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Davis' Apology Sheds No Light on Sterilizations in
California
Lack of an inquiry into the
state's ambitious eugenics effort and its 20,000 victims
angers some historians and disabled advocates.
By Aaron Zitner
Times
Staff Writer
Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times
March 16, 2003
WASHINGTON -- To make amends for a state program that
sterilized 7,600 people against their will, North
Carolina's governor created a panel last year to probe
the history of the effort, interview survivors and
consider reparations.
In Oregon, then-Gov. John Kitzhaber last year apologized
in person to some of the 2,600 people sterilized there,
and he created an annual Human Rights Day to commemorate
the state's mistake. On the day Virginia Gov. Mark R.
Warner apologized, Jesse Meadows and other victims
unveiled a roadside marker.
"It felt pretty good to be there, even though it was
so late," said Meadows, 80.
Some historians and advocates for the disabled had a
mixed reaction to the apology issued Tuesday by Gov. Gray
Davis for California's policy, the most aggressive in the
nation, which sterilized an estimated 20,000 mentally
disabled people and others from 1909 through the 1960s.
Davis offered his apology in a press release. No
survivors or disability groups were on hand to accept it.
There was no order to probe for more details of a history
that, according to scholars, is still largely unexplored
and not fully understood.
"It's like a preemptive apology.... We don't know
yet who to apologize to," said Alexandra Stern, a
University of Michigan historian who is writing a book
about California's sterilization program.
"An apology with no attempt to find the people who
deserve to receive it is meaningless," said Stephen
Drake, research analyst with Not Dead Yet, a national
disability rights group. "If the governor is serious
about wanting to understand this shameful chapter of
California history, then you need an effort to study the
records of just how this was done."
"I think it's premature," said Paul Lombardo, a
University of Virginia historian who revived interest in
the state policy when he lectured Tuesday to a California
Senate committee. The lecture, which some officials said
was the first time they had heard of the sterilization
policy, triggered a statement within hours from Davis and
a separate apology from state Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer.
Lombardo and Drake said the apologies were welcome as
acknowledgments of past abuse. "But if they don't
try to understand the history, then I don't know what
it's worth," Lombardo added.
Historians have only recently begun to explore
California's sterilization effort. Primarily at
institutions for the mentally ill and the developmentally
disabled, the state sterilized thousands of people under
the premise that the "unfit" should be removed
from the gene pool so their children would not burden
society.
But some of the basic details still are missing. Among
them: exactly how many people were sterilized.
The mentally ill and developmentally disabled were the
initial focus of the policy, but some historians believe
that it also targeted Mexican and Asian immigrants,
criminals, juvenile delinquents and sexually active
women.
Even the date that the practice ended is unclear, though
it may have been as late as 1969.
"We checked that and we haven't been able to
determine that," said Bertha Gorman, spokeswoman for
the California Health and Human Services Agency. Because
of patient confidentiality rules, historians have had
little access to state records that might shed light on
the state's sterilization history.
"Shouldn't we demand that the state fill in the
history?" asked David Mitchell, who runs a
disabilities studies program at the University of
Illinois at Chicago. "That would be the foundation
of a meaningful apology."
Russell Lopez, a spokesman for the governor, said he had
called three state departments last week in an attempt to
find survivors but was told no names could be released
because of patient confidentiality rules.
"The governor just learned about this," Lopez
said, "and he decided it was something he must do:
apologize for what the Legislature did in the past."
In Virginia, North Carolina and Oregon, a combination of
media interest and university research brought attention
to past sterilization programs and led to the state
apologies.
Although some details remain clouded, there is no doubt
that California was once home to the largest
sterilization program in the nation and to some of the
most influential supporters of the practice, including
the publisher of the Los Angeles Times in the 1930s.
At least 30 states passed laws in the first decades of
the 1900s that aimed to shape society by denying the
so-called unfit the ability to reproduce. Scientists
already had shown how careful breeding could improve
crops and livestock. Now, they were arguing that
selective breeding could improve humanity and wipe out
poverty, prostitution and mental illness, which were
thought to have genetic roots.
The concept, known as eugenics, led to the sterilization
of more than 63,000 people in the United States from
about 1907 through the 1970s.
California accounted for one-third of all operations. Its
sterilization law was the second in the nation, after
Indiana's.
The state's enthusiasm for eugenics was so well known
that it is mentioned in "The Great Gatsby."
