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

 

 

  

Fail Mary: A Good Book Badly Interpreted

 

 

 

 

 

 

PROJECT HAIL MARY (2016)

Directed by Phil Lord and Christoper Miller

Amazon-MGM Studios, 156 minutes, PG-13 (intensity, mention of suicide)

★★

 

Project Hail Mary was a megahit, but the film gets very little love from me. It is ever-so-loosely based on the 2021 novel of the same name by Andy Weir (no relation of mine). Weir’s book was quite good, an exemplar of what is sometimes called a “hard science novel.” It was also “hard” in the sense that Weir didn’t shy away from throwing math equations, chemistry, and physics at his readers. Those things are also present in the movie, but it’s ultimately a buddy film between astrobiologist Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) and a xenon-based alien nicknamed “Rocky” (James Ortiz voicing a rather obvious puppet).

 

The story is rather straightforward. Grace is a wise guy scientist whose nonconventional behavior and lack of ambition have wrecked his chances of working at any sort of high-powered university or research lab. He has been reduced to teaching middle school science and he’s really good at it; it fits his slacker-like demeanor. He is, however, aware of the frightening buzz over mysterious celestial dots, the infrared “Petrova line” extending beyond Venus, and rumors that is has been sucking radiation from the sun at such a rate that within 30 years tens billions will die from global freezing.

 

Ryland is commandeered to do research on astrobiological problem he wrote about when he was a serious graduate student. Somehow this makes him the world’s expert above those malingering deadbeats at crappy schools such as Arizona State, Cal Tech, Colorado University, Harvard, MIT, Stanford and university labs in Beijing, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Tokyo. Ryland almost immediately identifies that a microbe dubbed astrophage is the culprit. (How did those lab-coated dolts elsewhere miss it?) Ryland also realizes that the scenario is much worse than a frozen earth. The Petrova line upon which astrophage travels could wipe out all of creation, except for a faraway small planet named Tau Ceti. A team is needed immediately to be put into induced comas, go to Tau Ceti, determine why it is unaffected, and send probes back to earth–nearly 12 light years away. The odds of all this happening are so low that their spaceship is named “The Hail Mary,” a term that infers an act of desperation.

 

Ryland believes that his work is done, before Petrova Taskforce head Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) tells Ryland he is one of the three chosen for the one-way suicide mission. He protests that he is not an astronaut, doesn’t want to go, and isn’t ready to die. His refusal is ignored; the stakes are so high that he is forcibly sedated, plonked aboard, placed in a coma, and wakes up 4-5 years later (roughly 13 years by earth time). Ryland is alone in space–both of his colleagues died in their receptacles–until he encounters a giant array. After some gawking, he approaches the array and eventually meets an alien he dubs Rocky, whose language is based on music and echolocation. (Shades of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.)  The two learn to communicate and Ryland writes a computer program that allows them to “talk” to each other. Rocky, an engineer from the Eridani A system, is also alone in space, his 22 crew members dead from radiation exposure. Despite their linguistic, cultural, and physical differences, Ryland and Rocky become good friends.

 

From this point on, Project Hail Mary plays more like a buddy film than any sort of thoughtful first contact movie. (For my money, Star Trek: First Contact tops the thriller/insightful list.) Like almost all buddy films, there are funny moments–Ryland is a klutz and playful goof-off–times in which they save each other, mutual homesickness, and teamwork to stave off disaster. A lot of the “cute” cultural misunderstandings skirt the boundary between character development and cheesy. The bonding process is even worse, as in Ryland’s efforts to hug Rocky through his protective sphere. Not to mention that the Eridian Rocky looks like the Horta from Star Trek’s first season crossed with a Muppet decked out in sepia and ash.

 

I do give credit to Greig Fraser for his stunning cinematography. I wish the movie itself had been more worthy of Fraser’s craft. Andy Weir’s novel made me think; the movie made me sigh.

 

Rob Weir