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47
e Journal of American History
June 2015
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jav197
© e Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.
Youth of Color and California’s
Carceral State: e Fred C. Nelles
Youth Correctional Facility
Miroslava Chávez-García
e Fred C. Nelles Youth Correctional Facility, originally known as Whittier State
School when it opened in 1891, lies dormant as a result of massive California state budget
cuts in the early 2000s. ough the facility is closed, its history remains alive, intimately
tied to the early practices of the emerging carceral state in California. Beginning in the
1910s, with the support of Gov. Hiram Johnson and under the guidance of the progres-
sive reformer and newly appointed facility superintendent Fred C. Nelles, Whittier State
School used a rigorous science- and scientic-research-based approach in determining
the causes of delinquency among its young incarcerated population. Relying on leading
thinkers and practitioners in the nascent elds of psychology, education, social work,
and eugenics, state ocials implemented the latest tools and techniques—namely, intel-
ligence testing and eldwork—to understand and contain the sources of juvenile crime.
To aid in the interpretation of the research, ocials also drew on the latest ideas about
and ideologies of race, intelligence, heredity, and crime. ose Whittier State School resi-
dents classied through this process as “normal” and “borderline normal” remained in
the institution and received individualized attention, while those considered beyond the
assistance of the program were labeled “feebleminded” and “defective” and farmed out
to alternative sites of imprisonment or simply returned home, leaving Nelles with what
he considered a group of pliable juvenile inmates. Nelles’s winnowing process proved
successful. Within a few years of its founding, Whittier State School became known
nationally and internationally as a premiere site of rehabilitative connement.1
Nelles’s achievement in implementing the new policies and practices took a toll,
though, on the most vulnerable inmates: the impoverished and poorly educated racial
and ethnic minorities (in particular Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and African Ameri-
cans). In poking and probing juvenile inmates’ intelligence, heredity, and environment,
state ocials labeled a generation of youths of color as “feebleminded delinquents” whose
biology or race linked them to criminality. at most Mexican youths who took the in-
Miroslava Chávez-García is a professor of Chicano and Chicana studies at the University of California, Santa Bar-
bara.
I would like to thank Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Kelly Lytle-Hernández, and the anonymous reviewers of the
Journal of American History for their patience and insightful comments and criticism. I would also like to thank all
the editors of this special issue for giving me the opportunity to share my work.
Readers may contact Chávez-García at mchavezgarcia@chicst.ucsb.edu.
1 For a work that extends the themes covered in this essay, see Miroslava Chávez-García, States of Delinquency:
Race and Science in the Making of California’s Juvenile Justice System (Berkeley, 2012).
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48 e Journal of American History June 2015
telligence tests or responded to the eldwork questionnaires often had little command of
English or that most of those who performed poorly had received a substandard educa-
tion or no schooling at all did not matter. Scientic thought of the day held that low in-
telligence and related physical deciencies or “dysgenic traits” resulted from inherited and
genetic dierences, not from cultural biases inherent in the investigative process. To deal
with many of these young people, state ocials imprisoned them in state hospitals where
they faced permanent care and sterilization.2
Using scientic research methods to identify, predict, and suppress crime is not unusu-
al today in the elds of criminology, penology, crime mapping, and statistics. One cen-
tury ago, however, the use of science-based investigations was the latest innovation in the
ght against rising deviance in an increasingly urbanized, industrialized, and ethnically
and racially diverse society. Public leaders, prison ocials, judges, lawyers, intellectuals,
social workers, and other progressives viewed science—especially its use in the contain-
ment of criminals and the eradication of crime—as the cure for society’s ills. In embracing
and harnessing the power of scientic thought, state ocials nurtured the emerging car-
ceral state, giving rise to a complex, research-based criminal justice system in California.
To explore the roots of that development, this essay relies on more than two hundred
case histories for Mexican, Mexican American, and African American youths, detailing
the role of eugenics-based eldwork in linking notions of intelligence, crime, heredity,
and race. I begin by tracing the origins and development of eugenics in Europe and the
United States and its impact on nonwhite immigrant people. Next, I examine the role of
East Coast–trained eldworkers in carrying out the study at Whittier State School, pay-
ing specic attention to those employed by the California Bureau of Juvenile Research
(), which oversaw the study. Finally, I look at the ideologies and practices that eld-
workers and other scientic researchers used in their investigations and how these scien-
tists racialized, criminalized, and pathologized Mexican, Mexican American, and Afri-
can American youths. Ultimately, pervasive and deep-rooted beliefs about race, science,
and crime—powerful seeds in the development of the carceral state in California—kept
youths of color vulnerable to connement.3
e Origins of Eugenics Fieldwork in the United States
Training in eugenics eldwork occurred as part of the rapid expansion of eugenics-based
ideologies and practices across the United States in the early twentieth century. e eld
of eugenics was developed in the late nineteenth century in England by Charles Darwin’s
2 On contemporary beliefs about the inheritance of dysgenic traits and for discussion of eugenics in the criminal
justice system, see Amy LaPan and Tony Platt, “‘To Stem the Tide of Degeneracy’: e Eugenic Impulse in Social
Work,” in Mental Disorders in the Social Environment: Critical Perspectives, ed. Stuart A. Kirk (New York, 2005),
139–64; Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berke-
ley, 2004); Steven Selden, Inheriting Shame: e Story of Eugenics and Racism in America (New York, 2001); Daniel
J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, Mass., 1995); and Philip R.
