The presence of this exhibit and of eugenics at the PPIE was a result of the deliberate planning of its managers. In February 1913, James A. Barr, head of conventions and congresses, contacted David Starr Jordan to ask him to help arrange for a major eugenics gathering at the exposition and expressed a willingness to cover the travel costs of some of the participants.106 Aware that the first international eugenics conference had been held in London in 1912, Barr was interested in holding its successor at the PPIE: “I am still hoping against hope that we may yet be able to bring the International Congress on Eugenics to California in 1915.”107 Although this never materialized, by calling upon Jordan and communicating with other national figures, Barr was able to fill the PPIE’s calendar with race betterment events.
Barr’s ambitions were shared by Alvin E. Pope, chief of the section on the Social Economy, which concentrated on “human improvement” in all its guises. For Barr, the two pillars of Social Economy were “prevention” and “efficiency,” which he strove to bring to life at the fair to illuminate the “greatest achievement of the centuries—the Panama Canal—a completion made possible by the rigid application of the discoveries in hygiene.”108 Pope was adamant that eugenics play a commanding role at the exposition, arguing that the “exhibits in Eugenics and in Sex and Mental Hygiene” would render the PPIE “absolutely unique” among world’s fairs and related events.109 For him, showing graphs and dioramas of hereditary disease transmission, social biology, and the menace of the feebleminded was “of the greatest importance to humanity.”110
Both Barr and Pope succeeded in making eugenics matter at the PPIE. Race betterment was a staple concern at the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Educational Association meetings, where the Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman, his Harvard colleague Robert M. Yerkes, and the psychiatrist Aaron Rosanoff discussed abnormality, intelligence testing, and mental hygiene.111 They were joined by Henry H. Goddard, who in addition to being the author of the influential book The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness had several years earlier personally carried a copy of the Frenchman Alfred Binet’s mental test across the Atlantic in order to translate it and administer it at the New Jersey Vineland Training School.112 Eugenicists also dominated the annual gathering of the American Genetic Association (previously the American Breeders’ Association), where about three hundred people attended sessions “devoted to promoting knowledge of the laws of heredity and environment and their application to the improvement of plants, animals, and peoples.”113 On the day before the beginning of the Second National Conference on Race Betterment (SNCRB), the American Genetic Association’s Eugenics Section convened. As Paul Popenoe, secretary pro tem of the association and the editor of its Journal of Heredity, noted, talks were delivered on the intersection of eugenics and sociology, how to foster a eugenic conscience, the need for broadened sterilization laws, and the medical inspection of immigrants at California ports of entry.114 In his talk “The Long Cost of War,” Jordan propounded the moral and biological costs of military engagement, a message that he repeated at the International Purity Congress, where “he pointed out that the 8,000,000 men who are reported as killed, wounded or missing in Europe are the flower of their country’s manhood, and that the degenerate and unfit are left behind to repopulate the warring nations.”115
Of all the eugenics events, however, the SNCRB was the largest and most important. In 1913, Jordan, Kellogg, and Charles B. Davenport, head of the ERO, had started to exchange letters about the feasibility of arranging a second international eugenics congress in San Francisco.116 When it became clear that financial considerations and the shadow cast by war in Europe would foreclose this option, Kellogg, fresh on the heels of the First National Conference on Race Betterment, held in his hometown of Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1914, decided that the PPIE would be the ideal site for his organization’s next meeting. Jordan pledged his support and, along with more than a dozen others, including Read, Burbank, and A. W. Hoisholt, who was medical superintendent at the Napa State Hospital, he joined the SNCRB’s California Committee.117 Through Jordan, Kellogg hired Herbert R. Stolz, an assistant professor of hygiene at Stanford University, to coordinate the conference.118 At Kellogg’s request, Popenoe assembled a photographic exhibit for the race betterment booths.119 August 4 to 8 was the fair’s official Race Betterment Week, when educators, biologists, physicians, and social workers assembled with the intent of launching “a progressive battle for bettering our race.”120
Figure 2. Entrance to the Race Betterment Exhibit, sponsored by the Race Betterment Foundation and designed by Paul Popenoe, at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, 1915. Source: Official Proceedings of the Second National Conference on Race Betterment (Battle Creek, Mich.: Race Betterment Foundation, 1915).
