Eugenic Nation

by Stern, Alexandra Minna

  If the quarantine concentrated on the boundary line, then the tracking and monitoring of the Border Patrol extended the border into the U.S. interior. Preceded by the Spanish militarists who guarded the presidios, the Texas Rangers who hounded the Comanches and Apaches, and the first immigration “line riders” stationed on the border in early 1900, the Border Patrol emerged out of both local and national concerns. On the one hand, it was a response to the growing numbers of immigrants who started circumventing designated ports of entry, in part to avoid the quarantine. On the other, the Border Patrol must be situated within the debates over immigration restriction that gripped the United States in the 1920s and resulted in the passage of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act in 1924. From multiple angles, the Border Patrol can be understood as a facet of a larger eugenic movement rooted in anxieties about biological purity and attendant to contracting and shifting categories of race.108 Perhaps somewhat unexpectedly, it was not the Border Patrol’s early incarnation as a uniformed extension of the Texas Rangers but its more professionalized image as a federal police agency that illuminates some of its most poignant affinities with eugenic ideas about racial purity and the protection of America.

  These connections resonated in late twentieth-century representations of the Border Patrol. Released in 1982 and starring Jack Nicholson and Harvey Keitel, the film The Border tells the story of Nicholson, who joins the El Paso branch of the Border Patrol and soon realizes that it is an invasively corrupt organization replete with smugglers. For Nicholson, the most egregious acts of his fellow patrolmen do not pertain to the smuggling of drugs, guns, or laborers, but of Mexican babies that await placement with Anglo families. Disgusted, outraged, and mildly infatuated with the mother of a stolen baby, Nicholson becomes determined to return the child to its rightful parent. In one of the final scenes, Nicholson fatally shoots several patrolmen—including his partner—as he hightails it on dusty dirt roads while his rescued contraband wails in a plastic laundry basket. In the last moments of the movie, Nicholson finds the Mexican mother of the child along the banks of the Rio Grande and, in an act of nationalistic compassion, reunites the baby with its “natural” owner. Toward the end of the film, Nicholson says to himself, “I just wanted to do something good for someone.”109

  The Border demonstrates the longevity of the icon of the honest patrolman as a benevolent patriarch and protector of the body politic, particularly in contrast to the corrupt patrolman. Moreover, it links this gendered persona to the upholding of boundaries that are at once national, biological, and social. In this sense, the Border Patrol influenced the country’s demographic composition and shaped understandings of the legitimate American family. Furthermore, the eugenic impulse behind the formation of the Border Patrol, which harbored particular animosity toward Mexicans, had a far-reaching impact beyond the border region and affected health and welfare agencies and health care access throughout the American West.

  CHAPTER 3

  Instituting Eugenics in California

  From 1935 to 1941, readers of the Los Angeles Times could open their Sunday magazines to the column “Social Eugenics,” written by the veteran arts and society contributor Fred Hogue.1 An enthusiast of the American Eugenics Society, Hogue attended the meetings of its California Division, often held at the Los Angeles Public Library, which he then summarized for his audience. He also frequently cited the publications of the Human Betterment Foundation, organized by the Pasadena citrus magnate Ezra S. Gosney to promote surgical sterilization, and commended the marriage and mate counseling offered by Paul Popenoe and Roswell M. Johnson, authors of Applied Eugenics, at the American Institute of Family Relations in central Los Angeles. Although by 1940 Hogue was criticizing the “war hysteria” and imperialist ambitions gripping Nazi Germany, he never maligned Adolph Hitler’s program of racial hygiene and in 1936 had applauded “the movement in Germany and other Nordic countries of Europe for the elimination of the reproduction of the unfit.”2 That Hogue’s feature found a home in the Los Angeles Times was not surprising, given that the newspaper’s owner, Harry Chandler, was a charter member of the HBF who published a defense of Nazi policies in 1935.3

