Eugenic Nation

by Stern, Alexandra Minna

  If faith in science and technology made Fairfield Osborn’s catastrophism unpalatable to some at the start of the Cold War, his predictions resonated with the pessimism of the 1960s and 1970s as societal upheaval, political turmoil, defeat in Vietnam, and mounting cognizance of environmental degradation rocked the country. Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, published in 1968 by the Sierra Club through Ballantine Books, reiterated many of Osborn’s jeremiads and made population growth “a major focus for groups interested in linking the problem of resource limits to the growing concern about ‘quality of life.’ ”69 Ehrlich proposed pegging tax rates to family size, levying taxes on basic staples for children such as diapers, and sterilizing all men in India who had fathered three or more children. This book had an enormous impact, selling more than one million copies in less than two years and going through twenty-two printings. It also catalyzed the formation of Zero Population Growth (ZPG), a group based at Stanford University, where Ehrlich was a professor of biology. ZPG mushroomed to more than thirty-three thousand members and 380 chapters by the early 1970s.70 It strove to attain replacement-level fertility rates in the United States, a goal shared by allies in the Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood, and the Audubon Society.71 With a strong presence in California, ZPG relied on decades-old stereotypes of Mexicans and Mexican Americans as diseased hyperbreeders and demonized Spanish speakers and undocumented immigrants. This animus intensified in 1978 when John Tanton, a Sierra Clubber and “English only” advocate, founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform to press for stricter immigration laws and border control. By the late 1970s, population control, particularly in the Southwest and California, had fused with “efforts to control the flow of Mexican migrants.”72

  In the 1950s, some leaders, such as David Brower, tried to challenge the elitism and racial exclusivity of mainstream environmentalism.73 For the most part, such attempts fell on deaf ears; it was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s, when a more racially and economically diverse group of grassroots activists began to address issues such as soil contamination and toxic waste dumping, usually in or surrounding urban communities, that the color and scope of American environmentalism changed.74 Today distinctions are often made between the conservation and preservation endeavors of the past and the contemporary environmental justice movement. Nonetheless, the alliance between eugenic racism and environmentalism, which seemed quite natural to the founders of both movements, continues to flicker on and off in the twenty-first century in the xenophobic platforms endorsed by the population section of the Sierra Club, and sometimes in the rhetoric employed to campaign for greenbelts, no- or slow-growth policies, and strict zoning codes.

  ORIGIN STORIES

  For redwood savers, theirs was an epic crusade unfolding in epoch time. European Americans “brought a very particular concept of time, and their place in it, to their understanding of the trees, in the process weaving a tale of conquest, domination of outsiders, and, ultimately, of racial supremacy.”75 This usually involved tracing the genesis of the redwood back to antiquity, following its evolution, protracted destruction, and Lazaruslike fight for resurrection to the moment that enlightened white knights arrived at the antediluvian forests of the West Coast. This story pivoted on the depiction of the redwood as timeless and immortal specimens whose wanton decimation bordered on blasphemy and crimes against evolution. On a tour of California in 1903, Teddy Roosevelt intoned to his audience at Stanford University, “I feel most emphatically that we should not turn a tree which was old when the first Egyptian conqueror penetrated to the valley of the Euphrates, which it has taken so many thousands of years to build up, and which can be put to better use, to shingles.”76 Madison Grant and fellow preservationists viewed the redwood as a portal to a past buried in fossils: “sequoias were flourishing when dinosaurs roamed the earth.”77 Gazing down from on high over infinite time, redwoods had “witnessed, if not the birth of man, at least man’s development from the lowest estate. It has seen the rise and fall of civilization.”78 David Starr Jordan wrote that the redwood forests constituted “the oldest living plant representatives of an earlier geologic era.”79 From the paleontological perspective, Merriam viewed the redwoods as a “living link in history” that “connect us as by hand-touch with all the centuries they have known. The time they represent is not merely an unrelated, severed past; it is something upon which the present rests, and from which living currents still seem to move.”80 By claiming intimate and expert knowledge of the geologic and scientific lifespan of the redwood, which they adorned with spiritual sentiment, preservationists inserted themselves as key figures into the unfolding dramaturgy of the settlement of the American West.

