MARCIA DAY CHILDRESS: So good afternoon.
I'd like to welcome you to the Medical Center Hour.
I'm Marcia Day Childress from the Center
for Biomedical Ethics and Humanities
here in the School of Medicine at UVA,
and I'm delighted to welcome you to today's program.
This is a program entitled The Continuing Relevance
of America's Eugenic Legacy.
The history of eugenics is often characterized
as a cautionary tale about the bad old days
when pseudoscientific assumptions
about genetic determinism and engineering human improvement
permeated science, medicine, and social attitudes,
and provided a respectable veneer that
enabled barely submerged racism, xenophobia,
and blatant discrimination against persons
with disabilities to take root in American law.
Some argue that more recently our science is sound,
our attitudes enlightened.
We need not be hobbled by fear of
debunked, bad eugenic habits.
Paul Lombardo, the Regents Professor and Bobby Lee Cook
Professor of Law at Georgia State University in Atlanta,
has written extensively on eugenics and the law
in America.
As one of the undisputed experts on this subject,
he continues to track our nation's eugenic legacy
as this evolves in the early 21st century.
He joins us here to look again at eugenics assumptions
and ask some questions critical for us today.
What is eugenics legacy in our country now?
Are the same underlying tendencies
that led to a century of eugenic law and policy
to be found in our public debate about democratic values
and social policies?
And what is the proper role of science and medicine as tools
for solving social problems?
Professor Lombardo's presentation
is one of our history of the health sciences
lectures produced in partnership with historical collections
in the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library.
His talk is also the second annual Joan Echtenkamp Klein
Memorial Lecture in the history of the health sciences.
This lecture is named for our longtime dear colleague
and inimitable friend who as Alvin V. And Nancy Baird
curator was the heart and soul of historical collections
for the period from 1982 until her untimely death in December
of 2015.
As one who understood that history is always
a crucial component, sometimes even
a driver of the present moment, Joan
was a co-conspirator with many of us
on some great projects over a great many years.
She was also a generous friend of and contributor
to the Medical Center Hour.
We miss her and are honored to honor
her memory with this lecture.
It's fitting that Paul Lombardo is presenting this year's
lecture, for it was Joan who decades ago worked closely
with him when he was another of our colleagues here at UVA
and he was just starting his research into eugenics
in America and indeed into eugenics
place, power, and practical impact in local Charlottesville
and University of Virginia history.
I'll also say before welcoming him
that Professor Lombardo has no financial conflicts of interest
to disclose.
So please welcome Paul Lombardo, who spent many years here
at UVA before he headed south to Georgia.
Welcome back, Paul.
[APPLAUSE]
PAUL LOMBARDO: Thank you, Marcia.
I think maybe one of these days when I grow up,
I'm going to have a conflict of interest that I can disclose.
But since the kids are graduated from college,
it's probably too late.
I want to thank Marcia and Dan for the invitation,
particularly for the honor of speaking here
at the Joan Echtenkamp Klein Memorial Lecture.
As Marcia said, Joan was a friend of mine
and a colleague for more than 35 years.
And in the time that she was here,
she figured very significantly in my own research
on the history of eugenics.
And so as I prepared for this talk,
I was repeatedly reminded of how often I relied on Joan,
how often she directed me to material that I used
in my own scholarships, how regularly she
invited me to be involved in meetings and symposia and the--
some of you will remember many, many parties which
she put together, and those were places
where I met other archivist, other librarians,
and other scholars.
And so it's only fitting that I note some of those occasions
as part of my remarks today, with apologies
for too many personal references,
but because the material that I discovered with Joan's help
became inextricably intertwined with
the historical explorations in eugenics
that I'm going to talk about today.
So I will talk later a bit more about Joan and some
of those things, but I want to take everybody
to the same at least starting line,
and that is this word eugenics.
You have to start in the same place.
You've got Gregor Mendel, who tells us
what the rules of heredity are with his pea plants,
and his ideas happen to come back about the same time
that Francis Galton comes up with this new word meaning well
born.
And so you really have to start with Galton and Mendel.
I think of the biostatistics of Galton
as married to the heredity of Mendel
as really being the foundation for what happens in America
under the label of eugenics.
Within a generation, people were looking at Galton,
looking at his ideas, and proposing ways
to make eugenic ideas a practical reality.
Here the clergy discuss the issuance
of marriage certificates that would be proof
that couples were fit to marry and had been so declared
by medical experts.
Before long, the idea becomes more widespread,
and every newspaper is full of articles about eugenics.
There were organizations initiated
to promote the so-called eugenic ideal of good birth,
and describing your tot as a eugenic baby was all the rage.
In this particular case, contest winners
were betrothed in their early years
by their parents who said, what better could we do,
a couple of gold prize winners, we'll
get them together in eugenics' name.
Even the federal government gets in on the act
in the person of the Surgeon General of the Public Health
Service who issues the first-- perhaps the only official
eugenic marriage certificate to this man
Palmer Terrill, an employee of at that time the Treasury
Department.
Families who pursued the eugenic ideal, meaning
healthy, happy babies, were celebrated in their communities
in these Fitter Family contests which I
suspect you may have heard of.
The media coverage of those fairs
looked something like this.
Science applies to human stock the same principles
which have developed championed cows and horses and prize hens
to lay the foundation for proposed laws to regulate
the rules for human mating.
It is difficult-- it is very difficult
to exaggerate how pervasive the word eugenics was
early in the 20th century and the extraordinary numbers
of meanings it took on having to do with health and hygiene
and prosperity.
How eugenics was used in advertising
gives us just one clue about the popularity of the concept,
and I have a whole show on this, but I'll just
share a few of these with you.
