Eugenic Nation

by Stern, Alexandra Minna

  There are many histories of human intervention embedded in California’s landscapes: the patchwork of missions first forged by indentured Indians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and refurbished by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression, the vast fields of agribusiness that rose up on the backs of migrant laborers in the central and southern valleys, the ever-widening pockets of suburbia creeping into the desert, and the arteries of aqueducts dredged and paved over the past hundred years, to name just a few. After the fact, the human beings who imagined, orchestrated, and physically built these geographies are frequently rendered invisible.25 Instead, what is perceived is the sheer beauty of the topography or the concrete results of arduous labor, such as bridges, skyscrapers, and highways. This phenomenon is even more pronounced for parks and wilderness areas, which exist in large part because of modern myths of virgin lands, untouched forests, and the sacred quality of nature free from people. This helps to explain why much of the story of eugenicists and California’s landscapes remains hidden in the soil. This absence is even more striking considering that eugenicists intentionally inscribed the geography with an exultant historical narrative of westward expansion and progress that culminated in California with their entrance as saviors and victors.

  California was the cradle of the modern environmental movement. In 1892 John Muir and more than one hundred kindred Yosemite lovers founded the Sierra Club; the Sempervirens Club for the defense of central coast redwoods followed in 1900, and the Save-the-Redwoods League in 1918. From the outset, eugenic guidelines of selective breeding and species endangerment were central to these three organizations, especially the Save-the-Redwoods League.26 Indeed, hikers passing through the Madison Grant Forest and Elk Refuge in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park or climbing Mount Jordan in Sequoia National Park might be surprised to learn that they are enjoying places named in honor of two of the most prominent eugenicists in the first half of the twentieth century.27

  Men such as these promoted nature-making in California in three key ways. First, they founded, directed, and financed environmental organizations, thus facilitating the legislative and fiscal involvement of governmental agencies in land appropriation and management. For instance, about fifteen years before they joined the country’s first eugenics body, the Eugenics Committee of the American Breeders’ Association, Jordan and the horticulturist Luther Burbank were charter members of the Sierra Club. Eugenicists were also behind some of the initiatives that produced shelters, playgrounds, parks, and arboretums across the state.28 The Sacramento real estate tycoon Charles M. Goethe, who established the Eugenics Society of Northern California, enabled Stephen Mather, the inaugural director of the National Park Service, to launch the interpretive parks program in Yosemite in 1920, and gave more than two million dollars to the Save-the-Redwoods League for memorial groves and related projects.29 Others who resided on the East Coast, such as Henry Fairfield Osborn and Madison Grant, lent energy, time, and their prestige to California’s environmental groups and campaigns.

  Second, California eugenicists interwove hereditarian and evolutionary tenets and motifs into the narratives they crafted about the Pacific West and westward empire as the crucible of the American nation. As part of the rush of European American settlers who sought to order and appropriate postcolonial California, eugenicists fabricated origins stories about the exceptionalism of the West. They frequently invoked the trope of the Garden of Eden, now being harvested anew by a superior class of colonist.30 These narratives evoked the evolutionism of Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” and the “agrarian myth” of “simple, rural people coming into a western country . . . and creating there a peaceful, productive life.”31 Burbank, for instance, expressed buoyant optimism about the potential for the innovative hybridization of fruits, flowers, and people in a region rich with Spanish, Mexican, Russian, French, and, most recently, Anglo-Saxon heritages. In a complementary fashion, eugenicists also conceived of the West as a savage frontier where men afflicted by neurasthenia and the deleterious effects of urbanization and industrialization could be restored through mountaineering, bareback riding, and communing with the primeval forest.32 At the turn of the twentieth century, this was often tied to fantasies of a tribe of white supermen marching westward to the ocean, carrying the banner of civilization. Joseph P. Widney, a Los Angeles physician, propounded the Aryanization of the entirety of the Pacific Coast, and for Teddy Roosevelt, staving off “race suicide” involved remasculinizing and toughening up the country’s flaccid men in the badlands and borderlands. Commonly, these narratives about “winning the West” or the “conquest of a continent” traced the forging of the American republic back thousands of years, from the dawn of Homo sapiens to the gradual global dominance of Nordics and finally to the dire urgency of ensuring the perpetuation of “pioneer stock.”33

