Paul Popenoe

Paul Bowman Popenoe (October 16, 1888 – June 19, 1979) was an American marriage counselor, eugenicist and agricultural explorer. He was an influential advocate of the compulsory sterilization of mentally ill people and people with mental disabilities, and the father of marriage counseling in the United States.

Born Paul Bowman Popenoe in Topeka, Kansas, in 1888, he was the son of Marion Bowman Popenoe and Frederick Oliver Popenoe, a pioneer of the avocado industry. (Popenoe dropped his middle name early in life.) He moved to California as a teen. After attending Occidental College for two years and Stanford University for his junior year majoring in English with coursework in biology, Popenoe left school to care for his father and worked for several years as a newspaper editor.

Popenoe married Betty Stankowitch in New York on August 23, 1920. They remained married until her death on June 26, 1978. He died less than a year later, on June 19, 1979 in Miami, Florida, at the age of 90.

The youngest of Paul Popenoe's four sons, David Popenoe, became a sociology professor who was a prominent advocate for "rebuilding a marriage culture" and reviving the "married-parent nuclear family."

Popenoe worked briefly as an agricultural explorer collecting date specimens in Western Asia and Northern Africa for his father's nursery in California, along with his younger brother, Wilson Popenoe, a horticulturist. His travels received considerable support and interest from the US Department of Agriculture. Paul Popenoe published his first book, Date Growing in the Old World and the New, in 1913.

In the mid-1910s, Popenoe became interested in human breeding and edited the Journal of Heredity from 1913 to 1917, with a special attention to eugenics and social hygiene.

By 1918, Popenoe had become well-established enough to co-author (with Roswell Hill Johnson) a popular college textbook on eugenics (Applied Eugenics, edited by Richard T. Ely), which outlined his vision of a eugenics program that primarily relied on the segregation of "waste humanity" into rural institutions, where they would perform manual labor to offset the cost of their institutionalization. He opposed child labor because he believed that people whom he regarded as unfit members of society would have fewer children if their children were not allowed to work. Additionally, Applied Eugenics contains a chapter expounding on Popenoe's belief in the racial inferiority of black people.

An elementary knowledge of the history of Africa, or the more recent and much-quoted example of Haiti, is sufficient to prove that the Negro's own social heritage is at a level far below that of the whites among whom he is living in the United States.... The Negro race is germinally lacking in the higher developments of intelligence.