Eugenic Nation

by Stern, Alexandra Minna

  Whether taking the neo-Lamarckian or Mendelian route, California eugenicists penned narratives that touted the region’s superior species and biological versatility, the protection of ancient wilderness, and the rationally managed utilization of the soil. More often than not, this revolved explicitly around celebration of the cultural and scientific conquest of the West by the fabled “races” of the Anglo-Saxons and Nordics and condemnation of the inferior “stock” of immigrants, especially Mexicans. By writing evocatively and extensively about geology, vegetation, plant breeding, and redwoods and heralding their privileged place in California’s landscapes, eugenicists naturalized notions of racial difference and interlaced another thread into the mythology of the Pacific West as Garden of Eden and the frontier of American opportunity.

  WHAT’S IN A NAME?

  On July 11, 1966, the San Francisco Chronicle paid homage to “America’s Grand Old Man of the conservation movement,” Charles Matthias Goethe.112 At the age of ninety-one and after months of failing health, the inveterate Sacramento resident had passed away. The Chronicle acclaimed the steady stream of missives from Goethe about biology, ornithology, botany, and geology that had “graced this newspaper for a half-century” and fondly remembered one letter in which he had explained the “remarkable survival mechanism of alligators.”113 On the same day the Sacramento Bee ran front-page coverage of the death of its native son, extolling his venerable career as a “philanthropist, author, scientist, civic leader, and world traveler,” and highlighting his outstanding devotion to nature preservation.114 The Bee, which had been a friendly home for Goethe’s wide-ranging editorials for decades, quoted from the condolence messages that “poured into Sacramento from throughout the world and abroad.”115 Recognizing a “great loss to California and the nation,” Governor Edmund G. Brown eulogized: “This marvelous man dedicated most of the waking moments of his life to the betterment of mankind. The results of his efforts are evident throughout the length and breadth of this land.”116

  Over the preceding fifty years, Goethe had built up his reputation as a renowned conservationist, rising to enough prominence to be designated “Honorary Chief Naturalist” by the National Park Service.117 He belonged to dozens of environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society, donated thousands of dollars to naturalist projects, helped to introduce the interpretative parks movement, and funded plant biology and genetics research. Goethe’s passion and zeal were rooted in an eccentric and multipronged eugenic philosophy that integrated nature preservation, immigration restriction, and selective breeding. Goethe invested in what he understood as the comprehensive betterment of the biota, a grand goal that could be attained through the enlightened management of the earth’s multitudinous and interrelated species, particularly those he deemed hardy, supple, and righteous. As a young man, Goethe coined two adages that became his lifelong mantras: “learn to read the trailside as a book,” and “reduce biological illiteracy.”118 The former applied directly to his conservationism. In addition to reading about plants, animals, and rocks in the library, Goethe was convinced that people should learn about evolution in nature’s laboratory. The latter slogan took this a step further to patterns of human reproduction and fitness, which Goethe thought could be grasped only by mastering biology and the health sciences, and above all the laws of heredity.

  If Goethe’s brand of eugenics was a product of his idiosyncratic intellect, it was also framed by his self-identification as a child of the American West. In his memoir, Seeking to Serve, Goethe credited his interest in eugenics to his boyhood amazement at California’s fascinating flora and fauna, which his mother had nourished by teaching him about Darwin and showing him how to press and catalogue wild flowers.119 Like his contemporaries, Goethe predicated the Arcadian fulfillment of California on the persistence and propagation of the “white pioneer stock,” which, through rough-and-tumble frontiering, had proven its indomitable and remarkable fiber. He compared the European American migrants who had settled in the arid and montane American West to the rugged cacti of the desert and the Egyptian Bedouins, all of which thrived in extreme elements. For Goethe, California’s frontier “race,” like a well-bred racehorse or delphinium, was a superlative biological strain whose purity demanded defense.120 Ever aware of himself as an actor in this drama, Goethe wrote that he and his wife “were of Covered Wagon stock” and that the overland journeys of the late nineteenth century had “meant further severe selection of stocks, already winnowed by Mother Nature to eliminate weaklings.”121 Goethe viewed his personal trajectory, political and ideological battles, as well as the fate of California and the world, through the prism of his eugenic cosmology. He certainly persuaded many of the uprightness of his cause, although the extent to which his colossal wealth or the chance of being touched by his philanthropy buoyed his allegiances will never be known.

