The Mansion of Happiness (18 page)

Many modern ideas about marriage—and a great many ideas about American family life, including having, raising, and educating children—date to the
Progressive era, when progress was no longer either John Bunyan’s pilgrimage or a locomotive chugging across the continent. For Progressives, progress was science. And for Paul Popenoe, that science was eugenics.

The American Institute of Family Relations was funded by
E. S. Gosney, the president of the
Human Betterment Foundation, for which Popenoe served as secretary. Before he became “the man who saves marriages,” Popenoe was a leader in the campaign to sterilize the insane and the weak of mind. He considered marriage counseling the flip side of compulsory vasectomy and tubal ligation: sterilize the unfit; urge the fit to marry. But what if the fit got divorced? “I began to realize that if we were to promote a sound population,” he explained, “we would not only have to get the right kind of people married, but we would have to keep them married.” He opened his marriage clinic in order “to bring all the resources of modern science to bear on the promotion of successful marriage and family life.”
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He didn’t much mind if the marriages of people of inferior stock fell apart: “Divorcees,” he wrote, “are on the whole biologically inferior to the happily married.”
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By saving the marriages of the biologically superior, though, Popenoe hoped to save the race.

The son of a California avocado farmer, Paul Popenoe was born in 1888. He went to Stanford, where he studied with the university’s president,
David Starr Jordan, a biologist who was much influenced by both
Herbert Spencer and
Charles Darwin. In 1906, the
American Breeders’ Association appointed Jordan to head a committee to “investigate and report on heredity in the human race” and to document “the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood.”
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Darwin redefined what it meant to be human. Americans read his
work avidly.
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Animals had been bred for thousands of years. If people are animals, why not breed a better race? Maybe human suffering could be relieved, people hoped. Maybe disease and even poverty could be eradicated. That was one vision. Another was darker. If people are animals, and natural selection weeds out the unfit, others wondered, then why bother taking care of the weak? In the United States, what came to be called social Darwinism provided conservatives with an arsenal of arguments in favor of laissez-faire economic policies, against social welfare programs, and in support of Jim Crow. “The Negro,” it was argued, was “nearer to the anthropoid or pre-human ancestry of men” than any other race, a living missing link; only slavery had prevented the extinction of the black American; if not for the peculiar institution, natural selection would have led to the death of the entire race.
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New laws were put on the books, segregating the races. In 1891, Georgia was the first state to demand separate seating for whites and blacks in streetcars; five years later came
Plessy v. Ferguson.
By 1905, every southern state had a streetcar law, and more: in courthouses, separate Bibles; in bars, separate stools; in post offices, separate windows. In Birmingham, it was a crime for
blacks and whites to play checkers together in a public park.
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The year the
American Breeders’ Association appointed Jordan to that committee,
Robert Bennett Bean, a former student of Franklin P. Mall’s, weighed and measured more than a hundred brains from Mall’s anatomical laboratory and reported that parts of “the Negro brain” were smaller than those same parts of “the Caucasian brain.”
American Medicine
published an editorial about Bean’s research, noting, “Leaders in all political parties now acknowledge the error of human equality.” It seemed but a short step to implementing policy. Perhaps, the editors suggested, the
Fourteenth Amendment ought to be repealed, thereby removing “a menace to our prosperity—a large electorate without brains.”

