Imbeciles

by Adam Cohen

  Among the most prominent of the University of Virginia eugenicists was Harvey Ernest Jordan, who would go on to become dean of the medical school. Jordan, who had extensive ties to eugenics groups nationwide, helped organize Virginia scientists and laypeople to promote eugenic policies, including sterilization. Forced sterilization was, Jordan believed, necessary “for the protection of society against distressing economic and moral burdens and racial decay.”

  Ivey Foreman Lewis, a professor of biology who rose to become a top university administrator, was one of the nation’s most influential eugenics educators. Starting in 1915, he taught generations of Virginians biological science from a eugenic perspective. In his course Biology C1: Evolution and Heredity, Lewis lectured his students: “In the 20th century an abundance of experimental evidence proves that the large part ascribed to environment was mostly imaginary and that the capacity and natural bent of an individual are due to heredity.”

  Not surprisingly, “scientific racism” was a central part of the university’s eugenics instruction. Lewis, who admired Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, was outspoken on the issue of immigration. The idea of the melting pot was “simply and perilously false,” he said, and the nation’s openness to foreigners was endangering the “purity of the white race.” In some parts of the university, the racial “science” was cruder. Robert Bennett Bean, who came to the school as an anatomy professor in 1916, researched the biology of race and propounded the idea that differences in brain size made whites and blacks “fundamentally opposite extremes in evolution.”

  The University of Virginia’s eugenic teachings were influential because its graduates played such an important role in the state. Many served in the legislature and on the courts, and they carried their educations with them. One alumnus, Lemuel Smith of Charlottesville, voted for both the sterilization and racial purity laws as a state legislator; thirty years later, as a justice on the state’s highest court, he voted to annul a “miscegeneous” marriage between a white woman and a Chinese man.

  The university’s faculty became an important force in support of eugenics in the state, the nation, and even the world. Harvey Ernest Jordan attended the First International Eugenics Congress in London in 1912 and presented a paper, “The Place of Eugenics in the Medical Curriculum.” Robert Bennett Bean would become a national leader in racist eugenics, inspiring generations of white supremacist scientists with his research on subjects like, as the title of one of his papers expressed it, “Some Racial Peculiarities of the Negro Brain.”

  Another center of support for eugenics in Virginia, as in other states, was the charitable community. In Virginia, the leader in this sector was Joseph Mastin, a Methodist minister who headed the state’s Board of Charities and Corrections. The legislature created the board in 1908 to be Virginia’s first government-funded social welfare system. When Mastin was appointed, he made clear he was interested not only in helping Virginia’s disadvantaged but also in using biological tools to reduce their number.

  One of Mastin’s first acts in office was to survey the scope of the “problem.” He enlisted doctors across the state to help him determine the number of “epileptics, idiots, feeble-minded, and cripple children.” Mastin issued reports that emphasized the size of this population, and he used his platform to argue that these disabilities had hereditary origins. “The child of normal parents may be feeble-minded, but it is impossible for the children of feeble-minded to be mentally normal,” he wrote.

  Mastin propounded the common eugenic refrain about the “differential fecundity” of the feebleminded: they reproduced at a dangerous rate, he advised in one report—“about twice as rapidly as normal stock.” Mastin called on Virginia to protect itself from what he saw as a looming threat. He advocated a law barring the feebleminded from marrying, as well as broader, unspecified legislation “for the prevention of the procreation of the feeble-minded.”

  Doctors were another sector of Virginia society that—as in other parts of the country—was particularly drawn to eugenics. In the early 1900s, physicians from across the state took to the pages of the Virginia Medical Semi-Monthly to argue that “defectives” should be barred from marrying. Dr. A. Einer, from Rural Retreat, a small town in the southwest part of the state, made the case in a 1905 article, “Medical Supervision of Matrimony.” He called on the state to create panels of doctors to conduct eugenic examinations of couples before they were granted marriage licenses. It was the only way, Dr. Einer insisted, to prevent unions that would produce “diseased and degenerate progeny” who would lead to “national degeneration.”

