Eugenic Nation

by Stern, Alexandra Minna

  28. See Stern, “From Mestizophilia to Biotypology”; Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, “Sexuality and Biopower in Chile and Latin America,” Political Power and Social Theory 15 (2001): 315–72; and William H. Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

  29. For example, see Madison Grant, The Conquest of a Continent; or, The Expansion of Races in America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933).

  30. Charles M. Goethe, Seeking to Serve (Sacramento: Keystone Press, 1949), 137.

  31. See Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001); Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002); Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); and Molly Ladd-Taylor, “Saving Babies and Sterilizing Mothers: Eugenics and Welfare Politics in the Interwar United States,” Social Politics 4 (1997): 136–53.

  32. See Thomas M. Shapiro, Population Control Politics: Women, Sterilization, and Reproductive Choice (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985); and Betsy Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control, rev. ed. (Boston: South End Press, 1995).

  33. See Reilly, Surgical Solution; Kline, Building a Better Race.

  34. See Rickie Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race before Roe v. Wade, 2nd. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000). Similar patterns developed in Sweden and Norway. See Broberg and Roll-Hansen, Eugenics and the Welfare State.

  35. See Castles, “Quiet Eugenics.”

  36. See Schoen, Choice and Coercion.

  37. See Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right.

  38. See Ordover, American Eugenics; and Carole R. McCann, Birth Control Politics in the United States, 1916–1945 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994).

  39. See Briggs, Reproducing Empire.

  40. See Kline, Building a Better Race; Molly Ladd-Taylor, “Eugenics, Sterilisation and Modern Marriage in the USA: The Strange Career of Paul Popenoe,” Gender and History 13, no. 2 (2001): 298–327.

  41. See Kline, Building a Better Race.

  42. See Carole McCann “Birth Control, Eugenics, and the Foundations of Demography” (manuscript cited with the permission of the author).

  43. See Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 29. On the transition from discrete categories to continuums, also see Hamilton Cravens, The Triumph of Evolution: The Heredity-Environment Controversy, 1900–1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).

  44. See Kline, Building a Better Race; Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992).

  45. See Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage Books, 1997); Elena Rebéca Gutiérrez, “The Racial Politics of Reproduction: The Social Construction of Mexican-Origin Women’s Fertility” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1999); Ian F. Haney López, Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003); Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right; McCann, Birth Control Politics; and Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie.

  46. Naomi Rogers, “ ‘Caution: The AMA May Be Dangerous to Your Health’: The Student Health Organizations (SHO) and American Medicine, 1965–1970,” Radical History Review 80 (2001): 5–34; Sheryl Burt Ruzek, The Women’s Health Movement: Feminist Alternatives to Medical Control (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1978); Sandra Morgen, Into Our Own Hands: The Women’s Health Movement in the United States, 1969–1990 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002).

  47. See James H. Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1992); and Susan M. Reverby, ed., Tuskegee’s Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

  48. See Paul, Controlling Human Heredity; Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics; Frank Dikötter, “Race Culture: Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics,” American Historical Review 103, no. 2 (1998): 467–78; and Martin S. Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of “Defective” Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

  49. See Paul, Politics of Heredity; and Adam, Wellborn Science.

  50. Francis Galton, Essays in Eugenics (London: Eugenics Education Society, 1909), 35.

  51. Charles B. Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1911), 1.

  52. See Troy Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics (New York: Routledge, 1990).

  53. See Hermann J. Muller, “Better Genes for Tomorrow,” in The Population Crisis: Implications and Plans for Action, ed. Larry K. Y. Ng and Stuart Mudd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 246; and Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, chap. 12.

  54. Lee M. Silver, Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will Transform the American Family (New York: Avon Books, 1997).

  55. See J. Edward Chamberlain and Sander L. Gilman, eds., Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Robert A. Nye, “The Rise and Fall of the Eugenics Empire: Recent Perspectives on the Impact of Biomedical Thought in Modern Society,” Historical Journal 36, no. 3 (1993): 687–700.

  56. See Jan Breman, ed., Imperial Monkey Business: Racial Supremacy in Social Darwinist Theory and Colonial Practice (Amsterdam: V.U. University Press, 1990).

