Segregation's Science: The American Eugenics Movement and Virginia, 1900-1980 (In Two Volumes) Volume II Gregory Michael Dorr Darien, Connecticut A.B., Dartmouth College, 1990 M.A., University of Virginia, 1994 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of History University of Virginia August, 2000 CONTENTS Volume I: Acknowledgements iv Introduction 1 1. The Sacrificeof A Race 47 2. Breeding the Human Thoroughbred 123 3. Defendingthe Thin Red Line 206 4. Peopling Virginia 306 5. Sterilize the MisfitsPromptly 370 6. Mongrel Virginian:; 449 Volume II: 555 7. The New Sparta 8. From Human Thoroughbreds to Humar. Tragedy 649 9. They Saw Black AJ.lOver 708 Conclu,;;ion: I Never Knew What They'd Done With Me 787 Bibliography 801 Chapter VII: "The New Sparta" 555 Writing a term paper for Ivey Foreman Lewis's eugenics course, a University of Virginiaundergraduate remarked, "In Germany Hitler has decreed that about400,000 persons be sterilized. This is a great step in eliminating the mental deficients." While the student acknowledged that, "The wide scope of the law may permit it to be used politically,"he rer.iained convinced that, "the eugenic result will outweigh any evil practice, if any [should occur]. "l A year later, in June of 1935, another student wrote, The greatAmerican problem is the gradual amalgamation, now in progress, of the variousand widely differing races which occupy our land. All who have given any serious consideration to this question, uninfluencedby sentimentality or self-interest are compelled to admit that the intermixture of races as diverse as the white and the Negro certainly injures or destroys the most specialized qualities of the white race .... the only hope, therefore, of slowing up the process of amalgamation is to prevent racial intermarriage.2 Although it is difficult to gauge the "true beliefs" of the students-who may simply have been writingto please Lewis and earn a grade-we can safely assume that these statements a:::curatelyreflect the tenor of Ivey Lewis's teaching in the 1930s. A decade after the passage of Virginia's steriiization bill and Racial Integrity Act (RIA), Lewis was still te".ching his students about the value of eugenics as a social policy. The so-called feeblemindedstill menaced civilization, and Lewis and his students ideatified in Hitler's 1This paper was written in May of 1934. just Len months after Adolf Hitler signed Nazi Germany's "Lawfor the Prevention of Hercditarily Diseased Offspring." HB, "Eugcnical Sterilization (May 20, 1934)," Box 1, Term Papers Collection 7568, Special Collections, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, page 15, [Hereinafter cited as TP, Box number. page number. All student authors will be referred to by initials.] For the text of the Nazi law, its legislative h:slory, and medical diagrams and instructionsfor performing vasectomy and tubal ligation, see Arthur GULt, Ernst RUdin, and Falk Ruttke, Zur Verhii.tung ?rbkranken Nacl,wuchses: Gese1z und Enauterungen [For LhePrevention of Hereditarily DiseasedOffspring: Law and Commentarie:,J,Zweile, neul"learbeiteleAuOage [Second, newly-revised edition] (Munchen: J. F. Lehmanns Verlag. 1936). A copy of this volume resides in the University of Virginia Library. Whether it was acquired by the university euger,icists is unclear,but unlikely. It is probable thatthe t0ok came to the University with a iarge numberof Nazi tracts acquired by University of Virginia historian Oron J. "Pat" Hale. Hale, an historian of Germany, served in the U.S. Army during the war and as a member o: the Allied miiitary government overseeing Gennan reconstruction afterthe war. He collectedlarge numbers of important historical documents and shipped them back to the university library. 2NZF, "Race Mixture (June 1935)," TP, Box 2, I. 556 eugenic program a more aggressive version of that pursued by many American states.3 Moreover, Lewis and his students remained conscious of racial mixing as another crucial aspect of the United States' purportedeugenic dilemma. These two papers are representative of the tenor and thrust embodiedin the twenty-seven term papers remaining from Lewis's class. These papers, along with the other activities of Virginia's eugenicists inside and outside the academy during the 1930s, provide an index of the state's eugenic devotion. The extant evidence points suggestively toward the continuing salience of eugenic beliefs in shaping Virginia's educational, social, and political structures during the 1930s and 1940s. Not only did Virginia eugenicists continue to patrolthe fit/unfit, normaVfeebleminded, and white/black borders of segregation, but they also stepped up theirsurveillance and began