Bean’s work did not go unchallenged. At
Clark University, Mall had been a colleague of
Franz Boas’s. Boas, a German immigrant who was raised as an Orthodox Jew and had confronted anti-Semitism from childhood, railed against racial taxonomies, finding them to rest on nothing more than “the shackles of dogma.”
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Mall was inclined to agree with him (the two men had been colleagues at Clark). He repeated Bean’s study, conducting his study blind, and found no difference in brain size.
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“To those who stoutly maintain a material inferiority of the Negro race and who would
dampen your ardor by their claims,” Boas told a graduating class at Atlanta University in 1906, “you may confidently reply that the burden of proof rests on them, that the past history of your race does not sustain that statement.”
W.E.B. DuBois was in the audience that day. “I came then and afterwards,” DuBois wrote, “to realize how the silence and neglect of science can let truth utterly disappear.”
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In 1908, when nine-year-old
E. B. White was publishing his first poem, about a mouse, and
C. C. Little was embarking on the study of heredity in
Mus musculus
, Paul Popenoe left Stanford to master the subject of heredity by studying breeds of date palms. The next year, California passed a
forced sterilization law. (Two-thirds of American states eventually did the same.)
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In 1913, Jordan appointed Popenoe editor of the
Journal of Heredity;
C. C. Little contributed to an early volume.
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The first National Conference on Race Betterment was held, in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1914. (The
Race Betterment Foundation was established by an early Grahamist,
John Harvey Kellogg, and was endowed with proceeds from the sale of Kellogg’s cereals.)
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The growing eugenics movement only really made national news in 1915, when Americans learned about the case of Baby Bollinger, born in a Chicago hospital on November 12. The baby, never named, was severely deformed, missing an ear and its neck, and with a blocked bowel and a malformed skull.
Harry J. Haiselden, the surgeon called to the case, told the baby’s parents that surgery could repair the bowel obstruction and save the baby’s life, but he recommended against it. Baby Bollinger died five days later. Haiselden then cowrote and starred in a feature film about the case called
The Black Stork.
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The Black Stork
tells the story of the barely fictionalized Bollingers, here a man named Claude who marries a girl named Anne, after having been warned by a doctor, played by Haiselden, that he suffers from a heritable disease. The disease is traced to a grandfather who fathered a child with “a slave—a vile filthy creature who was suffering from a loathsome disease.” (A “black stork” might bring a dead baby, but the phrase was also used at the time to refer to a stork delivering a black baby to a white mother. “The Wrong Address” is the caption on a postcard from 1905; it pictures a white stork carrying in its beak a sleeping black baby. From a window, an alarmed white mother throws a shoe at the bird, urging both bird and baby away.)
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Before the film was released to theaters, that
scene was reshot and the slave was replaced by a servant girl. The title was changed, too. By 1919, Haiselden’s film was being screened as
Are You Fit to Marry?
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Eugenics found its strongest foothold in California. Charting the progress of the state’s sterilization project, Popenoe traveled from one asylum to the next, counting and inspecting the feeble, the insane, and the criminal. Under the auspices of human betterment, more than twenty thousand men and women were sterilized in California, more than in all the other states put together; over half the sterilizations in the United States were conducted there.
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Popenoe’s vision, though, was far grander; he estimated that about ten million Americans should be sterilized. At the time, that would have meant about a tenth of the population.
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But which tenth? Knowing whom to sterilize, like knowing who was fit to marry, came to depend on the idea that intelligence is a thing, a quantity, something that you’re born with, something that can be measured. In 1906,
Lewis M. Terman, a student of G. Stanley Hall’s, had written a dissertation titled “Genius and Stupidity.” For his subjects, boys aged ten to thirteen, Terman selected “the brightest or most stupid that could be found within easy distance of
Clark University, in the city of Worcester.” After subjecting them to a battery of tests, which reinforced his view that the seven bright boys were bright and that the seven stupid boys were stupid, he concluded that what lay between them was inherited and unchangeable.
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Terman then joined
David Starr Jordan’s faculty at Stanford, where he refined a test designed by the French psychologist
Alfred Binet in 1905. Binet’s test was meant to identify children who needed help learning. Terman standardized the scale, with a mean of 100, and developed what he called an “intelligence quotient,” or IQ, the ratio of mental to physical age. For his test, which he named the Stanford-Binet, Terman took some of his questions from the Frenchman: “My neighbor has been having queer visitors. First a doctor came to his house, then a lawyer, then a minister. What do you think happened there?” But where Binet accepted “a death” as the only correct answer, Terman allowed “a marriage”: the lawyer came to make the arrangements, and the minister to officiate. And the doctor came to see if the betrothed were fit to marry.
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In 1916, Terman published
The Measurement of Intelligence.
With Terman’s work, the measurement of intelligence moved from anatomy to psychology, from weighing brains to administering tests. He recommended that all schoolchildren be subjected to the Stanford-Binet test, so that “real defectives” could be identified, not so much (as Binet had believed) because they needed dedicated instruction, but because “all feeble-minded are at least potential criminals.”
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His conclusions constituted an argument against not only equality but also philanthropy: “when charity organizations help the feeble-minded to float along in the social and industrial world, and to produce and rear children after their kind, a doubtful service is rendered.”
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Like Bean’s measurement of brains, Terman’s measurement of intelligence did not go unchallenged. In the pages of the
New Republic
,
Walter Lippmann attacked Terman’s work as “quackery in a field where quacks breed like rabbits.” Lippmann argued that Terman, “muddle-headed and prejudiced,” had supplied no evidence that intelligence is either fixed or heritable. Terman had promoted a staggeringly dangerous idea, Lippmann said, an idea of whose danger he seemed utterly unaware. “I hate the impudence of a claim that in fifty minutes you can judge and classify a human being’s predestined fitness in life,” Lippmann wrote. Terman ought to be stopped, Lippmann urged, adding, “If the impression takes root that these tests really measure intelligence, that they constitute a sort of last judgment on the child’s capacity, that they reveal ‘scientifically’ his predestined ability, then it would be a thousand times better if all the intelligence testers and all their questionnaires were sunk without warning into the Sargasso Sea.”
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That impression did take root, but the drowning of the testers and the tests didn’t quite come to pass.

