Eugenic Nation

by Stern, Alexandra Minna

  173. “Norwalk Sterilizations,” place of birth worksheet for females, Folder 12, Box 30; “Norwalk Sterilizations,” place of birth worksheet for males, Folder 13, Box 30, ESGHBF, CIT, IA. Numbers and percentages derived from the Biennial Reports of the Department of Institutions from 1922 to 1930.

  174. Excerpt of “Nationality,” Folder 8, Box 28, ESGHBF, CIT, IA.

  175. Paul Popenoe and Ellen Morton Williams, “Fecundity of Families Dependent on Public Charity,” American Journal of Sociology 40, no. 2 (1934): 214–20, esp. 214, Folder 6, Box 1, ESGHBF, IA, CIT.

  176. For the quintessential racist eugenic tract, see Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race; or, The Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920). On sociological authority in the 1920s, see Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chap. 10.

  177. Popenoe and Williams, “Fecundity of Families,” 219.

  178. Ibid., 220.

  179. See rough draft of Twenty-Eight Years of Human Sterilization, Folder 8, Box 28, ESGHBF, IA, CIT.

  180. See unnamed patient records in Boxes 39–43, ESGHBF, IA, CIT. The Caltech Institute Archives houses sixteen boxes of patient records that it will review for possible use by researchers in 2005. Also see Anton, “Forced Sterilization Once Seen as a Path to a Better World.”

  181. See Kline, Building a Better Race, chap. 3.

  182. See Matocq, ed., California’s Compulsory Sterilization Policies.

  183. See unnamed patient records in Boxes 39–43, ESGHBF, IA, CIT; Mark A. Largent, “ ‘The Greatest Curse of the Race’: Eugenic Sterilization in Oregon, 1909–1983,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 103, no. 2 (2002): 188–209; and Peter Boag, Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003).

  CHAPTER 4. CALIFORNIA’S EUGENIC LANDSCAPES

  Epigraph: Joan Didion, “Girl of the Golden West,” in Vintage Didion (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 7–8.

  1. See Gene E. Carte and Elaine H. Carte, Police Reform in the United States: The Era of August Vollmer, 1905–1932 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975). Vollmer served on the advisory council of the American Eugenics Society from 1927 to 1935.

  2. See Erwin G. Gudde, California Place Names: The Origin and Etymology of Current Geographical Names (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960), 338; and William Bright, 1500 California Place Names: Their Origin and Meaning (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998).

  3. See Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration for the State of California, California: A Guide to the Golden State (New York: Hastings House, 1939).

  4. “Tenth Anniversary Report of the East Bay Regional Park District,” submitted by Richard E. Walpole, District Manager, and “Inter-Office Communication,” Aug. 12, 1935, Folder: East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD), Carton 5, Papers of August Vollmer (AV), CB 403, Bancroft Library (BL), University of California at Berkeley (UCB). For those readers familiar with the EBRPD, the redesigned areas were Wildcat Canyon, Lake Chabot, and Lake Temescal.

  5. “History of the Creation of the East Bay Regional Park District,” Folder: EBRPD, Carton 5, AV, CB 403, BL, UCB. The seven cities were Berkeley, Alameda, Oakland, Piedmont, Emeryville, Albany, and San Leandro.

  6. See Carte and Carte, Police Reform in the United States.

  7. August Vollmer, The Criminal (Brooklyn: Foundation Press, 1949), 411; also see Vollmer, The Police and Modern Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1936).

  8. August Vollmer (AV) to Thomas D. Eliot, Oct. 30, 1929, Folder: Correspondence July–October 1929, Box 40, AV, CB403, BL, UCB.

  9. Vollmer, Criminal, 94, 97.

  10. See Harold G. Schutt, “Advanced Police Methods in Berkeley,” National Municipal Review 11, no. 3 (1922): 80–85; and Gerald Woods, The Police in Los Angeles: Reform and Professionalization (New York: Garland, 1993).