For example, there were eugenic cosmetics and pharmaceuticals,
from lemon shampoo to hair tonic.
There was, of course, eugenic corn.
There were even eugenic diamonds,
which just like eugenic marriages,
required a certificate of fitness.
It was not surprising that with sentiments like these
the American Magazine of wit and satire
would say on its cover in 1913 "Eugenics Makes The World Go
Round."
So this is the image of health, which
is linked with the eugenic ideal and highlighted as a promise
to future generations.
And the impulse for social improvement, the wish
to eradicate suffering, and the life problems that
plagued society was a large part of what attracted people,
many, if not most, Americans to eugenics.
But that ideal, of course, had other implications, which
I like to describe as made up of equal parts hope and hate,
equal parts aspiration and fear.
The side that represented people's fears
often included a very heavy handed kind
of biological determinism that played out
in propaganda like this.
And I'm going to spend my time talking to a large extent,
about this side, showing us that unfit human traits can all
be breeded it out, it says.
What your environment is is what you have.
Your education is what you do.
But what you really are, that's your heritage.
And if you didn't have good parents, too bad,
you're too late.
So I'm going to look at the legal result
of this propaganda, but I do want
to stop for just a second to remember our friend
Joan, the person this lecture is named for,
and how important she was both to my own scholarship
but also how she made it certain that Virginia would not forget
its own history in this field.
Joan and I came to UVA at about the same time in the late '70s,
and we met in 1980 in the basement of Alderman Library.
While I was dealing with learning
how to breathe in dust in an archive, Jonah already knew.
I was in the process of writing on the topic that would become
my dissertation on Virginia's eugenic history
in the case of Buck vs. Bell.
I got to know Joan a bit better when
she took over the special collections
at the medical school and I went on to law school
and conferred with her a couple of times.
She was extraordinarily helpful in the first two law review
articles that I wrote.
One was on Buck.
The other was on Loving vs. Virginia.
And it is an interesting coincidence
that we are now celebrating anniversaries
of both those Supreme Court cases in eugenics this year,
Buck 90 years and Loving vs. Virginia 50 years.
And there's even an Academy Award nominated film on that
out there.
So a lot happened here in eugenics.
I went off to practice law.
But when I came back here in 1990,
Joan and I picked up where we left off.
And I'd often find myself in the medical school library
where she usually shared her most recent acquisitions.
And in 1993 she asked me if I would
agree to participate in a symposium
on the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study.
Well, I said yes.
And because of Joan, I got to join scholars like Jim Jones
and Vanessa Northington Gamble, John Fletcher and others
in discussing Tuskegee, and I got
to watch over the next several years
as the momentum grew toward a Presidential repudiation
of the study.
And that finally did occur in 1997,
and Joan is shown here meeting President Clinton
as the movement culminates in a Presidential apology.
My time at Joan's symposium led me in a different direction.
It provided me a motive to look back
into the part of the Tuskegee history
that had not been explored.
I was surprised to discover that the three architects shown
here, Hugh Cumming, Raymond Vonderlehr, and Taliaferro
Clark--
they had all been UVA medical graduates.
And with Joan's help, I eventually
marshalled the evidence for this article, which
I did with my then student Gregory Dorr, which attributed
some of the results of Tuskegee and certainly
a lot of its longevity to the training
that these men had in racial medicine in public health
and in eugenics here at UVA.
The spring after that symposium Joan
asked me to give a lecture on the history of Health
Sciences on eugenics, and so I did,
following a screening of the Lynchburg story,
a film that documented eugenical sterilization here in Virginia.
And Joan later invited me to present
at a meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archivist
Conference, a group that I knew nothing of at the time.
But there I met an archivist who suggested a couple of databases
and said maybe you should look at those for source materials.
And as a result, when I returned home,
just learning how to use the internet,
I was able to find a batch of records
that included this picture of Carrie
Buck and her mother, Emma, taken before the trial in 1924.
I'd been looking for a photo of Carrie Buck for 20 years
by then.
So this was a big day for me.
And when I showed it to Joan, she immediately
said, oh, you've got to do a paper for the history meeting.
What history meeting, I said.
She said the American Association
for the History of Medicine.
And so I did, and I presented this-- a paper and this picture
and began an involvement which has lasted ever since then.
In early 2002 Joan asked me to showcase the Buck story again
in her lecture series, and she used that occasion
to kick off an exhibit on eugenics that was displayed
in the medical library for a number of months
and subsequently became a web exhibit which you can still
find online.
Later in the semester on the 75th anniversary of the Buck
case, Joan came to join me over on Preston Avenue
at an event that marked the dedication of the Buck marker I
put up, which is now permanently located there
in front of Region 10.
And Governor Warner used that occasion
to make Virginia the first state to apologize
to the victims of sterilizations.
So it should be obvious that Joan
was a key player in focusing attention
on the history of eugenics, and I personally have a great deal
to thank her for.
But she also showcased the historical work of others.
UVA Grad Gregory Dorr from the history department here also
presented at the History of Health Sciences Lecture
on Virginia eugenics, and his dissertation--
later this book--
highlighted a number of prominent UVA grads and members
of the faculty who were active in the 20th century movement.
Prominent among them Harvey Jordan,
the person for whom this building was originally named.
And you might ask, as students usually
do, well, how did he get here?
And the answer is relatively straightforward.
Dr. Alderman, the first president of UVA,
following the German model that had been transplanted to Johns
Hopkins, took it upon himself to raise UVA
into the rank of elite universities.
And he started by looking for young scholars.
