Authors: Edwin Black
Laughlin and the American eugenics movement were undeterred by their own lack of knowledge, lack of scientific evidence, and even the profound lack of public support. The crusade would continue. In their eyes, the future of humanity-or their version of it~was at stake.
Moreover, America’s eugenicists were not satisfied with merely cleansing the United States of its defectives. The movement’s view was global. The last of eighteen points circulated by Laughlin’s committee was entitled “International Cooperation.” Its intent was unmistakable. The ERO would undertake studies “looking toward the possible application of the sterilization of defectives in foreign countries, together with records of any such operations.” Point eighteen made clear that Laughlin’s ERO and the American eugenics movement intended to tum their sights on “the extent and nature of the problem of the socially inadequate in foreign countries.”
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W
hen Galton’s eugenic principles migrated across the ocean to America, Kansas physician F. Hoyt Pilcher became the first in modern times to castrate to prevent procreation. In the mid-1890s, Dr. Pilcher, superintendent of the Kansas Home for the Feebleminded, surgically asexualized fifty-eight children. Pilcher’s procedure was undertaken without legal sanction. Once discovered, Kansas citizens broadly condemned his actions, demanding he stop. The Kansas Home’s embattled board of trustees suspended Pilcher’s operations, but staunchly defended his work. The board defiantly proclaimed, “Those who are now criticizing Dr. Pilcher will, in a few years, be talking of erecting a monument to his memory.” Later, Pilcher’s national association of institution directors praised him as “courageous” and as a “pioneer, strong [enough] to face ignorance and prejudice.”
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Enter Dr. Harry Clay Sharp, physician at the Indiana Reformatory at Jeffersonville. Sharp earned his medical degree in 1893. Two years later, he was hired by the Indiana Reformatory as its doctor. The Indiana Reformatory, the state’s first prison, was proud of its progressive sanitation and medical policies. Sharp was already performing extralegal medical castrations to cure convicts of masturbation. In early 1899, he read an article in the
Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)
by distinguished Chicago physician AlbertJohn Ochsner, who later cofounded the American College of Surgeons. Dr. Ochsner advocated compulsory vasectomy of prisoners “to eliminate all habitual criminals from the possibility of having children.” In this way, Ochsner hoped to reduce not only the number of “bom criminals” but also “chronic inebriates, imbeciles, perverts and paupers.”
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Sharp combined Ochsner’s idea with a second suggestion by another Chicago doctor, Daniel R. Brower. Brower read a paper before the American Medical Society, reprinted in
JAMA,
similarly urging that someone employ vasectomy on convicts to prevent the propagation of a criminal class.
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Sharp was willing to be that someone. In October of 1899, he became the first in the world to impose vasectomy on a person in custody. A nineteen-year-old Indiana Reformatory prisoner complained of excessive masturbation, and Sharp used the opportunity. After disinfecting the prisoner’s scrotum, the doctor made a one-inch incision, severed the ducts, and then buried a stitch. Sharp was pleased with his work. During the next several years, he performed the same operation on scores of additional inmates, becoming the world expert in human sterilization. Each operation took about three minutes. Anesthetic was not used for subsequent operations.
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The Indiana prison doctor proudly lectured his colleagues about the procedure’s advantages in a 1902 article in the
New York Medical Journal.
He presented the surgery strictly as a tool for human breeding. Quoting an old essay, Sharp railed: “We make choice of the best rams for our sheep … and keep the best dogs … how careful then should we be in begetting of children!”
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Sharp’s article described his method in instructive, clinical detail. Yet involuntary sterilization was still not legal, and was thought by many to be unconstitutional. So he urged his fellow institutional doctors to lobby for both restrictive marriage laws and legal authority for every institutional director in every state to “render every male sterile who passes its portals, whether it be an almshouse, insane asylum, institute for the feeble minded, reformatory or prison.” Sharp declared that widespread sterilization was the only “rational means of eradicating from our midst a most dangerous and hurtful class…. Radical methods are necessary.”
