Eugenics in Vermont

Vermont for the Vermonters: The History of Eugenics

            in the Green Mountain State (2023)

By Mercedes De Guardiola

Vermont Historical Society, 177 pages + appendices and back matter

★★★

 

 

 

When I was a high school teacher in Vermont, Nancy Gallagher was one of my favorite colleagues, even though she taught science courses and I was a social studies instructor. Years after I left, Nancy published Breeding Better Vermonters (1999), the first major work on the eugenics movement in Vermont.

 

Gallagher’s work concentrated heavily on Henry Perkins, who headed Vermont’s Eugenics Records Office for 11 years. Breeding Better Vermonters was a major inspiration for Mercedes De Guardiola, who looked deeply into available records across Vermont and published Vermont for the Vermonters. Guardiola would be the first to admit that even her study is incomplete as many records are missing–thrown away, destroyed by floods and fires, misfiled, or still undiscovered.

 

Eugenics is soiled by its association with racism, ethnocentrism, ableism, intolerance, and other now-unsavory assumptions. Because of its unsettling association with Nazi Germany, the eugenics movement is not broadly taught in the United States. Nor is it comfortable to acknowledge that eugenics passed for “science” in much of the Western world or that Hitler’s reign of hate drew upon American sources as well as European sources. Although adherents in Vermont and elsewhere argued that “positive” eugenics would literally produce better traits among humans, selective breeding was an ideal more suited to crops and livestock than humans. It thrived between the 1890s-1940s and its logical extension was to identify “subnormal” humans and prevent them from passing on their “defects,” either by voluntary or forced sterilization. In Vermont and elsewhere, chapters of the Ku Klux Klan endorsed eugenics. A large KKK rally in Montpelier during the 1920s was thus less shocking than one might assume. In retrospect, the truly shocking takeaway from Vermont eugenics is that so many educated and prominent luminaries embraced eugenics, including doctors, college presidents, governors, women’s club members, judges, scientists, and other professionals. 

 

De Guardiola pored over records from the Waterbury Hospital, the Brandon Reform School, the Perkins-led Eugenics Survey, state records, gubernatorial speeches, newspapers, and Vermont Country Life Commission reports. Among the many contradictions of eugenics is that “improving” the human race involved identifying those who would drag it down. Vermont eugenics dovetailed with the 1931 Vermont Commission on Country Life, whose 1931 Rural Vermont: A Program for the Future, sounded the warning that the state’s “Old Stock” was in decline, which in turn threatened to alter Vermont’s special rural characters. Thus, other commissions on everything from potatoes, apples, poultry, and dairies to woodworking, tourism, land use, and “religious forces” voiced opinions on eugenics. In essence, what was at stake was old-time Vermont versus emergent Vermont. The Old Stock was Protestant, Yankee, and rural. Eugenics targeted those of supposedly low IQ, but it was far too easy to assume that African Americans, French Canadians, Catholics, Native Americans, mixed bloods, delinquents, epileptics, the poor, and the under-educated were prone to mental deficiency. Not to mention unscientific assumptions that retardation and intelligence were genetically based. Today, many would also find it distasteful to deny the right of procreation to those of lower IQs or physical challenges. (Some genetics advocates did allow for the possibility that “high grade imbeciles” and “morons” could perhaps handle family life, but not “idiots” or “low grade” and “medium” imbeciles. 

 

Classification also lacked academic rigor. The Eugenics Survey of Vermont highlighted six “families”–the “Pirates,” the “Gypsy,” the “Chorea,” the “Doolittle,” the “Rector,” and the “Furman.” Of these, the first three were not families at all, rather generalized collectives to describe those who lived on boats, travelers and peddlers, and those poor souls driven insane by Huntington’s Chorea. Nor is the data from the latter three biologically-related families consistent, as some family members led quite productive lives.

 

It would be far too simplistic to condemn all eugenicists as bigots. I reiterate that eugenics passed for science at its height. Science is a dynamic field in which rigorous observation drives conclusions until new tools and methodologies proves them wrong. I am a historian, not a medical doctor or scientist. I would say, though, that one of the jobs of a historian is to warn citizens to ask hard questions lest the errors of the past repeat themselves. Hats off to my old friend Nancy Gallagher and to Ms. De Guardiola for illuminating the dangers of predetermined assumptions.

 

Rob Weir