Reilly, e Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States (Baltimore, 1991).
3 Fieldworkers completed at least 400 inmate case studies at Whittier State School in the late 1910s through the
early 1920s, but only 203 studies survive. Of those, 127 are studies of Euro-American male youths, 44 are studies of
Mexican and Mexican American male youths, and 33 are studies of African American male youths. See Series VII:
Field Worker Files, Mss. Ms. Coll. 77, Eugenics Record Oce Records, American Philosophical Society (Philadel-
phia, Pa.). I thank Alexandra Minna Stern for pointing me to these sources. I have provided only rst names and
surname initials for Whittier State School youths mentioned in this essay, and I have redacted other personal details
that might reveal their identities.
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49Youth of Color and California’s Carceral State
cousin Francis Galton, a statistician and the founder of the biometrics movement. In
1883 Galton coined the term eugenics, literally meaning “well born,” but which he used
to denote “the science which deals with all inuences that improve the inborn qualities of
a race” and develops them to “the utmost advantage.” Eugenics borrowed from contem-
porary theories emerging in plant and animal biology, such as Neo-Lamarckism, which
argued that the environment could alter human heredity and aect any ospring, and
Mendelian theory, which posited that human traits or characteristics were passed directly
from parents to ospring. e rise in popularity of Mendelian beliefs dovetailed with Gal-
ton’s research on talented men and led him to argue that certain traits were innate, not ac-
quired. Galton’s work eventually popularized the denition of eugenics as better breeding
through selective reproduction of those deemed “t” while preventing the reproduction of
those seen as “unt.” By the 1920s Galton’s research into eugenics as the science of better
breeding was accepted around the world, developing into a scientic movement—albeit
with signicant variations across time and place—in at least thirty-ve countries.4
In the United States Galton found an ardent supporter in Charles Davenport, a pro-
fessor of biology at the University of Chicago. In 1899 Davenport traveled to England
4 Stern, Eugenic Nation, 11, 14, 16, 87, 90; Mark B. Adams, Garland E. Allen, and Sheila Faith Weiss, “Human
Heredity and Politics: A Comparative Institutional Study of the Eugenics Record Oce at Cold Spring Harbor
(United States), the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics (Germany), and
the Maxim Gorky Medical Genetics Institute (),” Osiris, 20 (2005), 232–62, esp. 233–35.
Fred C. Nelles, a progressive leader in juvenile reform across the United States, was
superintendent of the Whittier State School from 1912 (around the time of this photo)
until his untimely death in 1927. Courtesy California State Archives, Oce of the Secretary
of State, Sacramento.
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50 e Journal of American History June 2015
to study biometrics under Galton and became a proponent of Mendelian theories of in-
heritance. Upon returning to the United States, Davenport worked to establish his own
research laboratory. He successfully lobbied the newly established Carnegie Institution of
Washington for funding, and in 1904 he opened the Station for Experimental Evolution
in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. Davenport set his sights on applying Mendelian theo-
ries to human beings, believing that a rising number of socially and racially inadequate
peoples threatened the nation’s moral and social fabric. When the opportunity arose for
securing private funding for an institute dedicated to the study of human genetics and
eugenics, Davenport launched the Eugenics Record Oce (), also in Cold Spring
Harbor, in 1910; in 1920 the oce would join the Station for Experimental Evolution to
create the Carnegie Institute of Washington’s Department of Genetics.5
Soon after its founding the quickly became a hotbed of eugenics advocacy, re-
search, and publication in the United States. To gain wide support, Davenport and his
assistant, Harry Laughlin, an ardent biological determinist and immigration restriction-
ist, focused their energies on advocating their social and legislative agenda and gathering
scientic research on the inheritance of human traits. Beginning in the late 1910s and
early 1920s, Laughlin worked diligently at the state and national levels to draft and sup-
port legislation advocating the sterilization of those labeled “unt”: primarily poor, white
southern European immigrants. In 1920 Laughlin wrote a model law on eugenic prin-
ciples and sent it around the country to legislators for use in drafting compulsory steril-
ization laws. irty states, including California, ultimately adopted aspects of Laughlin’s
work to pass similar legislation that resulted in the compulsory sterilization of thousands
conned in state prisons and mental hospitals, eectively strengthening the emerging
power of the carceral state.6
Laughlin would join Washington State representative Albert Johnson, the nativist head
of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, in March 1924 to address
the immigration restriction debates in Congress. Laughlin testied as an “expert eugen-
ics witness,” speaking on the dangers of continued immigration from countries with de-
generate peoples. His testimony helped pass the Immigration Act of 1924, which cur-
tailed immigration from southern and eastern Europe and debarred Asian immigration
completely. e law also targeted Mexican immigrants, not by imposing quotas but by
increasing the enforcement of restrictions. Concurrent with the passage of anti-immigra-
tion legislation, Davenport launched the research arm of the to train eldworkers
in gathering evidence to support the study and use of eugenics across the United States.7
e growing demand for research on the personal and family histories of patients and
prisoners conned to the institutions of the expanding carceral state prompted Daven-
port to open a summer training institute for eugenics eldwork in 1910. ere students
learned the latest theories on and methodologies in the study of such topics as feeble-
mindedness, criminality, and insanity. Davenport also taught students how to use various
instruments, including intelligence tests, and supplied them with e Trait Book, a man-
ual he developed at the , containing hundreds of codes representing various “physical,
5 Adams, Allen, and Weiss, “Human Heredity and Politics,” 236–37. Garland E. Allen, “e Eugenics Record
Oce at Cold Spring Harbor, 1910–1940: An Essay in Institutional History,” Osiris, 2 (1986), 225–64.
