by Jill Lepore
For much of the world’s ills, Grant blamed “swarms of Polish Jews” and “half-breeds,” but Popenoe and Johnson blamed other people, too, especially college girls. Women’s education, they warned, “is tending toward race suicide”: “Many a college girl of the finest innate qualities, who sincerely desires to enter matrimony, is unable to find a husband of her own class, simply because she has been rendered so cold and unattractive, so overstuffed intellectually and starved emotionally, that a typical man does not desire to spend the rest of his life in her company.”30 Popenoe was, at the time, unmarried. Two years later, at the age of thirty-two, he married a nineteen-year-old dancer.
Meanwhile, he lobbied for immigration restriction. In 1924, Congress passed the most restrictive anti-immigration act in U.S. history. But, as a member of the Immigration Restriction League put it, “The country is somewhat fed up on high brow Nordic superiority stuff.”31
The next year, a Grant-like figure made an appearance in The Great Gatsby:
“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?”
“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.
“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
“Tom’s getting very profound,” says Daisy, to which Jordan replies, “You ought to live in California.”32
Popenoe turned his attention to marriage. “That something is wrong with marriage today is universally admitted and deplored,” he wrote in Modern Marriage: A Handbook in 1925. “The number of celibates, of mismated couples, of divorces, of childless homes, of wife deserters, of mental and nervous wrecks; the frequency of marital discord, of prostitution and adultery, or perversions, of juvenile delinquency, tells the story.”33 The following year, he offered policy recommendations in The Conservation of the Family, in which he defined the “normal family” as “one in which two adults live together happily and give birth to an appropriate number of healthy and intelligent children.” What number was appropriate depended on whether the parents were superior, inferior, or defective, because “among the 1,000 leading American men of science, there is not one son of a day laborer.” Defectives should have no children at all: “the interests of society are best fostered if it is made up of families of more than four children among the superior part of the population, and of less than four in the inferior part, ranging down to no children at all among the defectives and genuine undesirables.”
Popenoe preferred sterilization to birth control, which he considered dangerous. “If charity begins at home, Birth Control should begin abroad. Continued limitation of offspring in the white race simply invites the black, brown, and yellow races to finish the work already begun by Birth Control, and reduce the whites to a subject race preserved merely for the sake of its technical skill, as the Greeks were by the Romans.”34 The best way to ensure that the superior would have more children was to convince women to lower their expectations: “Most of the dissatisfaction with existing marriage is expressed either by women, or by men who have accepted the woman’s point of view of the case.” He did not consider marriage tied to procreation because “where both parents are defective, there should be no children at all, and yet the family may be called normal.” Most of all, he wanted to keep birth control out of the hands of feminists like Margaret Sanger. “If it is desirable for us to make a campaign in favor of contraception,” he wrote to Grant, “we are abundantly able to do so on our own account, without enrolling a lot of sob sisters.”35
The constitutionality of compulsory sterilization laws was brought before the Supreme Court in 1927 in Buck v. Bell. As measured by Terman’s Stanford-Binet test, Carrie Buck and her mother, Emma, were feebleminded, a trait that was associated with “moral degeneracy” and, for Terman, criminality. After Buck bore a child out of wedlock at the age of seventeen, she was placed in an asylum in Virginia, run by J. H. Bell, who scheduled a tubal ligation. Buck had been raped by the nephew of her adoptive parents. Her daughter was classed as an imbecile at the age of seven months after a social worker testified that there was something about her “not quite normal, but just what it is, I can’t tell.” Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for the eight-to-one majority, concluded that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Buck was sterilized. (Reporters who met Carrie Buck later in life—she died in 1983—described her as a woman of normal intelligence who liked to do crossword puzzles.)36
