Vermont Eugenics

Nazi Germany's Debt to Vermont

Playing God in the Green Mountains

Minutes of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Vermont Conference of Social Work October 1927. In attendance, was the new director of Kurn Hattin Homes for Children, Mr. W. I. Mayo, who outlined his plans for the school.

"The 13th annual meeting of the Vermont Conference of Social Work was held in the Ira Allen Chapel, University of Vermont, Burlington. In spite of an all day's downpour, 148 individuals registered and the attendance at some of the sessions showed that a large number availed themselves of the opportunity of listening to the vital program on the theme "Rural Betterment in Vermont," so well thought out by Dr. H. F. Perkins and his program committee.

A beautiful organ recital by Miss Marston, instructor in the musical department, U. V. M., was held at the beginning of the evening session. The audience then heard a rousing address by Judge Harry L. Olson, chief justice of the municipal court of Chicago. He declared that we must clean up the blood stream of the race, that heredity plays a most vital part in the future as well as in the present. A luncheon was served at the Hotel Vermont to some 50 members of the conference."

The out of state speaker for the afternoon was Mr. Leon F. Whitney of New Haven, Conn. He gave a strong plea for guarding the future of the race by allowing only the fit to multiply. He advocated a voluntary sterilization law, and emphasized that only by increasing the families of the best stock and lessening those of the defectives can America keep its high place in the world.

The Making of a Eugenics Cabal
Leon Whitney was one of the most prolific and connected eugenics proponents of his time and of the socio-economic connected, power wielding, Boston Brahmin / Harvard - the brain trust of eugenic thought / Dartmouth / Andover Seminary power based cabal of the time. Here he is in a meeting with Kurn Hattin Homes director, W.I. Mayo, of the Vermont Commission on Country Life, Vermont Eugenics Survey, Committee on the Handicapped of Vermont human sterilization law fame pontificating on eugenical sterilization. Herein lay the seedbed of state sanctioned human sterilization in Vermont and far greater consequences for the world to come.

American Eugenics Society (AES) executive secretary Leon F. Whitney, was an alumnus of the field worker course at the Rockefeller Foundation and Carnegie Institution for Science sponsored, Eugenics Record Office, Whitney was an expert on dog breeding and president of the Fruit Growers Supply Company in Massachusetts. From their headquarters in New Haven, Connecticut, the AES in the 1920s and 1930s organized conferences, contests, and publications on a wide range of topics related to eugenics. During the Eastern States Exhibitions in Springfield Massachusetts, Whitney promoted the "Breeding Fitter Families" competitions at The Eugenics Society's Fitter Families for Future Firesides booth at the Expo.

Whitney was an animal breeder and used dog breeds at fairs and exhibits to demonstrate eugenic principles. Writing as Executive Secretary of the AES in 1926, Leon Whitney made the demographic case for the value of the farm family. In his words, “The average farm family is at least sufficient to carry on the goodly heritage, while the average city family is too small.” But farmers had a deeper appreciation of eugenics, because they are animal breeders themselves."

Eugenic College
Whitney was also responsible for the Shutesbury Eugenic Study, in which his alma mater also had a role. That school was the Massachusetts Agricultural College, known today as UMass Amherst. William I. Mayo, director of Kurn Hattin Homes for Children, was also a graduate of the college and attended the school with Whitney, and Whitney's brother Joseph. Professors at the Massachusetts Agricultural College, (MAC) were enthusiastic supporters of Leon Whitney's work in Shutesbury, volunteering their students as fieldworkers. The Eugenics Society was “in the first line of importance,” said former Amherst College president George Olds, “in making for the progress of the race.”

Whitney directed the secretive Shutesbury Study from the AES headquarters, often arriving in person to accompany fieldworkers on their visits. He was collaborating with professors at MAC, relying on students to assist him in collecting data from the history of the town's settlement, industry, and agriculture, to residents' psychometric / IQ test scores, church attendance, tax records, medical files, and family histories. Whitney wrote, “Of course, we do not want to make much noise about what we are doing because then we would not get the cooperation of the people.”

