Building a "better" human race: the Human Betterment Foundation and eugenic sterilization in California, 1909-1942

[ABSTRACT ONLY; NO FULL TEXT] During the American Progressive Era, California was the most active state in terms of eugenic sterilization operations. California was also an early adopter of sterilization legislation, as the third American state to institute such laws in 1909. California's laws effectively protected surgeons and other medical practitioners from legal repercussions related to sterilization operations. The state reported around twenty thousand of the surgeries performed in its institutions between 1909 and the 1970s, when sterilization legislation was finally overturned. Proponents of human sterilization by vasectomy or salpingectomy, also known at the time as asexualization, proposed the operations as a solution to issues including overcrowding in state institutions, widespread poor moral hygiene, and a supposed overreliance on state welfare by poor people. From its incorporation in 1928 until its dissolution in 1942, the Pasadena-based Human Betterment Foundation (HBF) encouraged wider application of eugenic sterilization (both compulsory and voluntary) in California and throughout the United States. Ezra Seymour Gosney, a millionaire citrus magnate, created and privately funded the foundation, and hired Paul Popenoe to carry out the HBF's analysis of California's sterilization program and its effects. The HBF presented its study as an objective analysis of California's sterilization program, taking advantage of a large and influential network of organizations in the state with links to eugenics. The true purpose of the HBF, however, was to espouse value judgments about who deserved to reproduce, allowing Gosney and Popenoe to advance their own subjective worldview under the guise of scientific analysis. HBF members and publications employed various methods to portray the foundation as a legitimate authority, such as emphasizing their ties to state institutions, universities, and medical practitioners. An analysis of primary sources, including HBF publications as well as unpublished documents from the E. S. Gosney and Human Betterment Foundation collection in the Caltech archives, shows that the HBF's work was more akin to lobbying or propaganda than detached analysis of the results of California's eugenic sterilization program.