Book discussion illuminates details, impact of Vermont's 20th-century eugenics history
March 17, 2024 | By Cheryl Casey | Correspondent A new book that delves into Vermont’s 20th-century experiment in eugenics brought people together in Waterbury last week for a presentation and discussion led by its historian and author, a state archives expert, and a local lawmaker who led the push for an official state apology.
Author and historian Mercedes de Guardiola (standing) speaks to an audience of about 40 in the Steele Community Room at the Waterbury municipal complex last week. Photo by Gordon Miller
Mercedes de Guardiola spoke on March 7 in the Steele Community Room at the municipal offices about her recent book examining the history of eugenics in Vermont. She was joined by Mariessa Dobrick, a reference archivist for the state, and Rep. Tom Stevens, D-Waterbury, who played a key role in supporting a 2021 General Assembly resolution (J.R.H.2) apologizing for state-sanctioned eugenics policies and practices.
Author Mercedes de Guardiola. Photo by Gordon Miller
De Guardiola’s book, “‘Vermont for the Vermonters’: The History of Eugenics in the Green Mountain State” (Vermont Historical Society, 2023), contextualizes the eugenics movement in the collapse of the state’s public welfare system and the increase in rural poverty throughout the 19th century. According to de Guardiola, eugenics, “a pseudoscience with a simplistic understanding of human heredity…was based on existing biases, especially classism and racism.”
The eugenics movement began in Britain in 1883 when Sir Francis Galton, half-cousin to Charles Darwin, proposed this new “science,” using the Greek concept of “eugenes,” or “good in stock,” to establish an all-encompassing term for the field’s methodologies. In his book, “Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development”, Galton wrote, “We greatly want a brief word to express the science of…[giving] the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.”
As de Guardiola explains, it would take the movement another decade for Americans to seriously implement the ideas in public policy, and another two decades beyond that for eugenics to formally emerge in Vermont. By the late 19th century, it had become clear that the state’s public welfare system was failing.
Then in 1912, Gov. John A. Mead declared in his farewell speech that the “considerable class” of “‘degenerates’ and ‘defectives,’ by which is meant a class of individuals in whose mental or nervous construction there is something lacking,” prompts a “great question” for lawmakers across the country: “How best to restrain this defective class and how best to restrict the propagation of defective children.”
De Guardiola described state-run institutions (mental asylums and reform schools) as ready-made for serving two main eugenical goals laid out by Gov. Mead: segregation and sterilization. These strategies of “discouraging and preventing procreation” were termed negative eugenics, explained de Guardiola.
Conversely, positive eugenics practices sought to promote marriage and procreation by the “right” sorts of people. Mead proposed his third eugenical goal – marriage restrictions – using the positive eugenics framework, calling for educational campaigns as well as legislation to position marriage as the chief means by which the quality of Vermonters would remain high.
De Guardiola explained that none of Mead’s goals revealed particularly new ideas or even practices—“the state already had a law restricting marriages based on mental capacity,” and municipalities put “undesirable inhabitants…out of sight and mind” on poor farms, she writes in her book—however, the outgoing governor’s speech marked the first time the ideas were expressed specifically as an argument for eugenics.
The presentations traced the history and impacts of eugenics in Vermont from the late 19th century to the present day. Photo by Gordon Miller
Eugenical sterilization was the only new piece that Mead introduced to Vermont’s legislature, and in late 1912 his proposal reached the stage of a bill in the state Senate. Both the Senate and House passed the bill, but by then the next governor, Allen M. Fletcher, had assumed office and he vetoed it. The bill was eventually defeated in the House, but de Guardiola said that ongoing interest and research in eugenics kept the path open for the 1931 bill legalizing voluntary eugenical sterilization in Vermont.
That bill and other state-sanctioned policies were influenced to a large degree by the work of the Eugenics Survey of Vermont (1925-1936), led by University of Vermont Professor Henry F. Perkins. De Guardiola explained that by the 1920s, institutions were overwhelmed and their directors took little convincing to provide the Eugenics Survey researchers with data on all of their inmates. Perkins also sent women into the field as researchers to interview people in rural towns.
“Essentially, the women were invited into homes and gathered gossip under false pretenses,” de Guardiola said.
The Eugenics Survey closed down in 1936 as the state continued implementing policies based on its research. Within a decade, Americans across the country were disavowing the term eugenics in light of the Nazi atrocities perpetrated in its name.
Historical records tell only part of the story
Reference archivist Mariessa Dobrick assisted de Guardiola with research for the book. Photo by Gordon Miller
De Guardiola began her research in 2015 as a history student at Dartmouth University. “It was very clear there was something to be said, to be added to the public discourse” on eugenics, she said. The work eventually became her senior thesis and won the Dartmouth History Department’s Jones History Prize, awarded annually to “the best thesis upon some subject connected with the history of the United States,” according to the department’s website.
Subsequently, the Vermont Historical Society invited de Guardiola to submit a manuscript to its journal, “Vermont History,” and later to publish her work as a book.
De Guardiola’s source material is drawn largely from the Vermont State Archives, which holds the majority of the Eugenics Survey of Vermont records, Vermont Historical Society archives, contemporary newspapers, and oral histories.
Much documentary evidence from public institutions has been lost over the years due to poor record-keeping, floods, and fires, but in addition to the records of the Eugenics Survey, de Guardiola combed through what was publicly available in records of the Reform School (1886-1979, established in Waterbury and then moved to Vergennes after a building fire), the Waterbury Hospital (1891-2011) and the Brandon Training School (1915-1993).
