California’s ‘number one citizen’ was a white supremacist, and he founded a state university
Charles M. Goethe, a wealthy eugenicist, was praised by the governor
Charles M. Goethe invested a lot of money and philanthropy into Northern California. His environmental work earned him a prestigious park in his name, not to mention a school and some shiny plaques. He did good. He also believed white people were the superior race and needed to biologically quarantine themselves from diseased, delinquent Mexicans. If he could prevent brown people from procreating all together, even better.
At the time, this version of white supremacy didn’t stop politicians, educators, and community leaders from singing his praises. In fact, by mid century, Goethe’s name (pronounced “gay-tee”) was everywhere, enshrined in public parks and schools around the state capital. But after his death, and after decades of sanitizing the past, Goethe’s troubling legacy tumbled out.
American eugenics simmered in the early 20th century, then boiled into the 1920s and 1930s. Goethe was a strong force in advancing the conversation. He feared that Nordic people’s historical “contributions to all mankind” were under threat by “the coming of heterogeneity.” Under a guise of protecting this group, who, in California he interpreted as the state’s earliest pioneers, he founded the Immigration Study Commission in the early 1920s. Its target was “low powers,” otherwise known as Mestizos and Mexicans, that were infecting the nation’s “germ plasm,” according to Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (2015).
In 1927, he wrote to the Santa Cruz Sentinel, “The Anglo-Saxon birthrate is low. Peons multiply like rabbits….If race remains absolutely pure, and if an old American-Nordic family averages three children while an incoming Mexican peon family averages seven, by the fifth generation, the proportion of white Nordics to Mexican peons descended from these two families would be as 243 to 16,807.”
Goethe lobbied to close the border and instructed his real-estate brokers not to sell to Mexican people, who he viewed as sub-intelligent criminals.
Eugenics gave “the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable,” according to one of its founders, Francis Galton. Eugenicists inferred that heredity proved humans were inherently unequal, and race was the primary marker of not only inferior and superior genes but also of social supremacy. Leaders in the movement claimed brown and black populations suffered from inferior health due primarily to intrinsically flawed biology. But the wealth and social influence enjoyed by Anglo-Saxon populations was proof of a vast intellectual edge, too. To protect whites from “contamination” was considered, by eugenicists, a noble cause in the purification of the human race.
Already a member of several influential eugenics organizations, in 1933 Goethe organized and funded the Eugenics Society of Northern California. Over two decades, he lectured and lobbied with the goal of “reducing biological illiteracy.” During this time, he invested an estimated $1 million to publish pamphlets on racial superiority, family planning, tantrums against racial diversity, and other topics he considered related. In a 1936 presidential address to the national Eugenics Research Association, Goethe publicly defended Nazi Germany’s “honest yearnings for a better population” and proclaimed the country’s sterilization strategy as “administered wisely, and without racial cruelty.” (Two years earlier, Germany had sterilized roughly 5,000 people per month. Hitler praised America’s forced sterilization campaigns, such as Goethe’s, for the idea.) In his speech, Goethe emphasized the duty of Nordic nations to sterilize the “markedly social inadequate, such as those insane, blind, criminal by inheritance.” Between 1907 and 1940, tens of thousands of mostly poor women were involuntarily sterilized in the U.S. At least 20,000 Californians residing in state prisons and hospitals were sterilized before 1964, with laws supported by Goethe.
What made Goethe unique at the time wasn’t necessarily his white supremacist beliefs; it was the fact that he interwove racial pseudoscience with progressive tentpole issues, such as conservation and public education. Throughout his lifetime, he designated several redwood preserves, built playgrounds, financed an orphanage, established ranger programs, contributed to San Francisco’s Academy of Sciences planetarium, and, with his wife Mimi, was considered the founder of the interpretive parks movement. Each of these he considered a step toward the purification of a safer, cleaner, more wholesome, and white America.
His ideologies would conflict modern thinkers for decades, especially after Goethe’s name became the backbone of some of Northern California’s crowning establishments. Students at the California State University, Sacramento, with its commitment to diversity, stroll a campus that may not have existed without a white supremacist benefactor. The school’s arboretum, nestled behind a thicket of trees adjacent to the campus entrance, was named the “C.M. Goethe Arboretum.” The elder benefactor presented personal gifts to faculty members, sometimes via grants but also in the form of travel and “other matters.” In the mid-1960s, Sacramento Mayor James B. McKinney proclaimed March 28 “Dr. Charles M. Goethe Day” in honor of one of the city’s “most outstanding citizens.” The county board of supervisors named Goethe “Sacramento’s most illustrious citizen” and designated a portion of the American River Parkway in his honor; Goethe Park boasted 444 acres of oak trees and wild turkeys. And then there was Charles M. Goethe Middle School.
Praise poured in from media and politicians. In February of 1965, in Goethe’s 90th year, the California State Assembly honored the eugenicist with a resolution. The Sacramento Bee called him a “devoted Sacramentan who has brought national recognition to his city through a lifetime of unlimited contribution.” A telegram from President Lyndon Johnson praised “an American whose life has been so richly dedicated to the service of humanity.” Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren remembered Goethe’s “remarkable career of public service.” Governor Edmund Brown called him “our number one citizen.”
After his death in 1966, CSU Sacramento received a sizable portion of Goethe’s $24 million estate. Yet, in a 2004 paper for the university’s Division of Social Work, Professor Tony Platt reported that the university knew about Goethe’s views on race from the start. “Once his bigotry became a public embarrassment, especially in the context of the anti-racism movements of the mid-1960s and 1970s, the administration tried to surgically separate Goethe-the-conservationist from Goethe-the-eugenicist.” For several decades, the matter of benefitting from and decorating a white supremacist went mostly unaddressed.
Then Platt published some of Goethe’s long-buried tracts, which he discovered during his research at CSUS. The issue erupted. Sacramento activists fought to tear down Goethe’s name from the park and the middle school. Opponents claimed that removal was akin to historical erasure and would set a slippery precedent in political correctness. Nevertheless, Goethe Park is now River Bend, and Charles M. Goethe Middle School became Rosa Parks.
Today, another Sacramento elementary school still gets its mail delivered to Goethe Road. Some people would just as soon forget, as if it were that simple.
This article is part of our White Terror U.S.A. collection, covering the shameful history of white supremacy in America.
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