He started by looking for people who are doing research
and who are publishing and who had a national profile,
and he hired Dr. Harvey Earnest Jordan
because he was exactly one of those people.
He came here in 1907 directly from summer study of the Cold
Spring Harbor Laboratory, the home of the eugenics record
office.
Jordan was internationally known.
He give papers at conferences such as the First International
Congress of Eugenics, and his articles
were published in those proceedings.
He was also very interested in embedding eugenics
in the medical curriculum, as Greg Dorr has documented.
And he was very successful.
He was particularly interested in studying STDs
as a disgenic influence.
More on that later.
And he took his place among the most prominent scholars
of eugenics in the country.
He was around like-minded people.
Another important member of the faculty at one time
was John Powell, composer, pianist,
really important musician in the 1920s.
But another part of his contribution to American life
had little to do with music, and that
was the foundation of this group, the Anglo-Saxon Clubs
of America, who sponsored and advocated the 1924 Racial
Integrity Act that prohibited marriage between whites
and all other races.
A bit more on that later, too.
One of the first chapters of that organization
was here at UVA, and this document,
which is its constitution, called
for the maintenance of Anglo-Saxon institutions
and ideals, the wise limitation of immigration,
and the complete exclusion of unassimilable immigrants,
the principles of honor and fair play in all relations of life,
and the supremacy of the white race
in the United States of America.
Powell wrote other things such as this track which
amplified fears of intermarriage when
Virginia's Native American population interbred
with people who had been from families formerly enslaved.
Powell wrote editorials, one called Is America
to Become a Negroid Nation?
which he published in the Richmond Times Dispatch.
And he said it is not enough to segregate
the Negro on railway cars and streetcars and schools
and theaters.
It is not enough to restrict his exercise of the franchise
as long as the possibility remains
of the absorption of Negro blood into our white population.
And he went on to say that it was
the development of eugenical science
that paved the way for this new law that would be passed.
Powell was praised for his work in passing
that act and others described him
for his distinct and distinguished service
to the Anglo-Saxon race that would, they said,
ensure him a place in history.
Powell was here at the same time as Jordan,
as was Dr. Robert Bennett Bean.
Bean took his time learning and becoming
known as a racially focused physical anthropologist.
He too thought that this is what ought
to be taught in every medical school,
and he wrote an article to that effect that was published
in Science magazine in 1921.
He too was concerned about interracial marriage
and the degradation of the white race,
and he continued to pay attention
to what was known as race suicide
in most famous book, The Races of Man:
Differentiation and Dispersal, which was published while he
was here on the faculty.
In it he emphasized specific distinguishing characteristics
of different racial groups.
He thought whites had large brains,
were active, physically vivacious,
had strong ambitions and passions and idealism.
He also thought that their industry was incessant
and elaborate.
In contrast, he described blacks as people
who had a strong and somewhat irrational egoism,
but whose worst diseases came from sexual promiscuity
and contact with the white race.
Dr. Bean is generally known as one
of the fathers of scientific racism in America.
Another faculty member whose time
overlapped with all the people I've mentioned
was, of course, Biologist Ivey Forman Lewis,
who later became dean of the college.
He came to UVA in 1915, and in his nearly 40 years here
he left a record as a staunch hereditarian, a convinced
eugenicist, and a proponent of white racial purity.
This is what Greg Booher has to say in his book
Segregation Science about Dr. Lewis.
In his professional swan song performed in 1951
on a national stage at the annual convention
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
Lewis incited a tremendous controversy.
His talk called Biological Principles and National Policy
hammered eugenical themes, outraged listeners, and caused
the AAAS to break precedent and refused
to publish his speech in its flagship journal Science.
Lewis had argued that those who contribute least
to the general welfare have the largest families and selection
of the worst rather than the best as parents
of the next generation flies in the face of biological laws.
Now, that's not a pretty picture,
and the things that I have pointed out to you
you might say were unusual, unique, and particularly
bothersome, but I have to remind you
that having spent this time talking about UVA faculty
members who were entrenched in the eugenics movement
and having reminded you that Joan Klein was
a key person in making sure that the history was
available for this community, I do not
want to leave you with the false impression
that UVA was somehow an anomaly in its engagement
on this topic.
What I have presented only scratches the surface
of how common such scholars were in colleges and universities
at the time.
The survey of colleges in 1920 showed more than 300
who taught eugenics as part of the curriculum.
I'm convinced if you did a survey today and went back
to the records that number would probably double.
We just didn't have the surveys that were as good back then.
It is certainly true that Virginia and this university
provided national leadership in the ranks of eugenics,
but what happened here also happened around the country
at many elite universities.
And here are just a few examples.
There's Charles W. Eliot, the famous president of Harvard
University, known for his-- what is it,
five-foot bookshelf of wisdom.
He was one of the strongest proponents of the Immigration
Restriction Act.
Irving Fischer, first PhD in political science at Yale,
a strong proponent not only of immigration restriction
but also sterilization, a member of the scientific board
of directors of the Eugenics Record Office.
David Starr Jordan founded--
was one of the founders of the very
first eugenic professional organization in America
around 1905.
He was the first president of Stanford University.
Victor Vaughan, a giant in public health,
dean of the University of Michigan Medical School,
also strong in this field.
And at the bottom, Edward Thorndike, the psychologist who
did so much to make sure that mental measurement testing
became part of the American educational landscape.
And then finally, William Welch, the grandfather-- the godfather
of medical education, the president of the American
Public Health Association, Mr. Who's
Who on every letterhead of every organization you can imagine.
He too was on the first scientific board of directors
for the Eugenics Record Office.
