Alina Utrata
HISTORY 209S
February 28, 2016
Stanford University and California’s Forced Sterilization Program
Between 1909 and 1979, California forcibly sterilized more than 20,000 people it deemed racially inferior. It was the most effective sterilization program in the country, accounting for nearly a third of all forced sterilizations conducted in the United States. The California laws allowed health and government officials to review cases of persons who were committed to state institutions to deem if they should be sterilized, with or without their consent. Two-thirds of those sterilized had been committed to asylums for symptoms ranging from schizophrenia to bipolar disorder to hysteria. The remaining third were those deemed “feebleminded”—which in practice meant anyone with an IQ of less than seventy.
In the past year, the Palo Alto school district has become enmeshed in a controversy upon the discovery that Stanford University President David Starr Jordan and Stanford psychology professor Lewis Terman—whom the Jordan and Terman Middle School were named after—were involved in the forced sterilization program. Some students and concerned members of the community have signed a petition demanding the school district rename the schools because of the men’s support of the program.
The involvement of Stanford University faculty in a forced sterilization program complicates the legacy of men who we most remember for their work in classifying fish, pacifism, education and intelligence research and marital happiness. So how was Stanford University involved in California’s forced sterilization program? And can these men be condemned for their support?
There were three key figures at Stanford University who were linked in some way to the forced sterilization program: Paul Popenoe, a Stanford transfer student; Lewis Madison Terman, a professor of psychology; and David Starr Jordan, the first president and chancellor of the University. All three men were members of the Human Betterment Foundation, a society created to support the forced sterilization program. And all three men made unique contributions to enable the possibility of sterilization. Popenoe supplied the propaganda; Terman, the scientific underpinning; and Jordan, the legitimacy.
David Starr Jordan, Lewis Terman, and Paul Popenoe were not evil scientists plotting world domination in the high towers of Stanford University. As the title “Human Betterment Society” indicates, they—along with other proponents of forced sterilization—believed that they were improving human society. The forced sterilization program was predicted on eugenics, or the belief that human characteristics were hereditary. By sterilizing certain members of the population, they thought that they could remove genes that caused mental illness and mental deficiency. But while the belief in eugenics justified a forced sterilization campaign on the one hand, it also motivated programs that by today’s standards we would judge as positive: pacifism, birth control, and marriage counseling.
These men believed in eugenics. They truly believed that intelligence, work ethic and other human characteristics were hereditary, even though today we take it as common fact that this is not true. But does the belief in a flawed ideology excuse the harmful consequences like forced sterilization program? And are positive outcomes still commendable when they are justified by a flawed ideology? Should we really white-wash our history of these figures, without critically examining the role they played in society at the time and how their work has influenced us today?
Rather than condemning the past, the involvement of our founders in the program should force us to question our own complicity in accepted beliefs and assumptions today. What are our flawed beliefs and policies that will future generations will condemn us for accepting? While today we reject eugenist notion about the heredity of intelligence, we clearly do base many of our policies on the assumption that those who are more intelligent, fit, beautiful, or other characteristics are better and more desirable than those who are not. Is the sterilization program disturbing because we reject the notion of valuing individuals based on their characteristics and contributions to society, or is it because the program reflects our current beliefs in their extreme form?
Lewis Terman
Since he was a small child, Lewis Terman was obsessed with intelligence. The future principal and Stanford psychologist was born in 1877 in rural Indiana, the twelfth of fourteen children. Distinguishing himself amidst such a large family was difficult for Terman, until he proved himself to be an avid student. Surrounded by physically superior relatives and friends, Terman dedicated himself to his studies, attending a teacher’s college near his hometown, then Indiana University, and then finally completing his PhD at Clark University in Massachusetts. His dissertation was a study of the physical and mental abilities of smart and dull children.
Among his many accomplishments, Terman is known for proving that intelligent children are not generally sickly and weak, but on average have the same physical abilities as other children. He may have had something personal to prove: Terman suffered from tuberculosis, and in 1905 had to move west because of his poor health. Terman, his wife, and their two children moved to southern California, where Terman worked as a teacher and then a principal. Then, in 1910, came the offer that would change his and thousands of other lives to come: a position at Stanford University. By the end of his tenure, Lewis Terman would dramatically shift the way America thought about intelligence.
When Terman came to Stanford, the eugenics movement was already in full-swing. Drawing upon the work of Charles Darwin, the eugenicists believed that human characteristics—including work ethic, disposition, and intelligence—were hereditary. These men of science argued that humans should take breeding offspring into consideration, much like breeding horses or dogs, since who reproduced with whom would ultimately determine the characteristics of their children—and society in general. The idea had gained great popularity among the elite intelligentsia in America at the turn of the century. David Starr Jordan, who was finishing up his tenure as president when Terman joined the Stanford faculty, was a well-renowned eugenicist, and the first Committee on Eugenics of the American Breeder's Association.
