The Great White Hope
Between the world wars, Southern California was a hotbed of eugenics activism. A Pasadena think tank with the Orwellian title of the Human Betterment Foundation lobbied for compulsory sterilization laws and forged a mutual admiration society with its counterparts in Nazi Germany. Professors from Caltech and USC worried about the high birthrate among Mexican “peon type” families. In Los Angeles, the Institute of Family Relations vetted young couples’ biological compatibility for marriage.
The proponents of eugenics were not obscure cranks but the best and brightest representatives of the small elite that dominated Southern California until the 1950s. The Human Betterment Foundation enjoyed the active support of banker Henry Robinson as well as social scientist William Munro and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Millikan, all of whom also served on the board of trustees of San Marino’s Huntington Library, one of the country’s most exclusive archives and a leading cultural institution of Southern California.
Eugenics found wide support in Europe and the United States from the last part of the 19th century through the first third of the 20th. It was based, according to its founder, English scientist Francis Galton, on a desire to improve the human stock by giving “the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.” Its earliest proponents in the United States used eugenics to promote their beliefs in the genetic superiority of Nordic civilizations over “backward” peoples, namely all others, and to express their anxiety about the degeneration of middle-class Aryans through a declining birthrate and miscegenation.
Though the movement to improve the human species through the scientific use of heredity ebbed in the wake of Nazism, it has been revived recently in debates on the racial basis of intelligence, sociobiology and human genetic engineering.
Between 1907 and 1940, more than 35,000 involuntary sterilizations were carried out by the U.S. government on poor women, mostly in California. But these efforts paled next to the deeds of the Nazi regime. Under the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, the Third Reich compulsorily sterilized about 400,000 victims, broadly categorized as “socially unfit by virtue of defective biology.” It was the top of a slippery slope that led to the killing of 100,000 mentally ill patients and then to the mass-produced butchery of millions. For eugenicists, sterilization was not so much a technical procedure to enhance physical and mental health as it was a way to cleanse the body politic of racial impurities.
“The Unfit” and “Building a Better Race” are useful but problematic additions to a growing revisionist literature on the topic. The canon under challenge was established by Mark Haller in his 1963 book “Eugenics” and in Daniel Kevles’ authoritative study, which appeared first as an essay in the New Yorker, then as a 1985 book, “In the Name of Eugenics.” Kevles argues that, by the mid-1930s, the right-wing version of eugenics “had generally been recognized as a farrago of flawed science.” After World War II, according to Kevles, biologists managed to repudiate Nazi pseudoscience and reestablish human genetics as a “solid field of science that would explain the complexities of human heredity and assist medicine by illuminating the relationship of genetics to disease.”
Feminist historian Wendy Kline and genetics expert Elof Axel Carlson take issue with the position that eugenics was a short-run fad. “The ‘golden age’ of eugenics,” argues Kline, “occurred long after most historians claim the movement had vanished.” They place their arguments in a grand sweep of history: Carlson from Deuteronomy to gene therapy, Kline from Teddy Roosevelt to family values, as her book places eugenics in turn of the century angst about changing gender roles and fears of “race suicide” by white middle-class Americans.
Carlson, who teaches biology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, looks at his profession’s moral responsibility for contributing to the myth of “degeneracy theory.” His book’s publisher, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, was home base for many years to Harry Laughlin, the “notorious representative” of eugenics, who was awarded an honorary doctorate in medicine by the University of Heidelberg in 1936 for his contributions to Nazi racial science.
The authors caution against a conspiracy-minded view of eugenics as a “unilateral conservative social movement.” Kline argues that it enjoyed broad appeal among reformers, feminists and professionals and that it was a “tenacious and popular ideology.” Carlson finds “many strange bedfellows” in its ranks.
