California 'Demonic' Eugenics Continues

If you’re white and wealthy in California, the state’s not going to trouble you too much with how many children you have. If poor and of color, however, the state’s old eugenics program is still a genuine threat.

A California state policy, the Maximum Family Grant (MFG) rule, limits women’s ability to make reproductive decisions. ACLU is campaigning to end the rule in the state that has led the world and the nation in racism and eugenics.

‘Three generations of imbeciles is enough’: Court

Photo credit: Amphilsoc.org

California’s long history of both leading the world in sterilization eugenics as well as supporting personal reproductive choices of women and trusting women to do what’s best for their families are at odds today. California helped lead in the early 20th century hundreds of thousands of “defective” Americans forcibly sterilized to ”improve” the human race.”

“Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in ‘colonies,’ and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning.” (SFGate News)  In one of the darkest chapters in its history, the Supreme Court sanctioned eugenics in Buck v. Bell, declaring, “three generations of imbeciles is enough.” 

As an early leader in eugenics internationally and the epicenter of eugenics nationally, California ranked third in the US to enact a sterilization law. By 1921, the state accounted for 80% of forced sterilizations nationwide. That continued until World War 2, when sterilizations began to decrease, largely due to Hitler’s eugenics movement fallout.

California’s eugenicists included powerful but little-known “race scientists”: Army venereal disease specialist Dr. Paul Popenoe, citrus magnate Paul Gosney, Sacramento banker Charles Goethe, plus members of California Board of Charities and Corrections and the University of California Board of Regents (SFGate). Eugenics was financed by corporate philanthropies: Carnegie Institution, Rockefeller Foundation and Harriman railroad fortune - all in league with some of America’s most respected scientists from prestigious universities such as Stanford, Yale, Harvard and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and science, and then faked and twisted data to serve racist aims. 

• Stanford President David Starr Jordan originated the ”race and blood” notion in his 1902 racial epistle Blood of a Nation, in which the university scholar declared that human qualities and conditions, such as talent and poverty, were passed through the blood.

• In 1904, the Carnegie Institution established a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island that stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans, as researchers carefully plotted the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures and the nation’s social service agencies and associations.
• The Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities, such as New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration, to find Jewish, Italian and other immigrants in New York and other crowded cities and subject them to deportation, confinement or forced sterilization. The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and funded the program where Josef Mengele was before he went to Auschwitz. 

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Much spiritual guidance and political agitation for America’s eugenics movement came from California’s quasi-autonomous eugenic societies, such as: Pasadena’s Human Betterment Foundation and California’s branch of American Eugenics Society, that coordinated many activities with the Eugenics Research Society in Long Island. These organizations functioned in a closely-knit network, and published racist eugenic newsletters and pseudoscientific journals, such as Eugenical News and Eugenics and propagandized for the Nazis.

Obama’s Lethal Solution

The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in the U.S. was a “lethal chamber” or public, locally operated gas chambers. Today’s Obama administration is considering gas chambers for capital punishment, despite the United Nation’s call on the president to halt all prisoner executions. (Obama’s Prelude To Mass Gas Chamber Extermination?, Dupré, May 2014) Most people on death row are people of color.

In 1918, Popenoe, the Army venereal disease specialist during World War I, co-wrote the widely used textbook, Applied Eugenics, arguing, ”From an historical point of view, the first method which presents itself is execution… Its value in keeping up the standard of the race should not be underestimated.’ Applied Eugenics devoted a chapter to Lethal Selection, that operated “through the destruction of the individual by some adverse feature of the environment, such as excessive cold, or bacteria, or by bodily deficiency.”

Eugenic breeders believed Americans were not ready for an organized lethal solution. Many mental institutions and doctors, however, improvised medical lethality and passive euthanasia. One institution in Lincoln, Ill. fed incoming patients milk from tubercular cows, believing a eugenically strong individual would be immune. Thirty to 40 percent annual death rates resulted. Some doctors practiced passive eugenicide one newborn infant at a time. Some doctors at mental institutions engaged in lethal neglect.

