Paul Popenoe

Paul Bowman Popenoe (October 16, 1888 – June 19, 1979) was an American agricultural explorer, eugenicist, influential advocate of the compulsory sterilization of the mentally ill and the mentally disabled, and the father of marriage counseling in the United States.

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. He then worked briefly as an agricultural explorer collecting date specimens in Western Asia and Northern Africa for his father's nursery in California, along with his younger brother Wilson Popenoe, a horticulturist. These travels received considerable support and interest from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 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, editing the Journal of Heredity from 1913 until 1917, with a special attention to eugenics and social hygiene.

By 1918, Popenoe had become well-established enough to co-author (with Roswell Hill Johnson) a popular college textbook on eugenics (Applied Eugenics), which outlined his vision of a eugenics program that primarily relied on the segregation of "waste humanity" into rural institutions where they would perform manual labour to offset the cost of their institutionalization. Eugenics contains a chapter expounding on Popenoe's belief in the racial inferiority of Negros.

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