So the point is all of these men provided
a public face for the eugenics movement on American campuses
from about 1905 until at least World War II,
and all of these universities, just like UVA,
were proud of the courses, the research, and the publications
in eugenics that their faculty produced.
This set of ideas, complex set of ideas
was part of the mainstream of medicine and science
for a very significant time during the 20th century.
And in the broader population, these ideas,
both the hopeful ones, the aspirational ones,
as well as the hateful ones and the fearful ones,
captured the attention of an enormous group
of prominent, noteworthy people who at one time or another,
in different forms and for widely divergent reasons,
embraced the ideas that were part
of the so-called eugenic ideal.
Now, you might ask, so what?
Why should we care?
Well, as a historian and as a lawyer,
I care because the ideas that we associate with eugenics
were imprinted on hundreds of American laws
that lasted in some cases for an entire century.
Here's a list of just five categories
laws passed in the name of eugenics,
and I'm going to walk through each one of those.
The first ones starting with Connecticut in 1895
were passed to prevent marriages by people who were disabled.
Connecticut law specifically prohibited marriage
by anyone who was diagnosed with epilepsy.
And one of the first proposals of the official eugenics
committee would have extended those laws
to prohibit the blind from marrying.
This proposal came from W. M. Hayes, the Assistant Secretary
of Agriculture under Teddy Roosevelt
and a member of the American Breeders Association.
Others wanted to battle the spread of STDs.
Ministers advocated for eugenics screenings
before marriage as early as 1905.
One reason for the clergy support
was that there was a long and rich mythology
about sexual misbehavior and heredity
in every manner of disability, from this man's
premature decline caused by syphilis to his son's blindness
and his daughter's withered limb were bundled together
as if all of a piece, results of immoral living,
evidence of an intergenerational curse
that cascaded through families from parents
to children as part of an hereditary legacy.
Even baseball player turned evangelist Billy Sunday
pushed eugenic themes, and one of his most famous sermons
playing to packed crowds, hammering away
at the dangers of sexual excess.
The sermon was called The Chickens Come Home to Roost,
and it invoked the famous Jukes family,
that legendary problem family of criminals and ne'er
do wells marked by immorality and feeble mindedness,
and of the two people who started that family he bemoaned
the power of one godforsaken vicious, corrupt man
and woman to breed and propagate and damn the whole world
by their offspring.
The public health implications of STDs were also obvious.
The relationship between having healthy babies--
remember, eugenics means well born--
and the dangers of so-called venereal diseases
led many to attempt to educate people
about the careful choice of marriage mates.
The graphic in this publication, take off the hoodwink,
don't go blindly into marriage illustrates a pamphlet in 1924
urging couples to be more aware of the health,
including the eugenic health, of prospective spouses.
Beginning in about 1910, most of the states in the country
passed public health laws to prevent marriage between people
with STDs, and those laws were uniformly known
as the Eugenic Marriage Laws.
Among the first states and the one
that was the most controversial was Wisconsin.
That law was eventually tested in court,
and as you can see from this headline,
the court found in 1914 that the eugenic law was valid.
It, of course, was legislation that
would guard innocent women and their even more
innocent babies.
Another kind of marriage restriction law
emphasized the means of preventing the purportedly
harmful mixture between races.
These laws called The Anti-miscegenation Laws were
in place in more than 20 states, and many of them
relied on the arguments of this man, Madison Grant,
known as the father of racial anthropology, who
in 1916 published his famous and wildly successful
book, The Passing of the Great Race
or The Racial Basis of European History.
Grant gave the eugenics movement a new set
of arguments to support existing restrictions on marriage,
and he warned that racial mixing was one avenue down
the slope toward so-called racial suicide
and the eventual disappearance of white civilization.
In his book he provided a formula which we still
refer to today to determine who should be
able to claim a white heritage.
"The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian;
the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro.
The children of mixed marriages between contrasted races
belong to the lower type."
That is the formula which became known as Grantism,
and it's the formula that is built into Virginia's 1924
Racial Integrity Act, which was passed as a public health
measure shown here on the cover of the Virginia Health Bulletin
that year.
And it was thought to present the spread of what
were thought to be deficiencies that
would pollute the white race via contact
with other inferior races.
So this is a very clear example of the racial side
of eugenics law.
Grant's thinking was also critical in another piece
of eugenic legislation, the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act,
curiously known as the Johnson Reed Act or the National Quotas
Act.
Politicians like Calvin Coolidge had read Grant,
and this is what he said.
"Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people
will not mix or blend.
Nordics propagate themselves successfully.
With other races, the outcome shows
deterioration on both sides.
Quality of mind and body suggests
that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity
to a nation as immigration law."
And so beginning in the 1880s American laws
became more and more harsh with various tests
meant to sort out the useful immigrants from those
who were thought not fit for American Life.
Here recently landed immigrants or travelers are lined up
in the Great Hall of Ellis Island
for processing, literally being marked with a piece of chalk
so they can be screened for insanity and other defects.
Eventually they move on to be tested
for physical problems such as trachoma of the eye,
and then they're given IQ tests to screen out
the mentally suspect.
The man shown in this picture is a member of the Public Health
Service Corps.
His name is Howard Knox, and he wrote about his experience,
giving IQ tests and articles like this, "How the Public
Health Service Prevents Contamination
of our Racial Stock by Turning Back Feeble-Minded Immigrants."
So you can see that this is part not only of public sentiment
but certainly public policy and law.
This law is a model, it turns out, for others.
This particular quotation is taken
from some of the comments made in his book Mein Kampf, which
Hitler wrote while he was languishing in prison,
and he says then, at present there exists one state which
manifests at least some modest attempts to show a better
appreciation of how things ought to be done.
