After an initial intake session, for which Mrs. C wrote an autobiographical statement, the AIFR counselor administered the Johnson Temperament Analysis Test (JTA), an instrument designed scientifically to measure temperament, which was defined as a principally innate although complex human characteristic. Consisting of 182 questions, the JTA assessed overall personality and compatibility based on nine oppositional pairs: Nervous-Composed, Depressive–Gay Hearted, Active-Quiet, Cordial-Cold, Sympathetic–“Hard Boiled,” Subjective-Objective, Aggressive-Submissive, Critical-Appreciative, and Self-Mastery–Impulsive.3 The results were then plotted along a spectrum with four gradations—white, light gray, medium gray, and dark gray—that indicated, respectively, improvement urgent, improvement desirable, acceptable, and excellent. The test relied on several modes of statistical and graphical representation including numbers and averages, percentiles and deviation zones, and lines (blue for women, red for men) that expressed each individual’s itemized profile.
While Mr. C’s scores revealed a generally balanced temperament punctuated only by exaggerated aggressiveness (ninety-fifth percentile on the Aggressive-Submissive axis), Mrs. C’s results were much more troubling. Scoring above the ninety-fifth percentile in nervousness and subjectivity (improvement urgent) and below the fifteenth percentile in cold and impulsive (improvement desirable), Mrs. C was diagnosed with “masculine protest.” The counselor assigned to Mrs. C was concerned that her client was becoming “more and more resentful of spending her day in housework,” and noted that her “heart [was] not in it.”4 In order to encourage her to accept homemaking as a respectable profession on which her family depended, Mrs. C was given What Every Woman Wants and Emotional Questions, just two of the AIFR’s dozens of pamphlets devoted to marriage, sexuality, and gender norms.
One month later, Mrs. C returned to the AIFR. This time, she explained how much she wanted her husband, who ignored her and spent his evenings and weekends listening to the radio and smoking cigarettes, to change. The counselor, however, “worked with her from the point of view that we couldn’t do anything with the husband at the moment, it was his problem, but we could do a lot toward changing her attitude to build up something constructive.” When asked to write up a list of actions that she could take to better the marriage, Mrs. C came up with seven ideas, including devoting more time to her husband in the morning, trying to be “more submissive,” overlooking “a lot of the little things that irritate me,” taking “more interest in the house,” and being more entertaining and fun-loving when they were out on the town.5 The counselor also recommended that Mrs. C find a satisfying “ego outlet,” such as volunteering at a local church or taking up a recreational hobby.
The JTA, in conjunction with three marital counseling sessions, had determined that Mrs. C needed to confront her “masculine protest” through a self-willed readjustment to wifehood and a deliberate embrace of femininity. Although we do not know what happened to Mrs. C, if she became more “feminine,” identified an “ego outlet,” or perhaps even ended up leaving her husband, we do know that between 1930 and 1970 thousands of people were similarly advised at the AIFR and that starting in 1941, when Roswell H. Johnson unveiled his first prototype, the JTA became the centerpiece of the institute’s marriage counseling and personality evaluation. It was one of a burgeoning battery of tests that stretched psychometrics beyond intelligence into the domains of aptitude, personality, and vocation.6 Its underlying logic reflected and fostered the postwar revision of eugenics, as the door of strict hereditarianism opened up enough to let in various psychogenic and psychoanalytic explanations of human development and deviance.
