“The exclusion processes have been solidly institutionalized, and administrators are clearly ignorant of the nature of these processes. The pervasive elements of racism exist with most people I met from chancellors on down.”

“I can sum up my evaluation of the effort being made by the University, relative to the Chicanos, as being totally inadequate. Taking each area of student recruitment, employment, curriculum development, studies, and research, the results are so negligible as to stand as an indictment of the institution's meager commitment to the largest minority population in the state.”

“This is typical of the situation which does not even approach the reprehensible level of a token effort.”

These quotes were from a letter written by Paul Sanchez, appointed as special adviser on Mexican-American affairs to UC President Charles Hitch, to the president in 1969. He was asked to evaluate the UC’s efforts to educate the state’s Chicano population. Obviously, we was less than impressed. The first quote captures succinctly the problems with racism that really do continue to this day–in society, not just the UCs or higher education. Where racism continues to exist, it is so institutionalized as to be practically invisible to the uncritical. Sanchez’s assessment in the second quote was true then and 10 years later still the case as the number of Mexican-American undergraduates at UC Davis remained below 3% of the total population. Department of Chicana/o Studies Records, AR-215, Archives and Special Collections, UC Davis Library, University of California, Davis.

“Catatonic manifestations are present in Raecke's [a German psychologist] stupor and in the cases that persist for months a diagnosis of catatonic dementia præcox may be made with the correspondingly bad prognosis, especially since such cases may present such symptoms as impulsiveness, silliness, verbigeration, stereotypy, grimacing, and the assuming of attitudes.”

Doctor Howard A. Knox was an Assistant Surgeon with the U.S. Public Health Service stationed at Ellis Island in the 1910s and an important figure from this period in my research looking at the role of mental health officials in immigration. He devised several tests that were used to determine whether an immigrant was excludable based on intelligence. Admittedly this was an early period in the professionalization of psychology but that a medical official described concerning behaviors such as impulsiveness, grimacing, and attitudes, is just silly. Howard A. Knox, “Psychogenetic Disorders: Cases Seen in Detained Immigrants,” Medical Record 84, no. 2 (July 12, 1913): 61.

N.B. dementia præcox was a contemporary label for schizophrenia; Stereotypy is the persistent repetition of an act, especially by an animal, for no obvious purpose; Verbigeration is a verbal stereotypy in which usually one or several sentences or strings of fragmented words are repeated continuously. Sometimes individuals will produce incomprehensible jargon in which stereotypies are embedded. The tone of voice is usually monotonous. This can be produced spontaneously or precipitated by questioning.

“California, resting content under this Roosevelt arrangement, suddenly waked to the fact that the State was filling up with Japanese women and that little brown babies were cluttering up the landscape.”

In now of his frequent xenophobic, anti-immigration articles as Congress debated what became the 1924 Immigration Act, George Creel had this to say about the Japanese. As proof of this “frightening” development, he gives the not-at-all impressive number of 35,482 Japanese women who resided in California in 1920, which represented 1% of the state’s population (3,426,861).George Creel, “Close the Gates!” Collier’s (May 6, 1922), 18.

“How can it be expected that these of low intellectual grade can become good citizens? To become a worthy citizen of this country only a few things are required, but they are essential. Understanding of the general principles on which our Government is founded is one of them.”⁠

It is more than apropos that the author writes an anti-immigrant diatribe that claims immigrants cannot understand our founding principles, one of the most basic being, of course, white supremacy. Arthur Sweeney, “Mental Tests for Immigrants,” North American Review 215, n. 798 (May, 1922): 609.

“Spend your money on shoes and stockings and soft, well-made underwear if you wish to be good-tempered and continue equal to the demands of the day, is the advice of a veteran to the sisterhood of working women.”

Margaret E. Sangster, “What the Girl of Business Needs,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 25, 1904. I think well-made underwear is good advice for all of us to survive a day at work. Sangster was a contributor to the Chronicle in the early twentieth century on matters of interest to young working women.

“Our country was founded and developed by picked men and picked women.”

“This is indeed a ‘country of immigrants,’ but immigrants of a certain kind. The men and women who settled America–who made America–were pure Nordic stock.”

That, of course, is an especially egregious load of rubbish. This was the opening to an article by Robert DeCourcy Ward, a Harvard-trained climatologist, who went on to become the first ever professor of climatology in the U.S., advocating for the use of eugenic ideas in immigration policy. That three-fourths of all people who arrived on the shores of North America in the first century were unfree and the ones who developed the United States is, of course, the truth, but one Ward and generations of believers in the lie of “American Exceptionalism” like to tell themselves. “Our Immigration Laws from the View Point of Eugenics,” American Breeders Magazine 3, no. 1 (First Quarter, 1912), 20. This sentiment was widespread during the early twentieth century and in the context of advocating for immigration restrictions. The second quote comes from journalist George Creel, who also led President Wilson’s Committee on Public Information propaganda machine during World War I. “Close the Gates!” Collier’s (May 6, 1922), 18.

