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Popenoe was born in Kansas in 1888 and grew up in California, the son of a pioneer of the avocado industry. After spending some time at a university, Popenoe became an agricultural explorer , collecting date specimens for his father's nursery along with his younger botanist brother Wilson Popenoe , and published his first book Date Growing in the Old World and the New in 1913. In 1929 he received an honorary degree from Occidental CollegeOccidental College located in Los Angeles, California, is a small, coeducational, liberal arts college. The school is referred to as "Oxy" by those familiar with the college. The College was founded in 1887 by a group of Presbyterians and became independe (after which he commonly referred to himself as "Dr. Popenoe").
In the mid-1910s Popenoe became interested in human breeding, editing the Journal of Heredity from 1913 until 1917Events January 2 The Royal Bank of Canada takes over Quebec Bank. January 22 World War I: President Woodrow Wilson calls for "peace without victory" in Europe. January 25 The Danish West Indies is sold to the United States for $25 million January 25 Anti-, with a special attention to eugenicsThe word eugenics (from the Greek , for "well-born") was coined in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, to refer to the study and use of selective breeding (of animals or humans) to improve a species over generations, specifically in re and social hygiene. During World War IWorld War I (also known as the First World War , the Great War the War of the Nations and the "War to End All Wars") was a world conflict occurring from 1914 to 1918. No previous conflict had mobilized so many soldiers, or involved so many in the field of he left the journal, joined the staff of the United States Army Sanitary Corps , and while overseas was exposed to GermanThe word German can mean: From or related to Germany or its predecessor states see also the German language Germanic tribes Holy Roman Empire ( 843- 1806) German Confederation ( 1815- 1866) North German Confederation ( 1867 1871) German Empire ( 1871- 191 marriage-consultation centers established by the Prussian Social Welfare Ministry for the purpose of promoting procreation.
After the war, Popenoe returned to the United States and began working with E.S. Gosney , a wealthy California financier, and the Human Betterment Foundation to promote eugenic policies in the state of California. In 1909Events January 5 Colombia recognizes the independence of Panama. January 16 Ernest Shackleton's expedition finds the magnetic South Pole. January 28 United States troops leave Cuba after being there since the Spanish-American War. February 12 The National, California had enacted its first compulsory sterilization law which allowed for sterilization of the mentally ill and mentally retarded in its state psychiatric hospitals. With Popenoe as his scientific workhorse, Gosney intended to study the sterilization work being done in California and use it to advocate sterilization in other parts of the country and in the world at large. This would culminate in a number of works, most prominently their joint-authored Sterilization for Human Betterment: A Summary of Results of 6,000 Operations in California, 1909-1929 in 1929. This work would become a popular text for the advocacy of sterilization, as it purported to be an objective study of the operations in the state and concluded, not surprisingly, that rigorous programs for the sterilization of the "unfit" were beneficial to all involved, including the sterilized patients. The work would later be cited by the Racial Hygiene theorists in Nazi Germany to justify Germany's own sterilization program, and was one of the first American books translated into German by the Nazi government. Eventually the Nazis would sterilize over 400,000 people under their sterilization laws; in the USA the total would be around 65,000, about a third in California.
By 1918, Popenoe had become well-established enough to co-author a popular college textbook on eugenics (Applied Eugenics, with Roswell Johnson ). During the 1930s he served as a member of the American Eugenics Society 's board of directors along with Charles B. Davenport , Henry H. Goddard, Madison Grant, and Gosney, among others).
Along with his advocacy of sterilization programs, Popenoe was also interested in using the principles of Prussian marriage-consultation services for eugenic purposes. Aghast at the divorce rate which boomed during the Great Depression, Popenoe came to the conclusion that "unfit" families would reproduce out of wedlock, but truly "fit" families would need to be married to reproduce. Marriage counseling could keep "fit" families together, and advise them on the importance of "good heredity", and so Popenoe opened the first United States " marriage clinic " in Los Angeles in 1930, the American Institute of Family Relations .
For a while, Popenoe's two major interests, sterilization and marriage counseling, ran parallel, and he published extensively on both topics. Over time he became more prominent in the field of counseling, however, reaching his peak when he authored Ladies Home Journals most popular serial of all time, "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" As public interest in eugenics waned, Popenoe focused more of his energies into marriage counseling, and by the time of the public rejection of eugenics at the end of World War II, with the revelation of the Nazi Holocaust atrocities, Popenoe had thoroughly redefined himself as primarily a marriage counselor (which by that time had lost most of its explicit eugenic overtones). However his family focuses -- primarily concerned with preserving traditional roles of masculinity, heterosexuality, and arguing for preserving of strict racial and class boundaries in reproduction -- can be interpretted as being veiled extensions of his original eugenic ideas. Popenoe's approach to marriage counseling fell out of favor in the 1960s with the popularity of feminism and the sexual revolution.
Popenoe died in 1979, convinced that civilization was still on the verge of collapse due to poor breeding and poor social mores.
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