Daily Archives: June 22, 2017

Eugenics, the selection of desired heritable characteristics in order to improve future generations, typically in reference to humans. The term eugenics was coined in 1883 by British explorer and natural scientist Francis Galton, who, influenced by Charles Darwins theory of natural selection, advocated a system that would allow the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable. Social Darwinism, the popular theory in the late 19th century that life for humans in society was ruled by survival of the fittest, helped advance eugenics into serious scientific study in the early 1900s. By World War I, many scientific authorities and political leaders supported eugenics. However, it ultimately failed as a science in the 1930s and 40s, when the assumptions of eugenicists became heavily criticized and the Nazis used eugenics to support the extermination of entire races.

Although eugenics as understood today dates from the late 19th century, efforts to select matings in order to secure offspring with desirable traits date from ancient times. Platos Republic (c. 378 bce) depicts a society where efforts are undertaken to improve human beings through selective breeding. Later, Italian philosopher and poet Tommaso Campanella, in City of the Sun (1623), described a utopian community in which only the socially elite are allowed to procreate. Galton, in Hereditary Genius (1869), proposed that a system of arranged marriages between men of distinction and women of wealth would eventually produce a gifted race. In 1865, the basic laws of heredity were discovered by the father of modern genetics, Gregor Mendel. His experiments with peas demonstrated that each physical trait was the result of a combination of two units (now known as genes) and could be passed from one generation to another. However, his work was largely ignored until its rediscovery in 1900. This fundamental knowledge of heredity provided eugenicistsincluding Galton, who influenced his cousin Charles Darwinwith scientific evidence to support the improvement of humans through selective breeding.

The advancement of eugenics was concurrent with an increasing appreciation of Charles Darwins account for change or evolution within societywhat contemporaries referred to as Social Darwinism. Darwin had concluded his explanations of evolution by arguing that the greatest step humans could make in their own history would occur when they realized that they were not completely guided by instinct. Rather, humans, through selective reproduction, had the ability to control their own future evolution. A language pertaining to reproduction and eugenics developed, leading to terms such as positive eugenics, defined as promoting the proliferation of good stock, and negative eugenics, defined as prohibiting marriage and breeding between defective stock. For eugenicists, nature was far more contributory than nurture in shaping humanity.

Read More on This Topic

biological determinism: The eugenics movement

One of the most prominent movements to apply genetics to understanding social and personality traits was the eugenics movement, which originated in the late 19th century. Eugenics was coined in 1883 by British explorer and naturalist Francis Galton, who was influenced by the theory of natural selection developed by his cousin, Charles Darwin. Galton used the term to refer to more...

During the early 1900s, eugenics became a serious scientific study pursued by both biologists and social scientists. They sought to determine the extent to which human characteristics of social importance were inherited. Among their greatest concerns were the predictability of intelligence and certain deviant behaviours. Eugenics, however, was not confined to scientific laboratories and academic institutions. It began to pervade cultural thought around the globe, including the Scandinavian countries, most other European countries, North America, Latin America, Japan, China, and Russia. In the United States, the eugenics movement began during the Progressive Era and remained active through 1940. It gained considerable support from leading scientific authorities such as zoologist Charles B. Davenport, plant geneticist Edward M. East, and geneticist and Nobel Prize laureate Hermann J. Muller. Political leaders in favour of eugenics included U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, Secretary of State Elihu Root, and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court John Marshall Harlan. Internationally, there were many individuals whose work supported eugenic aims, including British scientists J.B.S. Haldane and Julian Huxley and Russian scientists Nikolay K. Koltsov and Yury A. Filipchenko.

Galton had endowed a research fellowship in eugenics in 1904 and, in his will, provided funds for a chair of eugenics at University College, London. The fellowship and later the chair were occupied by Karl Pearson, a brilliant mathematician who helped to create the science of biometry, the statistical aspects of biology. Pearson was a controversial figure who believed that environment had little to do with the development of mental or emotional qualities. He felt that the high birth rate of the poor was a threat to civilization and that the higher races must supplant the lower. His views gave countenance to those who believed in racial and class superiority. Thus, Pearson shares the blame for the discredit later brought on eugenics.