“Q.—It has been stated that these Chinese houses of prostitution are open to small boys, and that a great many have been diseased. Do you know anything about that?

A.—I know that is so. I have seen boys eight and ten years old with diseases they told me they contracted on Jackson Street. It is astonishing how soon they commence indulging in that passion. Some of the worst cases of syphilis ever seen in my life occur in children not more than ten or twelve years old. They generally try to conceal their condition from their parents. They come to me and I help screen it from their parents, and cure them without compensation. Sometimes parents, unaware of what is the matter, bring their boys to me, and do all I can to keep the truth from them.”

I touched briefly on an anti-immigration, anti-Chinese report published by the California State Senate in 1878 and this jaw-dropping quote is just one of many a reader will find in that report. Apparently, in San Francisco, children as young as eight-years old could find enough money, know where to go and how to get there, to indulge their sexual desires with Chinese prostitutes. Even if one accepts that sexual activity occurred earlier than what we expect these days, this still seems out-of-this-world ridiculous. As equally absurd is this physician, a member of the San Francisco Board of Health, testifying before a legislative committee that he treats minors, free of charge and deliberately withholds knowledge of that from the minor’s legal guardians. How was that not malpractice? Remarkable. Chinese Immigration; Its Social, Moral, and Political Effect. Report to the California State Senate of its Special Committee on Chinese Immigration (1878).

“A great public scandal is like an enema.”
From the memoir of a former prostitute and madam of a brothel in St. Louie, New Orleans, and San Francisco. Here she is remarking on the undeniable connection between political corruption, organized crime, and money in fin de siècle U.S. cities. A remarkable book that was written during the Great Depression by the author in hopes of making some much-needed money but rejected by every editor and publisher because it is saucy…to say the least. Nell Kimball, Her Life as an American Madam by Herself (New York: Macmillan Company, 1970), 143.

“We were free to delve into the arcana of rascality and dishonesty that fronted us every where.”
Probably no other sentence in human history has combined "arcana" and "rascality." San Francisco Grand Jury, Report on the Causes of Municipal Corruption in San Francisco, as Disclosed by the Investigations of the Oliver Grand Jury, and the Prosecution of Certain Persons for Bribery and Other Offenses Against the State (San Francisco: Rincon, 1910), 7.

“The control of the venereal diseases is very much more difficult because of their relationship to elemental emotions fundamental to the continuity of human life.”⁠
Here's a fancy way of saying people like sex! United States Interdepartmental Social Hygiene Board, Report for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1920 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920), 18.

"Dr. Wm. T. English, of Pittsburg, made a remark in one of his papers before this Society, in regard to the importance of the welfare of the sexual apparatus in the male and in the female and the sad results to human happiness of the abuse of this apparatus through ignorance or grossness, which remark has been in my memory for the past two years."
The not-at-all-ironic opening to an article entitled "Sexual Knowledge versus Sexual Ignorance" by Dr. Walter Cheyne in the Journal of the South Carolina Medical Association from May, 1907 (660). Despite making an argument for sex education as a means to prevent the spread of STDs, this medical professional cannot even bring himself to use medical terms to describe sexual anatomy or masturbation. I mean, "grossness," really doctor? 

"Wine and prostitution go together." 
The Great War (aka World War I) raised concern among military and medical professionals about the high rate of venereal disease among enlisted men. Dr. Jennie Harris, describing the measures England undertook to control the misbehaviors of their soldiers and the possibility they may also prohibit the consumption of alcohol because, you know, wine and prostitution go together. 
Jennie H. Harris, “The Prostitute in Relation to Military Camps,” Woman’s Medical Journal 28, no. 6 (June, 1918): 126.

“It is but a common place to affirm that virtue and vice are, to some extent, the result of good or bad digestion, and that digestion depends largely on the way in which one’s food has been cooked.” 
From the Report of Supervisor of Domestic Science to the Superintendent of Schools in San Francisco. San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Municipal Reports for the Fiscal Year 1907-08 (San Francisco: Neal Publishing, 1909), 235.

“The economic basis of feminism is obviously one of the most if not the most important aspect of feminism, because its economic basis is more or less fundamental to every other aspect of feminism.” 
Maurice Parmelee, “The Economic Basis of Feminism.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 56 (November, 1914), 18.

Henry T. Finck didn't care for the notion of working women very much:
"One of the most important problems to be solved in the new century is this: Shall women be flowers or vegetables, ornamental or useful?" Indeed. 

"Do you believe that in these days, when we men are compelled, owing to the increased struggle for existence, to double our efforts, a weak woman can do her duty and compete with us?" The very thought struck this "eminent Viennese gynaecologist," as self-evident absurdity. By "her duty" the author was referring to motherhood and housewifery. [Quoted in]

"Nervous collapse is, indeed, the fate of most women who engage with men in the strenuous competition of mercantile life and otherwise." Henry T. Finck, “Employment Unsuitable for Women” The Independent 53, no. 2732 (April 11, 1901), 834-836.