Vermonters had lost their confidence. They believed their state was stagnating while the rest of the nation was moving forward. A small, self-appointed, urban elite, peering into the countryside, thought they had found the cause. Many of the noble country folk — the hardy, independent Vermonters whom they credited with making the state great — had left Vermont to seek opportunities elsewhere, the elite argued; and the rural Vermonters who remained were largely feebleminded, crime-prone degenerates who lacked initiative.
In 1925, a University of Vermont zoology professor named Henry Perkins offered what he saw as proof of the decline. He seized on draft board records showing that during the recent world war Vermonters were disproportionately rejected by the military on mental or physical grounds. (Later studies would contradict this assessment of Vermonters’ fitness.) The war records showed that Vermont’s draftees were turned away at a higher rate than any other state for having asthma, chorea (a variety of neurological disorders that cause involuntary jerking or twitching), curvature of the spine and deafness. They ranked second for rejections for deformities, mental deficiency and diabetes, and ranked third for eye defects.
Where some would have viewed these conditions as signs of rural poverty, Perkins saw something more insidious at work. He believed that the “racial stock” of the founding generation, which had been mostly white, Protestant and of European descent, had been weakened by intermarriage with people of other races and religions.
Perkins had fallen under the sway of eugenics, a field of inquiry invented in the late 1800s by an English anthropologist and aristocrat, who was also a cousin of Charles Darwin. The term “eugenics” means “well-born” and suggests that physical and mental problems, and even societal ones, could be overcome through better breeding. As a zoologist, Perkins appreciated the value of breeding. He set out to document the role of heredity in Vermont’s perceived troubles. What resulted was the pseudo-scientific Eugenics Survey of Vermont, a shameful chapter in the state’s history.
Vermonters had largely forgotten about the Eugenics Survey until it was brought back before the public by historian Kevin Dann, in a 1991 essay in the journal of the Vermont Historical Society, and by historian Nancy Gallagher, in her 1999 book “Breeding Better Vermonters.”
According to these and other historians, Perkins singled out families he believed posed a threat to the state. He and his assistants studied the families by poring over public records, interviewing family members (when they were willing), and recording details offered by informants. In establishing a family’s “pedigree of degeneracy,” researchers noted such “defects” as insanity, alcoholism, blindness, tuberculosis, feeble-mindedness and suspected feeble-mindedness. In all, Perkins’ team identified 62 families, representing 4,642 people, primarily in the Champlain Valley, in whom they saw traits that encouraged “defectiveness, crime and pauperism.”
The survey paid special attention to three families, who researchers gave the pseudonyms the “Gypsy,” “Pirate” and “Chorea” families. Pseudonyms were supposedly given to protect identities, Dann noted, but they masked the fact that the so-called “families” were often actually composites of numerous unrelated families. Revealing that fact would have severely weakened Perkins’ assertions about the inheritance of undesirable traits.
Researchers claimed to have located 436 members of the so-called Gypsies. Despite the extended family’s large numbers, researchers stereotyped them as “horse traders, fortune tellers, and basket makers” with a supposed propensity to steal from their neighbors. The Gypsies wintered just outside settled areas and spent warmer months migrating through rural parts. The family “contributed liberally to the population of prisons and other institutions of Vermont, New York and Massachusetts,” the survey reported.
Perkins’ assistant who studied this family traced it back five generations to a Quebecer who was of “mixed ancestry with apparently very strong doses of Indian and Negro.” Apparently, to the researchers, that mixed heritage was enough to explain the family’s reputation. Today, members of the state’s Abenaki community believe the Gypsies were Abenakis who were singled out because of their race.
The Pirates were members of an extended family that lived in houseboats and shanties along Lake Champlain. As Gallagher points out, the Pirates were like the Gypsies, in that they lived on the periphery of mainstream society and were somewhat nomadic. The Pirates worked as shippers, carrying goods along the lake. They had a reputation for being poor, living in squalid conditions and stealing. “They manage pretty successfully to keep out of prison, although (they are) frequently arrested for petty larceny and various other minor offenses,” according to a survey report. Their many offspring were seen as a threat, since “(d)isease and feeblemindedness are always conspicuous in the children.”