It is not our model German Republic,
it's the US of A, which is making efforts
to conform at least partly to the counsels of common sense.
By refusing immigrants to enter there if
they are in a bad state of health.
By excluding certain races from the right
to become naturalized, they have begun
to introduce principles similar to those on which we wish
to ground the people's state.
That he said, of course, before he came to power.
Support for immigration restriction, for sterilization,
for marriage restriction, for all kinds
of racially based restrictions and quotas
were meant to address the demise of the majority Anglo-Saxons
whose decrease would mark, as Madison Grant said,
the passing of a great race.
And this widespread anxiety was popularly
known as race suicide was on display, especially
between the two world wars.
The last law I want to talk about
is the one I probably spent the most time on,
and that's the eugenic sterilization laws.
And to introduce that topic, I've
taken a paragraph from the Scientific American
in February of 1875.
The date is important because it shows that even before the word
eugenics exists, there is a movement
to apply principles that the eugenicists would glom onto.
This is an article called "The Knife Remedy."
We can only regard it as an illustration of the power
of popular prejudice.
The people are ready to hold up their hands
in horror at the most guarded suggestion of the advisability
of making it impossible for lusty savages
to inflict upon the community a brood of ill-balanced organisms
destined to swell the ranks of vice and crime.
Yet society may be driven to adopt
just such radical measures in self-defense.
So the knife remedy, as they call it,
is recommended even in a scientific publication
before the formal ideas of eugenics take place.
So the point is policies that are made into law don't really
require us to use that word, but eugenics
does give those who would argue for sterilization
an entire ideology on which to found public policy.
Now, in 30-odd years of talking about these cases,
I think I can distill what I know into a short statement.
The arguments in favor of eugenics were about two things.
They were about sex almost always,
and they were about money always.
Let me show you what I mean by that.
The state of Alabama went to pass
one of the last sterilization laws in the 1930s,
and they proposed a bill.
I'll read you what that bill says.
This was a bill in 1935 to sterilize any sexual pervert,
sadist, homosexualist, masochist, sodomist,
or any other grave form of sexual perversion
or any prisoner who has twice been convicted
of rape or thrice imprisoned for any offense
or any mental deficient of any grade who habitually
and constantly is dependent upon public relief
or supported by charity.
If you look at all of the sterilization laws that
were passed between 1907 in Indiana and 1937 in Georgia,
you will find that they all include,
from different eras and different places,
the categories enumerated in the bill that I just quoted from.
They all focus on what was at the time
considered unconventional sexuality,
disability of various types.
Either in the way they were described at the time
or in the very language they use,
they include attention to the social cost generated by people
who embody those behaviors.
So it is always to me at some level about sex and money,
and it's often also about people living
on the margins of society because of their race
or their ethnicity or their disability.
People who violated social norms in the realm of sexuality
were defined as deviant and/or criminals.
They filled the jails, the poor houses, the asylums,
and other institutions that were paid for with tax dollars.
Wiping out that behavior or the possibility of children
who would inherit such behavioral propensities
and those costs were a big part of the motive
force behind eugenical sterilization laws.
And so the first one is passed in 1907
with the help of Dr. Henry Sharp here,
the physician at the Indiana reformatory
whose great concern was masturbation in the prisons.
Sterilize those people, we won't have any more prisoners.
They have this propensity.
We can cut it out of them.
And so his law was entitled an act
to prevent procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots,
imbeciles, and rapists.
And the preamble said, heredity plays a most important part
in the transmission of crime, idiocy, and imbecility.
That idea was taken forward by other people,
most noteworthy was the Model Law
that was written by this man Harry Laughlin in 1914,
seven years later after the Indiana law.
And in his model sterilization law,
Laughlin said, we've got to get rid of the socially inadequate
classes.
The socially inadequate people were
those like the feeble-minded, the insane, the criminalistic,
the inebriate, the epileptic, the diseased, the blind,
the deaf, the deformed, the dependent, orphans,
ne'er do wells, tramps, the homeless, and paupers.
Laughlin covered the waterfront.
Laughlin got a chance to speak to this issue
legally when he appeared as a witness
by deposition in the famous case of Buck vs. Bell.
Here's Carrie Buck, the picture I showed you earlier,
on the left, her mother, Emma, on the right.
Carrie was 17 at the time when she
was committed to the Virginia Colony
for the Epileptic and Feeble-Minded.
She met her mother, who had been declared a moral degenerate
because she was suspected of being a prostitute.
Her mother had been declared feeble-minded and unable
to take care of herself.
Carrie was also called feeble-minded
because only three months before her arrival she had a baby,
and the problem was she wasn't married.
So she too was called a moral degenerate.
The baby shown here in a companion picture taken
the same day was examined by doctors and other experts
and called not normal, not quite right,
which made the Buck family the perfect example of what
Virginia's brand new 1924 Sterilization
Act had been meant to address.
Problem families suffering from mental and moral defects,
intergenerational poverty, criminality, sexual excess,
and probably most importantly a tendency
to consume more than their small share of tax support
and services.
That was what the eugenics law was about.
It was meant over time to eliminate
all those conditions as well as the people who carried them.
So Carrie was the person picked to test the law.
The person who wrote the law was this man Aubrey Strode,
who drafted the statute and then later defended
it all the way through the Supreme Court.
Strode, of course, is the person who
was a graduate-- was a student here at UVA
and also a law student.
And it's his papers over at Alderman Library
that first got me interested in this whole matter.
In the case that Strode brought against Carrie Buck,
he said that these things-- poverty, disease,
inappropriate sexuality-- could be wiped out by surgery.
