Eugenic Nation

by Stern, Alexandra Minna

  48. By the mid-1920s, Johnson was both a member of the American Eugenics Society and president of its affiliated Eugenics Research Association.

  49. See John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988); and Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).

  50. George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995); Vicki L. Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Gabriela F. Arredondo, Mexican Chicago: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender, 1916–1939 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, in press). Statistics on Mexican immigration are notoriously problematic because of shifting racial and legal classifications and the circular and seasonal nature of Mexican migration patterns. Many scholars concur, however, that at least one million and perhaps even two million Mexicans entered the United States from 1910 to 1930, the majority from 1920 to 1930. The 1930 census offers the following statistics: 367,510 Mexicans in the United States in 1910; 700,541 in 1920; and 1,422,533 in 1930. See “Table E-7. White Population of Mexican Origin, for the United States, Regions, Divisions, and States: 1910 to 1930,” U.S. Census Bureau, available at http://www.census.gov/population/documentation.

  51. See David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), chaps. 2 and 3.

  52. Goethe is listed as a council member of Survey Graphic beginning in 1918.

  53. See chapter 4. Goethe sent Laughlin a postcard of the Arizona desert, on which he wrote: “Am down here on the Border studying the eugenic aspects of the Mexican immigration problem. One’s reaction to their slums surrounding the Nordic quarters of border towns is that the latter are competing with a rabbit-type birth rate. The more one studies the peon the more one wonders: Did the Conquistadores eliminate the thinkers when he destroyed the Aztec priest and soldier?” Charles M. Goethe (CMG) to Harry H. Laughlin (HHL), Feb. 1927, Papers of Harry H. Laughlin (HHL), Box C-4–1, Special Collections (SC), Truman State University (TSU). Also cited in Randall D. Bird and Garland Allen, “The J.H.B. Archive Report: The Papers of Harry Hamilton Laughlin, Eugenicist,” Journal of the History of Biology 14, no. 2 (1981): 339–53, which discusses the correspondence between Laughlin and Goethe.

  54. C. M. Goethe, “The Influx of Mexican Amerinds,” Eugenics 2, no. 1 (Jan. 1929): 6–9.

  55. Ibid., 6.

  56. Similar language was used in depictions of the Irish domestic worker Mary Mallon, better known as “Typhoid Mary,” the first confirmed “silent carrier” of typhoid. See Judith Walzer Leavitt, Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public’s Health (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).

  57. HHL to John C. Merriman (JCM), Sept. 24, 1929, HHL, Box C-4–6, SC, TSU.

  58. We can assume with almost complete certainty that this individual was male, given that there were few if any female physicians in El Paso in the early twentieth century.

  59. “Questions Pertaining to Mexican Immigration to Be Answered by Persons Interested in Public Health,” included in John C. Box (JCB) to HHL, Jan. 29, 1930, HHL, Box C-4–1, SC, TSU.

  60. See “Auburn-Haired Amazon at Santa Fe Street Bridge Leads Feminine Outbreak.”

  61. Interview with Señora X by Maria Nuckolls, Dec. 7, 1979, Tape 722, Institute of Oral History (IOH), Special Collections (SC), University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP).

  62. The interviewee is probably referring to some cyanide compound; there is no explicit reference to cryolite in the USPHS records. Interview with José Cruz Burciaga by Oscar J. Martínez, Feb. 16, 1974, Tape 143, IOH, SC, UTEP.

  63. Interview with Felix López Urdiales by Oscar J. Martínez, Feb. 22, 1974, Tape 144C, IOH, SC, UTEP.

  64. “The Future of Mexican Immigration,” Survey of Race Relations Collection (SRRC), Box 4, Hoover Institution Archives (HIA), Stanford University (SU).

  65. Nat K. King (NKK) to the Surgeon General, July 22, 1922, File 1169, USPHS, RG90, NARA.

  66. “Copy of Reports of Mounted Guards Heston B. Martin and Alvis C. Taylor beginning August 1st and ending August 31st (1921) inclusive,” File 1169, USPHS, RG90, NARA.

