Not to overstate the case, but this is one of the most important Vermont history books ever written. Vermont for the Vermonters by Mercedes de Guardiola tells a sweeping tale of eugenics in our state, and makes it clear that the story is much longer and deeper than we’d like to think. She also reveals that much of the story has yet to be told and may never be, thanks to poor record keeping and lax oversight. (The newly established Truth and Reconciliation Commission has a hell of a job on its hands.)

The back cover blurb refers to eugenics as “one of Vermont’s darkest chapters.” That’s a massive undersell of the book. We might like to think of it as a single chapter at some remove from the rest of our history, but it’s more like the dark underbelly of Vermont’s character, always lurking about and always influencing our politics and policies.

Two big takeaways from the book. One, we have always “othered” the less fortunate, portraying them as somehow alien to solid, hardworking “real Vermonters.” Two, we have a long and horrible history of failing the people we’ve chosen to institutionalize. Both points were true long before Gov. John Mead brought eugenics into the center of Vermont politics or Henry Perkins became head of the Eugenics Survey, and both still resonate in the present day. (On the former, see our reaction to homelessness and substance use. On the second, see Joe Sexton’s exposé of abuses at the laughably named and now mercifully defunct Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation Facility.)

De Guardiola chronicles our very own persistent version of MAGA: a yearning for a purer time when the “old stock” held sway, when true Vermonters worked the fields and forged a special society. That golden age had been lost, so the story goes, through a combination of the superior types moving away and inferior strains moving in or reproducing at unacceptably high rates.

This dismay over a lost golden age was born of local and state governments’ struggles to deal with the poor, the sick, the elderly, the “feeble-minded” who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) pull their own weight. This population seemed always to be growing, perhaps because the definitions were, ahem, highly flexible. De Guardiola:

Recognized signs [of feeble-mindedness] included out-of-wedlock pregnancy, homosexuality, menial jobs, poor or middling performance in school, physical disability, speech impediments, functional illiteracy, intellectual disability, rebellious behavior, allegations of sexual promiscuity or perverseness, poor moral judgment, laziness, simple-mindedness, inarticulateness, shyness, and poor mental health.

That covers an awful lot of ground. No thought was given to the kinds of systemic issues that might create various kinds of “feeble-minded” folk, such as lack of economic opportunity, racism, classism, misogyny, domestic violence, or child abuse.

Still, no reason to despair. The Vermont Commission on Country Life reported that “The old stock is still here, in greater proportion than any other commonwealth of the north.” All we had to do was encourage the “old stock” and discourage the rest.

And that’s where eugenics came in. It saw pure heredity as the root cause of all human ills. Eugenicists feasted on Vermonters’ desire to see themselves as innately superior by blaming social ills on the inbred defects in others. This reasoning was irresistible to Vermont’s ruling class, the prosperous white men who looked down on the rabble from their mansions and ivory towers.

We often think of eugenics as forced sterilization. That was only part of the program. The entire effort included identifying and tracking the “feeble-minded,” segregating them from polite society, and preventing them from reproducing by any means at hand. Thus, they believed, the faulty strains of humanity would be painlessly bred out of existence, returning the “old stock” to their rightful place and restoring Vermont’s golden age. Many of the principles of eugenics were routinely enforced well before the movement came to prominence, and many of them undergird our beliefs and stereotypes to this very day.

Eugenics was presented in the language of science, but de Guardiola shows that in scientific terms it was pure junk. Eugenicists and their allies started with a preconceived idea, and cherrypicked or fabricated data that supported their cause. The findings of Vermont’s Eugenics Survey and other eugenical organizations proved to be worthless. In fact, a study published in 1929 by the National Committee on Mental Hygeine dismayed Eugenics Survey leader Henry Perkins because it found “no larger proportion of subnormal children [than in] various other states” and “the incidence of subnormality was almost exactly the same among families of foreign origin and amongst those of native stock.”

Which didn’t stop Perkins from going full speed ahead. Nor did it prevent the Vermont Legislature from legalizing eugenical sterilization two years later.

De Guardiola also has bad news for those who’d like to believe it all ended when the Eugenics Survey shut down in 1936. The stench of Nazism made eugenics less acceptable in polite society, but while eugenical policies were mitigated and clothed in more acceptable language, de Guardiola writes that “Vermont’s eugenicists embedded eugenics into institutions, policies, and programs… which extended well beyond the 1931 sterilization law.”

The human toll of eugenics in Vermont has yet to be fully counted and, thanks to lousy recordkeeping and a near-complete lack of oversight or review, will never be fully known. Many Vermonters were institutionalized from childhood until they were sterilized or safely past their child-bearing years. Many sterilizations were done off the books or under cover of other medical procedures. Women were told they had undergone appendectomies or some such, only to discover years later that they couldn’t bear children. Under the 1931 law, a patient or guardian had to consent to sterilization, but doctors were skilled at obtaining consent. De Guardiola could find not a single case where a patient objected and was not sterilized.

Near the end of her book, de Guardiola writes that “public understanding of the movement is lacking” because it’s omitted or only briefly covered in primary or secondary education. It’s often presented as the work of isolated individuals like Perkins, not the product of powerful social and political forces. As a result, she writes, “Notable inaccuracies about the state eugenics movement have been and continue to be reported in the press and scholarly works, which feeds into a cycle of repeated misinformation.”

Vermont for the Vermonters clocks in at a spare 177 pages. There’s a hell of a lot of vital information packed into her slim volume. I hope the book finds a broad readership and a place in educational curricula, because it goes a long way toward exposing, not a dark chapter, but the ideological currents that led us to commit ghastly offenses against our own neighbors and that still influence our beliefs, stereotypes, and even policy discussions to this very day.