Despite these glaring gaps, there are discernible patterns. The charts and records that Popenoe compiled during his HBF-sponsored study in the late 1920s and his 1936 follow-up study report that the foreign-born were disproportionately affected by California’s program, constituting 39 percent of men and 31 percent of women sterilized.170 Of these, immigrants from Scandinavia, Britain, Italy, Russia, Poland, and Germany were represented in the greatest numbers.171 These documents also suggest that African Americans and Mexicans were operated on at rates that exceeded their proportion of the population. For instance, although according to the 1920 census they made up about 4 percent of the state population, Mexican men and Mexican women, respectively, comprised 7 and 8 percent of those sterilized. It is likely that without the Deportation Agent’s forced repatriation of Mexicans, this figure would have been slightly higher.172 More striking, at the Norwalk State Hospital, in Southern California, where Mexicans constituted 7.8 percent of admissions, or 380, from 1921 to 1930, they were sterilized at rates of 11 percent for females and 13 percent for males.173 In addition, although African Americans constituted just over 1 percent of California’s population, they made up 4 percent of total operations.174
Without further information about gross ethnic and racial composition and without knowing if Mexicans were counted among the native-born, it is not possible to determine how these patterns played out as sterilization rates rose in the 1930s. Regardless, Popenoe and California eugenicists continued to demonize Mexicans as overly dependent on state welfare and oversexed, procreating families in excess of the “normal” size of responsible citizens. In 1934, for example, Popenoe and Ellen Morton Williams of the Los Angeles Children’s Protective Association tracked 504 recipient families of public aid, most of whom had been “producing children steadily at public expense.”175 Distancing themselves from the overtly racist rhetoric of eugenicists such as Laughlin and Madison Grant, Popenoe and Williams crafted their argument out of the fabric of demography and family planning, proposing several plausible explanations for social phenomena and mobilizing the neutrality of statistics to subtly make their case.176 They reported that 40 percent of the families accepting assistance were foreign-born. Of these, Mexicans had the largest family size, a mean of 5.20 living children. Determining that dependency had often begun before the birth of the first child, they asserted, “The conclusion is plain. The longer a family is in receipt of charity, the more children it produces.”177 According to Popenoe and Williams, these kinds of parents rarely produced children of “superior quality;” much more common were “eugenically inferior” offspring. They summarized their paper cautiously: “every new family admitted to charitable relief should also be given contraceptive instruction and materials, unless it is clear that no children are likely to be produced while the family is dependent. Beyond this, sterilization at public expense should be provided for selected patients who desire it.”178
Popenoe’s two studies also relate that although the age of those sterilized varied according to sex, institution, and marital status, the vast majority were in the twenty to forty range; according to his second survey, the mean age of commitment, after which sterilization typically occurred in less than twelve months, was about thirty for men and twenty-eight for women.179 However, unnamed patient records from the 1920s reveal hundreds of individuals in their late teens and early twenties sterilized for dementia praecox (schizophrenia), epilepsy, manic depression, psychosis, feeblemindedness, or mental deficiency. A notable percentage of these young patients, if male, were typed as masturbators or incest perpetrators, if female, as promiscuous, even nymphomaniac, or not infrequently having borne a child out of wedlock.180 Indeed, California’s program was motivated by deep-seated preoccupations about gender and female sexuality.181 Especially after the surgical procedure of salpingectomy became faster and less dangerous in the 1920s, the sterilization of women and young girls categorized as immoral, loose, or unfit for motherhood intensified. This trend is captured by the changing ratio between sterilizations carried out at institutions for the mentally ill and those for the feebleminded. Initially, the majority of operations occurred at the former, affecting more men than women; by the late 1930s, as this pattern first leveled off and then began a minor reversal, the two types of institutions were approaching parity. Although nationwide by the 1930s female rates were overtaking male rates, the relatively early beginning of California’s sterilization regime meant women would not substantially outpace men in annual or aggregate numbers until the 1940s, although the ratio of sterilizations was routinely higher for females at institutions for the feebleminded and, ultimately, about 60 percent of those sterilized were diagnosed as insane, often schizophrenic, and 40 percent as mentally deficient.182 What is masked by this simple gender breakdown is any numerical sense of how the unease of eugenicists and their allies vis-à-vis gender roles and sexuality may have affected those whose appearance or affective behavior transgressed heterosexual norms. Scattered “sodomites” appear in unnamed patient records from the 1920s, but the contours of such patterns and how they compare with the overlap between sterilization and homophobia in the states of Washington and Oregon remain unknown.183
Eugenics flourished in California from 1900 into the 1940s, when an influential web of individuals and groups endorsed, financed, 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 hereditarianism into state, city, and county concerns and policies. Eugenics also bolstered 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 exclusionary purge of the Great Depression. Lastly, 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 country in the expulsion of foreigners and undesirables, the development of large-scale intelligence testing, and the sterilization of those deemed unfit.
