Eugenic Nation

by Stern, Alexandra Minna

  10. See Elizabeth N. Armstrong, “Hercules and the Muses: Public Art and the Fair,” in Anthropology of World’s Fairs, ed. Benedict, 114–33.

  11. See Michael Worboys, “Tropical Diseases,” in Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 1:512–36; François Delaporte, The History of Yellow Fever: An Essay on the Birth of Tropical Medicine, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991); Victoria A. Harden, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever: History of a Twentieth-Century Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); and Kim Pelis, “Prophet for Profit in French North Africa: Charles Nicolle and the Pasteur Institute of Tunis, 1903–1936,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 71, no. 4 (1997): 583–622.

  12. On “upward causation,” see Lily E. Kay, The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise of the New Biology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

  13. For the best articulation of homologies between eugenics and public health, see 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), chap. 3; and Pernick, “Eugenics and Public Health in American History,” American Journal of Public Health 87 (1997): 1767–72. On sanitarian campaigns, see John Duffy, The Sanitarians: A History of American Public Health (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990).

  14. See William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).

  15. See Brechin, Imperial San Francisco.

  16. Ibid., chap. 3. The oldest base, the Presidio, had been built by the Spanish in 1776. The U.S. military built Fort Mason, Alcatraz, and Fort McDowell (on Angel Island) during the Civil War era and continued the militarization of the Bay Area with the establishment of Yerba Buena Naval Station, Fort Baker, Fort Funston, and Fort Miley during the Spanish-American War.

  17. Ibid., 130.

  18. Cited in ibid., 136.

  19. David McCullough, The Path between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977), 254–55.

  20. See Michael L. Conniff, Panama and the United States: The Forced Alliance, 2nd ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001); McCullough, Path between the Seas; John Major, Prize Possession: The United States and the Panama Canal, 1903–1979 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Ulrich Keller, The Building of the Panama Canal in Historic Photographs (New York: Dover Publications, 1983). Note that the status of the Canal Zone was similar to that of Guam and American Samoa, considered to be an “unorganized possession,” not an “incorporated territory” like Alaska and Hawai’i nor an “unincorporated territory” like the Philippines and Puerto Rico.

  21. McCullough, Path between the Seas, 393.

  22. See ibid., chap. 20, for an excellent description of the “structured and paternalistic” order imposed by Colonel Goethals in the Canal Zone, which included various moral and spatial regulations, YMCA activities, church groups, and clubs and fraternal organizations, all of which were intensely segregated by race according to a two-tiered system of “gold” and “silver” payments.

  23. See Brechin, Imperial San Francisco; and Starr, Americans and the California Dream, chap. 9. This was not the first time Burnham had a hand in making San Francisco’s image. Architect of some of the city’s most prominent structures, such as the Chronicle and Mills buildings, Burnham had served as director of works at the 1893 Chicago world’s fair. The following year, when the California Midwinter International Exposition was held in Golden Gate Park, many exhibits were transported from the Midwest to the “Sunset City” via rail. See Barbara Berglund, “ ‘The Days of Old, the Days of Gold, the Days of ‘49’: Identity, History, and Memory at the California Midwinter International Exposition, 1894,” Public Historian 25, no. 4 (2003): 25–49; and Rydell, All the World’s a Fair.

  24. Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 292; Marjorie M. Dobkin, “A Twenty-Five-Million-Dollar Mirage,” in Anthropology of World’s Fairs, ed. Benedict, 66–93.

  25. See Todd, Story of the Exposition, vol. 1. It is important to note that although Congress approved the PPIE as an international exposition, it did not provide federal funding for the event. Moore demonstrated his acumen as a businessman by overseeing a successful campaign to raise the required funds through bonds, taxes, and donations.

  26. Bascom Johnson, Moral Conditions in San Francisco and at the Panama-Pacific Exposition (New York: American Social Hygiene Association, 1915), 1. For a comparison between the San Francisco’s laxity and Los Angeles’s moral absolutism, see Gerald Woods, “A Penchant for Probity: California Progressives and the Disreputable Pleasures,” in California Progressivism Revisited, ed. William Deverell and Tom Sitton (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 99–113. In 1915, the American Social Hygiene Association expressed ongoing dissatisfaction with the raucous dance halls and sexually suggestive shows at the fair and the meager police force entrusted with curbing vice throughout the city. See Johnson, Moral Conditions; and relevant letters in PPIE, CA 190, Carton 23, BL, UCB.

