Progressives in the 20th century often described California as
an Eden of enlightenment. But this Pacific Eden produced an
enormous amount of rotten fruit. The Human Betterment Foundation, a
ludicrously named California think tank from the 1920s, was an
example of the brutal and heartless ideology that masqueraded as
enlightenment in the state. The Human Betterment Foundation was
nothing more than a propaganda mill for eugenics.
The Los Angeles Times
reported on Wednesday that the Nazis drew inspiration from its
work. “California civic leaders helped popularize eugenics around
the world, including Nazi Germany,” reported the Times.
Dr. Fritz Lenz, a premier Nazi eugenicist, wrote to the foundation:
“You were so kind to send…new information about the
sterilization particulars in California…These practical
experiences are also very valuable for us in Germany. For this I
thank you.”
Paul Popenoe, the foundation’s leading researcher, “lauded
Hitler as a visionary, quoted from ‘Mein Kamp,’ and concluded that
Germany’s effort was in ‘accord with the best thought of
eugenicists in all civilized countries,’” reports the
Times. Popenoe later became one of America’s most
celebrated marriage counselors, says the Times, a “pop
psychology guru with best-selling books, a syndicated newspaper
column, articles in Ladies Home Journal and appearances on Art
Linkletter’s ‘House Party’ television story.”
Sacramento banker Charles M. Goethe, a member of the Human
Betterment Foundation’s board, visited Germany in the 1930s and
wrote back to Ezra Gosney, the foundation’s head: “You will be
interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in
shaping the opinion of the group of intellectuals who are behind
Hitler in the epoch-making program.… I want you, my dear
friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life,
that you have really jolted into action a great government of
60,000,000 people.”
The Times acknowledges that liberals, from Margaret
Sanger to John Maynard Keynes, endorsed “eugenic sterilization.”
The Human Betterment Foundation’s members represented a roll-call
of the liberal vanguard in California: “David Starr Jordan,
Stanford University’s first president; Los Angeles Times publisher
Harry Chandler; Nobel Prize-winning physicist and Caltech head
Robert A. Millikan; USC President Rufus B. von KleinSmid; and Lewis
M. Terman, a Stanford psychologist who developed the IQ test.”
From 1909 through the 1960s, 20,000 people were sterilized in
California state hospitals. The progressives viewed society’s
undesirables as animals in need of spaying. The Times says
Popenoe visited the state’s mental hospitals and reported on its
grisly practices. In one memo he wrote: “I found one case, which
they didn’t know about, where they had sterilized the same man
twice, two years apart…He was an unintelligent Italian, and I
suppose he didn’t know enough to tell them that he had been through
the mill before, and they missed the fact in their own records.” In
another memo he wrote of a convention of the Assn. of Railway
Surgeons at the Mendocino state hospital at which a conventioneer
had the “special honor” of sterilizing two women deemed
feebleminded. “Both women died in agony a few days later,” wrote
Popenoe. “Autopsy showed that instead of tying the fallopian tubes,
the surgeon had tied up the ureters, so they both died of kidney
poisoning from being unable to urinate.”
This didn’t faze Popenoe. He could placidly write that 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…Sterilization was seen
to be not a punishment but a protection, alike to the afflicted and
their families, to society, and to posterity.”
Here is the Golden State’s legacy of liberal beneficence.