Over these five days, hundreds of people crowded into the Inside Inn to hear race betterment lectures, and, according to Kellogg, more than three thousand people turned out for the final session at the Oakland Civic Center, which was capped off by “Redemption, a Masque of Race Betterment,” a theatrical tale about the morality and science of eugenic mating.121 Pierce, as mentioned, presented on typhoid fever. Jordan spoke yet again on the dysgenic consequences of war, contending that only pacifism could protect the “germ plasm” of the country’s healthiest and most cherished element, young men of fighting age: “a continual killing off at the upper end and a continual breeding from the lower end, lets a Nation down.”122 Burbank, the cultivator of the Shasta Daisy and the Paradox Walnut, applied his practical knowledge of plant biology to the problem of race betterment, which, he asserted, depended on a two-pronged strategy: “one by favorable environment which brings individuals up to their best possibilities; the other ten thousand times more important and effective—selection of the best individuals through a series of generations.”123 Hoisholt, who, as a member of the State Commission in Lunacy, had championed California’s 1909 sterilization law, insisted that the insane should be rehabilitated, not punished. Like many Progressives, he believed that mental patients were best handled by medical, not correctional officers, and that depriving so-called morons, idiots, and the feebleminded of their reproductive capacity benefited both the individual and society.124 Calls for sterilization and the elimination of the “unfit” were also voiced by Popenoe, who decried any attempts to impede natural selection, which he thought was appropriately leading to the extinction of decadent races such as the American Indian. Instead, in the name of civilization and progress, he implored scientists to identify those that were a “burden to the race” as well as the social and medical measures to stimulate race betterment. In his talk, “Natural Selection in Man,” Popenoe adumbrated his future advocacy of better breeding, which he would promote in the 1920s after returning to California and embarking on a comprehensive survey of sterilization in state institutions.125
Just as insecurity over racial contagia simmered below the surface of tropical medicine, not far beneath the optimism of race betterment lay uncertainty about the United States during a period of unprecedented immigration, urbanization, corporatization, and industrialization. In the preface to the Official Proceedings of the SNCRB, for example, readers were warned of the “the rapid increase of race degeneracy, especially in recent times,” and the terrible need to rid the country of millions of degenerates.126 Kellogg’s answer to the impending threat was the birth of a “real aristocracy made up of Apollos and Venuses and their fortunate progeny.”127 He calculated that the United States was already suffering under the weight of 500,000 lunatics, 80,000 criminals, 100,000 paupers, 90,000 idiots, and 90,000 epileptics, and he cited statistics proffered by Davenport and Laughlin that mental defectives constituted at least 10 percent of the population.128 In order to save the nation from ruin, Kellogg enumerated twelve measures for race betterment, which included a thoroughgoing health survey to be conducted in every community every five years, free medical dispensaries fo
r the afflicted, the inspection of schools and schoolchildren, health education, prohibition of the sale of alcohol and tobacco, strict marriage laws in each state, and the establishment of experiment stations where experts could devote their energies to investigating the laws of heredity in plants, animals, and humans. His final recommendation was to start a eugenics registry that would take into account three constituencies: those interested in eugenics, those who met eugenic standards, and children born of eugenic standards.129 For Kellogg, the eugenics registry was essential to the “creation of a new and superior human race” based on Mendelian principles. He made it the hallmark of the SNCRB and was proud of the fact that Davenport, although absent from the conference, had agreed to sit on the registry’s board of directors.130
