by Adam Cohen
The hospital in Williamsburg: Dorr, Segregation’s Science, 120.
Central State Hospital for Negroes: Ibid., 120–21; Houseman, “Department History: 1766 to 1968,” 7.
Epilepsy was little understood: Thomas Stephen Szasz, Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society’s Unwanted (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998), 49.
Across the nation: Ibid., 47–51.
Without specialized facilities: W. I. Prichard, “History—Lynchburg Training School and Hospital,” Mental Health in Virginia, 11 (Summer 1960): 41.
Colonies, with their “vocations”: Szasz, Cruel Compassion, 50.
“the myth of the dangerous epileptic”: Ibid., 49.
There was a long tradition: Ibid., 56.
There was interest: Houseman, “Department History: 1766 to 1968,” 23.
A wealthy resident of Amherst County: Ibid.; Report of the Attorney General to the Governor of Virginia (Richmond, VA: Division of Purchase and Printing, 1910), 26; Prichard, “History—Lynchburg Training School and Hospital,” 40.
The legislature passed a bill: Houseman, “Department History: 1766 to 1968,” 23; Western State Hospital v. General Board, 112 Va. 230, 232 (Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia, 1911); Prichard, “History—Lynchburg Training School and Hospital,” 41; First Report of Virginia State Epileptic Colony at Lynchburg, Virginia, from February 20, 1906 to September 30, 1909, in Annual Reports of Officers, Boards, and Institutions of the Commonwealth of Virginia for the Year Ending September 30, 1909 (Richmond: Davis Bottom, Superintendent of Public Printing, 1909), 67.
The State Hospital Board: Prichard, “History—Lynchburg Training School and Hospital,” 42.
The donated land: Western State Hospital, 112 Va. 230, 232; First Report of Virginia State Epileptic Colony at Lynchburg, Virginia, 69.
The State Hospital Board and the legislature: Id. at 235; Houseman, “Department History: 1766 to 1968,” 23; State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded Second Biennial Report, 1922–1923, 1–5.
On April 8, 1910: Prichard, “History—Lynchburg Training School and Hospital,” 42, 46.
As a medical doctor: Ibid., 46; “Tribute to Albert Sidney Priddy”; Veselik, Superintendents and Directors, 4.
He had to build: Prichard, “History—Lynchburg Training School and Hospital,” 42, 46.
There was considerable room: State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded: Second Biennial Report, 5, 16–17; Bruce Roberts and Elizabeth Kedash, Plantation Homes of the James River (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 1.
In the colony’s early days: Prichard, “History—Lynchburg Training School and Hospital,” 46.
The first epileptic patients: Ibid., 42.
The first wave: Ibid.
Before arriving at the colony: Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 14.
The colony was necessarily “custodial”: W. I. Prichard, “History—Lynchburg Training School and Hospital, Pt. II” Mental Health in Virginia 11 (Autumn 1960), 29.
If the colony could not offer cures: Ibid., 41.
For the more spiritually inclined: State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded: Second Biennial Report, 11–15.
In keeping with the colony model: Ibid., 16–17.
He took satisfaction: Ibid., 9.
If relatives insisted: Ibid., 5.
After initially admitting: Lombardo, Three Generations, 15.
A few years earlier: “Chap. 48 of Acts 1906—An Act to Establish an Epileptic Colony on Land of the Western State Hospital, in Amherst County,” in Pollard’s Code Biennial, 1908 (Richmond, VA: E. Waddey, 1908), 434.
In a 1914 annual report: Steven Noll, Feeble-Minded in Our Midst (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 115.
The women “morons”: A. S. Priddy, Biennial Report of the State Epileptic Colony (Lynchburg, VA: State Epileptic Colony, 1923), cited in Smith and Nelson, Sterilization of Carrine Buck, 32.
Several new buildings: Prichard, “History—Lynchburg Training School and Hospital,” 44.
In recognition of its wider mission: Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Mental Health/Mental Retardation, Central Virginia Training Center, box 7, Central Virginia Training Center Papers; Prichard, “History—Lynchburg Training School and Hospital,” 46.
By 1925 more than two-thirds: Prichard, “History—Lynchburg Training School and Hospital, Pt. II,” 28.
He insisted on housing: Ibid.
“Pitiful appeals in behalf”: State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded: Second Biennial Report, 11.
Unlike Virginia: David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 1971), 130.
States began to establish: Alfred A. Baumeister, “Mental Retardation: Confusing Sentiment with Science,” in What Is Mental Retardation?: Ideas for an Evolving Disability in the 21st Century, ed. Harvey N. Switzky and Stephen Greenspan (Washington, DC: American Association on Mental Retardation, 2006), 101; David Wright, Downs: The History of a Disability (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 69.
This “cult of asylum”: John M. Herrick and Paul H. Stuart, eds., Encyclopedia of Social Welfare History in North America (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2005), 234; Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum, 130.