  The sequoia was a common protagonist in tales of conquest and colonization in California. Furthermore, redwood savers often grafted these historical chronologies on to nature by affixing date markers and plaques to redwood logs and rounds.81 Once a tree’s age had been ascertained by counting growth rings, preservationists plotted “great moments” of western civilization on these concentric calendars, whose diameters could reach ten feet. The earliest event was placed at the eye of the round and the most recent at its perimeter. On one Santa Cruz redwood slice, for example, the passage from antiquity to the present was distilled down to the birth of Christ, Mayan civilization, the coronation of Charlemagne, Marco Polo, Columbus’s discovery of America, the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and the day that very tree was felled.82

  The origin stories of California eugenicists extended beyond the redwood, however, incorporating broader themes of the rational exploitation of land, soil, and natural resources in pursuit of a Pacific paradise. More often than not, these narratives of racial regeneration countenanced white supremacy. Such was the case with Joseph P. Widney, an Ohio-born physician who arrived in Los Angeles in the 1860s by way of Panama. The second president of the University of Southern California and founder of the Los Angeles County Medical Association, Widney was an indefatigable booster of the Southland. In Race Life and the Aryan Peoples, published in 1907, Widney chronicled a Wagnerian saga. Molded by his stint as a military surgeon during the Apache Wars, Widney saw Anglo colonization west of the Mississippi as a triumphant procession that had begun centuries ago in Eurasia. From this distant region, the Aryan began his journey to the New World and eventually to Los Angeles, which, he argued, would become the world capital of white domination.83 According to Widney, it was “not by chance but through the working of purely natural laws, and laws which are general in scope, not special, that the Teuton and not the Latin was to control the New World.”84 In a California freed from the vestiges of Spain and Mexico, the drama of the survival of the fittest would reach its ineluctable conclusion, giving birth to a hardier American race that far surpassed its ancestors. Widney advocated his views for at least thirty years. For example, in 1935, then in his nineties, he wrote The Three Americas, reasserting his previous predictions of Aryan ascendancy.85 Three years later, he submitted to the Los Angeles City Planning Commission a plan that visualized that metropolis as the “greatest health resort of the world,” and petitioned for the “building of a hundred miles of mountain-slope sanitariums, facing out upon the broad slope of the desert.”86

  Other California eugenicists, such as Burbank, painted a much more inclusive picture of racial regeneration. When Burbank followed his brother, moving from Massachusetts to Santa Rosa in 1875, he brought with him knowledge of Darwin’s theories of variation and selection, experience in horticultural experimentation, and unbridled enthusiasm about the fecundity and lushness of Northern California.87 After working in several local nurseries, Burbank quickly developed prune and plum varieties capable of unparalleled crop yield. By the 1890s he had set up his own garden; it was there that he produced the Shasta daisy, the Burbank rose, the Paradox walnut, and the Humboldt blackberry-raspberry by tailoring new methods of cross-fertilization and hybridization. His fame grew, especially after Hugo de Vries, the
Dutch botanist who had independently rediscovered and confirmed Gregor Mendel’s laws of heredity, visited Burbank in the early 1900s and dubbed him the “plant wizard.”88