Test Your Knowledge

Science Quiz

In the United States, the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) was opened at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, N.Y., in 1910 with financial support from the legacy of railroad magnate Edward Henry Harriman. Whereas ERO efforts were officially overseen by Charles B. Davenport, director of the Station for Experimental Study of Evolution (one of the biology research stations at Cold Spring Harbor), ERO activities were directly superintended by Harry H. Laughlin, a professor from Kirksville, Mo. The ERO was organized around a series of missions. These missions included serving as the national repository and clearinghouse for eugenics information, compiling an index of traits in American families, training field-workers to gather data throughout the United States, supporting investigations into the inheritance patterns of particular human traits and diseases, advising on the eugenic fitness of proposed marriages, and communicating all eugenic findings through a series of publications. To accomplish these goals, further funding was secured from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the Battle Creek Race Betterment Foundation, and the Human Betterment Foundation.

Prior to the founding of the ERO, eugenics work in the United States was overseen by a standing committee of the American Breeders Association (eugenics section established in 1906), chaired by ichthyologist and Stanford University president David Starr Jordan. Research from around the globe was featured at three international congresses, held in 1912, 1921, and 1932. In addition, eugenics education was monitored in Britain by the English Eugenics Society (founded by Galton in 1907 as the Eugenics Education Society) and in the United States by the American Eugenics Society.

Britannica Lists & Quizzes

History Quiz

Literature & Language List

History Quiz

Arts & Culture List

Following World War I, the United States gained status as a world power. A concomitant fear arose that if the healthy stock of the American people became diluted with socially undesirable traits, the countrys political and economic strength would begin to crumble. The maintenance of world peace by fostering democracy, capitalism, and, at times, eugenics-based schemes was central to the activities of the Internationalists, a group of prominent American leaders in business, education, publishing, and government. One core member of this group, the New York lawyer Madison Grant, aroused considerable pro-eugenic interest through his best-selling book The Passing of the Great Race (1916). Beginning in 1920, a series of congressional hearings was held to identify problems that immigrants were causing the United States. As the countrys eugenics expert, Harry Laughlin provided tabulations showing that certain immigrants, particularly those from Italy, Greece, and Eastern Europe, were significantly overrepresented in American prisons and institutions for the feebleminded. Further data were construed to suggest that these groups were contributing too many genetically and socially inferior people. Laughlins classification of these individuals included the feebleminded, the insane, the criminalistic, the epileptic, the inebriate, the diseasedincluding those with tuberculosis, leprosy, and syphilisthe blind, the deaf, the deformed, the dependent, chronic recipients of charity, paupers, and neer-do-wells. Racial overtones also pervaded much of the British and American eugenics literature. In 1923, Laughlin was sent by the U.S. secretary of labour as an immigration agent to Europe to investigate the chief emigrant-exporting nations. Laughlin sought to determine the feasibility of a plan whereby every prospective immigrant would be interviewed before embarking to the United States. He provided testimony before Congress that ultimately led to a new immigration law in 1924 that severely restricted the annual immigration of individuals from countries previously claimed to have contributed excessively to the dilution of American good stock.

Immigration control was but one method to control eugenically the reproductive stock of a country. Laughlin appeared at the centre of other U.S. efforts to provide eugenicists greater reproductive control over the nation. He approached state legislators with a model law to control the reproduction of institutionalized populations. By 1920, two years before the publication of Laughlins influential Eugenical Sterilization in the United States (1922), 3,200 individuals across the country were reported to have been involuntarily sterilized. That number tripled by 1929, and by 1938 more than 30,000 people were claimed to have met this fate. More than half of the states adopted Laughlins law, with California, Virginia, and Michigan leading the sterilization campaign. Laughlins efforts secured staunch judicial support in 1927. In the precedent-setting case of Buck v. Bell, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., upheld the Virginia statute and claimed, It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.

