Eugenic Nation

by Stern, Alexandra Minna

  Shortly after the United States entered World War I, Popenoe left the Journal of Heredity to serve in the military, recruited by the American Social Hygiene Association and the Army Sanitary Corps to serve as a first lieutenant. During his absence, his younger brother Herbert, who had come to eugenics by way of psychology and statistics, filled his shoes at the Journal of Heredity.35 For twelve months, Popenoe patrolled the U.S.-Mexican border for venereal diseases, shutting down red-light districts, saloons, and gambling houses and prosecuting offenders under the National Defense Act.36 At the war’s conclusion, he moved to New York City to act as the ASHA’s executive secretary.37 It was there that Popenoe, now thirty-two, met and married Betty Lee Stankovitch, a rhythmic dancer and nursery school teacher thirteen years his junior. Despite a solid future at the ASHA and various job prospects on the East Coast, Popenoe could not resist the lure of California. Eager to return to the land of his youth and try his hand at date palm cultivation, in the summer of 1920 Popenoe resigned from his position and by September of that year was back in Coachella, this time accompanied by Betty.38 Popenoe romanticized California, and above all the inland valley, where he and his betrothed could enjoy a simple and rigorous “outdoor” life. In letters he penned to “the sweet-lipped daughter of the desert, the incomparable companion of the date-palms, the lovely Lady Betty” while preparing for their cross-country relocation, Popenoe described the beauty of the landscape—its snow-capped mountains, fields of yellow flowers, luscious orange groves, and palo verde trees.39 He envisioned a desert paradise where he and Betty could remake themselves and commune with one another: “you and I must have a complete change of environment, where we can live primarily in each other.”40

  Once in Coachella, the couple started matrimony in a shack that Popenoe had constructed and for their honeymoon traversed the northern rim of the desert on horseback, toting their camping gear in saddle packs.41 Relying on his father’s agricultural networks and guided by the lucrative example of West India Gardens, Popenoe purchased a ranch, conveniently situated across the road from a pre-existing date-packing house, which boasted eighty acres, six wells, and three pumping stations. Within several years, he was producing a half million dates annually, as well as Malaga grapes and Bermuda onions.42 According to a remembrance written by one of Popenoe’s four sons, David, the move to California was not restorative but “wrenching” for Betty, who suffered from the “social isolation, the intense heat, the inadequate housing, the sandstorms, the scorpions, and the need to carry a pistol to kill rattlesnakes.”43

  As his crops yielded fruit, Popenoe read and wrote voraciously about human heredity. Perhaps motivated by the tensions that he and Betty confronted as newlyweds in Coachella, by 1926 Popenoe had published three books related to the family, reproduction, and marriage, all three of which adumbrated the mission of the AIFR.44 Nor did he lose contact with the eugenicists he had met in the 1910s. In 1924 Popenoe even entertained the possibility of spending half the year at the Battle Creek Sanitarium to assist Kellogg with projects for the Race Betterment Foundation.45 Although this never transpired, two years later Ezra S. Gosney, the wealthy Pasadena philanthropist and citrus grower, asked Popenoe to help him set up a eugenics organization in Southern California. Popenoe responded by drafting a blueprint for a “race-hygiene foundation,” which, with added input from Laughlin, resulted in the formation of the Human Betterment Foundation. As an initial venture, Popenoe and Gosney carried out a systematic inquiry into the results of California’s sterilization law. This legislation, initially passed in 1909, affected patients in state institutions, more than twenty thousand of whom were sterilized between 1909 and 1979. Eager to augment the scope and ambit of this law, Popenoe traveled about the state gathering extensive data at each of California’s hospitals about the benefits of reproductive surgery, eventually coauthoring Sterilization for Human Betterment: A Summary of Results of 6,000 Operations in California, 1909–1929 and touting sterilization as a surgical solution both for patient and populace.46