Whitney's conclusions: The biggest problem, he argued, was the influx of immigrants, “unwanted human debris” from abroad, degrading “good pioneer stock” through intermarriage “so that a few generations later the mixture is producing degenerates.” The town was identified as Cellarholes and a Country Slum, in his book, The Case for Sterilization, in which Whitney presents an argument for sterilization and immigration restrictions “… by preventing their reproduction, and increase the better,” urging “careful consideration of the kind of people we want to have forming the race of the future.” This ordinary horse and dog breeder was able to spread a pathological ignorance and bigotry among the most important scientists, politicians and intellectuals (all willing) of his day. His role was key in decisions which eventually led to the sterilization of thousands of those deemed “a cancer on the body politic,” (including hundreds of Vermont's most vulnerable citizens) many without their knowledge.

Enthusiastic Hatred and Eugenic Coonhunts
In the 1920s and 1930s, Whitney, American Eugenics Society founding member, Irving Fisher and Whitney's co-author, Ellsworth Huntington were the three most powerful figures in the nationally respected society. The group had thousands of members from most of America’s most prestigious universities and its ranks included some of the top thinkers of the age.

A supposed friend and fellow AES member goes so far as to call him “a darn fool,“ and states "Mr. Whitney is an enthusiast. His enthusiasm remains, rather than diminishes whether his delight be coon-hunting, a hobby, a sport, or a hatred.” Whitney writes frequently to his personal friend and member of the Vermont eugenics cohort, UVM Prof. Henry Perkins, who advises Kurn Hattin director William Mayo, Jr., Chairman of the VCCL Committee on the Handicapped whose ultimate goal and primary intent and purpose is the enactment of eugenical sterilization legislation in Vermont. In those letters to Perkins, he refers to the founder of the Vermont Eugenics Survey with the curiously affectionate pet name of Prexy. "Now, throw your hunting shoes in the car, throw Mrs. Perkins in too, and trickle along down this way and George and I will take you for a coonhunt, - yes a eugenic coonhunt. As ever, Lee"

Whatever Whitney may have lacked in knowledge or substance he made up for in ambition, serving as executive secretary and also as president of the American Eugenics Society for one year. He wrote “The Builders Of America” co-authored with Huntington, and “A Eugenics Catechism ,” two publications that served as fundamental texts of the eugenics movement throughout the early 20th century. He also wrote that “many far-sighted men and women . . . have long been working earnestly toward something very like what Hitler has now made compulsory .... And this represents but a small beginning, we are told!”

Nazi Collaboration
Whitney, who was corresponding with German scientists on state sponsored sterilization policies, received a letter from Adolf Hitler himself, congratulating him on his most recent book (The Case for Sterilization) that was particularly helpful to der Fuhrer in conspiring to rend asunder and into extinction, entire races, cultures and the very memories of multiple generations of human beings.

In January of 1934, UVM professor of Zoology, Henry Perkins who was also director and founder of the Eugenics Survey of Vermont and member of the Vermont Commission on Country Life received a letter from Leon Whitney outlining how his book, A Case for Sterilization was originally inspired and influenced by Hitler.

Secondly, the next piece of news nay be something that will help with the finances of the society. Two weeks ago I gave out an interview regarding Hitler's statement that 400,000 Germans were to be sterilized. You may have seen some of the reports. It was published in all the big New York papers, some of them giving a whole column to it. It went all over the country. Immediately I received a telephone call from Frederick Stokes & Company asking me to write a 70,000 word. book, written for the layman. I finished it two weeks from the day I got the contract. They start selling it today. The first copies will be out March, 1st, or before but the publication date isn't set for a few weeks later. Now you understand the circumstances, let me tell you I have made as strong an appeal for eugenics as I know how to make. In fact, the whole book is just that. I have tried to answer the objections to sterilization as well as present constructive ideas and have opposed compulsory sterilization as impractical. The only thing that grieves me is that I didn't have an opportunity to discuss the book with some of my friends, like yourself, who could doubtless have helped me to avoid numerous pitfalls and have added much worthwhile information.