  Goethe’s grandparents had come to California from Germany via Australia in the 1870s. Looking for business opportunities, Goethe’s family settled on the state capital, Sacramento, where Charles was born in 1875. Arriving during a period of rapid regional economic development, his father gradually became quite well-off through a mix of real estate, agriculture, and banking.122 By the first decade of the 1900s, Charles was well assimilated into the family business, working as a solicitor, clerk, and bookkeeper, and on the road to fashioning a lucrative career of his own.123 Goethe completed high school in Sacramento, and although he did not earn a bachelor’s degree, he passed the California bar examination in 1900.124 Always an exceedingly disciplined man, Goethe was vigilant about diet and exercise and followed a rigid daily schedule. It was not unusual for his diary to contain entries in which he chastised himself for falling short of his own exacting standards.125 Into his nineties, Goethe arose before six in the morning to “arrange dictation before his secretaries arrived” punctually at seven, and he organized his activities with clockwork precision.126

  In 1903, Goethe married Mary Glide, a daughter of one of the area’s wealthiest families. According to his diaries, it took nine frustrating attempts before Mary consented to become his wife. Apparently, “Mimi,” as Charles affectionately called her, was hesitant for two reasons. First, she wanted to be absolutely sure that Charles was not hungry for the Glide family money. Twice during their courtship Mimi told Charles that she had been disinherited, at one point insisting that she would wed him only on the condition that her financial resources were channeled into human betterment and not wasted on profligate luxury, a request that Charles easily endorsed. Second, it is likely that Mimi stalled because of her infertility, alluded to in Charles’ diaries. After a melodramatic (but scantly detailed) confession from Mimi, Goethe consoled himself: “[I]t takes a great deal of courage to do what you’re doing. Your mother who loves you dearly has told you that the one thing you have been willing to sacrifice is the one thing that all men demand—that is the pleasure of marriage” (his emphasis). He expressed remorse that he would fail to give his “eldest son the proud title—a title of a family that made its influence felt throughout the Fatherland.”127 The Goethes never had any children, an absence that they attempted to compensate for by backing youth programs and junior scientists and by supporting, most likely with monetary incentives, those they deemed eugenically fit to produce more offspring.

  By the 1920s, Goethe was running several ranches and had diversified into Sacramento real estate, from which he turned a high profit by selling inexpensive subdivided plots through mortgages and installment plans.128 During the Great Depression, Goethe invested his proceeds in the stock market, purchasing gilt-edged and blue ribbon stocks. Additionally, Mary’s liquid assets and the profits she accrued from various agricultural enterprises and oil wells, even with a lawsuit that diminished the inheritance she received from her mother, augmented the couple’s income.129 By the end of World War II, Goethe had become an exceptionally prosperous man, with sizable savings, a bulging stock portfolio, and considerable property holdi
ngs, as well as lucrative beet and citrus orchards. When Mary passed away in 1946, her estate was valued at nearly one and one-half million dollars. Charles invested this fortune shrewdly, which, in conjunction with his other ventures, resulted in a total net worth of twenty-four million dollars at the time of his death.130

