Breeding Better Vermonters

Eugenics -- the study of human racial progress through selective breeding -- frequently invokes images of social engineering, virulent racism, immigrant persecution, and Nazi genocide, but Vermont's little known adventure in eugenics shows the inherent adaptability of eugenics theory and methods to parochial social justice. Beginning with genealogies of Vermont's rural poor in the 1920s, and concluding in the 1930s with an exposé of ethnic prejudice in Vermont's largest city, this story of the E…