During the 1930s, eugenics gained considerable popular support across the United States. Hygiene courses in public schools and eugenics courses in colleges spread eugenic-minded values to many. A eugenics exhibit titled Pedigree-Study in Man was featured at the Chicago Worlds Fair in 193334. Consistent with the fairs Century of Progress theme, stations were organized around efforts to show how favourable traits in the human population could best be perpetuated. Contrasts were drawn between the emulative, presidential Roosevelt family and the degenerate Ishmael family (one of several pseudonymous family names used, the rationale for which was not given). By studying the passage of ancestral traits, fairgoers were urged to adopt the progressive view that responsible individuals should pursue marriage ever mindful of eugenics principles. Booths were set up at county and state fairs promoting fitter families contests, and medals were awarded to eugenically sound families. Drawing again upon long-standing eugenic practices in agriculture, popular eugenic advertisements claimed it was about time that humans received the same attention in the breeding of better babies that had been given to livestock and crops for centuries.

Antieugenics sentiment began to appear after 1910 and intensified during the 1930s. Most commonly it was based on religious grounds. For example, the 1930 papal encyclical Casti connubii condemned reproductive sterilization, though it did not specifically prohibit positive eugenic attempts to amplify the inheritance of beneficial traits. Many Protestant writings sought to reconcile age-old Christian warnings about the heritable sins of the father to pro-eugenic ideals. Indeed, most of the religion-based popular writings of the period supported positive means of improving the physical and moral makeup of humanity.

In the early 1930s, Nazi Germany adopted American measures to identify and selectively reduce the presence of those deemed to be socially inferior through involuntary sterilization. A rhetoric of positive eugenics in the building of a master race pervaded Rassenhygiene (racial hygiene) movements. When Germany extended its practices far beyond sterilization in efforts to eliminate the Jewish and other non-Aryan populations, the United States became increasingly concerned over its own support of eugenics. Many scientists, physicians, and political leaders began to denounce the work of the ERO publicly. After considerable reflection, the Carnegie Institution formally closed the ERO at the end of 1939.

During the aftermath of World War II, eugenics became stigmatized such that many individuals who had once hailed it as a science now spoke disparagingly of it as a failed pseudoscience. Eugenics was dropped from organization and publication names. In 1954, Britains Annals of Eugenics was renamed Annals of Human Genetics. In 1972, the American Eugenics Society adopted the less-offensive name Society for the Study of Social Biology. Its publication, once popularly known as the Eugenics Quarterly, had already been renamed Social Biology in 1969.

U.S. Senate hearings in 1973, chaired by Edward Kennedy, revealed that thousands of U.S. citizens had been sterilized under federally supported programs. The U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare proposed guidelines encouraging each state to repeal their respective sterilization laws. Other countries, most notably China, continue to support eugenics-directed programs openly in order to ensure the genetic makeup of their future.

Despite the dropping of the term eugenics, eugenic ideas remain prevalent in many issues surrounding human reproduction. Medical genetics, a post-World War II medical specialty, encompasses a wide range of health concerns, from genetic screening and counseling to fetal gene manipulation and the treatment of adults suffering from hereditary disorders. Because certain diseases (e.g., hemophilia and Tay-Sachs disease) are now known to be genetically transmitted, many couples choose to undergo genetic screening, in which they learn the chances that their offspring have of being affected by some combination of their hereditary backgrounds. Couples at risk of passing on genetic defects may opt to remain childless or to adopt children. Furthermore, it is now possible to diagnose certain genetic defects in the unborn. Many couples choose to terminate a pregnancy that involves a genetically disabled offspring. These developments have reinforced the eugenic aim of identifying and eliminating undesirable genetic material.

Counterbalancing this trend, however, has been medical progress that enables victims of many genetic diseases to live fairly normal lives. Direct manipulation of harmful genes is also being studied. If perfected, it could obviate eugenic arguments for restricting reproduction among those who carry harmful genes. Such conflicting innovations have complicated the controversy surrounding what many call the new eugenics. Moreover, suggestions for expanding eugenics programs, which range from the creation of sperm banks for the genetically superior to the potential cloning of human beings, have met with vigorous resistance from the public, which often views such programs as unwarranted interference with nature or as opportunities for abuse by authoritarian regimes.

Applications of the Human Genome Project are often referred to as Brave New World genetics or the new eugenics, in part because they have helped to dramatically increase knowledge of human genetics. In addition, 21st-century technologies such as gene editing, which can potentially be used to treat disease or to alter traits, have further renewed concerns. However, the ethical, legal, and social implications of such tools are monitored much more closely than were early 20th-century eugenics programs. Applications also generally are more focused on the reduction of genetic diseases than on improving intelligence.