This was certainly true in California. The Human Betterment Foundation also counted among its supporters banker Charles Goethe, Stanford University chancellor David Starr Jordan, Los Angeles Times Publisher Harry Chandler and self-taught biologist Paul Popenoe, who became famous for his advice in the Ladies’ Home Journal to readers asking, “Can This Marriage Be Saved?”
Kline and Carlson share the view that supporters of eugenics had a perverse obsession with regulating sexuality. To Carlson, it was male masturbation that “served as the first theory of degeneracy,” and he cites research done at an Indiana prison in the early 1900s by Harry Clay Sharp, a doctor who sterilized 176 men “solely for the purpose of relief from the habit of masturbation.” On the other side of the country at about the same time, reports Kline, psychologists and doctors tried everything from quarantine to sterilization to ensure that the licentious “feeble-minded” woman did not reproduce “high-grade morons.” By the 1930s, Dr. Robert Latou Dickinson, a leading eugenicist and former president of the American Gynecological Society, was advising his colleagues to consider sterilization for women with engorged genitalia, a sure sign of a propensity to “sexual pathology.”
Carlson quickly abandons the link between eugenics and sexuality. Kline, on the other hand, devotes her book to the insight that eugenics was aimed at containing women’s erotic independence and restricting their sexuality to reproduction. In the two years after the close of World War I, 30,000 “khaki-mad girls” were arrested near military bases in this country on suspicion of promiscuity and prostitution. For eugenicists in the 1920s, women classified as mentally ill “symbolized the danger of female sexuality unleashed” because they threatened to reproduce defective children.
In the 1940s, Kline continues, eugenicists reinvented themselves as family counselors, promoting “marriage and motherhood as a central goal of womanhood.” They drew upon the homophobic research of psychologist Lewis Terman “to create rigid standards of masculinity and femininity as a way of shoring up traditional gender roles and family patterns.” By the 1980s, Kline concludes, the New Right’s campaign for “pro-life, pro-chastity, and pro-motherhood” represented an updated version of the old eugenics agenda. She notes that in the front ranks of today’s campaign for responsible fatherhood is sociologist David Popenoe, son of the leading American eugenicist of the 1920s, whom she says inherited part of his father’s obsession with “reproductive morality.”
Kline has a powerful argument that today’s right-wing preoccupation with family morality is rooted in the eugenics movement of the 1920s. She weakens it, however, with sparse and selective evidence. She makes a point of stressing that her analysis is relationship-based, not focused only on women. But, except for a brief discussion of homosexuality, men’s sexuality is not addressed. Kline asserts, no doubt correctly, that eugenics had a “powerful appeal to generations of Americans,” but she fails to show how it achieved popular acceptance. More significant, after promising that her book will address “anxieties about race and gender” in the eugenics movement, Kline abandons one of those two goals. We learn, for instance, little about the racist assumptions of eugenics or how sterilization policies were differentially applied nationwide or about the staggering numbers of Puerto Rican and American Indian women who were sterilized in the 1960s and 1970s.
The authors diverge in their approach and conclusions. Carlson’s folksy prose brims with irrelevant detours, rambling footnotes and idiosyncratic opinion. (For some reason he thinks this country is “largely a classless society.”) As a biologist and amateur historian, he should not be expected to be familiar with arcane journal articles, but there is no excuse for ignoring the last decade’s scholarship on eugenics. By contrast, Kline promises more than she delivers. Her slim 164 pages of text do not provide enough texture and evidence to back up her thesis. Because her insightful theoretical framework is draped over rather than integrated into her analysis, the reader is required to read between too many lines. Pity, because her core idea is provocative and her research opens up new lines of investigation. The strength of Kline’s book is that it makes connections in social policy we might otherwise miss. It alerts us to the thread of continuity from Victorian doctors who feared that it had become “sex o’clock in America,” to proponents of “family values” hawking the dangers of moral decay. I am much more persuaded by Kline’s wake-up call than I am by Carlson’s reassurance that “we have taken charge of our health, of our reproduction, of our psyches.”
