibits, the sponsorship of annual physical examinations at the YMCA, and the installation of psychometric laboratories in police departments and courts. As his lecture on race betterment at the PPIE in 1915 had illustrated, Popenoe believed that charity had furthered the survival of the unfit and that the moment to put an end to the propagation of defectives had long since arrived. Convinced that extreme measures were necessary, Popenoe opined, “[T]he first project taken up might well be sterilization, for which the data exist in California to an unusual extent. A thoroughgoing and impartial investigation, which would doubtless occupy at least a year or two, should serve to reveal what the actual results have been from the four or five thousand operations already performed.”141

  Gosney wholeheartedly agreed and resolved to underwrite the inquiry.142 By spring 1926, Gosney and Popenoe had visited five state institutions in order to procure access to medical records, a hurdle overcome by the patronage of the Department of Institutions, whose director sent an instructive to the medical superintendents at Norwalk, Patton, Stockton, Napa, and Sonoma to accommodate these two eugenic investigators: “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 disseminating 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.”143

  For about two years, Popenoe gathered statistics, demographic profiles, 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.144 Popenoe was warmly welcomed at all the state institutions. At Stockton, he was impressed with the zeal of physician Margaret Smyth, who, he noted, “has 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.145 At Sonoma, medical superintendent Butler unreservedly put all the hospital’s records at Popenoe’s disposal.146 In charge of Sonoma for more than thirty years, Butler was a vociferous sterilization campaigner, who averred that “all defectives who are capable of propagating, especially the hereditary class,” should “be asexualized before leaving the institution,” and was adamant that discharge be contingent on surgery.147 To ensure that higher numbers of young women classified as feebleminded or moronic were deprived of the capacity to reproduce, in the 1920s Butler started to turn Sonoma into a hospital with a revolving operating room, as teenage girls tagged as unruly, promiscuous, and mentally inferior were briefly interned with the intent of sterilization. Popenoe explained to Gosney, “It appears that something like 25% of the girls who have been sterilized were sent up here solely” for surgery. “They are kept only a few months—long enough to operate and install a little discipline in them; and then returned home.”148 According to Butler, these cases comprised 21 percent of Sonoma’s load and it was routine for persons categorized as mentally retarded (possessing an IQ of 80 or below) to be surgically fixed and released in less than a month’s time. Like many other California eugenicists, Butler continually campaigned for extramural sterilizations at the hands of private surgeons or in general hospitals and lamented that their prohibition hurt society from a biological, financial, and moral standpoint.149

  Popenoe’s research culminated in dozens of papers, which he presented 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 Association, American Sociological Review, and American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology; and a book, Sterilization for Human Betterment, which he coauthored with Gosney.150 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 Popenoe sought to quash misrepresentations of sterilization as damaging to sexual pleasure and individual morale, or as a viable excuse empl
oyed by young women to enter prostitution. Above all, Sterilization for Human Betterment strove to impress upon readers the imperviousness of eugenic logic and the immense urgency of the task at hand. Contending that at least 5 percent of the American population was borderline or feebleminded, and that hundreds of thousands more were affected by devastating mental and physical diseases rooted in bad heredity, they cast the elimination of defectives yet unborn as one of the final saving hopes for modern civilization and the human race. Eager to rid sterilization of any punitive connotations and disassociate it from castration, Gosney and Popenoe clarified that “eugenic sterilization of the hereditary defective is a protection, not a penalty, and should never be made a part of any penal statute.”151

  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 Eugenical News sketching what he limned as the overarching trends in human sterilization. Like his writings for the HBF, this was part journalistic fact-finding and part wish list. Popenoe described a general move toward sterilization for “social as well as eugenic indications,” evaluation 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).152 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 developments and drew attention to a Nebraska statute that entailed the registration of all the feebleminded in the state and was predicated on overtly social, not hereditary, considerations.153 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.154

  Besides disseminating his findings in the United States and abroad, Popenoe collaborated with Gosney to further better breeding 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 unfit” 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 themselves and relatives and the State.”155 Section members listened to lectures by medical superintendents, such as Butler and Smyth, who persuaded them of the myriad benefits of reproductive surgery.156 Taking direction from the HBF, this section backed the 1935 and 1937 draft bills to establish a State Eugenics Board and spread sterilization to all state facilities.