For Terman, the most important component of eugenics was the implication that human characteristics, like intelligence, were inherited and therefore unlikely to change significantly after birth. And that meant that it was possible to quantify intelligence. This became the focus of Terman’s research at Stanford: how to classify people based on intelligence. In 1915, Terman released the first version of the Stanford-Binet test, today more commonly known as the IQ test. With this 50 minute test, Terman claimed he could determine an individual’s “intelligence quotient”, a measure of their intelligence which would stay constant through that individual’s life. The test was a combination of oral and written questions measured test-takers ability in various categories. The final calculated score was a reflection of the individual’s “mental age”—or how their intelligence compared to the intelligence of other people in their age group. So a twelve-year old with the mental ability of an average nine-year-old would have an IQ of 75.
When Terman published his IQ test, many individuals and organizations were excited about the potential applications for such a test. IQ testing, or variations of it, were applied to everything from college admissions to job applications. The US War Department even requested Terman advise them on implementing the test for recruitment and promotions in the military. But there was one particular program that was looking at Terman’s work with interest: the forced sterilization program.
In 1909, California passed its first forced sterilization law; the legislation allowed the compulsory sterilization of individuals in state institutions who suffered from hereditary mental illness, or schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and dementia. They believed that in order to prevent these diseases from spreading, and to prevent children from being raised by unsuitable parents, they had to sterilized the mentally ill. But, in 1917, California expanded the law to apply to “all those suffering from perversion of marked departures from normal mentality” or “feebleminded” individuals.
It was no accident that the law had been changed just two years after Terman published his intelligence test. Terman had been working several years on how to use his IQ test to identify “feebleminded” people. Feebleminded individuals were “so incorrigible and so lacking in inhibitions, that they cannot be trusted to return to citizenship in the outside world.” Their intelligence levels were so low that they were unable to support themselves. A Human Betterment Foundation publication claimed that there are “at least 1,000,000 persons in the United states are so feebleminded as to need special care and supervision.” When no appropriate relative or husband, in the case of feebleminded women, existed to support these individuals, the state would have to institutionalize them.
The challenge existed in systematically identifying these feebleminded individuals. How to do it? Terman had the answer: his IQ test! In 1914, he assisted with implementing a version of his IQ at the Sonoma State Home, a California institution for people with mental disabilities. Terman’s research was critical in determining the different degrees of feeblemindedness: “morons”, who could almost function normally in society; “imbeciles” who could function at the level of a four year old; and “idiots” who were severely retarded and unable to speak.
With the advent of these classifications, the forced sterilization program could expand from targeting just the mentally insane to the mentally deficient. The IQ test allowed the state to systematically identify not just feebleminded individuals, but those who could almost function in society if they were properly supervised. As a Human Betterment Foundation text explained:
“Here is a man below the border line of normal intellect, whose family is being increased at the rate of a child every year or two, while his jobs remains as casual as ever. Any social worker can predict the future; he gets discouraged and simply walks out, abandoning his family, which is thenceforth supported by the country charities which, for convenience and economy, separate the children from the mother so that she can work to support herself, while the children are placed around wherever homes can be found for them. That home is gone. But if the husband or wife is sterilized before this happens, the home will be maintained.”
Clearly, this implies that proponents of the forced sterilization program did not view “feebleminded people” with the agency to decide whether or not to be a good parent and embrace or avoid responsibility. Like their intelligence, their choices were predetermined by heredity. If properly assisted, however, this “top brass” of feebleminded individuals could function normally in society and would not have to be institutionalized—if only they could be prevented from having children. With Terman’s test, state institutions could identify these people, sterilize them, and then release them on parole. It was the IQ test that allowed the state to identify and sterilize mentally deficient individuals.
After 1917, the state began using Terman’s Stanford-Binet test to identify feebleminded individuals. After implementing the test, the medical superintendent could recommend the sterilization of any patient. If the recommendation was approved by the Director of the State Department of Institutions, the procedure was legally compulsory. Research by the Human Betterment Society wrote that anyone with an IQ under 70 was eligible for sterilization.
From a modern day perspective, it is not entirely clear who exactly feebleminded individuals were and how we would refer to them today. The group probably included individuals who in today’s terminology we would say have learning disabilities. However, it also probably included a number of individuals we would not necessarily have considered, for want of a better word, disabled. For example, a number of women committed to state institutions had been classified as “sexually delinquent”. Sexually delinquent woman, as the Human Betterment Foundation described, are “oversexed, feebly inhibited, lacks other interests, and [are] not merely a ready prey to unscrupulous males, but too often [themselves] an aggressor in this field.” This usually meant a woman of lower socioeconomic status who had engaged in pre-martial sex, or had simply exhibited sexual desire. Feebleminded men often seemed to be described simply as men who could not find work or employment. But what is abundantly clear overall is that they were disproportionately from the lower-classes.
