Eugenic Nation
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119. Paul Popenoe to his parents, Nov. 18, 1914, Box 3, Papers of Paul Bowman Popenoe, 1874–1991, Accession no. 4681 (4681), American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming. Since I conducted my research at the American Heritage Center, the Popenoe papers have been recatalogued. Working with the new finding aid, I have been able to deduce the location of some of my sources; when that was not possible with accuracy, I have omitted unverifiable information, such as the box or folder title or number. Between my reconstructed citations and the new finding aid, which is organized chronologically and thematically, researchers should be able to locate all of my references.
120. Samuel G. Dixon, “Race Betterment,” in Official Proceedings, 9.
121. Program of the Second International Conference on Race Betterment, Aug. 4–8, 1915, PPIE, CA 190, Carton 12, BL, UCB; JHK to CBD, Aug. 15, 1915, CBD, B:D27, APS. For an astute analysis of this play, 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), chap. 1.
122. David Starr Jordan, “Eugenics and War,” in Official Proceedings, 13. Jordan blamed many of American’s problems following the Civil War on the dysgenic effects of that conflict, which destroyed the fittest and left young widows who did not remarry and produce more children. See David Starr Jordan and Harvey Ernest Jordan, War’s Aftermath: A Preliminary Study of the Eugenics of War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914). For an extended discussion, see David Starr Jordan, Blood of the Nation: A Study of the Decay of Races through the Survival of the Unfit (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1910).
123. Luther Burbank, “Evolution and Variation with the Fundamental Significance of Sex,” in Official Proceedings, 50.
124. A. W. Hoisholt, “The Commitment of the Insane,” in Official Proceedings, 107–13.
125. Paul Popenoe, “Natural Selection in Man,” in Official Proceedings, 54–61. 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.
126. Official Proceedings, 4.
127. John Harvey Kellogg, “The Eugenics Registry,” in Official Proceedings, 79.
128. Ibid., 79–80.
129. Ibid.; JHK to DSJ, June 24, 1915, DSJ, 92/822, SC, SU.
130. JHK to DSJ, June 24, 1915, DSJ, 92/822, SC, SU; and JHK to CBD, May 20, 1915; June 16, 1915, CBD, B:D27, APS. Davenport told Kellogg that he was unable to attend the SNCRB because of a busy summer training field workers at the ERO.
131. See Cooke, “Limits of Heredity.”
132. See Steven Selden, Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in America (New York: Teacher’s College, Columbia University, 1999), chap. 1.
133. “Race Betterment Problems” (editorial), San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 15, 1915.
134. Helen Dare, “After We Are Eugenically and Otherwise Remodelled,” San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 12, 1915.
135. JHK to CBD, Aug. 15, 1915, CBD, B:D27, APS.
136. JHK to DSJ, Aug. 15, 1915, DSJ, 92/824, SC, SU.
137. Ibid.; JHK to DSJ, Oct. 25, 1915, DSJ, 94/838, SC, SU. See subsequent correspondence (1915–1926) for details of JHK’s doctoring of DSJ.
138. Frank Morton Todd and George Sterling, An Account of the Closing Ceremonies of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, Dec. 4, 1915 (San Francisco: Press of the Blair-Murdock, 1915).
139. Robert W. Rydell, World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
140. “San Francisco Joint Meeting,” PPIE, CA 190, Carton 157, BL, UCB.
141. “National Congress on Recreation to the Chambers of the Commerce of the Pacific Coast,” PPIE, CA 190, vol. 71, BL, UCB; Sacramento Bee, July 8, 1915, Papers of Charles Matthias Goethe, 85F2. no. 8, SSCF 10, University Archives, California State University, Sacramento.
CHAPTER 2. QUARANTINE AND EUGENIC GATEKEEPING ON THE U.S.-MEXICAN BORDER
1. Telegram, Secretariat of Foreign Relations to Jesus Acuña, Mar. 6, 1916, 17–9-204, Historical Archive of the Secretariat of Foreign Relations (HASFR), Mexico City. All translations from the Spanish are my own.
