csua.org/u/54q -> www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/03/10/BU91464.DTL&type=printable
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 Hitlers 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.
Ill be the first to admit I had no idea this went on in California, said Alpert, adding that when Lombardos state of Virginia confronted its history of eugenics, it prompted the states governor to offer a public apology.
That may be the appropriate response here, but thats 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, Californias 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 Californias 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 Californias 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, its 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 states 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 Stanfords 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 movements unofficial headquarters.
The Eugenics Record Office, in turn, had links to the Nazi party during the 1930s.
Theres 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 Californias 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 womans 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 Californias 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 dont want you generating any more kids wed have to pay for, and we dont 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.
Theres 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 am until noon in Room 113 in the State Capitol in Sacramento.
The hearing is free.
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