Still, with or without the use of the term, many eugenics-related concerns are reemerging as a new group of individuals decide how to regulate the application of genetics science and technology. This gene-directed activity, in attempting to improve upon nature, may not be that distant from what Galton implied in 1909 when he described eugenics as the study of agencies, under social control, which may improve or impair future generations.

See the original post:

eugenics | Description, History, & Modern Eugenics ...

The late author and social activist Dorothy Canfield Fisher was no slouch. The Arlington resident wrote 40 books, spoke five languages and received at least eight honorary degrees. When she wasn't writing, the best-selling novelist was leading World War I relief efforts, managing the first U.S. adult education program and promoting prison reform. Eleanor Roosevelt named her one of the 10 most influential women in the United States.

Now one Vermonter wants to add "eugenicist" to Fisher's rsum because of the writer's connection to a dark chapter in state history. With support from a number of librarians, teachers and historians, Abenaki educator Judy Dow is lobbying the Vermont Department of Libraries to strip Fisher's name from the popular children's literature award created 60 years ago to honor her.

Dow points out that Fisher stereotyped French Canadians and Native Americans in her writings, and she claims that the writer was part of the eugenics movement that called for cleansing Vermont of "bad seeds" and "feeble-minded" people in the 1920s and '30s. The state should not enshrine the name of such a woman, especially in a literary program focused on children, Fisher's critics say.

Thecontroversy facing the Vermont state librarian has a familiar ring it echoes the recent fight over replacing the Rebels mascot at South Burlington High School, as well as the removal of Confederate statues throughout the American South.

It's appropriate to revisit history and reexamine the lessons it might teach through a contemporary lens, said State Librarian Scott Murphy, who has the final say on whether to remove Fisher's name. But he said it's also important to view things in context and take a measured approach when it comes to removing honors in response to changing attitudes and understanding.

"I'm not saying this is an instance where we don't do it," Murphy said about the Fisher awards. "We want to make sure that we make the right decision."

"Some people will be upset," predicted Julie Pickett in an email to Murphy; as the children's librarian at Stowe Free Library, she supports Dow's effort. "Some will say political correctness is taking over. It's all in the eye of the beholder and is a very complicated issue, for sure."

Murphy said he is skeptical about the most serious claim against Fisher. "I haven't seen a smoking gun that says she was a eugenicist," he said during an interview at his Montpelier office last week. Fisher was not among the prominent Vermonters who sat on the advisory board of the Vermont Eugenics Survey, a chilling social-science experiment that ran from 1925 to 1936. But she did serve on a related organization, the Vermont Commission on Country Life, which was charged with revitalizing the state's Yankee roots.

Murphy called that association "problematic." And he said Dow's April presentation to the state library board, in which she cited examples of Fisher's insulting characterizations, was an "eye-opener."

In Fisher's novel Bonfire, one character describes another as "half-hound, half-hunter, all Injun." In her play Tourists Accommodated, a Yankee Vermont farm woman who is renting rooms responds to a potential French Canadian guest "speaking as to a dog she rather fears." In a state tourism pamphlet, Fisher invited families of "good breeding" to consider buying second homes in Vermont.

Murphy characterized Dow's presentation as "very powerful." The board is expected to make its recommendation to him at its next meeting, on July 11. Murphy plans to make a decision soon after that.

Fisher fans argue that the author, like Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad, was a product of her times. To get hung up on her perceived failings is to ignore countless other things that set this crusading humanitarian apart.

"There were wonderful parts of her," said children's author Katherine Paterson of Montpelier, winner of the National Book Award, the Newbery Medal and other honors though not Vermont's Dorothy Canfield Fisher Book Award. "But there were also parts of her, as there are parts of all of us, that were not praiseworthy and perhaps were offensive to other people."

Judging Fisher by contemporary standards brings up a difficult question, continued Paterson, adding that history serves up plenty such questions.

"Our founding fathers were slave owners. And the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence was definitely a slave owner, who said that all men are created equal," Paterson said, referring to Thomas Jefferson.