California performed nearly all sterilization procedures with little or no due process. In its first 25 years of eugenics legislation, it sterilized 9,782 individuals, mostly women, many classified as “bad girls;” diagnosed as “passionate,” “oversexed,” or “sexually wayward.” At Sonoma State Home, some women were sterilized due to what was deemed an abnormally large clitoris or labia.

The U.S. Supreme Court endorsed eugenics in its infamous 1927 decision, when Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: ”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.” That decision opened floodgates for thousands of coercive sterilizations or persecutions as subhuman. Years later, Nazis at the Nuremberg trials quoted Holmes’ words in their defense.

In 1933 alone, at least 1,278 coercive sterilizations were performed in California, 700 on women. The two leading sterilization mills in 1933 were Sonoma State Home and Patton State Hospital. Other centers included Agnews, Mendocino, Napa, Norwalk, Stockton and Pacific Colony state hospitals. 

Sterilizing Female Inmates

In California, approximately 20,000 forced sterilizations occurred between 1909 and 1963. It did not, however, end there. Between 2006 and 2010, “doctors under contract with California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation sterilized nearly 150 female inmates” without approval of top medical officials in Sacramento, as required by law, according to a shocking 2013 report by the Center for Investigative Reporting. Medicos targeted those they deemed most likely to re-offend. Of course, most United States inmates are people of color. 

“As soon as he found out that I had five kids, he suggested that I look into getting it done,” one former inmate said about her her medical doctor. “He made me feel like a bad mother if I didn’t do it.”

Some medical staff members justified sterilizations as “empowering” inmates. If a noble act, why did they hide it by never seeking the required state approval? This human dignity violation might have lacked brutality of Nazis, but was as efficient in a war against the weak as the Nazi efforts it inspired. 

The Nazi concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race did not originate with Hitler. It was created in the U.S. and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler’s atrocities. After developed in the U.S., American “corporate philanthropies helped found and fund the Nazi eugenics of Hitler and Mengele,” according to historians such as Edwin Black, who documented this in his book, The War Against the Weak.  

Leon Whitney, executive secretary of the American Eugenics Society, declared of Nazism, “While we were pussy-footing around … the Germans were calling a spade a spade.”

After the war, eugenics was declared a crime against humanity, an act of genocide. Germans were tried and they cited California’s statutes in their defense — to no avail. They were found guilty. Despite the Nazi “racial hygiene” horrors, ”forced sterilizations of prisoners, the mentally ill and the poor were commonplace in California” and other states until the 1970s, when the practice was finally declared illegal. Even that, however, did not stop many powerful Californian social workers, doctors, psychiatrists, and biologists, sought to hurt many of California’s “undesirables” – Mexican, Indian and Asian populations. They did this through exclusionary laws that scientists proposed. 

Gov. Brown’s MFG

The California Eugenics plan has been viewed as a way to save money so the state could eliminate money it spends on welfare and other programs helping the less fortunate.  Today’s MFG rule is part of CalWORKs, California’s welfare program, supposedly to help families in poverty.  The rule, however, according to ACLU, punishes some women and children:

• It punishes poor women for their reproductive decisions by withholding aid for a newborn child.
• It punishes poor children by denying them financial support, driving families deeper into poverty.

ACLU, wants people to tell California’s lawmakers and Gov. Brown today: repeal the MFG rule. 

“The rule limits reproductive freedom by telling women how many children they should have,” ACLU says. “The government shouldn’t be intruding in families’ private lives like this.”

Staunch environmentalists concerned about population pressures on the environment might balk at ACLU’s stand. Others, such as human rights and religious groups, applaud it.

“[T]he same demonic worldview that fueled earlier efforts remains with us: one that views human dignity as a product of personal productivity,” reports Christian Post. “Throw in the anti-natalism, which views children as a burden, not a gift, and the stage is set for what happened in California’s prisons.”

“It’s the Church’s job to wage war on the demonic worldviews that make outrages like this possible. Three generations of eugenics is three too many.”

Ruth Dawson, an ACLU Reproductive Justice Fellow, says, “For the past 20 years, this failed state policy (MFG) has made life harder for families. It’s time to stop punishing children and to start supporting families who are trying hard to make ends meet. It’s time to keep the government out of women’s decisions about when to have children.”

“It’s time to repeal the MFG rule,” Dawson and ACLU say.