2. H. J. Hamilton to Melquiades Garcia, Mar. 6, 1916, 17–9-204, HASFR.
3. H. J. Hamilton to Surgeon General, Mar. 5, 1916, File 1169 (San Antonio; Laredo), Central File, 1897–1923, U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS), Record Group 90 (RG90), National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
4. James E. Trout to Melquiades García, Mar. 11, 1916, 17–9-204, HASFR.
5. See Jonathan Xavier Inda, “Foreign Bodies: Migrants, Parasites, and the Pathological Nation,” Discourse 22, no. 3 (2000): 46–62.
6. Claude C. Pierce (CCP) to H. D. H. Connick, Dec. 15, 1915, Papers of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), CA 190, Carton 86, Bancroft Library (BL), University of California, Berkeley (UCB).
7. Very similar patterns unfolded in Germany, where, starting in World War I, health authorities patrolled the borders of Eastern Europe and implemented harsh delousing campaigns that medicalized and racialized Jews and created associations of Jews with lice and typhus that would play out in a harrowing fashion during the Nazi era. See Paul Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
8. See reports and employee files, Consejo Superior de Salubridad (CSS), Box 57, Folder 1 (Ciudad Juárez); Box 63, Folder 1 (Ciudad Juárez); Box 60, Folder 25 (Nuevo Laredo); Box 43, Folder 28 (Ciudad Porfirio Diaz/Piedras Negras), Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Mexico City.
9. See Ann R. Gabbert, “El Paso, a Sight for Sore Eyes: Medical and Legal Aspects of Syrian Immigration, 1906–1907,” Public Historian 65, no. 1 (2002): 15–42.
10. 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.
11. See, for example, “Quarantine Is Modified against Mexico,” El Paso Herald, May 9, 1904; “Texas Quarantines Mexico,” El Paso Herald, Apr. 13, 1905.
12. CCP to Surgeon General, Dec. 20, 1915, File 2126, USPHS, RG90, NARA.
13. Ibid.
14. “El Paso Forces Sanitary Homes for Mexicans,” El Paso Herald, Jan. 27–28, 1917.
15. “Close Quarantine Is Placed on Juarez to Keep the Typhus Out,” El Paso Herald Post, Jan. 24, 1917; CCP, “Mexican Border Quarantine,” Jan. 23, 1917, File 1248, Central File 1897–1923, El Paso, USPHS, RG90, NARA.
16. Kluttz fell ill in late December and died on Jan. 2, 1917. In the local papers he was portrayed as a martyr of municipal sanitation campaigns, and his death was directly linked to valiant attempts to treat a sick Mexican family living in El Paso tenements. See “Dr. W. C. Kluttz, City Health Officer, Succumbs to Typhus,” El Paso Herald Post, Jan. 4, 1917; “City Physician Kluttz Gives His Life in Cause of Municipal Sanitation,” El Paso Times, Jan. 5, 1917. Seven days after Kluttz’s death, Pierce sent a four-page letter to the surgeon general recommending that a quarantine be immediately established. See CCP to Surgeon General, Jan. 9, 1917, File 1248, USPHS, RG90, NARA.
17. See “El Paso Is a Great Health Center for the Southwest,” El Paso Herald, Jan. 27–28, 1917. The El Paso elite was obsessed with presenting the city as the Southwest’s “Magic Mountain,” a desirable area blessed with a dry and curative climate ideal for patients with respiratory ills.
18. Pershing and his troops began evacuating their encampments in Chihuahua the very weekend (Jan. 27–28) the quarantine began. See Linda B. Hall and Don M. Coerver, Revolution on the Border: The United States and Mexico, 1910–1920 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988).
19. “Auburn-Haired Amazon at Santa Fe Street Bridge Leads Feminine Outbreak,” El Paso Times, Jan. 29, 1917.
20. “Quarantine Riot in Juarez, Women Lead Demonstrations against American Regulations,” New York Time
s, Jan. 29, 1917.
21. “200 Women Lead in Assault at Bridge,” El Paso Herald, Jan. 29, 1917.
22. For a comparison of medical inspections on the four sides of the continental United States, see Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna Stern, “Which Face? Whose Nation? Immigration, Public Health, and the Construction of Disease at America’s Ports and Borders, 1891–1928,” American Behavioral Scientist 42, no. 9 (1999): 1314–31.