Many groups, including immigrant and working-class European Americans, especially young girls classified as immoral or delinquent, African Americans, and Asian Americans, were affected by the eugenics movement in the first several decades of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, Mexicans and Mexican Americans bore the brunt of eugenic racism. It was Mexicans who most perturbed the quota seekers of the Eugenics Section of the CCC and who were transported en masse across the southern border. Furthermore, the implementation of IQ testing programs fomented racial segregation and a two-tracked school system, helping 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. The legacy of eugenics lingered and sometimes fervidly reappeared in California in the second half of the century, as young Americanized Mexican boys were derided as mentally incompetent, and Mexican women were caricatured as hyperbreeders dependent on welfare handouts and medical care.
Even as California had its own homegrown movement, it supplied national leadership, presaging many of the trends that would reconfigure hereditarianism after the heyday of sterilization. In the 1940s, for example, Popenoe helped to reorient eugenics away from public and legislative arenas and into the intimate domain of domesticity and the family, as the AIFR counseled thousands of people on their career, marital, and reproductive choices based on revamped theories of human heredity and personality. For this and many other reasons, the history of California necessitates a reperiodiziation of the history of American eugenics and disrupts the rise-and-fall narrative that has interpreted the 1930s as a time when hereditarianism evaporated in response to the heinousness of Nazism.
CHAPTER 4
California’s Eugenic Landscapes
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p; The extent to which certain places dominate the California imagination is apprehended, even by Californians, only dimly. Deriving not only from the landscape but from the claiming of it, from the romance of emigration, the radical abandonment of established attachments, this imagination remains obdurately symbolic, tending to locate lessons in what the rest of the country perceives only as scenery.
Joan Didion, “Girl of the Golden West”
Atop a steep ridge lined with eucalyptus and pines in the hills above Berkeley, California, sits Vollmer Peak, named for August Vollmer, an eclectic eugenicist and one of the most innovative reformers in modern policing.1 What was formerly known as Baldy Peak was christened in honor of Vollmer in 1940, after New Deal and relief projects had transformed the face of much of California and the Southwest.2 Thanks to the toil of thousands of young workers attached to the Civilian Conservation Corps and the State Emergency Relief Administration, hundreds of parks, gardens, recreation facilities, and historical monuments were constructed during the Great Depression.3 In the East Bay, one centerpiece of public works was the East Bay Regional Park District, which consisted of ten thousand acres of woodlands acquired through a public bond initiative from the Municipal Utility District.4 In the November 1934 election, the residents of seven East Bay cities voted for the park and elected five Regional Park Board directors, charged with oversight and administration.5 Two of the “leading citizens” on the board were Charles Lee Tilden, for whom the park is now named, and Vollmer.
Born to German parents in New Orleans in 1876, Vollmer moved with his family to Berkeley in the late 1890s. A founder of Berkeley’s volunteer fire department, Vollmer became town marshal soon after returning from duty in the Spanish-American War. In 1905 he organized his patrol into the Berkeley Police Department, serving as its chief until 1932. After retiring from the force, Vollmer was appointed professor of police administration in the political science department at the University of California at Berkeley, where he established the School of Criminology. A prolific author of books and articles on crime control and the criminal personality, Vollmer was in great demand on the lecture circuit and was active in dozens of local and national organizations.6 Throughout his long career, Vollmer emphasized the need to professionalize police agencies and do away with the vigilantism and Old Boy’s personalism that had characterized many law and order squads in the nineteenth century, especially in the American West. Above all, this meant reliance on scientific methods: “criminology will be on solid ground when it follows in the footsteps of medical science.”7 For Vollmer, objective observation, laboratory science, and clinical diagnosis provided civilized solutions for the rehabilitation of criminals that were a far cry from the shackles and corporeal punishments of yesteryear. Vollmer’s philosophy was strongly rooted in hereditarian and evolutionary theories, and he insisted that the starting point for an evaluation of a criminal’s mindset and motivations should be his or her genetic and constitutional makeup. Vollmer set a place at the table for extrinsic factors, which could discourage or encourage positive or negative dispositions, above all “during the early and formative years of the individual’s life,” but ultimately exerted little influence.8 Using the example of an orange tree, he explained, “environment plays an important role in developing all of the potentialities of the tree, but that is all that environment can do. It can add nothing to the tree that was not there at the beginning of its existence.” Extending this analogy to humans, Vollmer continued, “a constitutionally defective individual will always be defective,” adding, “as a general rule, brilliant and talented persons usually are descendants of people of superior qualities while the stupid and insane are descendants of dull or defective forbears.”9
In order to infuse science and medicine into policing, in Berkeley and the other locales across the Americas (Los Angeles, San Diego, Kansas City, Detroit, and Havana) where he revamped police departments, Vollmer introduced an array of new-fangled technologies and procedures, such as integrated radio communications, an identification records system, mobile patrols, sophisticated laboratories, and mandatory fingerprinting.10 Taken with anthropometrics and biometrics, Vollmer commissioned a physiologist at the University of California at Berkeley to design the country’s first polygraph or “lie-detector” apparatus.11 He was also keen on intelligence testing, which he thought could both accurately identify feebleminded and delinquent adolescents and grade the ability of police recruits. Under his watch, the Berkeley Police Department began to administer the Army Alpha and Beta tests to screen policemen and women in the late 1910s.12 In Vollmer’s estimation, the coordinated implementation of these original tactics constituted the cutting edge of the modern fight against crime. If there was one key word for Vollmer’s philosophy, it was prevention, a concept he understood principally in medical terms: “crime should be combated by preventive measures in the same manner that diseases are fought by professional health officials.”13 Just as a particular vaccine could inoculate a person against a particular infection, a scientifically informed and calculated intervention administered at the appropriate time and place could reduce crime and deter criminals.
