Editor’s note: This commentary is by Judy Dow, who is an educator from Essex and on the boards of directors of Gedakina and Oyate.
[I] agree with the Vermont State Library Board that the children’s book award named for Dorothy Canfield Fisher needs to be renamed. I can’t help but wonder if State Librarian Scott Murphy is dragging his feet on making a decision about changing the name for political reasons.
On April 7, 2017, I shared my research and concerns with the Vermont Board of Libraries about the Dorothy Canfield Fisher book award. I support programs that encourage children to read, Dorothy’s list included. What troubles me is Fisher’s name connected to a children’s award. How is it an author whose writings harmonize with the writings of those who were eugenicists, not be a eugenicists, especially when she mirrors the philosophy of someone that has not been equal and unbiased to all children? Honoring someone’s name with an award is never about history itself, but more about how people who created the award saw history. I’m not asking to erase the history of Dorothy Canfield Fisher or other Vermonters. I’m asking that Vermonters see another perspective of history, and recognize the historical trauma caused by eugenics and its impacts.
Fisher’s writings of the 1920s-1950s embraced the vision of the Vermont Commission on Country Life, a statewide study initiated in 1927 by Henry Perkins, director of the Vermont Eugenics Survey. The survey’s board of directors along with “300 progressive citizens” examined social, cultural and economic forces in Vermont. Their conclusions were published in “Rural Vermont: A Program for the Future” (1931). Fisher served on the Vermont Commission on Country Life’s Adult Education and Vermont Traditions and Ideals subcommittees. Most reports in “Rural Vermont” celebrated the white Yankee Protestant values. In the 1930s Fisher with “like minded colleagues” published many books, pamphlets, plays and articles which were disseminated throughout Vermont. Such works as her nonfiction, “Summer Homes” (1932), “Tourist Accommodated” (1934), and “Vermont Traditions” (1953) restated and expanded the commission’s themes of “desirable” and “undesirable” people and traditions which should either be celebrated or excluded from Vermont communities. For example, in “Rural Vermont” Fisher’s committee suggests: “It would be fortunate for the state and its people if more and more men and women of this desirable type sought Vermont for summer or permanent homes.” Fisher assisted the committee by writing for the Vermont Bureau of Publicity promoting the commission’s stereotypes. These publications included a “special invitation” to a certain class of people to purchase a second home in Vermont, namely “those men and women teaching in schools, colleges, and universities: those who are doctors, lawyers, musician, writers, artists — in a word those who earn their living by professional trained use of their brains.”
Fisher’s committee continues with: “The benefits of a community interest in drama are far reaching and important.” “Tourists Accommodated,” a collection of Arlington neighbors’ stories published as part of this request, shows exactly how important “One cold, sunshiny January afternoon, three or four years ago, we women who live in the North District of our Vermont town were sewing together in a farmhouse living-room, making an outfit of clothes for an expected and (to tell the truth) not especially welcome baby in one of the poorer families of town.” In her book “Bonfire,” (1931) Fisher takes people directly from the Vermont Eugenics Survey records in Sandgate and makes them characters, showing her disdain for them.
These writings sounds like those of a eugenicist, ideas that were part of a progressive movement to breed better people as was done with cattle, horses and sheep. This was a scientific experiment later deemed a pseudo-science, but only after the history, continuity and life ways of French-Canadians, indigenous peoples and African-Americans living in this state were targeted, broken apart and destroyed by these surveys.
In “Institutions, Relatives, Respond to Dorothy Canfield Fisher Controversy,” (Bennington Banner, July 25, 2017), Cherise Madigan quotes Vivian Hixon, Fisher’s granddaughter: “She (Fisher) was temporarily convinced that eugenics had a good case.” “Temporarily convinced” up into the 1950s that is, where her personal and public writings continued to reflect “Eugenics Speak” and cultural stereotypes.
After more than 15 years of research, Nancy Gallagher and I have concluded that the Yankee Protestant culture likes to celebrate itself as much today as it did in the past at the expense of Vermonters of different ethnicities and cultures. Historians, teachers, librarians and students that have studied both Fisher and eugenics know it’s time for change. The essence of racism is denying it exists. Only through speaking out can there be acknowledgment and healing.
For more information on our research, click here.