  67. “Daily Reports of Mounted Guards Alvis C. Taylor and Heston B. Martin beginning September 1st and ending September 31st (1921) inclusive,” File 1169, USPHS, RG90, NARA.

  68. Ibid.; NKK to the Surgeon General, July 9, 1923, File 1169, USPHS, RG90, NARA.

  69. See David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University, 1992); and María Teresa Koreck, “Space, Power, and Imperial Remappings of the Mexican North, 1730–1840” (manuscript cited with the permission of the author).

  70. See David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987); Robert M. Utley, The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846–1890 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984); and Elliott Young, “Remembering Catarino Garza’s 1891 Revolution: An Aborted Border Insurrection,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 12, no. 2 (1996), 231–72.

  71. For a more recent history, see Timothy J. Dunn, The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1978–1992: Low-Intensity Conflict Doctrine Comes Home (Austin: CMAS Books, University of Texas at Austin, 1996).

  72. Oliver Knight, “Forward,” in Six Years with the Texas Rangers, 1875–1881, by James B. Gillett (1921; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1976), xiii.

  73. Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 117–128; Benjamin Heber Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003).

  74. Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 117–128.

  75. See Kelly Anne Lytle Hernández, “Entangling Bodies and Borders: Racial Profiling and the U.S. Border Patrol, 1924–1955” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2002).

  76. U.S. Border Patrol, “History of United States Border Patrol,” 4, General Archives (GA), U.S. Border Patrol Museum (USBPM), El Paso, Texas.

  77. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Immigration, “General Order No. 49,” Mar. 16, 1925, included in “Immigration Border Patrol,” Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, House of Representatives, 75th Congress, 2nd session, Jan. 15, 1930 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1930), 27.

  78. Ibid., 4–6; I. F. Wixon, “The Mission of the Border Patrol,” U.S. Department of Labor, INS, Lecture no. 7, Mar. 19, 1934 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1937).

  79. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, “To Establish a Border Patrol,” Hearing before the Committee on the Judiciary. 69th Congress, HR 9731, Apr. 12 and 19, 1926 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1926), 32.

  80. Wixon, “Mission of the Border Patrol,” 2.

  81. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, chap. 2.

  82. Ibid., 60.

  83. Ibid., 67.

  84. For a more extensive development of this argument, see Alexandra Minna Stern, “Nationalism on the Line: Masculinity, Race, and the Creation of the Border Patrol, 1910–1940,” in Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History, ed. Samuel Truett and Elliott Young (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 299–323.

  85. For a persuasive exposition of this new conception of entry into the nation’s interior, see Ngai, Impossible Subjects.

  86. “Why Marfa, Texas Is Sector Headquarters for the United States Immigration Border Patrol,” D87.92.12, Marfa Sector Folder (MSF), GA, USBPM.

  87. Wixon, “Mission of the Border Patrol,” 8–9.
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br />   88. See, for example, Alvin Edward Moore, Border Patrol (Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 1988); Clement David Hellyer, The U.S. Border Patrol (New York: Random House, 1963); and Jack Kearney, Tracking: A Blueprint for Learning How (El Cajon, Calif.: Pathways Press, 1978).

  89. Peter Odens, The Desert Trackers: Men of the Border Patrol (Yuma, Ariz.: Southwestern Printers, 1975), chap. 3 (no page numbers).

  90. Ibid. Murphy J. Steen, a Miami-based patrolman who often carried out boat patrol, also claimed that master sign-cutters could read “race” out of such clues: “The individual’s color was an important means of identification, and we could usually tell whether the person who had preceded us along the trail was white or black.” Murphy J. F. Steen, Twenty-Five Years a U.S. Border Patrolman (Dallas: Royal, 1958), 11.

  91. See Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998); and Michael Rosenthal, The Character Factory: Baden-Powell and the Origins of the Boy Scout Movement (New York: Pantheon, 1986).