  27. See Guenter B. Risse, “ ‘A Long Pull, A Strong Pull, and All Together’: San Francisco and Bubonic Plague, 1907–1908,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 66 (1992): 260–86.

  28. 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); Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001); and Alan M. Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

  29. See Frank Morton Todd, Eradicating Plague from San Francisco (San Francisco: Press of C. A. Murdock, 1909).

  30. See Risse, “ ‘Long Pull.’ ”

  31. Todd, Eradicating Plague, 84.

  32. See Risse, “ ‘Long Pull.’ ”

  33. See Todd, Eradicating Plague; and Story of the Exposition, vol. 1.

  34. See 1913 correspondence between C. C. Moore and Surgeon General Rupert Blue, PPIE, CA 190, Carton 9, BL, UCB.

  35. See Todd, Eradicating Plague.

  36. Barry, City of Domes, 10.

  37. Ibid.; and Ardee Parsons, A Day at the Exposition (undated pamphlet).

  38. Quoted in Armstrong, “Hercules and the Muses,” 116.

  39. Quoted in ibid., 122. Also see Brechin, Imperial San Francisco, 245–49.

  40. See Barry, City of Domes, 44–50.

  41. Ibid.

  42. Todd, Story of the Exposition, 2:302.

  43. Ibid., 2:324–29. On female suffrage in California, see Gayle Ann Gullett, Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women’s Movement, 1880–1911 (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

  44. See press release, “Women to Promote Permanent Peace at the Great Exposition by Margaret Wallace,” June 2, 1915, PPIE, CA 190, vol. 71, BL, UCB. Also see Anna Pratt Simpson, Problems Women Solved: Being the Story of the Woman’s Board of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition; What Vision, Enthusiasm, Work and Co-operation Accomplished (San Francisco: Woman’s Board, 1915).

  45. Although opinions certainly differed on the Woman’s Board, it conveyed a fairly uniform antiwar and prosuffrage message throughout the PPIE.

  46. See Rydell, All the World’s a Fair; and pertinent letters in PPIE, CA 190, Carton 23, BL, UCB.

  47. See S. L. Mash, President, Colored Non-Partisan Leagues of California, to Hon. Chas. C. Moore, Jan. 14, 1915; Secretary, PPIE, to Mr. S. L. Mash, Feb. 6, 1915; and S. L. Mash to C. C. Moore, Feb. 13, 1915, PPIE, CA 190, Carton 23, BL, UCB.

  48. Wilson and Waters to the Mayor of San Francisco, Mar. 8, 1915, PPIE, CA 190, Carton 23, BL, UCB.

  49. J. S. Tobin to Mr. C. C. Moore, Jan. 25, 1915, PPIE, CA 190, Carton 23, BL, UCB.

 
50. See relevant letters in PPIE, CA 190, Carton 23, BL, UCB; and Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 228–29.

  51. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, chap. 8; Smithsonian Institution, The Exhibits of the Smithsonian Institution at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (San Francisco: Press of H. S. Crocker, 1915).

  52. Quoted in Todd, Story of the Exposition, 2:151.

  53. See McCullough, Path between the Seas; and William C. Gorgas, Sanitation in Panama (New York: D. Appleton, 1915).

  54. 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; Anderson, “Excremental Colonialism: Public Health and the Poetics of Pollution,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 3 (1995): 640–69; and Anderson, “Immunities of Empire: Race, Disease, and the New Tropical Medicine, 1900–1920,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 70, no. 1 (1996): 94–118. Also see Reynaldo Ileto, “Cholera and the Origins of the American Sanitary Order in the Philippines,” in Discrepant Histories, ed. Rafael, 51–81; and Melbourne Tapper, “Interrogating Bodies: Medico-Racial Knowledge, Politics, and the Study of a Disease,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 1 (1995): 76–93.

