Eugenic Nation

by Stern, Alexandra Minna

  Indeed, one of the striking ironies of the AIFR is that by legitimizing the erotic expression and physical pleasure of women, albeit married women, through studies and counseling, and by constructing concepts of gender identity and embodiment, it laid the groundwork and began to articulate the vocabulary of the sexual revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s. Needless to say, Popenoe derided these movements as a grave threat to the family-nation-civilization triumvirate. Starting in the late 1960s, as male experts and scientific authority began to come under attack by feminists and antipsychiatry activists, Popenoe found more and more affinity with Christian conservatives, who shared his convictions about the sanctity of marriage and strict sex-gender norms. Thus, at least one current of postwar eugenics streamed into incipient family values campaigns and can partially account for the echoes of race suicide voiced by the Moral Majority in the 1980s and some evangelical Christians to this day. In another historical twist, it was through these channels that the JTA, an instrument initially based on understandings of human heredity and evolution, migrated into fundamentalist ministries, where its successor, the Taylor-Johnson Temperament Test or T-JTA, is a preferred tool for premarital counseling.174

  CHAPTER 6

  Contesting Hereditarianism

  Reassessing the 1960s

  In 1965, the May Second Committee, a radical student organization at California State University at Sacramento, began disseminating a leaflet titled “Sacramento State’s Own Doctor Strangelove.” This mimeograph demanded that the university administration refrain from bestowing the name “C. M. Goethe” on the campus’s new science building, which was under construction. Asking, “Who is C. M. Goethe?” the students responded angrily that he was a Nazi sympathizer who instituted racial segregation in Sacramento and trumpeted bigotry and eugenics. At the conclusion of their six-page single-spaced indictment, which vilified Goethe as a coldhearted capitalist who funded biased genetics research at CSUS and bought off the administration and faculty with his philanthropy, the May Second Committee declared:

  THE NAMING OF THE NEW SCIENCE BUILDING AFTER C. M. GOETHE WOULD BE A MOCKERY AND A BLASPHEMY AGAINST SCIENCE. IDEAS SUCH AS GOETHE’S ARE SCIENTIFICALLY, HISTORICALLY, AND MORALLY BANKRUPT; AND EVEN THOUGH HE IS NOT FINANCIALLY BANKRUPT, HE AND HIS MONEY SHOULD BE BANISHED FROM INFLUENCE. [Capitals in the original.]1

  In a subsequent flyer, they charged that “Goethe’s programs and attitude of Nordic superiority are akin to fascism and are therefore incompatible with scientific or democratic institutions.”2 In response to this rebuke of one of the CSUS’s “founding fathers,” the administration insisted that the May Second Committee cease to disseminate their leaflets. The students, in turn, upbraided the university for what they interpreted to be a censorious violation of their right to free speech. The May Second Committee situated the administration’s actions and their fight over the science building in the context of a youth rebellion against the status quo that was gaining momentum by the day: “all over the country, students are coming into conflict with a power structure inside and outside the colleges which supports, tacitly or otherwise, those racists and reactionaries who would perpetuate the oppression of Black Americans.”3

  Despite the May Second Committee’s condemnations, the Committee on Gifts and Public Affairs of the California State College Board of Trustees, which had unanimously agreed to immortalize Goethe’s name on the $4.7 million structure about a month earlier, remained committed to their original plan, which included a lavish banquet for their donor’s ninetieth birthday.4 Over the past several decades, Goethe had given CSUS money for student fellowships, genetics research, library collections, and unrestricted gifts, and upon his death the following year would leave the university a bequest of more than $650,000 as well as his historic Julia Morgan–designed home.5 From the perspective of CSUS trustees, they were attaching the name of a magnanimous benefactor to an edifice designed to teach the knowledge that Goethe most revered—science, especially plant and animal biology—to college-bound Californians. For many students, however, anything touched by Goethe or his appellation was tainted. How could CSUS name its newest building, one dedicated to the objective pursuit of science, after a man who had founded the Eugenics Society of Northern California, harangued against immigration and overpopulation, and expressed an unabashed belief in white supremacy?

