Robert Millikan, Eugenics, and Justice in the Laboratory and the Archives

I presented two versions of this essay in 2022, one in a session of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting and the other for a video produced by the Consortium of History of Science, Technology and Medicine. The video below is of the CHSTM version, while the text is of the longer and more detailed AAAS version.

In November, Caltech renamed a building and other assets named after one of its most prominent faculty, American physicist Robert A. Millikan. Over the last year and a half, student and alumni advocacy at Caltech for removing names from the campus landscape has prompted new historical interest in Millikan and in Caltech’s relationship through him and others to the Human Betterment Foundation, which advocated for involuntary eugenic sterilization.¹ This paper is one manifestation of that renewed interest. In the context of a session otherwise devoted to Lise Meitner and the roles of discrimination against women in science, I’m going to focus on how Millikan, as a powerful scientist and administrator, himself addressed questions of sex and gender in physics, coeducation, and eugenics.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Robert A. Millikan was the most prominent scientist born in the United States. He had received the Nobel Prize in 1923 for his determination of the charge of an electron and for research on the photoelectric effect, an effort to disprove Albert Einstein’s corpuscular theory of the light which instead produced evidence supporting it. He was leading the California Institute of Technology to a central position in physics and in American science. And his research on cosmic rays—a term he coined—had long made headlines, as had his blending of science and religion in describing them as “birth cries” of atoms continually being created.²

When Duke University hired the German refugee physicist Hertha Sponer in 1936, Millikan wrote to department chair Charles W. Edwards questioning the decision. Edwards shared a paragraph with the university’s president, William Preston Few, who wrote to Millikan to ask for further advice.³ Millikan did not elaborate further on his concerns about Sponer, but rather argued generally against hiring women in American university physics departments. “At least 95% of the ablest minds that are now going into physics are men,” he wrote, and they needed men for mentors. There were, Millikan conceded, exceptional women physicists, and indeed, he wrote, “Fraulein Meitner of Berlin and Madam Curie of Paris are in the front rank of the world’s recognized physicists.” But since “no other living women” had achieved as much as Meitner, he suggested, no other was qualified for a professorship.⁴ As Margaret Rossiter writes, “rather than ‘opening the doors’… these two examples… justified continued exclusion, for, to Millikan at least,” their achievement now marked “the minimum acceptable level.”⁵ Ultimately, when Few replied that he generally agreed but that Duke’s circumstances were exceptional because it operated a separate women’s college as well as one for men rather than embracing coeducation, Millikan conceded the point.⁶

Only a year later, in 1937, Millikan took the opposite side on an issue of women and higher education in an internationally broadcast speech on the centenary of admission of women to his alma mater, Oberlin College, and thus the introduction of coeducation to American colleges. In his lecture, Millikan argued that “intelligent men” at Oberlin admitted women because they saw that “the Mississippi Valley… needed an educated womanhood for its fullest development,” and that others expanded coeducation because “a new scientific world” similarly “needed education and brains among women as well as men.” It was the imperial expansion of America west and the intensification of its industry, in Millikan’s account, which liberated its women’s minds. In turn, education and the operation of markets led to the “economic” and “physical emancipation” of women from poverty, dependence, and “hampering and unwholesome social custom” such as “unhygienic dress” and prohibitions on athletics. Progress did not come, argued Millikan, from “hatchets and brickbats and strikes” by militant feminists, or even from legislation mandating suffrage and the right to own property. “Fortunately,” he suggested, suffrage hadn’t actually had a political effect, because women’s voting patterns mirrored men’s; “if there were a sex vote,” he added, “women’s suffrage would be a curse.” Rather, progress in women’s rights came from the continuous expansion of science, technology, and capitalism.⁷

Taken together, Millikan’s stances on women in higher education suggest that he celebrated inclusion and, as he put it, “liberation,” as long as these trends towards equality did not threaten men’s power and professorships. And while by 1937, “404 of the country’s 625 institutions of collegiate grade are coeducational,” as Millikan noted in a footnote, his own Caltech was not among them: it would first admit a woman graduate student in 1953, after Millikan left the presidency, and would not admit women as undergraduates until 1970.⁸

While Caltech excluded women, it very much embraced the vision of American expansion in the west which Millikan described as Oberlin’s initial reason for educating them. In a 1924 fundraising document, Millikan described “Some Exceptional Opportunities in Southern California,” a location he argued was uniquely suited for science and industry. Lacking coal, Millikan predicted presciently, it would be a major site for the development of new forms of energy, including solar power. “On account of the climatic conditions existing in the southwestern region,” he wrote, “and the character of the race that inhabits it, the solution of that problem may be expected to come from California.”⁹