  92. “To Establish a Border Patrol,” Hearing before the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, 69th Congress, April 12 and 19, 1926 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1926), 17–18.

  93. See Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Matthew Basso, Laura McCall, and Dee Garceau, eds., Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the American West (New York: Routledge, 2001).

  94. Hellyer, U.S. Border Patrol, 20–21.

  95. Clifford Alan Perkins, Border Patrol: With the U.S. Immigration Service on the Mexican Boundary, 1910–54 (El Paso: Texas Western Press, University of Texas at El Paso, 1978).

  96. Complaints were endemic in Southwestern newspapers in the late 1920s, as the creation of the Border Patrol merged with stricter immigration laws to lead to a rapid rise in the deportation and harassment of Mexicans. For example, see “Texas Mexicans Are Told to Demand Search Warrant before Admitting Officers,” Antonio Evening News, Nov. 14, 1929; “Border Patrol Slays Mexican,” El Paso Herald, Sept. 7, 1929; “Border Citizen Protests against New Regulations,” Big Bend Sentinel, Mar. 7, 1929; and “Amazing Abuses of Mexicans in U.S. Is Charged in Report,” Bisbee Daily Review, Jan. 26, 1929, Microfilm Records of the INS, Reel 16, Series A, Part 2, casefile 55598/459D. Numerous instances of outrage are also archived in the HASFR in Mexico City. In his 1934 report, Wixon refers obliquely to this period: “There was a period when pressure from the Department for arrests and deportations inculcated a competitive spirit in the force and led to grave abuses and invasions of the rights of both citizens and aliens.” Wixon, “Mission of the Border Patrol,” 9.

  97. Perkins, Border Patrol, 102.

  98. Hellyer, U.S. Border Patrol, chap. 9.

  99. Perkins, Border Patrol, 100.

  100. Wixon, “Mission of the Border Patrol,” 11.

  101. Ibid.

  102. Quoted in U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Immigration, Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration to the Secretary of Labor for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1930 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1930), 42.

  103. See Mary Kidder Rak, Border Patrol (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938); and Rak, They Guard the Gates: The Way of Life on the American Borders (Evanston, Ill.: Row, Peterson, 1941).

  104. See Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

  105. See Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).

  106. See Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors.

  107. On interior frontier and intimate frontiers, see Ann Laura Stoler, “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 198–237.

  108. See Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

  109. The Border, directed by Tony Richardson, 1982, 107 mins.

  CHAPTER 3. INSTITUTING EUGENICS IN CALIFORNIA

  1. “Fred Hogue Funeral Service Will Be Conducted Thursday,” Los Angeles Times, July 1, 1941.

  2. Fred Hogue, “Social Eugenics,” Los Angeles Times (Sunday Magazine), Feb. 16, 1936.

  3. K. Burchardi, “Why Hitler Says: ‘Sterilize the Unfit!’ ” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 11, 1935; Tony Platt, “What’s in a Name? Charles M. Goethe, American Eugenics, and Sacramento State University” (self-published report, Feb. 2004), 17; Mike Anton, “Forced Sterilization Once Seen as Path to a Better World,” Los Angeles Times, July 16, 2003.

  4. Fred Hogue, “Social Eugenics,” Los Angeles Times (Sunday Magazine), Jan. 19, 1936.

  5. Fred Hogue, “Social Eugenics,” Los Angeles Times (Sunday Magazine), Mar. 26, 1939.

  6. Fred Hogue, “Social Eugenics,” Los Angeles Times (Sunday Magazine), May 10, 1936.

  7. Fred Hogue, “Social Eugenics,” Los Angeles Times (Sunday Magazine), Feb. 23, 1941; Fred Hogue, “Social Eugenics,” Los Angeles Times (Sunday Magazine), Nov. 17, 1940. Hogue usually referred his queries to the AIFR.

