Engaging the past: Charles M. Goethe, American Eugenics, and Sacramento State University.

• Date: 22 June 2005
• Author: Platt, Tony
• Published date: 22 June 2005
• Author: Platt, Tony

The Arboretum

EVERY TIME THAT I DROVE THROUGH THE MAIN ENTRANCE TO CALIFORNIA STATE University in Sacramento during the last 25 years, I could not help but notice the prominent signage that announced the C.M. Goethe Arboretum." As a long-time faculty member, I knew that Charles M. Goethe (1975-1966) was a widely respected philanthropist and benefactor of the university. But because I have been doing research on eugenics, a now-discredited science popular in the 1920s and 1930s, I now know that in his 1936 presidential address to the Eugenics Research Association, Goethe (1936: 66) publicly defended Nazi Germany's "honest yearnings for a better population."

Why would my university, with its strong commitment to multicultural values, pay homage to somebody devoted to breeding a master race? This question prompted my investigation into Goethe's relationship to his adopted alma mater. (1) What I discovered was that from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, when Sacramento State College, as it was then known, was courting Goethe for his money and prestige, the university turned a blind eye to his widely known racist views, even participating in efforts to sanitize Goethe's public reputation. Once his bigotry became a public embarrassment, especially in the context of the antiracism movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the university held its nose and distanced itself from Goethe's unsavory reputation, while continuing to use his bequest. This has been the policy for the last 30 years. It is time for a different approach.

The decision to remember, whether made personally or socially, is a selective process and an "ongoing activity" (Young, 1994: 36). There is no such thing as a neutral act of commemoration because memory is always partial. The past never rests in peace: it is always in motion, subject to revision and reinterpretation, dogmatized into eternal truths or splintered into a thousand fragments. "Every act of recognition," observes geographer David Lowenthal (1985: 412), "alters what survives. We can use the past fruitfully only when we realize that to inherit is also to transform." The choices inherent in remembering are critical to how history becomes embedded in everyday life: commemorating momentous dates, people, and events, and enshrining significance in statues, symbols, and public markers. The case of Charles M. Goethe and Sacramento State University provides a window into the problems faced by universities confronting institutional legacies of hatred.

Human Betterment

Charles M. Goethe was a leading visionary and patron of the American eugenics movement. (2) The science of eugenics, which emerged at the turn of the last century, was designed, in the words of one of its founders, Francis Galton, to give "the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable" (Kevles, 1995: xiii). Influenced by new developments in genetics, medicine, and public health, at the core of eugenics was an assumption about "the central role of heredity in determining physical and mental traits and in the innate inequality of individuals and groups" (Weiss, 2004: 15). Belief in the role of genetic inheritance as a determining cause of social inequality was by no means unique to the Third Reich. Social Darwinism, as it was known, had a long, respectable history in the West.

Eugenics was "all over the political map" (Briggs, 2002: 99), with enormous variation in policies and practices from country to country: endorsed by Fabian socialists in England and by Nazis in Germany; linked to birth control and progressive economic reforms in Denmark, and to racial policies against itinerant tattare in Sweden; an expression of fascist ideology in Argentina and of cultural hybridity in Mexico; and closely associated with the sterilization of those defined as "feeble-minded" in Germany, the United States, Sweden, and Denmark, but not in Holland, England, and Mexico (Broberg and Roll-Hansen, 1996; Stepan, 1991; Kevles, 2004).

In the United States, eugenics was dominated by hard-line tendencies. Here, its right-wing supporters promoted "Anglo-Saxon" societies as the engine of modern civilization and advocated policies of apartheid to protect the "well born" from contamination by the poor, mentally ill, and "socially inadequate." Its leaders believed that a variety of social successes (wealth, political leadership, intellectual discoveries) as well as social problems (poverty, illegitimacy, crime, mental illness, and unemployment) could be traced to inherited biological attributes associated with "racial temperament." They advocated "positive eugenics" to increase the birthrate of privileged families and "negative eugenics" to reduce the birthrate of the "socially inadequate." (3)

Eugenics was also a cultural vehicle for expressing anxiety about the "degeneration" of middle-class "Aryans." For many American eugenicists, sterilization was not so much a technical, medical procedure to enhance physical and mental health, as it was a way to cleanse the body politic of racial and sexual impurities, resulting from the declining birthrate of the well-to-do and the "evil of crossbreeding" (Popenoe and Johnson, 1926: 301). Eugenics organizations hoped that their research would demonstrate the biological basis of white supremacy, thus bolstering restrictions on welfare benefits to poor families, bans on interracial marriage or "miscegenation," and limits on immigration from non-European countries, as well as campaigns for compulsory sterilization.