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It is no wonder that the world was first prompted to embrace forced sterilization by Indiana. Within the state’s mainly rural tum-of-the-century population existed a small but potent epicenter of radical eugenic agitation. For decades, Indiana law provided for the compulsory servitude of its paupers. They could be farmed out to the highest bidder. Unwashed homeless bands wandering through Indiana were reviled by many within charitable circles as genetically defective, and beyond help.
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Reverend Oscar McCulloch, pastor of Indianapolis’s Plymouth Congregational Church, was known as a leading reformer and advocate of public charity. Ironically, McCulloch actually harbored an intense hatred of paupers and the displaced. He was greatly influenced by the publication of Dugdale’s
The Jukes,
which traced a Hudson Valley family of paupers and criminals as a living example of the need to improve social conditions. But McCulloch was foremost among those who twisted Dugdale’s work from a cry for social action into a vicious hereditary indictment.
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McCulloch went even farther, adding his own genealogical investigation of Indiana’s thieving vagabonds, the so-called Tribe of Ishmael. He proffered their stories as further scientific proof of degeneration among the impoverished. McCulloch preached to his fellow reformers at the 1888 National Conference of Charities and Corrections that paupers were nothing more than biologically preordained “parasites” suffering from an irreversible hereditary condition. By 1891, McCulloch had become president of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, further ingraining his degeneracy theories upon the nation’s charity and prison officials, who were only too quick to accept.
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Reverend McCulloch’s outspoken sermons and investigations of the Ishmael tribe drew the attention of another leading Indianian, biologist David Starr Jordan, president of the University of Indiana. Convinced that paupers were indeed parasites, as McCulloch so fervently claimed, Jordan lectured his students and faculty to accept that some men were “dwarfs in body and mind.” Quickly, Jordan became America’s first eminent eugenic theorist. His 1902 book,
Blood of a Nation,
first articulated the concept of “blood” as the immutable basis for race. He readily proclaimed, “The pauper is the victim of heredity, but neither Nature nor Society recognizes that as an excuse for his existence.” Jordan left Indiana in 1891 to become the first president of the newly created Stanford University, founded by the estate of wealthy railroad entrepreneur Leland Stanford. While at Stanford, Jordan used his position to further champion the eugenic cause, damning paupers in his writings and leading the like-minded elite in national eugenic organizations.
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Among the staunchest of Indiana’s radical eugenicists was Dr. J. N. Hurty, who quickly rose from his insignificant station as the proprietor of an Indianapolis drug store to become the secretary of Indiana’s State Board of Health. A close colleague of Hurty’s once recalled for a eugenic audience: “It was not until Hurty had become the State Health Officer and had observed the stupidity of mankind, the worthlessness and the filthiness of certain classes of people, that he became really greatly interested in the subject [eugenics].” Once, when a prominent minister argued that all human beings were God’s children, subject not to the laws of Mendel, but to the laws of grace, Hurty retorted, “Bosh and nonsense! Men and woman are what they are largely because of the stock from which they sprang.” Hurty was eventually elected president of the American Public Health Association.
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By 1904, Sharp had performed 176 vasectomies as a eugenic solution designed to halt bloodlines. But the procedure was still not legal. So for three years, Drs. Sharp and Hurty lobbied the Indiana legislature to pass a bill for mandatory sterilization of all convicts. No distinction was made between lesser or graver crimes. There was no groundswell of public support for the measure, just the private efforts of Sharp, aided by Hurty and a few colleagues. The men stressed the social cost to the state of caring for its existing degenerates, and promised the new procedure would save Indiana from caring for future degenerates.
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Drs. Sharp and Hurty were not immediately successful. But they did not give up.
It was an uphill battle. Indiana was not the first state to consider reproductive intervention, but until now, the idea had been rebuffed. In 1897, in the wake of Dr. Pilcher’s first castrations, Michigan’s legislature rejected a proposed law to make such actions legal. From 1901 through 1905, a key Pilcher supporter, Dr. Martin Barr, director of the Pennsylvania Training School for the Feebleminded, pushed for compulsory sterilization of mental defectives and other degenerates. Barr was undoubtedly among those responding to Sharp’s early call to seek legislation. In 1905, both houses of Pennsylvania’s legislature finally passed an “Act for the Prevention of Idiocy.” The bill mandated that if the trustees and surgeons of the state’s several institutions caring for feebleminded children determined “procreation is inadvisable,” then the surgeon could “perform such operation for the prevention of procreation as shall be decided safest and most effective.”
