Paul Bowman Popenoe (1888–1979)

Paul Bowman Popenoe was a researcher, writer, and social advocate who studied breeding in the United States during the twentieth century, first in plants and then in humans. Popenoe advocated for eugenic policies in California and beyond in the early twentieth century, and he introduced and promoted marriage counseling as a professional service in the US during the mid-twentieth century. The US eugenics movement, in which Popenoe participated, was a scientific and political project in which eugenicists attempted to improve human populations through selective breeding. Participants of the movement often advocated for the implementation of compulsory sterilization laws for certain “undesirable” populations. Though largely disavowed as of 2026, eugenics persisted well into the twentieth century. Through dozens of publications and a lifetime of public advocacy, Popenoe supported policies that led to the forced sterilization of thousands of people in California and popularized counseling as an intervention into people’s marriages and reproductive choices.

1. Early Life, Education, and Work in Horticulture
2. Eugenics and the Human Betterment Foundation
3. Marriage Counseling and Popenoe’s Departure from Overt Eugenics
4. Impacts in California and Beyond

Early Life, Education, and Work in Horticulture

Popenoe was born on 16 October 1888 in Topeka, Kansas, the eldest of four children to Marion Bowman and Frederick Oliver Popenoe. Popenoe’s father worked in a variety of fields in Topeka throughout Popenoe’s childhood, including court reporting, real estate investing, and newspaper publishing. In 1904, when Popenoe was a teenager, the family moved to Los Angeles, California. According to writer Joshua Siskin in a 2015 article in the Los Angeles Daily News, the family relocated to more favorable climates due to his father’s poor health. Popenoe’s father became involved in horticulture, the practice of garden management, which led to Popenoe becoming involved in horticulture and agriculture as well. Siskin also asserts that Popenoe’s father contributed to the introduction of both avocados and dates to California agriculture.

Following his family’s relocation to southern California and his father’s entry into horticultural work, Popenoe pursued university education. He attended Occidental College in Los Angeles, California, from 1905 to 1907 before transferring to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. There, he studied biology with David Starr Jordan, who was president of the university at the time. Jordan studied evolution and development in fish, and he promoted eugenics, helping found the Eugenics Committee of the American Breeders Association shortly before Popenoe came to study with him. After one year at Stanford University, Popenoe left his studies without a degree to care for his father, whose ill health had continued. After working for a period as a newspaper editor, he began traveling to Africa and Asia with his brother Wilson Popenoe to collect date samples for his father’s nursery business. In 1913, Popenoe published his first book, Date Growing in the New and Old Worlds, in which he outlined growing practices for dates. The focus on controlling breeding and heredity present in horticulture carried over into Popenoe’s subsequent work promoting eugenics and marriage counseling.

Eugenics and the Human Betterment Foundation

In the 1910s and early 1920s, Popenoe’s area of focus moved from breeding plants through horticulture to breeding humans via eugenics. As stated in his writings, Popenoe was concerned with what he saw as a rising number of individuals with traits, such as physical and mental disabilities, that he thought were detrimental to society. According to his son, David, Popenoe, along with many others during his time, believed that controlling human genetics was the path to controlling human behaviors that impact the broader society. In 1913, Jordan, Popenoe’s previous academic mentor, appointed him the editor of the Journal of Heredity, a scholarly publication focused on genetics. Popenoe held the editorial position until 1917. During his tenure as editor of the journal, Popenoe began researching and advocating for limiting the reproduction of people he deemed unfit as well as promoting the reproduction of those he viewed as desirable.

In 1918, Popenoe published Applied Eugenics, a textbook co-authored with Roswell Hill Johnson, a professor then focusing on eugenics and sociology at the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Popenoe’s son, in a 2005 book chapter dedicated to discussing his father’s life and career, claims that Applied Eugenics was the first major textbook about eugenics. Much of the book’s contents came from material published in the Journal of Heredity during Popenoe’s time as editor. In the preface, Popenoe and Hill state that their vision for eugenics involves both an increase in reproduction for people they deem “superior” and a reduction, or outright suppression, of reproduction for people they deem “inferior.” In further chapters, Popenoe and Johnson present biological theories of inheritance, particularly focusing on the inheritance of intellectual ability. They spend part of the book arguing for the importance of increasing marriage and breeding for “superior” individuals, while discouraging those same practices for “inferior” individuals, a similar approach to marriage Popenoe used in his later counseling work. Popenoe and Johnson also take a chapter to argue that Black individuals are genetically predisposed toward both lower intelligence and worse health. From those premises, they go on to promote bans on intermarriage between different racial groups. As of 2026, scientists reject the arguments Popenoe and Johnson make in Applied Eugenics, recognizing no genetic basis for claims of superiority or inferiority based on race.