Reference archivist Mariessa Dobrick followed de Guardiola’s presentation with additional context for the research process. Dobrick summarized the records available to Vermonters regarding what she called the “web of souls” in the care and custody of the state in the 19th and early 20th centuries, showing examples from the Brandon Training School and the Eugenics Survey.
Dobrick also explained some of the difficulties of relying on these records as sources for understanding history because of the faulty methodologies and assumptions used by doctors and researchers at the time. Data was recorded through the lens of those who saw with a eugenical eye, and the information these records provide us now needs to be considered in that context, she said.
Reckoning with the past in the 21st century
Stevens rounded out the presentation with a discussion of how the state legislature today is working to reckon with its past decisions. A longtime resident of Waterbury, Stevens lives just walking distance from the state hospital and has toured its shadowy halls. He spoke to the political dimension of the eugenics movement and its extensive roots.
Waterbury state Rep. Tom Stevens, shares details of the process behind drafting and passing the eugenics apology joint resolution in the state legislature in 2021. Photo by Gordon Miller
“Vermonters were making decisions about how to weed the seedbed of the pioneer stock long before the eugenics movement,” he said, referring to the White Protestant perspective and policies aimed at the Abenaki Indians.
As chair of the House General and Housing Committee, Stevens was a key legislator behind the 2021 resolution apologizing for state eugenical policies and in bringing the resolution out of committee to the House floor where it received unanimous support and likewise in the state Senate. Noting that “there was still language on the books [from these policies] until about 15 years ago,” Stevens described the experience of interviewing witnesses and gathering testimonies from survivors in order to write the resolution.
“By segregating people and by sterilizing people, we were committing genocide by the U.N. definition. We did that in Vermont, as a state-sanctioned policy,” Stevens said. “That was what the apology addressed.”
Stevens also acknowledged several action items that have followed the resolution, including a public apology at the statehouse in October 2021 to commemorate the resolution’s unanimous passage earlier in the year. Additionally, the state is developing equity programs and it has established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission “to work with people harmed by these policies,” Stevens said.
“I still believe in government,” Stevens insisted. “There are a lot of good things that can come out of government. Eugenics wasn’t one of them.”
Published by the Vermont Historical Society in 2023, signed copies of “‘Vermont for the Vermonters:’ The History of Eugenics in the Green Mountain State,” from the discussion event are available at Bridgeside Books. Borrow it at the Waterbury Public Library as well. Photo by Gordon Miller
A footnote on Gov. Mead
A few months after the legislature’s public apology, Middlebury College announced that its Board of Trustees had voted to remove Gov. Mead’s name from its prominent marble and wood chapel, which sits on the highest point on campus. In a letter to the Middlebury Community dated September 27, Board of Trustees Chair George Lee and college President Laurie Patten described the “careful and deliberative process” by which the trustees decided to rename Mead Memorial Chapel.
“Following its review…the working group [advising the president] determined that ‘the name of former Governor Mead on an iconic building in the center of campus is not consistent with what Middlebury stands for in the 21st century,’” Lee and Patten wrote. According to Middlebury’s charter, the Prudential Committee of the Board of Trustees is granted authority to act on behalf of the full board, and the committee voted unanimously to remove Mead’s name from the chapel. The college now refers to the iconic landmark as Middlebury Chapel.
Meanwhile, another former Vermont governor, Middlebury resident and Middlebury College “executive in residence” Jim Douglas, filed a suit in state court a year ago on behalf of the Mead family to reverse the college’s naming decision. Douglas’ claim is based on a breach of contract allegation given that the chapel was named in acknowledgment of a financial contribution from Mead. The case is still making its way through Vermont Superior Court in Addison County.
History as a current event
Bridgeside Books owner Katya d’Angelo. Photo by Gordon Miller
The book discussion event was organized and co-sponsored by Bridgeside Books, Waterbury Public Library, and Waterbury Historical Society. Katya d’Angelo, owner of Bridgeside Books, said the collaboration felt important because of the scope of the topic’s significance, introducing the presentation as “so much larger than a typical author event” that Bridgeside often hosts.
About 40 people attended the presentation. Among them was Waterbury resident Mary Koen, a former educator whose office was located in the building that had once been the Brandon Training School. “I knew about Perkins and eugenics, but it was compelling to hear stories that are so antithetical to what I know of Vermont,” Koen admitted. “We need to learn, to be able to talk about it. The parallels to today are striking,” she added.
Sally Blanchard-O’Brien, an archivist currently working to catalog former U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy’s papers at the University of Vermont, came from Burlington for the event. Blanchard-O’Brien is a former colleague of Dobrick’s at the state archives and admitted she wanted “to see the full research trajectory” after having provided some assistance to de Guardiola during her research.
“Vermont has not reckoned with this topic,” Blanchard-O’Brien said. “Given what we’ve seen in the last decade, these ideas aren’t gone. We don’t understand how long-entrenched these ideas are, that they have a history.”
De Guardiola, who lives in New York City and works as an open innovation consultant, has been giving presentations in Vermont and New Hampshire since the book’s release in September. This summer, she will be a keynote speaker at the Vermont Principals Association Leadership Academy in Killington.
Author Mercedes de Guardiola, left, speaks with attendees including Anne Imhoff (right) and Lucy Ely Pagan (center) after the presentation. Photo by Gordon Miller
Waterbury Center resident Cheryl Casey is a professor of communication at Champlain College and president of the Waterbury Historical Society.