"We go in for excessive bleeding and come out missing body parts!"

November 9, 2023 6:52 PM

Between 1909 and 1979, California ran the most active eugenics program in the United States. California passed a law in 2021 creating a program to compensate survivors of forced and involuntary sterilization.

"Between 1909 and 1979, California ran the most active eugenics program in the United States. During this period, more than 20,000 people living in state-run institutions and deemed “feeble-minded” were sterilized. They were disproportionately disabled, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian. Many were institutionalized primarily because they were poor. Despite the repeal of the state’s formal eugenics law in 1979, the practice of coerced sterilization continued in California’s prisons. In 2013, a Reveal investigation found that nearly 150 women received tubal ligations—in other words, had their tubes tied—in violation of state policy at just two California prisons between 2006 and 2010. A state audit produced after that exposé confirmed that 144 incarcerated women received tubal ligations between 2005 and 2013."

CW: Sexual assault, eugenics

posted by arachnidette (7 comments total)

One of the principle proponents of Eugenics in California was David Starr Jordan, President of Stanford University. USC Professor Henry H. Goddard published the influential treatise The Kallikak Family, which became a major reference point for scientific racism.
A third major proponent of the eugenics laws was Charles M. Goethe, founder of CSU Sacramento (and later in life a major early backer and mentor of Richard Nixon).

Besides that, they were all members of the Immigration Study Commission, which also included Harry Chandler (magnate of the Los Angeles Times), Ezra Gozney (the orange baron of Pasadena), and the Merriam brothers (of the Merriam-Webster dictionaries), as well as another institute known as the Human Betterment Foundation. Another major agent of policy advocacy was Alexander Graham Bell, who organized the First International Conference of Eugenic Sciences.

Compulsory sterilization was thus advocated as the next step after the Chinese Exclusion Act and the 'Gentleman's Agreement' which curtailed Japanese and Korean migration. As we know now from what remains of the archives of Goethe, the California sterilization laws were meant to ensure white supremacy by ensuring a steady diminuition of the Asian, Mexican, and black populations of California.

This was related to an unsuccessful effort of the Immigration Study Commission: buoyed by the success of the Chinese Exclusion Act and the 'Gentleman's Agreement', they also lobbied for both an Italian Exclusion Act and a Mexican Exclusion Act. President Taft, to his credit, squashed the Mexican Exclusion Act- Taft worked a lot to improve US-Mexican relations. Meanwhile, the news of a second Italian Exclusion Act galvanized Amadeo Giannini (founder of Bank of America) and Angelo Rossi (future mayor of San Francisco) into a wave of organizing that created the political and donor base for Earl Warren- a now sadly extinct branch of California Republicans who opposed the nativism pursued by Hearst and Hiram Johnson.

Finally, my graduate HIST 274 American Cultural History Seminar paper comes in use! For what may be the only time!
posted by LeRoienJaune at 9:56 PM on November 9, 2023 [50 favorites]

Henry H. Goddard published the influential treatise The Kallikak Family, which became a major reference point for scientific racism.

It's hard to overstate how clownish and amateurish the treatise is, to our modern eyes. The Kalikaks were purportedly a family from Italy responsible for spreading low IQs through prolific breeding. One of the signs of low IQ is sunken eyes. Photographs of the Kalikaks in the treatise clearly show that someone has drawn dark lines under their eyes with a pen. To us it's obvious; apparently at the time, the visually unsophisticated did not readily recognize this.

Beyond publishing this founding document for scientific racism, Goddard was apparently also key behind the policy of sterilizing immigrants at Ellis Island while telling them they were receiving a routine procedure.
posted by fatbird at 10:57 PM on November 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

One of the signs of low IQ is sunken eyes.

I'm not actually sure about this fact either
posted by away for regrooving at 12:01 AM on November 10, 2023 [4 favorites]

An antidote to this shit-show is that Goddard carried out some of his research fakery at Vineland School, NJ. Pearl S. Buck's daughter Carol was born in 1921 with phenylketonuria PKU and eventually enrolled in Vineland. Her mother meanwhile wrote best-selling books based on her experience as a missionary in China and nabbed a Pulitzer 1932 and Nobel 1938 Prize. The money rolled in. Enough to support Carol but also to endow Vineland and later to co-f[o]und Welcome House an international interracial adoption agency which went on to place 5000 orphans in homes where their future was brighter than a Third World orphanage. My 'research' required a lot less than LeRoienJaune's ! [and hats off] I merely read Carl Zimmer's She has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity (2018) and took notes.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:09 AM on November 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

One of the signs of low IQ is sunken eyes.

I'm not actually sure about this fact either

Sorry, yes, to be clear: Goddard claimed in the treatise that this was so, and then presented obviously doctored photographs of "Kalikaks."
posted by fatbird at 7:34 AM on November 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

Well, there's no poor or BIPOC people in California now, so I guess it worked.
posted by Panjandrum at 8:28 AM on November 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

So THAT'S why I had such a hard time in 1999/2000 trying to get Kaiser SoCal to tie my tubes. I thought it was just because I was 24, unmarried, and brown.
posted by luckynerd at 2:10 PM on November 10, 2023