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"The menace of feeble-mindedness is now generally recognized. Especially dangerous is the moron (mental age 7-12 years.) whose mental taint may entail moral obtuseness or obliquity. . . |
Asa R. Gifford, |
"There is a problem of feeblemindedness in this state that is far more serious than the average citizen cares to admit. Every social worker in the state knows this and also knows that the problem is too big for social agencies to cope with." |
Lillian Ainsworth, |
Despite the Eugenics Survey's intrusion of hereditary causes and eugenic solutions into discussions of human betterment in Vermont, leaders of the Vermont Conference of Social Work more often cast the problem of so-called "degenerate families" in terms of social, medical, and educational deprivations of the poor. Yet eugenic objectives are often implicit in their social reforms. The experience of World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II provided a shifting framework for the advancement of social legislation that would expand surveillance of the poor through a centralized authority to collect, interpret, and use family histories to inform social case work and public policy. For twenty-five years, at least, a central plank in the VCSW social legislation platform was to develop a "census of the feebleminded" in Vermont.
Federal funding from New Deal programs of 1935 enabled Vermont to establish welfare districts, staffed with professional social workers to administer Aid to Dependent Children and Child Welfare Services, to organize travelling psychiatric clinics, and to expand the facilites at Brandon for care and training of the "feebleminded." In 1941, the state legislature authorized a Board of Control of Mentally Defective Persons to identify, register, and supervise mentally deficient Vermonters. Lillian Ainsworth's 1940 study, "Vermont's Feeble-minded Problem" provided the justification for this board.
As family case workers in the Department of Public Welfare began work on a census of "mental defectives" in Vermont, they encountered the impact of a generation of eugenics education and family interventions in Vermont communities. Their lengthy, yet informative, unpublished manuscript, "What Mental Deficiency Means to the State of Vermont," shows a 1940s reconception of the "degenerate family." Despite their derisive attack on the Eugenics Survey's profiles of degenerate families, on the obsolete theories that informed them, and on the resulting "dispossession" of poor families by their communities, the DPW social workers remained commited to such "agencies of social control" as identification and supervision of familes in poverty, with a view to reducing the size and numbers of families receiving public assistance.
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