The Child's Heredity

PUBLISHED IN 1929 WHEN DOCTOR POPENOE HAD PROMOTED 6000 COMPULSORY STERILIZATIONS IN CALIFORNIA--HIS HONORARY DEGREE RESCINDED 90 YEARS LATER.

14.5x22 cm hardcover, green cloth binding, i-xiii, 316 pp, 4 pp publisher's advertisements, bibliography, figures throughout. Very good in very good minus jacket with edge chips and light soiling, in protective mylar sleeve.

PAUL BOWMAN POPENOE (1888 1979) was an American marriage counselor, eugenicist and agricultural explorer. He was an influential advocate of the compulsory sterilization of mentally ill people and people with mental disabilities, and the father of marriage counseling in the United States. Popenoe worked briefly as an agricultural explorer collecting date specimens in Western Asia and Northern Africa for his father's nursery in California, along with his younger brother, Wilson Popenoe, a horticulturist. His travels received considerable support and interest from the US Department of Agriculture. Paul Popenoe published his first book, Date Growing in the Old World and the New, in 1913. In the mid-1910s, Popenoe became interested in human breeding and edited the Journal of Heredity from 1913 to 1917, with a special attention to eugenics and social hygiene. By 1918, Popenoe had become well-established enough to co-author (with Roswell Hill Johnson) a popular college textbook on eugenics (Applied Eugenics, edited by Richard T. Ely), which outlined his vision of a eugenics program that primarily relied on the segregation of waste humanity into rural institutions, where they would perform manual labor to offset the cost of their institutionalization. He opposed child labor because he believed that people who he regarded as unfit members of society would have fewer children if their children were not allowed to work.[3] Additionally, Applied Eugenics contains a chapter expounding on Popenoe's belief in the racial inferiority of black people. In the mid-1920s, Popenoe began working with E.S. Gosney, a wealthy California financier, and the Human Betterment Foundation to promote eugenic policies in California. In 1909, California had enacted its first compulsory sterilization law to allow for the sterilization of the mentally ill and the mentally retarded in its state psychiatric hospitals. With Popenoe as his scientific workhorse, Gosney intended to study the sterilization work done in California and to use it to advocate sterilization in other parts of the country and in the world at large. That would culminate in a number of works, most prominently their joint-authored Sterilization for Human Betterment: A Summary of Results of 6,000 Operations in California, 1909-1929 in 1929. The work would become a popular text for the advocacy of sterilization, as it purported to be an objective study of the operations in the state and concluded, unsurprisingly, that rigorous programs for the sterilization of the unfit were beneficial to all involved, including the sterilized patients. In 1929, he received an honorary Sc.D. degree from Occidental College, which he had attended. Thenceforth, he commonly referred to himself as Dr. Popenoe. However, on April 26, 2019, Occidental rescinded the honorary Sc.D. degree after a unanimous vote of its board of trustees. Leading up to that vote, Occidental Professor Peter Dreier wrote an opinion article in March 2019 about the college's historical role in eugenics and racism, and 86 percent of the college's faculty then signed a statement urging the board to revoke the degree granted to Popenoe 90 years earlier.

Product Info

Publisher: Williams & Wilkins Co.

Year: 1929

Type: Used

Binding: Softcover

First Edition

Seller Info

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Country: United States