Defectiveness and the Ideal Citizen: Borders, Exclusion, and Social Control in Vermont's Eugenics Movement

In the 1920s, in response to social transformations of the late 19th century, Vermont professionals developed a eugenics movement to correct perceived degeneration of the state’s population. Largely driven by nostalgia for... [ view full abstract ]

In the 1920s, in response to social transformations of the late 19^th century, Vermont professionals developed a eugenics movement to correct perceived degeneration of the state’s population. Largely driven by nostalgia for an imagined past identity, eugenicists, reformers, and community leaders (including Middlebury College’s former president Paul Moody) worked to extend their reach into future generations of Vermonters through reproductive, institutional, and migration control. Through examination of primary sources from and related to the Eugenics Survey of Vermont (1925—1936), this project seeks to understand the criteria by which the eugenicists judged Vermonters as having “good” or “bad” heredity, and to identify the purposes served by those judgments. I draw on Disabilities Studies scholarship to argue that, leveraging ableism and white supremacy to legitimize their work, the Vermont eugenicists categorized certain body-minds as “defective” in order to articulate the parameters of ideal citizenship and justify exclusive access to the powers, rights and resources of citizenship. In their expressions of particular concern for identifying and punishing communities on the borders of ideal citizenship, Henry Perkins and his contemporaries revealed potent anxieties about the perceived threat to the maintenance of settler colonial Vermont’s legacy of exclusion.