And why, as I would see in California, there shouldn’t be.
PART III
THIS LAND IS MY LAND
The Dark Side of Expansion and Growth
THE SONOMA DEVELOPMENTAL CENTER
There exists today a widespread and fatuous belief in the power of environment, as well as of education and opportunity to alter heredity, which arises from the dogma of the brotherhood of man.… Such beliefs have done much damage in the past and if allowed to go uncontradicted, may do even more serious damage in the future. Thus the view that the Negro slave was an unfortunate cousin of the white man, deeply tanned by the tropic sun and denied the blessings of Christianity and civilization, played no small part with the sentimentalists of the Civil War period and it has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes and going to school and to church does not transform a Negro into a white man.… Americans will have a similar experience with the Polish Jew, whose dwarf stature, peculiar mentality and ruthless concentration on self-interest are being engrafted upon the stock of the nation.
—From The Passing of the Great Race (1916) by Madison Grant
EMBEDDED IN A rock next to the 364-foot-tall Founders Tree in California’s Humboldt Redwoods State Park, a bronze plaque reads:
Dedicated to the Founders of the
Save-the-Redwoods League
Madison Grant • John C. Merriam • Henry Fairfield Osborn
by the California State Park Commission
September 13, 1931
None of the other tourists here seem to notice it. They are more inclined, as I was upon arriving, to crane their necks skyward. No photograph can capture the tree’s booster-rocket height, and every person I see walk around its forty-foot circumference looks struck with a childlike sense of awe.
In 1991 one visitor did catch sight of Grant’s name, however, and angrily shot off a letter to the California Department of Parks and Recreation: “Honoring Madison Grant with a plaque on public property is as historically bizarre as erecting a monument to Adolf Hitler for his part in founding the Volkswagen Company. Please have it removed.”
Invoking Hitler can be unnecessarily provocative in some debates, but here the connection is apt. After reading the 1925 German translation of The Passing of the Great Race, the future führer sent Madison Grant a flattering letter, praising the book as his new “bible.” And not without reason, for what Madison Grant most wanted to preserve, more than any giant sequoia or wild bison, was the white race. This was his main calling and his life’s passion, regardless of how distasteful it might have seemed to others. “Race feeling may be called prejudice by those whose careers are cramped by it,” Grant wrote bluntly in his book, “but it is a natural antipathy which serves to maintain the purity of type.” Whites were endangered, Grant went on to argue, because
whether we like to admit it or not, the result of the mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us a race reverting to the more ancient, generalized and lower type. The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.…
This is a matter of every-day observation and the working of this law of nature is not influenced or affected by democratic institutions or by religious beliefs. Nature cares not for the individual nor how he may be modified by environment. She is concerned only with the perpetuation of the species or type and heredity alone is the medium through which she acts.
Hermann Göring, Hitler’s deputy and designated successor, also admired Grant (the 1937 Berlin trip Grant was preparing for right before he died came at Göring’s invitation), and the Third Reich’s most influential eugenicists, Wilhelm Frick, Fritz Lenz, and Eugen Fischer, all counted Grant as both a colleague and good friend. He kept them apprised of new research in the United States and helped articulate the movement’s “intellectual” foundation in Germany.
Especially appealing to them was Grant’s endorsement of negative, as opposed to positive, eugenics. “Man has the choice of two methods of race improvement,” Grant summarized in his book. “He can breed from the best or he can eliminate the worst by segregation or sterilization.” The latter option better ensured long-term success, Grant believed. But much to his consternation, meddling human traits like “altruism [and] philanthropy” were preventing society from fully eradicating “the undesirable underclasses.” He went on to say:
Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves no value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or the race.
Monstrous as this sounds today, thanks to enthusiastic and outspoken proponents such as Madison Grant, eugenics was already being practiced in the United States. The Germans modeled their early sterilization efforts on what they saw occurring here.
Fifty miles north of San Francisco and nestled within the grape-scented valleys of wine country is the Sonoma Developmental Center, my destination after Humboldt Redwoods State Park. Conceived in the late 1800s, the Center was originally the California Home for the Care and Training of Feeble-Minded Children, and it expanded numerous times before settling into its present one-thousand-acre location.
“Sonoma Developmental Center,” its literature states, “is the oldest facility in California established specifically for serving the needs of individuals with developmental disabilities. The facility opened its doors to 148 residents on November 24, 1891, culminating a ten-year project on the part of two prominent Northern California women who had children with developmental disabilities.” By all accounts it was a model of humane care.
At first.
The literature goes on to note: “Many changes over the last 110 years include attitudes, philosophies, values, and beliefs in regard to the treatment of developmentally disabled people.” This is a more pleasant way of saying: For a while, some really terrible things went on here. What happened, to be blunt, was the forced sterilization of thousands of men, women, and children deemed “unfit” or “subnormal”—an assessment made based on frighteningly arbitrary standards.
