MERCEDES DE GUARDIOLA, “Vermont for the Vermonters”: The History of Eugenics in the Green Mountain State. Barre and Montpelier: Vermont Historical Society, 2023. ISBN: 9780934720779

 reviewed by Patrick Lacroix

In 2018, David Vermette’s A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans affirmed the relevance of the interwar eugenics movement to the Franco-American community, an issue that had until then earned only superficial scrutiny. Inspired by new research on historically marginalized groups and mental health in the United States, Mercedes de Guardiola, now a communications consultant in New York City, has produced a fine study of the Eugenics Survey of Vermont and its context. Her work raises its own questions about French Canadians’ place in American racial thinking and race making.

A product of Guardiola’s undergraduate work at Dartmouth College, “Vermont for the Vermonters” builds on significant scholarly precedents. Leading these is Nancy L. Gallagher’s Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State (1999), itself indebted to a study published by Kevin Dann in Vermont History nearly a decade earlier. Gallagher approached eugenics in Vermont through the activities of its key figures, particularly Henry F. Perkins, the founder and director of the Eugenics Survey. Guardiola, by contrast, proves attentive to the small number of institutions that segregated and sterilized people deemed “feeble-minded” or “defective.” 

In the second half of the nineteenth century, it became apparent that the state’s intense localism was failing to meet real and perceived social challenges. The outmigration of native-born Vermonters and growing ethnic diversity—interpreted nostalgically as the loss of the “old stock”—fed a sense of crisis and were held partially responsible for the apparent rise of poverty and mental disabilities. The state responded to “defectiveness,” “delinquency,” and “deviance” with institutions in Brattleboro, Vergennes, Waterbury, and Brandon. However, these hardly improved on the ad-hoc, town-based approach to welfare. The commitment to small, frugal government led to chronic underfunding, overpopulation, and a lack of public oversight, which only deepened the shortcomings of the treatments offered at the time. These problems would endure into the late 1930s and even then, reform was slow.

Lest Vermont be seen as unique, Guardiola explains that “[b]y 1936, over half of American states already had eugenical sterilization and other policies in place” (p. ix). Nevertheless, due to the perceived social crisis and the complicity of state-funded institutions, Vermont became fertile ground for the theories propounded nationally by the New York-based Eugenics Record Office, led by Charles Davenport and Harry H. Laughlin. In this regard, state leaders were invariably more concerned with the “negative” eugenics of isolating those deemed defective than with the “positive” approach of perpetuating the “old stock.” A sterilization bill received the assent of the legislature as early as 1912-1913, but remained without the force of law due to legal reservations expressed by the state attorney general. In 1931, the governor signed into law a bill that provided for the voluntary sterilization of an individual deemed “an idiot, imbecile, feeble-minded or insane person” (p. 114). To avoid constitutional challenges, the patient’s consent was required, but policymakers never directly addressed how a person with a severe mental impairment, let alone a child, could understand and consent to such a life-changing procedure. Medical professionals and administrators were undaunted: 120 sterilizations were performed at the Brandon School for Feeble-Minded Children during the 1930s. The total number of procedures carried out statewide under the 1931 law, which survived unamended for fifty years, is unknown.

While eugenics formally entered Vermont’s legal regime, Henry F. Perkins and his team of fieldworkers were collecting data about families they deemed subnormal and likely to pass down the problem of feeble-mindedness. Beginning in 1925, the Eugenics Survey created 62 family case studies, only a small number of which appeared in the organization’s annual reports. Each of these highlighted the perpetuation of undesirable characteristics through heredity. But, far from leading to an authoritative work that would shift public opinion and public policy, the work of the Eugenics Survey ended with little more than a whimper. This owed in part to the contentious debates wracking the larger world of eugenics in the 1930s. A heavy investment in the eugenic program was unlikely to come from the state legislature, and it seems that members of the Survey team, Perkins included, were beginning to question their preconceived notions and recognize the environmental factors behind poverty, learning impairments, and mental health issues. Fieldworker Elin L. Anderson’s community study of Burlington (We Americans, 1937) was only superficially connected to the Eugenics Survey. As Gallagher argues, when Perkins wrote a retrospective summary of the project in 1940, he sanitized its language. The summary showed little of the eugenical assurance of the early interwar years. The war with Nazi Germany may have been a factor but, as we will see, Perkins already had doubts about the degeneracy ascribed to specific ethnic groups a decade earlier.

