In 1905, Lewis S. Terman, a freshly minted graduate of Clark University with a Ph.D. in psychology, accepted a job as principal of San Bernardino High School. Like many before and after him, Terman was motivated by more than professional opportunity; he hoped that the aridity of southern California would cure him of a chronic tubercular infection.75 The relocation not only rejuvenated him, it also set him on the path to becoming one of the most prominent psychologists of the twentieth century. After a few years in the Southland, Terman moved to Stanford University, where he devoted himself to the nascent discipline of psychometrics and set out to redesign the mental test invented by Alfred Binet in France in the early 1900s, an undertaking that resulted in the Stanford-Binet intelligence test. Just over a decade later, he and his protégés had administered intelligence tests to thousands of children, had helped to introduce mental testing in dozens of school districts, and had set up the California Bureau of Juvenile Research (CBJR) to study the cognitive aptitudes of the state’s youngest generation.
Terman was pivotal to the national eugenics movement; he was a longtime member of the AES who maintained an undying belief that inferior or superior intelligence was determined principally by genetics. Tracing his trajectory illuminates the meteoric rise of standardized testing and demonstrates how correlations between race and intelligence became embedded in statistical methods.76 The numerical classifications for feeblemindedness, moronity, and idiocy and the expected average intelligence quotients (IQs) of different racial groups that he detailed in The Measurement of Intelligence, published in 1916, dominated psychometrics for years.77 The eugenicists and nativists who championed the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act and encouraged the feebleminded threshold (usually an IQ of 70 or below) for compulsory sterilization relied chiefly on Terman’s scales.
Terman was very much a creature of the American West. He was one of hundreds of entrepreneurial Easterners and Midwesterners suffering from respiratory ailments who sought relief in the dry climates of Denver, Los Angeles, and El Paso.78 He arrived in California just as the young universities of Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) were achieving prestige and renown. Like other transplanted men of science and letters at the cusp of the twentieth century, such as David Starr Jordan and Luther Burbank, Terman embraced eugenics as a vehicle to build a new social and racial order in postconquest and post–Gold Rush California. He cofounded the Eugenics Section of the Commonwealth Club of California (CCC) and belonged to the Human Betterment Foundation (HBF) and the California Division of the AES. His psychometric rankings and the surveys conducted by the CBJR (which designated itself the “Western representative” of the ERO) fostered the channeling of immigrant, especially Mexican, schoolchildren into vocational tracks and the manual trades. Moreover, in the 1930s, when Terman began to evince agnosticism about the causal links between race, intelligence, and heredity and started instead to probe norms of gender and sexuality, he collaborated with Popenoe to calibrate his Male-Female (M-F) Test at the AIFR.79 Terman’s career, which stretched into his work on “gifted children” in California schools in the 1960s, constituted a critical facet of eugenics in the United States. It is also a revealing sliver of the history of science and medicine in the American West.
