Paul Popenoe

Paul Bowman Popenoe (October 16, 1888 - June 19, 1979) was an American agricultural explorer, eugenicist, influential advocate of the compulsory sterilization of the mentally ill and the mentally disabled, and the father of marriage counseling in the United States.

Biography
Popenoe was born in Kansas in 1888 and grew up in California, the son of a pioneer of the avocado industry. After spending some time at a university, Popenoe became an agricultural explorer, collecting date specimens for his father's nursery along with his younger botanist brother Wilson Popenoe, and published his first book Date Growing in the Old World and the New in 1913. In 1929 he received an honorary degree from Occidental College (after which he commonly referred to himself as "Dr. Popenoe").

In the mid-1910s Popenoe became interested in human breeding, editing the Journal of Heredity from 1913 until 1917, with a special attention to eugenics and social hygiene. During World War I he left the journal, joined the staff of the United States Army Sanitary Corps, and while overseas was exposed to German marriage-consultation centers established by the Prussian Social Welfare Ministry for the purpose of promoting procreation.

After the war, Popenoe returned to the United States and began working with E.S. Gosney, a wealthy California financier, and the Human Betterment Foundation to promote eugenic policies in the state of California. In 1909, California had enacted its first compulsory sterilization law which allowed for sterilization of the mentally ill and mentally retarded in its state psychiatric hospitals. With Popenoe as his scientific workhorse, Gosney intended to study the sterilization work being done in California and use it to advocate sterilization in other parts of the country and in the world at large. This 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. This 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, not surprisingly, that rigorous programs for the sterilization of the "unfit" were beneficial to all involved, including the sterilized patients. The work would later be cited by the Racial Hygiene theorists in Nazi Germany to justify Germany's own sterilization program, and was one of the first American books translated into German by the Nazi government. Eventually the Nazis would sterilize over 400,000 people under their sterilization laws; in the USA the total would be around 65,000, about a third in California.

By 1918, Popenoe had become well-established enough to co-author a popular college textbook on eugenics (Applied Eugenics, with Roswell Johnson). During the 1930s he served as a member of the American Eugenics Society's board of directors along with Charles B. Davenport, Henry H. Goddard, Madison Grant, Harry H. Laughlin, and Gosney, among others).

Along with his advocacy of sterilization programs, Popenoe was also interested in using the principles of Prussian marriage-consultation services for eugenic purposes. Aghast at the divorce rate which boomed during the Great Depression, Popenoe came to the conclusion that "unfit" families would reproduce out of wedlock, but truly "fit" families would need to be married to reproduce. Marriage counseling could keep "fit" families together, and advise them on the importance of "good heredity", and so Popenoe opened the first United States "marriage clinic" in Los Angeles in 1930, the American Institute of Family Relations.

For a while, Popenoe's two major interests, sterilization and marriage counseling, ran parallel, and he published extensively on both topics. Over time he became more prominent in the field of counseling, however, reaching his peak when he authored Ladies Home Journal's most popular serial of all time, "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" As public interest in eugenics waned, Popenoe focused more of his energies into marriage counseling, and by the time of the public rejection of eugenics at the end of World War II, with the revelation of the Nazi Holocaust atrocities, Popenoe had thoroughly redefined himself as primarily a marriage counselor (which by that time had lost most of its explicit eugenic overtones). However his family focuses -- primarily concerned with preserving traditional roles of masculinity, heterosexuality, and arguing for preserving of strict racial and class boundaries in reproduction -- can be interpreted as being veiled extensions of his original eugenic ideas. Popenoe's approach to marriage counseling fell out of favor in the 1960s with the popularity of feminism and the sexual revolution.

Popenoe died in 1979, convinced that civilization was still on the verge of collapse due to poor breeding and poor social mores.

The archives of the Human Betterment Foundation are in Special Collections at Caltech in Pasadena.