Following the publication of Applied Eugenics, during World War One, Popenoe served as a captain in the US Army Sanitary Corps, where he worked to remove alcohol and sex work from Army camps. After the war, Popenoe moved to New York City, New York, in 1920 to work as a secretary for the American Social Hygiene Association, an organization that attempted to use public education to promote restrictions on behaviors that Popenoe and the Association saw as undesirable. The same year, in New York City, Popenoe met and married Betty Stankovitch, a dancer and schoolteacher who was thirteen years younger than him. They had four children during their marriage.

After only a year in New York City, Popenoe returned to California in September of 1920 and spent time farming before returning to his research about and advocacy for eugenics. He and his wife bought a farm in the Coachella Valley in southern California and lived there for six years. At the end of that period, Popenoe’s son reports that the farming business collapsed, leading the couple and their children to relocate to the Los Angeles area. In 1925, Ezra Seymour Gosney, a wealthy agricultural businessman and eugenics advocate, invited Popenoe to collaborate with him in the creation of an organization to promote eugenics in the state of California. Gosney, similarly to Popenoe, became interested in eugenic breeding practices after an agricultural career working with sheep and citrus trees. Gosney and Popenoe officially founded the Human Betterment Foundation, or HBF, in 1928. The organization’s membership included multiple prominent figures within the sciences in California, including Jordan, Popenoe’s previous academic mentor, Robert Millikan, who won the Nobel Prize for his work in physics, and Lewis Terman, who studied psychology at Stanford University and developed intelligence tests. The HBF’s purpose was to not only promote eugenic policies in California, but to research and report on their effects as well.

Continuing during the 1920s, Popenoe’s involvement with the Human Betterment Foundation led to his further research into the practical effects of eugenic policies in California. In California, laws permitting the compulsory sterilization of disabled and mentally ill people had been in effect since 1909. To study the effects of those laws, Popenoe received funding from Gosney to travel the state, visiting state institutions, such as mental hospitals and group homes for individuals with mental or physical disabilities, that held many people he and his colleagues considered to be “defective.” He collected statistical information about the prevalence of sterilization in those populations.

In 1929, after years of studying how institutions performed sterilizations as well as how they affected those sterilized, Popenoe and Gosney published Sterilization for Human Betterment: A Summary of Results of 6,000 Operations in California, 1909–1929. In their book, Gosney and Popenoe look back on twenty years of eugenic sterilization in California, arguing that sterilizing people whom they deemed unfit benefitted society broadly as well as the sterilized individuals themselves. They primarily base their arguments for the societal benefits of sterilization on the costs incurred by the state due to supporting people confined in state institutions, arguing that it was less expensive for states to sterilize people rather than provide care for their potential offspring. They also express that their support for eugenic sterilization comes from fears that caring for convicted criminals, the disabled, and the mentally ill interrupt the natural processes that they believe should lead to “superior” people becoming the dominant members of the human species. Additionally, Gosney and Popenoe argue that sterilizing such people, particularly women, gives them better lives by decreasing the burden they would bear if they were to have children.

During the 1930s, Popenoe and his colleagues at the HBF continued to promote the idea that sterilization benefitted those who had undergone it. In multiple articles, they argued that people confined in state institutions could enjoy freer lives after sterilization had removed what the HBF saw as the risk of such individuals reproducing. During the mid-1930s, Popenoe and the HBF lobbied the California legislature to expand existing sterilization laws to apply to a wider range of state institutions, including correctional schools and detention camps, as well as to set up a government board to oversee the practice of eugenic sterilization. Although those laws did not pass, the HBF was nonetheless successful in its aim of spreading sterilization, and legal sterilizations continued to occur in California until 1979.

Marriage Counseling and Popenoe’s Departure from Overt Eugenics

During Popenoe’s work with the HBF in the 1920s, Popenoe also started writing about marriage, leading him to focus entirely on marriage counseling for the latter part of his career. According to Molly Ladd-Taylor, who studies the history of women’s health and reproduction at York University in Toronto, Canada, Popenoe had been interested in marriage since the 1920s during the period in which he primarily focused on advocating for eugenics and compulsory sterilization. She notes that Popenoe’s focus on heterosexual marriage and family values fell in line with his eugenic views. According to Ladd-Taylor, Popenoe’s work in the field of marriage counseling was another means for him to promote the breeding of particular groups of people. In 1925, Popenoe published Modern Marriage, A Handbook for Men, his first book on marriage. The next year, he published The Conservation of the Family. Similarly to Ladd-Taylor, Popenoe’s son states that his father’s interest in marriage naturally grew out of his interests in biology and inheritance, which he was simultaneously exploring via his research with the HBF. In other writings, Popenoe claimed that divorcees were themselves eugenically “undesirable” and that such groups of people showed higher rates of mental illnesses.