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Pennsylvania Governor Samuel Pennypacker’s veto message denounced the very idea: “It is plain that the safest and most effective method of preventing procreation would be to cut the heads off the inmates,” wrote Pennypacker, adding, “and such authority is given by the bill to this staff of scientific experts…. Scientists, like all other men whose experiences have been limited to one pursuit … sometimes need to be restrained. Men of high scientific attainments are prone … to lose sight of broad principles outside their domain…. To permit such an operation would be to inflict cruelty upon a helpless class … which the state has undertaken to protect.” Governor Pennypacker ended his incisive veto with five words: “The bill is not approved.” No effort was made to override.
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What failed in Michigan and Pennsylvania found greater success in Indiana. Throughout 1906, Sharp ramped up his campaign. But the Indiana legislature was still resistant. So Sharp reminded Indiana’s governor, J. Frank Hanley, that he was constandy performing vasectomies anyway, and his total had by now surged to 206. “I therefore wish to urge you,” Sharp wrote the governor, “to insist upon the General Assembly [that] passing such a law or laws … will provide this as a means of preventing procreation in the defective and degenerate classes.”
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On January 29,1907, Indiana Representative Horace Reed introduced Sharp’s bill. The measure’s phrasing was an almost verbatim rendering of the previously vetoed Pennsylvania bill. Three weeks later, with little debate, Indiana’s House approved the eugenic proposal, 59 in favor and 22 opposed. About two weeks later, again with virtually no debate, Indiana’s Senate ratified the bill, 28 voting aye and 16 nay. This time, there was no governor’s veto.
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Indiana thereby made its mark in medical history, and became the first jurisdiction in the world to legislate forced sterilization of its mentally impaired patients, poorhouse residents and prisoners. Sharp’s knife would now be one of a multitude, and the practice would crisscross the United States.
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In 1907, most Americans were unaware that sterilization had become legal in Indiana. Nor did they comprehend that a group of biological activists were trying to replicate that legislation throughout the country. Frequently, the dogged state lobbying efforts were mounted by just one or two individuals, generally local physicians who carried the eugenic flame.
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In February of 1909, Oregon’s first woman doctor, Bethenia Owens-Adair, promoted Bill 68, sporting provisions virtually identical to Indiana’s law, but vesting the sterilization decision in a committee of two medical experts. Both Oregon houses ratified and Governor George Chamberlain had promised to sign the bill into law. But when Chamberlain finally comprehended the final text, he vetoed the bill. In a letter to Dr. Owens-Adair, the governor explained, “When I first talked to you about the matter, without knowing the terms of the Bill in detail, I was disposed to favor it.” But, he added, there were too few safeguards to prevent abuse.
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In early 1909, several additional attempts in other states also failed. Illinois’s Senate Bill 249 authorized either castration or sterilization of confirmed criminals and imbeciles when a facility doctor felt procreation was “inadvisable”; it failed to pass. Wisconsin’s Bill 744 to sterilize the feeble-minded, criminals, epileptics and the insane on the recommendation of two experts was also rejected despite an amendment.
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But three states did ratify eugenic sterilization in 1909. Washington targeted “habitual criminals” and rapists, mandating sterilization as additional punishment for the “prevention of procreation.” Connecticut enacted a law permitting the medical staff at two asylums, Middletown and Norwich, to examine patients and their family trees to determine if feeble-minded and insane patients should be sterilized; the physicians were permitted to perform either vasectomies on males or ovariectomies on women.
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California was the third state to adopt forced sterilization in 1909; Chapter 720 of the state’s statutory code permitted castration or sterilization of state convicts and the residents of the California Home for the Care and Training of Feebleminded Children in Sonoma County. Two institutional bureaucrats could recommend the procedure if they deemed it beneficial to a subject’s “physical, mental or moral condition.”
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