  At once sensationalistic, folksy, and doctrinaire, “Social Eugenics” dwelt on the topics of population, birth control, venereal disease, marital exams, and, above all, sterilization. Reflecting the viewpoint of an influential sector of elite Californians that embraced eugenics as the best solution to the state’s perceived problems, Hogue saw sterilization as a “protection, not a punishment.”4 Not only would it save the state thousands of dollars by preventing the birth of defective children and allowing the release of inmates in overflowing mental institutions, but most important, it would enable society to shield “itself against the reproduction of the physically and mentally underprivileged, against the continued pollution of the human bloodstream.”5 Without such targeted intervention, Western civilization would collapse, just as Carthage had fallen centuries earlier.6

  Hogue encouraged his readers to be competent breeders who considered the “fate of those yet unborn,” and he proffered advice to correspondents worried about the transmission of hereditary blemishes down the family line.7 However, he believed that ultimately it was the “constitutional right” and the moral responsibility of the state, not the individual, to safeguard the public welfare by breaking “the chain of hereditary degeneracy.”8 To this end, Hogue advocated the broadening of California’s sterilization law to permit operations on people identified as feebleminded or otherwise unfit beyond the walls of state hospitals or asylums.9 In particular, he supported legislation drafted in 1935 and 1937 to establish a State Board of Eugenics and to expand the applicability of the sterilization law to prisons, correctional schools, reformatories, and detention camps.10 These proposed bills granted superintendents, wardens, and directors of all such institutions the discretion to file a petition to sterilize any patient or inmate, who, once released, appeared likely to “procreate a child or children” with “a tendency to serious physical, mental, or nervous disease or deficiency.”11 These draft laws also required only written notification to the patient or next of kin, who was allowed thirty days to appeal the order. Seeking to insulate surgeons and state officials against litigation, these bills left virtually no room for civil or criminal liability and, furthermore, mandated that the Eugenics Board’s records be sealed from “public inspection.”12

  Although these bills failed, their proponents were not fringe renegades out of touch with the times but rather prominent doctors, philanthropists, journalists, academicians, and administrators who wished to amplify the reach of an extensive eugenics agenda that dated back to the turn of the century.13 Indeed, the sweep and scope of these legislative intents illustrate the extent to which ideas about the dangers and costs of hereditary degeneracy pervaded California government and culture. Even with this legislative setback, the number of sterilizations rose markedly in the state in the mid to late 1930s, peaking in 1939 when, according to official statistics, 848 men and women at nine institutions underwent reproductive surgery.14 In absolute terms, California far outpaced the rest of the country, performing approximately 20,000 sterilizations—or one-third of 60,000 total nationwide—from 1909 to the 1960s.15 California stood at the vanguard of the national eugenics movement. Although hereditarianism certainly flourished elsewhere, its roots ran exceptionally deep in the Golden State.16 When European Americans such as the horticulturalist Luther Burbank and the doctor Joseph P. Widney migrated to California from the East in the late 1800s, they sought to settle the land and order society according to the principles of selective propagation and race betterment. By the 1910s, a dynamic network of scientists, reformers, and professionals were consolidating and launching eugenics projects and endeavoring to make hereditarianism integral to state priorities and practices. Eugenicists shaped modern California—its geography, inhabitants, and institutions—through agricultural experimentation, nature and wildlife preservation, medical int
ervention, psychological surveys, municipal and state legislation, and infant and maternal welfare.

  In contrast to their counterparts in other states who imitated broader trends, California eugenicists were players on the national scene from the outset. For instance, the Santa Rosa “plant wizard” Burbank and the Stanford president David Starr Jordan were members of the first eugenics body in the United States, the Eugenics Committee of the American Breeders’ Association. Established in 1906 under the direction of Charles B. Davenport, a biologist at the Carnegie Institution’s Station for Experimental Evolution in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, the Eugenics Committee was chaired by Jordan and included Alexander Graham Bell and the physical anthropologist Alès Hrdlicka. Formed to “investigate and report on heredity in the human race, and emphasize the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood,” this committee organized sections to study the hereditary etiology of insanity, criminality, eye defects, and many other conditions.17

