Paul Popenoe

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Paul B. Popenoe in 1931

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

marriage counseling
in the United States.

Personal life

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 23 August 1920. They remained married until her death on 26 June 1978. He died less than a year later, on 19 June 1979 in Miami, Florida, at the age of 90.[1]

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."[1]

Biology and eugenics

Popenoe worked briefly as an agricultural explorer collecting

US Department of Agriculture.[2]
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

social hygiene
.

By 1918, Popenoe had become well-established enough to co-author (with

venereal disease in US troops.[1]

In the mid-1920s, Popenoe began working with

Charles B. Davenport, Henry H. Goddard, Madison Grant, Harry H. Laughlin
, and Gosney, among others.

In 1929, he received an honorary Sc.D. degree from Occidental College, which he had attended. Thenceforth, he commonly referred to himself as "Dr. Popenoe". In 1976, Popenoe also received the Auld Lang Syne award from Occidental. However, on April 26, 2019, Occidental rescinded the honorary Sc.D. degree after a unanimous vote of its board of trustees.[5] Leading up to that vote, Occidental Professor Peter Dreier wrote an opinion article in March 2019 about the college's historical role in eugenics and racism, and 86 percent of the college's faculty then signed a statement urging the board to revoke the degree granted to Popenoe 90 years earlier.[6]

Marriage and family counseling

Along with his advocacy of sterilization programs, Popenoe was also interested in using the principles of German and Austrian marriage consultation services for eugenic purposes. Aghast at the divorce rate in US society, Popenoe came to the conclusion that "unfit" families would reproduce out of wedlock, but "fit" families would need to be married to reproduce. With financial help from Gosney, he opened the American Institute of Family Relations in Los Angeles in 1930. It was described in 1960 as "the world's largest and best known marriage-counseling center," with a staff of seventy.[7]

One of the greatest dangers in the use of sterilization is that overzealous persons who have not thought through the subject will look at it as a cure-all, and apply it to all sorts of ends for which it is not adapted. It is only one of many measures the state can and must use to protect itself from [the human race's] deterioration.[8]

For a while, Popenoe's two major interests, eugenics and marriage counseling, ran in parallel, and he published extensively on both topics. As public interest in eugenics waned, Popenoe focused more of his energies into marriage counseling and during public rejection of eugenics at the end of

Holocaust
, Popenoe had thoroughly redefined himself as primarily a marriage counselor, which had lost most of its explicit eugenic overtones. Over time, he became more prominent in the field of counseling.

Popenoe favored a popular, rather than academic, approach. In that vein, he appeared on the Art Linkletter television show for over a decade, and he regularly gave lectures and wrote mainstream articles for the general public. For many years, he had a nationally syndicated newspaper column promoting marriage and family life. As presented in a 1960 biography, the focus areas of his counseling approach and the American Institute of Family Relations included couples' attitudes towards marriage, preparation (including sexuality education), moral values, a focus on action, and mutual understanding between the sexes.[7]

At the peak of his career, he co-founded and edited Ladies' Home Journal's most popular column of all time, "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" In 1960, he co-authored (with Dorothy Disney) the book of the same name. His introduction to the book catalogued some of the statistics of the American Institute of Family Relations over its first 30 years. Under his direction, the institute gave intensive training to over 300 marriage counselors and shorter courses around the US to over 1500 other people. The caseload averaged about 15,000 consultations per year. From the files of the numerous cases came the material for the "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" book and serial. The institute published a bulletin, "Family Life," monthly or bimonthly for decades.[9]

Given the role of clergy in responding to crisis in families, Popenoe increased focus in training the clergy over many years. That culminated in 1978 with the American Institute of Family Relations creating the Pastoral Psychotherapy Training Program, which offered the Master of Arts in Pastoral Psychotherapy. It was the second offering of a master's degree by the institute.[10]

As Popenoe maintained his traditional values (chastity before marriage), changes in popular culture such as feminism and sexual revolution challenged his approach. At the same time, thought leaders in the helping professions tended more and more to favor self-fulfillment over preservation of the family. That led Popenoe to ally increasingly with religious conservatives even though he was not religious himself. For example, one of his assistants was James Dobson, who founded Focus on the Family in 1977. In the US society of the third millennium, the approach Popenoe developed to marriage counseling, educational and directive rather than medical or psychological, is becoming fashionable again.[1] In the end, the American Institute of Family Relations turned out to be highly dependent on Popenoe's leadership. It closed in the 1980s, not long after Paul Popenoe's death.

Archives

Shortly before his death, Popenoe transferred his papers to the University of Wyoming. In 2002, the American Heritage Center of the University of Wyoming reported the collection Paul Bowman Popenoe Papers, 1874–1991, consisting of 85 cubic feet of material.

Caltech in Pasadena
.

Publications

Books

Articles

See also

References

  1. ^
    ISBN 0-7658-0259-7
    .
  2. ^ Wilson, Robert Forrest (November 1921). ""Uncle Sam's" Adventures". St. Nicholas, the Century Co., New York. 49 (1): 59–66.
  3. ^ "...the unfit poor would be unable to put their children to work and thus would have fewer children, a eugenic goal".Thomas C. Leonard, "Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era". Journal of Economic Perspectives, Volume 19, No. 4, Fall 2005, pp. 207–224
  4. ^ Popenoe, P.; Johnson, R H (1918). "Chapter XIV: The Color Line". Applied Eugenics. New York, New York, US: The Macmillan Company.
  5. ^ "Springing Into Action". Occidental Magazine. June 5, 2019.
  6. ^ Dreier, Peter (June 23, 2019). "Why Occidental College Revoked a 1929 Honorary Degree to White Supremacist Paul Popenoe". Public Seminar.
  7. ^ a b Hoffman, Betty (September 1960). "The Man Who Saves Marriages". Ladies' Home Journal: 71, 120, 123–124.
  8. ISBN 9780140511918
    . "Troublesome Delinquents" section
  9. ^ Popenoe, Paul; Disney, Dorothy Cameron (1960). Can This Marriage Be Saved? (First ed.). New York: The Macmillan Company. Library of Congress number: 60-8124.
  10. ^ Peacock, Edward (September–October 1979). "Goodbye, Mr. and Mrs. Marriage". Family Life: Bi-monthly Service Bulletin of the American Institute of Family Relations: 2–8.
  11. ^ American Heritage Center Annual Report. Laramie, WY: American Heritage Center – University of Wyoming. 2002. p. 12.

Further reading

  • Anton, Mike, "Forced Sterilization Once Seen as Path to a Better World" Los Angeles Times (16 July 2003).
  • Kline, Wendy, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
  • Ladd-Taylor, Molly, "Eugenics, Sterilisation, and Modern Marriage in the USA: The Strange Career of Paul Popenoe," in Gender and History, vol. 13, no. 2 (August 2001), 298–327.
  • Spiro, Jonathan P. (2009). Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant. Univ. of Vermont Press.
    ISBN 978-1-58465-715-6
    .

External links
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