[T]he Immigration Section turned its attention to the "Mexican problem" when [...] Holmes and the Sacramento realtor Charles M. Goethe began to press for a [racial] quota [...]. A zoologist by training, Holmes taught eugenics at the University of California, produced a family pedigree inventory of Berkeley undergraduates, and espoused the idea of monetary incentive for white female students [...] to produce more children. In an article titled "Perils of the Mexican Invasion," Holmes assailed Mexicans as mentally [defective], and wildly procreative carriers of plague [...].
[B]efore they joined the country's first eugenics body, the Eugenics Committee of the American Breeders' Association, [Stanford University president] Jordan and the horticulturalist Luther Burbank were charter members of the Sierra Club. [...].
The Sacramento real estate tycoon Charles M. Goethe, who established the Eugenics Society of Northern California (ESNC), enabled Stephen Mather, the inaugural director of the National Park Service, to launch the interpretive parks program in Yosemite in 1920 and gave more than $2 million to the Save-the-Redwoods League for memorial groves [...].
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The glaring absence of [...] legal recourse for patients from 1909 to the late 1940s helps explain California's comparatively high [forced] sterilization rates. [...] [S]uperintendents acted with great impunity, aided by a geography of isolated institutions [...]. There were [some] differences among the mental hospitals and the feebleminded homes as well as among superintendents' [...] beliefs about the eugenic, or punitive purposes and value of reproductive surgery. Nevertheless, one preponderant pattern was an unforgiving racial antagonism toward Spanish-surnamed, primarily Mexican-origin, patients [...].
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After retiring [as chief of the Berkeley Police Department in 1932], Vollmer was appointed professor of police administration in the political science department at the University of California at Berekely, where he established the School of Criminology. [...] Using the example of an orange tree, he explained, "Environment plays an important role in developing all of the potentialities of the tree, but that is all that environment can do. It can add nothing to the tree that was not there at the beginning of its existence." Extending this analogy to humans, Vollmer continued, "A constitutionally defective individual will always be defective," adding, "As a general rule, brilliant and talented persons usually are descendants of people of superior qualities while the stupid and insane are descendants of dull or defective forbears."
To infuse science and medicine into policing, in Berkeley and other locals across the Americas (Los Angeles, San Diego, Kansas City, Detroit, and Havana) where he revamped police departments, Vollmer introduced an array of new technologies, [...] such as integrated radio communications, an identification records system, mobile patrols, sophisticated laboratories, and mandatory fingerprinting. [...]
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Vollmer commissioned a physiologist at the University of California at Berkeley to design the country's first polygraph or "lie-detector" apparatus. He was also keen on intelligence testing, which he thought could both accurately identify feebleminded and delinquent adolescents [...].
When he was elected to the park board in 1934, Vollmer brought his ideas about hereditary potentialities to bear [...]. These concerns [...] underpinned the construction of Tilden Park. So too did Vollmer's scientific and biological approaches to criminality [...]. Vollmer declared that [...] [t]he provision of nature areas [...] would stimulate health and diminish crime: "Delinquency thrives where there is no supervised recreation." [...]
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European Americans "brought a very particular concept of time, and their place in it, to their understanding of the trees [redwoods], in the process weaving a tale of conquest, domination of outsiders, and, ultimately, of racial supremacy" [...].
On the day the arboretum was officially dedicated, [...]. Dr. William J. Van Der Berg, chairman of the college advisory board, lauded Goethe's eugenic efforts "to increase the number of sound minds and bodies, and cut the chain of defective humans who crowd our institutions." If you visit the arboretum today, below the round you will find a bronze tablet, which reads: "ERECTED IN HONOR OF CHARLES M. GOETHE GOOD FRIEND OF MAN AND NATURE AND PRESERVER OF THE BEST IN BOTH [...]." Below the round sits a time line, "A Sierran Redwood's Reflections on the Second Millennium," which lists about fifty salient events in the making of the modern world [...]. It begins at the center with the Viking Leif Ericsson [...], followed by, just to name a few, the First and Second Crusades, [...] the opening of the Suez Canal, [...] the outlawing of the Communist Party in the United States [...]. Lyndon B. Johnson called Goethe "an American whose life has been so richly dedicated to the service of humanity" [...].
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All text above by: Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in America - Second Edition (University of California Press, 2016). Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.