6 Stern, Eugenic Nation, 9, 57–81; Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern
America (Princeton, 2004), 7, 9.
7 Stern, Eugenic Nation, 57–81. e Eugenical Aspects of Deportation: Hearings before the Committee on Immi-
gration and Naturalization, House of Representatives, Seventieth Congress, First Session, February 21, 1928. Including
Statement of Dr. Harry H. Laughlin (Washington, 1928). Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924).
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51Youth of Color and California’s Carceral State
mental, and social characteristics, behaviours, and diseases.” ough biased and open to
subjective interpretation, the book enabled Davenport to maintain a semblance of scien-
tic objectivity. To enable students at the institute to learn how to apply eugenics theories
in the development of family or social case histories, Davenport trained them in “inter-
viewing subjects, conducting investigations, preparing pedigree charts, and interpreting
results.”8
Between the summer institute’s establishment in 1910 and closure in 1924 the
trained over 250 eldworkers or “health ocers of the race”; 85 percent of those trainees
were women. Davenport assumed that women best t the criteria for eldwork because
of their “feminine tactfulness” and ability to engage family members—primarily other
women—in conversation. Most of the women he hired were young, single, middle class,
and had been educated in eastern U.S. women’s colleges. Davenport required all of his
eldworkers to have college or university training in related science elds such as biology,
zoology, or psychology. He also expected his students to be “industrious, loyal, discrete,”
“accurate, condent, systematic,” and to have favorable social and interview skills.9
To legitimize the purpose of the , Davenport ultimately sought to create ecient
and productive eldworkers who had the skills to get their clients—patients, prisoners,
and their families—to reveal their knowledge (of personal, familial, and medical histo-
ries), with all of its perceived limitations, and any family secrets. He knew, however, that
eldworkers would encounter resistance from inmates and their families. He encouraged
eldworkers to overcome any unwillingness by aggressively seeking out a range of family
members, friends, and neighbors for their opinions and insights on an inmate’s character,
despite the possibility of tainting the research with rumor and suspicion. Davenport also
believed that researchers had the right to “go to the homes of . . . people . . . to make in-
timate inquiries about their behaviour.” Such an invasion of privacy, he concluded, was a
small price to pay to improve and ultimately save the northern European race.10
Eugenics Fieldworkers and the California Bureau of Juvenile Research
In 1915 J. Harold Williams, a doctoral student of the pioneering educational psychologist
Lewis M. Terman, welcomed the rst eldworkers to the California Bureau of Juvenile
Research at Whittier State School. As the director of the bureau, Williams touted the
research unit as the western representative of the in that it closely mirrored the of-
ce’s scientic practices and procedures for carrying out eugenics research on the boys
conned to the institution (which ceased to be coeducational in 1913). Guided by the
Whittier Social Case History Manual, developed by Williams at the , eldworkers cre-
ated reports that included family trees or pedigree charts to identify the transmission of
dysgenic traits, such as feeblemindedness (capacity not beyond a twelve-year-old child),
8 C. B. Davenport, e Trait Book (Cold Spring Harbor, 1912). On the codes contained in e Trait Book and
on the application of eugenics in creating case histories, see Amy Sue Bix, “Experiences and Voices of Eugenics
Field-Workers: ‘Women’s Work’ in Biology,” Social Studies of Science, 27 (Aug. 1997), 625–68, esp. 644, 627–28.
9 Bix, “Experiences and Voices of Eugenics Field-Workers,” 632, 636. On Charles Davenport’s desired eldwork-
er characteristics, see “Qualities Desired in a Eugenical Field Worker,” 1921, C-2-4: 9 “Eugenics Fieldworker—
Material Used in Classes—1921” box, Harry H. Laughlin Papers (Special Collections, Pickler Memorial Library,
Truman State University, Kirksville, Mo.), http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/html/eugenics/static/images/1101.html.
10 Bix, “Experiences and Voices of Eugenics Field-Workers,” 626, 641, 650. For Davenport’s views on the re-
sponsibilities and rights of eldworkers, see “Meeting Notes,” June 23, 1915, pp. 331–39, esp. 334, box 1, Series
VII: Field Worker Files, Mss. Ms. Coll. 77, Eugenics Record Oce Records.
