REMOVE MILLIKAN’S NAME FROM CALTECH

These documents, which together establish the need to immediately remove the names of Robert A. Millikan, E.S. Gosney, A.B. Ruddock, Harry Chandler, and William B. Munro from the Caltech campus, are all published and freely available.

This image is from the pamphlet “Human Sterilization Today,” published and distributed in 1938 by the Human Beterment Foundation, Pasadena, California. E.S. Gosney was its president, Robert A. Millikan, A.B. Ruddock, and William B. Munro were trustees, and Harry Chandler was a member. The Human Betterment Foundation aims to “investigate the possibilities of race betterment by eugenic sterilization” and refers to “defectives.”

This is page 11 from Millikan’s 1924 book Science and Life. Millikan refers to “the Nordic race.”

This is page 131 from Sterilization for Human Betterment: A Summary of Results of 6,000 Operations in California, 1909–1929, by E.S. Gosney and Paul Popenoe (1929). Gosney and Popenoe state, “This, again, is no reason for not doing whatever is possible to purify the race.”

This is the first page of the article “The German Sterilization Law,” Journal of Heredity, volume 25 (1934), pages 257–260, by Paul Popenoe, whose affiliation is with the Human Betterment Foundation, Pasadena. Popenoe quotes liberally and uncritically from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and includes the full text of Nazi Germany’s “Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases,” passed in 1933. This law caused the sterilization of roughly 400,000 people.

This is from the article “Legal and Medical Aspects of Eugenic Sterilization in Germany,” American Sociological Review, volume 1 (1936), pages 761–770, by Marie E. Kopp. Kopp writes, “The leaders in the German sterilization movement state repeatedly that their legislation was formulated only after careful study of the California experiment as reported by Mr. Gosney and Dr. Popenoe. It would have been impossible, they say, to undertake such a venture involving some one million people without drawing heavily upon previous experience elsewhere.”

This announcement of the Gosney Research Fund, in Engineering and Science, volume 10 (1947), a Caltech publication, states that the trustees of the Human Betterment Foundation, which included Millikan, “agreed that the best interests of the Foundation would be served by transferring its activities to the California Institute of Technology.” In October 1943, Caltech accepted the Human Betterment Foundation’s assets. This 1943 agreement took place after the Nuremberg Race Laws and the start of World War II. This announcement, in Engineering and Science, in 1947, occurred after the end of World War II, the liberation of Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps, and the Nuremberg trials.