Werkplaats Biopolitiek

01 Nov '02 - 754 W Eugenicists used Shutesbury in study on sterilization idea

Globe Staff, 26 november 2002

In the late 1920s, when eugenics was a respectable science discussed in liberal drawing rooms, researchers looking to prove that rural bloodlines had become tainted hit upon the perfect case study in the town of Shutesbury.

Without revealing their purpose to residents, eugenicists spent many months gathering information about families in the Western Massachusetts town, drawing genetic charts that showed ''what may be expected when good pioneer stock is mixed with bad immigrant stock.'' The families of Shutesbury were used as a case study in Leon Whitney's 1934 book ''The Case for Sterilization,'' which argues that ''the useless classes'' should not be allowed to reproduce.

Many of the descendants of those families are learning of the study for the first time this week after a Boston Magazine reporter gathered hundreds of long-forgotten documents from the offices of the former American Eugenics Society in Philadelphia. Her article, which appears today, sheds light on the obscure part that Massachusetts played in the selective-breeding craze that culminated horribly in the Nazi plan to eliminate Jews.

Other papers found in Philadelphia document the forced castration of 26 teenage boys at the state-run Hospital for Epileptics in Palmer. The doctor who sterilized the boys - who were diagnosed with epilepsy, kleptomania, masturbation, or ''solitary behavior'' - described his actions as ''an effective means of race preservation.'' The emerging documents made the biggest stir yesterday among the residents of Shutesbury, who racked their brains to imagine how their bloodlines could have been studied and presented to national specialists without anyone's knowledge. ''It's just scary to think where that might have gone, that kind of report, if it fell into the wrong hands'' said Roberta Hunting, whose father-in-law was Shutesbury's town clerk for 60 years. The Hunting family's genealogy, carefully penned out for three generations, was among the papers found in Philadelphia.

Massachusetts was not an exception in its forays into eugenics. Historians estimate that as many as 60,000 Americans were sterilized without their consent in state institutions because they were alcoholic, epileptic, mentally retarded, or ''morally defective.'' In a landmark decision in 1927, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes defended the practice, writing that ''instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or letting them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.''

Although information has emerged gradually about states' roles in eugenic sterilization - similar documents were uncovered in Vermont in 1999 - most people who were sterilized are now dead. In Virginia 7,450 people were sterilized from 1924 to 1979.

But back in 1928, when Leon Whitney approached school and town officials in the Shutesbury area, he was unselfconscious about his goal: to find and document rural degeneracy. One academic had already characterized the town as ''a typically depraved community ... idle, ignorant and licentious.''

According to documents cited in the Boston Magazine article, Whitney appealed to the superintendent of schools in Amherst to share the ''mental tests'' of local children with him, but cautioned him not to inform the public of his study, ''as we would not get the cooperation of the people.'' Interviewing residents, he told them he was ''making a study of some of the old New England families.''

When Whitney's studies appeared in print seven years later - describing Shutesbury under the name ''Cellarholes'' - the townspeople were evidence for his thesis that ''degeneracy has increased ... to such an extent that a large proportion of its people are below par.''

Whitney's deceptive approach to his subjects was typical of an era that gave boundless rights to ''experts,'' said Alan Stoskopf, who directs Facing History and Ourselves, a Brookline nonprofit that encourages teaching the history of prejudice, racism, and anti-Semitism.

''There was this awe and history about science without real involvement of the consumer,'' Stoskopf said. ''This is a movement of educators and scientists. This is not a movement of people in white sheets writing graffiti. These are prominent people. ''

Shutesbury now is a bedroom community of about 1,800, where - as 79-year-old Ward Hunting noted - degeneracy runs at a lower level than it does on neighboring college campuses. Many professors live in the town. In interviews, residents were by turns eager and reluctant to see the conclusions of the long-ago researchers.

''I didn't relish the idea of Shutesbury's name being one associated with degenerate individuals, because I've never found that to be true,'' said town clerk Leslie Bracebridge, who has lived there since 1973. There might be a silver lining in all of this, she added: less traffic. ''Maybe people will drive around Shutesbury,'' she said.