The year Terman published
The Measurement of Intelligence
, Popenoe’s close friend
Madison Grant published
The Passing of the Great Race; Or, The Racial Basis of European History.
Grant, “never before a historian,” practiced what he called “heredity history.” He attempted to demonstrate that the “
Nordic race” (the “blue-eyed, fair-haired peoples of the north of Europe”) was being overrun by stupider people who were “dark-haired, dark-eyed.” This, he believed, posed a particular threat to the United States, since “democracy is fatal to
progress when two races of unequal value live side by side.”
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Evolution is an explanation for change over time, which is why arguments
about evolution are always arguments about history.
J.B.S. Haldane, in
Daedalus
, reflected on “the influence of biology on history.” For Grant, the only meaningful force in history was inheritance: really, there was no history; there was only biology.

In 1918, Paul Popenoe and
Roswell Hill Johnson wrote
Applied Eugenics
to explain “the practical means by which society may encourage the reproduction of superior persons and discourage that of inferior.” It became the most widely assigned college textbook on the topic; it was also translated into German. Popenoe and Johnson deemed miscegenation “biologically wrong” because “the Negro lacks in his germ-plasm excellence of some qualities which the white races possess.” For poverty, Popenoe and Johnson blamed the poor, citing a study reporting that 55 percent of retarded children belonged to the laboring class. The solution to want was to sterilize the needy. Following Terman, Popenoe and Johnson opposed old-age pensions, minimum-wage legislation, and child-labor laws: by helping the biologically and mentally unfit, these programs perpetuated a poor gene pool, just as slavery had protected blacks from extinction.
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Civilization, sympathy, and charity, Popenoe wrote later, “have intervened in Nature’s plan.”
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For much of the world’s ills, Grant blamed “swarms of Polish Jews” and “half-breeds,” but Popenoe and Johnson blamed other people, too, especially college girls. Women’s education, they warned, “is tending toward race suicide”: “Many a college girl of the finest innate qualities, who sincerely desires to enter matrimony, is unable to find a husband of her own class, simply because she has been rendered so cold and unattractive, so overstuffed intellectually and starved emotionally, that a typical man does not desire to spend the rest of his life in her company.”
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Popenoe was, at the time, unmarried. Two years later, at the age of thirty-two, he married a nineteen-year-old dancer.