It was a sign: Baumeister,” Mental Retardation,” 101; Wright, Downs, 69–70.
These institutions: Donna R. Kemp, Mental Health in America: A Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2007), 5.
“The power of population”: Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London: J. Johnson, in St. Paul’s Church-Yard, 1803), 350; Elof Axel Carlson, The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2001), 102–3.
“survival of the fittest”: Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Biology vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate, 1867) 53; Frederick Burkhardt et al., eds., The Correspondence of Charles Darwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 14:230.
“[L]ife has reached”: Herbert Spencer, Social Statics; Or the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of them Developed (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1892), 303; Eric Foner, introduction to Social Darwinism in American Thought, by Richard Hofstadter (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), xiv; Herbert Spencer, The Coming Slavery and Other Essays (New York: The Humboldt Publishing Company, 1888), 2.
Spencer believed this violent sorting out: Spencer, Social Statics, 415–16; Foner, introduction to Social Darwinism, xiv; Herbert Spencer, Political Writings, ed. John Offer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 127.
process of natural selection: Foner, introduction to Social Darwinism in American Thought, xiv; Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick, introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, ed. Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 5.
Galton concluded: Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (London: Macmillan, 1999), 1.
“the subject in a statistical manner”: Ibid., vi.
Derived from the Greek: Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (New York: Macmillan, 1883), 24–25n.
Galton called on humanity: Ibid.
“what Nature does blindly”: Edward J. Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 19.
Having invented eugenics: Karl Pearson, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, vol. 3, pt. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), 221.
Galton was convinced that eugenics: Ibid., 274.
In his writings, Galton described: Ibid., 351.
Galton saw a value: Kathy Wilson Peacock, Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering (New York: Infobas
e Publishing, 2010) 37.
“some other less drastic yet adequate measure”: Richard Lynn, Eugenics: A Reassessment (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001) 12; Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty, 27; Pearson, Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, 3:349.
“our democracy will ultimately refuse consent”: Lynn, Eugenics: A Reassessment, 12.
Jane Hume Clapperton: Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 67.
Many eugenicists and Tory politicians: Arthur Allen, Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 56.
Anyone who had ever: Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: D. Appleton, 1872), 162.
“the helpless”: Ibid.
Darwin believed: Ibid.
The new thinking: Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 15–37; Dorr, Segregation’s Science, 26–33.
“every serious thinker felt obligated”: Foner, introduction to Social Darwinism, xiv.
The book that set this field: Joseph F. Spillane and David Wolcott, A History of Modern American Criminal Justice (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2013), 52; The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity;, also Further Studies of Criminals (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1877).
He looked back: Carlson, The Unfit, 168–72; Larson, Sex, Race, and Science, 19; Francis T. Cullen and Pamela Wilcox, eds., Encyclopedia of Criminological Theory (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2010), 1:274–77.
Dugdale concluded: Carlson, The Unfit, 168–72; James W. Trent, Inventing the Feebleminded: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 70–71.
To the eugenicists: Carlson, The Unfit, 168–72.
When the book was republished: Ibid.; Anthony Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 26.
Oscar McCulloch, a minister: Nathaniel Deutsch, Inventing America’s “Worst” Family: Eugenics, Islam, and the Fall and Rise of the Tribe of Ishmael (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 26–28; Encyclopedia of Criminological Theory 1:276.
In The Tribe of Ishmael: Deutsch, Inventing America’s “Worst” Family, 49–51.
In his analysis: Oscar McCulloch, The Tribe of Ishmael: A Study in Social Degradation (Indianapolis: Charity Organization Society, 1891).
He described the harsh conditions: Brent Ruswick, Almost Worthy: The Poor, Paupers, and the Science of Charity in America, 1877–1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 46–47.
More than environment: McCulloch, Tribe of Ishmael, 3, 8.
His theories revolutionized: Carlson, The Unfit, 130–37.
Before Mendel: Rita Mary King, Biology Made Simple (New York: Broadway Books, 2003), 42.
Mendel’s work provided: Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 42.
Eugenics argued: Garland E. Allen, “The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, 1910–1940: An Essay in Institutional History,” Osiris 2 (1986): 226.
The eugenicists argued: Carol Isaacson Barash, Just Genes: The Ethics of Genetic Technologies (New York: Praeger, 2008), 4.
In the eugenicists’ view: Michael Willrich, “The Two Percent Solution: Eugenic Jurisprudence and the Socialization of American Law, 1900–1930,” Law and History Review (Spring 1998), 64.
The eugenicists’ plan: Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 145–46.
Thomas Hunt Morgan: Diane Paul and Hamish Spencer, “Did Eugenics Rest on an Elementary Mistake?,” 105
Supporters of eugenics had little interest: Barash, Just Genes, 4.