  Galvanized by his sterilization investigation, Popenoe became the Southland’s very own eugenic dynamo. In 1929 he was instrumental in establishing the Southern California Branch of the AES, which he hoped could serve as “an excellent vehicle for educational and legislative action, in cooperation with the existing eugenics section of the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.”47 Its aims were to promote eugenic education on the elementary school, high school, and college levels, amplify the state’s sterilization law, and sponsor fitter families contests.48 After formal approval by the AES as a regional office, the branch was incorporated in November 1929. It convened gatherings at the University of Southern California and the Los Angeles Public Library that brought together physicians, psychologists, and educators, many of whom held positions at local universities and colleges.49 Until the 1940s this branch, renamed the California Division in 1935, organized monthly lectures and produced broadsheets with alerts and factoids about Mexican immigration, genetic diseases, premarital exams, sterilization policies, the activities of sister organizations abroad, and family and population planning.50

  Despite the activities of the HBF, the California Division of the AES, and the Eugenics Section of the Commonwealth Club of California, Popenoe felt that one arena remained almost totally neglected: the propagation and nurturance of eugenic families and marriages. Not only were educational resources few and far between, but there were no centers for scientific and objective guidance. As Popenoe, ever the pragmatist, was fond of saying, “if your automobile broke down, you knew where to go for help,” but if your marriage collapsed, there was almost nowhere to turn.51 In order to rectify this situation, Popenoe decided to establish a clearinghouse “where anyone with a problem in family relations could go and get access to all of the existing information that would make for success.”52 On February 4, 1930, with Gosney’s financial backing, Popenoe opened the institute, which he directed, with few interruptions, for more than forty years. The Los Angeles Times announced the founding of the AIFR on its cover page, notifying readers that it had “started operations with the idea in mind that a few cold, unadorned and scientific facts thrown out to those floundering in the sea of domestic difficulties may prevent many a shipwreck or rescue some of the perishing.”53 For Popenoe, Southern California, a mushrooming metropolitan area simmering with temptations, was the ideal home for the AIFR.54 According to David Popenoe, it was unlikely that his father “would have taken up the profession of marriage counseling had he remained in the Midwest, away from ‘the Hollywood scene’ where the need for such counseling was constantly staring one in the face.”55 Indeed, Popenoe repeatedly expressed dismay over Hollywood’s chronic culture of divorce, at several points offering advice and administering the JTA to some of the biggest female stars of the silver screen, such as Susan Hayward during her acrimonious divorce from Jess Barker.56

  Popenoe modeled the AIFR on the clinics formed in Germany in the 1920s to assess the eugenic and mental fitness of potential spouses, stating that its intention was to “bring all the resources of modern science to the promotion of successful family life.”57 Like other marriage experts of the day, such as Ben Lindsey and Theodore H. Van Der Velde, Popenoe championed “companionate marriage” and spoke frankly about female sexual desire, which he believed was central to harmonious childbearing unions. In contrast to other counselors, however, Popenoe placed heredity at the center of his marriage philosophy; it was the core from which concentric rings of human relations—psychological, medical, sociological, legal, and religious—radiated outward. Upon its founding, Popenoe declared that the institute was “the only place in the United States which deals with these questions of individual heredity as a business, and not casually or incidentally.”58 He defined heredity not as the total sum of the individual, but as the inborn potentialities that delimited a person’s baseline capacity. Popenoe taught AIFR counselors that genetic makeup was as hard to annihilate as gravity and that the only effective stra
tegy was to “redirect or sidestep” undesirable traits.59