Recently, historians have started delving into the intriguing ways that agribusiness, public health, and physics shaped the American West.80 In general, this scholarship fits under the rubric of “New Western” history, an analytical and thematic turn initiated in the 1980s that sought to chase away the lingering ghost of Frederick Jackson Turner and open up a more textured interpretive landscape. “New Western” historians rejected the main tenets of Turner’s “frontier thesis,” which asserted that the United States, distinguished from Europe by its ethos of individualism and democratic values, had been born out of the struggle between barbarism and civilization that unfolded in the sequential frontiers of the trans-Mississippi wilderness.81 Practitioners of ethnic, gender, and environmental studies spearheaded this revisionism and sought to repopulate the West with a panoply of historical actors that had been all but erased in heroic and masculinist narratives of westward expansion and the settlement of vacant lands by intrepid pioneers. “New Western” historians contended that the Turnerian model of virgin territories and apocryphal yeomen left no room for women, immigrants, or minorities, and, moreover, that violence, conquest, and colonization stood at the center of the incorporation of the West into the continental United States.82
Initially “New Western” historians embarked on recovery efforts, seeking to give voice to subjects whose stories had been silenced or ignored. Through careful reconstruction, scholars began to bring to life the experiences of women and minorities, expose the fraught dynamics of gender, race, and class, and demonstrate how subaltern identities were forged in the postcolonial and multicultural context of the American West.83 If one of the “New Western” history’s aspirations was to explore the American West as a multiracial region par to none other, then scholars swiftly realized that many routes to ethnicity and race passed through the realms of science and medicine.84 For instance, much of the impetus behind the anti-Asian agitation that gripped San Francisco and the West Coast starting in the 1870s may have been based in white working-class resentment at the perceived encroachment of “coolie labor,” but the animus and ridicule directed at Chinese immigrants almost always drew on images of contagion and constitutional malaise. Again and again, West Coast nativists graphically portrayed Chinese men as effeminate, enervated, and spotted with suppurating pustules or ugly lesions.85 Medicine and public health molded the adaptation of Asian immigrants to the West, from the health inspections and psychological exams they endured on Angel Island to the antiprostitution and antivice campaigns waged by Progressives in Chinatowns or the public hygiene angles of the Americanization campaigns that were promoted from inside and outside of Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino communities.86
In a similar vein, Mexicans were simultaneously racialized and medicalized, sometimes in competing directions. Whereas eugenicists claimed that Mexicans needed to be placed under an exclusionary immigration quota because they constituted a mongrel—half Southern European and half Amerindian—“race,” agricultural growers contended that this same biological composition endowed Mexican laborers with remarkable “stooping abilities” and the capacity to work long hours in the fields.87 From 1917 until the late 1930s, Mexicans entering the United States along the southern border were subjected to aggressive disinfection rituals that were based on exaggerated, nearly hysterical, perceptions of them as dirty and diseased.88 Associations of Mexicans with typhus, plague, and smallpox solidified in the 1920s and were fused with stereotypes of Mexican women as hyperbreeders whose sprawling broods of depraved children threatened to drain public resources.89 Furthermore, more than in any other region of the country, the racialized public health measures implemented in the American West were initially devised and assayed in U.S. colonies. From the 1890s on, the cities, towns, and inhabitants of the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, and the Panama Canal functioned as laboratories for the elaboration of modern modalities of epidemiological surveillance and disease control that in short order were transposed to San Francisco’s Chinatown or El Paso’s Chihuahuita barrio.90
Colonialism also circulated back to the American West in the racial taxonomies that informed miscegenation statutes, which forbade unions between whites and persons of color, as identified by a hodgepodge of classifications including mulatto, Malay, Mongolian, and Negro. It was in the West, not the South, where miscegenation laws “reached their most elaborate, even labyrinthine, development, covering the broadest list of racial categories.”91 First enacted in early America in the 1660s and in the West in the mid to late 1800s these legal edicts were emboldened by the eugenic racism of the 1920s. They were not overturned until after World War II, when the California Supreme Court declared the state’s miscegenation
law unconstitutional in Perez v. Lippold (1948) and the U.S. Supreme Court issued a similar verdict on the federal level in Loving v. Virginia (1967).92 A related genre of segregation was ensured by laws that decreed as “violable the marriages of idiots and the insane” and “restricted marriage among the unfit of various types, including the feebleminded and persons afflicted with venereal disease.”93 Taken together, these laws sought racially and medically to manage courtship, love, and sexuality through policing the boundaries of the intimate.