In 1930, Popenoe founded the Institute of Family Relations, later renamed the American Institute of Family Relations, in Los Angeles with funding from Gosney and the HBF. Popenoe and the people he employed at the Institute worked to counsel “desirable” married couples to avoid divorce. Ladd-Taylor reports that the Institute was the first professional marriage-counseling clinic in the US and that Popenoe modeled his practice after similar clinics that arose in Germany in the 1920s that instructed couples about whether or not they could produce “desirable” offspring. Especially in its early days, the purpose of the Institute was to provide eugenic advice to couples, avoiding the transmission of traits he believed were hereditary, such as bad temper. Despite such initial goals, Ladd-Taylor identifies that Popenoe’s counseling practice evolved to more prominently focus on issues within existing marriages than the potential reproduction of yet-unmarried couples. In his publications on counseling, Popenoe argued for the necessity of monogamy and that marriages should never end in divorce.

Popenoe began to focus less explicitly on coercive forms of eugenics in the 1940s, transitioning fully into working as a marriage counselor. Additionally, Gosney died in 1942, which led to the dissolution of the HBF, though Popenoe’s Institute continued running. Ladd-Taylor reports that, after 1943, Popenoe did not publish any additional articles mentioning eugenics or sterilization. Instead, he began to publish exclusively about marriage. In 1953, he began publishing a column titled “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” in the popular magazine Ladies’ Home Journal. While living in Los Angeles, he also began making appearances on reality television shows, promoting his brand of marriage counseling. In 1956, Popenoe and popular television host Art Linkletter designed a personality questionnaire to determine the compatibility of potential couples. They used a computer to analyze the results of over 4,000 respondents and picked a couple to introduce to each other on television. Popenoe’s son claims that the use of a computer in administering the questionnaire functioned as the first computer dating service.

During the final two decades of his life, Popenoe continued promoting marriage counseling through his institute and appearances on television programs. Ladd-Taylor states that Popenoe’s focus on traditional families with two married parents became less popular starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She reports that, with changes in women’s roles in US society as well as increased legality of contraception and abortion, many people began treating reproduction as an area of personal choice rather than duty to society, as Popenoe generally conceived of it. During the 1970s, Popenoe continued publishing articles in Family Life, the periodical his Institute published, with many arguing against divorce, women’s liberation, and acceptance of homosexuality, developments he saw as detrimental to society.

Impacts in California and Beyond

Popenoe, especially during the first half of his career, supported state policies that harmed tens of thousands of people in California and had further consequences abroad. The state’s eugenics policies during the twentieth century, which Popenoe and the HBF supported and advocated expanding, led to the sterilizations of over 20,000 people between 1909 and 1964. California had the highest number of sterilizations of any US state and accounted for one third of all eugenic sterilizations in the country. Researchers like Daniel J. Kevles and Alexandra Minna Stern, who study the history of eugenics in the US and beyond, have noted the connection between the HBF, Popenoe’s longtime patron organization, and eugenicists in Germany during the Nazi era. The organization shared research with Nazi eugenicists, and, according to Stern, the government of Germany modeled their 1933 eugenic sterilization law on California’s. Additionally, Stern argues that Popenoe’s continual focus on breeding throughout his career linked the early field of marriage counseling in the US with eugenic concerns as well as traditional gender roles within married couples.

Forty years after Popenoe’s death, his alma mater also participated in criticizing his legacy. In 1929, Popenoe had received an honorary doctorate from Occidental College, where he had studied decades earlier, in recognition of his research on eugenics. Despite the honorary status of the degree and the fact that Popenoe never completed his undergraduate studies, he began using the title of doctor in his professional life. Nearly fifty years later, in 1976, the college presented him with an additional award for his loyalty to the college. In March of 2019, Peter Dreier, a professor at Occidental College, published an opinion article in the college’s newspaper arguing that the college should posthumously rescind Popenoe’s honorary degree to make up for the institution’s complicity in his legacy of racism and eugenics advocacy. The college’s board voted to revoke Popenoe’s degree in April of the same year.

