“In Vermont????” This is the response I hear when I mention recently reading Yvonne Daley’s Going Up Country (2011 New England University Press). The book details the movement of many fringe groups to Vermont in the 1960s and 70s. She also mentions the state once embraced eugenics.
Vermont had a eugenics program in the mid 20th century. According to the law, to legally sterilize “idiots, imbeciles, feeble‐minded or insane persons likely to procreate.” Yes, I said Vermont!
The Green Mountain State famous for skiing, maple syrup, cheese and some of the most cutting-edge politics in the nation was one of the last of 29 states to initiate its eugenics program in 1931. The movement to produce it, however, extended back over twenty years.
The popular eugenics movement
Eugenics was a powerful and popular movement in the United States and Europe in early part of the twentieth century. Many political and cultural leaders supported the sterilization or even the extermination of those they considered unfit. Their greatest concern was something called dysgenics in which they feared negative biological traits could be passed down through generations and have an overall negative impact on a population.
George Bernard Shaw promoted not only sterilization but also the blatant extermination of those…