  Two years later, once the science building was ready to be unveiled, a group of concerned faculty introduced a resolution in the Academic Senate to ensure that the structure would not carry Goethe’s name, proposing that no campus buildings be named after individuals, and, in addition, that any exception to this policy require approval from both the senate and the president. This action reflected the faculty’s general dissatisfaction with the top-down management style of the CSUS administration and desire to democratize academic governance. However, this policy change also had a very specific aim; as one professor in the Academic Senate glibly stated, “the faculty knew what Goethe stood for.”6 In the end, under pressure from students and professors, the administration sheepishly backed down and dropped the issue.7 Just two years after making their initial denunciations, the concerns of the May Second Committee had moved from the fringe to the center.8 By this time, Goethe had been dead for more than a year and the country was entering the maelstrom of 1968, a year marked by street violence, antiwar agitation, and political assassinations. In brief, Goethe’s name was never engraved on what today appears on the CSUS map simply as Science Hall and this minor hullabaloo is all but forgotten. However, when the May Second Committee and select CSUS faculty threw themselves into this battle, they were contesting the legacy of eugenics in Sacramento and California. In this sense, this incident is neither isolated nor insignificant.

  The protest and liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s arose out of multiple and sometimes competing currents—the intensification of the struggle against segregation in the South, the coming of age of a generation of idealistic college students unsettled by the dangers and alienation of the nuclear age, the mounting dissatisfaction of middle-class women with the limits of Cold War family and gender roles, and the emergence of a militant brand of ethnic nationalism and racial pride. The background of these developments was the Vietnam War, which began in the 1950s as a gradual attempt to contain communism in Indochina and by the mid-1960s had escalated into a protracted military engagement that would take more than fifty thousand American lives and kill millions of Vietnamese. As disapproval and ire over U.S. involvement in Vietnam grew, it intensified the tempo of protest and convinced many Americans that their country needed to be thoroughly transformed; by the late 1960s, antiestablishment revolt was at its zenith across America and the globe.9

  One facet of this long decade that has remained persistently “hidden in plain view” is the extent to which eugenics and its accumulated effects came under heated and sustained popular assault.10 On the one hand, the pillars of more than five decades of eugenic policies—which ranged from immigration laws to racial and spatial boundaries, sterilization statutes, and marriage laws—were dismantled or overturned. On the other hand, second-wave white feminists, radical women of color, gay and lesbian liberationists, and disability rights activists sought to upend the reconceived hereditarianism that had hardened during the Cold War. One of the motifs of the 1960s—the reclamation and liberation of the reproductive and sexual body—was part of a collective refusal of assorted hereditarian theories, especially as espoused on high from experts. Skeptics might rebut that reinterpreting this period as a broad-based contestation of hereditarianism is an exercise in historical exaggeration facilitated by the overdetermined morass of social, economic, and cultural inequalities that were questioned if not assailed during the decade. Although this complex historical period should certainly not be reduced to a eugenic firestorm, it is nearly impossible to traverse the fraught intersections of race, reproduction, sexuality, and gender—all of which were flashpoints of the 1960s—without reckoning with eu
genics, whether as residual scientific racism or as reconceived in the postwar era.

