Vermont's Eugenics Program
Near Stowe, Vermont
Vermont's reputation as a progressive state, the first to ban slavery, the first to grant universal male suffrage, the first to recognize civil unions, is not wrong. It is also incomplete. Between nineteen twenty-five and nineteen thirty-six, the University of Vermont operated the Eugenics Survey of Vermont, a state-funded research and policy program that identified Vermonters classified as genetically unfit and worked to reduce their reproduction and social influence.
The program was directed by Henry F. Perkins, a zoology professor at the university, who believed that heredity determined social outcomes and that targeted intervention could improve the state's genetic stock. The survey documented rural families, Franco-American communities, and Abenaki people with the explicit goal of identifying what Perkins called degenerate lineages. The surveys were presented as scientific research. They were used to support institutional commitments, sterilization recommendations, and restrictions on marriage.
Vermont passed a sterilization law in nineteen thirty-one, described in the legislation as a provision for human betterment by voluntary sterilization. Historians and archivists who have examined the records note that the procedures performed under its authority were not always voluntary in any meaningful sense. The records are incomplete. At least two hundred fifty sterilizations are verified in the documents that survive. The actual number is believed to be higher.
The program ended in nineteen thirty-six. It was not publicly repudiated at the time. The history was largely suppressed, known primarily to archivists, until scholars began recovering it in the nineteen nineties. The most thorough account, Nancy Gallagher's Breeding Better Vermonters, published by the University Press of New England in nineteen ninety-nine, drew on university archives to document what had been done in Vermont's name.
The state house in Montpelier, with its gold dome, is where Vermont's progressive tradition is most formally displayed. It is also the appropriate place to understand that progressive tradition requires knowing what it left out.