  The ABA’s Eugenics Committee served as the nucleus for the Eugenics Record Office. Attached to the Cold Spring Harbor Station and funded by Mrs. E. H. Harriman, the widow of the wealthy railroad baron, the ERO sponsored inquiries into feeblemindedness, family ancestry, and genetic diseases. According to Davenport, the ERO owed much to the reputation of Jordan. When Mrs. Harriman contacted Davenport, seeking an “opinion as to the desirability of the proposed work of studying extensively and intensively the blood lines in the country, both those that have resulted in criminality, imbecility, and poverty and those in which our most effective men have arisen,” he immediately requested Jordan’s assistance.18 Jordan, in turn, sent a letter to Mrs. Harriman stressing the enormous value of her potential donation, a missive that roused her to action; “owing very largely to your letter, in which I gather you spoke some kind personal words, Mrs. Harriman has decided to begin work at once instead of waiting until the first of January as was her original intention.”19 The ERO eventually absorbed the Eugenics Committee and served as the springboard for the AES in the 1920s. This pattern of California eugenicists facilitating national developments while pursuing projects peculiar to the Pacific Slope recurred throughout the twentieth century.

  Initially, eugenics resonated with the concerns of California Progressives, whose shared faith in scientific solutions to societal problems often overshadowed discrepant political opinions and approaches.20 For example, to John R. Haynes, a physician and one of Los Angeles’s most outspoken reformers, sterilization, the construction of colonies for the feebleminded, and direct municipal control of resources such as water and electricity were interrelated social endeavors best guided by the laws of physiology and biology. With well-placed adherents such as Haynes and Jordan spearheading eugenics, the movement gained momentum in the 1910s. In the 1920s and 1930s, the radius of eugenics widened, with the founding of, in chronological order, the Eugenics Section of the Commonwealth Club of California, the HBF, the California Division of the AES, the AIFR, and the Eugenics Society of Northern California.

  Eugenics prospered in California for several reasons. First, for many of the European American settlers who streamed into the Pacific West starting in the late 1800s, the act of civilizing what they saw as fertile yet underutilized terrain meant applying modern science, above all, the maxims of heredity and biology, to graft a new polis onto the Spanish and Mexican past. This was most visible in agricultural enterprises, such as large-scale citriculture, but also in other arenas where a premium was placed on selective breeding, such as the better baby contests held at state fairs and monetary inducements for the fit to have more children.21 Second, there was a strong affinity between the doctrines of Manifest Destiny and nativism that seized California during and after the Gold Rush and eugenic racism. Sinophobia and discrimination against Latin Americans and American Indians, which permeated California from the 1860s to the 1880s, offered propitious ground for scientific racism, targeted principally at Mexicans and Filipinos, to materialize in the 1920s and 1930s.22 Third, unlike other Western states, such as Oregon or Washington, which also passed sterilization laws, California possessed a dense and multilayered matrix of educational organizations, civic groups, business associations, medical societies, and philanthropies that subscribed to eugenic philosophies. Furthermore, at key points in this nexus stood powerful figures, such as Fred O. Butler, the medical superintendent of the Sonoma State Home; Lewis Terman, one of the foremost popularizers of intelligence testing; Paul Popenoe, the AIFR’s director and Ladies’ Home Journal columnist; and John R. and Dora Haynes, who endowed Los Angeles’s first private foundation in 1926 to foster research aimed at the “social betterment of mankind.”23 Although not always in agreement, these individuals and organizations collaborated to make California home to a dynamic eugenics movement. Their efforts were significantly enhanced by the State Department of Institutions, which, with the backing and imprimatur of Sacramento, sponsored anti-immigrant policies, intelligence testing, and sterilization.

  SCIENTIFIC RACISM AND EUGENIC EXCLUSIONS

  From his plant nursery, Burbank, who had abandoned Massachusetts for the Mediterranean climes of Sonoma County, espoused an optimistic neo-Lamarckian view of the harmonious outcome of race-mixing and open immigration that countered much eugenic thinking at the time. Almost always, xenophobia, most vehemently aimed at Mexican and Asian immigrants, was the explicit or implicit corollary of the eugenic construal of the state’s problems. Nativism was no stranger to California, having migrated westward with many of the European Americans who colonized the Pacific Slope. At best, California nativism was a paradoxical brand of racial discrimination, applied by recent East Coast and Midwest transplants to peoples with generations-long connections to the region.