  Popenoe envisioned the AIFR as a eugenic endeavor that would make Americans not “merely family-minded, but discriminatingly family-minded.”60 In the chapter on heredity in the institute’s training manual, for example, Popenoe included a long section on the role of the marriage counselor, who was “in a particularly favorable position to give advice that will have eugenic value.”61 At the most basic level, creating eugenic families meant impeding the unfit, the feebleminded and grossly defective, from reproducing, primarily through sterilization, which Popenoe already supported through the HBF and his collaboration with the California Department of Institutions.62 However, for the vast majority of Americans who were neither in state institutions nor subject to sterilization statutes, what was needed was sensible guidance about the suitability of marriage and procreation.63 One of the AIFR’s goals was to offer such direction, and the refrain usually repeated to its white middle-class clientele was to breed, ideally more than the replacement level of two children per couple. This responsibility of creating fit families fell squarely on women: “the wife who refuses to bear a child when health and eugenic considerations are favorable, and when her husband wants children, is refusing to meet a very important expectation in marriage.”64 Popenoe defined the AIFR’s eugenic program as “humane, far-reaching, and constructive,” warned counselors of the far-reaching social forces working against it, and declared, “only a complete reorientation of American society along eugenic lines can prevent a catastrophe.”65

  The AIFR did not signify Popenoe’s abandonment of “negative” for “positive” eugenics. While preparing to launch his syndicated column “Can This Marriage Be Saved,” for example, Popenoe was praising the virtues of sterilization and his articles on the topic were being reprinted in the German journal Archiv für Soziale Hygiene und Demographie.66 As he outlined in 1940, the institute’s objective was to contribute “something to the spread of negative eugenics” even as it offered more to “positive eugenics than is to be had today from any other source.”67 Like his peers in the 1940s, Popenoe ceased to speak the discredited idiom of nativism and degenerationism and began, more and more, to communicate in the language of family planning, biotypology, psychology, and medical genetics. For example, although he cautioned against them because of possible “disharmony in the offspring” and “social handicaps,” racial intermarriages received less than one page in the AIFR training manual.68 Insofar as it privileged human heredity, the AIFR was a predecessor of the genetic counseling programs that appeared on the American landscape in the 1940s, the first two launched at the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota. Marriage and genetic counselors alike relied on ERO-inspired pedigree charts to ascertain the probability that offspring might inherit a “deleterious trait” associated with autosomal recessive inheritance, frequently addressed queries related to interracial unions and child paternity, and took cues from the client-centered therapy of Carl Rogers.69

  That Popenoe viewed the AIFR as partly a heredity clinic is demonstrated by his happily agreeing to become the forwarding address for marital queries sent to the ERO after its closure in 1940.70 Popenoe also maintained a sizable file on genetic counseling, kept abreast of procedures at the University of Minnesota’s Dight Institute, and in the mid-1950s corresponded with the AES about writing an essay on the role of heredity counseling in marriage advice.71 Following World War II, however, the paths of the AIFR and genetic counseling veered apart, as the former moved more solidly into personality testing and family and sex psychology, and the latter became intermeshed with clinical genetics and attached to the laboratory, especially after the indicators for several chromosomal and metabolic disorders, such as Down Syndrome and phenylketonuria (PKU), were identified.72 Additionally, while genetic counselors ostensibly valued the autonomous decision making of their patients, the AIFR pursued a diametrically opposed strategy; its experts were in the business of doling out specific instructions that their clients were expected to follow.

  Ultimately, the AIFR encompassed much more than a heredity clinic, employing myriad techniques to investigate and mold marriage, reproduction, and sexuality. Its diverse staff of medical and social science professionals contributed to the institute’s comprehensive and flexible diagnostic approach, which could range from dispelling parents’ fear that they might transmit epilepsy to their children to suggestions on handling intrusive in-laws.73 Institute psychologists, for example, administered an array of tests to gauge gender comportment, emotional maturity, sexual attitudes, and extroversion-introversion.74 AIFR physicians participated in client evaluation. Dr. John Vruwink, a gynecologist who also belonged to the HBF, screened women for diseases, with a keen eye out for syphilis, at on-site clinics. And social workers and statisticians used the latest demographic methods to track and weigh variables related to marriage, divorce, and sex relations.75 With more than forty active personnel by the mid-1930s, the AIFR reverberated across Southern California’s social services matrix, from the juvenile courts to women’s groups such as the Friday Morning Club, the County Health Department, churches, hospitals, the police, and schools.76 The institute’s seminars, such as “Thinking about Marriage” and “Modern Marriage and the Modern Family,” were aimed at local professionals, while its six- to twelve-month correspondence courses versed clergymen, high school principals, and leaders of youth groups in the basics of premarital and marital counseling.77

