UPDATE: Keep your eye open for the eugenics conference at UVM this spring:



March 28, 2010

Symposium

Breeding Better Germans and Vermonters

Nazi and American Eugenics in History and Memory

It appears that a long-standing injustice done to some of Vermont’s most vulnerable populations in the early part of the 20th century is about to be officially acknowledged at last.



The Burlington Free Press reported today that the Legislature took testimony from a few of the descendents of those vicitimized in the Vermont Eugenics Project, pursuant to issuing an apology to the wronged communities. Had the project achieved it’s goal of sterilizing all but those who came from “the fine old stock of original settlers,” there would be no descendents to offer that testimony today.  It is a shame and a cloud of disgrace that hangs over the past of both the state and it’s premier university, since it was under the influence of a UVM Dean of Zoology, Henry F. Perkins, that the legislature undertook this ignoble adventure, following the preliminary “studies” in the 1920’s.

The UVM website devoted to the topic has an oddly understated tone, considering the volatility of its subject. Nancy L. Gallagher, who is credited on the website, has written a detailed history of the experiment entitled “Breeding Better Vermonters: The Vermont Eugenics Project.” A friend loaned me this UVM publication several years ago because I was completely ignorant on the subject.  In all the twenty some years I had lived in Vermont, no one had previously mentioned this particular piece of regional history to me. Quite an eye-opener.

Vermont was by no means unique in this perfidious action.  When, in 1931, Vermont passed it’s own sterilization law, it was the 27th state to do so.

In Vermont, the targeted populations included the Abenaki, French Canadians and persons deemed to be “feeble-minded” by virtue of an assortment of extremely arbitrary and even bizarre determinations.  I have been told that many families of Native American and French Canadian descent destroyed all evidence of their heritage for fear of detection and consignment to the sterilization clinics.  About now you could be forgiven for picturing Ann Frank hiding in an Amsterdam attic. In fact Hitler’s “scientific” authority for the horrendous practices of the Holocaust came from the same source as Vermont’s own Eugenics Project, a little theoretical perversion known as “neo-Darwinism.”  

No wonder there is so little remaining evidence of the cultural life of the Abenaki as they press their case for recognition in twenty-first century Vermont!

How much good is an apology from the Legislature almost 100 years after it endorsed the Eugenics Project? None to the original victims who were deprived of their rights and their dignity; not much to the generations who lost their heritage as a consequence; but it is right and necessary that  the Legislature takes this small step to raise public awareness of what horror has been committed, so close to home, in the name of  genetic “purity.”