“You know we don’t do that now, right?” a Sonoma receptionist said to me, clearly taken aback when I called to explain my request for a visit.
“Oh, absolutely,” I replied. “And I’m not trying to make Sonoma look bad. This was all a long, long time ago. But I just want to see where the sterilizations took place.”
“Let me connect you with Karen Litzenberg in our public information office.”
I meant what I said; I’m honestly not picking on Sonoma or suggesting it should advertise the more chilling aspects of its past, but it is a significant historic site. California wasn’t the first state to enact laws encouraging forced sterilizations (that would be Indiana, in 1907, followed by the majority of American states), but once the legislative green light blinked go in 1909, the state quickly made up for lost time and eventually surpassed all others. Out of sixty thousand involuntary sterilizations nationwide, one-third to a half of them were performed in California. And Sonoma bears the sad distinction of having carried out more than any other similar facility.
With its neoclassical buildings and well-manicured grounds, Sonoma looks more like an Ivy League campus than a government-run institution. “We want our residents to feel like it’s a home,” Karen Litzenberg says to me soon after we meet in the main administration building. “There’s an equestrian ring with an indoor arena, a pool that’s heated year-round, a softball field, a campground, and there are regular movie nights and dances, and also a coffee klatch.”
Sonoma’s mission now is to offer day-to-day living skills, vocational training, health education, and other guidance to developmentally disabled
adults so they can live independently. “The population varies,” Karen tells me as we pass newly renovated housing, “but about six hundred fifty people live here today.” (I assure Karen that for reasons of privacy I won’t photograph or write about any of the residents. I will say, and this is highly subjective and anecdotal, that all of the staff members Karen introduces me to are genial and forthcoming, and the overall atmosphere seems quite friendly.)
I need to find one of the hospitals where the sterilizations occurred, and Karen and I drive around the facility trying to match the current scenery with old photos she’s dug up. A caption on one says that the original hospital, built in 1906, is where the carpenter shop sits now. “No, this is the new carpenter shop,” a worker tells us. “I’m not sure where the old one was that replaced the hospital. That’s before my time.” Eventually we decide to focus on the Chamberlain Building, which was built in 1927. Long and beige with a red-tiled roof, the elegant three-story building is now home to clerical offices and laboratories.
Determining exactly how many sterilizations took place here is difficult because records have been lost and destroyed, and countless operations went unreported. Sonoma’s superintendent Dr. F. O. Butler is believed to have conducted at least one thousand of the surgeries himself.
There is no indication that Madison Grant ever set foot here, but years before writing The Passing of the Great Race he helped lay the philosophical groundwork on which America’s eugenics movement was constructed. (Grant also lobbied aggressively for racial segregation and anti-miscegenation laws.) Regrettably, he had no end of institutional allies. Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler used his paper as a megaphone to promote eugenics, and universities such as Yale, Stanford, and Harvard bestowed their academic credibility to the cause. The Carnegie Institution funded a Long Island laboratory in 1904 that began keeping tabs on the physical traits of half a million American citizens (the information was often gathered voluntarily at state fairs, where “Fitter Family Contests” took place), and two decades later the Rockefeller Foundation helped establish the Berlin-based Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. Grant’s buddy Eugen Fischer served as its director until 1933.
Back in the States, people with mental retardation were among the first to go under the knife. Men received vasectomies and women salpingectomies (meaning, the removal of the fallopian tubes). California law gave doctors wide discretion in deciding who was eligible, and the labels “idiot,” “imbecile,” and “moron” were actual medical categories determined by intelligence tests. Idiots were a mental age of one to two, imbeciles three to seven, and morons eight to twelve.
Alcoholics, epileptics, schizophrenics, manic depressives, and others suffering from mental illnesses were also thrown into the “unfit” category. Blacks and Mexican Americans were disproportionately targeted, along with women of any ethnicity rumored to be promiscuous. “Something like 25 percent of the girls who have been sterilized were sent here solely, or primarily, for that purpose,” wrote California’s leading eugenicist, Paul Popenoe (a close friend of Grant’s and, curiously, the “inventor” of marriage counseling), after inspecting Sonoma in 1926.
One year later, in Buck v. Bell, critics finally gained an audience before the U.S. Supreme Court and were confident that the justices would recognize the barbarity of forced sterilizations and their dangerous ethical implications. Carrie Buck was a twenty-one-year-old woman diagnosed as “feeble-minded,” like her mother, and “immoral” for bearing an illegitimate child. Buck had actually been raped, and her foster family institutionalized her to protect their own good name. James Bell, the doctor petitioning to sterilize Buck, insisted that her child, a baby girl named Vivian, would also be mentally deficient. The Court passed down an overwhelming 8–1 ruling. Against Buck.
Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes penned the majority opinion, which included these immortal words:
It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.… Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
After the decision, the pace of forced sterilizations accelerated exponentially. Along with operating on Carrie Buck, Dr. Bell also sterilized her daughter, Vivian, for good measure. And yet, before she died at the age of eight from measles, Vivian turned out to be such a bright student that she had made her school’s honor roll.
Charles Darwin’s half cousin, the anthropologist and explorer Sir Francis Galton, conceived the word eugenics—“wellborn” or “of good stock”—in 1883. (A man of diverse interests, Galton also invented the dog whistle and introduced the idea of putting weather maps in newspapers.) Galton’s aim was to apply the lessons of animal breeding to human beings, thereby promoting racial purity. His theories fit comfortably with early-twentieth-century American Progressivism, which had a borderline obsession with moral and physical cleanliness. Progressives, it’s true, admirably supported suffrage, ended child labor, and enacted other necessary reforms, but it’s also undeniable that many embraced eugenics as a potential cure-all for a host of social ills.
No one, however, rallied around the eugenics flag more fanatically than the Nazis, and after beginning with forced sterilizations, they concluded that operating on those deemed physically, psychologically, or morally defective was time-consuming and expensive. It was easier just to kill them.
One of the doctors most responsible for implementing this doctrinal shift in Nazi medical policies was Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician and the head of the Third Reich’s euthanasia program. Buried among the thousands of documents from Brandt’s trial at Nuremberg is this damning quote: “A strict selection by exterminating the insane or incapable—in other words, the scum of society—would solve the whole problem in one century, and would enable us to get rid of the undesirable elements who people our prisons, hospitals, and lunatic asylums.” Although the passage articulated Brandt’s opinion to the letter, he didn’t write it. The excerpt, submitted by his lawyer as evidence that Brandt’s views could not be judged abhorrent, came from Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race. Brandt was later hanged for war crimes.
“Do you want to see our petting zoo?” Karen asks me. My gut reaction is to say no. I have to catch a flight out of San Francisco at 7:00 P.M., and I want to avoid rush-hour traffic on Highway 101. I check my watch and decide a few minutes probably won’t matter after all. It doesn’t seem completely relevant to my visit, but I also don’t want to appear rude. “Sure,” I say.
As we drive up to the little farm, which has an indoor aquarium and an outdoor aviary, Karen familiarizes me with the animals. “We have llamas, ducks, rabbits, a guinea pig, sheeps, goats, and Pedro the bilingual parrot.”
“Pedro the bilingual parrot?”
“He’s an Amazonian parrot who knows words in both English and Spanish. Well, he speaks bird, too, so I guess he’s trilingual.”
We step into the barn, and Karen points out the buttons at wheelchair height along the stalls. “When you press one of these you get information about the animals. All of them have names. Deuce the pig is over there, and we also have two potbellied pigs, Breezy and Jethro. They’ve adopted a black rabbit named Louis, who prefers staying with them than the other rabbits.”
“That’s amazing.”
“They’re not the only ones like that. The llamas are very protective of the sheep, and Gretchen the turkey has been caring for some baby chickens that have taken to her as well. She’s very maternal and likes to give them rides on her back.”
We loop around to the parking lot, passing the outdoor pens along the way. I try to catch a glimpse of Louis snuggled under the watchful eye of his pig protectors, but he’s apparently hidden himself somewhere.
“Well, I hope that was worth it.”
“Oh, it was,” I say, cheerfully thinking of how appalled Madison Grant, who based his vile
and idiotic beliefs on the supposedly immutable laws of nature, would have been to find such an affectionate display among various creatures. It’s a small example, no doubt, and I certainly knew before coming here that different species care for one another, especially the more vulnerable among them, and that nature—whether animal or human—isn’t wholly cruel at heart. But every so often, it’s nice to be reminded.
HAUN’S MILL
The victims of persecution had now turned persecutors on their own account, and persecutors of the most terrible description.…
At first this vague and terrible power was exercised only upon the recalcitrants who, having embraced the Mormon faith, wished afterwards to pervert or to abandon it. Soon, however, it took a wider range. The supply of adult women was running short, and polygamy without a female population on which to draw was a barren doctrine indeed. Strange rumours began to be bandied about—rumours of murdered immigrants and rifled camps in regions where Indians had never been seen. Fresh women appeared in the harems of the Elders—women who pined and wept, and bore upon their faces the traces of an unextinguishable horror.
—From A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle. The 1887 novel, in which Sherlock Holmes appears for the first time, is set partly in Utah and features a rogue band of violent Mormons. (During a visit to Salt Lake City in 1923, Doyle expressed regret for his depiction of Mormon culture.)
Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History Page 12