Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (15 page)

The obituary also listed many of Grant’s numerous accomplishments, including an assortment of publications he either contributed to or authored.

Before flying off to visit Grant’s redwoods in Humboldt, California, and then a residential facility in Sonoma Valley for people with developmental disabilities, I purchase a now out-of-print book by Grant to better comprehend his perspective on humanity and the natural world. It’s a dense and academic work, not exactly light airplane reading, but it does help me understand why, despite Grant’s Herculean efforts to preserve lands and wildlife that still bring a sense of wonder to millions, there’s been no real push to build statues or memorials hailing him as a great and honorable man.

And why, as I would see in California, there shouldn’t be.

EMBEDDED IN A
rock next to the 364-foot-tall Founders Tree in California’s Humboldt Redwoods State Park, a bronze plaque reads:

None of the other tourists here seem to notice it. They are more inclined, as I was upon arriving, to crane their necks skyward. No photograph can capture the tree’s booster-rocket height, and every person I see walk around its forty-foot circumference looks struck with a childlike sense of awe.

In 1991 one visitor did catch sight of Grant’s name, however, and angrily shot off a letter to the California Department of Parks and Recreation: “Honoring Madison Grant with a plaque on public property is as historically bizarre as erecting a monument to Adolf Hitler for his part in founding the Volkswagen Company. Please have it removed.”

Invoking Hitler can be unnecessarily provocative in some debates, but here the connection is apt. After reading the 1925 German translation of
The Passing of the Great Race
, the future führer sent Madison Grant a flattering letter, praising the book as his new “bible.” And not without reason, for what Madison Grant most wanted to preserve, more than any giant sequoia or wild bison, was the white race. This was his main calling and his life’s passion, regardless of how distasteful it might have seemed to others. “Race feeling may be called prejudice by those whose careers are cramped by it,” Grant wrote bluntly in his book, “but it is a natural antipathy which serves to maintain the purity of type.” Whites were endangered, Grant went on to argue, because

Hermann Göring, Hitler’s deputy and designated successor, also admired Grant (the 1937 Berlin trip Grant was preparing for right before he died came at Göring’s invitation), and the Third Reich’s most influential eugenicists, Wilhelm Frick, Fritz Lenz, and Eugen Fischer, all counted Grant as both a colleague and good friend. He kept them apprised of new research in the United States and helped articulate the movement’s “intellectual” foundation in Germany.

Especially appealing to them was Grant’s endorsement of negative, as opposed to positive, eugenics. “Man has the choice of two methods of race improvement,” Grant summarized in his book. “He can breed from the best or he can eliminate the worst by segregation or sterilization.” The latter option better ensured long-term success, Grant believed. But much to his consternation, meddling human traits like “altruism [and] philanthropy” were preventing society from fully eradicating “the undesirable underclasses.” He went on to say:

Monstrous as this sounds today, thanks to enthusiastic and outspoken proponents such as Madison Grant, eugenics was already being practiced in the United States. The Germans modeled their early sterilization efforts on what they saw occurring here.

Fifty miles north of San Francisco and nestled within the grape-scented valleys of wine country is the Sonoma Developmental Center, my destination after Humboldt Redwoods State Park. Conceived in the late 1800s, the Center was originally the California Home for the Care and Training of Feeble-Minded Children, and it expanded numerous times before settling into its present one-thousand-acre location.

“Sonoma Developmental Center,” its literature states, “is the oldest facility in California established specifically for serving the needs of individuals with developmental disabilities. The facility opened its doors to 148 residents on November 24, 1891, culminating a ten-year project on the part of two prominent Northern California women who had children with developmental disabilities.” By all accounts it was a model of humane care.

At first.

The literature goes on to note: “Many changes over the last 110 years include attitudes, philosophies, values, and beliefs in regard to the treatment of developmentally disabled people.” This is a more pleasant way of saying:
For a while, some really terrible things went on here
. What happened, to be blunt, was the forced sterilization of thousands of men, women, and children deemed “unfit” or “subnormal”—an assessment made based on frighteningly arbitrary standards.

“You know we don’t do that now, right?” a Sonoma receptionist said to me, clearly taken aback when I called to explain my request for a visit.

“Oh, absolutely,” I replied. “And I’m not trying to make Sonoma look bad. This was all a long, long time ago. But I just want to see where the sterilizations took place.”

“Let me connect you with Karen Litzenberg in our public information office.”

I meant what I said; I’m honestly not picking on Sonoma or suggesting it should advertise the more chilling aspects of its past, but it is a significant historic site. California wasn’t the first state to enact laws encouraging forced sterilizations (that would be Indiana, in 1907, followed by the majority of American states), but once the legislative green light blinked go in 1909, the state quickly made up for lost time and eventually surpassed all others. Out of sixty thousand involuntary sterilizations nationwide, one-third to a half of them were performed in California. And Sonoma bears the sad distinction of having carried out more than any other similar facility.