In its overview of the Eugenics Survey’s work, “Vermont for the Vermonters” does not represent a significant departure from Gallagher’s book. On the other hand, it pushes the story—and the legacies of the interwar years—much closer to the present day. Damning investigations and a new mental health paradigm in the decades following the Second World War were slow to change established practices. Finally, the Reform School and the Brandon School closed in 1979 and 1993 respectively. After repeated decertifications and a Department of Justice investigation, the Waterbury Hospital closed in 2011. The accompanying shift to a community-based mental care model has, however, revived age-old problems of underfunding and lack of coordination. All the while, families across the state continue to reel from the legacies of abuse and neglect at the hands of institutions with a state mandate.

Guardiola’s institutional focus was made possible by impressive research in “records from the Vermont State Archives and the Vermont Historical Society, contemporary newspapers, and oral histories and testimonies” (p. xiv). These sources have the virtue of yielding a more human story, touching countless souls confined against their will and robbed of their futures due to the decisions of short-sighted physicians, uncomprehending community members, and a penny-pinching state government. Eugenical thinking exacerbated these tragic realities. Implied in Guardiola’s focus—made explicit in appendices that name Eugenics Survey members and people who signed sterilization certificates—is a call for accountability. That may yet materialize through the work of the Vermont Truth and Reconciliation Commission established in 2023.

In light of recent research on Franco-Americans and the Western Abenaki and works like Elise A. Guyette’s Discovering Black Vermont (2010, 2020), the secondary importance of ethnicity and race to Guardiola’s overarching narrative may, at first glimpse, seem puzzling. Secondary but not absent: Eugenics Survey fieldworkers commented on ethnicity, and minority groups were overrepresented among the 62 case studies. Guardiola acknowledges that “Vermont’s eugenicists firmly believed in the idea of a racial hierarchy and that inferior races were linked to ‘degeneracy.’” At the bottom of that hierarchy were Indigenous people and African Americans, the latter “clearly seen as inferior” (p. 121). Though the Survey’s third annual report (1928) listed English translations or corruptions of French names, hinting at the families that might appear in field notes, French Canadians’ place both in Vermont society and in local eugenical thinking was ambiguous. Degeneracy was, in their case, closely connected with alleged “race mixing.” Ultimately, Guardiola agrees with Gallagher that Perkins’s attitude towards French Canadians shifted (or was undergoing a shift) at the end of the 1920s. A report of the National Committee on Mental Hygiene revealed no unusual level of “subnormality” in Vermont, thereby exonerating French Canadians, the largest minority ethnic group in the state. Findings of disabilities among the “old stock” and a better understanding of French Canadians’ living conditions may have also created doubts. In fact, Perkins’s interest seemed to become more academic as he pleaded for funding. “[M]y reason for being particularly interested in the French Canadians,” he wrote, “is that they are so characteristically and so important a part of the population. They have been studied less than have European nationals,” a complaint about invisibility that has again become familiar. “The problem is not unlike that of the Amerind invasion along the Mexican border,” he added (Gallagher, p. 96). It remains, still, that Perkins failed to confront bigotry publicly or dispel enduring myths about people of French heritage, to say nothing of other minority groups in Vermont.

Further research will determine whether “Vermont for the Vermonters” understates the role of race and ethnicity in the application of eugenical principles in the Green Mountain State. Guardiola’s book at least reveals that confinement on account of “defectiveness” (psychological, moral, intellectual) cut across gender, class, and race, thus making the present-day pursuit of restorative justice the work of all Vermonters. We should hope that researchers will scrutinize the history and legacy of eugenics in other jurisdictions. As they do, Guardiola’s work will provide a valuable model.