  By the eve of the U.S. invasion of Mexico in 1846, white supremacy was poised to become a staple of the postconquest political and legal regime. In 1851, one year after the state entered the Union, a law was passed that taxed any quantity of placer gold mined by foreign nationals. In the 1870s and 1880s, San Francisco was home to the Workingmen’s Party, whose virulently Sinophobic platform set the stage for the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. White mobs repeatedly attacked Chinese communities, burning down homes and business, and rallying to drive the “Yellow Peril” out of town. Additionally, like other Western states, California passed an antimiscegenation statute in 1850 that forbade unions between whites and “negroes and mulattoes,” adding “Mongolians” to the list in 1880.24 By the 1890s, the californiano and Mexican grip on power at the local and state levels, which had proved quite resilient from the 1850s to the 1880s, had become much more tenuous and was under relentless assault from European American entrepreneurs, lawyers, and politicians.25

  At the turn of the century, California nativism was infused with budding eugenic notions of biological difference and racial capacity. More often than not, fears about the impending hereditary contamination brought on by racial or immigrant groups were couched in fiscal terms: not only would bad genes defile the “germ plasm,” but also the demands placed on the state by “defectives” would drastically deplete resources. Following this logic, the state’s principal reform agency, the Department of Institutions, implemented exclusionary racial policies. Originally formed in 1896 as the Commission in Lunacy, this department (renamed the Department of Institutions in 1920) created the Office of the Deportation Agent in 1915, whose responsibility was to expel foreigners and nonresidents confined in state asylums and mental hospitals, a practice that had begun sub silentio as early as 1905. The Deportation Agent was partisan to the perception, popular at the time, that California had become the “the greatest sanitarium in America,” luring the mentally and physically ill from far and wide.26 This sentiment was accentuated by worries that the farther one ventured into the Western frontier, the greater the likelihood of a disordered mind.27 In the early 1920s, the Deportation Agent bemoaned a 120 percent surge in arrivals and blamed ignorant and parochial doctors in the East and Midwest
for prompting an exodus of hundreds of the infirm to the Pacific.28 Over a span of about twenty-five years, the Department of Institutions delivered more than eight thousand nonresidents across state lines and, working with federal immigration authorities, repatriated more than two thousand foreign nationals—predominately to Mexico, the Philippines, and China.29

  The year deportations officially began, the Department of Institutions’ sister agency, the Board of Charities and Corrections, announced that the county hospitals were suffering from a “foreign problem,” notably a “Mexican problem,” because Mexicans comprised 4.8 percent of the twelve thousand patients treated in 1914.30 In the eyes of the Department of Institutions, Mexicans cost the state money and, worse, were ungrateful for any care they received: “the Mexican does not make a good eleemosynary charge. He will not work and is sullen and surly.”31 From 1915 to the late 1920s, the Deportation Agent consistently repatriated Mexicans at the highest rate. Between 1926 and 1928, Mexicans made up 47 percent of those deported, chiefly from Southern California, where “the problem of caring for the defective, delinquent and destitute of Mexico” was “most acute.”32 During the Depression, when thousands of Mexicans returned across the border under intense pressure and often force, Filipinos and Chinese surged to the top of the banished list. For instance, the Deportation agent sent back seventy-six Filipinos in 1930 and fifty-eight in 1938.33 The Deportation Agent also ousted scores of poor European Americans who hailed from the East and South, particularly “Okies” who had fled the Dust Bowl in search of jobs in California’s fields and factories. Los Angeles replicated the exclusionary techniques of the Department of Institutions in the 1930s, when the mayor set up a Committee on Indigent Alien Transients to bar Mexicans, African Americans, and Okies from entering the city.34 Fiscal justifications for such policies loomed large. In 1942, for example, the Department of Institutions calculated that the deportation of 10,359 nonresidents and foreign nationals over the previous three decades had resulted in an estimated net savings of more than twelve million dollars.35