  11. See Carte and Carte, Police Reform in the United States

  12. There are samples of these tests in Folder: Miscellaneous, Carton 6, AV, CB 403, BL, UCB. Vollmer did the same in Los Angeles in 1924, when he spent a year attempting to clean up and professionalize the Los Angeles Police Department. Working with the California Bureau of Juvenile Research, the entire police force (1,712 men) was given the Army Alpha and Beta, Terman Group, and National Intelligence tests. See Grace M. Fernald and Ellen B. Sullivan, “Personnel Work with the Los Angeles Police Department,” Journal of Delinquency 10, no. 1 (1926): 252–67. Additionally, while in Los Angeles, Vollmer sponsored a crime symposium (mentioned in chapter 3) at which hereditarian explanations of criminality and eugenic solutions for crime prevention, such as sterilization, predominated. For descriptions of the latter, see AV to Pat, May 5, 1924, Folder: Correspondence 1918–1928, Box 40, AV, CB403, BL, UCB; and Los Angeles Police Department, Law Enforcement in Los Angeles (1924; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975).

  13. Vollmer, Criminal, 434.

  14. “Report, District Manager, East Bay Regional Park District,” Folder: EBRPD, Carton 5, AV, CB 403, BL, UCB.

  15. Dominick Cavallo, Muscles and Morals: Organized Playgrounds and Urban Reform, 1880–1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981); American Academy of Political and Social Science, Public Recreation Facilities (Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1910).

  16. See Hal K. Rothman, Saving the Planet: The American Response to the Environment in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 75; and Neil M. Maher, “A New Deal Body Politic: Landscape, Labor, and the Civilian Conservation Corps,” Environmental History 7, no. 3 (2002): 435–61.

  17. See Bryant Simon, “ ‘New Men in Body and Soul’: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Transformation of Male Bodies and the Body Politic,” in Seeing Nature through Gender, ed. Virginia J. Scharff (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2003), 80–102.

  18. U.S. National Park Service, A Study of the Park and Recreation Problem of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1941), 4. On engendering environmental history, see Scharff, ed., Seeing Nature through Gender.

  19. “Memorandum Regarding East Bay Park District,” Folder: EBRPD, Carton 5, AV, CB403, BL, UCB.

  20. Ibid.

  21. Barry Alan Mehler, “A History of the American Eugenics Society, 1921–1940” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1988), 435.

  22. See constitutions and meeting agendas, Folder: Berkeley Inter-racial Committee, Carton 4, AV, CB403, BL, UCB.

  23. Carte and Carte, Police Reform.

  24. For an excellent overview of this complex spectrum, see Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993), chap. 1.

  25. On the invisibility of labor, see Don Mitchell, The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

  26. One of the few historians to have linked environmentalism and eugenics is Gray Brechin. See “Conserving the Race: Natural Aristocracies, Eugenics, and the U.S. Conservation Movement,” Antipode 28, no. 3 (1996): 229–45.

  27. Gudde, California Place Names, 150.

  28. A 1939 Eugenical News article suggested that recreation enabled young couples to socialize in a wholesome manner and encouraged the hereditarily “favored” to produce more children. In short, recreation was seen as fostering a child-centered and eugenic family life. See Weaver W. Pangburn, “Recreation and Eugenics,” Eugenical News 24, no. 1 (1939): 53–57.

  29. “Constituent Profile: Estate of C. M. Goethe,” Save-the-Redwoods League, San Francisco, California (generously provided to me by the Save-the-Redwoods League).

  30. Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004).

  31. See
Donald Worster, “Beyond the Agrarian Myth,” in Trails: Toward a New Western History, ed. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991), 7.

  32. See Matthew Basso, Laura McCall, and Dee Garceau, eds., Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the American West (New York: Routledge, 2001); and Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993).

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

  34. See Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

  35. On place-naming, see George R. Stewart, Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958); Rebecca Solnit, Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West (New York: Vintage, 1994); and Charles W.J. Withers, “Authorizing Landscape: ‘Authority,’ Naming, and the Ordnance Survey’s Mapping of the Scottish Highlands in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Historical Geography 26, no. 4 (2000): 532–54.