  Other Virginia doctors went further, arguing in favor of eugenic sterilization. Dr. H. W. Dew of Lynchburg was alarmed by the growing ranks of “feeble-minded women” who were “notoriously immoral.” They were prone to give birth out of wedlock, he warned, citing one feebleminded woman he said he knew who had “two illegitimate children by her own father.” Dr. Dew called for a program of “sterilization of the confirmed criminal and the mentally defective.”

  Dr. L. S. Foster of Richmond addressed a meeting of the Medical Society of Virginia about the threat posed by defective members of the population. Using case studies from state hospitals, he argued that feeblemindedness, syphilis, and immorality all had a hereditary basis. His answer was emphatic: “We must have a sterilization law.”

  Though there was as yet no law in Virginia authorizing eugenic sterilizations, doctors in the state had already begun performing them. The subjects were blacks and poor whites—people on the margins of society with little ability to resist. In 1908 Dr. Charles Carrington, a surgeon at the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond, told a National Prison Association conference that he was “unreservedly of the opinion that sterilization of our habitual criminals is a proper measure” and he mentioned having sterilized two black men. Using the crude racial imagery of the time, Dr. Carrington described one of his unfortunate subjects as “a debased little negro . . . a notoriously lusty, boastful Sodomist and masturbator.”

  Another physician, Dr. Bernard Barrow, reported in the Virginia Medical Semi-Monthly in 1910 that he had sterilized five mentally deficient black men. Dr. Barrow was blunt about the role his racist views played in his decisions to sterilize. “The negro” was “a savage race” that could not solve its own “social and sanitary problems,” he said. The responsibility lay with “the stronger race—the white man.” Dr. Barrow got around the absence of a law authorizing sterilization by asserting, improbable though it was, that the men had agreed to the procedure. He underscored that claim in the title of his article: “Vasectomy for the Defective Negro with His Consent.”

  During the first national wave of sterilization laws, there was an effort in Virginia to get a law passed. In 1909 Dr. Carrington told a meeting of the Medical Society of Virginia that he intended to push the legislature to adopt a eugenic sterilization statute. A few months after Dr. Carrington’s presentation, the Virginia legislature was considering a bill he had drawn up, based on the Indiana law, “to prevent procreation by confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists.”

  The Medical Society of Virginia endorsed the bill, and Dr. Carrington personally lobbied for it, offering his scientific expertise to legislators who knew little about the subject. Dr. Carrington’s bill failed, however, in the House of Delegates. The Virginia Medical Semi-Monthly reported that it ran into “much blind sentiment” in the lower house, among delegates who did not understand the issue. Dr. Carrington’s bill was not introduced again.

  The next push for a eugenic sterilization law in Virginia came from a group that had been active in campaigns in other states: the superintendents of the state mental hospitals. Dr. Priddy, the superintendent of the Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded, was a prominent member of the group of Virginia superintendents who emerged to promote eugenic sterilization—but he was not the first.

  That distinction belonged to Dr. Joseph S. De
Jarnette, the superintendent of Western State Hospital. Dr. DeJarnette came from a family whose Virginia roots traced back to colonial times. His father was a Confederate army captain, and he had an uncle who served in both the United States House of Representatives and its Confederate counterpart. His mother was a writer whose stories appeared in popular magazines, many of them written in a version of “Negro dialect.” Dr. DeJarnette had no doubt that his own high station in life was due, in large part, to what he considered to be his exalted lineage.

  Dr. DeJarnette graduated from the Medical College of Virginia in 1888 and then worked for a year at the Robert E. Lee Camp Confederate Soldiers’ Home, a retirement home and poorhouse for Civil War veterans. He then joined the staff of the Western Lunatic Asylum, which would later be renamed Western State Hospital, and quickly took to the work of ministering to the “lunatics,” developing a particular interest in the intersection of mental illness and criminality. A large and imposing man, Dr. DeJarnette was a stern authority figure at the asylum. He was also a moralist who opposed the use of alcohol. When he rose to superintendent, Dr. DeJarnette was a force for modernization and reform. He phased out the use of physical restraints and constantly sought out more modern approaches to therapy.