"I don't think we can throw out the Declaration of Independence because it was created by a man who didn't live it," she said.

Vermont created a reading program to honor Fisher and promote excellence in children's literature in 1957. She died the following year, at the age of 79, in her beloved Arlington. In that small southern Vermont town, she corresponded with American writer Willa Cather, helped Robert Frost find a home nearby and posed with her husband for neighbor Norman Rockwell of Saturday Evening Post fame.

Although she was born in Kansas, Fisher and her family had deep roots in Vermont. After her marriage to fellow writer John Fisher, Dorothy made her home at the old Canfield family farm in Arlington. From the lovely white house with sweeping views of the Battenkill Valley, Fisher wrote prolifically. She popularized Vermont as a rural kingdom of rugged hill farms tilled by self-reliant, sturdy people.

But she also wrote articles and columns about politics, prison reform, domestic life and the need for better education funding that ran in popular periodicals and newspapers of the day. The versatile writer could opine in a scholarly way as well as churn out engaging fiction, from children's stories such as Understood Betsy to the sexually charged novel Bonfire.

State senator and University of Vermont English professor Philip Baruth (D/P-Chittenden) teaches Fisher's The Home-Maker, a fictional story about a father who takes on the primary child-raising role and which incorporates Montessori education principles. A trip to Italy sold Fisher on the preschool method that emphasizes self-direction and empathy, and she became its most enthusiastic proponent in the U.S.

Baruth also praised Fisher's 1912 nonfiction book, A Montessori Mother. "That's a fantastic addition to the literature on child-rearing," Baruth said. "And, again, it was pathbreaking. So, to have her name on the Dorothy Canfield Fisher award makes real sense to me."

But Bonfire and several of her works were set in Clifford, a fictional Vermont town with pockets of entrenched poverty, including "Searles Shelf." The book portrays this hilly section of town as an enclave of French Canadian and French Indian sloths. Residents from another poor section of town are "irresponsible sub-normals." The central character, the alluring temptress Lixlee, is a "primitive" who comes from mysterious parentage that townspeople speculate might be "southern" or "foreign" or just plain "French canuck."

More unflattering references to French Canadians come in Tourists Accommodated, the play Fisher wrote in 1932 to help popularize tourism in Vermont. When a French-speaking man and woman in "countrified" costumes knock at the door of a Vermont farm that has just started taking in lodgers, Aunt Nancy, the lady of the house, urges them to "go home."

Once she learns that they are merely asking, in French, to rent two rooms, Aunt Nancy agrees in an apparent show of tolerance. The French-speaking characters are nevertheless portrayed as aliens in the Yankee community, even though there was widespread emigration from Qubec in that era.

Recruiting the right people to Vermont was a strong theme in a state tourism pamphlet Fisher wrote the same year. With pictures of handsome historic Colonials and unspoiled mountain views, the "Vermont Summer Homes" brochure reached out to "superior, interesting families of cultivation and good breeding" who might not be rich in dollars but were rich in intellect professors, doctors, lawyers and musicians who used their brains to make a living. "We feel that you and Vermont have much in common," Fisher wrote in her genteel pitch to attract refined second-home owners.

Similar themes and stereotypes are found in other Fisher writings. In a commencement presentation she wrote in 1941 called "Man and the Wilderness," Fisher explains how the residents of Manchester eventually bought a house for an itinerant Native American woman known as "Old Icy" when her "intoe-ing feet" could no longer carry her from local town to town.

While on the one hand the essay attempts to show the community's tolerance, it also downplays the prejudice of the day with the declaration that Vermont was never a real home to Indians and the state did not harbor "ugly racial hatred and oppression."

In her lifelong fight for social justice, Fisher stood up for vulnerable minorities: illiterate adults, female prisoners, disabled children, conscientious objectors. So it's puzzling that she seemed to have had a blind spot for the Vermont Eugenics Survey, which, in the language of its founder, Henry Perkins, was designed to provide information about "human heredity and about defective and degenerate families in the state."

Perkins pushed for sterilization programs and believed his Vermont research proved that bad genes were destined to repeat themselves in families. "Blood has told," he wrote in his first survey report about the families he studied, in 1927, "and there is every reason to believe it will keep on telling in future generations."

