Eugenic Nation

by Stern, Alexandra Minna

  110. “Why Are Women Like That?” 12.

  111. Popenoe, “Marriage Counseling,” 53.

  112. “Why Are Men Like That?” 4; also see “Chapter IV. The Psychology of the Male Sex,” 4.

  113. “Chapter IV. The Psychology of the Male Sex,” 4.

  114. Henry Catlett Roney (Consultant, AIFR), “Boss Him and Lose Him” (1943) PBP, AHC, UW.

  115. PP, Be It Ever So Jumbled, 15.

  116. See Paul Popenoe, “Cooperation in Family Relations,” Journal of Home Economics 26, no. 8 (1934): 483–86; Popenoe, “Should a Family Have Two Heads?” Parents’ Magazine (reprint, 1939), PBP, AHC, UW.

  117. Roney, “Boss Him and Lose Him”; Popenoe, “Smart Wives Don’t Have to Nag” (1939), PBP, AHC, UW.

  118. “Chapter IV. The Psychology of the Male Sex,” 4.

  119. “Why Are Men Like That?” 7.

  120. “AIFR Policies,” n.d., PBP, AHC. UW. In addition, these included, among others, attending staff meetings, not referring to private physicians, absolutely refraining from any physical contact, refraining from socializing with clients, and being careful about using a religious approach.

  121. “Case File of H and J,” PBP, AHC, UW.

  122. PP to Mr. R, Sept. 6, 1940, Box 25, PBP, AHC, UW.

  123. Popenoe, “Aggressiveness Can Wreck Romance” (1945), PBP, AHC, UW.

  124. The sex/gender separation started in the 1950s even as “sex” was being contested by transsexuality and intersexuality; see Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).

  125. Ibid., chap. 3.

  126. “Some Biological Foundations of Counseling,” 2; “Introverts and Extraverts” (notes), PBP, AHC, UW.

  127. Popenoe, “Introverts and Extraverts,” Scientific American (1937): 197–200, PBP, AHC, UW.

  128. Ibid.

  129. “Chapter III. Special Procedures in Counseling,” 5, PBP, AHC, UW.

  130. “Introverts and Extraverts” (notes).

  131. Popenoe, “Introverts and Extraverts,” Scientific American (1937): 200.

  132. “Introverts and Extraverts—‘Project’—Oct. 9, 1971,” PBP, AHC, UW.

  133. Popenoe, “Introverts and Extraverts,” 200.

  134. Intake form of Mr. and Mrs. K, Aug. 31, 1945, Box 156, PBP, AHC, UW.

  135. Popenoe and Disney, Can This Marriage Be Saved?, xvii.

  136. On Terman’s rejection of his earlier beliefs about the connections between race and intelligence, see Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996); and Lewis M. Terman and Catharine Cox Miles, Sex and Personality: Studies in Masculinity and Femininity (New York: Russell & Russell, 1936).

  137. Terman and Miles, Sex and Personality, chap. 11. For a discussion of Terman and the M-F Test, see Kline, Building a Better Race, chap. 5.

  138. See Roswell H. Johnson (RHJ) to LMT, Apr. 30, 1937; LMT to RJH, May 5, 1937, Folder 7, Box 2, LMT, SC38, SC, SU.

  139. Kline, Building a Better Race, 138; Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996).

  140. “Memorandum on Tests and Measurements Used by the AIFR,” PBP, AHC, UW.

  141. “Temperament Factor in Marital Happiness”; Johnson, “Factors Producing Temperament,” both PBP, AHC, UW.

  142. See Francesca Bordogna, “The Psychology and Physiology of Temperament: Pragmatism in Context,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 37, no. 1 (2001): 3–25; and Otniel E. Dror, “Counting the Affects: Discoursing in Numbers,” Social Research 68, no. 2 (2001): 357–78.

  143. See Richard Stephen Uhrbrock, An Analysis of the Downey Will-Temperament Tests (New York: Teacher’s College, Columbia University, 1928).

  144. See George W. Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

  145. See Jennifer Terry, “Anxious Slippage between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’: A Brief History of the Scientific Search for Homosexual Bodies,” in Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture, ed. Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 129–69.

  146. “Chapter III. Special Procedures in Counseling”; “Memorandum on Tests and Measurements Used by the AIFR.”.

  147. “Memorandum on Tests and Measurements Used by the AIFR.”