  Third, California eugenicists literally left their mark on the landscape by naming it, in a manner akin to European colonizers, starting with Christopher Columbus, who staked a claim to the New World through “ceremonies of possession” and rituals of proclamation.34 Comparable patterns unfolded centuries later, when expeditions, such as Lewis and Clark’s, started to fan out across the American West. Scientists classified flora and fauna while surveyors plotted the terrain, attaching their surnames to plants and places and alternately erasing and raiding Native American tribal lexicons.35 The landscape of the American West is a nomenclatural testament to the numerous rites of possession realized by the naturalists and explorers affiliated with the Army’s Corps of Topographical Engineers, the Mexican Boundary Survey, and other expeditions.36 As scientists eminently concerned with the natural universe, eugenicists followed in the footprints of these forerunners; they named varieties of flowers and vegetables, expanded botanical and zoological taxonomies, and left their names for posterity on memorial plaques and eponymous markers.37

  REDWOODS AND RACE SUICIDE

  In 1918, three men at the core of the American eugenics movement, John C. Merriam, Henry Fairfield Osborn, and Madison Grant, founded the Save-the-Redwoods League.38 Merriam was a paleontologist at the University of California at Berkeley who in the early 1900s had catalogued vertebrate and invertebrate fossils and unearthed evidence of the Pacific Coast’s prehistoric past.39 After serving as dean of the paleontology department, Merriam moved to Washington, D.C., in 1920 to head the Carnegie Institution, which was the chief sponsor of the Eugenics Record Office from 1917 until its unceremonious closing in 1940. Osborn, a comparative anatomist, was president of New York’s American Museum of Natural History and a member of the Galton Society and similar organizations. A year earlier he had written the preface for the second edition of Madison Grant’s popular book, The Passing of the Great Race, praising the author’s thesis that history was best interpreted as a violent competition among races and that the brightest hope for human civilization lay with the “Anglo-Saxon branch of the Nordic race,” a strain of “human stock” characterized by its “unanimity of heart, mind, and action.”40 As Madison Grant explained in his tome, barring drastic action, the “great race” that had conquered America would soon be extinct, obliterated by its inferiors, such as immigrant laborers, who were “breeding out their masters and killing by filth and by crowding as effectively as by the sword.”41 A seasoned outdoorsman, Madison Grant was also president of the Boone and Crockett Club, a fraternal game hunting society (motto: “promote manly sport with the rifle”) established by Teddy Roosevelt in 1887.42 All three had long been enraptured by California’s towering redwoods, particularly the Sequoia sempervirens, which for millions of years had covered vast portions of the Northern Hemisphere but was now limited to a narrow band of foggy coast that snaked from Big Sur to the Oregon border.43

  The impetus for the Save-the-Redwoods League had originated the previous summer when the trio made a pilgrimage from San Francisco to Humboldt County in search of “a forest wall reported to have mystery and charm unique among the l
iving works of creation.”44 Encountering a cluster of trees that stretched more than three hundred feet toward the sky, they were awestruck by the trees’ scale, the kaleidoscopic patterns of sun and shade, and the statuesque elegance of the “evergreen” sempervirens. Grant sensed that he was seeing one of the “most magnificent forests in the world,” and Merriam saw “a fragment of the garden of Eden, coming to us directly from the hand of the Creator.”45 Aware that logging was fast encroaching on this site, that very night they decided to rescue the splendid giants. From a hotel in Arcata, they composed a letter to Governor William D. Stephens “urging that the legislature take some action to acquire the finest of these redwood forests.”46 Within a year, with the backing of scientists and politicians from both coasts, they had formed the Save-the-Redwoods League, which immediately began to coordinate the purchase of a patchwork of forestlands from private owners with matching funds from donors and the California State Park Commission.

