This book describes the origin and progress of the Vermont eugenic survey conducted by Professor Harry F. Perkins between 1925-36. What is particularly interesting for students of eugenics was that, whereas most eugenics movements arose as a response to the problems of urbanisation, Vermont was predominantly a rural state with a declining population and net emigration out of the state. It was also one of the more racially homogenous states in the American north east with a high proportion of Vermonters born within the state. There were only two sizeable ethnic groups, those of French Canadian origin and the native Americans, both long standing Vermonters.

Perkins was born and bred in the state and, in fact, succeeded to his father’s chair in zoology at the University of Vermont. He got his biological education at John Hopkins where T.H. Morgan was also a pupil. The author, perhaps unkindly, points out that, in spite of the distinguished company with whom he studied at John Hopkins, Perkins tended to follow rather than initiate trends. He did no significant biological research and Mendelian genetics appeared in his curriculum only in 1921.

The presiding passion governing his work, Gallagher argues, was his sense of crisis about Vermont and the place within it of the old Vermonter Yankee aristocracy of which he was a representative. Vermont was changing, threatened by the collapse of the small self-sufficient family farm and its replacement by larger commercially organized agriculture. There was a flight from the land, a decline of many small towns and drift to larger urban areas or out of the state altogether. Tourism was the chief area of economic expansion and, ironically, this expansion was largely due to the marketing of an image of ‘old Vermont’ of rural simplicity and small family farms just at the very moment of its disappearance.

Given the widespread unease throughout the community about Vermont’s economic and social decline, eugenics was offered by Perkins as, if not the solution, part of the solution. The eugenic survey he initiated and supervised had several strands; a study of pedigrees of ‘degenerate’ families, a survey of mental deficiency in Vermont’s schools and public institutions, and finally and most significantly an examination of the dysgenic and eugenic aspects of rural life. The latter was conducted, under Perkins’s general supervision, by Elin Anderson a rather talented graduate of the New York School of Social Work. She went on to survey Vermont’s ethnic and immigrant communities, published in 1937 by Harvard under the title of We Americans.

Gallagher’s book is a story of the limitations upon eugenic intervention in Vermont’s social and political life. She describes the impact of these limitations at a national level during the period from 1931-4 when Perkins was the vice president of the troubled American Eugenics Society. But they were brought home first and most forcibly through his work in Vermont. First his pedigree family studies, besides the usual faults which historians of eugenics have pointed out in these investigations, ran into difficulties with the community at large when in the course of amassing several thousand family networks he discovered that many of’ the ‘better’ Vermonter families had links to the ‘social problem groups’ he had identified. More to the point, most educated Vermonters were trying to recreate a sense of community in rural Vermont not shatter it by finger pointing. Under mounting disapproval Perkins quietly dropped and, in some cases, repudiated aspects of these studies by the late 1920s.

Next, although Vermont passed a voluntary sterilization law in 1931, Perkins’s abrasive and incautious advocacy of sterilization in 1927-8 alienated Vermont’s political and cultural community. French Canadians retreated behind the protection of the Roman Catholic Church and some families hired lawyers. Finally no significant difference was discovered in the incidence of mental deficiency among the Vermont school population from the rest of America or any group within Vermont from another. Given the rather aggressive assertions about ethnicity and IQ of some in the American Eugenics Society and his correspondents at Cold Spring Harbor at this time, Perkins did not broadcast this result.

By the late 1920s, Perkins had begun to adjust his eugenic goals in such a way as to integrate his work better with the demands from the movement to revive Vermont’s rural life. Thus the eugenic section of Rural Vermont: A Program for the Future in 1931 simply exhorted Vermonters to exercise judgment and discretion in bearing children and to replace existing stocks by increasing family size, to cultivate an interest in genealogy and eugenic health and to help stem the rural exodus financially and socially. In fact, in Anderson’s study of dysgenic and eugenic towns in Vermont, eugenic is defined as able to sustain a thriving population and dysgenic is applied to declining and under resourced local communities. The road to eugenic health was set out as increasing investment in an area, improving the environment, reviving community spirit and community integration – for example across the Yankee and French Canadian divide. We Americans was also written in that spirit.

Many of the problem families identified by Perkins in his first foray into eugenics in Vermont were, as contemporary opinion pointed out, not the cause but the symptom of wider problems. These families were often the old Vermont displaced, dislocated and in transit to the urban areas of the state or out of the state altogether. Gallagher argues that Perkins got the point about this. Not to have done so would have isolated him from opinion in Vermont and marginalized his work.

Gallagher points out that this eugenic episode, relatively unknown outside Vermont, has received a bad press within the state. She refutes many of the wilder exaggerations and myths around Perkins and the survey and is clear upon the fallacies of guilt by association. Perkins had a low opinion of French Canadians and Indians but he did not advocate their systematic persecution or extinction. He drew back from association with the German ‘experiment’ in 1933. He modified his language and, in his employment and patronage of Anderson, showed himself to be open to new ideas and more sophisticated approaches to social problems. What he was guilty of was of sometimes confusing the prejudices of his class with scientific truths.

Greta Jones