  36. See William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1966); and Dawn Hall, ed., Drawing the Borderline: Artist-Explorers of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Survey (Albuquerque: Albuquerque Museum, 1996).

  37. See David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

  38. See Susan R. Schrepfer, The Fight to Save the Redwoods: A History of Environmental Reform, 1917–1978 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983).

  39. Merriam wrote about ancient California in The Living Past (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930).

  40. Henry Fairfield Osborn, “Preface to the New Edition,” in The Passing of the Great Race, by Madison Grant, 2nd ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), xi.

  41. Grant, Passing of the Great Race, 12.

  42. The first comprehensive biography of Madison Grant is Jonathan Peter Spiro, “Patrician Racist: The Evolution of Madison Grant” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2000).

  43. See Schrepfer, Fight to Save the Redwoods; Spiro, “Patrician Racist.”

  44. Quoted in Schrepfer, Fight to Save the Redwoods, 3; see her chap. 1 for an evocative description of the trio’s pilgrimage.

  45. Madison Grant, “Saving the Redwoods: An Account of the Movement during 1919 to Preserve the Redwoods of California,” Zoological Society Bulletin 22, no. 5 (1919): 97. Merriam is quoted in Richard St. Barbe Baker, The Redwoods (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1943), 87.

  46. Interview of Newton Bishop Drury by Amelia Roberts Fry and Susan Schrepfer, 1972, vol. 1, p. 106 (transcription), Regional Oral History Project (ROHO), BL, UCB.

  47. See Schrepfer, Fight to Save the Redwoods, chap. 3.

  48. Walt Whitman, “Song of the Redwood-Tree,” in Leaves of Grass (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1897), 165–69.

  49. See Willie Yaryan, Denzil Verardo, and Jennie Verardo, The Sempervirens Story: A Century of Preserving California’s Ancient Redwood Forest, 1900–2000 (Los Altos, Calif.: Sempervirens Fund, 2000).

  50. Ibid.; Schrepfer, Fight to Save the Redwoods.

  51. Yaryan et al., Sempervirens Story, 15–17.

  52. John C. Merriam, “Living Link in History,” Save-the-Redwoods League offprint, n.d., 4; John Muir, “Save the Redwoods,” Sierra Club Bulletin 11, no. 1 (1920): 1–4.

  53. Rodney Sydes Ellsworth, The Giant Sequoia (Oakland, Calif.: J. D. Berger, 1924), 107; also quoted in Dana Frank, “Imperialism and Big Basin Redwood State Park,” in Local Girl Makes History (manuscript cited with the permission of the author).

  54. Madison Grant, “Saving the Redwoods,” National Geographic Magazine 37, no. 6 (1920): 519–36, quotation on 525.

  55. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 69–90.

  56. Another irony is that the automobile provided much of the access to the wilderness that advocates then sought to protect from intrusion. See Paul S. Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002).

  57. See Solnit, Savage Dreams.

  58. On the conflicted mission of army patrols in Yellowstone, see Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001). Also see Solnit, Savage Dreams; and Cronon, “Trouble with Wilderness.”

  59. John Muir, Our National Parks (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1901), 76.

  60. Joseph D. Grant, Redwoods and Reminiscences (San Francisco: Save-the-Redwoods League and the Menninger Foundation, 1973), 135.

  61. See Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring.

  62. See Thomas M. Shapiro, Population Control Politics: Women, Sterilization, and Reproductive Choice (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985); Betsy Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control, rev. ed. (Boston: South End Press, 1995); and Carole R. McCann, Birth Control Politics in the United States, 1916–1945 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994).

  63. See Spiro, “Patrician Racist”; and File: Madison Grant Grove, Memorial Groves Archives (MG), Save-the-Redwoods League (SRL), San Francisco (SF).

  64. “Save-the-Redwoods League—Proposed Acquisition,” and Save-the-Redwoods League to Mr. DeForest Grant, Jan. 1948, File: Madison Grant Forest and Elk Refuge (MGFER), MG, SRL, SF.

  65. “To Dedicate Madison Grant Memorial Redwood Forest and Elk Refuge,” 1948, MGFER, MG, SRL, SF.

