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State's little-known history of shameful science
California's role in Nazis' goal of 'purification'
Tom Abate
Monday, March 10, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback
URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?
file=/chronicle/archive/2003/03/10/BU91464.DTL
On Tuesday, a state Senate committee is scheduled to hear a historical
truth that might shock most Californians: Almost 100 years ago, their state
practiced a form of eugenics that helped inspire Hitler's Nazis.
"California was the second state to pass eugenics laws in 1909," two years
after Indiana made it legal to sterilize the "feeble-minded," according to
University of Virginia bioethicist Paul Lombardo.
Lombardo is an expert on eugenics, a school of thought popular around
the turn of the 20th century. Eugenicists thought they could improve the
human species through selective breeding, which meant preventing
habitual criminals, inmates of insane asylums and sexual deviants from
having kids.
When Lombardo briefs the Senate Select Committee on Genetics,
committee chairwoman Sen. Dede Alpert, D-Coronado (San Diego County),
expects his talk will raise eyebrows.
"I'll be the first to admit I had no idea this went on in California," said
Alpert, adding that when Lombardo's state of Virginia confronted its
history of eugenics, it prompted the state's governor to offer a public
apology.
"That may be the appropriate response here, but that's something that
would come after we get the chance to hear it," Alpert said.
Lombardo sketched out his two-hour presentation, "Eugenics: Lessons
>From a History Hidden in Plain Sight."
As he explained it, it was around the turn of the last century when
scientific thinkers, notably Sir Francis Galton, cousin of evolutionist
Charles Darwin, began arguing that allowing the unfit to have children
might weaken the human herd and should be controlled by law.
After Indiana passed a pioneering statute allowing state officials to sterilize
those deemed unfit to breed, California enacted an even stricter eugenics
law. California made it legal for state officials to asexualize those
considered feeble-minded, prisoners exhibiting sexual or moral
perversions, and anyone with more than three criminal convictions.
As Lombardo explained, by using the term "asexualization" instead of
"sterilization," California's law went beyond ordering vasectomies in men or
tubal ligations in women. California made it legal to castrate a man or
remove the ovaries from a woman, permanently preventing reproduction.
Lombardo said California's asexualization statute passed unanimously in the
state Assembly, drew only one dissenting vote in the state Senate and was
signed into law by Gov. James M. Gillett in 1909.
It was amended at least twice, in 1913 and 1917, to shift the focus of
California's eugenics program away from the castration of prisoners and
toward the sterilization of insane asylum inmates.
"If you look at the numbers of people from 1909 through 1950 sterilized in
California, it's something on the order of 19,000, evenly split between men
and women," Lombardo said. "My guess would be most of those were not
castration but were vasectomies or tubal ligations, which are a lot
cheaper, faster and safer."
By the time state law was revised in 1951 to greatly narrow the state's
authority to forcibly prevent procreation, eugenic sterilization had already
fallen into disfavor, thanks to public revulsion at the revelations of Nazi
atrocities before and during World War II, Lombardo said.
But in the years after the state embraced eugenics, California intellectuals
-- including Stanford's David Starr Jordan and Louis Terman, popularizer of
the IQ test -- were leading advocates of the movement, he said.
California was such a prominent practitioner of forced sterilization that it
was held up as a model by the Eugenics Record Office, the Long Island
think tank that was the movement's unofficial headquarters. The Eugenics
Record Office, in turn, had links to the Nazi party during the 1930s.
"There's lots of connections between the Germans interested in
sterilization and the Americans," Lombardo said, adding that after Hitler
took power in 1933, "the very first law passed by the Reichstag was the law
for the sterilization of the hereditarily diseased."
Lombardo cites an incident in which California's sterilization practices
were held up as models for the Nazi regime. In 1935, Eugenics Record
Office leader Harry Laughlin was invited to an international conference on
eugenics in Germany. Unable to attend, Laughlin instead sent his German
hosts a diagram displaying the pedigree of "a feeble-minded woman
sterilized by the state of California."
The chart shows how the woman was born to a mother deemed by state
officials to be "neurotic (and) feeble-minded" and a father termed a
"drunkard (and) gambler (with) low mentality." The woman's ovaries were
removed, a permissible form of asexualization under California law.
The Germans were far more aggressive than their California contemporaries
in practicing eugenics, Lombardo said. "They sterilized at the rate of
50,000- 70,000 (people) a year, compared with California's slightly more than
4,000 in 1927," he said.
While the Nazis practiced eugenics to "purify" their race, Americans had
more pragmatic reasons for trying to prevent certain people from having
children.
"This was about saving money. It was the economic motive," Lombardo said,
encapsulating the view of American eugenicists in these words: "We don't
want you generating any more kids we'd have to pay for, and we don't
think you could take care of the kid if you had it."
The Nazi horrors revealed after World War II put the final kibosh on this
paternalistic practice. But Lombardo has pulled together official
documents indicating that as late as the early 1960s, judges in San Diego
and Los Angeles counties were still ordering orchidectomies -- removal of
the testicles -- as a condition for paroling sex offenders.
One such letter, written in 1962 by the Los Angeles County probation
department, mentions one judge who ordered more than 50 former
prisoners, most of them guilty of child molestation, to undergo complete
bilateral castration as a condition of parole.
"The Supreme Court held that each defendant was free to refuse the
proffered conditions of probation and to choose instead the punishment
provided by law for the offense of which he was convicted," states the
letter dated 41 years ago Wednesday.
Looking ahead to his state Senate presentation, Lombardo said he fears
that Americans, who have forgotten their eugenic excesses, could be
beguiled into thinking modern science can cure social ills like poverty,
crime and disease.
"There's an impulse toward eugenics that is very much alive today,"
Lombardo said. "The basic belief that we can use science to engineer
social progress is an idea that many Americans believe in.
"The point of my presentation is not to paint science as something scary
and Frankensteinian," he said, adding that "at least as we forge ahead in
the new genetics we should take our history into account."
Lombardo is scheduled to speak from 10 a.m. until noon in Room 113 in the
State Capitol in Sacramento. The hearing is free. To learn more about
eugenics,
visit www.eugenicsarchive.org).
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback
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