If you have the occasion to travel south on Route 7 from UVM's campus in Burlington, you will come to the small town of Brandon, Vermont, half way between Middlebury and Rutland. Just north of the town, if you look to the right at the top of a small hill rising from the pasture that borders the road, you will see through the trees the remaining buildings of the old Brandon Training school. Founded in 1912 as the Brandon School of the Feebleminded, before changing its name in 1929, the school housed the "poor and disabled" until finally closing its doors in 1993. Now on its once spacious grounds developers are busy constructing homes and apartments. What you may not know as you look upon the facades of the buildings nestled benignly in their bucolic setting, is what took place inside during the early to middle years of the 20th century.
Now, as the result of an ambitious research project undertaken by UVM Honors College students in Professor Lutz Kaelber's HCOL 195F fall 2008 sophomore seminar, "Disability As Deviance," we learn that more went on there than just the "care and training of feebleminded children aged 5-21 years," as stated in the training school's charter. From the extensive findings posted on the project web site constructed by the students in the class http://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/, we discover instead that places like Brandon assumed an important role in the American eugenics movement. With the passage of compulsory sterilization laws adopted by many states in the early decades of the 20th century, more than 60,000 sterilizations of 'disabled' individuals were carried out in institutional settings similar to Brandon across the nation, In Vermont alone, according to the web site, we find out that there were 253 sterilizations performed, making it the 25th highest state in the nation, two thirds of which were performed on women, and 80% of whom were deemed 'mentally deficient.'
"I wanted my students to do actual research, engage in scholarship, and contribute to the existing body of knowledge," Professor Kaelber said, explaining the origin of the project. Given that his research materials on Nazi 'Euthanasia' crimes are mostly in German, he "thought his students might be interested in a related topic, eugenics." He guessed rightly, he added, when "most told me that they had never heard about the historical events that happened." The eugenics project, he went on to say, was one that "required synthesizing a lot of information and presenting it in a way that was novel and informative." It was pretty much "touch and go for the entire semester," he said, explaining how the task to cover all 50 states proved Herculean once the students unexpectedly gained access to some unpublished material they came across. Undaunted by the abundance of material they had uncovered, the students pressed on. At the same time, Professor Kaelber acknowledged, he on occasion had to push them to "revisit issues, clarify accounts, and improve reports - to make the outcome - the website, based on their write-ups - as informative and high-quality as it could be."
Professor Kaelber's encouragement evidently had its intended effect. In the words of one student in the class, Chris Morriss, a Biology major with a Spanish minor, "Disability as Deviance" was a class that I will definitely remember as one of the most interesting of my UVM career." Speaking of the work of the class, Chris continued, "The scope of our... [class]...subject was very wide and demanding, but in the end it was highly rewarding, and I have come out of the class a wiser person." The project, Chris explained, "was for each student to research the eugenics movements in several states, so that with the twenty or so students in the class we were able to cover the entire United States." He personally researched Ohio, Missouri, and Indiana, the last he said was the first state to have sterilizations for the disabled. Summing up the course, Chris said it presented "a wide variety of topics and controversies, some of which are as alive today as they were a century ago. As a result, we were able to get to the heart of some of the hardest cases involving human liberty, rights, and persecution. Looking at the history of such subjects was thus an incredible experience," he concluded, "as it shows our country and our concept of rights in a very different light, one that would make most people (today) pretty uncomfortable."
Another student, Elizabeth Salsgiver, a Biological Science major with a minor in Animal Sciences, took the course she said "to break up the science and math classes that inundated her schedule." She welcomed the chance "to complete novel research on a topic with scattered data and primary resources," which she said, "was both challenging and hugely rewarding." For her, "The final project was particularly satisfying as it felt like I was giving voice to a group that had been largely unheard." Elizabeth said she researched eugenic sterilization in Indiana (as did Chris), as well as North and South Dakota. In both the Dakota's, she explained, the rural poor constituted the vast majority of the sterilization victims, with most of them women. In both states, she went on, Native Americans were overrepresented in the group, particularly after the passage of the Snyder Act in 1921, which gave quarter-blooded, or more, Indians free health care. What shocked her from her research was "the lack of commemoration for the sterilization victims." Continuing, she said, "Hospitals where hundreds of people were sterilized have neglected to mention the victims in their histories or even to leave a marker to tell people what occurred. I was also shocked that eugenic sterilizations are largely untaught in the United States school system, yet thousands of people were affected and many of the underpinnings of the Holocaust can be traced back to methods used in the United States."
Another student, Sarah Gendreau, an early childhood Education major, echoed Elizabeth's feelings. "The part that disgusted me most was how our methods and ideas of sterilization motivated the Nazis to sterilize and later to 'euthanize' [i.e., murder] the people they similarly deemed 'feeble-minded.' "
From both the testimony of his students and the thoroughly researched descriptions that appear on the web site, Professor Kaelber needs no more evidence to demonstrate that his goal for the course has been reached. "I hope students learned to be scholars," he said, "to pursue an idea and address a topic by carefully going through the materials, working with primary data, and recognizing when and how a research strategy has to be changed." Praising his students efforts on the project, he said, "Many of them have become arguably top experts on a particular state, as indicated by their state write-ups, a level I did not know they would be able to reach,but they did.and finally, "I wanted the students to recognize that the project was about an important historical event that affected some people in horrendous ways, and I tried to make sure that the personal side of the victims would not be forgotten."
Will you teach the course again? "I had not planned to teach the course again," he said, "because I thought the outcome of the project could not be duplicated. However, I will likely teach it again, as some tasks remain. These include trying to gain access to state newspaper archives and finding institutional histories of main 'feeder institutions' for sterilizations." If Professor Kaelber wants a reason to offer the course again, he need only heed the words of Elizabeth Salsgiver. "I hope this class will continue to find a home at UVM so other students can be enlightened and inspired to question our nation's past."
Last modified March 31 2009 01:55 PM