That the Stanford-Binet test generally predicted the IQ of lower class individuals to be significantly less than the upper classes was not exactly news to to proponents of forced sterilization, nor to Terman himself. Terman conducted a study on gifted children and found that: “The professional class, which provides only 3% of the sterilized patients and 1% of the retarded children, produces 54% of the very bright children. On the other hand the unskilled and semiskilled laborer’s, who produce 46% of the sterilized feebleminded and 55% of the retarded children in LA schools, furnish only 1% of the very bright children.” These findings did not cause Terman to pause, or question the design of his test, but rather were confirmation that the upper echelons of society had got there because of their superior genes—and the lower classes were poor because of their inferior heredity.
In the next few decades, Terman’s IQ tests would be criticized for exactly that—failing to take into account the possibility that environment influenced intelligence. The entrenched advantages of upper-class students—like better school systems, access to tutoring, and highly educated parents—allowed them to perform better on the test; and not, as Terman’s test implied, some inborn quality passed on through generations. The test has also been criticized for not taking into account different forms of intelligence—some people argue creativity and “people smarts” are not measured. But regardless, the IQ test and its derivatives still have a significant impact on our lives today—most people in America will take some form of an intelligence test, whether it be the IQ test or the SAT. And for the next several decades, the intelligence test would form the basis of who was sterilized and who was not.
Paul Popenoe
In 1925, Ezra Seymour Gosney, a businessman in the California citrus industry, was riding high. He owned the largest lemon grove in California; he was the director of various banks, trusts, and corporations; and he had made his fortune in Pasadena. Then he met Paul Popenoe, who told him about something that was going to change the world: California’s sterilization program.
Every program needs a propagandist, and Paul Popenoe was perfect for the job. The young Popenoe was born in Topeka, Kansas in 1888. When he was twelve Popenoe’s father, an avocado farmer, got into some financial difficulties—so the Popenoes moved out west, one of the first families to settle in the southern California town of Pasadena. Popenoe’s son later reminisces, “[Pasadena] was made up mainly of Midwesterners . . . What an era it must have been—an upright and hardworking people with a sense of unlimited progress in one of the most beautiful places on earth.” For Paul Popenoe, progress certainly did seem unlimited. In 1906, he began school at Occidental College, but his junior year transferred to Stanford University. Although he was an English major, Popenoe was very interested in biology—so he enrolled in a class with the university chancellor, David Starr Jordan. The topic was eugenics.
Popenoe was inspired by Jordan—along with his hero, Charles Darwin—and became fascinated by the issues and applications of heredity. Unfortunately, the next year Popenoe had to return home to care for his ailing father. He would never officially graduate from University, but in 1929 Occidental College granted him an honorary degree.
In 1913, Popenoe was offered a position as the editor of the Journal of Heredity. Unfortunately, when WWI broke out, Popenoe was inducted into the military. He served as captain in charge of vice and liquor control, perhaps an appropriate position for someone described as a “Kansas Republican and Victorian moralist” and who “around women was awkward and shy.” (Apparently he retained a lifelong aversion to the word “daddy” after prostitutes used to cat-call him as “sugar daddy”.) His interest in eugenics continued and in 1918 he co-authored a popular college textbook called “Applied Eugenics.”
In 1925, Popenoe met E.S. Gosney, a fellow Pasadena-native, and pitched to him his next project: collecting data on California’s forced sterilization program and its effectives on human society. Gosney agreed to finance the project. By 1926, Gosney had become so taken with the idea of sterilization that he decided to establish a whole foundation dedicated to supporting the program. It was called the Human Betterment Society and its goal was to “investigate the possibilities for race betterment by eugenic sterilization and to publish the results.” Popenoe was to be the secretary.
The first order of business was to get their research published. In the first years, they focused on writing a series of papers in scientific journals and a comprehensive book about the progress and effects of the sterilization program thus far. In 1928, when the Human Betterment Foundation was officially established, the forced sterilization program had already been operating for almost twenty years. By 1929, when Popenoe and Gosney published their first book on the program, the state had already sterilized about 6,000. By 1979, the number would be over 20,000.
After the initial publications were finished, Popenoe and Gosney needed to find men of stature to join their foundation. ES Gosney, perhaps through Popenoe, knew the Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman. Terman was one of the first members of the Human Betterment Foundation. Popenoe and Gosney wrote to Terman for his scientific advice and had him review their publications. But most importantly, Lewis Terman was instructed to ask David Starr Jordan and then president Ray Wilbur to join the Human Betterment Society. (Wilbur declined; Jordan joined, but under circumstances describe later.)