  EUGENICS AND ITS CRITICS

  Eugenics was never short on critics nor were its adherents strangers to discord and recrimination. A heterogeneous lot, eugenicists disagreed, often sharply, amongst themselves. Some were beholden to doctrines of free love and anarchism, others believed in state-managed utopias.11 There were eugenicists who found answers in competing and ofttimes clashing doctrines of neo-Lamarckianism, Mendelianism, biometrics, and, later, biotypology and population policy. In the 1920s Herbert S. Jennings, a professor of zoology at Johns Hopkins University, resigned from the American Eugenics Society, disgusted with the race and class prejudices of his colleagues. An early advocate of the importance of nurture in development, Jennings chafed at leading eugenicists who stubbornly clung to the theory of singular unit characters despite substantial proof that most human traits were polygenic.12 Jennings was particularly offended by Harry H. Laughlin, the superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office, who was appointed “Expert Eugenical Agent” of the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, which convened the hearings on the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act. In his testimony before this committee, Laughlin, loaded with statistics and graphs, convinced his receptive audience that Southern and Eastern European immigrants were degenerate “stock” that must be stopped at the gates; his data became ammunition for the national origins quotas that were enacted in the late 1920s and not rescinded until 1965.13 Later in that decade, John C. Merriam, president of the Carnegie Institution, which was supporting the ERO, complained bitterly to Charles B. Davenport about the invective of Laughlin’s noisy nativism. Over the 1930s, animosity toward Laughlin would magnify, and was instrumental in spurring the Carnegie Foundation’s defunding, and the subsequent closure, of the ERO. There were also rancorous backstage skirmishes, revealed in private correspondence between Laughlin and Davenport, about whether Eugenical News, Eugenics (1928–1931), or the short-lived People (1931) should be the flagship journal of organized eugenics.14

  Several decades later, Frederick Osborn, who sought to remake eugenics during the postwar period, stepped down from the Pioneer Fund. Established in 1937 to launch initiatives for “gifted” children and conduct “study and research into the problems of heredity and eugenics in the human race,” the Pioneer Fund was the brainchild of Laughlin and the wealthy Colonel Wickliffe Draper.15 By the mid-1950s, Osborn, the fund’s first secretary, had warred too many times with Draper over the mission of the organization, which the colonel envisioned as a vehicle for protecting racial purity and Osborn wanted to steer down the less controversial avenues of population planning and demography. Under Osborn’s leadership, critical stocktaking was not uncommon; for him, this was part and parcel of making eugenics relevant to liberal democracy. In 1962, for example, while he was managing editor, Eugenics Quarterly (which succeeded Eugenical News in 1954) published an article questioning the therapeutic and institutional benefits of sterilization. After locating fifty mentally retarded patients who had been discharged from California’s Pacific State Hospital (previously the Pacific Colony) from 1949 to 1958, the two researchers interviewed them about their feelings about the procedure, which had been performed as a prerequisite for release. Sixty-eight percent stated that, in retrospect, they disapproved of the operation, while less than 20 percent approved. Moreover, there were noteworthy gender discrepancies: 35 percent of men viewed their sterilizations favorably, compared to only 9 percent of the women. Some patients stated that it was difficult for them to pass as “normal” after sterilization and others bore the surgery as a stigma of a “degraded” or “reduced” status of self.16

  Besides wrangling within organized eugenics, there was public disapprobation. In 1922, the journalist Walter Lippmann chided the Army’s intelligence tests, the Alpha and Beta, as well as Lewis Terman’s revision of the Binet-Simon, the Stanford-Binet. Although he concurred that mental tests could be effective in vocational placement, Lippmann contended that the assumptions undergirding the ubiquitous and blindly trusted IQ tests of the day—namely, that “intelligence” was unchangeable, could be easily quantified, and that a pencil and paper test could actually measure such an entity, even if it did exist—were preposterous.17 Several years later eugenics was mocked, this time in Arrowsmith, a sardonic novel by Sinclair Lewis about scientific research, doctoring, and the limits of male heroism.18 In charge of the public health department in an Iowa town while its permanent director was out campaigning for Congress, the book’s protagonist, Martin Arrowsmith, learned the true heritage of the “Eugenic Family” on display at the Health Fair. According to official accounts, this family’s pedigree was pristine: the parents and their five children neither smoked, drank, spat on pavements, nor used foul language. A few days into the fair, however, a police officer divulged that the crew was none other than the “Holton Gang.” The parents were unmarried and living in sin, only one of their kids was their own, and they had been recently imprisoned for bootlegging liquor and running confidence scams. What is more, at high noon on closing day, “when the Eugenic Family was giving a demonstration of perfect vigor, their youngest blossom had an epileptic fit.”19