  55. See McCullough, Path between the Seas, 415.

  56. Ibid., 418; Gorgas, Sanitation in Panama, chaps. 4–6.

  57. McCullough, Path between the Seas, 415; Gorgas, Sanitation in Panama, chaps. 4–6.

  58. Ibid. Also see Todd, Story of the Exposition, vol. 1; Charles Francis Adams, The Panama Canal Zone: An Epochal Event in Sanitation (Boston: Proceedings of the Massachusetts History Society, 1911); and James Ewing Mears, The Triumph of American Medicine in the Construction of the Panama Canal (Philadelphia: Wm. J. Dornan, 1911).

  59. McCullough, Path between the Seas, 144.

  60. Ibid.

  61. Gorgas, Sanitation in Panama, 182.

  62. Gorgas, Report of the Department of Health of the Isthmian Canal Commission for the Month of January, 1906 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1906), 6–9.

  63. Adams, Panama Canal Zone, 4; Todd, Story of the Exposition, 1:26; Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, 1915, PPIE, CA 190, Carton 108, BL, UCB.

  64. James A. Buchanan and Gail Stuart, eds., History of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (San Francisco: Pan-Pacific Press Association, 1916), 14.

  65. See Conniff, Panama and the United States.

  66. See Adams, Panama Canal Zone, 28. For an excellent analysis of these connections, see Anderson, “ ‘Where Every Prospect Pleases.’ ”

  67. See Anderson, “ ‘Where Every Prospect Pleases,’ ” and “Immunities of Empire.”

  68. McCullough, Path between the Seas, 501; Michael L. Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama, 1904–1981 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985).

  69. “Insects Great Enemy of Mankind,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 26, 1915.

  70. See Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, 1915, PPIE, CA 190, Carton 108, BL, UCB.

  71. Official List of Commissioned and Other Officers of the United States Public Health Service (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1914), 13; Who Was Who in America (Chicago: A. N. Marquis, 1950), 2:425; “Personal,” Canal Record 7 (Dec. 10, 1913): 143.

  72. Annual Report of the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1915), 277–82.

  73. See C. C. Pierce to the Surgeon General, May 8, 1915, PPIE, CA 190, Carton 86, BL, UCB.

  74. Letter of Dr. R. M. Woodward, June 4, 1913, re: Hospital Service at Grounds, 14, PPIE, CA 190, Carton 23, BL, UCB; Annual Report (1915), 279–80; Todd, Story of the Exposition, 5:187–92.

  75. Todd, Story of the Exposition, 5: 187.

  76. Ibid.; Annual Report (1915), 281.

  77. International Jury Awards, 20–25, PPIE, CA 190, Carton 51, BL, UCB.

  78. Ibid.

  79. W. C. Rucker and C. C. Pierce, United States Public Health Service Exhibit at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, 1915, Supplement no. 27, USPHS Reports (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1915), 1.

  80. Ibid.

  81. List of Exhibits referring to Hygiene and Sanitation—Located in Palace of Education, PPIE, Dr. J. R Hurley, U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS), Superintendent of Hygiene and Sanitation Exhibits, PPIE, CA 190, Carton 131, BL, UCB.

  82. Todd, Story of the Exposition, 5:16.

  83. Manager James A. Barr to Dr. W. F. Snow, Oct. 26, 1912, PPIE, CA 190, Carton 66, BL, UCB.

  84. See materials in PPIE, CA 190, Carton 156, BL, UCB; and Todd, Story of the Exposition, vol. 5, chap. 5.

  85. Todd, Story of the Exposition, vol. 5, chap. 5.

  86. Helen Dare, “They Say We Owe the Canal to Medical Men,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 22, 1915.

  87. Untitled report of the American Society for Tropical Medicine (submitted to Todd by John W. Swan), PPIE, CA 190, Carton 156, BL, UCB.

  88. See Charles A. L. Reed, “The Relation of the Medical Profession to the Practical Panamericanism of the Twentieth Century” (presidential address to the Seventh Medical Congress, June 18, 1915), PPIE, CA 190, Carton 156, BL, UCB.

  89. See Anderson, “Immunities of Empire.”

  90. Reed, “Relation of the Medical Profession.”

  91. Ibid.

  92. See Shah, Contagious Divides.

  93. C. C. Pierce to D. H. Connick, Dec. 15, 1915, PPIE, CA 190, Carton 86, BL, UCB. Pierce left San Francisco on December 15, just eleven days after the exposition ended.