It was Popenoe who was responsible for writing the propaganda to convince people of the value of the forced sterilization program. The arguments made by Popenoe and the Human Betterment Foundation were designed to appeal to an elite audience of educated men who believed in eugenics. Popenoe explained the problem in one of the Human Betterment Foundation’s pamphlets: “More clearly than ever, the facts stood out: the multiplication of the feebleminded, so much more rapid than that of the most intelligent and best educated people in the community; the destructive results of parenthood in families handicapped by mental disease; the effectiveness of sterilization, from all points of view, in meeting the problems presented by this facts.”
The arguments that Popenoe made in the Human Betterment Foundation publications were designed to appeal to the elite intelligentsia. First, he pointed out the economic cost to society because of the need to support mentally ill and feebleminded people. He explains, “Births among families living on public charity have increased as much as 30% to 50% in recent years . . . The burden of taxation due to the mentally diseased and mentally defective, is at the same time steadily mounting.” Popenoe includes all sorts of statistics—like the cost of running mental institutions and the number of “feebleminded” individuals who had to depend on the state—to make the argument that mentally diseased and deficient individuals were costing the state, and therefore taxpayers, money. If the state could sterilize some of them, and allow them to leave the institution and support themselves financially, it would reduce the burden on the state.
Secondly, Popenoe pointed out the genetic dangers of allowing the feebleminded and mentally ill to reproduce. Since the eugenically inferior were reproducing at such a faster rate than the eugenically superior, human society faced a real danger of the proliferation of inferior genes. This was a particular problem faced in modern life, as Popenoe explains: “In modern civilizations, where the weak and helpless are protected so carefully, it is not possible to depend on Nature to solve this problem of the survival of the unfit.” However, the sterilization program would allow the state to eradicate, or at least reduce, the inferior genes. Popenoe quotes a famous eugenist in one of his pamphlets who claimed that “if all the known feebleminded in such a population as that under consideration could be sterilized for one completely generation, the amount of known feeblemindedness in the next generation would probably be reduced by 36%”. Society at large would benefit from the sterilization of these individuals.
But the program was not purely for the benefit of society, Popenoe claimed, but would also benefit the individual. People who had been destined for institutions could now be set free without fear of recidivism. The sterilization program allowed them to return home “without danger of producing handicapped children . . . [and] thus keeps homes together by removing the threat of defective offspring.”
It would also remove a burden from families who had to protect these individuals and provide mentally defective individuals.
In fact, Popenoe claimed that many patients or their relatives of patients requested the sterilization procedure. For example, Popenoe tells the story of one fifteen-year-old girl “with the mind of a three-year old” whose “parents believed her quite safe in her own home, when they occasionally went out . . . on one such occasions she was raped by a delivery man, and gave birth to a child, whereupon she was sent to Sonoma to be sterilized.” Popenoe attempts to paint this story of a girl who is so incompetent that she is unable to make her own decisions, and thus requires care and protection from the state. However, a different interpretation of the story can be inferred from a footnote in her file which noted that her parents had complained she was “fond of men.” Here was a girl who did not conform to the sexual mores of society: The paternalistic state therefore had to sterilize her in order to prevent her future sexual deviance. As Lewis Terman commented, “every feeble-minded woman is a potential prostitute.”
In fact, a large part of the criticism of the forced sterilization program was that people believed it would increase “sexual deviancy” among those who were sterilized, who now had no fear from pregnancy. Popenoe takes care to address this criticism, saying that “sterilization has been followed by a marked decrease in sex offenses.” This is not simply because of the procedure, but because sterilized individuals in institutions were given “educational discipline” while in the institution and then “supervision” when released. In general, sterilized patients released from institutions were paroled, and required to check in with a state official, for three years after their release who could monitor their behavior and re-commit them if deemed necessary.
Notably, Popenoe’s arguments for the forced sterilization program were targeted towards the elite intelligentsia who would be implementing the program, and not the lower-classes who were experiencing it. His propaganda pieces therefore tapped into the fears of the upper-classes during the Progressive era. These elites were were watching birth rates decline among the white upper-middle classes at the same time that birth rates among lower-class, ethnic minorities were increasing. As Popenoe points out, “What kind of families are producing the feebleminded who have been sterilized in California? Statistical calculations indicate that this stock is multiplying nearly twice as fast as is the native-white population of the state in general.” It was the non-white and foreign-born population who were producing these feebleminded people.