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52 e Journal of American History June 2015
excitability, and nomadism, across at least three generations. ese reported results came
from intelligence tests and a laundry list of details in the boys’ personal and family his-
tories, including their mental and physical health, moral character, education, employ-
ment, and household and neighborhood conditions. Fieldworkers’ reports also included
summaries of the causes of delinquency and a prognosis, which raised the possibility of
connement and sterilization. e reports were sophisticated analytical interpretations,
but they were also biased, judgmental, and detrimental to the lives of hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of youths in and outside of the emerging carceral state in California.11
Despite eldworkers’ claims to scientic objectivity, much of their research rested on
biological determinism, cultural biases, and a host of unveried criteria. Undoubted-
ly, most of the scientic misconceptions surrounding inheritance and genetics stemmed
from the eld of eugenics, as reected in the ’s guides and training manuals. Williams
and his eldworkers regularly invoked e Trait Book to evaluate the presence of
11 For an example of Lewis M. Terman’s work, see Lewis M. Terman, e Measurement of Intelligence: An Expla-
nation of and a Complete Guide for the Use of the Stanford Revision and Extension of the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale
(Boston, 1912). For evidence of Eugenics Record Oce () inuence on the California Bureau of Juvenile Re-
search (), see J. Harold Williams et al., Whittier Social Case History Manual (Whittier, 1921), 16, 36. On what
the eldworkers’ reports included, see ibid., 17–38; and J. Harold Williams, “Individual Case History Outline,”
Journal of Delinquency, 5 (May 1920), 71–82, esp. 72.
J. Harold Williams developed these pie charts around 1915 based on his doctoral
research on intelligence, race, and delinquency among 150 boys at Whittier State
School. e research was believed to provide evidence of dierences in intelligence
across members of the three main racial groups housed at the reformatory. Courtesy
California State Archives, Oce of the Secretary of State, Sacramento, Calif.
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53Youth of Color and California’s Carceral State
dysgenic traits—a dicult task, according to researchers. Most high-grade defectives or
the feebleminded, they argued, often looked normal and passed undetected among the
general population. is ability made them an acute social menace, for they could easily
attach themselves to normal individuals and eventually marry and reproduce, which they
did at an alarming rate. “ey are the most prolic breeders and constitute the gravest
social and moral oenders,” armed a leading psychologist.12
Fieldworkers not only harbored misguided notions of inheritance but also had sparse
knowledge of the boys’—and their families’—cultural, ethnic, or socioeconomic back-
grounds. Many of Williams’s sta knew almost nothing about the ethnically and racially di-
verse peoples they met on the West Coast, particularly the growing population of Mexicans
and Mexican Americans, because the researchers and their subjects came from such dierent
social worlds. Moreover, the eldworkers operated in an ideological framework that privileged
Euro-American values and customs, and the authority of science and scientic research, and
that scorned the beliefs and practices of poor, nonwhite clients (reserving particular antipathy
for Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans). In fact, Williams’s research for
e Intelligence of the Delinquent Boy had established a race-based, hierarchical intelligence
order, with whites at the apex, African Americans or “negroes” in the middle, and “Mexican-
Indians” on the bottom. Fieldworkers were well aware of Williams’s conclusions and used
them to inform their research in the process of criminalizing, racializing, and pathologizing
youths of color and conning them to the institutions of the growing carceral state.13
Racializing, Criminalizing, and Pathologizing Youths of Color
Eugenics eldworkers at the invoked long-held assumptions about biological dier-
ences—understood as racial dierences—among Mexican, Mexican American, and Af-
rican American boys to develop a system of race-based “typologies.” ey described male
youths of Mexican descent using labels such as “Mexican type,” “cholo type,” and “Mex-
ican-Indians.” Typologies used in these researchers’ eldwork refer to boys of African
origin as “negro type,” “nigger type,” or “big coon type”—similar to epithets established
decades earlier to keep African Americans in slavery and neoslavery (that is, subservient
to and fearful of whites). Fieldworkers also used these typologies to describe a host of per-
ceived cultural and biological characteristics shared by boys of color and their families.
Researchers rarely invoked similar typologies to refer to Euro-Americans, though they
occasionally made special references to some subjects of eastern and southern European
ancestry. In dealing with boys of Mexican and African origin, researchers most com-
monly used race-based typologies to infer subnormal intelligence, as determined on the
intelligence scales and through interviews and on-site research with families and friends.
e research process often conrmed what they already knew or believed they knew
about youths of color at California’s state prison for boys.14
Fieldworkers’ convictions about the links among intelligence, race, heredity, and de-
linquency were so rmly ingrained that when youths of color challenged those beliefs—
12 On the importance of e Trait Book and other studies as foundational to the , see Williams et al.,
Whittier Social Case History Manual, 44. J. E. Wallace Wallin, “e Hygiene of Eugenic Generation,” Psychological
Clinic, 8 (Oct. 1914), 121–37, esp. 124.