With its neoclassical buildings and well-manicured grounds, Sonoma looks more like an Ivy League campus than a government-run institution. “We want our residents to feel like it’s a home,” Karen Litzenberg says to me soon after we meet in the main administration building. “There’s an equestrian ring with an indoor arena, a pool that’s heated year-round, a softball field, a campground, and there are regular movie nights and dances, and also a coffee klatch.”

Sonoma’s mission now is to offer day-to-day living skills, vocational training, health education, and other guidance to developmentally disabled adults so they can live independently. “The population varies,” Karen tells me as we pass newly renovated housing, “but about six hundred fifty people live here today.” (I assure Karen that for reasons of privacy I won’t photograph or write about any of the residents. I will say, and this is highly subjective and anecdotal, that all of the staff members Karen introduces me to are genial and forthcoming, and the overall atmosphere seems quite friendly.)

I need to find one of the hospitals where the sterilizations occurred, and Karen and I drive around the facility trying to match the current scenery with old photos she’s dug up. A caption on one says that the original hospital, built in 1906, is where the carpenter shop sits now. “No, this is the
new
carpenter shop,” a worker tells us. “I’m not sure where the old one was that replaced the hospital. That’s before my time.” Eventually we decide to focus on the Chamberlain Building, which was built in 1927. Long and beige with a red-tiled roof,
the elegant three-story building is now home to clerical offices and laboratories.

Determining
exactly
how many sterilizations took place here is difficult because records have been lost and destroyed, and countless operations went unreported. Sonoma’s superintendent Dr. F. O. Butler is believed to have conducted at least one thousand of the surgeries himself.

There is no indication that Madison Grant ever set foot here, but years before writing
The Passing of the Great Race
he helped lay the philosophical groundwork on which America’s eugenics movement was constructed. (Grant also lobbied aggressively for racial segregation and anti-miscegenation laws.) Regrettably, he had no end of institutional allies.
Los Angeles Times
publisher Harry Chandler used his paper as a megaphone to promote eugenics, and universities such as Yale, Stanford, and Harvard bestowed their academic credibility to the cause. The Carnegie Institution funded a Long Island laboratory in 1904 that began keeping tabs on the physical traits of half a million American citizens (the information was often gathered voluntarily at state fairs, where “Fitter Family Contests” took place), and two decades later the Rockefeller Foundation helped establish the Berlin-based Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. Grant’s buddy Eugen Fischer served as its director until 1933.

Back in the States, people with mental retardation were among the first to go under the knife. Men received vasectomies and women salpingectomies (meaning, the removal of the fallopian tubes). California law gave doctors wide discretion in deciding who was eligible, and the labels “idiot,” “imbecile,” and “moron” were actual medical categories determined by intelligence tests. Idiots were a mental age of one to two, imbeciles three to seven, and morons eight to twelve.

Alcoholics, epileptics, schizophrenics, manic depressives, and others suffering from mental illnesses were also thrown into the “unfit” category. Blacks and Mexican Americans were disproportionately targeted, along with women of any ethnicity rumored to be promiscuous. “Something like 25 percent of the girls who have been sterilized were
sent here solely, or primarily, for that purpose,” wrote California’s leading eugenicist, Paul Popenoe (a close friend of Grant’s and, curiously, the “inventor” of marriage counseling), after inspecting Sonoma in 1926.

One year later, in
Buck v. Bell
, critics finally gained an audience before the U.S. Supreme Court and were confident that the justices would recognize the barbarity of forced sterilizations and their dangerous ethical implications. Carrie Buck was a twenty-one-year-old woman diagnosed as “feeble-minded,” like her mother, and “immoral” for bearing an illegitimate child. Buck had actually been raped, and her foster family institutionalized her to protect their own good name. James Bell, the doctor petitioning to sterilize Buck, insisted that her child, a baby girl named Vivian, would also be mentally deficient. The Court passed down an overwhelming 8–1 ruling. Against Buck.

Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes penned the majority opinion, which included these immortal words:

After the decision, the pace of forced sterilizations accelerated exponentially. Along with operating on Carrie Buck, Dr. Bell also sterilized her daughter, Vivian, for good measure. And yet, before she died at the age of eight from measles, Vivian turned out to be such a bright student that she had made her school’s honor roll.

Charles Darwin’s half cousin, the anthropologist and explorer Sir Francis Galton, conceived the word
eugenics
—“wellborn” or “of good stock”—in 1883. (A man of diverse interests, Galton also invented the dog whistle and introduced the idea of putting weather maps in newspapers.) Galton’s aim was to apply the lessons of animal breeding to human beings, thereby promoting racial purity. His theories
fit comfortably with early-twentieth-century American Progressivism, which had a borderline obsession with moral and physical cleanliness. Progressives, it’s true, admirably supported suffrage, ended child labor, and enacted other necessary reforms, but it’s also undeniable that many embraced eugenics as a potential cure-all for a host of social ills.