  148. These questions are paraphrased (for copyright reasons) from the T-JTA because I did not find any original JTA questionnaires (in draft or printed form) in Popenoe’s papers.

  149. “Aids to Interpreting Johnson Temperament Analysis Profiles,” PBP, AHC, UW.

  150. Ibid.

  151. Ibid.

  152. Robert M. Taylor and Lucile P. Morrison, Taylor-Johnson Temperament Analysis Manual (1966; reprint, Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Psychological Publications, 1996), 33–36.

  153. “Client Will Come Back for Second Time If,” PBP, AHC, UW.

  154. Leslie F. Kimmell (LFK) to Dr. H, Apr. 15, 1954, PBP, AHC, UW. The Marriage Readiness Materials are most likely in Boxes 95 and 96 or were alphabetically interfiled into one of the twenty-one boxes of case histories.

  155. LFK to Miss K, May 21, 1954, PBP, AHC, UW.

  156. Miss M to PP, Feb. 24, 1954, PBP, AHC, UW.

  157. Mary Jane Hungerford to Miss M, n.d. (probably April 1954), PBP, AHC, UW.

  158. Gene Benton (GB) to Miss M2, July 30, 1954, PBP, AHC, UW.

  159. “Marital Counseling” (June 7, 1952) and JTA (Sept. 20, 1952), Mrs. P, PBP, AHC, UW.

  160. Ibid.

  161. JTA of Miss H, June 9, 1954, PBP, AHC, UW.

  162. GB to Miss H, Aug. 17, 1954, PBP, AHC, UW.

  163. “Counseling on Frigidity,” PBP, AHC, UW. It is likely that most of the material on frigidity is in Box 153.

  164. For an early articulation of Popenoe’s ideas about frigidity, see “Marital Counseling: With Special Reference to Frigidity,” Western Journal of Surgery, Obstetrics and Gynecology (1937), PBP, AHC. UW. In keeping with the logic that women had many more sexual problems than men and could find more ways to help themselves, Popenoe identified five kinds of frigidity: pseudo, occasional, relative, pathological, and essential. According to him, 25 percent of all women experienced one of these types of frigidity during their married life, and all but the last two, which were viewed as the most biologically rooted, could be overcome with a steady program of psychological and physical exercises.

  165. Popenoe and Arnold H. Kegel, “New Approach to Sexual Problems,” 9; “Improvement of Technique in Sexual Intercourse,” 1, PBP, AHC, UW.

  166. Popenoe and Kegel, “New Approach.”

  167. Ibid., 6; “New Approaches to Sexual Problems,” Family Life, 15, no. 7 (1955): 2, PBP, AHC, UW.

  168. “Improvement of Technique in Sexual Intercourse.”

  169. Ibid.

  170. “New Approaches to Sexual Problems.”

  171. In 1962, the trustees hired Floyd Anderson, a Ph.D.-trained marriage counselor from Utah who proved to be a terrible manager and demoralizing leader. Moreover, he was a Mormon who let his religious affiliations dictate his plans for the Institute even though he had promised when hired that he would take an ecumenical approach. See letters from 1962–1963, PP to AIFR trustees, Box 145, PBP, AHC. UW.

  172. David Popenoe, “Remembering My Father.”

  173. Ibid., 3.

  174. In the early 1960s, Robert M. Taylor, who replaced Johnson as counseling director, revised the JTA with Johnson’s approval. After recalibrating the tests on hundreds of test subjects in Texas, Colorado, and California, it was reissued as the T-JTA in 1966. Its logic remains the same but the wording of the questions and categories have been updated to reflect contemporary terminology. See Taylor and Morrison, Taylor Johnson Temperament Analysis, 33; also see H. Norman Wright, Biblical Application for the Taylor-Johnson Temperament Analysis (Santa Ana, Calif.: Christian Enrichment, 1975); and “Rig
ht Start Premarital Program,” at http://www.rightstartpublications.com/Classroom.htm; http://www.godisgood.com/sbcs/ccp.html; www.eastviewcc.org/counseling.html.