BIOTYPES AND POPULATIONS
By the 1940s, as the cultural anthropology espoused by Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Franz Boas, and others began to predominate in many intellectual arenas and as the public slowly became aware of the brutality of the Final Solution, many eugenicists revamped their thinking. They began consciously to distance themselves from overt hierarchies and rankings, particularly those predicated on race or class, which were rejected as simplistic and anachronistic. As Frederick Osborn, the president of the American Eugenics Society, wrote in 1946, “the ten years, 1930 to 1940, marked a major change in eugenic thinking. Before 1930 eugenics had a racial and social class bias.” Now he and his colleagues contended that the differences between individuals far outweighed “any differences which might be discovered between the averages of the larger racial or social groups.”7
In addition, by this time most eugenicists had conceded that earlier attempts to stamp out hereditary traits defined as recessive or latent, including alcoholism, immorality, and the catchall of feeblemindedness, had been proven futile by the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium principle, which demonstrated that the overwhelming tendency of gene frequencies and ratios was to remain constant from one generation to the next. Hence, targeted interventions, such as sterilization, could not breed out defects; even if viable, these techniques would show results only after thousands of years of regulated procreation.8 Increasingly and sometimes begrudgingly, eugenicists traded in “unit characters” for polygenic inheritance and genetic predispositions. Accompanying this realignment was a heightened interest in the manipulation and management of human heredity through population control. Against the backdrop of postwar internationalism, the hardening of geopolitical boundaries, and burgeoning fears of nuclear annihilation, eugenicists forged relationships with organizations such as the Population Council, the Population Reference Bureau, and Planned Parenthood. Many eugenicists viewed population control as a vehicle for modernization, the introduction of liberal democracy, and, if properly pursued, world peace.9 As Guy Irving Burch, the director of the Population Reference Bureau and the AES, explained in 1945, “uncontrolled human reproduction not only favors the survival and the multiplication of the least gifted members of society; it menaces and in the long run will destroy human liberties and any chance for a world at peace.”10 Under the banner of population control, eugenicists established birth control clinics, distributed devices such as foams, jellies, and the IUD, and set up oral contraceptive trials in countries and colonies, including India and Puerto Rico, where they forged what were often tenuous and fraught alliances with a heterogeneous mix of feminists, nationalists, and modernist reformers.11
Rather than thoroughly annul earlier presumptions about racial capacities and endowments, however, this shift refocused eugenicists’ scales of analysis in two countervailing yet corresponding directions: at once outward toward a global framework and inward toward the family and its constituent parts. Race was no longer understood as a singular trait or a person’s blood, but rather in terms of aggregated yet somewhat fluid population subdivisions that had been constituted through fairly endogenous patterns of language, geography, and interbreeding.12 Now, guided more by Malthus than Mendel, many eugenicists tended to blame racialized population subdivisions, principally those in the Third World, for resource depletion, skyrocketing fertility, and environmental degradation; more and more, the advocacy of sterilization was linked to the goal of population reduction, rather than to a recessive carrier rationale.13
In keeping with this transformation, one of the most salient developments in postwar eugenics was the advent of biotypology, which sought to classify humans scientifically as composite organisms beyond the strictures of pure races. Replacing categorical pyramids with gradated spectrums, biotypologists used an array of instruments, such as spirometers, stethoscopes, Rorschach inkblots, blood sampling kits, ergographs, dream analysis, and personality and temperament tests, to measure human capacities and variations.14 Starting in the 1930s, scientists who remained committed to the primacy of heredity but wanted to reenvision human differentiation and allow greater latitude for psychological, hormonal, and environmental factors were attracted to biotypology and constitutional holism. This was most definitely the case at the AIFR, where clients were regularly labeled as biotypes—endomorphs/ectomorphs, hypokinetic/hyperkineti