Goethe was an influential member of the most important eugenics associations and invested at least one million dollars of his own money in writing about and promoting tracts on eugenics, conservation, race, and immigration (Schauer, 1976: 125). Based in Sacramento all his long life, Goethe was bred for success. He completed high school in Sacramento in 1891 and passed the bar in 1900, but never practiced law. Instead, he worked in his father's bank and real estate business, leading a self-disciplined life, observing his family's conventional Lutheran religiosity. In 1903, he married Mary Glide and into one of the wealthiest families in Sacramento. Through shrewd investments and real estate deals, his wealth steadily accumulated to $24 million by the time of his death in 1966 (Ibid.).

Goethe was a public activist in the tradition of Progressive philanthropists who used their wealth for hands-on projects of significant social consequences. He was interested in conventional politics, but it was not his passion. He regularly supported candidates and politicians who had a reputation for right-wing views on race and communism. He was an early supporter of Richard Nixon, even giving him advice on how to maintain good relations with the press. (4) In the late 1950s, when Goethe lobbied Congress to maintain racial restrictions on immigration, Strom Thurmond let him know that "I appreciate your comments, as I am also opposed to opening up our immigration floodgates." (5) Goethe was also on the mailing list of Georgia Governor Marvin Griffin, a fierce opponent of integration who was convinced that communists had highjacked the Civil Rights movement and that "the white race are [sic] the only people able to perpetuate the Christian religion." (6)

But it was to a variety of civic rather than political causes that Goethe was primarily devoted--protecting wilderness areas and supporting research in genetics and plant biology--all of which were framed within his passion for eugenics, in particular a sense of urgency about the need to protect pure stocks from mongrelization and extinction, whether Nordic Americans or redwood forests (Stern, 2005: 134-139).

In the early 1920s, Goethe formed the Immigration Study Commission to lobby the government to prevent an influx of "low-powers," especially from Mexico, into California (Goethe, 1929). Four years later, he successfully pressed the Commonwealth Club of California, an elite fraternal society based in San Francisco, to create a eugenics section. In 1929, he was a founding member and enthusiastic booster of the Human Betterment Foundation, the West Coast's leading eugenics organization, which he supported financially until its demise in 1942. In Sacramento in 1933, he organized, funded, and led the Eugenics Society of Northern California, which he administered out of his office, and in the mid- 1930s he served as president of the national Eugenics Research Association (Stern, 2005: Chapters 4 and 6). Goethe's wealth enabled him to stay removed from the day-today operations of organizations such as the Human Betterment Foundation, but he was an effective organizer, shrewdly influencing the direction of the eugenics movement through financial support, and helping to create a network of communication through a barrage of newsletters, reports, and correspondence (Platt, 2005: Chapter 4).

Goethe stayed in touch with the eugenics movement in Europe, the East Coast, and Southern California, steadily doling out grants to promote his favorite researchers and projects. Through a prolific outpouring of correspondence and personal newsletters, he kept his colleagues well informed about eugenic accomplishments in Nazi Germany. Goethe retained strong cultural ties to Germany throughout his life, in part through his paternal origins, in part as a matter of cultural preference (Schauer, 1976).

Goethe's interest in the Nazi government, however, was not simply a nostalgic yearning for his biological and cultural roots. He was neither a sentimentalist nor a fifth columnist, as suggested by Edwin Black, (7) but rather a long-time defender of "that sense of scrupulous business honor of the Nordic race dating back to the time of the Crusades." Goethe was preoccupied with the fear that the Nordic tradition of "unique contributions to all mankind" was being diminished worldwide as a result of "the coming of heterogeneity." What was...