Paul Bowman Popenoe (October 16, 1888 – June 19, 1979) was an American agricultural explorer and eugenicist. He was an influential advocate of the compulsory sterilization of mentally ill people and people with mental disabilities, and the father of marriage counseling in the United States. Biography Born Paul Bowman Popenoe in Topeka, Kansas, in 1888, he was the son of Marion Bowman Popenoe and Frederick Oliver Popenoe, a pioneer of the avocado industry. (Popenoe dropped his middle name early in life.) He moved to California as a teen. After attending Occidental College for two years and Stanford University for his junior year majoring in English with coursework in biology, Popenoe left school to care for his father and worked for several years as a newspaper editor. He then worked briefly as an agricultural explorer collecting date specimens in Western Asia and Northern Africa for his father's nursery in California, along with his younger brother, Wilson Popenoe, a horticulturist. His travels received considerable support and interest from the US Department of Agriculture. Paul Popenoe published his first book, Date Growing in the Old World and the New, in 1913. In the mid-1910s, Popenoe became interested in human breeding and edited the Journal of Heredity from 1913 to 1917, with a special attention to eugenics and social hygiene. By 1918, Popenoe had become well-established enough to co-author (with Roswell Hill Johnson) a popular college textbook on eugenics (Applied Eugenics, edited by Richard T. Ely), which outlined his vision of a eugenics program that primarily relied on the segregation of "waste humanity" into rural institutions, where they would perform manual labor to offset the cost of their institutionalization. He was opposed to child labor on the belief that banning it would reduce the size of families that he regarded as unfit members of society. Additionally, Applied Eugenics contains a chapter expounding on Popenoe's belief in the racial inferiority of black people. During World War I, Popenoe was inducted into the officer corps of the US Army. Under the War Department Commission on Training Camp Activities, he was charged with rooting out liquor and prostitution in an effort to reduce the high incidence of venereal disease in US troops. Popenoe married Betty Stankowitch in New York on 23 August 1920. They remained married until her death on 26 June 1978. In the mid-1920s, Popenoe began working with E.S. Gosney, a wealthy California financier, and