Gosney founded the Human Betterment Foundation in 1928, with Popenoe, Jordan, and Terman as board members. Popenoe and Gosney published Sterilization for Human Betterment the next year; like Applied Eugenics, it was translated into German.37 In 1930, Popenoe opened his marriage clinic. Its services included a premarital conference to eliminate those among the betrothed who “are not qualified to marry.” He instructed his staff “that marriage counseling involved essential questions of hereditary fitness.”38 He used a personality test called the Johnson Attitude Inventory, devised by his coauthor from Applied Eugenics. It consisted of 182 questions, a Stanford-Binet of nuptial fitness.39 Popenoe and Terman collaborated, too; Popenoe collected questionnaires taken from more than a thousand married couples to aid Terman in a new project, an effort to derive an “index of marital happiness,” which could be used to advise a prospective couple whether or not to proceed with the banns. Terman conducted a detailed analysis of the “correlates of orgasm adequacy in women,” concluding that, although the cause of the problem remained a mystery, “almost exactly a third of the wives in our group are inadequate in this respect.”40
In counseling, Popenoe stressed the importance of sex, believing that nearly “every instance of marital disharmony” arises from “sexual maladjustment,” which came down to female orgasmic inadequacy; that lack appeared to be fixed and hereditary, just like intelligence.41 He recommended that a prospective husband determine whether his bride is “frigid, normal, or ardent,” as “some frigid women require surgical treatment.”42 The institute also published a pamphlet titled Are Homosexuals Necessary? 43 Dr. Popenoe thought not.
Eugenics relied on a colossal misunderstanding of science and a savage misreading of history. Harvard’s William McDougall argued that illiteracy could be eradicated by forbidding people who could read from marrying people who couldn’t, as if this followed, naturally, from Mendel, with his peas, wrinkly and smooth.44 In 1938, Terman took pride in what he considered to be the great success of his IQ tests, noting that “admission to college is denied to thousands of high school graduates every year in part on the basis of their intelligence scores. Other thousands are influenced against applying for admission as a result of the intelligence ratings they have received.”45 Madison Grant cobbled together Spencer, Darwin, and Frederick Jackson Turner to write the history of Western civilization as the Nordic race’s epic battle for demographic supremacy.
In the Progressive era, eugenics was faddish. Progressivism ran through both political parties for nearly two decades. Early on, and especially before the First World War, eugenics was championed by all sorts of people—Margaret Sanger and Woodrow Wilson prominent among them—but the movement was, at heart, profoundly conservative: atavism disguised as reform.46 After a while, the disguise got pretty flimsy.47 The week Holmes handed down his decision in Buck v. Bell, Harvard declined a $60,000 bequest to fund eugenics courses, refusing “to teach that the treatment of defective and criminal classes by surgical procedures was a sound doctrine.”48 In “The Eugenics Cult,” an essay Clarence Darrow wrote not long after defending John Scopes, charged with the crime of teaching evolution in Tennessee, Darrow judged that he’d rather live in a nation of ill-matched misfits and half-wits than submit to the logic of a bunch of cocksure “uplifters.” “Amongst the schemes for remolding society,” Darrow wrot
e, “this is the most senseless and impudent that has ever been put forward by irresponsible fanatics to plague a long-suffering race.”49
Lashed by such stinging criticism, only passionately committed eugenicists remained undaunted. At the International Congress on Genetics in Ithaca in 1932, C. C. Little complained, “We are now spending more money on defectives than we are on school children” and promised that “compulsory sterilization is just around the corner.” (“Sees a Super-Race Evolved by Science” was the New York Times headline about Little’s lecture.)50 In 1933, Germany passed its first forced sterilization law; Franz Boas’s books were burned by Nazis; and Paul Popenoe wrote to J. H. Bell, asking for photographs of Carrie Buck and her mother and daughter for his archive, telling him, “A hundred years from now you will still have a place in this history of which your descendants may well be proud.” That year, too, Madison Grant published The Conquest of a Continent: Or, The Expansion of Races in America, a “racial history” based on “scientific interpretation.” The book recommended “the absolute suspension of all immigration from all countries,” to be followed by the deportation of aliens.51