  The Save-the-Redwoods League’s initial roster consisted mainly of affluent European American Protestant and professional men, two-thirds of whom lived in California and one-third on the Atlantic seaboard.47 Many were natural scientists, landscape architects, or engineers, and a few were lawyers, bankers, independent entrepreneurs, and real estate agents. In addition to Grant, Merriam, and Osborn, several league councilors—including Charles M. Goethe and Vernon Kellogg—belonged to local and national eugenics organizations, while many others—such as Harold Bryant, the educational director of the California Fish and Game Commission; Benjamin Ide Wheeler, the president of the University of California; Newton Drury, a businessman who eventually became director of the National Park Service; and fellow travelers William Kent, Joseph D. Grant, and George Lorimer—endorsed eugenically driven immigration restriction and the dreams of Aryan and Nordic supremacy that crested to popularity in the 1920s.

  For redwood savers, the sempervirens was a potent symbol of looming destruction, possible regeneration, and the fate of the American West. Several decades earlier, in “Song of the Redwood-Tree,” Walt Whitman had conveyed bittersweet nostalgia over the impending ruin of the redwood, which, like the Indian and other inhabitants of the West, was destined to succumb to the march of civilization, “our term, our term has come,” and be vanquished at the hands of a “superber race” and “an empire new.”48 Eager to turn the tide against the unregulated felling of these majestic trees, in 1900 a coalition of scientists, surveyors, and female reformers organized the Sempervirens Club to guard the dense groves in the Santa Cruz mountains from the ax and sawmill.49 The club took its name from the Sequoia sempervirens, which was taller and scarcer than its wider, shorter, and older distant relative, the Sequoia gigantea, often referred to as the Big Tree.50 In 1902 the club, with the help of the Native Sons and Native Daughters of California, the Sierra Club, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, purchased nearly four thousand acres in Big Basin to create California’s first bona fide Redwood Park.51 Over the next decade, the Sempervirens Club devoted itself to enlarging Big Basin and safeguarding the redwoods in the Santa Cruz vicinity. By the 1910s, however, Grant, Merriam, and Osborn had determined that saving California’s redwoods was a much bigger task that warranted a more powerful organization.

  If Whitman had depicted the vanishing of the redwood as one of the inevitable costs of progress, then Grant and his colleagues saw defending the sempervirens from extinction as a battle that had to be won for scientific, spiritual, and racial reasons. For Grant and other conservationists, the redwood—its stateliness, grandeur, and perseverance—represented the “great race.” Like Anglo-Saxon America, which was being engulfed by hordes of defectives and mongrels and menaced by the excessive breeding of undesirables, the redwood was imperiled by “race suicide” from rampant logging, urban encroachment, and human ignorance. Analogies between the redwood and the Anglo-Saxon race abounded at the turn of the century. Muir had called the Big Trees of Calaveras County “the noblest of a noble race,” and Merriam called them the survivors of a “splendid race.”52 In a tract dedicated to the genus Sequoia, one author wrote, “the great white race which dominates the world today had made its entrance on the stage of history when the Grizzly Giant began its existence.”53 Saving the redwoods meant more than just protecting a tree; it was a metaphor for defending race purity and ensuring the survival of white America. With proper measures of preservation and prophylaxis, the resilient redwoods, like the Anglo-Saxon race, would revive and prosper: “Sequoia sempervirens—the immortal Sequoia—is far from being a battered remnant . . . is a beautiful, cheerful, and indomitable tree. Burned and hacked and butchered, it sprouts up again with a vitality truly amazing.”54

  Wilderness is the greatest of contradictions: we can enter and relish it only because we have construed it as untamed and untrampled.55 Since the late nineteenth century, efforts at preservation and conservation have been based primarily on the idea that nature must remain unimpaired by human interference. This stimulated the creation of Yellowstone, the nation’s first national park, in 1872, and organizations such as the Wilderness Society, founded by Aldo Leopold and Robert Sterling Yard in 1935.56 Certainly, trees, streams, geologic formations, and meadows abloom with spring lupine all exist, but the concept of pristine wilderness was part of the ideology of settlement and conquest that European Americans brought to the American West.57 Even though Native Americans had interacted for centuries with the Western landscape—burning controlled fires, for instance, to ensure the longevity of mature oak trees—many European Americans insisted that what eventually became Yosemite and Big Basin were unspoiled territories that they alone had discovered and were compelled to defend, at times with army scouts.58