Madison Grant, who wrote The Passing of the Great Race, and Leon Whitney were close friends and eugenics advocates. Grant also received a personal letter from Herr Schicklgruber for his eugenics primer. Grant shared this perceived honor with Whitney, who, in a glorious moment of chest swelling pride and one-upmanship, produced his own letter from the mass-murdering Nazi despot, who called the Grant's book his "bible". Whitney concluded that, following Hitler's actions, one could believe it.

Grant quotes colonial founding father, Gouverneur Morris, who in 1787 said: “Every society from a great nation down to a club has the right of declaring the conditions on which new members should be admitted.” He was intent on doing the same with his nation. His unflinching and determined effort, along with Vermont senator William Dillingham, and Vermont native, U.S. President Calvin Coolidge, to preserve the Nordic character of the United States involved three legislative steps that progressively and severely restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe: the literacy test of 1917, the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, and the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. It was an undertaking that one scholar has referred to as “America’s most ambitious program of biological engineering.”

Hitler's Mein Kampf referenced directly the recently passed US National Origins Act of 1924, the enthusiastic work of Vermonters Dillingham and Coolidge, which called for eugenic quotas.

"There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception of immigration are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States, in which an effort is made to consult reason at least partially. By refusing immigrants on principle to elements in poor health, by simply excluding certain races from naturalization."

Proselytizing Eugenics
Whitney, not one to dismiss the roles of either maniacal dictators or of malleable, innocent, young minds, also wrote for the potential future eugenicists of America audience. His book, Pigeon City, a eugenical allegory for children in which three young boys, assisted by an expert with the surname 'Grant,' decide to raise homing pigeons. The boys allow only the best American pigeons into their flock, and they wisely refuse to accept birds from Europe until the bloodlines of the immigrants can be verified. When the boys have to move out of town for a year, they entrust their birds to two girls who almost destroy the flock because, owing to their naive sentimentalism, they allow low-grade mongrels to mate with the purebreds. And so a valuable lesson is learned: when it comes to raising homing pigeons, training is not as important as good heredity, and undesirable individuals must be eliminated if the flock as a whole is to prosper.

But as Kurn Hattin founder, Christian Endeavor Society co-founder, founder of the Kurn Hattin Asylum for Inebriates Gold Cure, (The so-called Gold Cures were among the greatest and most profitable organized, franchised financial scams in US history) Harvard and Andover Seminary graduate and pastor of the wellborn Boston Brahmin congregation of Berkley Temple of Boston, Rev. Charles Albert Dickinson, D.D. stated to a group of Dartmouth Young Men's Christian Association students in June of 1893: "Humanity in the bulk is dull material."

Evangelizing Eugenics
Catholic opposition to eugenics was not just a theological ideal. The Italians, Irish and the 'swarthy' Eastern Europeans ranked abysmally low on the eugenicists’ evolutionary scale. By confronting eugenic ideology, the church was protecting its constituency in America. The difference between the opposing sides was made clear when the pope claimed that “the family is more sacred than the state,” to which Leon F. Whitney replied: “The family is not paramount. . . . Just as the agriculturalist encourages the reproduction of the most productive cow, so the state . . . must cultivate its families by seeing that the better type of individuals are preserved.” Both the farmer and the state, must have the courage to say: “Here is an outstandingly obnoxious weed. It must be destroyed.”

The Catholic Church was a particularly strong opponent of eugenic dogma. Church officials argued that God intended all children to be born, including the mentally and physically handicapped. Whitney confronted this religious objection. “What a terrible thought. … God created man in his own image,'” Whitney said. “And if God is like any of these imbeciles, who are kept chained in chairs in the institutions, who sit gibbering and grimacing, then we should all be atheists.”

Feeblemindedness and Fear
Concern about the racial degeneration of the American population was illustrated in a 1937 Fortune Magazine survey, which indicated that a majority of the American population supported sterilization. Sixty-six percent were reported as supporting compulsory sterilization of repeat criminals.

In a note sent to a receptive media in 1933, Whitney claimed that Hitler's sterilization policy demonstrated the Fuhrer's great courage and statesmanship. Though harboring doubts about the German government's ability to completely implement the law, (as history records, his doubts were unfounded) he described the measures as evidence that "sterilization and race betterment are becoming compelling ideas among all enlightened nations."