  57. On hybridity, see Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (New York: Routledge, 1995).

  58. See Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991).

  59. Stepan, “Hour of Eugenics.”

  60. Paul, Controlling Human Heredity, chap. 2.

  61. Ibid., 41.

  62. See Jan Sapp, “The Struggle for Authority in the Field of Heredity, 1900–1932: New Perspectives on the Rise of Genetics,” Journal of the History of Biology 16, no. 3 (1983): 311–42.

  63. His results were published in 1866; see Gregor Mendel, “Experiments in Plant Hybridization,” in Classic Papers in Genetics, ed. James Peters (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1959), 1–20.

  64. See Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, chap. 3.

  65. Ibid.

  66. See ibid.; and Robert F. Weir, Susan C. Lawrence, and Evan Fales, eds., Genes and Human Self-Knowledge: Historical and Philosophical Reflections on Modern Genetics (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994).

  67. See James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (New York: Atheneum, 1968).

  68. Kathy Cooke convincingly argues that scholars have dismissed the role of environment too readily and that World War I was the watershed in the transition to strict Mendelianism. See Kathy J. Cooke, “The Limits of Heredity: Nature and Nurture in American Eugenics before 1915,” Journal of the History of Biology 31, no. 2 (1998): 263–78; and Peter J. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).

  69. On the family studies, see Nicole Hahn Rafter, ed., White Trash: The Eugenic Family S
tudies, 1877–1919 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988).

  70. See Paul, Politics of Heredity, chap. 7.

  71. See Frederick Osborn, The Future of Human Heredity: An Introduction to Eugenics in Modern Society (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1968), 86.

  72. Ibid., 84.

  73. Ibid., 92–94. Also see Frederick Osborn, Preface to Eugenics, rev. ed. (New York: Harper, 1951), chap. 2; and Alan F. Guttmacher, “The Place of Sterilization,” in The Population Crisis: Implications and Plans for Action, ed. Larry K. Y. Ng and Stuart Mudd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 201–6.

  74. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994).

  75. See Paul Davis Chapman, Schools as Sorters: Lewis M. Terman, Applied Psychology, and the Intelligence Testing Movement, 1890–1930 (New York: New York University Press, 1988).

  76. See ibid.; and Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).

  77. Lewis M. Terman, The Measurement of Intelligence (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1916).

  78. On health seeking and the myth of the curative West, see Sheila M. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

  79. See Kline, Building a Better Race, for a discussion of Terman’s M-F Test at the American Institute of Family Relations. For the national role, see Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996).

  80. See, for example, Stephen Tchudi, ed., Science, Values, and the American West (Reno: Nevada Humanities Committee, 1997); Rebecca S. Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997); Steven Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998); Matt Garcia, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900–1970 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Douglas Sackman, “Inside the Skin of Nature: Science and the Quest for the Golden Orange,” in Science, Values, and the American West, ed. Stephen Tchudi (Reno: Nevada Humanities Committee, 1997), 117–145; and Kevin Fernlund, ed., The Cold War American West, 1945–1989 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998).

  81. Volumes have been written on Frederick Jackson Turner. An imaginative retrospective is Kerwin Lee Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of Native America, 1890–1990 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).

  82. See Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987); Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin, eds., Trails: Toward a New Western History (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991); and William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, eds., Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).

  83. See Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage, eds., Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997); David G. Gutiérrez, “Significant to Whom? Mexican Americans and the History of the American West,” Western Historical Quarterly 24, no. 4 (1993): 519–37; Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997); Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769–1936 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995); Sarah Deutsch, “Landscape of Enclaves: Race Relations in the West, 1865–1990,” in Under an Open Sky, ed. Cronon, Miles, and Gitlin, 110–31; Sarah Deutsch, No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995); and Sucheng Chan, ed., Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882–1943 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).

  84. See Limerick, Legacy of Conquest; Deutsch, “Landscape of Enclaves.”

  85. See Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001); and Charles J. McClain, In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle against Discrimination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994).