  Although Goethe was not able to bestow his illustrious German family name on a son or daughter, he did leave his inscriptions on the landscape of Northern California. A fervent redwood saver, Goethe spearheaded the purchase and designation of three memorial redwood groves—the Jedediah Smith Grove, the Mary Glide Goethe Grove, and the Drury Brothers Grove—and was directly involved in the establishment of the Luther Burbank Grove, the Aubrey Drury Grove, the Madison Grant Grove, and the Madison Grant Forest and Elk Refuge. He endowed scholarships in his and his wife’s name, and sponsored honorary titles so that the California Historical Society could enshrine those he admired, such as the Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman.131 In turn, many sites bear his name. There is a plaque acknowledging the vital role of the Goethes in initiating the naturalist ranger program at Fallen Leaf Lake near Lake Tahoe.132 Sacramento is home to the Charles M. Goethe Middle School and the Charles M. Goethe Park, which was approved by the county board of supervisors and contains another plaque honoring the Goethes, subsidized by the Save the American River Association and the Audubon Society.133 In 1959, California State University at Sacramento (CSUS) founded the Goethe Arboretum, and five years later decided to name the campus’s main science building after its famous benefactor.134 At the California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, where the Goethes assisted in the construction of the Morrison planetarium, there is a Goethe room. In 1964, Sacramento’s mayor decreed March 28 “Dr. Charles M. Goethe Day” in acknowledgement of one of the city’s “most outstanding citizens.”135 Finally, in 1977, the Save-the Redwoods League posthumously honored their steadfast patron’s “magnanimous support” by naming the Charles M. Goethe Memorial Grove in the Prairie Creek Redwoods.136

  Goethe himself recognized the consequence of place-names and often ruminated on their historical and expressive significance. For him, they were onomastic clues to California’s vibrant pioneer past, which, if carefully scrutinized, could illuminate the “selection of the fittest” at play. In one of his books, What’s in a Name?, Goethe traced the etymology of Gold Rush town names, such as Whiskeytown, One-Horse Town, and Flea Valley, to the wave of enterprising Anglos and Nordics who began to populate the Pacific Slope in the mid-nineteenth century. In answer to the rhetorical question “what’s in a name?” Goethe responded “imagination, contemplation, discussion, some agitation, then finally Selection, Decision.”137 For him, to take stock of the crusty, haphazard, and playful names of these hard-scrabble towns was to unravel the making of a “Male-Land” of intrepid colonists, who, as “products of ten generations of Frontier’s Life most severe SELECTION, could have had the stamina, the courage, the lust for wandering, the invention, the alertness, the daring, the imagination, the resourcefulness to complete the Conquest of our Continent.”138 Adhering to the “race suicide” rationale of redwood saving, Goethe asseverated that these ghost towns-in-waiting needed to be preserved in deference to “those blue-eyed, blonde empire-building Nordics” who had settled California.139

  From the outset of his participation in social, civic, and political programs, Goethe was astutely interested in how space and the environment could best serve the aim of human betterment. Around 1910, after having reviewed urban development in Europe, Goethe began to advise the Sacramento Chamber of Commerce on city planning.140 In 1911, the Goethes underwrote Sacramento’s first supervised playground, and shortly thereafter embarked on a multi-city trip through Asia, Africa, and Europe to explore the possibilities of exporting American-style playgrounds abroad.141 The Goethes were instrumental in introducing the Boy Scouts to the region, financed the Sacramento orphanage, and helped to found the Alta Sanitarium.142 It was through these kinds of endeavors, which sometimes included field trips into the Sierra foothills, and after an inspiring tour through the European Alps, that Charles formed the California Nature Study League in 1918.143 He was so animated about the prospects for nature study, which he hoped would teach children to “read the trailside like a book” and “reduce biological illiteracy,” that one year later he and Mimi launched what would soon be termed the interpretative parks movement.144

  In 1919, the Goethes were spending the summer at a resort on Fallen Leaf Lake near Lake Tahoe. They were sponsoring two naturalists, Harold C. Bryant, the educational director of the California Fish and Game Commission, and Loye Holmes Miller, from the University of California at Los Angeles, to direct nature study groups and walks. For several years, Bryant had run a biology program for youngsters in the Bay Area, leading them into the Berkeley Hills or Marin County to “see the wild flowers and the birds and the trees and everything along a trailside.”145 At some point during their stay, the Goethes persuaded the owners of the various lake resorts to invite their guests to one of the educational evening sessions offered by Bryant and Miller.146 Serendipitously, that same night Stephen Mather happened to have stopped at Fallen Leaf Lake while en route to Sacramento.147 Mather was the inaugural director of the National Park Service, which was formed in 1916 and embodied the federalization of the conservationist impulse. The Park Service’s mission differed in moderate degree from the Save-the-Redwoods League, which was devoted first and foremost to the preservation of designated species and areas. Instead, as a conservationist agency, the Park Service was entrusted with a seemingly contradictory task, of both wilderness stewardship, as defined by the nature-as-pristine axiom, and transforming the nation’s parks into usable and accessible recreation grounds. This paradox was encapsulated in the Park Service’s mission statement, namely, that the parks be “maintained in absolutely unimpaired form for the use of future generations” and that they be “set aside for the use, observation, health, and pleasure of the people.”148

