I have been reading the new best seller, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand.

Hillenbrand (the author of Seabiscuit) states that as a 13 year old Louie Zamperini was scared straight when a freind of his, also 13, was very nearly castrated by the state of California for being a juvenile delinquent. Zamperini realized that he could go under the knife if he kept going as he was. The year would have been around 1930 and Hillenbrand says that at that time thousands of boys in California were being castrated for being diffacult to manage. Is this on the level or is her imagination running wild?

Yes,

This was a real thing. Read THIS. (http://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/CA/CA.html)

California used the process to sterilize anyone they deemed unfit. Prisoners, the disabled, and delinquents. They also allowed any legal guardian to request the procedure for their underage charges, though parental consent was not required if a physician signed off on it.

If you were underage, living in California, and running afoul of the law, you were risking your sexual future on every misadventure.

From the numbers though, this would have been a very unlikely outcome. Over 70% of the cases were labeled as "mentally ill", whatever that means. The law was mostly concerned with institutionalized persons.

Still it was very possible for a Judge to classify you as an incorrigible, remand your guardianship to the state, and order your sexual sterilization. For what you describe of the book, it seems very plausible.

Yes, but that was just sterilisation, wasn't it? Vasectomy. Like Hitler did to congentitally deaf people. Not castration.

justjustin (imported) wrote: Fri Oct 28, 2011 12:18 am Yes, but that was just sterilisation, wasn't it? Vasectomy. Like Hitler did to congentitally deaf people. Not castration.

No it was castration, which was thought to calm down violent offenders and schizophrenic. It was the case of identical male twins, one of whom was castrated as a schizophrenic that established the role of testosterone in male pattern balding. The twin still producing testosterone went bald; his castrated brother kept his hair until researchers supplied it late in life.

Vasectomy only became popular by the second world war. (though it has been around a lot longer.)

Prior to that, "snip, snip." and something went missing.

Doing a little Google research on the subject, shows that there was a pretty big divide in how it was done. If it was done to control behavior, then good-bye gonads. Where it was done to prevent further generations of "defective people" then it was mainly just the vas deferens that got the snip.

It looks like it would be up to the physician, or judge to decide the outcome. Seems the "mentally infirm" would get the full treatment, where the poor, and the criminals would get vasectomized.

I am unsure of where Juvenile Delinquents would fit into that model. If they were just viewed as criminals, then a vasectomy seems likely. If they were viewed as mentally deficent, and in need of behavior modification, the more drastic snip would seem to be implied.

There are not enough records about how many, and exactly WHAT was done to whom. Medical records were routinely destroyed, or altered to avert shame from the family.

What is clear is that BOTH the vasectomy option and the castration option were available to those who made the decisions.

In Mythbusters style, I'm going to stick to PLAUSIBLE, for my opinion of the situation described in the book.

How very interesting. Never knew that.

Josh Goodman (imported) wrote: Thu Oct 27, 2011 8:24 pm I have been reading the new best seller, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand.

Hillenbrand (the author of Seabiscuit) states that as a 13 year old Louie Zamperini was scared straight when a freind of his, also 13, was very nearly castrated by the state of California for being a juvenile delinquent. Zamperini realized that he could go under the knife if he kept going as he was. The year would have been around 1930 and Hillenbrand says that at that time thousands of boys in California were being castrated for being diffacult to manage. Is this on the level or is her imagination running wild?

Yes it was for real and it was nation wide and was conman into the early 1950's

I should add that Unbroken is listed as a biography and nonfiction. According to Hillenbrand one of the reasons for "sterilization" was "excessive mastrubation". A vasectomy would not have done much to address that issue.

As for Louie Zamperini's young friend Hillenbrand states that the boy had run afoul of the law a few too many times and was thus facing a court ordered sterilization for "mental deficiency" which could mean quite a few things. The story goes that the boy's parents mounted a legal defence and that after being tutored by Zamperini's sisters was able to earn straight A's in school. As a result of all this the court ordered sterilization was set aside and the boy remained intact. The book seems to imply, but doesn't really state, that the boy was living at home at the time, not in an institution.

I would not buy Unbroken for the section on castration alone, it's less than a page long. But if the story is true, and it many very well be, it is as remakable as most of the stories I've read in the EA. Strange that something that was commonplace not so long ago is now so controversial.

Our lucky day, google books has the part available to read: Page 11 (http://books.google.ca/books?id=-kNK2cN ... ze&f=false)

The book clearly mentions “sterilization,” not “castration,” though castration was sometimes used in California. Most of those sterilized in California were young women, most of whom had an oöphorectomy (removal of the ovaries – the female equivalent of castration). Most, but not all, of the young men had only a vasectomy, though some were certainly castrated. (Just as today, male doctors are reluctant to remove testicles, though they have little compunction about removing healthy ovaries. I once met one of the surgeons who performed sterilizations of young women at the Napa State Hospital in California and he was proud of his work.)

The use of eugenic sterilization in the United States officially began in the 19th century and continued until at least the 1970s. There are mentions of it in some of the works in the http://www.eunuch.org/forums/showthread ... bliography]Bibliography[/url (http://[URL="http://www.eunuch.org/forums/showthread ... bliography]Bibliography[/url")]. See for example the work published in 1700 and attributed to Daniel Defoe (most famous as the author of Robinson Crusoe) as a much earlier suggestion of the practice.

In the United States, castration was used in mental institutions well into the 1940s. An article by Everett Flood (1899) describes the effect of castration on 26 boys at the Michigan Home for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic. All were castrated because of “chronic masturbation.” Half of those castrated were under 14 at the time. Twenty-four suffered from epilepsy, only two were institutionalized for low intelligence. Hamilton and Mestler (1969) studied the life expectancy of 297 men who had been castrated in Kansas mental hospitals for a variety of reasons. There were many more castrated, but these were the ones born within the time window that they were studying and on whom there were complete records.

Probably most relevant to this book, however, is Mark Linsky’s article (1989), which surveys judicial castrations in San Diego, California between 1938 and 1975. No record was kept of the number, but evidence points to something around 500 young men castrated in the county during that period. Most of the young men were castrated for sex crimes of various sorts, though I have found a record of one toward the end of that period where a teenager was castrated for arson. He had set fire to an empty chicken coop.