After growing up on South Prospect Street in Burlington, Perkins became a zoology professor at the University of Vermont, where he had big shoes to fill his father, George Perkins, was a dean on the hilltop campus and a well-known entomologist.

The younger Perkins began teaching a UVM course in heredity and evolution in 1922, and, as the eugenics movement picked up steam around the country and globe, he made the quest for better human breeding his main academic focus.His targets of study were "degenerate'' Vermont families who were often French Indian and, in some cases, black.

Perkins published five reports between 1925 and 1931 and continued a few more years before the project ran out of steam. The first survey involved long "pedigree" studies, conducted by social workers who interviewed and studied members of three extended families in and around Burlington. They supplemented their research with records from police, various state institutions and old poor-farm reports going back more than a century.

The roots of one family, identified as "gypsies," were traced to an Indian reservation near Montral, according to the survey. It also references numerous children in the family who had "negro blood" and whose descendants were identified as "colored," "copper toned" and "swarthy." The family was labeled as "gypsies" because in its early history in Vermont, members traveled from town to town by wagon, selling baskets and other goods.

A lengthy chart lists the "defects" of the various members of the extended "gypsy" clan over several generations and uses labels such as "illiterate," "town pauper" and "sex offender." Although the labels were often based on unsubstantiated gossip or personal bias, the identification likely increased the risk that such people would face involuntary confinement in institutions for those with perceived mental illness or cognitive delays.

In the Second Annual Report of the Eugenics Survey, published in 1928, Perkins announced the creation of a comprehensive survey of rural Vermont that would examine racial, "eugenical," hygienic, agricultural, social and mental aspects, among other things. The governor would appoint members, he explained, and the Eugenics Survey would be at "its center and core," Perkins wrote.

He hired Henry Taylor to oversee the new organization, which was called the Vermont Commission on Country Life. More than 70 people, including Fisher, were recruited to take part and to produce chapters for a 1931 book titled Rural Vermont: A Program for the Future. Taylor explained in the introduction that Perkins and his eugenics questions were the motivation.

"For more than a century, Vermont has been one of the most reliable seedbeds of our national life," Taylor wrote, adding that conserving the quality of the human stock was a key issue for the state and the Vermont Commission on Country Life.

But the commission also studied ways to revitalize agriculture, education and the arts. Fisher served on the "traditions and ideals" subcommittee, which suggested strategies to improve the state's image through drama and tourism promotion, as well as ways to preserve its culture and historic architecture. Helen HartnessFlanders, who spent her life collecting and archiving Vermont folk songs, served with Fisher on the subcommittee. Their chapter closes with this encouragement: "The old stock is here still, in greater proportion to the total population than in any other commonwealth of the north."

Historian Nancy Gallagher documented Vermont's eugenics movement in her book Breeding Better Vermonters. In it, she noted an implicit racism in the commission's overarching ideals. She won't call Fisher a "eugenicist" but concludes from her participation that the author was someone who clearly accepted the eugenic attitudes of the era and "shared the values."

In 1932, Fisher agreed to serve on the commission's executive committee one year after Perkins successfully pushed a sterilization law through the Vermont legislature and called for more widespread institutionalization of "feeble-minded" people, in part so they would be unable to reproduce and create more "bad seeds."

Although the Vermont sterilization law was voluntary, Gallagher said many people in institutions agreed to undergo the procedure without understanding what it was or as a condition of release coercion, essentially. About 250 people were sterilized in Vermont institutions between 1933 and 1960, according to Department of Health records, although the statistics might be incomplete.

Meanwhile, some of the language used in the eugenics movement, including the importance of good bloodlines, crops up in Fisher's writings. In some cases, her books stand up against prejudice, yet they also seem to promote softer versions of ugly stereotypes. In Seasoned Timber, a young Vermont headmaster refuses to accept a gift from a donor who sets a condition: that the school must deny entrance to Jews. But later in the book, the same headmaster refers to a prospective student's "awful Jewish mother" and her "New-York-Mediterranean haggling code."

Eugenics movements in Vermont and elsewhere set the stage for the pseudoscience and racist philosophies that gave rise to Adolf Hitler and World War II.