  Like many mental health reformers of his time, Dr. DeJarnette was drawn to the promise of eugenics. Writing in his hospital’s annual report in 1908, he argued that it was important for Virginia’s future to get rid of the “defectives and weaklings.” He urged the state legislature to enact a eugenic marriage law, as Connecticut and other states had.

  In the same annual report, he advocated eugenic sterilization. Dr. DeJarnette was the first state hospital superintendent in Virginia to endorse it, and he would later claim to have been the first person in Virginia to publicly call for it. He compared sterilization laws with laws against spitting that were passed to prevent the spread of tuberculosis—which had also once been ridiculed, but came to be widely accepted. As a doctor, he insisted that the case for sterilization was simple: “In the treatment of all diseases, it is an established fact that prevention is far better than cure.”

  Dr. DeJarnette became an outspoken advocate for eugenic sterilization legislation. He lectured to medical associations, spoke to elected officials and political groups, and made efforts to educate the general public. In his hospital’s 1911 annual report, he repeated his call for eugenic sterilization in even more emphatic terms: “Sterilization of all weaklings should be legally required,” he wrote.

  To make his case, Dr. DeJarnette even composed a pro-sterilization poem. He was enormously proud of “Mendel’s Law: A Plea for a Better Race of Men,” which he published in the Virginia Medical Monthly on three separate occasions. In it, Dr. DeJarnette urged:

  Oh, you wise men, take up the burden

  And make this your loudest creed,

  Sterilize the misfits promptly—

  All not fit to breed.

  Dr. DeJarnette may have been the first Virginia superintendent to endorse eugenic sterilization, but it was Dr. Priddy, the superintendent of the Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded, who ended up leading the campaign for it. Dr. Priddy would work with Dr. DeJarnette to get Virginia to enact a sterilization law, and then Dr. Priddy became the driving force behind the legal campaign to defend the law. There was no cause in his life that Dr. Priddy fought for more passionately—and he would pursue it, quite literally, until his dying breath.

  Three

  Albert Priddy

  In his first annual report as superintendent of the Colony for Epileptics, as it was then called, Dr. Albert Priddy enthusiastically endorsed the eugenics movement. In the report—the colony’s official annual statement to government officials, the medical profession, and the public at large—he was blunt about why he supported eugenics. He saw it as the best way to rid the world of the sort of patients he spent all of his days ministering to. Epileptics were, Dr. Priddy declared, among “the most pitiful, helpless, and troublesome of human beings.” Of all the known causes of epilepsy, he said, “that of bad heredity is the most potent.” He recommended marriage restrictions on epileptics to prevent them from increasing their kind.

  The next year, Dr. Priddy went further and used his annual report to endorse eugenic sterilization. He warned of an impending rapid increase in “epileptics and mental defectives.” It was time, he said, “to call the attention of our lawmakers to the consideration of legalized eugenics for the prevention of this growing blight on [Virginia’s] population.” Dr. Priddy once again urged restricting marriages of epileptics—as well as of the insane, the feebleminded, and “confirmed alcoholics.” This time, however, he also suggested permitting sterilization of inmates “in such cases as it is deemed proper.”

  Dr. Priddy returned frequently to the subject of eugenics. In his 1915 annual report, he warned that without “radical measures . . . to curb” the feebleminded from reproducing it would “be only a matter of time before the resulting pauperism and criminality” would “be a burden too heavy . . . to bear.” Until the state sterilized defective people, Dr. Priddy saw institutionalization as important to protect society. In a 1916 letter, he argued that segregating epileptics could prevent reproduction by “these afflicted and troublesome burdens on our population.”