13 J. Harold Williams, e Intelligence of the Delinquent Boy (Whittier, 1919).
14 On nineteenth-century racial terminology and epithets, see, for example, Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm
So Long: e Aftermath of Slavery (New York, 1979), esp. 252–55.
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54 e Journal of American History June 2015
mainly by performing well on intelligence tests—researchers found ways to dismiss the
results. e psychologist Julia Mathews could not believe that the eleven-year-old
Mexican American Victor R. had performed exceedingly well on the intelligence exami-
nation; his intelligence quotient () of 1.15 or 115 percent (on a scale with an of 1.0
or 100 percent dened as normal) rated him superior. “at fact that he is classied so
high,” Mathews said, “was due to the eect of practice and probably coaching, which his
test showed,” though she failed to explain how she knew this. Moreover, she continued,
“it is interesting to note that in spite of his uent English and talkative tendency he has a
vocabulary only equal to that of a 9 year old child.” Mathews clung to her line of reason-
ing even though the sta members she interviewed at the juvenile prison believed that
Victor was “clever” and “brighter than the average boy.” To explain his performance in
scientic terms, Mathews rationalized that he was not a typical Mexican. Rather, she said,
“Victor is on the whole an American type rather than a Mexican-Indian type.”15
In interviews with families of Mexican and Mexican American youths at Whittier
State School, the eldworker Mildred S. Covert, like Mathews, discounted evidence of
extraordinary intelligence, believing that parents, siblings, and even distant relatives of
such delinquent boys had low intelligence levels, at best, or were defective, at worst. After
briey meeting with the family of John A., a Mexican American youth classied as “fee-
bleminded,” Covert decided that John’s younger sister, Irene, who refused to speak with
her, was “probably of moron intelligence.” e girl’s “reasoning,” the eldworker wrote,
is “very poor.” Covert did admit, however, that Irene had redeeming qualities: “quiet and
quite clean in her personal appearance, although lacking in ordinary courtesy and rene-
ment.” Apparently Irene did not demonstrate the decorum expected of Euro-American
middle-class girls.16
Low intelligence did not place Mexicans and Mexican Americans at a decided dis-
advantage, Covert and her fellow researchers concluded, as long as those groups stayed
among their own kind. Negotiating Euro-American society, however, was another mat-
ter. In evaluating and predicting the future of Henry P., a thirteen-year-old Mexican and
English boy rated as “moron” or “feebleminded” (with an of 0.54), the eldworker
George Brammer warned of the pitfalls that Henry would face in Euro-American soci-
ety. “A complication is brought in by this boy being a half-breed,” Brammer stated. “If
he remained under Mexican competition, he should be able to succeed fairly well, but if
he attempts to live with white competitors, his inadequate mental endowment will place
him at a decided disadvantage. He is denitely feeble-minded according to the standards
of our [Euro-American] society.”17
eldworkers held many of the same beliefs about African Americans that they did
about Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Covert described Nathan M., a sixteen-year-old
African American boy who had scored in the “moron” or “feebleminded” range on the
intelligence test, as being “of average intelligence for his race.” Nathan’s defective powers,
however, posed no disadvantage, she reasoned, because many African American men led
their lives as unskilled workers. “Although we believe in our classication of this boy (mo-
ron) is justied by his low mental level, there are nevertheless men of his race (negro) and
15 “Family of Victor R., No. 322,” pp. 2, 3–4, California Bureau of Juvenile Research Case Histories (microlm:
reel 1822219), box 57, Field Worker Files, Eugenics Record Oce Records.
16 “Family of Arthur and John A., No. 305,” p. 25, ibid.
17 “Family of Arthur and Henry P., No. 295,” p. 14, California Bureau of Juvenile Research Case Histories (reel
1822577), box 58, ibid.
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55Youth of Color and California’s Carceral State
his intelligence who are able to make their living and support families.” Farm work was
best suited for “one of his mental level.”18
When the researchers encountered African American boys who deed race-based hi-
erarchies, they described these youths as anomalies, just as they did the boys’ Mexican
counterparts. Among the highest-scoring boys in the juvenile prison’s history was twelve-
year-old John W. P., an African American boy with an of 1.27 or 127 percent. “is is
the highest intelligence quotient ever found at Whittier State School,” Williams informed
the eldworker who investigated the case. “e vocabulary . . . is nearly superior adult . . .
higher than many college students attain.” Not everyone agreed, however. e sta called
the results “erroneous,” but a second test two years later conrmed the earlier ndings.
“He is still one of the brightest boys in the School of any race and has developed intel-
ligence since the last test,” Williams remarked. e testing, he wrote, “indicates genuine
superior intelligence and should denote superior development and ability.”19
Despite John’s intellectual superiority, researchers identied a dysgenic trait in him
that they often associated with African Americans and, to some extent, with Mexicans
and Mexican Americans. e boy, they found, suered from “racial inertia” (laziness).
John’s sluggishness is “evident in both mental and physical reactions and has led to the
18 “Family of Nathan Tom M. (Negro), No. 268,” pp. 1–2, California Bureau of Juvenile Research Case Histo-
ries (reel 1822219), box 57, ibid.