That race was, Millikan wrote, “Nordic,” “Anglo-Saxon,” and “Arian,” ethnicities with which Millikan associated both himself and ideals of “progress,” “responsibility,” and “individual initiative.” Conversely, in his 1924 book Science and Life, Millikan associated Asia with “static civilizations” of irrational and suffering people.¹⁰ Decades later, in a 1946 letter to Life publisher Henry Luce regarding British rule in India, Millikan argued for the necessity of colonialism. Only “Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian countries, Holland and Switzerland,” he wrote, were capable of “constitutional, representative government,… but the rest of the world… must be handled by something that approaches dictatorship.”¹¹ All could make progress towards democracy eventually, but it must be extremely gradual, over many generations; Britain, Millikan said in 1942, had the world’s most successful democracy because it had developed over 200 years “by this evolutionary rather than revolutionary process,” while revolutionary countries “are certainly now hundreds of years behind.”¹² In a 1951 letter to his wife Greta, Millikan expressed similar concern about self-government by Mississippi’s Black majority, “an unthinkable disaster in view of the sort of people they now are.”¹³

Despite his rhetoric of progress towards women’s liberation for the Oberlin centennial in 1937, Millikan’s authoritarianism influenced his approaches to sex and gender as well. Among the benefits of “physical emancipation” Millikan listed in 1937 was the demise of “the sex slavery that denied to women the control of when and how she was able to bear her young.”¹⁴ The following year, though, he became a trustee of an organization which, in the name of scientific progress and small government, advocated for denying both men and women reproductive autonomy. This was the Human Betterment Foundation.

In 1909, California had become the third state to pass a bill authorizing superintendents of asylums and prisons to sterilize patients and inmates without their consent. Over the decades to come, the state sterilized increasing numbers of people, totaling over 20,000 by the 1960s, a third of the national total. Legislators and administrators increasingly articulated their motivations for sterilization in terms of eugenics, selective breeding to improve the fitness of the human population.¹⁵

Among eugenic sterilization’s enthusiastic supporters were Pasadena lawyer and rancher Ezra Gosney and biologist Paul Popenoe. In the late 1920s, the two men visited state institutions, obtained copies of their medical records, and began statistical analysis to measure and demonstrate the individual and social benefits of sterilization. They also incorporated the Human Betterment Foundation, recruited a board of trustees which shared members with Caltech’s, and began publishing and distributing books and pamphlets advocating for the expansion of “eugenic sterilization of the hereditary defective.”¹⁶ In the early 1930s, the Foundation mailed pamphlets advocating sterilization to Nazi administrators and influenced Germany’s 1933 eugenic sterilization law.¹⁷

In their 1938 pamphlet Human Sterilization Today, the Foundation presented sterilization as a solution to the economic problem that “births among families habitually living on public charity are often 50% higher than births among self-supporting families.”¹⁸ In a draft of the pamphlet, they expressed an additional racial motivation; “native whites in California,” they wrote, “produce only 69% enough children to take the place of those who die.”¹⁹ Enacting this anxiety about the demise of the white race, the state of California disproportionately sterilized Mexican and Mexican-American people; state institutions also disproportionately sterilized women.²⁰

1938 was also the year in which Millikan joined the Foundation’s board of trustees.²¹ He thus lent the organization his scientific reputation and formally took responsibility for its work. While Millikan sometimes missed meetings of the Foundation, in letters to Gosney he expressed his enthusiastic support.²² “May I congratulate you and the Trustees of the Human Betterment Foundation,” he wrote in one, “on the generous gift that you are making to a great cause.”²³

In his insightful Rise of Robert Millikan, Robert Kargon writes that Millikan “saw himself as a progressive-conservative” and that his approach to research also embodied this duality, as he strived to contribute both to the new physics with its emphasis on theorizing the subatomic and to the distinctly American, pragmatic, measurement-oriented physics of his mentor A. A. Michelson. “Millikan’s choice of the measurement of e as a research program reflects his decision to serve two masters,” writes Kargon, while his unsuccessful attempt to falsify Einstein’s theory of the photoelectric effect, which Millikan described as “unthinkable,” “bold,” and “reckless,” “was undertaken to restrain the excesses of modernity.” In his own writing, Millikan argued against the popular rhetoric of “revolutionary discoveries.” “The growth of science,” he wrote, “is in general by a process of accretion, almost never by revolution.”²⁴

Millikan and the Human Betterment Foundation found common cause because of their shared belief in progress within existing hierarchies, progress without egalitarianism. Millikan often referred to this progress as evolutionary, and here too his vision matched that of the Foundation.²⁵ Gosney and Popenoe identified the reproduction of poor people and people with disabilities as a threat to this gradual human progress, and they advocated an evolutionary intervention, reducing reproduction through involuntary sterilization. Consistently with his visions of progress within science and politics, Millikan granted them his support.