  As much as Dr. Priddy supported segregation of defective people, he believed it was not an adequate response to the threat they posed. There were not enough institutions in Virginia to hold them all, in his view—and it was not likely there ever would be. Without a “great increase in tax rate,” he said, the state could not afford to institutionalize all the “anti-social women and girls” in the state who were likely to produce defective children.

  Dr. Priddy argued for a combination of segregation and sterilization, which he called the “clearing house” model. In this approach, young women with hereditary defects would be identified and sent to institutions like the colony. When they arrived, they would be given “educational, industrial and moral training.” Once they were properly instructed, the young women would be sterilized and then safely released into society again. By sterilizing and releasing many women, rather than holding a few women until their reproductive cycle ended, Dr. Priddy argued, his model would lead to many more women being sterilized, relieving the state of an “enormous financial burden.”

  There was a third superintendent who joined in Dr. Priddy and Dr. DeJarnette’s campaign. Dr. William F. Drewry, who ran the Central State Hospital for Negroes in Petersburg, publicly endorsed sterilization in 1912. Dr. Drewry, who was white, added a racial element to the discussion, by focusing on what he regarded as the particular threat posed by feebleminded black people. He warned that feebleminded blacks were increasing in numbers and that “the presence of such individuals is a perpetual menace, a constant source of trouble and danger.” Dr. Drewry believed the answer lay in preventing the feebleminded from reproducing “by the relentless hand of science, under sanction and authority of law.”

  Like other doctors across the country, Dr. Priddy appears to have sterilized people before it was authorized by law. In his first few years at the colony, he began performing procedures that were, as the legal historian Paul Lombardo has argued, almost certainly eugenic sterilizations, even though they were not described that way. In his 1915 annual report, Dr. Priddy said the colony had performed an operation on a young woman “for relief of a chronic pelvic disorder, which sterilized her.” The woman was then permanently discharged from the colony. In the next few years, an extraordinary number of women at the colony were diagnosed with vague “pelvic diseases” and ended up being sterilized.

  In 1916 Dr. Priddy and Dr. DeJarnette began a campaign to persuade the state legislature to enact a eugenic sterilization law. They had missed the first national wave, which peaked in 1913, when six state legislatures adopted sterilization statutes, four of which were signed into law. Now, however—six years after Dr. Carrington’s bill fai
led—there was growing support in Virginia, particularly at the University of Virginia and among administrators of the state’s mental hospitals. Dr. DeJarnette and Dr. Priddy approached a state senator they believed would be sympathetic and asked if he would draft a bill.

  The state senator, Aubrey Strode, was a friend of Dr. Priddy’s who had been pivotal in founding the colony. He drafted a bill, but it was not the kind of bold eugenic sterilization law other states had passed. Strode’s bill, which became law, did not directly authorize sterilization or mention eugenics. Instead, it gave superintendents of state hospitals for the feebleminded authority to provide inmates “such moral, medical and surgical treatment” as they deemed “proper.”

  The “moral, medical and surgical treatment” language in Strode’s law was vague, but it left superintendents room to claim that any sterilization they performed was authorized. Dr. Priddy was quick to do just that, asserting that “a logical and plain construction” of the newly enacted statute permitted him to sterilize feebleminded inmates at the colony. His reading was, as even Dr. DeJarnette conceded, a “broad and liberal interpretation” of the law.

  When the 1916 law took effect, Dr. Priddy began openly performing sterilizations. In his next annual report, he made reference to a group of feebleminded women who had been sterilized. They had been released, he said, and were almost without exception doing well in the outside world.

  The next year, Dr. Priddy sterilized thirty women, and he offered up the same excuse. “We have continued the policy of sterilizing young women and girls of the moron type,” he reported. “In nearly all cases sterilized, the pelvic disease was found in a greater or lesser degree, such as to make the removal of the tubes necessary for the relief of physical suffering.”