When he was elected to the park board in 1934, Vollmer brought his ideas about hereditary potentialities to bear on the mission and purpose of the East Bay Regional Park District.14 Like many other proponents of expanded recreation, Vollmer subscribed to arguments about humans’ evolutionary need for open space and access to wilderness. Such notions began to gain currency during the Progressive era as urban reformers emphasized how playgrounds and recreation could improve the physical and psychological well-being of American children, and conservationists began to push for managed park systems.15 During the New Deal, the environmentalist agenda was given a boost by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s relief agencies, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, which employed more than two million Americans to carve out and enlarge nearly one thousand parks across the country.16 The corps itself reflected popular attitudes about the invigorating effects of nature contact and the anticipation that assigning demoralized, jobless, and often malnourished young men to parks and wilderness projects would bolster simultaneously their virility and national fitness.17
By the mid-twentieth century, access to recreation and nature areas was seen as a crucial component of maintaining a balanced and harmonious society. In 1941, for example, a National Park Service report outlined the penalties of the modern exile from nature, which risked turning Americans into automatons and severing man’s (the relationship to nature was almost always expressed in androcentric terms) bond to his primitive self, a predicament “which can be alleviated only by making it possible for him to escape at frequent intervals from his urban habitat to the open country.”18 Many reformers contended that, aside from these salutary effects, parks could also stem juvenile delinquency by keeping in check the dormant antisocial tendencies of overstimulated city youth. These concerns, coupled with the desire to take advantage of federal funds and workers, underpinned the construction of Tilden Park. So too did Vollmer’s scientific and biological approaches to criminality and crime prevention. In his campaign report, Vollmer declared that the East Bay had less recreational acreage per capita than any other community and that urban sprawl had “now reached practically to the hilltops and no play space [was] left.”19 The provision of nature areas, hiking trails, rifle ranges, camping grounds, and botanical gardens would stimulate health and diminish crime: “delinquency thrives where there is no supervised recreation. The National Crime Commission says that if we paid one half the amount for recreation that we do for jails we would not have half as many criminals.”20
Vollmer has been forgotten in the literature on eugenics; he does not fit the expected mold and he devoted scant energy to high-profile issues such as sterilization and immigration restriction. Nonetheless, his story is one path along the variegated terrain of hereditarianism in the twentieth century. He sat on the advisory councils of the American Eugenics Society and the Euthanasi
a Society of America and was a member of the National Committee of Mental Hygiene and the National Society for the Legalization of Euthanasia.21 Vollmer backed the legalization of birth control and the voluntary suicide of the infirm and incompetent. However, as a criminologist with a humanitarian agenda, he strongly opposed the death penalty. Disdainful of doctrines of racial superiority, Vollmer championed desegregation as well as free speech. He took part in Berkeley’s Inter-Racial Committee, founded in the early 1940s, and during that same period refused to censor socialist discussion groups at the local YMCA.22 His life ended at his own hands, when, at the age of seventy-nine, suffering from Parkinson’s disease and diagnosed with cancer, he fatally shot himself with his service revolver in his Berkeley home.23
A NATURAL ALLIANCE?
Eugenicists profoundly shaped California’s landscapes. Their approaches to the environment encompassed the entire spectrum, from preservationists fiercely intent on forever insulating the wonders of nature from intrusion, to parks and recreation enthusiasts who wanted to build roads, lookouts, and concessions to make the outdoors more accessible if not commercially profitable.24 What unites them is the extent to which they comprehended California’s biota and topography through a framework of selective breeding, one in which specific species and organisms were elevated, chosen, and revered over others. In a more general sense, they viewed exposure to nature as a method of containing the worst and actualizing the best of humans’ evolutionary and hereditary predispositions. Almost always their vision at once mirrored and extended into the world of plants and animals the Pacific West’s brand of nativism and racial exclusion. There were exceptions, such as Vollmer, whose ecumenical hereditarianism—based not on assumptions about the inherent capacities of certain races but on the principle that genetic assets and defects were universally distributed among the human population—anticipated later understandings of the interplay between nature and nurture.
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