Dow grew up in Burlington's New North End in a family with Qubec and Abenaki roots, although her parents didn't say much about the Native American part. But her father, a firefighter, was raised on Convent Square overlooking the Intervale. The tight cluster of streets was once known as "Moccasin Village," according to Dow, because so many French Indian families lived there. She views both parts of her heritage as equally important.

As an adult, Dow became interested in Abenaki traditions and studied and began teaching them in Vermont schools through a state-funded artist-in-residency program. She played a pivotal role in the successful effort to move an industrial-scale composting operation out of the Intervale, partly by raising concerns about its impact on a possible Abenaki burial ground in the floodplain along the Winooski River.

Through her activism, Dow met Gallagher, who confirmed that some of Dow's own relatives, including a great-aunt in Colchester, had been identified in one of the Vermont eugenics pedigree surveys. It focused on a family for its supposed high rate of Huntington's disease, a neurological condition.

Today Dow lives in a sunny suburban house in which she recently hosted Gallagher, retired French teacher Kim Chase and a Seven Days reporter. A collection of baskets, some made by Dow, were displayed near the kitchen table.

Dow is determined to get Fisher's name off the award program. She's told the board that "it's a crime that very good authors are receiving this award under the name of an author who's a eugenicist, and they don't even know it."

Gallagher agrees with Dow that the Fisher connection should go. "I think we can find someone else, a better name," she said.

So does Chase, who has Qubcois roots. "Holding this person up as an example of wonderful literacy is really painful," she said.

But Fisher's defenders see injustice in the call to rid the award of her name.

"I don't mean to make light of the eugenics movement; it was a horrible thing," said Baruth. "But I've yet to see evidence that Dorothy Canfield Fisher was an active part of that movement or that she campaigned for its goals.

"Having taught her work, having thought a great deal about her work and also having investigated this controversy," he continued, "I just don't see there's the kind of evidence you would need to say this person is a eugenicist, this person is generally neo-Nazi in her views."

Many people served on the Vermont Commission on Country Life, Baruth added, and Fisher's attitudes about the demographics of Vermont were shaped by the era.

"That was extremely typical of the day," he said. "It's not as though she was unique in talking about Vermont as a Yankee place. We brand and capitalize on the idea of the Yankee today."

Fisher's name should stay on the award, Baruth said.

"She was a fantastically important figure in Vermont, and she was a best-selling, groundbreaking female author. I don't think we've got enough important female authors that we can afford to throw one overboard, for the evidence I've seen."

Who knows Fisher better than anyone? Vermont librarians. Murphy asked them for feedback, and the emails are filtering in.

Some urged him not to make a rash decision. Cheryl Sloan, youth services librarian at the Charlotte Library, was not fully convinced by Dow's presentation to the state library board in April.

"I would like to see some balanced investigation into the actual history of Dorothy before we take all of Ms. Dow's information at face value," Sloan wrote. "Some of the books she had piled before her in Berlin were works of fiction by Dorothy. Can we condemn an author on their body of fiction?"

But Catherine Davie, a school librarian at Blue Mountain Union School in Wells River, is ready to see Fisher's name go.

Although she has participated in the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Book Award program "in every possible way," including a sleepover at her library this spring, Davie wrote that now is the time to make a change.

"With deep respect for her skill as a writer and as a social activist, I don't think it's right to ask all of Vermont's students to honor her in this way, when some of her beliefs are so repugnant to some of them," she wrote.

Pickett of the Stowe Free Library is of a similar mind. "Even though it may seem like Dorothy is being thrown under the bus, I can't abide the fact that she did indeed support a eugenics movement that had a devastating effect on generations of Native Americans and French Canadians," Pickett wrote.

"Do we penalize every racist? Every person involved in eugenics or slavery? We obviously can't. But this small step, in my mind, is a recognition of wrongdoing and is a step toward healing," Picket added. "Maybe in this divisive world we live in right now, it sends a positive message."

Other librarians have different reasons for considering a name change. Youngsters rarely check out Fisher's work and don't have much of a connection to her as readers, said Hannah Peacock, youth services librarian and assistant director at Burnham Memorial Library in Colchester and chair of the Dorothy Canfield Fisher reading committee.