c, and extroverted/introverted—in order to treat their marital and sexual problems. As was the case with population subdivisions, racial and evolutionary conceits lingered, though often submerged, sometimes masquerading as gender and sexual maladjustment.15
Some scholars have suggested that this should be seen as a transition from “negative” to “positive” or “mainline” to “reform” eugenics.16 Such interpretations, however, fail to capture many sides of better breeding during the postwar period. First, “negative” practices—such as marriage restrictions, immigration quotas, and compulsory sterilizations—did not disappear concomitant with this chronology. Although rarely enforced in some states, laws forbidding interracial unions were not overturned on the federal level until Loving v. Virginia in 1967, national origins quotas were not replaced with the family reunification model until the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, and sterilization statutes were not repealed by state legislatures until the 1970s and 1980s. By the time that anthropologists and geneticists had begun to refute many aspects of “negative” eugenics, its attendant measures had been naturalized into federal, state, and even municipal institutions and were underpinning postwar norms of conformity. Furthermore, sterilization operations peaked nationwide from the late 1930s to the early 1940s and in some states, such as North Carolina and Virginia, escalated into the 1950s and 1960s.17 Thus “positive” eugenics, which concentrated on encouraging those deemed fit to reproduce in higher numbers, was constructed on the back of an interlocking set of ongoing medicalized exclusions. Second, as they gravitated toward family planning and biotypology, “reform” eugenicists often began to locate the marrow of human differentiation not in racial distinctions, as previously understood, but in sex and gender. This was a Faustian transposition: as race moved progressively into the terrain of culture, sex and gender in turn became more tightly wedded to biology. From this perspective, “reform” eugenics retained and even extended the rigidity of “mainline” eugenics. To a great extent, the racism of the 1920s was rearticulated into the sexism of the 1950s. Moreover, for many American eugenicists this reorientation was linked to a diminishing interest in the abnormal and a pronounced interest in those considered normal and fit, mainly the white middle class, whose ranks solidified in urban and suburban areas of the country after World War II.18
The AIFR and its director, Paul Popenoe, exemplified and propelled these changes, promoting a family-centric eugenics that rested on and demanded sex and gender uniformity. For Popenoe the male-female difference transcended all others and was the “greatest that can exist between two normal human beings.”19 It was an irrevocable distinction based on evolution, nature, and genetics that warranted protection at all costs from the centripetal forces of hedonism, commercialism, and decadence emanating from modern society. The AIFR’s resounding message was that the male-female dichotomy was essential to the interconnected health and survival of the family, the nation, and western civilization. By casting a wide net around this fundamental difference, which he then complemented with the biotypological dyad of extroversion-introversion, Popenoe engendered a layered eugenics, one that paid heed to psychogenic, physiological, polygenic, and behavioral variables.
Popenoe’s more tractable eugenics was in tune with the sexual liberalism of the Cold War and, as such, was beset with the conflicting currents that reached their tipping point in the late 1960s. By World War II, the middle classes had greater access to contraception, marriage was idealized as a mutual emotional and sexual partnership, and women’s erotic pleasure had become a valid topic for discussion in many quarters. These developments were circumscribed, however, by the tyranny of sex-gender norms, particularly the double standard expected of women and deep-seated paranoia about homosexuality and sexual deviance.20 Some feminist historians have situated the Cold War cult of male expertise and the prominence of marriage and sex counseling wholly on the shoulders of Freudian pathologies of “penis envy” and “frigidity.”21 Although sexual liberalism owed a great debt to Freud and his American protégés, biological determinism affected the postwar sex-gender system in significant yet overlooked ways. The veneration of maternity and parenthood and the pronatalism advocated by Popenoe and his contemporaries set the stage for the “baby boom,” which lasted from 1946 to 1964.22 Moreover, marital counseling, which affected the lives of thousands of women and men in North America and was a bête noire of second-wave feminism, became a household fixture largely because of Popenoe’s efforts to make a rather rudimentary version of sex biology integral to mating, marriage, and procreation.
