Several decades before Adolf Hitler and the Nazis took the notion of "purifying" society to genocidal extremes in the Holocaust, the ideas behind it were enthusiastically embraced in Vermont.

Eugenics is the pseudoscience that humans can be improved through selective breeding. Many American states, including Vermont, used eugenics as the basis for public policies including family separation, institutionalization and sterilization. By 1936, over half of states practiced eugenical sterilization. In the 1920s and ’30s, vulnerable Vermonters were targeted, institutionalized and otherwise separated from their families, and many were sterilized.

Eugenics policies were “designed to break apart entire families and to basically get rid of them over several generations, whether that be segregating them in an institution, whether that be sterilizing them, whether that be inflicting so much trauma that the family no longer comes together,” said Mercedes de Guardiola, author of a new book published by the Vermont Historical Society, “Vermont for the Vermonters: The History of Eugenics in the Green Mountain State.” De Guardiola originally wrote the book as an undergraduate thesis at Dartmouth College, where she graduated in 2017 with a degree in history and art history.

In 2021, the state of Vermont became one of the few states to formally apologize for the practice. De Guardiola testified about the eugenics movement before the Vermont Legislature in 2021.

The University of Vermont apologized in 2019 for its role in the eugenics movement and removed the name of former UVM President Guy Bailey from its library for his role in promoting eugenics.

Vermont’s eugenics program became national news earlier this year when former Gov. Jim Douglas sued Middlebury College, his alma mater, for changing the name of Mead Memorial Chapel, which was named for John Abner Mead, Vermont’s governor from 1910 to 1912. The college removed Mead’s name in 2021, citing his “central role in advancing eugenics policies that resulted in harm to hundreds of Vermonters.”

“In the cases of these unfortunates there is little or no hope of permanent recovery,” Mead said in his farewell speech in 1912. “And the great question that is now being considered by the lawmakers in many of our states is how best to restrain this defective class and how best to restrict the propagation of defective children.”

Douglas insisted that Mead was a victim of “cancel culture.”

De Guardiola said that Mead’s role is emblematic of “participation at the highest level of government across several decades and a number of state officials, as well as private citizens (who) also (threw) their support in for eugenics.”

De Guardiola declined to weigh in on whether Mead’s name should be removed from the Middlebury chapel, saying simply, “His words speak for themselves.”

“It's important to consider what their words were and what they resulted in,” de Guardiola said, adding that eugenics laws led to family separation and sterilization.