The Chorea Family, whose members commonly suffered from Huntington’s chorea, was characterized as a drain on public welfare coffers, since many of them were patients at the State Hospital for the Insane at Waterbury. But Perkins thought the Chorea Family problem would take care of itself, since the birthrate among its members seemed to be declining. The same could not be said for the Gypsies, the Pirates and others like them, but Perkins had a solution, which he would soon unveil.
“‘(B)lood has told,’” he wrote in the survey’s report, “and there is every reason to believe that it will keep right on ‘telling’ in future generations.”
After Perkins finished his initial survey, his research suffered a serious blow. He asked the National Committee on Mental Hygiene to study the mental and emotional deficiencies of Vermont’s children. The committee found that the mental health of the state’s children was about average compared to the rest of the nation. The statistics contradicted the draft board data that Perkins had used as proof that Vermonters were falling behind. (Other contemporary data showed that Vermonters had the lowest illiteracy rate in New England.)
But Perkins was undaunted. He next sought to expand his work to include a comprehensive statewide study of rural Vermont. Grants from charitable foundations interested in child welfare issues funded a larger study, known as the Vermont Commission on Country Life, which looked at economic, cultural, social and demographic reasons for the decline of the state’s rural areas. As a subset of the commission, Perkins and his staff continued their eugenics work under the name of The Human Factor Committee.
The Vermont Commission on Country Life attracted business and civic leaders, the two most famous of whom were authors Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Sarah Cleghorn.
Commission members shared Perkins’ belief that Vermont was faltering due to the continued outflow of “native stock.” In its final report, entitled “Rural Vermont” and issued in 1931, the commission asked: “Are there pockets of degeneracy hidden among our hills?”
It was a rhetorical question and the solution seemed obvious to commission members. The state needed more people of “the good old Vermont stock” – white Protestants of European descent. It was surely no coincidence that those adjectives described commission members themselves.
To reinvigorate the countryside, the commission recommended a variety of cures. It called for an improved educational system, more emphasis on luring tourists and summer residents, and the preservation of the state’s historic heritage and natural beauty.
Other proposals, such as moving farmers from “sub-marginal” lands and building a scenic tourist highway along the spine of the Green Mountains, died due to public opposition.
Commission members saw pride and fertility as one cure for what they saw ailing the state. In its report, they encouraged Vermonters to look back with “pride in the achievements and high qualities of their ancestral stock so that this pride may in turn stimulate their better efforts and guide them in their choice of mates.” Committee members essentially told Vermonters, of the right lineage, to go forth and multiply: “it is the patriotic duty of every normal couple to have children in sufficient number to keep up to par ‘the good old Vermont stock.’” Otherwise, families with undesirable traits would have an ever-increasing influence on the character of Vermont.
If desirable families weren’t having enough babies, then Perkins believed something had to be done to cut the number of “defectives” being born. Perkins helped author legislation calling for the “voluntary sterilization” of the handicapped and the “feeble-minded,” provided two doctors declared that the patient and society would benefit if the procedure were performed. The patient also had to state that they were undergoing the surgery voluntarily. The bill became state law in 1931.
By the time Perkins began his work in the ’20s, some scientists were already condemning eugenics at least on scientific grounds. It was the Nazis’ adoption of eugenics, however, that ultimately doomed the field. But it lived on in Vermont in the form of the sterilization law. People judged as insane or “feeble-minded” were targeted for sterilization, especially women who were labeled “bad” or “loose.” By 1936, the state had sterilized roughly 100 Vermonters, two-thirds of them women. In 1951, the American Journal of Mental Deficiency reported that that number had risen to 210.
Perkins dismissed the journal’s number, saying with apparent pride that it was too low. And he continued to defend the practice, calling it “one of the most important and progressive measures on the statute books.”
The state Legislature eventually made changes to the law, requiring a Superior Court judge to review doctors’ recommendations, determine whether the patient is mentally competent to consent to being sterilized, and conclude whether the operation is in the patient’s best interest. But those changes didn’t come until 1981.