Bleecker Van Wagenen: Stefan Kuhl, For the Betterment of the Race: The Rise and Fall of the International Movement for Eugenics and Racial Hygiene (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 21; Harry Bruinius, Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 171.
Some of the most urgent warnings: Wehmeyer, Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology and Disability, 5.
In 1912 Goddard published: Henry Herbert Goddard, The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness (New York: Macmillan, 1912).
In The Kallikak Family: Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 78; Goddard, Kallikak Family, 16.
Kallikak produced two lines: Goddard, Kallikak Family, viii, 18, 50.
The line from Kallikak’s wife: Ibid., 18–19, 30; Philip R. Reilly, The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 21.
Goddard presented the Kallikaks: Goddard, Kallikak Family, 104, 116.
What was at stake: Henry Herbert Goddard, Feeble-Mindedness: Its Causes and Consequences (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 4–9, 17, 588–90.
In his 1917 essay: Lewis Terman, “Feeble-Minded Children in the Public Schools of California: The Menace of Feeble-Mindedness,” School and Society 5 (Feb. 10, 1917): 161-65.
Samuel J. Holmes: Samuel J. Holmes, The Trend of the Race: A Study of Present Tendencies in the Biological Development of Civilized Mankind (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921), 131, 382, 383.
A study prepared: Lewis M. Terman, “Feeble Minded Children in the Schools,” in Report of the 1915 Legislature Committee on Mental Deficiency and the Proposed Institution for the Care of Feeble-minded and Epileptic Persons, ed. Fred C. Nelles (Whittier, CA: Whittier State School Department of Printing, 1917), xiv.
The same year: Board of Charities and Corrections, Mental Defectives in Virginia (Richmond: Davis Bottom, Superintendent, Public Printing, 1915), 16.
Scientific American warned: Robert DeC. Ward, “Our Immigration Laws from the Viewpoint of National Eugenics,” Scientific American, May 4, 1912, 287.
An article the following year: John M. Connolly, “The Foundation Law of the Science of Heredity,” Life and Health: The National Health Magazine 28, no.5, 198 (May 1913), 235.
“The Village of a Thousand Souls”: Ben Harris, “Arnold Gesell’s Progressive Vision: Child Hygiene, Socialism and Eugenics,” History of Psychology 14, no. 3, 311 (2011) 311–12; Ron Seely, “‘The Village of a Thousand Souls,’ Sheds Light on Eugenics,” Winona Daily News, August 28, 2011.
As rural residents fled: Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (Knopf Doubleday, 2011), 7.
At the same time: John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 147.
Native-born, white, middle-class, Protestant Americans: Hofstadter, Age of Reform, 144.
These reform campaigns: John Ehrenreich, The Altruistic Imagination: A History of Social Work and Social Policy in the United States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 28.
“the diseased, the deficient”: Hofstadter, Social Darwinism, 162.
The eugenicists matched: Hofstadter, Age of Reform, 5.
Both the leaders: Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 64.
Hofstadter observed: Hofstadter, Age of Reform, 148.
So it was with eugenics: Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 64; Marcus Graser, “A ‘Jeffersonian Skepticism of Urban Democracy’? The Educated Middle Class and the Problem of Political Power in Chicago, 1880–1940,” in Who Ran the Cities? City Elites and Urban Power Structures in Europe and North America, 1750–1940, ed. Ralf Roth and Robert Beachy (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 215.
“practical deterrent”: Mark A. Largent, Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 64–65.
“We prolong the lives”: G. Hudson Makuen, “Some Measures for the Prevention of Crime, Pauperism, and Mental Deficiency,” American Academy of Medicine (August 1900): 1–2.
The Very Reverend Walter Taylor Sumner: Christine Rosen, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 53.
Other religious leaders: Amy Laura Hall, Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008), 254.
Women were active: Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 64.
Many influential feminists: Wilma Pearl Mankiller et al., eds., The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999), 178; Angela Franks, Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), 10–17.
Sanger lectured: Jonathan Peter Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2009), 235. At least one Sanger biographer contends that the speech may have been inaccurately reported, or at the least has been misinterpreted; see Ellen Chesler, Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), 614n21.
Edward J. Larson: Larson, Sex, Race, and Science, 75.
Eugenics found support: Mary Beth Norton, Carol Sheriff, David W. Blight, and Howard Chudacoff, A People and a Nation: A History of the United States, vol. 2, Since 1865 (Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2011), 583; Cynthia Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 302.
Theodore Roosevelt: Theodore Roosevelt, “Twisted Eugenics,” Outlook, Jan. 3, 1914, 30–34, 32; Reilly, Surgical Solution, 43. American radicals were not great believers in eugenics, in part because of its anti-immigrant orientation. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics 106.
Hereditary Genius: Galton, Hereditary Genius, 338–39, 342; Richard S. Levy, ed., Anti-Semitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 1:212.