And he showed the Buck family history.
It's been captured after the fact in this slide.
He showed this in court.
He said, we have hereditary world degeneracy, illicit sex,
mental defect that reverberates through three generations
of the Buck family.
The case was decided several years later in 1927,
and the opinion was written infamously by Justice--
then Senior Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said,
it is better for all the world, instead
of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime
or let them starve for their imbecility,
society can prevent those who are
manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.
And in one of the great non-sequiturs of Supreme Court
opinions, he then reached for precedent
and found one in the smallpox vaccination
case of several years earlier and said,
the principle that sustains compulsory vaccination
is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes.
He described the Buck family again with their three
generations of defect and said, three generations of imbeciles
are enough.
Now, Carrie Buck for herself went on
to live another 63 years, and all her life she was poor.
And when she died, she and her family that survived still
carried the shame of the Holmes' opinion.
Here she is a few weeks before she died.
When I met her in 1983, she confirmed to me
that she was pregnant in 1923 not because
of her moral failings but because she had been raped,
and she died in this hospital.
Her daughter, Vivian, left her own records,
such as this second grade honorable record
over from the Venerable School showing that she was not
feeble-minded after all.
And there were other records, probably
the most distressing, if you're a lawyer,
are the ones from Irving Whitehead, the man who
was appointed and paid very well to represent Carrie Buck
but, in fact, betrayed his client
and defrauded the court, leaving the record
as a fraud and a sham.
We also didn't learn until years later
that Harry Laughlin, the man who wrote the Model Law
and then testified against Carrie Buck,
had received an honorary degree from the Nazis
in 1936 for his work in what they
called the science of racial cleansing.
So we're left with the Buck case,
the shame of the states, 8,300 or so sterilized in Virginia,
some 60,000, 65,000-- who knows how
many-- sterilized nationally under eugenic sterilization
laws.
And by the time the last state had
passed a law, the practice had, of course,
spilled over into Europe.
Another 14 places passed laws.
But, of course, the Nazi law was the most important one
because it was used to sterilize some 400,000 to 500,000 people,
and we also know that the Nazis practiced
eugenic euthanasia of those with mental impairments
and redefined eugenic exclusion to include genocide.
So if we look back at the sterilization laws,
we can see how they covered all the problematic groups,
the sexually deviant, criminals, the feeble-mindedness--
people with feeble-mindedness who
were blamed for every manner of social ill
and the costs of the juvenile court or the infirmary
and the workhouse and the police,
and of course, the very expensive
institutionalized mentally ill.
These are headlines from New York,
Wisconsin, Indiana, and Arizona, and the story
is pretty much the same wherever you go.
Taking care of disabled people is expensive.
The economic motive is never far from the surface.
Better breeding through tax cuts was a common eugenic mantra.
So where are we today?
Well, we have lots of new technologies
and they are exciting technologies,
and they are technologies that those of us who
have the privilege of working in universities
get to argue about and get to question
on all kinds of grounds, ethical, political,
and otherwise.
But I put those off to the side for a moment
because as important as they are and as important as it
is for us to argue about them, they're
not what I'm worried about.
When people ask me what eugenics is still here
and what I should worry about, I'm not
worried about cloning so much.
I'm really not worried about the sensational and sometimes
irresponsible speculations that fill
the popular press about the potentially genetic basis
for crime or even the potential for somebody's
idea of super babies and a hypothetically created master
race.
As I said, it's important to debate the ethical impact
of all those technologies.
But what concerns me that we spend so much time arguing over
whether we should call those things eugenics.
My concerns about eugenics in the future
is not about new technologies.
It's about old attitudes, very old attitudes,
some very old-fashioned bigotry that is still
focused on the least powerful people in our society
and the attempts to blame them for all of our problems.
If we focus on those attitudes, we
would realize that they were the most important foundation
for the practices that we condemn as the worst
result of eugenic thinking now.
So again, if you ask me what is the contemporary relevance
of eugenics, this is my answer.
We have seen too often lately--
we have seen public displays of unabashed contempt
for the disabled.
We have seen a chorus of hate focused on people who violate
conventional sexual norms.
We hear daily about the need to eradicate social welfare
programs that are aimed at addressing crime or poverty
or disease.
And the nation's attention is now focused
on an unvarnished campaign to ramp up
the rhetoric of decay and fear and hate
to justify closing the borders against people
whose presence would threaten the white demographic balance.
We also hear the old mantra, all of this
has to be done to make us safe in future generations
and to lower our taxes today.
Race suicide hangs in the balance.
So because all these strains of thought
remain a part of our current political landscape,
I still think that eugenics continues
to be worth our attention as a field of historical study.
Thank you.
I'll take questions now.
[APPLAUSE]
MARCIA DAY CHILDRESS: That was quite a trip
to the late 19th and 20th centuries.
And for our audience now, there's plenty of time
for us to entertain your questions and comments.
When I bring you the mic, please identify yourself.
MICHAEL SWANBERG: My name is Michael Swanberg.
I'm from the School of Nursing.
And first I'd like to thank you for acknowledging Joan Klein.
She was so important to so many of us in our work,
and through Joan Klein I first became familiar with Gregory
Michael Dorr's work.
And you talked about attitude.
What was the attitude of the university
to Gregory Dorr's work?
PAUL LOMBARDO: That's a hard question
because I'm not sure I know the answer.
He was a PhD graduate.
His work, while he was still a student, won national prizes.
I know his teachers were proud of that.
I know the people on the dissertation committee,
along with me, were proud of what he did.
I think that these are topics that are always
discomforting in an institutional sense
because they're not fun.
They're just not fun things to talk about.
