UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Testing for Race: Stanford University, Asian Americans, and Psychometric Testing in California, 1920-1935 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9p87m1cv Author Palter, David Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ Testing for Race: Stanford University, Asian Americans, and Psychometric Testing in California, 1920-1935 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements of the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in HISTORY by David Palter March 2014 The Dissertation of David Palter is approved: _______________________ Professor Dana Frank, Chair _______________________ Professor Alice Yang _______________________ Professor Noriko Aso _______________________ Professor Ronald Glass ___________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by David Palter 2014 Table of Contents Abstract iv Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 Chapter 1: 42 Strange Bedfellows: Lewis Terman and the Japanese Association of America, 1921-1925 Chapter 2: 87 The Science of Race Chapter 3: 126 The Test and the Survey Chapter 4: 162 Against the Tide: Reginald Bell’s Study of Japanese-American School Segregation in California Chapter 5: 222 Solving the “Second-Generation Japanese Problem”: Charles Beard, the Carnegie Corporation, and Stanford University, 1926-1934 Epilogue 283 Bibliography 296 iii Abstract Testing for Race: Stanford University, Asian Americans, and Psychometric Testing in California, 1920-1935 David Palter Between 1920 and 1935, researchers at Stanford University administered thousands of eugenic tests of intelligence and personality traits to Chinese-American and Japanese-American children in California’s public schools. The researchers and their funders, a diverse coalition of white supremacists and immigrant advocacy organizations, sought to use these tests to gauge the assimilative possibility and racial worth of Asian immigrants, and to intervene in local, national, and transpacific policy debates over Asian immigration and education. By examining the Stanford testing projects, and exploring the curious partnerships that coalesced around them, this study seeks to expand our understanding of the intersection between race science and politics in early twentieth-century California. Racial psychometric testing was a key technology of the Progressive-era eugenics movement, and Stanford’s testing projects reflected the assumptions of this movement. Like scores of other race-based testing projects during the era, they adhered to careful, premeditated formulae predicated upon the dual-hinged fallacy that race and intelligence were fixed and quantifiable categories. Despite the hereditarian and racial essentialist foundations of the tests, however, the researchers and funding institutions affiliated with the Stanford projects approached their work from a wide array of political positions. Lewis Terman, who iv directed the balance of the testing, was a prominent eugenicist, and he used his cache as a faculty member at Stanford and President of the American Psychological Association to advance eugenic causes, including race-based immigration restriction. By contrast, Terman’s largest funder, the Japanese Association of America, three of his students, Kwok Tsuen Yeung, Hisakichi Misaki, Reginald Bell, and one of his colleagues, Edward Kellogg Strong, attempted to use testing to augment the social status of Asian immigrants and their children, end racial segregation in the public schools, and stem the tide of California’s nativist movements. By highlighting the contributions that individuals and organizations affiliated with Stanford University made to eugenic testing during the 1920s and 1930s, this study complicates our understanding of the eugenics movement, and renews our sense of the movement’s broad and lasting influence over American institutions. Many of the Stanford testers had an agenda that was progressive compared to that of Terman’s, but they never escaped the constraints of the eugenic testing paradigm. In part because their tests drew upon and helped to reify false notions of intelligence and racial hierarchies, their projects ultimately failed to change anti-Asian sentiment or public policy. The participation of Asians, Asian Americans, and pro-immigrant progressives in the testing projects, however, reminds us that eugenic technologies were once so pervasive that they compelled the intellectual and material investment of those they were designed to marginalize. v Acknowledgements Though the title page of this dissertation lists only one author, this was a collective effort. I will be forever grateful for the advice, love, and support of my mentors, colleagues and family. