At the turn of the twentieth century, failing systems of healthcare and public welfare, coupled with preexisting beliefs on human worth, exploded into support for eugenics. Understanding these systems and how they broke down in the 1800s is critical to understanding why so many state leaders began to seriously consider eugenics—and argue it was a humane solution.
From town aid to the institution
In 1797, the Vermont state legislature mandated that towns take care of citizens in need—regardless of their financial ability to do so. Policies penalized families in need, hindering their ability to recover while hiding the extent of socioeconomic and health issues.
Following the Civil War and overcrowding at the Brattleboro Retreat, the state government began to replace town aid with mass institutionalization through the Reform School (1866-1979) and the Waterbury Hospital (1891-2011). Nearly immediate overcrowding, worsened by towns’ abuse of lax commitment standards, led leading citizens to fear that Vermont was in the midst of a severe crisis.
By the 1860s, state leaders were becoming alarmed by apparent depopulation of agrarian communities, outward migration, and low population growth. Prior to institutionalization, Vermont’s vulnerable were hidden out of sight and mind through town aid. As the institutional populations exploded, Vermont leaders began to fear that the quality of Vermont was decreasing—ignoring the many issues with town aid and the institutions as well as the many natural causes of depopulation.
Interested in heredity, institutional officials had begun to keep short records of families. This rudimentary tracking system was highly predisposed to show that certain families were contributing to Vermont’s issues—without recording the vast environmental factors that gave little hope of recovery, rehabilitation, or socioeconomic advancement. Nearly immediate overcrowding, worsened by towns’ abuse of lax commitment standards, led leading citizens to fear that Vermont was in the midst of a severe crisis.
The 1912 eugenics campaign
In 1912, Governor John Abner Mead issued the first known public call for eugenical policies in the state. The legislature responded by nearly legalizing sterilization and founding the Brandon School for Feeble-Minded Children. Though sterilization failed to pass, the campaign was by no means a failure: With little opposition in the state, supporters continued to press forward with eugenics. Institutional evidence of bad heredity only continued to grow as the weaknesses of state public welfare went unaddressed and treatments in overcrowded, understaffed, and underfunded institutions failed.
In the period between the 1912 campaign and the Eugenics Survey of Vermont, demand on public welfare resources only increased as the state faced World War I and the Spanish Flu. The second Ku Klux Klan emerged throughout the nation in force, finding great support in the North and in Vermont as it advocated for eugenics and railed against Catholics, immigrants, and other minorities. The state institutions practiced eugenical segregation in force during this period and may have begun to utilize sterilization.
“Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Over the 1910s, national eugenics organizations began to grow in strength—and most prominent among them was the Eugenics Record Office. Led by Charles Davenport and Henry Laughlin at the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Station for Experimental Evolution in Cold Spring Harbor, the ERO was one of the most prominent eugenics organizations in the United States. One of its chief goals was to promote eugenics legislation and practice at the state level.
Davenport and Laughlin were highly influential to the Eugenics Survey of Vermont. They trained several fieldworkers at the ERO and supplied informational manuals on how to conduct eugenics research. Such research was used to make the case for eugenics with the eventual goal of legalization and public acceptance.
In addition to promoting marriage restrictions, institutionalization, and restrictive immigration laws, the ERO helped to develop a model sterilization law to address questions over constitutionality. In 1927, the United States Supreme Court finally declared sterilization for the good of the state constitutional in Buck v. Bell. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The case was supported as a test case by the ERO, and both courts and lawyers failed to address major issues with the case—including that there were not three generations of imbeciles. The case has not been fully overturned.
The Eugenics Survey of Vermont
1925-1936
In 1925—when eugenics had already reached a zenith nationally—the University of Vermont’s Dr. Henry F. Perkins founded the Eugenics Survey of Vermont to carry out investigations into Vermont families and advocate for a range of eugenical public policies. Though it called itself a private organization, numerous public officials served on its advisory committee in their public roles; institutional superintendents volunteered their case records and medical notes to fieldworkers.
Before it closed in 1936, the Eugenics Survey published five annual reports and a book as well as opened the Vermont Commission on Country Life, a positive eugenics initiative that published Rural Vermont: A Program for the Future.
With the support of the Survey and its advisory committee, the Vermont state legislature legalized voluntary eugenical sterilization in 1931. The law mandated that the performing surgeon submit the sterilization certificate to the state government; no oversight was put into place to ensure certificates were sent in or that subjects did voluntarily consent to the procedure.
Bedlam 1946
By the 1930s, allegations of abuses at the state institutions increase, spurring a number of investigations and state reports until deinstitutionalization. But eugenic proposals continue into the 1940s, with a state report in 1941 recommending a range of eugenical policies to address the problem of “feeble-mindedness” in the state, including registration, segregation sterilization, and marriage restriction.
During World War II, more than 3,000 conscientious objectors were sent to work at mental asylums across the nation. Unused to the conditions so commonplace across the institutional system, the objectors were horrified by what they found and became strong advocates for reform. Their efforts led to national uproar as reports in prominent magazines such as Life detailed scenes of maltreatment, abuse, and murder.
Nazi Germany created a permanent association between eugenics and the atrocities of the regime, leading American eugenicists to quietly rebrand the field in the post-war period. Key ideas of the movement remained highly influential in Vermont and at the national level, with eugenical policies such as sterilization and segregation continuing even as the term faded from use.
The end of eugenics?
Determining when eugenics ends presents difficulties. The movement was designed to have an intergenerational impact—whether through education that could be passed on or by inducing trauma to stunt the family growth. Today, governments and communities continue to grapple with how best to address the lingering impact and influence of eugenics.
In Vermont, 1942 and 1966 state reports advocated for eugenical policies while largely avoiding the term, though the latter promoted community care over institutionalization. In 1980, a judge declared the sterilization law unconstitutional; the legislature then passed a new law allowing for forced sterilizations, but without eugenical references.
Spurred by investigations into abuse, growing awareness of the state of mental asylums, and the federal deinstitutionalization push under President John F. Kennedy, the state began to shut down its public institutions over the turn of the twenty-first century. Local citizens also played a key role in advocating for deinstitutionalization. In the 1950s, the Waterbury Hospital participated in the Vermont Project, a research project on rehabilitating schizophrenic patients.
The Reform School closed in 1979 after more than a decade of legislative action and study. Following a lawsuit from four residents (which resulted in the Brace Decree) and various court orders, the Brandon School closed in 1993. The Waterbury Hospital was shut down in 2011 following de-certifications, skyrocketing costs, widespread discharges, and unfavorable reports.