19 “Family of John W. P. (Negro), No. 221,” pp. 2–3, 5, 8, 13, California Bureau of Juvenile Research Case His-
tories (reel 1822575), ibid.
Jonny G., shown here upon his admittance to Whittier State School in 1920, was one of
dozens of Mexican boys identied as “feebleminded” through the scientic-based research
carried out at the reformatory. Courtesy California State Archives, Oce of the Secretary of
State, Sacramento.
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56 e Journal of American History June 2015
notion that he is mentally weak.” “He is not a keen thinker, but slow and lazy intellectu-
ally,” Williams noted. “He is, however, more tractable and less conceited than the average
negro. Neither has he the average negro’s idea of self-importance.” “He should be taught
to cultivate a mental ‘drive’ of which he is fully capable,” Williams concluded.20
John’s racial inertia t neatly with the race-based typologies developed at the : the
temperaments of African American youths were often characterized as phlegmatic or slow
and lazy. Covert characterized Douglas W., a twelve-year-old boy in a similar way. He is a
cruel, mischievous, “no account, shiftless nig[g]er.” It is “impossible to get any work out
of him.” “He was just born lazy,” she said. His chief supervisor agreed but tempered his
views on the boy’s potential for violence, saying, “he is just the swamp niger type, not ma-
licious and not good for much.” e boy’s home fared no better under review: it was the
“usual shiftless negro type of home.”21
Covert also described eleven-year-old Oscar K., an African American boy with a near-
normal of 0.99, as not only “probably above average for his race” but also “a little more
lazy than average for his race.” According to the disciplinarian at the juvenile prison, Os-
car K. wasted time and engaged in frivolity while working in the print shop. Covert re-
marked that fourteen-year-old Joe F., also an African American boy, had the “perpetual
darky grin” and “worked only the way the average darky boy does. He was rather lazy and
had to be watched.”22
Fieldworkers’ views of African American boys were not surprising given the long-held,
gender-specic, race-based stereotypes dating back to slavery. Black males in particular
were considered inherently lazy, stupid, inferior, and animalistic, and proponents of the
slave system used these designations to justify their enslavement and inhumane treat-
ment. Later, following emancipation and the passage of the irteenth, Fourteenth, and
Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, southern whites used those same ideologies,
the convict lease system, the courts, violence, intimidation, threats, and many other de-
humanizing tactics to dismantle Reconstruction, control the freed black population, and
segregate and disenfranchise African Americans in employment, schools, public institu-
tions, and many other sectors of society. Jim Crow segregation and many of those same
beliefs about African Americans persisted into the twentieth century and were used to ex-
plain blacks’ menial position in all facets of society as well as their increasing presence in
adult and juvenile prisons in California and throughout the United States.23
Researchers in the twentieth century described the temperament of “Mexican-types”
or “Mexican Indians” as similar to that of African Americans. In addition to being phleg-
matic, slow, stubborn, and lazy, Mexican boys had “inferior energy.” Drawing on decades-
old ideas and ideologies about Mexican peoples in the southwestern United States, most
Euro-Americans viewed them as a racially mixed—of Spanish, Indian, and African ances-
20 Ibid., pp. 22, 31–32.
21 “Douglas W. (Negro), No. 278,” pp. 5–6, 11, California Bureau of Juvenile Research Case Histories (reel
1822219), ibid. For similar social case histories in which African American youths were labeled “slow,” “lazy,”
or “shiftless,” see “Family of Carl H., No. 249,” p. 3, California Bureau of Juvenile Research Case Histories (reel
1822577), box 58, ibid.; and “Family of Joseph M., No. 277,” p. 4, ibid.
22 “Family of Oscar K., No. 137 (Colored),” pp. 1–2, 7, California Bureau of Juvenile Research Case Histories
(reel 1822219), box 57, ibid.; “Family of Joe F., No. 312,” pp. 4, 12, ibid.
23 For studies examining the dominant Euro-American views of African Americans in slavery, see, for example,
George M. Frederickson, e Black Image in the White Mind: e Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny,
1817–1914 (New York, 1971). For studies of African Americans in Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era, see, for
example, Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York, 1999); and David