  CHAPTER 6. CONTESTING HEREDITARIANISM

  1. May Second Committee, “Sacramento State’s Own Doctor Strangelove: New Multimillion Dollar Science Building at S.S.C. to Be Named after C. M. Goethe, Prominent Racist and Eugenist,” circa 1965, 85D:9, Papers of Charles Matthias Goethe (CMG), University Archives (UA), California State University Sacramento (CSUS). There is a clue that Goethe was aware of the protest; in a letter dated April 9, 1965, he wrote to three science faculty, whose research he had funded, about that week’s “battleaxe” incident. See Charles M. Goethe (CMG) to Dr. Albert Delisle, Dr. J. Harold Severaid, and Dr. W. J. Beeson, Apr. 9, 1965, 85F3:9, CMG, UA, CSUS.

  2. May Second Committee, “Banned at Sac State,” circa 1965, 85D:9, CMG, UA, CSUS.

  3. Ibid.

  4. “Goethe Immortalized by Science Building,” State Hornet, Mar. 30, 1965.

  5. See Tony Platt, “What’s in a Name? Charles M. Goethe, American Eugenics, and Sacramento State University” (self-published report, Feb. 2004); “Estate of Charles Matthias Goethe,” C. M. Goethe Memorial Grove, Memorial Grove Archives, Save-the-Redwoods League, San Francisco; and Andrew Schauer, “Charles Matthias Goethe, 1875–1966,” Foundation of the California State University Sacramento, 1976, 85A:1, CMG, UA, CSUS.

  6. Quoted in Platt, “What’s in a Name?” 54. Also see “Academic Senate Agenda,” Oct. 3, 1967, 83:3:02, Academic Senate Files (AS), UA, CSUS, where scribbles on the margin of a senate agenda intimate that this action was specifically directed at Goethe. Beside item 8, “Naming of Buildings,” someone wrote, “substitute motion, naming of building, consent of Academic Senate, Goethe Bldg.—deliberate.”

  7. Platt, “What’s in a Name?” 54–55.

  8. See Darrell J. Inabnit to Robert Thompson, Nov. 9, 1967, 83:3:03, and “Academic Senate Minutes,” Nov. 14, 1967, 83:3:03, AS, UA, CSUS.

  9. See Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, 2nd ed. (New York: Bantam Books, 1993).

  10. I have borrowed the phrase “hidden in plain view” from Paul A. Lombardo; see his “Eugenics: Lessons from a History Hidden in Plain View,” Mar. 11, 2003, Lecture to the California Legislature, Senate Select Committee on Genetics, Genetic Technologies, and Public Policy (California State Senate, June 2003).

  11. 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); Diane B. Paul, The Politics of Heredity: Essays on Eugenics, Biomedicine, and the Nature-Nurture Debate (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).

  12. Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), chaps. 8–9.

  13. Steve Selden, Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in America (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1999), 111.

  14. See Leon Whitney to Paul Popenoe (PP), Feb. 21, 1929, Folder: Southern California Branch, Papers of the American Eugenics Society, 575.06 Am3, American Philosophical Society.

  15. William H. Tucker, The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 43; Lombardo, “ ‘The American Breed’: Nazi Eugenics and the Origins of the Pioneer Fund,” Albany Law Review 65, no. 3 (2002): 743–830.

  16. G. Sabagh and R. B. Edgerton, “Sterilized Mental Defectives Look at Eugenic Sterilization,” Eugenics Quarterly 9, no. 4 (1962): 213–22. Also see Robert B. Edgerton, The Cloak of Competence, 2nd ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).

  17. See Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics; Selden, Inheriting Shame.

  18. Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith (1924; reprint, New York: Signet Classic, 1980). Also see Howard Markel, “Prescribing Arrowsmith,” New York Times Book Review, Sept. 24, 2000.

  19. Lewis, Arrowsmith, 241.

  20. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 263.

  21. See interview with Mary Conway Kohler by Gail Hornstein, Nov. 2, 1983 (cited with permission); Dede Welles, “Mary Conway Kohler,” Women’s Legal History, 1997, accessible at: http://www.stanford.edu/group/WLHP/papers/kohler.html.

  22. Quoted in Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 166.

  23. See Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

  24. M.F. Ashley Montagu, “The Concept of Race in the Human Species in Light of Genetics,” Journal of Heredity 32, no. 8 (1941): 243–47.

  25. L. C. Dunn and Th. Dobzhansky, Heredity, Race, and Society (New York: Mentor Books, 1946), 115.

  26. See Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan@_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997), chap. 6.

  27. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), The Race Concept: Results of an Inquiry (Paris: UNESCO, 1952).

