At Middlebury College, the most iconic image of the picturesque institution is its chapel, once known as the Mead Memorial Chapel. It is now simply called the Middlebury Chapel after the school stripped away the name of its donor, the late Gov. John Mead. The reason was his support of eugenics. However, in a recent brief, former Vermont governor James Douglas seemed to put the “you” into eugenics by claiming that it was the college itself that was committed to eugenics more than the governor. Built in 1916 with a donation from Mead (Class of 1864) and his wife, the chapel has long been the central focus of the campus.“In 1912, two years before the chapel gift was made, in his outgoing speech as governor, John Mead strongly urged the legislature to adopt policies and create legislation premised on eugenics theory. His call to action resulted in a movement, legislation, public policy, and the founding of a Vermont state institution that sterilized people—based on their race, sex, ethnicity, economic status, and their perceived physical conditions and cognitive disabilities. John Mead’s documented actions in this regard are counter in every way to our values as an institution, and counter to the spiritual purpose of a chapel, a place to nurture human dignity and possibility, and to inspire, embrace, and comfort all people.”
However, Douglas and others continue to cry foul over how the college has brushed over its far more significant ties to eugenics and scapegoated the former governor. The brief claims that “Middlebury College was literally, a Eugenicist factory, for over 50 years” with required classes on the practice and widespread support for the sterilization of what were called “defectives & degenerates.” The college was recognized as one of the schools teaching and advancing eugenics in the United States.
Douglas compares that history with the single reference to eugenics cited by the college in Mead’s 1912 Farewell Address. He claims that “reviewing the long history of Eugenics at Middlebury College from 1895 to 1946, brings one to the inescapable conclusion that it was Middlebury College itself which contributed to the philosophical and scientific basis for the Nazi program of Eugenics, not one speech in 1912 by Governor Mead.” This allegedly included press conferences and courses advancing the theory.
This historical period included many American figures who embraced the theory. Classes, as shown in this picture, were held around the country. Funding of programs came from sources such as the Carnegie Institution, and the Rockefeller Foundation,
As discussed in my book, The Indispensable Right,” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes upheld such sterilizations in his infamous Buck v. Bell decision where he declared that “three Generations of Imbeciles are Enough.”
Douglas told The College Fix the issue is one of integrity and the commitment to donors. He insisted that it must be courts, not colleges, that should make such decisions.
Critics have accused the college of using the name removal as a type of historical cancel campaign and virtue signaling. The alternative would have been to keep the name while acknowledging the troubling connection for both Mead and the college to the study of eugenics.
In regard to Abe Lincoln’s position: his primary objective – and I would say rightly so – was to somehow keep the United States intact as a union of all the States; we recall that against Southern states’ demand that slavery be allowed or else they would not join the union of States the best that the Framers could manage in 1787 was to outlaw the importation of slaves starting in 1808 (a plan which presumed that slavery would die out anyway of its own accord at some point in the not-too-distant future since the growth of cotton wore out the actual ground and thus the South’s need for slaves to grow cotton would thereby die out on its own; but then in the mid-1790s Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin and the South’s reliance on cotton-growing was greatly increased and that was the end for the original 1787 plan). By Lincoln’s time, working his way up the electoral ladder in the later 1850s and then elected President in 1860, it was clear to him that the country faced the dissolution by Southern secession and his primary goal was – as it had to be – to somehow keep the country together. And things went on from there.
“THEY WILL NEVER MIX BLOOD IN KANSAS”
Abraham Lincoln advocated a form of eugenics before Meade which suggests there will soon be an effort to tear down the Lincoln Memorial.
Hallelujah!!!
To wit,
“There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people to the idea of indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races … A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation, but as an immediate separation is impossible, the next best thing is to keep them apart where they are not already together. If white and black people never get together in Kansas, they will never mix blood in Kansas …”
Racial separation, Lincoln went on to say, “must be effected by colonization” of the country’s blacks to a foreign land. “The enterprise is a difficult one,” he acknowledged,
“but ‘where there is a will there is a way,’ and what colonization needs most is a hearty will. Will springs from the two elements of moral sense and self-interest. Let us be brought to believe it is morally right, and, at the same time, favorable to, or, at least, not against, our interest, to transfer the African to his native clime, and we shall find a way to do it, however great the task may be.”
– Abraham Lincoln, Springfield, Illinois, June 26, 1857
Let’s ask AI if they employ any particular form of eugenics on their progeny.