  To many European American settlers, Burbank’s robust hybrids symbolized the metamorphosis of fertile soil and vegetation—disparaged as fallow during the Spanish and Mexican eras—into resplendence. Burbank himself was often lauded as the ideal settler.89 In 1929, Ray Lyman Wilbur, the president of Stanford University and a member of the AES, called Burbank to mind when he described the exemplary colonist as someone “who could make an investment, who could work with his neighbors, who could develop ten acres so intensively that they would produce as much as one hundred acres elsewhere.”90 Burbank was central to the development of large-scale crops in California, a role buttressed by his appointment as dean of the College of Agriculture at the University of California and his receipt of a prestigious grant from the Carnegie Foundation, both in 1905. For California’s agricultural entrepreneurs, no industry put land to a better utilitarian purpose than the citrus industry, which “became a model more or less for the whole Pacific slope.”91 Burbank contributed to these efforts in 1914 when he joined a committee entrusted with choosing a site for the Citrus Experiment Station in Riverside.92 This station promoted the modern cultivation of the California navel orange, aiding growers by supplying fertilizers and recommending premium rootstocks.93 Many of the scientists affiliated with the Citrus Experiment Station, including Burbank and Thomas Hunt, Burbank’s successor as dean of the College of Agriculture, tied racial progress to the manipulation of nature and the judicious crossing of diverse plant species.94

  In his writings about his journey westward, Burbank folded a sense of the sublime, reminiscent of Muir, into a narrative of biological renaissance that foresaw the materialization of a superlative hybrid race. Like many other European Americans who came to California in the late nineteenth century, Burbank was taken with the varied landscape, the temperate climate, and the austere beauty of the Sierra Nevada. After surveying Santa Rosa, he wrote to his relatives in Massachusetts, “I firmly believe from what I have seen . . . that it is the chosen spot of all this earth as far as nature is concerned, and the people are far better than the average. The air is so sweet it is a pleasure to drink it in. The sunshine is pure and soft, the mountains which gird the valley are very lovely. . . . I cannot describe it. I almost have to cry for joy when I look upon the lovely valley from the hillsides.”95 Burbank credited his peculiar hereditary makeup, which contained a strain that “responded so instantly to the repeated call of California,” for spurring him, a “small, wiry, active young man” with deep roots in New England, to pack up and head west.96

  Compared to most other American eugenicists of his era, Burbank’s philosophy was atypical. Deeply influenced by his hands-on hybridization experiments, Burbank supported the theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics formulated by the French naturalist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck. Following Lamarck, Burbank believed that a living creature could inherit traits from its environment and, moreover, that these traits could become intrinsic to the organism. From his perspective, the best characters from each “race” could be consciously amalgamated into a tougher, stronger type.97 For these reasons Burbank, unlike almost all the prominent American eugenicists that succeeded him, was ebullient about racial mixing and open to immigration. In his most well-known text, The Training of the Human Plant, he wrote, “I think it is fair to say [that it] is the grandest opportunity ever presented of developing the finest race the world has ever known out of the vast mingling of races brought here by immigration.”98 With its salubrious climate, California—where the “North, powerful, virile, aggressive” could be “blended with the luxurious, ease-loving, more tempestuous South”—was the perfect laboratory for the gestation of “a magnificent race, far superior to any preceding it.”99 Burbank’s caveat was that experts needed to watch over this experiment, much as he supervised the cultivation of new varieties of flowers and vegetables in his orchard.