The Conquest of a Continent married eugenics as science and heredity as history: it was pseudoscientific pseudohistory. Popenoe, too, had become something of a historian. Over four years, he’d conducted Grant’s research. He’d also compiled the book’s bibliography.52 Unlike The Passing of a Great Race, though, The Conquest of a Continent met with a furious reception. Ruth Benedict, who had been a student of Boas’s, said the only difference between it and Nazi racial theory was that “in Germany they say Aryan in place of Nordic.” Boas attacked Grant in the New Republic; Melville Herskovits, another Boas student, attacked Grant in the Nation. The Anti-Defamation League said Conquest of a Continent was “even more destructive than Hitler’s Mein Kampf.”53
Popenoe pressed on, insisting in 1934 that Germany’s sterilization program had nothing to do with race: its aim was more the elimination of all “undesireable elements among the Aryans, whatever these are, than to hit any of the non-Aryan groups.”54 He also wrote about Mein Kampf admiringly, and at length: “Hitler himself—though a bachelor, has long been a convinced advocate of race betterment through eugenic measures.” He concluded, “The present German government has given the first example in modern times of an administration based frankly and determinedly on the principles of eugenics.”55
Prominent scientists took a different position. In 1936, Abraham Myerson, chair of the American Neurological Association’s Committee for the Investigation of Eugenical Sterilization, issued a report which found that “it is not true that the feeble-minded have large families or are more prolific than the general population, nor is this true of the insane”; in a letter to the New York Times, Myerson declared compulsory sterilization “futile,” not least because so very little was understood about the heritability of mental diseases. In 1937, Columbia University’s L. C. Dunn delivered a radio address condemning American immigration restriction and Germany’s sterilization campaign, both of which he attributed to the quackery of eugenics. “What can science do for democracy?” Dunn asked. “It can tell the people the truth about such misuses of the prestige of science.”56
There was room, too, for a quieter critique, not only about the quackery of eugenics but about human betterment and, more broadly, about science as the hobbyhorse of the age. In 1939, E. B. White visited the World’s Fair in New York while suffering from a cold. The fair’s theme was “The World of Tomorrow.” Its exhibits featured all sorts of futuristic contraptions. White was unimpressed. “When you can’t breathe through your nose,” he wrote, “Tomorrow seems strangely like the day before yesterday.”57
By the end of the 1930s, eugenics had faded from public view. David Starr Jordan, Madison Grant, and William McDougall had died. The American Eugenics Society and the Eugenic Research Association had closed shop. The Eugenics Record Office became the Genetics Record Office. The Journal of Heredity proclaimed its distate for eugenics and invited articles repudiating it.58
Popenoe pressed on. Not until the end of the Second World War did he stop publishing on racial purity, and then only begrudgingly, complaining in 1945, “When it comes to eugenics, the subject of ‘race’ sets off such tantrums in a lot of persons that one has to be very long-suffering!”59 The next year, at the Nuremberg trials, lawyers defending the Nazi doctors cited Madison Grant’s work. “My interest in eugenics is as keen as ever,” Popenoe wrote, privately, in 1949, “although most of the work I am doing is in a slightly different field.”60 Four years later, Ladies’ Home Journal began publishing “Can This Marriage Be Saved?”
The history of quackery is a book of many chapters. “Their romancing would not be worth noticing,” Darrow once wrote, “were it not for the fact that the public apparently takes it at face value.”61 In eighteenth-century London, troubled husbands and wives could pay fifty pounds a night to sleep in a “magnetico-electric” Celestial Bed.62 Some people will always think they know how to make other people’s marriages better, and, after a while, they’ll get to cudgeling you or selling you something; the really entrepreneurial types will sell you the cudgel. They’ll use whatever’s handy; Darwin’s an add-on. But he’s not just any add-on. The intellectual history of the last few centuries can be told as the story of the articulation, repudiation, and reassertion of scientific and especially of biological and hereditary explanations for just about everything, right down to who does the vacuuming. Scientific fantasies of marriage betterment did not end with the Second World War.
