Ugly side of philanthropist divides CSUS
Sacramento Bee 3/1/07
Before his death, they named parks, schools and university buildings after him and passed resolutions honoring him. Goethe died at age 91, splitting his money among nearly 100 institutions and individuals.
Sacramento State would get the biggest and most troubling portion of the estate. In addition to his mansion on T Street and more than $650,000, Goethe left the university his collection of racist literature. It included thousands of books, letters and pamphlets about eugenics, a popular pseudoscience of the 1920s and '30s that called for breeding worthy humans and sterilizing socially unfit ones.
California State University, Sacramento, has long wrestled with its ties to Goethe. Professors who have studied Goethe's darker side provided evidence for employees at C.M. Goethe Middle School to call for a name change. The city school board is scheduled to vote Thursday to establish a citizens advisory committee on the issue.
The public school controversy has renewed interest in the university's love-hate relationship with Goethe. A group of professors argues there's academic value in better understanding Goethe and the eugenics movement, while others aren't interested in digging into the past.
National leader of eugenics cause
Goethe was more than just your neighborhood Archie Bunker. A national leader of eugenics organizations, he continued to support the cause long after the end of Nazi Germany. In his will, he hoped Sacramento State would use his house for a eugenics museum and directed his money to be used for research in "population genetics." The school took his house and his money, and got rid of most everything else.
Forty years later, a group of history professors wants to rebuild Goethe's collection of books and letters, erect counter-memorials on campus and turn the university into a national clearinghouse for information about eugenics.
"As an institution, we could turn Goethe on his head," said CSUS history professor Chloe Burke. "I think that's a very nice way of speaking back to history."
The eugenics movement is a historical footnote that fell out of favor after Nazi Germany adopted it as scientific rationale for its "Final Solution" -- the killing of all Jews in German-controlled territories. In the 1930s, Goethe often spoke admiringly of Hitler's efforts to breed out "inadequates."
But eugenic ideology didn't end with World War II, Burke said. It can be heard in debates today about family planning and abortion, immigration and population control, genetic testing -- even the environmental movement, she said. Goethe and other eugenic leaders donated heavily to save redwood forests, a metaphor for protecting hardy, native species, she said.
"It should give us pause that there are such strong echoes between contemporary debates and a lot of what the eugenicists hoped to accomplish," Burke said.
Little evidence of him on campus
Currently, there are few traces of Goethe at CSU Sacramento. Even before his death, students and professors began protesting the decision to name a new science building after him. The university relented -- after Goethe died.
By 1970, CSUS auctioned off more than 2,000 of Goethe's books about eugenics, many of which included Goethe's racist notes scribbled in the margins.
Tony Platt, a professor who was written extensively about Goethe, said members of the nonprofit foundation that oversees donations to CSUS told him the material "had a bit of an Aryan feel."
The foundation sold the books at auction for $2,100 to an unidentified out-of-town buyer.
More than 5,000 letters of Goethe's were taken by a professor who planned to write a biography about him, Platt said. The professor, Rodger Bishton, abandoned the project in the 1970s and died in 2003. He left Goethe's papers to rot in a backyard shed after finding unpleasant material he didn't want to reveal, Platt said.
The school struggled for years about what to do with the house. A eugenics museum was never seriously considered, Platt said. CSUS remodeled the home and in 2000 renamed it for its architect, Julia Morgan. Today, it hosts weddings and university events.
No one protested.
Goethe's research endowment has grown to more than $1.8 million. Instead of using the money to study eugenics as Goethe preferred -- but did not require -- in his will, it goes for grants to biology professors and students.
In 2005, Platt asked for funding to research Goethe. The response: "The use of funds from the C.M. Goethe Bequest to expose or undermine the donor himself -- no matter how abhorrent his views seem to educated people today -- is inappropriate."
Instead of a "calculated amnesia," CSUS ought to have an honest reckoning, Platt said.
In 2005, the university renamed the Goethe arboretum on campus without fanfare. School officials said only $85,000 was left in an arboretum fund set up by Goethe, and the money was depleted to clean up the aging grove of trees and plants.
The old Goethe arboretum sign is stored in an office in the university library.
"When you erase names, you risk erasing the history," said Alexandra Minna Stern, a University of Michigan scholar on the eugenics movement. "We need to recognize the way Goethe and people of his ilk shaped California in negative ways."
Official collection missing much
In July 2003, Stern testified in the Legislature about California's eugenic laws that Goethe helped write. From 1909 to 1979, the state forced 20,000 mentally ill and disabled hospital patients to undergo sterilizations.
Gov. Gray Davis issued an apology for the policy in 2003.
Today, the "sanitized" collection of Goethe's writings at CSUS fill 22 small boxes in the university library. Some contain Goethe mementos like his postcard collection. A few letters from prominent politicians are in there, such as one from U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond, who wrote in 1957 that he shared Goethe's views about opening the immigration floodgates.
"There is a gap -- a very big gap -- in the manuscript collection," said Sheila O'Neill, who heads the special collection department. She has been trying to retrieve copies of Goethe's letters from other universities and wants to build an online archive of firsthand material, but funds are limited.
Alexander Gonzalez, who has been the university's president since 2003, said it was a shame the university lost most of the Goethe collection.
Gonzalez said he began his career as a psychology professor debunking the type of intelligence tests that people like Goethe used to justify their racist theories.
"Goethe would have really held me in disdain because that was the group he really disliked," said Gonzalez, who grew up in east Los Angeles, one of seven children of Mexican immigrants and the first of the children to go to college.
Gonzalez said he's open to further discussing how to tell Goethe's story.
"Part of the responsibility of being part of Goethe's legacy is a thorough understanding and thorough review of who he was and what he did and what he thought," Gonzalez said.
"Here's this guy who would in our present day be viewed as a racist -- there's no other way to say it. On the other hand, he was a pillar in the community.
"How do you square that when you're looking at that from 2007?"