In part, the pessimism about the future that marked the SNCRB reflected the mounting acceptance of Mendelian and Weismannian theories of heredity among eugenicists. Neo-Lamarckian explanations of degeneracy were popular in the United States among many Progressives at the turn of the twentieth century.131 Indeed, Kellogg’s original dual strategy of “euthenics” or personal and public hygiene combined with “eugenics” or race hygiene, personified the race betterment agenda in the early 1900s. By 1915, however, “euthenics,” which had been in much greater evidence at the 1914 Race Betterment Congress in Battle Creek, began to be seen by many prominent eugenicists as soft, ineffective, and scientifically unsound.132 It is partly because of such interpretations that Kellogg has been ignored in the eugenics scholarship. While he maintained close friendships with many of the country’s most notorious eugenicists such as Davenport, many saw his enthusiasm for vegetarianism, electric baths, enemas, and bran consumption as futile and fanciful. Even some commentators at the PPIE in 1915 viewed Kellogg’s clamors for a “eugenic aristocracy” as preposterous, particularly given the astronomical statistics he employed to make his case. His eugenics registry was also mocked: “That is to say, America can be saved from extinction and insanity by employing a vast army of medical registrars and inspectors, as though to adopt such a policy would not of itself be an evidence of mental deficiency.”133 Dare, the San Francisco Chronicle columnist, believed that Kellogg, along with other purists, sought nothing more than to purge society of its entertaining diversity. She wrote acerbically, “When we all are raised to an admirable—but undiverting—level of physical, mental and moral perfection (through the indefatigable efforts of purity leagues, prohibition parties, eugenic societies, anti-swearing, anti-kissing, anti-corset, standing-up-straight, don’t-wear-a-hat, vegetarian, fruitarian, granarian, let-your-hair-grow-long, back-to-nature, esperanto, volapuk, mind-your-step organizations), won’t our excellent sameness rather pall on us?”134
But Kellogg’s ideas of race betterment and human improvement persisted for decades, even if the Race Betterment Foundation was soon overshadowed by other eugenic organizations and “euthenics” relegated to the realms of body culture and therapeutic self-help. Moreover, at the PPIE Kellogg and his foundation functioned as handmaidens, helping to crystallize a eugenics movement that privileged surgical sterilization, marriage laws, immigration restriction, and ever more elaborate ways of counting and classifying the fit and the unfit. The talks by Popenoe, Jordan, Hoisholt, and Kellogg fostered this metamorphosis. Even Burbank, who had long upheld a belief in the neo-Lamarckian inheritance of acquired traits, was careful to state that heredity was “ten thousand times” more important than environment. The SNCRB was crucial to the formation of a network of heterogeneous reformers, many of whom would lead the eugenics charge in the 1920s. Furthermore, the tenets around which the eugenics movement coalesced in San Francisco in 1915 would have profound effects in the decades to come. The SNCRB consolidated the ties between California eugenicists, not just among an older generation, which included Jordan and Burbank, but also among a young cohort of crusaders, such as Popenoe and Terman, that would direct the state’s main eugenics societies from the 1920s until as late as the 1960s.
Kellogg was supremely pleased with the SNCRB, writing to Davenport soon after that the conference had received more press coverage than any other organization except for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Seeking to impress on Davenport the advances made for their shared cause, he wrote, “your efforts in behalf of eugenics are certainly beginning to bear fruit. The public are beginning to understand better and appreciate more.”135 Kellogg profusely thanked Jordan for his leadership on the California Committee, crediting him for much of the SNCRB’s success.136 In order to repay him, Kellogg extended an invitation to Jordan to spend one month at the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Although subsequent meetings kept Jordan at the PPIE for the rest of the year, he did accept Kellogg’s medical advice, which led to a diagnosis of pronounced diabetes and auricular fibrillation and a lifelong supply of soy bean biscuits, carbonates, and yeast extract.137
The PPIE closed on December 4, 1915, repeating the fanfare with which it had opened 288 days earlier.138 By this time it had become clear that the war in Europe would not abate anytime soon. Despite the admonitions of Jordan and the Woman’s Board, the United States was mobilizing and training troops across the Southwest in preparation for action on the European Front. The PPIE was the last of the great colonial fairs; the next exposition in the United States would not be held until 1933, in Chicago. Two more, in New York City and on San Francisco’s Treasure Island, would follow in 1939.139 The world’s fairs of the 1930s were a different genre—homages to modernist architecture and industrial science that incorporated the wonders of new forms of mass media, such as radio and film. After World War II, the pace of international expositions slowed considerably. Television and movies had helped to bring entertainment into the home and airplane travel made it possible for many more Americans to visit the “exotic” places they might have caught glimpses of at world’s fairs fifty years before.