M. Oshinsky, “Worse an Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York, 1997).
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57Youth of Color and California’s Carceral State
tries—“mongrel” people. In the dominant Euro-American narrative, the seemingly swift
conquest of Mexico in the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846 underscored the racial and cultural
inferiority of Mexican peoples in relation to the superior Anglo-Saxon race. ese under-
standings inuenced eugenics researchers’ views of Mexican and Mexican American boys
and their families.24
eldworkers drew on deep-rooted ideologies and stereotypes to make sense of
the histories of Mexican and Mexican American boys and African American boys. For
example, Covert characterized Luis A. P., a Mexican American boy, as slow, sly, and un-
trustworthy. “He has all the characteristics of the Mexican race, is suspicious when among
others than his own people,” she reported. e trade instructor at Whittier State School
agreed, saying, “he is deceitful, sneaky, and not to be trusted out of sight.” Willis Clark,
another eldworker, described Xavier V., a thirteen-year-old Mexican boy, in a similar
way, noting that he did “everything in a sleepy fashion. He is rather lazy and indolent.”25
To the researchers, the Mexican and Mexican American boys’ lazy demeanors were also
rooted in their biology—specically their Indian ancestry. In evaluating Jacob V., a thir-
teen-year-old Mexican American, the eldworker indicated that he “doesn’t take much in-
terest [in work], [and] does not realize the value of learning a trade.” He “is just a boy and
his mind is more on play than work. e Indian nature is very strong,” she concluded; “he
would love to roam around the hills with a gun.” eldworkers often described the
parents of Mexican youths in a similar manner. Covert, for instance, depicted the twelve-
year-old John A.’s mother, Angelina A., whom Covert had never met, as “a woman of very
ordinary ability. Not progressive, but of the negligent, course [coarse] type of Cholo.” Co-
vert chose a derogatory descriptor reserved for poor, working-class Mexicans.26
When Covert and her fellow researchers met Mexican and Mexican American boys
who challenged their ideologies, they explained the ndings as atypical—much as they
did when describing unusually bright African American boys. Joe M., a fteen-year-old
Mexican American boy diagnosed as “one of our lower grade Mexican boys intellectually,”
had a “better disposition and more active temperament than characterize[d] his social and
racial group,” Covert noted. Sixteen-year-old Armando T., like Joe M., surprised Covert
as not only “average-normal and unusually intelligent for his race” but also “active; espe-
cially noticeable in view of his race and [borderline] intelligence.”27
e race-based typologies used in the case histories to arm the deviancy of boys of
African and Mexican descent not only included behavioral attributes but also physical
characteristics. In portraying the appearances of many boys, the researchers explicitly de-
scribed their bodies, particularly their facial features. Covert identied Jacob V., for ex-
ample, the boy with the Indian tendencies and “a typical Cholo type,” as having “straight
black hair, brown eyes, [and] thick regular shaped lips.” His eyes, she continued, “slant
inward to a slight extent; particularly noticeable is the fact that they are usually bloodshot,
a condition which he seems to have inherited from his mother.” Jacob’s nose, too, was
24 On the labeling of inferior energy, see “Family of Johnny G., No. 318,” p. 3, California Bureau of Juvenile
Research Case Histories (reel 1822219), box 57, Field Worker Files, Eugenics Record Oce Records. On racial
stereotypes, see Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: e Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berke-
ley, 1994).
25 “Family of Louis A. P. (Mexican-Indian), No. 227,” p. 3, California Bureau of Juvenile Research Case Histo-
ries (reel 1822219), box 57, Field Worker Files, Eugenics Record Oce Records. “Family of Xavier V., No. 333,”
pp. 1, 10, ibid.
26 “Family of Jacob V., No. 231,” pp. 1, 8, ibid. “Family of Arthur and John A., No. 305,” p. 24, ibid.
27 “Family of Joe M. (Mex[ican]-Ind[ian]), No. 240,” p. 2, ibid. “Family of Armando T. (Mex[ican]-Ind[ian]),
No. 211,” p. 2, ibid.
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58 e Journal of American History June 2015
“quite broad and nostrils quite wide open. [His] cheek bones [are] high, suggesting some
Indian descent. [And his] ears project outward from the head.”28
eldworkers’ descriptions of African American physical types were equally ex-
plicit yet more disparaging in their meaning and tone than those used for Mexicans and
Mexican Americans. e researchers referred to large—tall and heavy—African American
boys as “big negroes,” likely in reference to late nineteenth-century fears of the New Ne-
gro and of seemingly oversized African American males who threatened Euro-American
society, generally, and Euro-American women, in particular. As Leon Litwack and many
other scholars have explained, after African Americans had obtained their emancipation
in 1864, images of menacing, sexualized black males circulated in the South and through-
out the United States to instill fear of “race rule,” the rape of Euro-American women,
and the contamination and subordination of the white race. e threat of the New Ne-
gro—in contrast and in reference to the safe “old Negro” bound in chains during slav-
ery—remained in many early twentieth-century American minds, even among those in
California, where the African American community remained fairly small, compact, and
potentially nonthreatening. e perception of alleged danger was palpable in the eld-
workers’ descriptions of the young black males, most of them the grandchildren of former
slaves and the products of Jim Crow segregation.29
Covert described fteen-year-old Walter J. as “a large strong negro boy, almost of gi-
gantic proportions, although only slightly taller than average” with “the big nigger ap-
pearance.” Julius J., another African American boy, also “shows the usual big coon fea-
tures.” He had “broad nostrils, thick heavy protruding lips and his prole shows strongly
the negro type face.” “See [the] photograph” in the report, Covert implored readers. He
also had “very dark skin.” Nathan M., a sixteen-year-old African American boy, resem-
bled “the usual big featured negro type—broad nose, big thick lips, [and] chin somewhat
receding.” His “eyes [are] inclined to be blood-shot most of the time,” with skin “quite
badly pimpled,” she said.30
Fieldworkers not only developed race-based typologies for evaluating youths of color
but also graded harshly the boys’ homes and neighborhood environments, which re-
searchers believed contributed to delinquency. “ere is a relation between the social
quality of homes and the social quality of the people who live in them,” Williams wrote
in the 1920s. Such beliefs doubtless inuenced eldworkers’ views of the homes and
neighborhoods they visited, as when Karl Cowdery, one of the rst eldworkers at the
, visited the ten-year-old African American Paul B.’s home. e household, the re-
searcher said, was “not very clean, but [had] fair order and arrangement. [e] front yard
[was] well kept, but back-yard [appeared] disorderly with boxes, rubbish, etc., and a poor
excuse for a garden in one corner.” e “care given [to the household was] probably av-
erage for [a] negro home,” he concluded. e “Negro section” in which they lived, he
continued, included a “few low-grade whites [and] mostly illiterate[s]” with “low moral
standards.”31
28 “Family of Jacob V., No. 231,” p. 3.