When Nazi Germany wrote its sterilization policy, it
borrowed from California's law, historians say.
"Why California more than other states? That's a key
question," Stern said. "I think it has to do
with the need to civilize the frontier."
In better breeding practices, Californians saw a way to
control the chaos of nature. And their use in human
reproduction had the support of prominent citizens,
including then-Stanford University President David Starr
Jordan and Pasadena citrus magnate Ezra Gosney, who
founded one of the most influential think tanks devoted
to eugenics, the Human Betterment Foundation, in 1926.
Another cheerleader was The Times, whose publisher, Harry
Chandler, was listed as a member of the Human Betterment
Foundation in a 1938 pamphlet by the group.
"We have secured the ardent support of the Los
Angeles Times," Gosney wrote in a 1937 dispatch to
the Eugenical News, a monthly periodical. "They are
running an article each week in their Sunday magazine
edition which, while not as good as the editor-owner of
the paper would like, keeps the subject before the people
and does much to encourage us in carrying on."
That Sunday column, called "Social Eugenics,"
ran from 1935 to 1941 and argued for strong sterilization
laws, said Lombardo of the University of Virginia. The
paper ran at least 120 of them, he added.
Through much of the 1930s, many sterilization advocates
also cheered on the eugenics policies in Germany.
"Why Hitler Says: 'Sterilize the Unfit!' " ran
a headline in a 1935 issue of The Times' magazine.
"Here, perhaps, is an aspect of the new Germany that
America, with the rest of the world, can little afford to
criticise."
Under California law, people with "mental
disease" could be sterilized if doctors believed the
condition could be passed to descendants. The
superintendents of state institutions had broad authority
to decide how often to use the procedure, Stern said.
"The term 'mental disease' could be interpreted
broadly," she said. "People who were epileptics
were lumped in there, and people with 'perverse' sexual
tendencies, so you had gay men."
Some who were sterilized had landed in state institutions
on grounds of theft, forgery and truancy from school. In
some places, women appear to have been sterilized merely
for promiscuity.
"Something like 25% of the girls who have been
sterilized were sent up here solely, or primarily, for
that purpose," wrote Paul Popenoe, director of the
Human Betterment Foundation, during a 1926 research trip
to the Sonoma State Home for the Feeble-Minded.
"They are kept only a few months -- long enough to
operate and instill a little discipline in them; and then
returned home."
Stern and Lombardo believe that hundreds of prisoners, as
well as many of the women and others at the Sonoma
facility, are not included in the commonly cited figure
of 20,000 sterilizations in California.
They also suspect that the state's strong anti-immigrant
movement of the early 1900s targeted Mexicans and other
nonwhite groups with sterilization, an attempt to dilute
their presence in the population. But no broad survey of
the racial and ethnic profile of sterilization patients
has been done
Joel Braslow, an associate professor of psychiatry at
UCLA, says critiques of sterilization laws often misstate
how the policy was practiced.
In state institutions, he says, doctors cared little
about eugenics. Instead, they saw sterilization as a
humane and beneficial treatment for patients, along with
lobotomies and other now-discredited practices.
"In practice, we didn't sterilize the severely
retarded," said Dr. William Keating, a surgeon at
Sonoma State Hospital throughout the 1950s. "They
had very little opportunity for sex. The people we
concentrated on were people who were moderately retarded,
who had a chance of going out and getting pregnant."
In an interview, Keating said he performed 500 to 600
tubal ligations and vasectomies at the institution.
Individuals who could perform some sort of job outside
the institution would be released, but not if they were
at risk of getting pregnant or impregnating someone. In
effect, sterilization was a ticket to a work furlough, or
general release.
Keating recalled a young man who had an IQ he estimated
to be 85. After his vasectomy, the man was released, only
to return for a visit one day -- in full Army uniform. He
had become a first lieutenant during the Korean War.
Eugenic sterilizations tailed off through the 1950s and
1960s but remained legal until 1979. Today, state law
allows sterilization for mentally incompetent people who
cannot give informed consent. A court-appointed
conservator must petition a judge for permission.
Victim Jesse Meadows said that Virginia, at least,
"ought to pay people for what they did."
Meadows, of Lynchburg, was sent to the Virginia Colony
for Epileptics and the Feebleminded in 1940, after his
mother died and his father remarried. He was sterilized
there, at age 17.
"They said it was to help my health ... and so I
wouldn't have no feeble-minded children," Meadows
said.