  28. See Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).

  29. On the time lag between institutionalized racism and “race” as defined by science, see David Theo Goldberg, Racial Subjects: Writing on Race in America (New York: Routledge, 1997).

  30. See Ronald Takaki, Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000).

  31. See Gilbert Gonzalez, Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation (Philadelphia: Balch Institute Press, 1990).

  32. See Ed Duran Ayres, “Statistics,” contained in NAACP, “NAACP 1940–55. General Office File. Zoot Suit Riots, 1943–44,” available on microfilm, Part 7, Series A, Reel 29 (Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America). On the trial and its political context, see Edward J. Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900–1945 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).

  33. Frederick V. Field to Walter White, May 17, 1943, contained in NAACP, “NAACP 1940–55. General Office File. Zoot Suit Riots, 1943–44,” available on microfilm, Part 7, Series A, Reel 29.

  34. Emory S. Bogardus, “Gangs of Mexican-American Youth,” Sociology and Social Research 28, no. 1 (1943): 60.

  35. See Mario T. Garcia, Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930–1960 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), chap. 10; and Steven Schlossman, “Self-Evident Remedy? George I. Sanchez, Segregation, and Enduring Dilemmas in Bilingual Education,” Teachers College Board 84, no. 4 (1983): 871–907.

  36. See Gonzalez, Chicano Education; Nancy Leys Stepan and Sander L. Gilman, “Appropriating the Idioms of Science: The Rejection of Scientific Racism,” in The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance, ed. Dominick LaCapra (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 72–103.

  37. For 1970s critiques of IQ testing in Mexican communities, see Esteban L. Olmedo, “Psychological Testing and the Chicano: A Reassessment,” and John Garcia, “Intelligence Testing: Quotients, Quotas, and Quackery,” in Chicano Psychology, ed. Joe L. Martinez Jr. (New York: Academic Press, 1977), 175–95; 197–212.

  38. Editorial, El Grito 3, no. 2 (1970): 2.

  39. Patricia Pullenza de Ortiz, “Chicano Children and Intelligence,” Aztlán 10 (1979): 71–72. Jamez Vásquez, “Measurement of Intelligence and Language Differences,” Aztlán 3, no. 1 (1972): 161.

  40. Ian F. Haney López, Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2003), 17.

  41. Ibid., 21. Also see Ernesto Chávez, “Mi Raza Primero”: Nationalism, Identity, and Insurgency in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles, 1966–1978 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002).

  42. See José E. Limón, “Stereotyping and Chicano Resistance: An Historical Dimension,” Aztlán 4, no. 2 (1973): 257–70; Raul Fernández, “The Policy Economy of Stereotypes,” Aztlán 1, no. 2 (1970): 39–45; and Nick C. Vaca, “The Mexican-American in the Social Sciences, 1912–1970, Part I (1912–1935),” El Grito 3, no. 3 (1970): 3–24; “Part II (1936–1970),” El Grito 4, no. 1 (1970): 17–51.

  43. See, for example, Armando Morales, “Mental and Public Health Issues: The Case of the Mexican Americans in Los Angeles,” El Grito 3, no. 2 (1970): 3–11; Morales, “The Impact of Class Discrimination on the Mental Health of Mexican-Americans,” in Chicanos: Social and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Nathaniel N. Wagner and Marsha J. Haug (St. Louis: C. V. Mosby, 1971), 257–62; Armand J. Sanchez, “The Definers and the Defined: A Mental Health Issue,” El Grito 4, no. 4 (1971): 4–35; Ruben Zamorano-Gamez and Eveline P. Carsman, “Chicano Consumer Participation in Health Planning: Reality and Myth,” Atisbos: Journal of Chicano Research 1 (Summer 1975): 126–39; and Luis M. Laosa, Alvin G. Burstein, and Harry W. Martin, “Mental Health Consultation in a Rural Chicano Community: Crystal City,” Aztlán 6, no. 3 (1976): 433–53.

  44. See Ramón A. Gutiérrez, “Decolonizing the Body: Kinship and the Nation,” American Archivist 57, no. 1 (1994): 86–99.

  45. See Keith Wailoo, Dying in the City of Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); and Chávez, “Mi Raza Primero!”

  46. Manuel Ferran, coordinator, Health Cultural Awareness Conference: “Viva la Diferencia” (published conference proceedings) (Albuquerque: New Mexico Regional Medical Program, 1972).

  47. See NCHO Newsletters (1971–1976).

  48. See 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.