"I just think it might be time for a change of name because they don't know who she is," Peacock said in a telephone interview.

And then there is the unfortunate coincidence of acronyms the one for Fisher's full name is the same DCF as the state child welfare agency the Department for Children and Families, which investigates child abuse. To avoid confusion, organizers of the book award changed the name of the annual selection of books to Dorothy's List and encouraged librarians not to use the DCF acronym, although many still do.

Paterson, for one, is not convinced by these arguments. If she had to decide, the distinguished children's book author said she'd keep the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Book Award just as it is.

"There are no perfect human beings," she said, "and no perfect heroes."

The state-run effort is both a reading program and an award. Librarians, authors and teachers volunteer to read some 100 books a year that are suitable for children in grades 4 to 8. The readers vote on their preferences, and the top 30 are named to Dorothy's List. Vermont public and school libraries stock copies and encourage children to read at least five books. The young readers cast votes for the best book out of the 30, which is then named as the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Book Award winner the next spring. The program is staffed by the Vermont Department of Libraries and volunteers. It receives minimal funding of a few thousand dollars a year, according to Vermont State Librarian Scott Murphy.

Read more from the original source:

Vermont Considers Dumping Dorothy Canfield Fisher Over Ties to Eugenics Movement - Seven Days

Photo Members of Argentinias federal police displayed a Nazi statue at the Interpol headquarters in Buenos Aires. Credit Natacha Pisarenko/Associated Press

In a hidden treasure room dedicated to celebrating the Third Reich, Argentine police officers have found a trove of Nazi artifacts, including a bust of Hitler, that they believe were taken to the country by fugitive Germans.

The police said on Tuesday that they had uncovered the collection of more than 75 artifacts outside Buenos Aires, in the suburban home of a collector whom they have not yet named.

After investigating, said Marcelo El Haibe, the federal police commissioner for the protection of cultural heritage, we were able to discover those objects that were hidden behind a bookcase. Behind the bookcase there was a wall, and after that a door.

In the secret chamber, the police found what they said were authentic Nazi artifacts that probably belonged to high-ranking party members during World War II.

Among the items, the police said, were a magnifying glass and photo negatives that appeared to show Hitler holding the same lens. We have turned to historians, and theyve told us it is the original magnifying glass used by Hitler in the photograph, said Nestor Roncaglia, the head of Argentinas federal police.

The police also found toys and musical instruments, including a box of harmonicas, emblazoned with swastikas and Nazi symbols, that would have been used to indoctrinate children.

There are Nazi objects used by kids, but with the partys propaganda, Commissioner El Haibe said. He added, There were jigsaw puzzles and little wood pieces to build houses, but they always featured party-related images and symbols.

The authorities said they had uncovered the collection in the course of a wider investigation into artwork of suspicious origin found at a gallery in Buenos Aires.

Agents of Argentinas federal police and Interpol, the international police force, raided the collectors house on June 8. The collector was not at the house at the time, and has not been charged, but is under investigation, the police said.

The authorities also found medical devices associated with the Nazis eugenics programs, including a tool used to measure peoples heads as a way of assessing their supposed racial purity.

We know the history, we know of the horrible experiments conducted by Josef Mengele, said Ariel Cohen Sabban, president of the Delegation of Israelite-Argentines Associations, the countrys largest Jewish organization.

Mengele, a notorious Nazi doctor, fled to Argentina to avoid prosecution for war crimes in Europe. He lived in the capital for a decade and eventually died in Brazil in 1979.

When I see these objects, Mr. Sabban said, I see the infamy of that terrible era of humanity that has caused so much damage, so much sadness.

A picture caption with an earlier version of this article, using information from the Associated Press, misstated the purpose of a device seen in the photo. It is for aiming mortars, not measuring head size.

Follow Russell Goldman on Twitter @GoldmanRussell.

Michel Vega contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on June 21, 2017, on Page A5 of the New York edition with the headline: A Secret Room, Nazi Artifacts and an Argentine Mystery.

Were interested in your feedback on this page. Tell us what you think.

Go to Home Page

Continue reading here:

The Secret Room, the Nazi Artifacts and an Argentine Mystery - New York Times