monitoring the interactions betweenJews and gentiles. Administratorsat Virginia's colleges and professional schools, particularly the University of Virginia, mounted efforts to restrictJewish enrollment. This move reflectednot only long-standing anti-Semitism, but also an eugenic evaluation of the biological worth of Jewish students. Although this increased vigilance regardingJew/gentile intermingling roughly paralleled the rise of Nazism and Nazi eugenics in Germany, it would be a vast and inaccurate overstatement to claim that all Virginia eugenicists were becoming fascists or Nazis.4 Delineating the similarities and differences between Virginia and Nazi eugenicists doesnot reduce the two groups to identity. Instead, revealing the contact points betweenthe two groups underscores how the eugenic metaphor could be invoked, under broadly similar 3By 1931, thirty states had passed sterilization laws at one time or another. Twenty-seven of those laws remained on the books, although they were not all actively enforced. Mark :::faller,Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963), 137. 4RohertProctor"s fascinating studies detail the rise of eugenics and phys!cal anthropology in Germany, and the subtle shifts from a pre-Nazi to a Nazi eugenics. He also compares the German and American eugenics movements in this period. See especially, Robert Proctor, "Eugenics Among theSocial Sciences: Hereditarian Thought in Germanyand the United States," in J oAnne Brown and David K. van Keuren, The Estate of Social Knowledge (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), chapter 9, particularly 186-89. 557 circumstances, to buttress each culture's social order. Eugenics anchored Virginians and Germans adrift in the Great Depression's socio-economic turmoil. It provided them with a scientificexplanation of the catastrophethat absolved them of guilt and provided convenient scapegoats. Rather than undermining the eugenicists' biological explanationof the socio­ economic order, formany Virginians the onset of the Great Depression confirmed their deepest eugenic fears. America's economy had not failed, they argued, as a result of reckless speculationby genetically-gifted white Nordics. Instead, the increasing societal drag of the "manifestlyunfit" triggeredthe devastating depression. Eugenictheory coupled with risinganti-radicalism within Virginia'seducational andsocial structureto quash "liberal" responses to the social dislocations precipitated by the crisis. Rather than advocating socialwelfare measures forall, the eugenicists acknowledged the "salubrious" effectsof the Depression: it skimmed the human dross from the society, pooled these individuals in easily identifiablegroups, and highlighted the necessity of instituting a more vigorous eugenic program to prevent the recurrenceof a similar catastrophe. More significantstill, tre continuing political influence of Virginia eugenicists demonstratesthat the state's experience varied from that of many others. The rise and fall of mainline eugenics in Virginia did not precisely parallel the trajectory of mainline eugenics at the national level, and it did not occur in lockstep with the ascension and destruction of the Third Reich.5 The rise of fascist dictatorships in Germany and Italy, with their attendant racial doctrines, initially appealed to many Virginia eugenicists. Extreme eugenicists like Cox, Plecker, and Powell would come closest to adopting Nazi attitudes. Patriotismprompted other mainline eugenicists, like those at the University of Virginia, to admire the Nazi program'sefficiency, but to eschew the totalitarian doctrinesof fascism. On some level, these individuals understood that Nazi and American eugenics promoted quite differentpolitical ends, despite their similar scientificjustifications. In the end, 5For a detaileddiscussion of historians' periodization of the eugenics movement, see the Introduction. 558 Americaneugenicists, especially those in Virginia, were able to reconcile the dichotomy between "rugged individualism" and statist intervention in the name of the common weal. This ideological rapprochement helps to explain how, even after the revelation of the Holocaust in 1945, Virginia eugenicists could differentiate themselves from Nazi eugenicists, even as they continued to sterilize the mentally retardedand persecute Jews and racialminorities. Other Virginians adopted the more moderate,"reform eugenics" advocated by men like Frederick Osborn, particularly after 1940. This group downplayed or dropped race as a significant marker of genetic worth. Still willing to declare some genes and genetic traits"fit" or "unfit," the individuals contributedto the durability of applied