The perceived rapid increase of the lower classes threatened many upper-class individuals way of life. The lower-classes, and those being sterilized, were disproportionately ethnic minorities and immigrants (which included non-white immigrants, but also the Irish and Eastern Europeans). While the upper-classes clung to their bourgeois and neo-Victorian values, they felt threatened by the lower classes who would not conform to their social or sexual norms and at the same time worried about declining birth rates among educated white women. The arguments put forward by Popenoe and the Human Betterment Foundation resonated among the elites because it tapped into their fears about the changing society.
There was no mass popular movement for the forced sterilization program, but rather a small circle of elite eugenicists who advocated the policy. In fact, the only public group who actively opposed the forced sterilization program were American Catholics. After Paul Popenoe, himself a secular humanist, commented that the Pope had not officially stated anything about sterilization, the Pope Pius II publicly stated that “the aims of eugenics were good but that the means of putting them into effect were sometimes evil.”
However, it was also important to note that not all eugenicists supported forced sterilization. Most eugenicists in this era believed in “positive eugenics,” which was focused on making sure eugenically superior people bred with other eugenically superior people and thus ensure the survival of superior genes. “Negative eugenics,” on the other hand, was focused on preventing births among eugenically inferior populations and eradicating inferior genes. Not all people who believed in positive eugenic policies necessarily believed in negative eugenics. The eugenics community did not form a consensus about the forced sterilization movement, in California or in other states.
Therefore, Popenoe’s propaganda was very important in convincing people about the benefits of forced sterilization. For example, New York’s Public Health chairman Jacob Landes said after reading Popenoe’s book in 1930, “even those of us who feel that sterilization is a rather crude method of dealing with individuals will have to change their opinions on reading this work.” In fact, one of the reasons that California’s program was so large compared to other states was because there was a confluence of well-placed government officials intellectuals who supported the program. This may have in large part been due to Paul Popenoe and the Human Betterment Foundation’s work.
These two Stanford men, Paul Popenoe and Lewis Terman, significantly shaped California's forced sterilization program: Terman supplied the scientific underpinnings, and Popenoe provided the propaganda.
David Starr Jordan
Finally we arrive at the last Stanford University figure we can trace to California’s forced sterilization program: University president and chancellor David Starr Jordan. In literature on the eugenics movement, it is often mentioned in passing that Jordan believed in the forced sterilization program. And while some evidence exists to suggest that Jordan was a supporter the program, it is not entirely clear the nuance behind his opinions or his role in the program.
Jordan did certainly know Lewis Terman and Paul Popenoe. Jordan refers Paul Popenoe as “one of his disciples” in his autobiography, although what this meant in practice is unclear. Lewis Terman was a professor in psychology department and, as a fellow eugenist, he and Jordan were involved in many similar societies. It was Lewis Terman who—on instructions from ES Gosney—asked David Starr Jordan to join the Human Betterment Foundation.
Jordan’s membership in the Human Betterment Foundation is the strongest piece of evidence of his support for the forced sterilization program, and the basis of many of contemporary historians’ claims of his belief in sterilization. Jordan was one of the incorporating members and remained on the board of trustees until his death in 1931. But what remains unclear is Jordan’s actual involvement in the Human Betterment Foundation. When E.S. Gosney instructed Lewis Terman to ask Jordan to join the Foundation in 1928, Jordan was 77. He initially declined to join the Foundation on account of his ill health; he was “having serious trouble with one eye and cannot read any book at present, calling in a student to read for me where it is necessary.” Gosney immediately wrote back to Terman instructing him to tell Jordan that “there is no financial or personal responsibility attached to the position of member or a trustee, and we will allow [Jordan] to resign from the Board of Trustees and as a member.” Indeed, the only reason Jordan may have joined at all, as Gosney put to Terman rather awkwardly, was that “we [the Human Betterment Foundation] took the liberty to place [Jordan’s] name in our articles of incorporation as one of the trustees and if he does not sign . . . [the articles] will have to be re-written and all of the signatures again obtained . . . and I think these explanations would necessarily call out in some cases references to Dr. Jordan’s health which the family would wish to avoid.”
Jordan did, obviously, end up signing and remained a member of the Board of Trustees. But the question remains as to how aware Jordan actually was of the organizations activities. Starting in late 1928, the year the Human Betterment Society was founded, Jordan had in fact begun removing himself from other societies due to his ill health. Popenoe’s report of a Trustee meeting in 1930 does not mention Jordan as being present, even though all other listed Trustees were. And although Popenoe thanks Jordan among others for his review of the book “Forced Sterilization for Human Betterment” in 1929, Jordan had previously written to him, “As to reading the book, I have the greatest confidence that Mr. Popenoe knows all I know or think or a great deal more and unless you wish me to examine it as a matter of form.”