  Against this backdrop, operations in California climbed to between 674 and 848 per year between 1936 and 1941, and by 1942 more than fifteen thousand had been performed, the bulk since 1925.157 Even when compared per capita to states with much smaller populations, sterilization rates in California were always clustered at the top. Not until the 1940s, when California claimed about 60 percent of all operations nationwide, did a few states such as Delaware, North Carolina, and Virginia begin consistently to overtake California in either per capita or annual terms.158 The last year with a substantial number of sterilizations in California was 1951, with 255 operations, a number that dropped dramatically the next year to 51, indubitably because of a revision to the statute inserting administrative requirements for physicians and safeguards for patients.159 This amendment and another 1953 bill deleted any references to syphilis (long since understood as bacterial, not hereditary, in etiology) and sexual perversion, instated more elaborate processes of notice, hearing, and appeal, and removed idiots and fools, terms seen as archaic, from the purview of the law.160 Apparently, the Catholic Church lobbied for most of the procedural changes, while the Department of Mental Hygiene aimed to bring terminology and concepts up to date. Nonetheless, the categories of mental deficiency and feeblemindedness were not touched, and the other portions of the law remained intact. Rather than comprising a thorough rebuttal of the law, these revisions amounted to a compromise among various constituents, in part to prevent “the passage of a much more stringent bill which has been suggested by many.”161

  By turning what had been a mere formality into a much more taxing request, these modifications deterred many physicians from seeking sterilization orders.162 Yet surgeries continued, albeit sporadically, at almost every state institution into the 1960s and 1970s, even at newly opened facilities such as DeWitt and Camarillo. In the 1940s, with the emergence of novel modalities for treating the mentally ill, such as electro- and insulin shock, medical superintendents debated the value of reproductive surgery and whether it was a eugenic, therapeutic, or fiscal measure. Such fine distinctions, however, were often lost on the Department of Institutions (now renamed the Department of Mental Hygiene), which wrote in 1947, “in addition to its therapeutic value for the patient, the [sterilization] program has obvious eugenic, social, and economic value for the community.”163 In the post–World War II period, the criteria for authorizing surgery progressively shifted from hereditary fitness and innate mental capacity to able parenthood and social skills. Nevertheless, it is crucial to recognize, particularly for California, that even if the compulsion to sterilize became less and less wedded to arguments about protecting the public’s hereditary health, the authority to operate was still derived from eugenic statutes that were not expunged from state law until 1979.

  It will be next to impossible ever to determine with any degree of certainty the number of sterilizations performed in twentieth-century California for five key reasons. First, uneven archival access and organization, coupled with the quandary of lost and destroyed documents, profoundly inhibit researchers from capturing a comprehensive picture. In addition, regulations regarding patient confidentiality, which are ethically essential, can nonetheless make it exceedingly difficult to obtain data that might shed substantial light on ethnic, racial, class, gender, and regional variations and dynamics. Second, operations not sanctioned by the law or included in the official statistics occurred in state prisons. In a 1930 presentation before the Eugenics Section of the CCC, Dr. Leo Stanley, the medical superintendent at San Quentin prison, made no secret of the fact that he was sterilizing inmates, even though this was technically illegal and could be interpreted as a punitive distortion of the law. Attempting to navigate around such obstacles, Stanley contended that his patients had willingly volunteered and furthermore could be classified as feebleminded.164 According to Gosney, who was uneasy about Stanley’s flouting of the law, approximately six hundred operations had been performed at San Quentin by 1941.165 Third, as Butler and Popenoe attest, there were notable numbers of “sent for sterilization only” cases, especially of adolescent female delinquents, who were either delivered to state institutions (above all, Sonoma) by court order or, in lesser numbers, self-admitted as “volunteers,” paying twenty-five dollars a month for maintenance.166 There is insufficient information to determine if these cases were partially or fully incorporated into the official numbers. Fourth, according to Popenoe, eugenically minded obstetricians and gynecologists in private practice and affiliated with county facilities carried out salpingectomies in numbers rivaling those of the Department of Institutions.167 In the 1920s, doctors at the Pasadena, Hollywood, Angelus, Methodist, and County General hospitals in Los Angeles as well as other facilities in Santa Barbara and Oakland sterilized several hu
ndred women, according to most of the patient records with the consent of the patient or her husband or both.168 It is conceivable that such operations rose in tandem with the augmenting pace of sterilizations in the 1930s and 1940s. Finally, there remains the blurred spectrum between choice and coercion. Did a few, some, or even many of the more than twenty thousand persons sterilized in California seek out the procedure as a form of birth control? In North Carolina, Minnesota, and Puerto Rico, a minority of women—often with several children in tow and scant resources or simply desirous of permanent contraception—petitioned eugenics councils or fought for elective surgeries, against a system of reproductive health where voluntary sterilization was illegal and most forms of birth control highly regulated.169 Moreover, while it is appropriate to define the majority of California’s sterilizations as compulsory, given that they often proceeded with little or no consent, some parents and patients alike believed that reproductive surgery was a reasonable remedy for a troubled individual, not a reprehensible infringement of personal rights and bodily integrity.