  Up until the mid-1800s, when the United States was still largely rural, it was not unusual for writers to portray nature as bewildering and forbidding. By the end of the century, however, as urbanization and colonization rolled westward across the United States, wilderness gradually began to be cast as sacrosanct. By the close of the nineteenth century, John Muir and many of his contemporaries were describing mountains and forests through an empyrean poetry of canopies, sanctuaries, and cathedrals. Of Yosemite, Muir rhapsodized, “Benevolent, solemn, fateful, pervaded with divine light, every landscape glows like a countenance hallowed in eternal repose; and every one of its living creatures, clad in flesh and leaves, and every crystal of its rocks, whether on the surface shining in the sun or buried miles deep in what we call darkness, is throbbing and pulsing with the heartbeats of God.”59 Other preservationists, especially redwood savers, were similarly effusive. Joseph D. Grant, a close friend but no relation of Madison Grant, enthused about his journey through the Dyerville and Bull Creek Flats, “standing in the radiance of this filtered sunlight, slanting down in long shafts like angel paths in the Primitives’ pictures, it was impossible not to think of the forest as a cathedral. . . . Overhead, fan-vaulting, and an exquisite tracery of branches against a heaven of intense blue. More glorious to me than any Gothic fane, more inspiring to awe and devotion!”60 These embellished paeans imbued tree saving with transcendental meaning and imagined the wilderness as a temple apart from the mundane.

  Redwood preservation was one stratum of the bedrock of the modern environmental movement, and its logic informed later generations of environmentalists who linked nature protection to the need to safeguard the most precious human “stock” from annihilation. After World War II, for example, a segment of environmentalists rearticulated “race suicide” within the parameters of postwar theories of developmentalism and modernization.61 They turned toward neo-Malthusian arguments about zero population growth and pushed for immigration restriction and mandatory birth control, including the implementation of sterilization programs in less developed countries. Now the burden of nature salvation was tied to the regulation of reproduction, child spacing, and the adoption of the nuclear family model.62 A leading proponent of this trend was Fairfield Osborn, the son of one of the thr
ee Save-the-Redwoods League founders (Henry Fairfield Osborn) and the author of Our Plundered Planet, an immensely popular book that painted a grim portrait of the fate of Earth and the human species.

  In 1948, the same year Our Plundered Planet appeared, Fairfield Osborn was invited to speak at a commemoration dinner at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. Hosted by the Save-the-Redwoods League, this event was convened to dedicate the Madison Grant Forest and Elk Refuge, a tract of more than sixteen hundred acres in Humboldt County that had been obtained from two lumber companies. Madison Grant’s name was already on display in Northern California’s forests. In 1929, he and Joseph D. Grant had donated ten thousand dollars each to jointly create a grove in Del Norte Coast State Park; after Madison Grant’s death in 1937, his brother used family monies to pay for the casting of a bronze tablet for the site. In 1931, the tallest known redwood in Northern California, not far from the magical spot that transfixed the trio in 1917, was consecrated the Founders Tree for Madison Grant, Merriam, and Osborn.63 Another honor was conferred on Madison Grant posthumously when the Grant estate, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Archer M. Huntington, the New York Zoological Society, the National Audubon Society, the National Wildlife Association, and the Boone and Crockett Club all made sizable contributions for the acquisition—matched by the league and the California State Parks Commission—of the forest and elk refuge.64 According to the league, this refuge paid tribute to Madison Grant’s life as a “conservationist, author and anthropologist” and, moreover, was intended to save from harm the “last remaining band of Roosevelt Elk in California.”65 For the league, this addition symbolized the “climax of the entire preservation program in this superb region, the last forest wilderness of large extent on the western side of the Park.”66 In his address, Fairfield Osborn told the audience that his two supreme idols were his father and Madison Grant, a “man of extraordinary vision.” He then detailed California’s population boom with numbers and statistics, lamenting Americans’ ignorance about the evils of unprecedented population growth and skeptically questioning the prospects for “the long-term preservation of our national life.”67 Through men like Osborn junior, the preservationist agenda of the first generation of redwoods savers was repackaged in terms of overpopulation and its frightening consequences.68