  8. Fred Hogue, “Social Eugenics,” Los Angeles Times (Sunday Magazine), June 21, 1936.

  9. Fred Hogue, “Social Eugenics,” Los Angeles Times (Sunday Magazine), Mar. 5, 1939.

  10. Assembly Bill no. 1607, Jan. 26, 1935; Assembly Bill no. 2590, Jan. 22, 1937, Folder 1, Box 3, Papers of E. S. Gosney and the Human Betterment Foundation (ESGHBF), Institute Archives (IA), California Institute of Technology (CIT).

  11. Assembly Bill no. 1607, Jan. 26, 1935, Folder 1, Box 3, ESGHBF, IA, CIT.

  12. Ibid.

  13. The 1935 bill passed the assembly but died in the senate. See “Background Paper,” in Lisa M. Matocq, ed., California’s Compulsory Sterilization Policies, 1909–1979, July 16, 2003, Informational Hearing, California legislative report of the Senate Select Committee on Genetics, Genetic Technologies, and Public Policy, Dec. 2003, vi. On sterilization in California, see Philip R. Reilly, The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001); Joel Braslow, Mental Ills and Bodily Cures: Psychiatric Treatment in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997); Richard W. Fox, So Far Disordered in Mind: Insanity in California, 1870–1930 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978); and Robert William Biller, “Defending the Last Frontier: Eugenic Thought and Action in the State of California, 1890–1941” (M.A. thesis, Simon Fraser University, 1993).

  14. In 1941, sterilization reached almost the same number, 818. See Statistical Report of the Department of Institutions of the State of California, Year Ending June 30, 1939 (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1940), 26; and California State Department of Institutions Statistical Report (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1941), 82. These are fiscal years, not calendar years.

  15. See Reilly, Surgical Solution. The national figure fluctuates between 60,000 and 66,000, depending on source and citation; the California figure of 20,000 is commonly accepted. Based on the reports of the Department of Institutions and its predecessor (Commission in Lunacy) and successor (Department of Mental Hygiene), as well as recent statistics provided by the Departments of Mental Health and Developmental Services, I have calculated a total of 19,250. This does not, however, include sterilizations performed at the very active Patton hospital between 1951 and 1960, the small yet undetermined number of operations performed at all institutions between 1961 an
d 1979, nor procedures at state prisons and other facilities that technically were not allowed to sterilize but did, most likely in excess of 1,000 operations. Hence, I believe that 20,000 is a fair working estimate, although probably low.

  16. One of the first studies to examine a region other than the East Coast is Edward J. Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). California has much in common with Virginia. See Gregory Michael Dorr, Segregation’s Science: Hereditarian Thought in Virginia, 1785 to the Present (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, in press); Paul A. Lombardo, “Miscegenation, Eugenics, and Racism: Historical Footnotes to Loving v. Virginia,” University of California, Davis, Law Review 21, no. 421 (1988): 421–52; and Lisa Linquist Dorr, “Arm in Arm: Gender, Eugenics, and Virginia’s Racial Integrity Acts of the 1920s,” Journal of Women’s History 11, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 143–66. On North Carolina, see Johanna Schoen, Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). There is a growing historiography on Midwestern and Western states with active eugenics movements such as Minnesota, Michigan, Indiana, and Oregon (see introduction).

  17. Quotation cited in Steven Selden, Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in America (New York: Teacher’s College, Columbia University, 1999), 4; Charles B. Davenport (CBD) to David Starr Jordan (DSJ), May 24, 1910, 62/604, Papers of David Starr Jordan (DSJ), Special Collections (SC), Stanford University (SU).

  18. CBD to DSJ, May 24, 1910, 67/645, DSJ, SC, SU.

  19. CBD to DSJ, June 21, 1910, 68/649, DSJ, SC, SU.

  20. See William Deverell, “Introduction: The Varieties of Progressive Experience,” in California Progressivism Revisited, ed. William Deverell and Tom Sitton (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 1–11.

  21. On eugenics and citriculture, see Douglas Cazaux Sackman, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005).