Eugenic ideas about biological purity and reproductive control resonated strongly in the American West and were espoused by many transplanted white professionals, such as Terman, who emphasized medical and scientific approaches to crafting a new biopolitical order. Starting at the turn of the twentieth century, eugenicists strove to manage racial, ethnic, and class interactions and categories through marriage, sterilization, and alien land laws. However, if eugenics was propelled by the racial and classificatory imperatives of elite settlers, it also flourished because of the region’s particular investment in agriculture and nature. For example, contemporaneous with Mendel, Burbank, the whimsical “plant wizard,” was also experimenting with plants in his Santa Rosa garden. Through inventive hybridization techniques, Burbank produced the Shasta daisy, the Humboldt blackberry, and what we today call the Russet potato. At the same time, he believed that the “human plant” could be improved through propitious mating, cleanliness, fresh air, and exercise, a conviction that led him to help establish one of the country’s first eugenics groups.94 In 1906, after receiving a request from Davenport, Burbank agreed to serve as a founding member of the Eugenics Section of the American Breeders’ Association (ABA), which published the influential Journal of Heredity and acted as a precursor to the ERO and the AES.
Burbank was accompanied by Jordan, the president of Stanford University. Whereas Burbank came to eugenics through horticulture, Jordan arrived through his dual interests in animal biology and environmentalism. An ichthyologist, Jordan converted to Darwin’s theories of evolution after studying the marine life of the Pacific Slope in the late nineteenth century.95 In 1891, the same year that he accepted Leland Stanford’s offer to run his new private university in Palo Alto, Jordan, an avid mountaineer, cofounded the Sierra Club with John Muir. Jordan adamantly believed that some species needed to be protected and preserved while others should be eliminated or excluded. He applied this logic to plant, animals, and people alike. In addition, for Jordan there was a eugenic connection between nature conservation and pacificism. Jordan opposed U.S. entry into World War I because he thought that war was dysgenic: it stole the nation’s healthiest and fittest men, leaving the rest to breed lesser offspring.96 From his base in northern California, Jordan became one of the most prominent Progressives and eugenicists in the early twentieth century and played a pivotal role in the formation of the ERO in 1910. According to Davenport, it was largely owing to Jordan’s stature and persuasion that Mrs. E. H. Harriman, after receiving personal correspondence from the Stanford biologist explaining the country’s need for a dedicated eugenics organization, decided to finance the ERO.
The sex and gender contours of American eugenics are also delineated by illuminating patterns in the American West. For example, in 1917, after the passionate lobbying of the suffragette and feminist physician Bethenia Owens-Adair, Oregon’s governor signed a law sanctioning the sterilization of the feebleminded in state institutions. When this statute was ruled unconstitutional in 1921, the Oregon legislature reworded the law, making consent or a court order a prerequisite for surgery, and passed an amended version in 1923. By the Great Depression, as states became increasingly worried about the costs of incarceration, and release in exchange for sterilization became customary, officials began to promote operations with much enthusiasm.97 The experiences of Oregon and Washington, where substantial numbers of those targeted for sterilization were classified as “sexual deviants”—often men caught in flagrante delicto with other men—demonstrate how eugenic practices often operated as methods of sexual regulation.98 Furthermore, they suggest important avenues for future research into the intersections of medicine, sexuality, and the state.
Finally, the American West also served as auspicious terrain for the development of eugenics during the postwar period. It was geographically removed from the criticism that some agencies and individuals heaped on the ERO and other East Coast organizations starting in the 1930s, and, moreover, by that time, hereditarianism had soaked into key institutions and organizations. For instance, the California Division of the AES, founded in 1929, remained active into the 1940s, helping to fortify an extensive nexus of psychologists, physicians, and scientists who remained engaged in eugenically inspired projects into the 1960s. Terman, Goethe, and Popenoe corresponded with one another during the midcentury, expressing their mutual support for family planning, managed parenthood, and confidence in psychometric tests as valid tools for categorizing human traits. Furthermore, it was at the AIFR that postwar eugenics burrowed intimately into the prosaic worlds and simmering angst of thousands of Californians and millions of Americans, underpinning the conformist norms of the “happy days” of the 1950s.