FROM DATES TO MARRIAGE
The AIFR represented the culmination of Popenoe’s career as a plant breeder, social hygienist, and eugenicist, and was an enterprise that dominated his adult life. In the early 1900s, when Popenoe was a teenager, his father moved the family from Topeka to Santa Monica to start West India Gardens, a subtropical nursery that supposedly introduced the profitable “fuerte avocado” to California.23 Once the family was settled, Popenoe enrolled in Occidental College and two years later at the behest of several professors transferred to Stanford University, where he studied under David Starr Jordan. This apprenticeship with California’s foremost eugenicist was formative for Popenoe, who wrote a term paper for his mentor on the relationship between heredity and alcoholism that helped to crystallize his belief in the authority of Mendelian, not Lamarckian, theories of genetic transmission.24
Like many of his contemporaries, Popenoe’s path to eugenics involved a sustained engagement with plant breeding.25 Upon returning to the Southland from Palo Alto in 1908 Popenoe, a skilled writer, was hired by the Pasadena Star, where he was promoted up the ranks from cub to managing reporter. In 1911 the city of Pasadena sent Popenoe to Europe to conduct a study of government, politics, and economic conditions. After gathering data on a dozen cities including London, Paris, Antwerp, and Berlin, Popenoe continued his journey to North Africa and the Middle East in order to fulfill his father’s request to return with some promising date palms for cultivation. The following spring, Popenoe deposited one thousand carefully handpicked offshoots of Algerian Deglet Noors in Thermal, a small town in the Coachella Valley, supplying some of the seeds for the large-scale date industry that would flourish in the area now known as Palm Springs.26 With this modest addition to the assorted species being grown by West India Gardens, Popenoe began his fascination with the origins, genetics, and transplantation of Arabian date palms. Several months later he was in the Persian Gulf searching for varieties likely to thrive in the arid American West and within short order had loaded a barge, this time with more than fifteen thousand specimens. While closely monitoring the slow progress of his offshoots across the Atlantic to the port of Galveston, from which they would be transported overland to California, Popenoe wrote Date Growing in the Old World and the New, in which he examined the selection, pollination, and harvesting of dates.27 This project led him to the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Bureau of Plant Industry to consult with David Fairchild, the son-in-law of Alexander Graham Bell and an influential member of the American Breeders’ Association, then the hub of America’s nascent eugenics movement.
Impressed with the young Popenoe, Fairchild asked him to become the editor of the ABA’s journal and in that capacity to recast and extend its focus from plants and livestock to people and from horticulture and animal husbandry to eugenics. As Popenoe explained in a letter to his parents, “The idea is to show that plants and animals obey the same laws of heredity, and that these laws are the ones which govern Homo Sapiens, as well.”28 Popenoe accepted the post and his proposed title for the ABA’s updated publication, the Journal of Heredity, was chosen over two alternatives (Breeding and Eugenics and Heredity and Breeding). With Popenoe in charge, the Journal of Heredity began to print articles on the topics that preoccupied most eugenicists of the day: feeblemindedness, the inferior stock of immigrants, the need for marriage and sterilization laws, and the transmission of undesirable traits (such as polydactylism or crim
inality) down the family line according to Mendelian ratios.
From 1914 to 1917, Popenoe sat at the editorial helm of the Journal of Heredity. He maintained his interest in fruit horticulture and was particularly intrigued by the taxonomy and evolution of the date palm.29 This was a passion that he shared with his brother, Wilson, with whom he had traveled in the Middle East and who also worked for Fairchild, as an agricultural explorer stationed mainly in the South American tropics.30 At the same time, Popenoe was becoming immersed in the burgeoning universe of race betterment. Aside from fraternizing with Fairchild’s circle and lecturing on human heredity to civic groups such as the YMCA, Popenoe began to befriend prominent American eugenicists. In 1914, for instance, he attended the inaugural conference of the Race Betterment Foundation, held in Battle Creek, Michigan, under the auspices of John Harvey Kellogg, and visited the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, where he toured the facilities and lunched with its superintendent, Harry H. Laughlin.31 In the fall of that year, Kellogg asked Popenoe to collect photos for the Second National Race Betterment Conference, scheduled to take place in San Francisco at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition the following summer.32 In addition to contributing to the race betterment exhibit, Popenoe delivered a paper at the world’s fair titled “Natural Selection in Man,” which laid out his hard-line hereditarianism and emphasized the importance of eliminating the unfit lest they defile the “germ plasm” and drain precious financial resources.33 In 1918, Popenoe and his steadfast collaborator, Roswell Johnson, expounded on these ideas and underscored the need for higher birthrates among the fit in Applied Eugenics, an immensely popular text which the duo updated for a second edition in 1933.34
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