Human Betterment Foundation

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Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924

History

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Eugenics Record Office Race Betterment Foundation Human Betterment Foundation Society for Biodemography and Social Biology Pioneer Fund Human Betterment League Heredity Commission AASPIM
General
Jukes family Average Young American Male (1921) The Relf Sisters Oneida stirpiculture Selective Reproduction of Slaves

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The Kallikak Family Eugenics manifesto The Bell Curve The Passing of the Great Race The Rising Tide of Color
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Annals of Eugenics

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Harry H. Laughlin Joseph DeJarnette David Starr Jordan Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen Charles Goethe Charles Benedict Davenport Gertrude Crotty Davenport Frederick Osborn Madison Grant
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Guy W. Bailey Wallace H. Kuralt. Sr.

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The Human Betterment Foundation (HBF) was an American eugenics organization established in Pasadena, California in 1928 by E.S. Gosney and Rufus B. von KleinSmid, President of the University of Southern California, with the aim "to foster and aid constructive and educational forces for the protection and betterment of the human family in body, mind, character, and citizenship". It primarily served to compile and distribute information about compulsory sterilization legislation in the United States, for the purposes of eugenics.

The initial board of trustees were Gosney, Henry Mauris Robinson (a Los Angeles banker); George Dock (a Pasadena physician); David Starr Jordan (chancellor of Stanford University); Charles Goethe (a Sacramento philanthropist); Justin Miller (dean of the college of law at the University of Southern California); Otis Castle (a Los Angeles attorney); Joe G. Crick (a Pasadena horticulturist); and biologist/eugenicist Paul Popenoe. Later members included Lewis Terman (a Stanford psychologist best known for creating the Stanford-Binet test of IQ); Robert Andrews Millikan (Chair of the Executive Council of Caltech); William B. Munro (a Harvard professor of political science); and University of California, Berkeley professors Herbert M. Evans (anatomy) and Samuel J. Holmes (zoology).

After Gosney's death in 1942, Gosney's daughter Lois Castle and the HBF's board liquidated HBF. Its funds were transferred in 1943 to the newly founded Gosney Research Fund at Caltech. The archives of the Human Betterment Foundation are stored at Caltech.

Later public disavowal

On account of Millikan's affiliation with the Human Betterment Foundation, in January 2021, the Caltech Board of Trustees authorized removal of Millikan and Gosney's names (and the names of four other historical figures affiliated with the Foundation), from campus buildings that had been associated with their other achievements.^[1] In June 2020, the University of Southern California similarly removed the name of von KleinSmid from campus buildings on account of his association with eugenics; he had served as President there for more than 25 years.

References

^ Rosenbaum, Thomas F.Statement from the President California Institute of Technology, Accessed January 15, 2021.

"The Human Betterment Foundation," editorial reprinted from Eugenics, Vol. 3, No. 3: 110–113, in Collected papers on eugenic sterilization in California (Pasadena: Human Betterment Foundation, 1930).
E.S. Gosney and Paul B. Popenoe, Sterilization for Human Betterment: A Summary of Results of 6,000 Operations in California, 1909–1929 (New York: Macmillan, 1929).