[A Burlington paper reprinted this, and the Wash Post ran a short item, but those are the only appearances of the words "Vermont" and "sterilization" in Lexis.]
The Boston Globe
August 7, 1999, Saturday ,City Edition
SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. A1
LENGTH: 1344 words
HEADLINE: Pages from past breed uneasiness; Historian chronicles Vermont's project to cleanse bloodlines
BYLINE: By Ellen Barry, Globe Correspondent
BODY:
It changes the way you think of those paragons of New England society, the Yankees, to learn that Vermont scientists had an active program to breed them.
But there it is, in the archives at the Public Records Office in Burlington: the long-abandoned paperwork of the Vermont Eugenics Survey, tracing in businesslike diagrams the "degenerate" bloodlines that social scientists in the 1920s and '30s hoped to eliminate and the "old pioneer stock" they hoped to replenish.
A dozen times, as she paged through the old records, Nancy Gallagher thought about abandoning her project.
On the one hand, no historian had ever written a book about Vermont Eugenics Survey's 12-year study of "good" and "bad" families, which was widely circulated among policymakers and culminated in a law providing for the sterilization of several hundred poor, rural Vermonters, Abenaki Indians, and other people deemed unfit to reproduce.
The story of state-level eugenics was largely untold. Somewhere, between Gregor Mendel's revolutionary work in genetics and the Nazis' bizarre distortion of it, there was a void in the teaching of history.
But on the other hand, she knew there are people in the state who would read their own family histories in her book.
Gallagher wasn't a bomb-throwing revisionist historian, she was a 50-year-old former biology teacher who expected her doctoral thesis to "sit on a shelf," and she had stumbled into a subject both unexplored and painful.
"Every step of the way," said Gallagher, "I wondered if I should even be writing it."
When her book, "Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State," is published by the University Press of New England later this year, the wondering will be over. Gallagher and the rest of the state will be left with the emotional fallout of a historical episode that no one, not even its victims, particularly wants to discuss. The Eugenics Project was an obscure independent effort whose only real effect was the sterilization law, but its archives reveal a mindset so abhorrent that the historian who first discovered the papers walked away from the subject.
"I don't have a real dark streak in me, and it's very dark material. You can try and not be affected by it, but there's a lot of hate in it," said Kevin Dann, a historian in Woodstock who came upon the crates of eugenics surveys almost accidentally in the mid-1980s and published the first article about it in 1986. "The tales of redemption and human kindness and serendipity and grace are not there."
Vermont's social scientists were hardly alone in embracing eugenics, the science of human breeding that branched off from social Darwinism. All over the United States during the first two decades of this century, progressives were on fire to prevent, and not just manage, the misery of the poor. New science seemed to supply an answer: domestic abuse and alcoholism, long blamed on bad social conditions, were thought to be caused by recessive genes and inbreeding. By reducing the number of babies born to sick or unwed parents, and by attracting desirable settlers, social scientists thought they could a build a healthier society.
In fact, Vermont was the 31st state to pass a law allowing for sterilization of the handicapped or "feebleminded." The number of sterilizations that took place in Vermont was a tiny fraction of the 60,000 that took place in states before the laws were rolled back in the 1960s and '70s, according to Diane Paul, a UMass-Boston political scientist and author of the book "Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present."
But in some ways, Gallagher argues, Vermonters were uniquely ready to accept eugenic solutions. The state's population was dwindling and the draft board was rejecting an increasing number of young men - trends that dealt a blow to the closely-held Yankee Protestant ideal. In 1930, 71 percent of the state's 350,000 people were native Vermonters. This kind of population can be changed more readily, encouraging eugenicists to "improve the quality of its native stock," as one put it. The global craze for bettering society through selective breeding could be applied to local aims.
It was in this atmosphere that the University of Vermont zoology professor Henry Perkins threw himself into the project of tracing what Gallagher calls "pedigrees of degeneracy" in a series of Vermont families.
Field workers selected particular "notorious" families and issued reports with titles like "The Results of the Matrimonial Adventures of Four Degenerate Offspring of the Fourth Generation of the Doolittle Family."
The reports drew on interviews with neighbors and local officials, and were sometimes supplemented with estimates of the families' cost to taxpayers, terming one extended family "Expensive Luxuries." One researcher reported that "the state of Vermont would have been better off had Richard, Simon, John and Joseph of Generation III not been allowed to produce children."
The work paid off for Perkins in 1931, when a sterilization bill finally passed, and between then and the early 1960s, the state would fund and arrange sterilizations, often on young men and women living in institutions for the "feebleminded" or handicapped, frequently as a condition of release.
Although there is plenty of anecdotal evidence about sterilization policy, particularly among the Abenaki, there is no documentation of how widespread the phenomenon was, or how the option was presented to its subjects. The only published summary of state sterilization, from the 1940s, puts the number at 212, although many suspect the real number is higher, Dann said.
The eugenics movement radically changed direction in the 1930s, as people recoiled from the Nazis' "race hygiene." When Perkins's student Elin Anderson published a 1937 study of Burlington called "We Americans," her work showed less nostalgia for the "old pioneer stock" and assigned positive value to racial diversity. By 1940, Perkins had omitted from his abstracts any mention of the years spent following Vermont's "degenerates."
And that whole project would have faded into obscurity except for a pair of accidents: Perkins's proud record keeping and Dann's chance discovery of 40 crates of surveys in the laundry room of a state mental hospital in the mid-1980s. He quickly realized that the history was still painfully fresh.
"You can still go into high schools in Vermont and mention the families that were studied and they'll say, 'They're still the troublemakers,' " he said.
Among the Abenaki - who, historians have established, made up a large contingent of the families Perkins studied - the sterilization law is hardly history at all. Rushlow, the 31-year-old Abenaki acting chief, said that female relatives of her father's generation were sterilized without their consent, and that stories of the Perkins research were not taught in school but were "passed down through the elders of the community."
To her, Rushlow said, Perkins has always seemed "just like Hitler."
The recent spike of scholarly interest has drawn mixed responses, she said - on the one hand, printing the history of Perkins's project could "finally let the public know what happened." But the historians' interest has also churned up painful episodes that had been "kind of buried." She told of a 53-year-old man who realized five years ago, after reading a revisionist account of the closing of the Brandon Home for the Feebleminded, that he had probably been sterilized when he was 7.
Nancy Gallagher, who taught biology in Vermont schools for years, is haunted by another possibility: That at some point, unknowingly, she may have popularized scientific inquiry with equally horrifying applications. Right now she's worried about the human genome project. After reading through boxes of Perkins's pedigrees, she'll never be as trustful of science, or of herself.
"It humbles you," she said. "To their dying day they probably thought they were doing the right thing."
GRAPHIC: PHOTO, Nancy Gallagher in front of a chart from her book, "Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State." / GLOBE PHOTO/ALDEN PELLETT