23. C. C. Pierce, “Combating Typhus Fever on the Mexican Border,” Public Health Reports 32 (Mar. 23, 1917): 426–29. Also see S. B. Grubbs, “Destroying Lice on Typhus Fever Suspects,” Public Health Reports 31 (Oct. 20, 1916): 2918–23.
24. Pierce, “Combating Typhus Fever on the Mexican Border.” Within the context of the bacteriological revolution, which began in earnest in the 1880s when scientists such as Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur discovered and verified that microorganisms caused infection and disease, the etiology of typhus was discerned rather late. In the early 1900s, bacteriologists believed that the typhus microbe was probably transmitted through some species of anthropod. In 1909, the French physician Charles Nicolle of the Pasteur Institute in Tunisia demonstrated that Pediculus humanis corporis, or the human body louse, was the principal vector of typhus. This was confirmed in 1916 by the Brazilian bacteriologist Henrique Da Roche Lima. The bacterium, Rickettsia prowazekii, which eluded researchers because of its tiny size, was named after two victims of typhus fever, Howard Ricketts and Stanislaus Prowazek, who perished while trying to identify the microbe (the former, in fact, in Mexico in 1910). Carrying the deadly bacteria in its intestines, the louse attaches parasitically to a human host to consume blood and soon deposits its feces. By scratching the rash and skin irritations occasioned by lice bites, the victim eventually introduces the bacteria into her or his bloodstream. After an incubation period of from five to fifteen days, the onset of the disease is sudden. The clinical manifestations of the disease are high fever, severe headache, prostration, and chills, followed by a purplish and sienna rash that covers the body’s trunk and limbs. Although no treatments existed in the early 1900s, since the introduction of broad-spectrum antibiotics in the middle of the century typhus has become curable if diagnosed early on. See “Epidemic Typhus,” in The Cambridge World History of Human Disease, ed. Kenneth F. Kiple (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1080–84; Howard Markel, When Germs Travel: Six Major Epidemics That Have Invaded America since 1900 and the Fears They Have Unleashed (New York: Pantheon, 2004), chap. 4; 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 (Winter 1997): 583–622; Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History: Being a Study in Biography, Which after Twelve Preliminary Chapters Indispensable for the Preparation of the Lay Reader, Deals with the Life History of Typhus Fever (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935); and Victoria A. Harden, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever: History of a Twentieth-Century Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
25. Pierce, “Combating Typhus Fever,” 427.
26. Ibid., 428.
27. After passage of the Immigration Act of 1917, new booklets with itemized instructions and examples of “undesirability” were published and distributed to immigration officers in the field. See USPHS, Regulations Governing the Medical Inspection of Aliens (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1917); and USPHS, Manual of the Mental Examination of Aliens (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1918). On the disease classifications used at the time, see USPHS, The Control of Communicable Diseases: Report of the American Public Health Association Committee on Standard Regulations Appointed in October, 1916 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920).
28. Pierce to the Surgeon General, Jan. 9, 1917, File 1248, USPHS, RG90, NARA; Public Health Reports, Feb. 2, 1917, p. 211.
29. Public Health Reports, June 1, 1917, p. 865; Public Health Reports, June 29, 1917, p. 1057.
30. These figures are calculated according to the numbers reported by Pierce in Public Health Reports from the week ending Jan. 12, 1917, to the week ending June 29, 1917 (twenty-one weeks total). These weekly reports are spotted with numerous inconsistencies where it appears that Pierce double-counted cases. Nonetheless, following these liberal figures shows that of thirty-one total cases in the United States during this period, twenty-five occurred in El Paso (including three fatalities), three in Laredo, one in Eagle Pass, one in Austin, and one in New York.
31. These figures are calculated according to the numbers given in Public Health Reports from the week ending Feb. 2, 1917 (when the first inspection numbers during the quarantine are reported) to the week ending June 29, 1917.