Even if the PPIE represented a culmination of the spectacles inaugurated with the Philadelphia Centennial in 1876, the seeds that were planted in San Francisco in 1915 with respect to health, medicine, and eugenics would sprout in the decades to come. Key figures from the PPIE, such as Pierce and Popenoe, would be instrumental in shaping the racial and sexual order of the American West, Pierce along the U.S.-Mexican border and Popenoe, briefly, on the border and in much more sustained fashion in Southern California. The nucleus of California’s eugenics movement converged at the PPIE, mostly at the SNCRB but at other venues as well. Terman advanced his newly coined version of the Stanford-Binet test at a joint meeting of the American Psychological Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.140 Charles M. Goethe, a Sacramento philanthropist who attended a Playground and Recreation Congress at the fair and was an admirer of Jordan, cofounded the Eugenics Section of the Commonwealth Club of California in 1925 and the Eugenics Society of Northern California in 1933.141
Moreover, the PPIE fostered the cross-fertilization of tropical medicine and race betterment at a critical moment of transition in modern medicine in American society. Both were fostered by similar racial doctrines and supported by shifting notions of race, germs, and genes rooted in the identification and illumination of specific disease etiologies that demanded expert intervention and prophylaxis, whether by sanitary brigade or surgical sterilization. Over time, tropical medicine and race betterment would veer apart and become linked to differing scientific and medical agendas. In San Francisco in 1915, however, the theories of race, disease, and degeneracy that infused both domains were still sufficiently in formation to closely intermingle. In any case, they had proven their centrality to narratives about the triumph of the Panama Canal and the promise of American empire in the West and the Pacific.
CHAPTER 2
Quarantine and Eugenic Gatekeeping on the U.S.-Mexican Border
In March 1916, Mexicans living in the twin cities of Laredo–Nuevo Laredo on the Texas-Mexican border began to complain loudly to their local consul. They were outraged that the U.S. Pub
lic Health Service had started to brand their arms, in permanent ink, with the word “ADMITTED” upon being bathed and physically examined at Laredo’s international footbridge. Angered as well, the Mexican consul sent a letter to the USPHS asserting that “the American sanitary and immigration authorities are acting against all principles of respect, justice, and humanity, by stamping Mexican citizens, who are looking for work, with indelible ink.”1 The USPHS medical inspector in charge of operations in Laredo, H. J. Hamilton, disagreed, responding that this measure constituted neither a violation of rights nor an assault on dignity, but an action carried out “for their own benefit.”2 According to Hamilton, the ink branding was necessary to defend Texas from the lice, smallpox, and other germs usually carried by “Mexican paupers,” and in a letter to the U.S. surgeon general in anticipation of denunciations in the Mexican press, he described it as a “very good plan” that would help to deter “future illegal entry.”3 Invoking the authority of the governor of Texas and the state’s quarantine laws, Hamilton further contended that aside from introducing infectious diseases into cities and towns, Mexicans were a severe drain on the state’s charity and welfare institutions. Justifying the actions of the USPHS as a form of benevolent paternalism, he added that by being so marked, clean and admissible Mexicans were differentiated from the great numbers of anonymous ailing immigrants that circulated along the border. Within days, this exchange between the Mexican consul and Laredo’s medical inspector had been forwarded to the Mexican Secretariat of Foreign Relations and the U.S. Department of Treasury. In a final missive, an official from the U.S. Immigration Service explained to the Mexican consul that the stamp, which he denied contained indelible ink, was employed in lieu of highly impractical identification cards and suggested that it effectively shielded Mexicans from the harassment of Texas Rangers.4
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