Support of the American eugenics movement for Nazi sterilization policies, or racial hygiene as it was known in Germany to protect the Volkskorper (body of the German people) from the perceived threat of racial sickness, is evident in Eugenic News, which served as the official publication of the three major U.S. eugenics societies. In 1934, it reported that in "no country of the world is eugenics more active as an applied science than in Germany," praising the 1933 Nazi sterilization law:

"One may condemn the Nazi policy generally, but specifically it remained for Germany in 1933 to lead the great nations of the world in the recognition of the biological foundations for national character. It is probable that the sterilization statutes of the several American states and the national sterilization statute of Germany will in legal history, constitute a milestone which marks the control by the most advanced nations of the world of a major aspect of controlling human reproduction, comparable in importance only with the state's legal control (Vermont's eugenic marriage law was enacted in 1915) of marriage."

Vermont 'Life Unworthy of Living'
Despite the historical precedent of the period of at least 8 state sterilization laws being found unconstitutional, Vermont enacted into law its own eugenical sterilization act on its third attempt at such efforts. The first bill in 1912 passed by both the Vermont senate and house, but was subsequently declared unconstitutional. The second attempt in 1927, which was strongly supported (as was the final and successful attempt with the help of Kurn Hattin director and Committee on the Handicapped chair, William Mayo) by the Eugenics Survey of Vermont and UVM Prof. Henry F. Perkins was passed by the senate, but not in the house. The third time was apparently the proverbial charm for Vermont's state sanctioned desire to sterilize its most marginalized and vulnerable citizens. To that end in 1931 the Eugenics News jubilantly reports on the success of Vermont's Act for Human Betterment by Sterilization:

"The Vermont statute is particularly interesting because it is the most serious effort thus far made by a state to limit sterilization to those subjects who consent to it. It is thus an extremely conservative and restricted bill and must be looked upon as experimental and educational, and as a stepping stone to wider authority by the state and a rise in standards of degeneracy which come within the scope of such a law. This bill was made possible by the researches and education of public opinion on the part of the Eugenics Survey of Vermont, of which Professor Harry F. Perkins is the Director. This preparation on the part of the state is further reflected by the message transmitted by Governor Stanley E. Wilson (former Lt. Gov. to Gov. John Weeks, President of Kurn Hattin Homes) to the legislature on January 9, 1931. In this he called particular attention to the recommendation of the supervisors for the enactment of a properly safe guarded sterilization law and added "You will do well to give this matter serious consideration." The bill as finally drawn was revised by Judge Harland B. Howe of the United States Circuit Court of Vermont and was approved by the Eugenics Survey, the Governor and the Attorney General. With this approval the bill was given a good chance to pass the legislature. During the debate in the legislature it is reported that more women were present than appeared to hear any other discussions during the current legislature (in fact, all but one of Vermont's female legislator were in attendance and voted to pass the law). It passed the House ... and Governor Wilson promptly approved the bill, which became effective June 1, 1931."

The Vermont Eugenics Survey and the Vermont Commission on Country Life, aided by Kurn Hattin Homes director, and VCCL committee chairman, W.I Mayo, publicized their findings in annual reports, which were distributed throughout Vermont and placed in the hands of wealthy philanthropists, religious leaders and public policy makers and lawmakers in Montpelier for the explicit purpose of enacting desired social legislation, aka, eugenic sterilization law. Professor Henry Perkins, director of Vermont's Eugenic Survey and board member of the VCCL expounds on these dehumanizing ends for the benefit of the apparently burdened Vermont taxpayers:

"...the rights of the individual cannot be fully safeguarded when he is being compelled to support in the midst of his community the lawless, the immoral, the degenerate, and the mentally defective.... We are beginning to know enough about human heredity, about the working of the sterilization laws, to have a little courage, and to undertake a much needed reform. To make our state safe for decent citizens, to free the taxpayer from unnecessary burden in the support of the hereditary defective, to place upon a self-respecting, self-supporting basis the largest percentage of our boys and girls --- these are the objects for which constructive social betterment measures ought to be passed." Henry F. Perkins

Sterilization law was encouraged by the taxpayers and legislators of Vermont, upon whom the financial burden of those committed to asylums weighed heavily upon. Sterilization, noted Pat Shipman, was “a twentieth-century version of transportation to Australia.” As Harry Laughlin, director of the Eugenics Record Office put it, sterilization was finally “cutting off” the supply of defectives in America who obsessed over the thought that sterilization would make it possible to “at one fell stroke cut off practically all of the cacogenic varieties of the race.” “Cutoff the useless classes,” chimed in Leon Whitney.