  One of Burbank’s close colleagues, David Starr Jordan, an ichthyologist, the first president of Stanford University, and a leading eugenicist, also authored publications about the glory of California’s landscape and its hale denizens. In the late nineteenth century, Jordan came to appreciate the complex “niche” ecology of the state’s topography and speciation when he participated in scientific expeditions along the Pacific Coast and its inland waterways. During these trips, he helped to identify about four hundred shore fishes (particularly trout and salmon), many of which were being discovered and named by European American biologists.100 In California and the Californians, first published as a syndicated column in the Atlantic Monthly, Jordan introduced readers to the majesty of the mountains and the abundance of the coastal plains, which he connected to the innate superiority of Californians. He wrote, “men live longer there, and, if unwasted by dissipation, strength of body is better conserved,” adding that, “other things being equal,” California’s children were “larger, stronger, and better formed than their Eastern cousins of the same age.”101 This perception was reinforced by a trip that Jordan took to his hometown in western New York in the 1910s, where he found that many of the “young men who were full of energy and vigor” had “gone West.”102 And in his two-volume autobiography, The Days of Man, Jordan traced his own robust lineage back to his New England Puritan ancestry and metamorphosis into a “Californiac.”103 In response to Easterners’ criticism of San Francisco’s dissolute tendencies, Jordan defended California and its cosmopolitan city by stressing its wealth, optimism, and, above all, sturdy racial stock: “In my judgment the essential source of Californianism lies in heredity. The Californian of to-day is of the type of his father of fifty years ago. The Argonauts of ’49 were buoyant, self-reliant, adequate, reckless, thoroughly individualistic, capable of all adjustments, careless of conventions, eager to enjoy life and action. And we, their sons, with all admixture of other blood and of other temperament are still made in their image. It is blood which tells.”104

  With its vast wilds, California was the place to pursue what Teddy Roosevelt called the “strenuous life,” a regimen that Jordan heartily embraced. He instituted mandatory physical education for the students at Stanford and spent much of his leisure time mountaineering in the Sierras where, “with sweat pouring down his face, straps biting into his shoulders, a long road ahead, Jordan acted out his moral vision of biological struggle and physical conquest.”105 Like Madison Grant and Merriam, Jordan was an avid preservationist. He was a charter member of the Sierra Club, helped to organize the Sempervirens Club, and belonged to the Save-the-Redwoods League. Jordan was so smitten with the sempervirens that in 1892, when Stanford enrolled its inaugural class, he chose the coastal redwood as the university’s official seal, a logo still sported on sweatshirts and bumper stickers.106

  In contrast to his friend Burbank, Jordan’s was an exclusionary utopia, one in which certain “blood” was better and purer. Informed by Victorian anthropology, Jordan’s early writings placed Anglo-Saxons at the apex of a racial hierarchy, a prejudice fortified in the 1920s by his acceptance of Mendelian theories of the fixed inheritance of unitary traits. In the coauthored volume Footnotes to Evolution, Jordan outlined his views on Mendelianism, explicating the mechanics of heredity through the fictional character of Richard Roe. Jordan underlined the validity of the conclusions reached by Galton, Mendel, and Weismann and dismissed any neo-Lamarckian principles, averring that Roe (just like any other person) would be a direct product of his “germ cells.”107 In a chapter on degeneration that excoriated paupers, defectives, and constitutional weaklings, Jordan exhibited his social Darwinian creed: “the strong races were born of hard times, they have fought for all they have had, and the strength of those they have conquered has entered into their wills. They have been selected by competition and sifted by the elements. They have risen through struggle and they have gained through mutual help, and by the power
of the human will have made the earth their own.”108 Conversely, the lesser “races,” many of whom hailed from tropical countries, the Southern Hemisphere, and the once-great cities and towns of a deteriorating Europe, were most accurately defined as parasites that enfeebled society and milked its precious biological and material resources. Like many other eugenicists, he maintained that “the dangers of foreign immigration lie in the overflow to our shores of hereditary unfitness. The causes that lead to degeneration have long been at work among the poor of Europe.”109 Jordan saw the peopling of California through this nativist lens. He advocated the restriction of Southern European and Asian immigrants, asserting that “only the Saxon and the Goth know the meaning of freedom,” and during the 1920s he complained bitterly about Mexican immigrants.110 In a letter to Charles B. Davenport, he carped that the American “germ plasm” was under assault from “the Mexican peon, who for the most part can never be fit for citizenship,” and was “giving our stock a far worse dilution than ever came from Europe.”111 For these reasons, he joined Goethe, the Berkeley zoologist Samuel J. Holmes, and the restrictionist congressmen John C. Box and Albert Johnson in demanding tighter border controls and national origins quotas for Mexicans.