The interest of Popenoe and Gosney in including Jordan in their organization seems to be motivated by the desire to the Human Betterment Society with some legitimacy. Jordan was a well-respected eugenist and scientist, and the forced sterilization program was not unanimously cheered by the eugenics community when Popenoe and Gosney began their work. There may have been an effort to use Jordan’s reputation to promote their work. For example, Popenoe and Gosney included a photo of David Starr Jordan in a report about the Foundation in 1928, despite the fact that he did not appear to have contributed to the publication in any way nor was any of his work quoted. This was clearly an attempt to link Jordan to the work of the Human Betterment Society. It is unclear how much Jordan—old, busy and in failing health—was aware of their activities.
There are some things that one can conclude definitively about Jordan’s opinions on heredity. He was a eugenist, a founding member of the Eugenics Commission of the American Breeders Association. He did believed that human breeding affected the character of the human race; but this belief—rather than causing him to advocate for sterilization—lead him to become a leading crusaders for pacifism and peace throughout his life. Jordan wrote three books—The Blood of a Nation, The Human Harvest, and War and the Breed—numerous articles and countless speeches about how war destroys human society through eugenic means. War and eugenics, Jordan claims, can explain the decline of ancient Roman Empire. At war with the Greeks, the Roman “who was bold enough to rise politically was almost without exception thrown to the ground. Only cowards remained, and from their brood came forward the new generation.” By sending the fittest and best men to die in battle, the only men who remained to reproduce at home were the “cowards” or the eugenically inferior. War, then, deteriorated the human race.
Jordan was through his whole life an ardent pacifist, even up to and during the first World War, even when he was vilified and faced much political pressure for his beliefs. As World Peace Foundation and president of the World Peace Congress, Jordan gave countless lectures urging America not to join the war. When America eventually did join in the fight, Jordan encountered significant public backlash and was suspected of having pro-German sentiments. In 1917, when Jordan was giving an anti-war speech in Baltimore, a mob chased him out of the lecture hall screaming “Hang Dave Jordan in a Sour Apple Tree.” His pacifist activism affected his relations with Stanford University as well—the University chose not to renew his term as chancellor in 1916 and he was forced to distance himself from the University. The animosity towards Jordan was not because of his belief in eugenics, but rather because pacifism during WWI in America was viewed as almost treasonous.
To be sure, Jordan was a believer in the benefits of positive eugenics, or measures that would encourage the intelligent classes to breed. He once entertained the notion of becoming the director of an organization created by eugenicists in Colorado that would host and promote Better Baby Contests. Better Baby Contests, which had become incredibly popular in Colorado, allowed eugenically fit mothers to show off their children and were intended to “educate the public on the importance of heredity and better breeding.” (Perhaps it was better for his scientific credentials that the Stanford president would not be remembered for organized what were essentially baby beauty pageants.) Jordan was also a support of the Cummins-Vaile bill, a proposal put forth by the Voluntary Parenthood League which would remove decriminalize distributing information about contraception. While his “greatest objection to the movement for birth control is that those who should most profit by it will never hear of it,” Jordan still maintained that there was “no reason why our government should not permit knowledge of any kind to be obtained. Everyone should be his own judge on his own knowledge.”
Indeed, the fallibly of government is an argument that Jordan put forth in 1911 against forced sterilization government programs. In his book The Heredity of Richard Roe, Jordan writes: “The public must give the individual the benefit of every doubt, for its own machinery of police officers, Justices of the Peace, and guardians of the poor is not above reproach. The defective has, at least, the right to be judged by a jury of his peers, before he is condemned to celibacy or to the quasi-sterilization known as vasectomy. In these matters, the state cannot take a radical position until its own methods are assured to be the methods of impartial science.” Jordan seemed to be cautious of implementing government programs to sterilize citizens because of potential flaws in the implementation and the underlying science.
But Jordan does not discount entirely the possibility of preventing births through other means among “defective” individuals. Indeed, some of his travels seemed to have imparted on him the wisdom of such prevention measures: for example, he wrote in his autobiography Days of a Man of his experience with the cretins of Aosta. Cretins were, as Jordan described them, individuals in the Alpine regions who were “a type of idiot . . . always associated with goiter, a swelling of degenerated thyroid glands . . . [a condition which] seems to be hereditary.” After visiting this region several times in the late 1800s and noting the burden these cretins imposed on the community, Jordan returned twenty years later in 1910 to discover that the cretins had completely disappeared. Jordan describes:
“To my astonishment I was informed that all the cretins and many of the goitrous had been then gathered into the asylum, which complete segregation of the sexes. Every child in a near-by orphanage was bright and alert, with no touch of the taint. I inspected the beggars standing in a row at the railway station—weak, inconsequential, but not cretins. Cretinism, like other forms of feeblemindedness, is descended from its own. Its plain remedy lies in segregation, the guarantee that each individual shall be the last of his generation.”