29 On the New Negro and the “old Negro,” see Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 179–216.
30 “Family of Walter J. (Negro), No. 153,” p. 2, California Bureau of Juvenile Research Case Histories (reel
1822219), box 57, Field Worker Files, Eugenics Record Oce Records. “Family of Julius J. (Negro), No. 237,” pp.
3–4, ibid. “Family of Nathan Tom M. (Negro), No. 268,” p. 3.
31 J. Harold Williams, “e Homes ey Come From,” in Whittier Social Case History Manual, by Williams et
al., 15, 17. “Family of Paul B. (Unnumbered), Colored,” p. 7, (reel 1822219), box 57, Field Worker Files, Eugen-
ics Record Oce Records.
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59Youth of Color and California’s Carceral State
Cleanliness was, nevertheless, relative across racial and ethnic lines. When visiting the
home of a Mexican family whose son was imprisoned at Whittier State School, Covert
noted that the “interior of home [was] cleaner than most Mexican homes and yet under
our [Euro-American] standards [it] would not be considered clean.” As a result of such
observations, Williams concluded that “racial dierences were found [in] the median
score for the Whites, Negroes, and Mexicans.” Simply put, the belief was that the shab-
bier the home, the lower the intelligence of its inhabitants. “Home conditions,” asserted
Williams, “are aected by race, nativity, and the relationship and occupation to the prin-
cipal wage-earner.” Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans, eldworkers
believed, simply held lower standards in their household environments than their white
counterparts, and those standards were indicative of their degenerate race, intelligence,
heredity, and criminality.32
e results of the scientic research carried out by the eldworkers led not only to the de-
velopment of race-based typologies built on long-held ideas and ideologies about youths
of color and their families but also to devastating long-term consequences for those iden-
tied as menaces to society. Many delinquents deemed “feebleminded” and hundreds
of thousands of California youths called “defective” were segregated and transferred
to state hospitals where they were sterilized without consent. ough beyond the pur-
view of this essay, the connections of the juvenile prisons to state hospitals throughout
California—like the science and scientic research carried out at state institutions of
connement—were eventually key to the strengthening of the burgeoning carceral state
in California.
Equally important to the rise of the emerging California carceral state were the pre-
vailing ideas and ideologies of science and scientic research as well as race, intelligence,
heredity, and crime. As the social case histories indicate, those theories—coupled with
the use of the latest tools and techniques in the nascent elds of psychology, education,
social work, and eugenics—worked powerfully to identify delinquent youths of color as
defective and deviant members of society who deserved connement. Indeed, by applying
and administering hundreds—more likely thousands—of physical, psychological, and
intelligence tests and eldwork studies on the youths’ families, home environments, and
communities of origin, researchers classied juvenile inmates along a continuum from
normalcy to degeneracy. In the process, scientist researchers identied a disproportionate
number of Mexican, Mexican American, and African American youths as feebleminded
and criminally minded oenders whose genetic or racial stock was the root cause of their
deciencies.
Juvenile prison ocials used those ndings, in turn, to transfer many mentally de-
fective wards to state mental hospitals for their forced connement, permanent care,
and, ideally, sterilization, as state compulsory sterilization laws allowed ocials to ster-
ilize patients against their and their families’ wishes. In the process, the juvenile prisons
were transformed into laboratories of the embryonic carceral state in which state ocials
carried out social experiments aimed at dealing with not only delinquency but also race
32 “Family of Armando T. (Mex[ican]-Ind[ian]), No. 211,” p. 10. J. Harold Williams, “Early History of the Cali-
fornia Bureau of Juvenile Research,” Journal of Juvenile Research, 28 (Oct. 1934), 189–214, esp. 203, 204.
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60 e Journal of American History June 2015
betterment. Ultimately, the process of weeding out defectives and improving the race—
largely understood as the European American race—was intimately tied to biological
determinism and nation building at home and globally—particularly in the post-1898
era—and served to criminalize, racialize, and pathologize a generation of Mexican, Mexi-
can American, and African American youths. In the end, eugenics-based research and
practices played central roles in strengthening the reach and power of the growing carceral
state in California.
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