  As he was walking to the hostel to register, Mather “passed the crowded auditorium” and was dazzled by Miller’s wild birdcalls.149 So absorbed by the spectacle that he missed dinner, Mather approached Bryant about introducing nature lore into the parks under the auspices of the Park Service; the next year Byrant and Miller, with ongoing support from Goethe, transferred the “Tahoe Laboratory” to Yosemite.150 The program was an immediate success. In 1922, the Yosemite Educational Department was formed. Two years later the fire-resistant Yosemite Museum, which operated as a training facility for naturalists, was built thanks to a Rockefeller Foundation grant, and Yosemite Nature Notes, which adopted Goethe’s motto to “Learn to Read the Trailside as a Book,” began circulation.151 The message of Yosemite Nature Notes tapped deeply into legends of mountain men and daring white settlers. Describing the Yosemite Museum, Nature Notes enticed: “here you will learn the full story of the Park—what tools were used by the great Sculptor in carving this mighty granite-walled gorge; who lived here before the white man came; how the Days of Gold led to Yosemite’s discovery; how the pioneers prepared the way for you; and how the birds and mammals and trees and flowers live together in congenial communities waiting to make your acquaintance.”152 In 1930, nature study attained national stature when Bryant relocated to Washington, D.C., to head the Park Service’s newly created Research and Education Unit. Thus was the American nature ranger born and, with him (and later her), the interpretative methods—nature loops, historical trails, guided trips, wildflower displays, wildlife exhibits, camp fire lectures, museums, and informative ranger stations—that have greatly enriched this country’s parks system.153

  At the same time that Goethe was underwriting federal naturalists, he was also becoming increasingly vocal in congressional debates over immigration restriction. Eager to apply his catchphrase of reducing biological illiteracy to people as well as plants, in the early 1920s Goethe formed the Immigration Study Commission. The ISC’s aim was to investigate th
e influx of “low-powers” to California, especially Mexicans and Southern Europeans, whom Goethe alleged were endangering the state’s pioneer heritage.154 Goethe sent editorials to newspapers throughout the Southwest, warning of the scraggly masses from the south that were stealing jobs from Americans and contaminating the national “germ plasm.”155 Again and again Goethe sounded the alarm of race suicide. In his usual blunt style, his 1927 submission to the Santa Cruz Sentinel alleged, “[T]he Anglo-Saxon birth rate is low. Peons multiply like rabbits. . . . If race strains remains absolutely pure, and if an old American-Nordic family averages 3 children while an incoming Mexican peon family averages 7, by the fifth generation, the proportion of white Nordics to Mexican peons descended from these two families would be as 243 to 16,807.”156 Speaking an uncensored idiom of raciology and regularly relying on numbers and calculations to demonstrate what eugenicists called “differential fecundity,” Goethe pressed for passage of the Box Bill and the implementation of strict immigration caps on Mexicans as well as the “Zambo-negro group extending from the Caribbean through Brazil.”157 When Goethe was not publicly railing against Mexican immigrants, he was erecting racial boundaries in Sacramento through his real estate policies. In a 1926 letter to Stuart Ward, who also belonged to the Eugenics Committee of the Commonwealth Club of California, Goethe remarked that since the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act had gone into effect, he was making fewer sales to Eastern and Southern Europeans. Appearing in their stead, however, were Mexicans, whom he shunned; because of their inferior intelligence, troublesomeness, and delinquency, he “instructed [his] brokers to make no more sales to them.”158