This anecdote implies that Jordan did see value in negative eugenics—that preventing certain people from reproducing could have positive effects on the general population. But here Jordan advocates, like many other eugenicists, for segregation and not sterilization.
To some extent the question remains, did the distinction between segregation and sterilization really matter? Jordan still believed in eugenically superior people and advocated programs based on eugenics. Did it matter if, at the end of his life, Paul Popenoe convinced him to take one step further and support sterilization?
Regardless, what is abundantly clear from Jordan’s papers is that sterilization did not take up much of Jordan’s time. Popenoe and Terman both dedicated significant amounts of their studies and energy to the question of sterilization; Jordan, on the other hand, was more concerned with pacifism, ichthyology, the running of Stanford University, and his other scientific pursuits—as well as the publication of some of his poems. In 1928, his eye infection and poor health were at the forefront of his mind, and not the work of the Human Betterment Foundation. While Jordan may have cautiously supported sterilization, he was not a pioneer nor a crusader of the field—so the footnote to the Stanford president’s life about being a proponent of sterilization may not have been entirely deserved through his own work, but rather were the result of the maneuverings of Paul Popenoe and ES Gosney.
From Forced Sterilization to Marriage Equality
In the end, eugenics became less popular in America after WWII. This was not entirely due to Hitler’s policies and the Holocaust. While the Nazi regime probably did give some eugenicists pause, many American eugenicists continued to argue that sterilization was “helping” the unfit, not trying to wipe them out. Indeed, in 1945, Congressman Jed Johnson advocated for forcibly sterilizing the Japanese-Americans in the internment camps (something that would certainly have constituted genocide). Rather, in the 1950s and 1960s, eugenics went out of fashion as more and more studies showed that intelligence, and other human characteristics, were inherited by complicated mechanism—and that environment could shape humans just as much, if not more than, genetics.
This revelation proved that intelligence could not be measured with things like the IQ test. In the past few decades, the validity of the IQ test has faced heavy criticism, even as it continues to be used among researchers and the public. General scientific consensus points to the fact that the low IQs of the working class in California may not have been a reflection of their inferior genes, but due to the fact that they had less access to education.
Negative eugenics, or eradicating certain traits, has also been proven to be more complicated than previously thought. Further scientific research has proven that even human traits are caused by multiple genes and complicated processes, and that eradicating certain genes was not as easy as it sounds. A recent modeling by a SCHOOL professor found that even if humans were to systematically kill every human with blue eyes, it would take NUMBER of years before blue eyes were eradicated entirely from the gene pool.
But by the time these realizations came, the Stanford men had already moved on. David Starr Jordan passed away in 1931, from heart disease. The Human Betterment Society was disbanded in YEAR, due the financial difficulties of ES Gosney. And Popenoe and Terman had made a career-switch from forced sterilization into martial happiness.
In 1930, the same year the sterilization book was published, Popenoe had established the American Institute of Family Relations, which was “the first organized attempt in the United States to bring all the resources of science to bear on the promotion of successful family life.” In essence, Popenoe became the first marriage counselor. By the 1940s, Popenoe was a huge hit—with his own TV and Radio show in which he would invite couples onto his show and, almost Dr. Phil style, work out their problems with them. The Ladies’ Home Journal regularly featured articles written by him, with sexy titles like “Make Your Quarrels Pay Dividends”, “Give the First Baby Second Place,” “Make Jealousy Work for You,” and “Now is the Time to Have Children”. Popenoe was nicknamed “the man who saved marriage.”
Essentially what Popenoe had done was to switch from focusing on negative eugenics to focusing on positive eugenics. Worried by the rising divorce rate among the eugenically superior, Popenoe’s crusade was now focused on making sure that eugenically fit couples stayed together and reproduced. His Institute drew from the exact same crowd that was supporting the forced sterilization research—ES Gosney provided the initial financial assistance for the Institute.
Popenoe’s colleague Lewis Terman had also turned towards positive eugenics. In 1934, Terman was beginning study about martial-happiness, and he wrote to Popenoe for help. “At present in American about one in marriage in five needs in divorce. Will you not contribute your “bit” to help us in our attempt to locate some of the causes of so much domestic unhappiness?” Popenoe agreed, and administered Terman’s survey to 800 couples in LA affiliated with his institute. Again, Terman provided the scientific underpinnings for Popenoe’s work.