Eugenic Nation proceeds chronologically and thematically. Chapter 1 begins in 1915 at the PPIE, where West Coast eugenics initially coalesced under the aegis of the Race Betterment Foundation. In this chapter, I describe the context in which advocates of race betterment from across the country united in the cosmopolitan city of San Francisco to articulate a vision of human improvement for the twentieth century. Many of the actors who star in this chapter—Jordan, Popenoe, Claude C. Pierce, and Terman—reappear later. One of the striking features of race betterment at the PPIE is the extent to which it was shaped by colonial medicine, particularly tropical medicine as implemented in the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Panama Canal. Furthermore, the racial imperatives behind colonial medicine, and concepts and practices such as quarantine and prophylaxis, not only informed eugenics, they also became entwined in the American public health mentality.
Chapter 2 draws more connections between colonial medicine and eugenics, this time along the U.S.-Mexican border, where a protracted quarantine scrutinized, and simultaneously racialized, the bodies of Mexican immigrants. Against the backdrop of an unusual and disturbing public health regime not seen anywhere else in the United States (not on Ellis or Angel Islands nor along the Canadian border), the U.S. Border Patrol began policing the binational boundary line. I argue that the Border Patrol, like the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act to which it was attached, should be seen as the product of a negotiation between capitalist growers and nativist restrictionists, and in this sense was part of the eugenic puzzle of the 1920s. In addition, the mandate of the Border Patrol to protect the white American family from intrusion and contamination was strongly influenced by ideas of racial purity.
In chapter 3, Eugenic Nation moves back to California for an in-depth exploration of the unfolding of the eugenics movement in that westernmost state from 1900 to the 1940s. Beyond painting a picture of the organizational and individual network that mobilized California’s dynamic eugenics movement, I seek to demonstrate how hereditarian initiatives were literally instituted by the state, through agencies affiliated with the Department of Institutions. California was home to an interwoven tripartite system, in which the sterilization program, antialien deportation policies, and psychometric research aimed mainly at children and adolescents worked in concert with one another to create one of the most activist eugenics movements in the country and even the world. This chapter begins to answer the question of why California outpaced all other states in the number of sterilizations performed between 1900 and 1979, sketching some of the racial, class, and gender components of this history.
The relationship between nature-making and eugenics in California is the focus of chapter 4, which begins at Vollmer Peak in Berkeley, named after the iconoclastic eugenicist and criminologist August Vollmer. Fro
m there the chapter examines, through the portal of the redwood tree and the Save-the-Redwoods League, the deep affinities between conservationist arguments about species survival and early twentieth-century fears of “race suicide.” One of the overarching arguments of this chapter is that narratives of Western conquest and colonization, and, more broadly, the mythology of the American West, were infused with eugenic notions of regeneration and the possibility of racial perfection. This chapter dissects such tropes in the writings of Burbank and Jordan. It also seeks to show how eugenics was inscribed on the California landscape by helping to shape park systems and, quite concretely, in dedicatory plaques and memorial groves. The section on place-names focuses on the fascinating and disquieting biography of Goethe, an avid conservationist who was largely responsible for introducing the naturalist ranger into the national park system.
Chapter 5 continues probing the history of eugenics in California by describing the founding and mission of the AIFR. Established in 1930 by Popenoe, the AIFR had become the country’s premier marriage counseling center by World War II, sponsoring a family-centric eugenics that resonated powerfully with the sex-gender dictates of midcentury America. The AIFR offers a compelling window onto the remaking of eugenics during the Cold War, and illustrates how planned parenthood, mate selection, and marital advice were implemented and affected the attitudes, behavior, and uncertainties of Americans. Furthermore, analyzing the AIFR’s operating principles with regard to sex, gender, and the family sheds light on the layered transition from the discrete racial typologies of the 1920s to the variance continuums of the 1950s. The trajectory of Popenoe and the AIFR reveals—not linearly, neatly, or completely—how the eugenic racism of the 1920s became the hereditarian sexism of the 1950s.
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