Popenoe died 19 June 1979 at the age of ninety in Miami, Florida.

Sources

1. Agtuca, Jacqueline, ed. With research by Kelsey Turner. 2020. “Past and Current United States Policies of Forced Sterilization.” Restoration Magazine. National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, November 2020.
2. Briggs, Jill, “David Starr Jordan (1851–1931)”. Embryo Project Encyclopedia (2013-06-26). ISSN: 1940-5030 https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/david-starr-jordan-1851-1931 (Accessed December 6, 2023).
3. Briggs, Jill, “Human Betterment Foundation (1928–1942)”. Embryo Project Encyclopedia (2013-07-10). ISSN: 1940-5030 https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/human-betterment-foundation-1928-1942 (Accessed December 6, 2023).
4. “California Eugenics.” 2025. Uvm.edu. 2025. https://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/CA/CAold.html#:~:text=In%20both%201935%20and%201937,83) (Accessed September 15, 2025).
5. Dreier, Peter. “Should Oxy Rescind an Honorary Degree to a Racist Recipient?” The Occidental, March 20, 2019, Opinion section. https://theoccidentalnews.com/opinions/2019/03/20/should-oxy-rescind-an-honorary-degree-to-a-racist-recipient/2896993 (Accessed December 6, 2023).
6. Egli, Rebecca. “Paul Popenoe.” Linda Hall Library. Last modified October 16, 2018. https://www.lindahall.org/about/news/scientist-of-the-day/paul-popenoe/ (Accessed December 6, 2023).
7. Find a Grave. “Marion Amanda Bowman Popenoe (1862–1920).” Find a Grave. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/12639413/marion-amanda-popenoe (Accessed December 6, 2023).
8. Foulkes, Debbie. “Paul Popenoe (1888–1979) First Marriage Counselor and Eugenicist.” Forgotten Newsmakers. Last modified October 27, 2010. https://forgottennewsmakers.com/2010/10/27/paul-popenoe-1888-1979-first-marriage-counselor-and-eugenicist/ (Accessed December 6, 2023).
9. Gosney, Ezra Seymour, and Paul Popenoe. Sterilization for Human Betterment: A Summary of Results of 6,000 Operations in California, 1909–1929. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1929.
10. Grimes, William. 2010. “Art Linkletter, TV Host, Dies at 97.” Nytimes.com. The New York Times. May 26, 2010. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/arts/27linkletter.html.
11. Jackson, Chazeman S, Daria Turner, Maya June, and Mona V Miller. 2023. “Facing Our History—Building an Equitable Future.” The American Journal of Human Genetics 110 (3): 377–95. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2023.02.005.
12. Kevles, Daniel J. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.
13. Ladd-Taylor, Molly. “Eugenics, Sterilisation and Modern Marriage in the USA: The Strange Career of Paul Popenoe.” Gender and History 13 (2001): 298–327.
14. Lockhart, Joseph, and Saty Satya-Murti. “Promoting Early 20th Century American Eugenics under the Guise of Science.” Hektoen International, August 15, 2024. https://hekint.org/2024/08/15/promoting-early-20th-century-american-eugenics-under-the-guise-of-science/ (Accessed September 24, 2025).
15. “Obituary: Paul Popenoe Jr.” 2020. The Portland Press Herald. June 4, 2020. https://www.pressherald.com/2020/06/04/obituarypaul-popenoe-jr/.
16. Occidental College. “Springing into Action.” Occidental College. Last modified June 5, 2019. https://www.oxy.edu/magazine/issues/spring-2019/springing-action (Accessed December 6, 2023).
17. Peacock, Edward. “Goodbye, Mr. and Mrs. Marriage.” Family Life, 1979.
18. Popenoe, David. War over the Family. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2005.
19. Popenoe, Paul, and Roswell Hill Johnson. Applied Eugenics. New York: The MacMillan Company, 2018.
20. Popenoe, Paul Bowman. Date Growing in the Old World and the New. Altadena, Cal.: West India Gardens, 1913. https://archive.org/details/dategrowinginold00poperich/page/29/mode/1u
21. Siskin, Joshua. “Father of 2 California Crops Had a Date with Destiny.” Los Angeles Daily News, September 3, 2015, Home and Garden section. https://www.dailynews.com/2015/09/03/father-of-2-california-crops-had-date-with-destiny/ (Accessed December 6, 2023).
22. Stern, Alexandra Minna. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America Second Edition. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016.