Terman found that, contrary to the contemporary literature, personality and background of partners predicted happiness in marriage more than sexual compatibility. He listed traits of men and women that predicted their happiness in marriage: men most likely to be happy have “an even and stable emotional tone” are more cooperative, have an “equalitarian” attitude toward women, and have a “a greater tendency to take responsibility, and greater willingness to give close attention to detail in their daily work.” Women who were happily married had “kindly attitudes . . . do not easily take offense . . .d o not object to subordinate roles and are not annoyed by advice from others.” Popenoe pulled from Terman’s research to make his recommendations to married couples. Popenoe advocated equality in marriage, telling men to “spend more time at home, to be more attuned to their wives’ sexual desires during love-making, and to assume a larger share of responsibility for childrearing.” If they could increase martial satisfaction, upper-class white families would reproduce and have more eugenically superior babies.
Although the work was not as chilling and was slightly more glamorous than the forced sterilization program, the goal was the same: human betterment. The belief in eugenics and racial purity that had led Terman and Popenoe to the forced sterilization program now led them into the marriage counseling industry.
Judging Retrospectively
Notably, biographers of the three Stanford men don’t seem keen to focus on their involvement on the forced sterilization program. Popenoe’s son wrote a book about his father’s life, but only mentions the Institute of Family Relations—sterilization, ES Gosney and the Human Betterment Society are not mentioned once. Terman is best remembered for the IQ test and his longitudinal study of gifted children, affectionately known as “Termites”. David Starr Jordan is best remembered for his role in ensuring the survival of Stanford University, his pacifism, and his work classifying of fish.
So how do we think about judging these men, if we can judge them at all? What were they really guilty for? Which of their actions are they morally culpable for and which can we excuse or mitigate because of the social context and beliefs of the time period?
Perhaps we can blame these men for not taking the evidence that intelligence may not be solely based on heredity seriously enough. In January 1939, ES Gosney wrote to Lewis Terman about Dr. Skeels’s work at Iowa University, in which he claims to “have demonstrated that feeble minds can be brought up to average by their nursery school program and that the average can be made into the exceptionally brilliant.” Terman dismisses these as “preposterous contributions” and “not backed up by data at all convincing”. These men of science should have more carefully considered other work which would have undermined their assumptions before recommending state policy.
But what is it about the sterilization program that causes us to feel so appalled and to argue they do not deserve to have schools named after them? Is it because the three men made arguments about the improvement of society, when we value the individual? We come from a culture that has rejected fascism, and enshrines in our constitution individual liberties? That we reject any program that would impose a limit on our freedoms? But there are plenty of examples of programs which limit our liberties which do not provoke the same sense of revulsion in us as does forced sterilization.
Is it because we have rejected the idea of valuing an individual based on specific characteristics as immoral? That we should accept all people regardless of beauty, intelligence, fitness. But plenty of our policies today are predicated on this notion—immigration, for instance, favors the most “intelligent” the most “wealthy”. We still admit to universities on a version of an intelligence test, the SAT, which assumes that intelligence is quantifiable.
Ultimately, I think, our intuitive aversion against forced sterilization rests on the distinction between negative and positive eugenics. The world does not condemn the ideology of Nazi German for making all bakeries in Berlin produce whole-grain bread, or limiting their citizen’s ability to smoke, or beginning youth camps, or any other measures designed to promote a “better German”. While based on flawed assumptions—and admittedly slightly creepy—they were acceptable to our sense of morality and our ability to judge people’s decisions in a historical context.
What we do condemn Nazi Germany for is the attempt to eradicate the less fit in its population: the Jews, and also the Roma, the disabled, the mentally ill, and the male homosexuals. Hilter argued that these people were scourges on the German breed and did not deserve the right to life. The argument that we should prevent other people from existing is disturbing to us, just as Popenoe’s comment that it was better that the unborn defective children had never been born is disturbing.
There is a difference between trying to create a “better” human and trying to prevent “worse” humans from existing, just as there is a difference between trying to cure a disease and trying to kill everyone with it. Ultimately, both measures may benefit society at large; but one option is still wrong. Therefore, we see in the decades after the height of the sterilization program, there was a shift from institutionalizing the mentally ill and deficient to treating them. Psychologists and psychiatrists now recognize that it is possible to treat patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder with a combination of drugs and therapy. And educational professional realize that changing the environment and education of a child can change affect their intelligence.
Ultimately, it is up to the community of Palo Alto to decide how they want to commemorate their past—whether they want their schools to be named after historically complex and complicated individuals or whether they want to forget a disturbing chapter of their community’s history. The Stanford men did play a significant role in California’s forced sterilization program, even if they did it unwittingly. Lewis Terman invented the IQ test which allowed the state to identify mentally deficient individuals for sterilization. Paul Popenoe produced propaganda to convince the California community to accept and expand the program. And Jordan’s association with forced sterilization provided the Human Betterment Society with legitimacy, and may have convinced some skeptics of the validity of the program. These are not easily excusable actions, but nor are they easily condemnable. Regardless, they are an important part of the history of California and of Stanford University, and one that deserves discussion and recognition by the members of this community.
