“Eugenics in Vermont” by Jordan Engel
As a volunteer at the Woodstock History Center, I work on small research projects and requests. One of the great pleasures of the work is the freedom to follow stories down pathways (rabbit holes?) that interest me and might be only tangentially connected to the original topic. But, sometimes these aimless roamings travel full circle right back to the beginning and formerly unrelated trails of information come back together. Such was the case when Jennie Shurtleff asked me to look into the eugenics movement in Vermont in the early 20th century and, more specifically, Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s sympathetic ideas.
The national eugenics movement came to Vermont in 1925 with a University of Vermont professor of zoology, Henry F. Perkins. He developed the Eugenics Survey of Vermont as part of a course he taught on heredity. The purpose of the survey was to identify what was considered a growing population of problem groups. The results of the annual survey were rife with bigotry and racism and described family groupings (with only thinly veiled anonymity) in Vermont villages that were living lifestyles outside of the mainstream, including high proportions of French-Canadian and Abenaki individuals.
The survey led to the passing by the Vermont Legislature of the 1931 “An act for human betterment by voluntary sterilization.” The law stipulated “Henceforth it shall be the policy of the state to prevent procreation of idiots, imbeciles, feebleminded or insane persons, when the public welfare, and the welfare of idiots, imbeciles, feebleminded or insane persons likely to procreate, can be improved by voluntary sterilization as herein provided.” Of course, the first question one might ask is “Who would voluntarily agree to have themselves sterilized?” Between 1931 and 1941, about 200 sterilizations were performed in Vermont, mostly on women.
Concern for the quality and quantity of Vermont’s population was motivated initially by the movement of farm families to the growing industrial areas of New Hampshire and Massachusetts in the 1890s. The eugenics movement and the economic issues brought on by the depression of the 1930s increased the State’s interest in repopulating Vermont with the “right kind of people.” In 1931 the Vermont Commission on Country Life published “Rural Vermont: A Program for the Future.” Among its recommendations was the creation of an advertising campaign touting the simple values and beautiful landscape of Vermont and the marketing of second homes to wealthy out of staters.
Enter Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Fisher’s involvement with the eugenics movement informed the subject matter of much of her fiction, portraying an idyllic picture of Vermont, romanticizing rural values and describing, pretty unsubtly, the “right” and “wrong” kind of people. The State of Vermont enlisted her growing literary fame to tout its series of publications “Vermont Farms and Summer Homes for Sale.” The 1932 edition included her name on the cover and an introductory essay she wrote called “Vermont Summer Homes. An Open Letter.”
It was directed to “those men and women teaching in schools, colleges and universities: those who are doctors, lawyers, musicians, writers, artists—in a word those who earn their living by a professionally trained use of their brains… It seems to us that Vermont just by being Vermont has something liked and needed by people of your sort, and that people of your sort just by being yourselves have something that Vermont likes and needs.”
This has been a bare bones description of the wonderful experience I’ve had using the resources of the History Center to learn about a neglected part of Vermont’s history. If you’d like to delve more deeply into the topics mentioned, try “Repeopling Vermont” by Paul M. Searls (available in the History Center Library). Online, the 1931 Vermont eugenics act can be read at http://www.uvm.edu/~eugenics/primarydocs/ogvt174033131.xml.