During the 20th century, eugenics was a foundational part of public policy in America and across the world. This page provides academic sources on the history of eugenics in Vermont and more broadly, as well as interconnected subjects such as public welfare, rural development, and institutionalization.
Eugenics in Vermont
Books
"Vermont for the Vermonters": The History of Eugenics in the Green Mountain State
Mercedes de Guardiola, 2023
Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State
Nancy Gallagher, 1999
Articles
“‘Segregation or Sterilization’: Eugenics in the 1912 Vermont State Legislative Session”
Mercedes de Guardiola, 2019
“Beyond the Feeble Mind: Foregrounding the Personhood of Inmates with Significant Intellectual Disabilities in the Era of Institutionalization”
Holly Allen, 2016
In “Vermont for the Vermonters”: The History of Eugenics in the Green Mountain State, Mercedes de Guardiola examines how the state’s eugenics movement emerged out of the public policies of the nineteenth century and led to state-sanctioned programs of institutionalization, sterilization, family separation, and education aimed at the most vulnerable Vermonters. Exploring the social and political legacy of the movement, de Guardiola brings new scholarship and context to one of Vermont’s darkest chapters.
Beginning with genealogies of Vermont's rural poor in the 1920s, and concluding in the 1930s with an exposé of ethnic prejudice in Vermont's largest city, this story of the Eugenics Survey of Vermont explores the scope, limits, and changing interpretations of eugenics in America and offers a new approach to the history of progressive politics and social reform in New England. Breeding Better Vermonters examines social, ethnic, and religious tensions and reveals how population studies, theories of human heredity, and a rhetoric of altruism became subtle, yet powerful tools of social control and exclusion in a state whose motto was "freedom and unity."
In his farewell address to the Vermont legislature in 1912, Governor John A. Mead endorsed for the first time a eugenical policy to address a longstanding fear of an increase in “degeneracy” in the state. Under the new theory of eugenics, socioeconomic status, physical and mental ability, and mental health officially became a question of heredity.
This essay explores the experiences of persons with significant intellectual disabilities at the Vermont State School for Feebleminded Children (later Brandon Training School) in the period 1915-1960. We discuss the limits of existing histories of intellectual disability in accounting for the distinct experiences of significantly intellectually disabled people. This essay works to correct the tendency to define the nominal intellectual disability of "morons" and "borderline" cases — both in the past and in disability historiography of the past — against the abject, embodied difference of the "low-grade idiot" or "imbecile." The history we offer has implications for the present-day disability rights movement.