"It is not difficult to notice that the leaders of the American Eugenics Society, like high priests demanding ever bloodier sacrifices for their cult, were, as Mark Haller says, “possessed by a compelling urge to castrate the unfit.” It is wondrous to witness the vehemence with which the many childless patriarchs of the AES set about attacking the genitals of the 'lower breeds.' Daniel J. Kevles reports that British scientists used to refer to their colleagues in the eugenics movement as those “off-with-their-cocks boys.” And surely it is not insignificant that the most important promulgators of the faith - from the founder (Francis Galton) to the prophet (Madison Grant), to the Ayatollah (Adolf Hitler) -- were also childless."

In regard to Judge Harry Olson, honored guest speaker at the 1927 Vermont Conference on Social Work and present among the "large number who availed themselves" of the opportunity of listening to the vital program on the theme "Rural Betterment in Vermont," so well thought out by Dr. H. F. Perkins," including Kurn Hattin director William Mayo, Jr.; Whitney writes of the Superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office and his book that contained his "Model Sterilization Law," from which Vermont drew to draft its own law.

Dr. Harry H. Laughlin has been of the greatest assistance to the legislators of many States. To him they have turned for information in their endeavors to get sterilization laws enacted. Laughlin was the author of the first formal book on the subject, Eugenical Sterilization in the United States. It is to the foresight of Chief Justice Harry Olson (who established the Municipal Court in Chicago) that we owe the publication of this epoch-making book. Judge Olson had always been interested in the eugenics movement and was for some years a director of the American Eugenics Society. It was he who established the first psychiatric clinic in connection with any court in America. His backing made it possible for the work to be published, and his public addresses on the subject helped the book to succeed. The book, as well as its author, has had a profound influence. Dr. Laughlin’s correspondence with interested legislators and laymen has been voluminous.

Foundations of Holocaust
To place the preceding in contemporary context, here in this seemingly simple rote University of Vermont / Vermont Eugenics Survey meeting minutes document is a man - Leon Fradley Whitney - one of the most influential eugenicists in America, who is one degree of separation removed from Adolph Hitler, who personally and profanely influenced the dictator in his pathological ends and who was lauded and encouraged in return, sitting in a room with William Irving Mayo, the director of a Vermont residential school for marginalized children, who also happens to head the Eugenics Survey of Vermont sponsored, Committee on the Handicapped, for the VCCL and the Committee on the Human Factor, with the mandate and mission of promoting legislation for eugenical sterilization, which resulted in Vermont's 1931 An Act for Human Betterment by Sterilization!

As Emerson said, "As we are, so we associate."

Two years later Nazi Germany enacted its own sterilization law, based in part on Vermont legislation, with the declared intent to sterilize 400,000 of its citizens, including children. By 1938, Germany had invaded Austria and was on the verge of sweeping across the continent. Hitler experimented to develop methods of rapid, large scale sterilization, which involved employing drugs, x-rays, and surgery, just as in Leon Whitney’s relentless cascade of eugenics publications, radio broadcasts, media interviews, and Vermont Eugenics Survey speeches, years before Nazi Germany actually put them into practice. And practice they did. Beginning in the Fall of 1939, over 200,000 minderwertig (inferior or useless, low-class) were to be exterminated in the Aktion T-4 euthanasia program alone. The segregation and sterilization advocated by Whitney, Judge Olson, Professor Henry Perkins, the Eugenics Survey of Vermont and the executive director of Kurn Hattin Homes for Children and the school's president, Governor John Weeks and Vice-President, Guy Bailey President of UVM in America had become terrifying and dehumanizing reality in Europe.