Paul Popenoe’s business launched an industry; marriage clinics popped up all over the country. The American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy, founded in 1942, had, as of 2010, twenty-four thousand members, although the actual number of therapists seeing couples was much higher.63 But while 80 percent of therapists practiced couples therapy, only 12 percent were licensed to do so.64 In 2010, 40 percent of would-be husbands and wives received premarital counseling, often pastoral, and millions of married couples sought therapy. Doubtless, many received a great deal of help, expert and caring. Nevertheless, a 1995 Consumer Reports survey ranked marriage counselors last, among all other providers of mental health services, in achieving results. And the rise of couples counseling both coincided with and contributed to a larger shift in American life: heightened expectations for marriage as a means of self-expression and personal fulfillment.65
“I have a pretty good marriage,” Elizabeth Weil wrote in a 2009 cover story for the New York Times Magazine, but “it could be better.” This is America. Why settle for pretty good? Weil and her husband sought the services of half a dozen therapists.66 Laurie Abraham’s 2010 book, The Husbands and Wives Club: A Year in the Life of a Couples Therapy Group, began as a cover story in the Times Magazine, too. (The book’s tagline—“Can These Marriages Be Saved?”—seemed to allude to Popenoe, but Abraham never mentioned him.) Abraham spent a year observing five couples undergoing group therapy with the Philadelphia clinician Judith Coché, whose work she admired. The group met for six-hour sessions, one weekend a month, including an annual Sex Weekend. Leigh and Aaron had been in Coché’s care for a decade; by the end of the year they had broken new ground: “they may still be using the vibrator more than she’d prefer but Aaron is ‘really there.’ ” Michael and Rachael had been discussing Michael’s desire to buy a motorcycle. Rachael was against it. Michael was angry. Coché explained, “Rachael is chastising herself for being too emotional and ‘overreacting,’ echoing her parents’ criticism of her; Michael is abruptly dropping his motorcycle dreams, capitulating rather than facing his wife’s disapproval and distress.” Later, Michael stated the problem differently: “ ‘Um, the trouble is,’ he says, ‘Rachael’s not a man.’ ” Between his first and second marriages, Michael slept with men. By the book’s epilogue, Rachael has had a baby. When Michael professed his love for his wife, “the therapist chuckles deeply. ‘That is so wonderful.’ ” Michael and Rachael hav
e “wondered whether they’d still be married without the group.” This reader wondered, too.67
That same year, Lori Gottlieb recounted her experience with computer dating in Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. (Popenoe launched computer dating—an “Electronic Cupid”—in 1956, on a UNIVAC.)68 Gottlieb was forty-one and a single mother. Determined to find a husband, she tried every possible matchmaking method, from speed dating to something called Cupid’s Coach to signing up with Evan Marc Katz, a “personal trainer for love,” who set about improving her marital fitness.69 “Understanding the science of marriage gives us a crystal ball of sorts,” wrote Tara Parker-Pope in For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage, also from 2010. Did you know that the first three minutes of an argument are the most important? That “strong marriages have at least a five-to-one daily ratio of positive to negative interactions,” so that “for every mistake you make, you need to offer five more good moments, kind words, and loving gestures to keep your marriage in balance”? Parker-Pope, the author of the Well blog for the New York Times, explained that she had investigated the work of “top scientists” because “the best insights about love and relationships are coming from the scientific community.” She cited a study titled “Ovulatory Cycle Effects on Tip Earnings by Lap Dancers” to argue that a woman shopping for a husband shouldn’t take the Pill, because it suppresses ovulation, and lap dancers command more tips when they’re ovulating. In a chapter titled “The Chore Wars,” Parker-Pope attributed the “Housework Gap” (men don’t clean) to heredity, since cutting-edge research has proven that “natural selection pressures resulted in neurobiological differences related to domestic skill.”70