  After two years of activity, Popenoe reported that the institute had aided scores of couples with the trials of family adjustment, inadequate finances, and child welfare, as well as “impotence, frigidity, homosexuality, and all sorts of worries growing out of sexual behavior.”78 Each year, more and more clients came through the AIFR’s doors. Such was the momentum that Popenoe sold his ranch in 1934, and he and Betty moved to Altadena around the same time, so that he could devote undivided attention to the institute’s daily management. During its inaugural decade, the AIFR’s staff lectured in two hundred colleges and universities, advised thousands of clients, led nearly one hundred all-day conferences, and reached an estimated twenty million people through an ever-growing list of newspaper and magazine articles.79 In 1941 alone, 2,763 people were seen at the institute’s office while 3,695 corresponded with its counselors.80 By this point, Popenoe and AIFR personnel were issuing a host of pamphlets with titles such as Building Sex into Your Life, publishing the monthly bulletin Family Life, and contributing regularly to health, social work, and religious journals.

  RECONSTITUTING THE FAMILY

  By the time the United States declared war on Japan, the AIFR was on firm footing and its director, who could be saluted as Dr. Popenoe, thanks to an honorary degree from Occidental College, was solidifying his reputation as a national marriage expert. If the AIFR had acted as a salve for the spousal strife and high divorce and desertion rates that marked the Great Depression, then in Popenoe’s opinion the possibilities after the war were unbounded.81 Popenoe viewed the reincorporation of thousands of returning soldiers as an opportunity to bolster marriage, boost reproduction, and enforce strict gender norms. In Be It Ever So Jumbled There’s No Place Like Home, a 1945 booklet distributed by the YMCA’s Army and Navy Department, Popenoe unveiled a plan of action for sweethearts reuniting after armistice day, whose deepest desire was a productive partnership, a prospect for which they were woefully unprepared. Popenoe intoned to young Americans that to succeed marriage must be “organized, deliberately and intelligently,” and toward that end he exhorted all couples to submit to a battery of temperament and personality tests to measure their compatibility.82 More than the scientific management of matrimony was required, however; secure postwar marriages were contingent on the acceptance and embodiment of stark gender roles, or, in his words, “better sex differentiation, to use a biological term; that is, the man will be more masculine, the woman more feminine.”83 While men would have to realize that breadwinning alone was the route to c
onfidence and prowess, women would need to direct their abilities into cooking, child-rearing, and cleaning, and find wholesome avenues for their “ego outlets.” Above all, this implied the redomestication and deskilling of women, many of whom had come to relish the independence of working in the factory or office during wartime.

  This was the message that awaited thousands of AIFR clients, composed preponderantly of white, middle-class migrants who had moved in droves to Southern California to fill white- and blue-collar jobs and purchase federally subsidized homes in sprawling suburban subdivisions.84 They streamed into the AIFR in record numbers; by the 1950s the institute was open for business from 9 A.M. to 9 P.M., Monday through Saturday, and its average caseload was 15,000 one-hour consultations per year or about 350 per week.85 In 1954 alone, AIFR counselors gave close to 14,000 consultations to 4,197 individual clients.86 For the multitude that, for geographical reasons, was unable to seek assistance in person, the institute offered correspondence counseling for a fee of fifteen to twenty-five dollars. Popenoe, who was already being heard on the radio waves, now became a television personality initially alongside the AIFR’s counseling director, Roswell Johnson, in a weekly advice show, and then on Divorce Hearing, a forum where couples presented their disputes for resolution, and for a fourteen-year stretch on the much-loved Art Linkletter’s House Party.87 Americans were also exposed to his creed in the film Modern Marriage, which was screened in three thousand theaters and which the institute helped to produce.88