  The 1930s witnessed more disputation. Sometimes this entailed eugenicists recanting previously held positions. For instance, Carl C. Brigham, who devised the prototype for today’s Scholastic Achievement Test (SAT), rejected the correlations between “race” and mental ability he had proposed earlier, one in which Nordics, Alpines, and Mediterraneans towered above all other groups. In addition he stated that the Army Alpha and Beta tests had been useless for measuring recruits, owing to sloppy sampling, and because “the tests had measured familiarity with American language and culture, not innate intelligence.”20 Also during this decade, Mary Conway Kohler, a graduate of Stanford law school, was appointed as a referee of the San Francisco Juvenile Court, where she heard the cases of delinquent girls and directed the Mother’s Aid Program. While at Stanford, Kohler had worked as a research assistant for Terman and become well versed in IQ testing and critical of its ingrained biases. She insisted that these psychometric instruments were incapable of identifying delinquents or accurately gauging intelligence, and, once in the court, she strove to terminate their diagnostic use. As a juvenile referee, Kohler was charged with sending girls who scored 75 or below on IQ tests, and hence were classified as feebleminded, to the Sonoma State Hospital for internment and probable sterilization. She avoided submitting female juveniles to such a fate and spoke out against compulsory salpingectomies, which were regularly performed without patient or parental consent. Kohler was a vociferous critic of Terman, whom she disliked personally and professionally. She was appalled by the omnipresent incitation to “purify the race” that hung in the air during the Great Depression, and she blamed California’s prosterilization climate on Popenoe’s propaganda and his panicked warnings about the impending deterioration of civilization.21 Similar doubts emerged from some pockets of the medical establishment. In 1936, a committee formed by the American Neurological Association and directed by the Boston psychiatrist Abraham Myerson, released a stinging report on eugenic sterilization: “there is at present no sound scientific basis for sterilization on account of immorality or character defect. Human conduct and character are matters of too complex a nature . . . to permit any definite conclusions to be drawn concerning the part which heredity plays in their genesis.”22

  And in the 1940s and 1950s many earlier bedfellows—scientists and social scientists—bid a lasting farewell to eugenics, assigning it to the detritus of history.23 In 1941, Ashley Montagu, then an anatomist at Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia, asserted that the anthropological concept of race was “meaningless,” a position that became generally accepted by geneticists.24 He was soon just one in a chorus that included the prominent geneticists L. C. Dunn and Theodosius Dobzhansky, coauthors of the canonical refutation of eugenic racism, Heredity, Race, and Society. In this tract, publish
ed in 1946, Dunn and Dobzhansky appreciated the biological variation of humankind, stressed the importance of environment in the development of individuals and the species, and disabused their readers of the notion of “pure races,” stating, “mankind has always been, and still is, a mongrel lot.”25 Dunn and Dobzhansky played a crucial role in aligning human genetics with theories of population maps and gene frequencies and were among the international luminaries who formulated the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s Statement on the Nature of Race and Race Differences.26 Written in the powerful language of postwar humanism, this document was central to the definitions of universal rights that solidified during the Cold War and were put to the test later in the century.27

  What happened in the 1960s and 1970s, however, was of a very different order of magnitude. Americans from diverse backgrounds began to challenge hereditarian doctrines, as they had been implemented on the ground over the previous fifty years. Eugenics—in its various permutations—helped to build the exclusion and discrimination that, if not toppled, were shaken at their foundation in the 1960s. The social movements of this era need to be reassessed in light of the longevity of hereditarianism across the twentieth century, not only because most eugenic laws enacted in the 1920s and 1930s were not repealed or ruled unconstitutional on the legislative and judicial level until the 1960s and 1970s, but because of the accreted effects of hereditarianism on several generations of Americans. The 1920s witnessed the consolidation of Caucasian as a racial category that encompassed European Americans who hitherto had been distinguished according to minor distinctions of nationality and language. This phase of ethnic inclusion was erected on the mantle of stark divisions between whites and nonwhites, who, like African Americans, remained relegated to second-class citizenship or, like Mexican Americans and Asian Americans, were deemed essentially foreign and inassimilable.28 Eugenic typologies, based largely on simplistic interpretations of Mendelian unit characters, were pivotal in cementing this racial regime, which far outlasted the scientific suppositions on which it was based.29