  94. Official List of Commissioned and Other Officers of the United States Public Health Service (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1916), 27–28.

  95. C. C. Pierce to Frank Morton Todd, Aug. 8, 1917, PPIE, CA 190, Carton 156, BL, UCB.

  96. Program of the Second International Conference on Race Betterment, Aug. 4–8, 1915, PPIE, CA 190, Carton 12, BL, UCB.

  97. See Official Proceedings of the Second National Conference on Race Betterment (Battle Creek, Mich.: Race Betterment Foundation, 1915).

  98. See relevant references to programs and schedules, PPIE, CA 190, vol. 71, CL, UCB.

  99. Todd, Story of the Exposition, 4:39.

  100. International Jury Award 137, PPIE, CA 190, Carton 51, BL, UCB.

  101. Ibid.

  102. J. H. Kellogg to Mr. Alvin E. Pope, Jan. 26, 1915; “Introduction, Purpose, Aims, and Methods of This Exhibit,” PPIE, CA 190, Carton 51, BL, UCB.

  103. “Introduction, Purpose, Aims, and Methods of This Exhibit.”

  104. Official Proceedings, 145.

  105. Todd, Story of the Exposition, 4:38.

  106. James A. Barr (JAB) to David Starr Jordan (DSJ), Dec. 14, 1912; JAB to DSJ, Feb. 5, 1913; JAB to DSJ, Feb. 21, 1913; PPIE, CA 190, Carton 66, BL, UCB.

  107. JAB to DSJ, Feb. 21, 1913, PPIE, CA 190, Carton 66, BL, UCB.

  108. Pope quoted in JAB to Dr. W. F. Snow, Aug. 21, 1913, PPIE, CA 190, Carton 66, BL, UCB.

  109. “Panama-Pacific International Exposition Will Display Achievements of Eugenic Societies,” Pacific Medical Journal 56, no. 11 (Nov. 1913): 649.

  110. Ibid.; Alvin E. Pope, “Educational and Social Economic Contributions of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition to Pan-American Interests (address delivered January 7, 1916 to the Pan-American Scientific Congress),” PPIE, CA 190, Carton 27, BL, UCB.

  111. “Child of Genius Often a Bluffer,” San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 18, 1915; “San Francisco Joint Meeting of Section H of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Psychological Association” (Section H = Anthropology and Psychology), PPIE, CA 190, Carton 157, BL, UCB.

  112. “San Francisco Joint Meeting of Section H of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Psychological Association” (Section H =
Anthropology and Psychology); Henry Herbert Goddard, The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness (New York: Macmillan, 1912). For a masterful biography of Goddard, see Leila Zenderland, Measuring Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  113. “Twelfth Annual Meeting of the American Genetic Association, August 2–7, 1915,” PPIE, CA 190, Carton 157, BL, UCB.

  114. Ibid.

  115. “Sex Topics before Purity Congress,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 21, 1915.

  116. See Charles B. Davenport (CBD) to DSJ, Feb. 11, 1913, Papers of David Starr Jordan (DSJ), 86/776, Special Collections (SC), Stanford University (SU).

  117. See Official Proceedings.

  118. “Minutes of the Fourth Meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Race Betterment Foundation” (Sept. 25, 1915), Papers of John Harvey Kellogg (JHK), vol. 117, p. 47, Large Collection 13 (LG13), University Archives and Historical Collections (UAHC), Michigan State University (MSU); JHK to CBD, May 20, 1915, Papers of Charles B. Davenport (CBD), B:D27, American Philosophical Society (APS). The Race Betterment Foundation spent more than eight thousand dollars on the PPIE. Its paid employees were Read, Stolz, Emily Robbins (the foundation’s secretary), and Fannie Perrin, who spent several weeks assisting at the exhibit. See “Minutes of the Fourth Meeting” and attached “Race Betterment Foundation Statement of Income and Expenditures, Year Ending December 31, 1914,” vol. 117, pp. 45–48; “Minutes of the Fourth Meeting” (Nov. 9, 1915), vol. 117, p. 55.