32. USPHS documents and newspaper articles indicate that the Santa Fe Street station had at least two and usually three physicians on active duty during the first four months of the quarantine. These included Pierce, John W. Tappan, a USPHS assistant surgeon and El Paso’s city physician for several months after Kluttz’s death, and at different times either Dr. T. C. Galloway, also of the USPHS, or the local doctor Hugh White. It is likely that additional physicians took part in quarantining and vaccinating, as the city’s medical community regularly collaborated with the immigration service and the U.S. Army. Excluding physicians and associated immigration inspectors, the El Paso quarantine station had about a dozen full-time employees running the plant by January 1917. See “Personnel of the Texas-Mexican Border Quarantine, El Paso,” June 1916, File 126, USPHS, RG 90, NARA; and the correspondence between June 1916 and January 1917 from Pierce and Tappan to the surgeon general requesting more workers for the station, Files 1248 and 126, USPHS, RG 90, NARA. Although I have calculated an estimate of 2,696 immigrants inspected daily in El Paso, it is probable that this number was actually much higher, since many estimates stress that 75 percent or more of all entries came through El Paso.
33. See Howard Markel, Quarantine! East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), chaps. 6–8; and Alan M. Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 55–56.
34. This figure comes from Harlan D. Unrau, Historic Resource Study (Historic Component): Ellis Island, Statue of Liberty National Monument, New York-New Jersey (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1984), 3:734. I thank John Parascandola, retired USPHS historian, for this source and for pointing out the difficulties of calculating precise figures for this period of immigration and inspection history.
35. James J. Davis, “Memorandum for the Bureau of Immigration,” Nov. 17, 1923, Microfilm Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), Reel 3, Series A, Part 2, casefile 52903/29.
36. Irving McNeil to J. W. Tappan, Dec. 22, 1923, Microfilm Records of the INS, Reel 3, Series A, Part 2, casefile 52903/29. Letters and reports from Files 126, 1248, and 2126, USPHS, RG90, NARA, document that after Pierce left the border, Tappan took over direction of the quarantine and continued to order equipment, deal with the daily logistics of operating the plant, and supervise personnel.
37. Will E. Soult to Supervisor, Immigration Service, El Paso, Texas, Dec. 13, 1923, Microfilm Records of the INS, Reel 3, Series A, Part 2, casefile 52903/29
38. John McMullen, Senior Surgeon, to the Surgeon General, Jan. 28, 1928, NC-34, General Correspondence with Quarantine Stations, 1927–1934, District #4 (El Paso), USPHS, RG90, NARA.
39. “Quarantine Operations at the Port of Laredo, Texas during the Fiscal Year ending June 30, 1926,” General Subject Files, 1924–35, Domestic Stations, Laredo, USPHS, RG90, NARA.
40. “Annual Report of Quarantine Operations at El Paso, Texas during the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1938,” General Classified Records, Group 1, Domestic Stations, 1936–44, El Paso, USPHS, RG90, NARA.
41. See Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna Stern, “The Foreignness of Germs: The Persistent Association of Immigr
ants and Disease in American Society,” Milbank Quarterly 80, no. 4 (2002): 757–88.
42. “Annual Report of Quarantine Operations at El Paso, Texas during the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1938,” General Classified Records, Group 1, Domestic Stations, 1936–44, El Paso, USPHS, RG90, NARA.
43. R. L. Allen to the Surgeon General, Nov. 13, 1941, General Classified Records, Group 1, Domestic Stations, 1936–44, El Paso, USPHS, RG90, NARA. Smaller stations, such as the Presidio, Rio Grande City, and Roma appear to have been the first to discontinue delousing in 1937, although Eagle Pass reported 163 disinfections that same year. See P. J. Gorman, Senior Surgeon to the Surgeon General, July 17, 1937, General Classified Records, Group 1, Domestic Stations, 1936–1944, Laredo, USPHS, RG90, NARA; and “Quarantine Transactions at Mexican Border Stations (Eagle Pass, Texas) for the Year Ending June 30, 1937,” General Classified Records, Group 1, Domestic Stations, 1936–1944, Eagle Pass, USPHS, RG90, NARA.
44. R. L. Allen to the Surgeon General, Nov. 29, 1944, General Classified Records, Group 1, Domestic Stations 1936–44, El Paso, USPHS, RG90, NARA.
45. “Annual Report. Medical Inspection. Aliens. Port Huron, Mich, 1928,” NC 34 E10, General Subject File, 1924–35, USPHS, RG90, NARA.
46. J.W. Tappan, “Protective Health Measures on United States–Mexico Border,” Journal of the American Medical Association 87, no. 13 (1926): 1022.
47. See Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001); 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); and Kraut, Silent Travelers.