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my advisor, Dana Frank, whose writing and teaching have inspired me since my first day in graduate school. I will always strive to match her remarkable level of commitment to scholarship, teaching, and social justice. To the other members of my committee, Alice Yang, Noriko Aso, and Ronald Glass, your guidance has been invaluable. It is in good part thanks to your comments and support that this project came to fruition. I am also indebted to all of the brilliant teachers at the University of California, Santa Cruz who guided my intellectual growth over the past several years. I have so cherished the opportunity to work with Edmund Burke III, Marilyn Westerkamp, Alan Christy, Susan Gillman, Gail Hershatter, Bruce Thompson, George Lipsitz, Pedro Castillo, Bruce Levine, Matthew Lasar, and Beth Haas that I am almost ready to enroll again. My heartfelt gratitude to the History Department staff, Cindy Morris, Stephanie Hinkle, Christine Khoo, Stephanie Sawyer, Rachel Monas and Kayla Ayers, for the many times they went out of their way to help me. To my colleagues and treasured friends, Yuki Sato and Nathaniel Heneghan, thank you for having confidence in me even when mine waivered. Michael Jin, Eliza Martin, Urmi Engineer, Chrislaine Pamphile Miller, Shelly Chan, Sara Smith, and Kiran Garcha, I can only say that your humor and warmth made graduate school the most rewarding experience of my life. vi For providing the financial support that made this study possible, I wish to thank the UCSC History Department, the Institute for Humanities, the University of California Center for New Racial Studies, and the American Historical Association. My thanks to the archivists and staff at McHenry Library at UCSC, Stanford University’s Special Collections and University Archives, Hoover Institution Library, and Cubberley Education Library, the Charles Young Research Library at UCLA, the Bancroft Library and Ethnic Studies Library at UC Berkeley, the Japanese American National Museum, the Labor Archives and Research Center at San Francisco State University, the San Francisco Public Library, the California State Library, the California State University, Sacramento Library, the Immigration History Research Center at University of Minnesota, and the Gutman Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I want also to give my heartfelt thanks to Eiichiro Azuma, Shelley Lee, Donna Gabaccia, Lon Kurashige, and Alexandra Stern for guiding me at all stages of this project, and for being so generous with their time. Finally, to my family. Mom and dad, I have never needed to look beyond you to find my role models or my heroes. You taught me the real value of things, how to love other people, and how to appreciate all that I have been given. To my wife, Celine, your unconditional love and support has been a tremendous source of strength. I could not have done any of this without you. This dissertation is lovingly dedicated to my grandparents, Carl and Jeanne Jackson, who have recently passed, and to my son Lewis, who has just arrived. David Palter Berkeley, California March 19, 2014 vii Introduction On October 23, 1929, Japanese biologist Yusaburo Noguchi announced to an awestruck New York press corps that he had discovered the secret of race. “Racial characteristics,” he declared, “are the result of glandular secretions and physical environment,” and “by electrical nutrition and glandular control” he could now “at will change an Indian to a darker color, with the physical characteristics of a Negro, or mold a Japanese so that he would have the same appearance as a Caucasian.”1 According to Noguchi, this revelation was the result of fifteen years of eugenic research in the jungles of Brazil, where he and his team treated “jungle savages” to interventions that included “sun rays, ultraviolet rays…and glandular treatments.”2 Noguchi’s claim captured headlines across the country. In New York, the Times led with “Biologist Asserts He Can Remold Man.”3 In Washington D.C., the Afro-American announced that “Glands Govern Racial Colors,” followed by the subtitles: “Japanese Says He Can Change Black to White” and “Can Develop Giants or Dwarfs to Order.”4 The Ogden Standard, in Ogden, Utah, relayed: “Man Soon Able to Change his Color,” and the Bee, in Danville, Virginia, used a similar title, followed by the more provocative: “Man Soon Will Be Able to Change from Black to 1 “Biologist Asserts He Can Remold Man,” New York Times, October 24, 1929; “Alchemy of Races Aired,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 24, 1929. 2 “Glands Govern Racial Colors, Says Scientist,” The Afro American, November 2, 1929. 3 “Biologist