In 1923 Vermont state government was reorganized to consolidate its administrative functions. The Department of Public Welfare, headed by William H. Dyer, was created to oversee the administration of state institutions, prisons, and reformatories and to assume the responsibilities of the Board of Charities and Probation (created in 1918) to locate and supervise families of dependent and delinquent children.
Commissioner Dyer took an active role in promoting eugenics in Vermont. He supported the Eugenics Survey's research on families and inmates of institutions and served as a consultant for the Subcommittee on the Care of the Handicapped of the Vermont Commission on Country Life. He testified before the Joint House and Senate Public Health Committee on behalf of the sterilization law. In February, 1931, while the sterilization bill was debated in the legislature, the Eugenics Survey was planning its next project: an educational campaign to promote eugenics education in Vermont through the Country Life Commission's report, Rural Vermont: A Program for the Future. Dyer endorsed the idea and congratulated Perkins on all his efforts:
"I think that the work of the Eugenics Survey before many years will be one of the bright spots in the survey history of the State of Vermont, as I feel that the matters that are being investigated and proven will be of inestimable value in the years to come and anything that can be done along this line, I should like to see done." |
William H. Dyer to Perkins, Feb. 2, 1931 |
Under Dyer's watch, the sterilization law was implemented and continued after 1936 under the next Commissioner, Timothy C. Dale.