I mean, I go and talk places, and they say,
well, we've got so-and-so who's going
to talk about the wonderful new technology
and we've got so-and-so who's going
to talk about other issues, and then Lombardo's the downer.
And I understand what they say.
These are not happy stories.
But as I think I said earlier this morning--
and I know I said this to Greg, but history is not
a happy greeting card from the past
with nothing but good news.
And he did good history.
I know the historians here were proud of him.
There were probably people who didn't like what he said,
but that wouldn't be unusual in any field.
JEFF WEISS: Jeff Weiss, retired physician.
Some of you may have seen that the current issue of National
Geographic talks about accelerated evolution
of the human, and as I read, it seemed
to be kind of a thinly veiled promotion of some
of the concepts of eugenics.
My question for you is, does--
is there still evidence in your mind
that there are academic supporters of eugenics
that exist in the current time frame?
PAUL LOMBARDO: Well, the hard part about that question
is it focuses me to ask another question, which is, what do you
mean by eugenics?
Because it's such a broad field.
And one of the things I've tried to do
is to point out that it's a mistake for us to vilify people
and say, oh, they were involved with eugenics because it's
almost everyone, and that's why I put up the slide
with the list of people.
You can find people on that slide--
there are over 30 of them--
who at some time said something good about eugenics.
You can find people from every field of life.
You can find Presidents.
You can find Nobel Prize winners.
You can find lots of physicians and lawyers and scientists.
Each one of whom is revered in their field one
way or the other.
So I think when you ask me, is there something that's going on
in the Academy having to do with eugenics,
the answer is almost certainly yes.
What I am interested in and what I hope I've focused on today
is the use of science as a panacea for social problems
and the promise that we can figure it out scientifically.
Just leave us alone, we'll take care of this part,
and we will make those scientific insights
into public policy.
If I've said anything more than once in my career--
and I've said most things 100 times--
it is that is a mistake.
It is a mistake to think that we can use science
to fix our social problems in the absence of a re-examination
or reflection on the kind of attitudes
that I was talking about this morning.
I've had academic food fights with people
at different institutions about what eugenics means
or whether or not they represented something
that I thought looked an awful lot like the old eugenics.
If you're really interested in this stuff
and you're having a problem with insomnia,
I've got a 100-page article out there
about the Pioneer Fund that goes through this stuff
in great and dreary detail.
But I don't think that's necessary.
I think that, again, you don't have to be a scientist
or even-- you certainly don't have
to be an academic to understand that what
drives the most repressive parts of this agenda and was
part of our law is a set of attitudes
which doesn't go away.
JOHN DAVIS: My name is John Davis.
I used to work here.
I thought that was a great review of bringing out
how widespread eugenics-- how it was
supported throughout this country
and the great institutions.
Harvard was a real leader.
Many of the churches were very strongly behind it
because they took care of the disabled and the poor.
I want to bring up something that you haven't
mentioned, which is abortion.
And I wonder what you think about abortion
on choices such as sex or color of eyes
or some other mild defect or anything
that is part of our life today and fully accepted
by the majority of our people.
I think there's some real moral questions here.
And I'd like to know what your thoughts might be.
PAUL LOMBARDO: The very first course
that I took that had anything to do with biomedical ethics
was actually in this building, and Jim Childress
was running it.
And he had just spent some time in Washington.
As I recall, he said to us, we used to have lunch every day
up at the Kennedy Center, and the Kennedy Center luncheons
were wonderful because we had all these great scholars.
But there was one topic we never talked about,
and that was abortion.
I think I remember you saying that, Jim.
And the point was it was an inflammatory topic that
was hard to get through without people getting very upset.
Obviously it still is today.
I have concentrated a fair amount of effort
in the last two years at going back in granular detail
and reading in the popular press, as well
as professional journals, what people thought about eugenics,
what people thought about birth control,
and what they thought about abortion, say, in 1916.
And the answer that I have is, most of them
thought they could find something
good to say about eugenics.
It would be hard to know what it was unless you
ask them further questions.
Many people in the eugenics movement
were split on the question of birth control.
Some said it was a bad idea.
Teddy Roosevelt went ballistic every time you mentioned it.
He said, oh, that's race suicide.
All those girls going to Harvard should
be out there having babies.
We can't have that, and a long, long literature on that.
But then there were people on the other side,
also part of the movement, who said,
we think this is a good idea.
It's not about quantity.
It's about quality.
We should be selective.
On the question of abortion, there
is almost universal silence because in 1916
either because people didn't talk about such things--
although they did talk about it in the newspapers
when someone died.
There was no debate about eugenics and abortion.
So when people ask me questions about eugenics and abortion,
I say, as a historian, there was nobody
in the eugenics movement who ever came out publicly
in favor of abortion.
So it's fine for us to have the debates today,
and obviously they will go on regardless of what I say.
But the abortion debate and eugenics
are topics which don't fit the historical frame that I look at
at all, and I would rather that we argue about abortion
and use other words because the other words are not so
freighted with pictures of Hitler and swastikas.
PRESTON REYNOLDS: Hi.
I'm Preston Reynolds.
It's a real honor to meet you and listen to this talk.
I'm a physician.
I'm also very professionally trained as an historian,
and I teach a course on grounds on race,
health disparities in the history of African-Americans
in the health professions.
And was invited to serve on the President's
Commission on Slavery in the university and was invited--
part of a newly created course on slavery
and its legacy at UVA to teach a lecture on eugenics
and its impact here on grounds.
And I approached that lecture as a historian,
coming from my other course, thinking,
well, I knew about race science and then read
Gregory Dorr's book and your material
and was really impacted by what I learned.
