“Vermont for the Vermonters”: A History of Eugenics in the Green Mountain State (Vermont Historical Society, 2023), written by Mercedes de Guardiola, is a new examination of one of Vermont‘s darker chapters, and sheds new light on the factors that helped bring it about.
Eugenics is a pseudo- scientific field of selective human breeding that rose to prominence in the early 1900s and was the foundation of Nazi Germany.
Vermont was one of many American states to adopt eugenics as the basis for public policies such as family separation, institutionalization, and sterilization that targeted the most vulnerable Vermonters and led to widespread intergenerational damage.
In 2021, the state formally apologized for the practice, and the legislature is exploring ongoing responses.
“Vermont for the Vermonters” is the result of years of research and new scholarship into the story of the eugenics movement in the state.
Examining developments from poor farms to mental institutions and public campaigns under State Senator Elmer Johnson and University of Vermont professor Henry Perkins, de Guardiola demonstrates the underlying social and political landscape that helped pave the way for strong support of Vermont’s eugenics policies, determined how they were implemented and carried out, and resulted in a devastating cost for Vermonters.
She regrounds Vermont’s actions and policies in the larger context of the state and the nation’s public policies, allowing us to better understand the motivations and long-range consequences of the movement.
A “Vermont for the Vermonters” Discussion Guide is available online.
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While I applaud Ms. de Guardiola‘s efforts, once again, she begins he “history” hundreds of years after these ideas has become fossilized in Euro-American culture. The term Eugenics is new, however, the ideas associated encapsulated within this term have been used to categorize peoples since humans began keeping written records. Further, placing the spotlight directly upon Vermont as if Vermont is somehow a unique anti-X, Y, Y culture that is linked immediately with the Nazis is totally inappropriate. Each state in the United States was instructed to form a Commission on Country Life that shared that same problems and sentiments as Vermont’s. The entire country was in the midst of multiple anti- campaigns, immigrants, African Americans, Germans, Orientials, Mixed-blooded peoples etc. Taking the Vermont Eugenics program out of the National context does a great disservice to the importance of her work.
Your comment’s goal seems to want to downplay eugenics in Vermont with some version of “it was a different time” (ugh.) and “everyone else was doing it” (super ugh.). There are so many options of what you could comment on, please introspect on why you find downplaying eugenics in Vermont so important. Vermont can be better, we must strive to be better, but we can’t become better if our focus is on “we weren’t that bad when committing eugenics” (yikes!) reminds me of folks saying someone was a “good slaveowner” — spoiler you can’t commit acts against humanity and consider yourself good.