The Kansas-born Popenoe had recently left the university, where he studied heredity, to care for his father, when his former academic adviser asked him to edit the Journal of Heredity, a scholarly publication focused on the subject of inheritance. One of his first editorial assignments was to cover the progress of California’s five-year-old forced-sterilization law, which authorized directors of state institutions to sterilize inmates against their will and even without their knowledge.
For this assignment, Popenoe visited asylums across the state to inspect the inmates subjected to the new legislation. He found that people from Scandinavia, Britain, Italy, Russia, Poland, and Germany constituted the majority of sterilizations, though African Americans and those of Mexican descent were operated upon at double their rate within the general population. He didn’t question these numbers, believing that immigrants and persons of color were the original sources of degeneracy and that African Americans and Mexicans were “hyperbreeders,” whose children could seldom support themselves. Based on his observations, Popenoe then argued in his journal that approximately ten million Americans—then, a tenth of the population—should be sterilized.
Gosney financed the study, in addition to commissioning it. The lemon grove owner had amassed a considerable fortune from selling citrus crops in Southern California. A Kentucky native who shared Popenoe’s background in agriculture, Gosney wanted to apply horticultural practices to human beings. Why, he wondered, were measures being taken to grow the plumpest, most appealing fruit and the sturdiest cattle, but nothing was being done to ensure the quality of the human species?
In 1928, after more than a decade of advocating for sterilization in academic circles, the two men established the Human Betterment Foundation in Pasadena, whose stated purpose was “to foster and aid constructive and educational forces for the protection and betterment of the human family in body, mind, character, and citizenship.”