Virginia's apology and roadside marker "helped me
some," Meadows said. "But it's hard to forget
that somebody ruined your life like that."
Times staff writer Dan
Morain and research librarian Janet Lundblad contributed
to this report. Copyright
2003 Los Angeles Times
State Issues Apology for Policy of
Sterilization
By Carl Ingram
Times
Staff Writer
Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times
March 12, 2003
SACRAMENTO -- It was a dark chapter in
American history. For more than half a century,
California and other states forcibly sterilized 60,000
mentally ill people as part of a misguided national
campaign to eliminate crime,
"feeblemindedness," alcoholism, poverty and
other problems blamed for dragging society down.
On Tuesday, Gov. Gray Davis apologized, placing
California in a small group of states that have issued
formal regrets.
"To the victims and their families of this past
injustice," Davis said in a statement, "the
people of California are deeply sorry for the suffering
you endured over the years. Our hearts are heavy for the
pain caused by eugenics. It was a sad and regrettable
chapter ... one that must never be repeated."
As eugenics was practiced in California and 31 other
states at various times between 1909 and 1964, when it
stopped, individuals considered defective included
alcoholics, petty criminals, the poor, disabled and
mentally ill.
About 20,000 people were involuntarily sterilized in an
attempt to prevent their genes from being passed on to
another generation.
Eugenics was intended to "clean up the gene
pool," Paul Lombardo, an expert on the subject, said
during a presentation at the Capitol only hours before
Davis acted.
The policy was horribly misguided and resulted in the
human rights of thousands being routinely violated by a
coercive government with the support of the Supreme
Court, said Lombardo, a professor at the University of
Virginia School of Medicine.
He spoke at a special California Senate hearing on
eugenics and the history of mandatory sterilization of
supposedly defective people.
Sen. Dede Alpert (D-San Diego) said she intends to
introduce a resolution that will express the
Legislature's apology.
Davis issued the official regrets shortly after state
Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer apologized for one of his
predecessors, Atty. Gen. Ulysses S. Webb, who
enthusiastically supported forced sterilization as
"enlightened" law free of legal
"inhibitions." Webb served from 1903 until
1939.
Lockyer said it is never too late to apologize for the
bigotry practiced against the disabled and others who
were "seen as misfits of the time." He said the
lessons of eugenics should not be lost in this era of
cloning and genetic engineering advancements.
Lombardo said later that he was stunned that a
gubernatorial apology from Davis would occur so quickly.
"I never expected that I'd finish a lecture at noon
and the governor would make an apology by 3:30
p.m.," Lombardo said.
He and George Cunningham, a genetic disease expert in the
state Department of Health Services, said it was unknown
how many forced-sterilization victims are living in
California, but suggested that the number is probably
small because most sterilizations occurred before World
War II.
"There is no registry of these cases," Lombardo
said.
Davis' apology did not propose reparations or other
compensation to the victims or their families.
Lombardo said it would be difficult for survivors to
collect damages in a lawsuit against the government
because the Supreme Court had upheld the
constitutionality of forced sterilization in 1927.
He told the hearing of the Select Committee on Genetics,
Genetic Technologies and Public Policy that Adolf
Hitler's Third Reich borrowed generously from U.S. laws
when it imposed forced sterilization on
"undesirables."
Lombardo, a lawyer and historian, said eugenics started
with the goal of encouraging development of a world of
healthy individuals who would pass along their best
traits to the next generation.
He said many leading minds of the late 1800s and early
1900s enthusiastically supported eugenics.
Contests were held to determine "perfect
children," movies publicized the movement, and major
foundations financed eugenics research, Lombardo said.
He said supporters were successful in persuading the Los
Angeles Times to run a series of favorable articles about
eugenics in its Sunday magazine.
Lombardo said eugenics was an "incredibly popular
movement" and a household word in America because
Americans "all wanted to help the children."
Eugenics was defined as "to be well born" and
to have a "happy heritage."
At the time, the mantra was, "Let's get rid of crime
and poverty. Let's have healthy children. Who could argue
against it?"
In 1929, California became the second state to adopt
forced sterilization as law and accounted for a third of
the total cases nationally during the 35 years that
eugenics was state policy, he said.
Many early supporters of eugenics became disillusioned
with the movement, Lombardo said, when it got sidetracked
into a policy for selective breeding.
If you want other stories on this
topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times
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