That lecture reverberated a lot.
I ended up meeting with President Sullivan, gave her
a copy of Gregory Dorr's book, talked with Dr. Rick Shannon.
And a lot of that scholarship that you pioneered
and published really was instrumental in the renaming
of Jordan Hall in honor of Vivian Penn.
So I really want to thank you and let
you know that the work that you did,
while it was controversial, actually I think
is contributing to a much larger conversation.
I've been invited to give that same lecture
now five times to undergraduate courses
and to the medical students.
And people are saying, why aren't we
talking about this more and the impact
it continues to have in the conversations or the lack
of conversations here on ground.
So I hope your lecture today is part of that ongoing need
to open up this topic for further exploration
and to make sure that we right the wrongs of what's
happened in the past.
So thank you.
PAUL LOMBARDO: Well, thank you for that comment.
Obviously I'm flattered, but I should say, though,
that we had--
there was a course that was given usually--
it was held in one of the pavilions, sometimes
the rotunda, in the '90s and early 2000s on the history
of the university.
And every year that I can remember for about 10 years
somebody in the history department
asked me come over and give a lecture on eugenics.
So there wasn't any--
nobody was shying away from it.
It was out there, and people were talking about it.
And I agree with you that this is the sort of thing
that if one thing has been constant in my life,
it's been giving talks like this and then somebody
coming up to me--
usually someone who is as old or older than me
and then someone who was in high school and both of them
said the same thing, why did nobody ever tell me about this?
So it's obvious that it bears repeating.
Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
I completely echo all of the wonderful things,
and it's an honor to be here in your lecture today.
My name is Caitlin Spock.
I'm a doctoral student in the School of Nursing,
and I've done a lot of personal investigation for coursework
in the School of Nursing on nursing's role in eugenics,
particularly in the Buck v. Bell case.
What is your narrative or argument as to why there
isn't--
there aren't stories of nurses involved in eugenics?
We hear a lot about physician involvement
and physician-driven medicine, and knowing the essential role
that nurses play in that patient care,
where are the nursing stories?
PAUL LOMBARDO: You probably know better than I
because there are some missing characters in all
these stories.
Nurses are one group missing.
And it's not because they weren't there
because we know they were there.
We know they were there, as nurses have always
been in health care, standing side
by side with whoever was doing the surgery, whoever was doing
the diagnosis, et cetera.
So it's always been a challenge to me
to find the voice of nurses.
I never did.
You're in a better position to do that now,
and I think probably know where the sources are.
So good luck.
MARCIA DAY CHILDRESS: Wasn't there a play
done about Nurse Rivers with the Tuskegee?
PAUL LOMBARDO: Yes, yes, Miss Evers' Boys.
MARCIA DAY CHILDRESS: Right, right.
And that nurse died just a few years ago,
but I think lived to see the apology.
Other comments and questions?
So again, taking things, as Joan often wanted to do,
why does this matter to us today and tomorrow?
You made some closing remarks that
suggested that we be a little more tuned into the talk,
the rhetoric, and the underlying assumptions
in our national and international scene today.
Any thoughts you have about ways that we might best
help the public conversation be a more reasonable one
and perhaps embrace some attitudes
that are not these historic ones you've talked about?
PAUL LOMBARDO: Yeah, I think that--
I gave a talk about this not too long ago,
and someone in the crowd asked me
if I was trying to make a political point.
And what I said to them was yeah,
I'm always trying to make a political point.
But actually the material that I read at that talk
was that something I'd written 10 years ago.
Most of what I said today--
the pictures are new.
But most of what I said today was
stuff that is in articles that are a decade or more old.
When I wrote my book on the Buck case, it came out in 2008,
and there were five or six pending controversies,
if not pieces of legislation, that
had been proposed-- one right here in Virginia-- to sterilize
people.
So it's not like we miss examples.
It's not like there aren't enough out there.
It's not like we have to focus on any person as the embodiment
of these problems.
It does seem to me that there are some things that
are relatively straightforward.
We don't have to use the word eugenics when
we talk about the level of contempt
that we dredge up to blame people with because
of their station in life.
And if we've learned anything over the 250
years of this experiment, we probably
should have learned that finding scapegoats and making
them the brunt of our fears always has a bad end.
MARCIA DAY CHILDRESS: Does anyone
have a closing comment or question?
AUDIENCE: Does the topic of eugenics
come up in conversations about capital punishment?
PAUL LOMBARDO: It does, yes.
It does because the earliest arguments for eugenics
relied on two things.
One was segregation, which Greg Dorr has spelled out
so well in his book, and the other was sterilization.
Imprison was thought to be the ideal segregation.
You lock people up, they can't have children.
So that's an area that you can think about.
When you execute people, they certainly can't have children.
And in the case of so-called eugenic euthanasia,
that's what the Nazis did.
Whether or not that rule applies in 21st century America,
whether we should use eugenics to talk about capital
punishment, again to me I don't really
care to argue about what the Nazis did
and whether we should call it eugenics.
I think that if you have an argument of capital punishment,
you should make it on moral grounds.
You don't even need the word.
MARCIA DAY CHILDRESS: So I'd like
to thank Paul Lombardo for this enlightening lecture
and some things to think about going forward certainly.
I'll also remind you this is the last Medical Center
Hour of the spring semester of this academic year.
We will resume in early September,
and we hope that you'll be back with us.
In the meantime, I'd like to thank all of you
for your patronage and your participation
through this year.
It's been a wonderful year-long conversation,
and we anticipate more of the same next year.
So thank you all for being here, and again please join me
in thanking Paul Lombardo.
[APPLAUSE]