  86. See Howard Markel, When Germs Travel: Six Major Epidemics That Have Invaded America since 1900 and the Fears They Have Unleashed (New York: Pantheon, 2004); Alan M. Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Shah, Contagious Divides; and Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

  87. See David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995).

  88. See Alexandra Minna Stern, “Buildings, Boundaries, and Blood: Medicalization and Nation-Building on the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1910–1930,” Hispanic American Historical Review 79, no. 1 (1999): 41–81.

  89. See William Deverell, “Plague in Los Angeles, 1924: Ethnicity and Typicality,” in Over the Edge: Remapping the American West, ed. Valerie J. Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 172–200; and Gutiérrez, “Racial Politics of Reproduction.”

  90. On the connected histories of the U.S. West and imperialism, see Peggy Pascoe, “Democracy, Citizenship, and Race: The West in the Twentieth Century,” in Perspectives on Modern America: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century, ed. Harvard Sitkoff (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 227–46. On colonial medicine, see Warwick Anderson, “ ‘Where Every Prospect Pleases and Only Man Is Vile’: Laboratory Medicine as Colonial Discourse,” in Discrepant Histories: Translocal Essays on Filipino Cultures, ed. Vicente L. Rafael (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 83–112. On the postcolonial turn toward conceiving of metropolis and colony in one analytical framework, see Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).

  91. See Peggy Pascoe, “Race, Gender, and the Privileges of Property: On the Significance of Miscegenation Law in the U.S. West,” in Over the Edge: Remapping the American West, ed. Valerie J. Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 215–30; and Pascoe, “Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of ‘Race’ in Twentieth-Century America,” Journal of American History 83, no. 1 (1996): 44–69.

  92. On the latter, see Paul A. Lombardo, “Miscegenation, Eugenics, and Racism: Historical Footnotes to Loving v. Virginia,” University of California, Davis Law Review 21, no. 421 (1988): 421–52.

  93. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 99.

  94. See Luther Burbank, The Training of the Human Plant (New York: Century, 1922).

  95. See Michael L. Smith, Pacific Visions: California Scientists and the Environment, 1850–1915 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987).

  96. See David Starr Jordan, The Blood of the Nation: A Study of the Decay of Races through the Survival of the Unfit (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1910).

  97. See Largent, “ ‘ Greatest Curse of the Race.’ ”

  98. See Peter Boag, Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003).

  CHAPTER 1. RACE BETTERMENT AND TROPICAL MEDICINE IN IMPERIAL SAN FRANCISCO

  1. Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition: Being the Official History of the International C
elebration Held at San Francisco in 1915 to Commemorate the Discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the Construction of the Panama Canal (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921), 2:264.

  2. Ibid., 2:265.

  3. See John D. Barry, The City of Domes (San Francisco: John J. Newbegin, 1915), 42.

  4. Quoted in Todd, Story of the Exposition, 2:270.

  5. Ibid., 272; Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 245–49.

  6. In terms of acreage, the PPIE was the third largest exposition held in the United States. The exposition at Chicago (1893) was slightly bigger and that at St. Louis (1904) almost twice the size.

  7. See Barry, City of Domes.

  8. Todd, Story of the Exposition, 5:159, 225–30; Donna Ewald and Peter Clute, San Francisco Invites the World: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1991). Note that Todd’s figure of nearly nineteen million does not differentiate between one-time and returning visitors to the fair.

  9. Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, 1915 (official pamphlet), papers of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), CA 190, Carton 108, Bancroft Library (BL), University of California at Berkeley (UCB). For analyses of the fair, see Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Burton Benedict, ed., The Anthropology of World’s Fairs: San Francisco’s Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915 (Berkeley, Calif.: Lowie Museum of Anthropology, 1983), 114–33; Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), chap. 9; Bill Brown, “Science Fiction, the World’s Fair, and the Prosthetics of Empire, 1910–1915,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 129–63; Keith L. Eggener, “Maybeck’s Melancholy: Architecture, Empathy, Empire, and Mental Illness at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition,” Winterthur Portfolio 29, no. 4 (1994): 211–26; and Michael L. Smith, Pacific Visions: California Scientists and the Environment, 1850–1915 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), chap. 9.