  66. Saving the Redwoods, 1948–49 (Berkeley: Save-the-Redwoods League, 1949), 6.

  67. “Save-the-Redwoods League Dinner Commemorating the Establishment of the Madison Grant Forest and Elk Refuge in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, Humboldt County, California,” July 29, 1948, MGFER, MG, SRL, SF.

  68. See, for example, language in In View of the Future, Annual Report of the Conservation Foundation (New York: Conservation Foundation, 1949).

  Osborn and Madison Grant’s brother DeForest were trustees of this foundation.

  69. Gottleib, Forcing the Spring, 256; Paul Ehlrich, The Population Bomb (San Francisco: Sierra Club/Ballantine Books, 1968).

  70. Gottleib, Forcing the Spring, 253–59; Elena Rebéca Gutiérrez, “The Racial Politics of Reproduction: The Social Construction of Mexican-Origin Women’s Fertility” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1999); Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 160–66.

  71. See Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: Birth Control in America, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1990).

  72. Gottleib, Forcing the Spring, 258.

  73. See Dowie, Losing Ground.

  74. See Gottleib, Forcing the Spring; and Eileen Maura McGurty, “From NIMBY to Civil Rights: The Origins of the Environmental Justice Movement,” Environmental History 2, no. 3 (1997): 301–23.

  75. Frank, “Imperialism and Big Basin Redwoods State Park,” 12. Frank offers a brilliant analysis of this kind of time-making.

  76. Transcription of Remarks at Leland Stanford Jr. University, Palo Alto, California, 68–70, pamphlets, Box 9, CA 284, Papers of the Save-the-Redwoods League, BL, UCB.

  77. Grant, “Saving the Redwoods,” 519.

  78. Joseph D. Grant, Saving California’s Redwoods (Berkeley: Save-the-Redwoods League/University of California at Berkeley, 1922), 4.

  79. David Starr Jordan, The Days of Man: Being Memories of a Naturalist, Teacher, and Minor Prophet of Democracy (Yonkers-on-Hudson, N.Y.: World Book, 1922), 1:428.

  80. Merriam, Living Past, 58.

&
nbsp; 81. See Frank, “Imperialism and Big Basin.”

  82. Ibid., 10–11.

  83. See Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 28.

  84. Joseph P. Widney, Race Life of the Aryan Peoples (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1907), 2:15.

  85. Joseph P. Widney, The Three Americas: Their Racial Past and the Dominant Racial Factors of their Future (Los Angeles: Pacific, 1935).

  86. Joseph P. Widney, The Greater City of Los Angeles: A Plan for the Development of Los Angeles City as a Great World Health Center (Los Angeles: n.p., 1938).

  87. See Peter Dreyer, A Gardener Touched with Genius: The Life of Luther Burbank (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1975).

  88. Ibid.

  89. See, for example, Edward J. Wickson, “Luther Burbank: The Man, His Methods, and His Achievements,” which ran in four parts in Sunset 8, no. 2 (1901): 57–69; 8, no. 4 (1902): 145–56; 8, no. 6 (1902): 277–85; and 9, no. 2 (1902): 101–12.

  90. Ray Lyman Wilbur, “Broadening Horizons: An Interview with Ray Lyman Wilbur,” Sunset 62, no. 4 (1929): 17–19, 18.

  91. Ibid., 18.

  92. Dreyer, Gardener Touched by Genius, 215.

  93. See 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), 117–45.

  94. Ibid.

  95. Quoted in Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 429.

  96. Luther Burbank, An Architect of Nature (London: Watts, 1939), 17, 20.

  97. He explained his Lamarckian position, of environment as “the architect of heredity,” as follows: “All characters which are transmitted have been acquired, not necessarily at once in a dynamic or visible form, but as an increasingly latent force ready to appear as a tangible character when by long-continued natural or artificial repetition any specific tendency has become inherent, inbred, or ‘fixed,’ as we call it.” Luther Burbank, The Training of the Human Plant (New York: Century, 1922), 82.