Note: This historical article contains mentions of outdated/offensive terms, sexual assault, and dark subject matter.
“The ultimate moral test of any government is the way it treats three groups of its citizens. First, those in the dawn of life, our children. Second, those in the shadows of life, our needy, our sick, our handicapped. Third, those in the twilight of life, our elderly,” former vice-president and Minnesota senator Hubert H. Humphrey said at the Democratic National Convention in New York City on July 13, 1976.
His sentiments have been echoed across the world by people like Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, and author Pearl Buck.
Selective breeding, eugenics, and all the associated horrors of the idea put into practice in Nazi Germany and in science fiction classics like “Brave New World” were alive and well in the early 20th century.
Carrie Buck and America’s Eugenics Era
A century ago, America was a very different place, a place where mandated sterilizations were allowed and sanctioned by elected officials. The most prominent victim of this practice was Carrie Elizabeth Buck, who was sterilized for being “feeble-minded” by her foster parents, John and Alice Dobbs.
Alice Dobbs’ nephew, Clarence Garland, raped Carrie, impregnating her. To hide the crime, the Dobbs had Carrie placed in the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and the Feebleminded. This was all legal under the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924.
Carrie was born in Charlottesville, the eldest of three children born to Emma Buck. Emma was abandoned by her husband, Frederick Buck, and later committed to the same institution that would eventually sterilize her daughter. She was charged with “immorality”, prostitution, and having syphilis.
Carrie was taken from Emma soon after she was born and placed with the Dobbs family. She attended school through sixth grade when she was pulled by the Dobbs to do housework. She was 17 when Garland raped her.
While institutionalized, Carrie gave birth to a daughter. To her horror, the Dobbs family adopted the baby, naming her Vivian Alice Elaine Dobbs.
People sympathetic to Carrie’s plight found legal counsel, and the issue ended up in the United States Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell.
The court of Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes ruled that it was legal for compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including the intellectually disabled, by an 8-1 decision. The majority opinion stated it was for the protection and health of the state and did not violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
The ruling has never been overturned.
Carrie Buck was sterilized along with her half-sister at the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and the Feebleminded in 1927, a risky procedure in the days before antibiotics.
No less an authority than Dr. John Kellogg, the man who invented the world’s most popular cereal, “Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.” Was a leading proponent of selective breeding, mass sterilization, and eugenics.
Kellogg advocated “beautiful baby contests” that were always won by blond-haired, blue-eyed children, no matter the location. The message was clear, long before Nazi Germany tried to breed a super race of Aryans.
Wyoming’s Early Commitment to Compassionate Care
Things were different here. Wyoming established itself as a place where people cared for the infirm, aged, and disabled even before we became a state in 1890.
Recognizing that Lander was near the geographic center of Wyoming, the Territorial Legislature appropriated $25,000 to build a State Poor Farm. In 1888, land was purchased in Sinks Canyon to build one, but it sat idle for almost two decades.
Governor Bryant B. Brooks resurrected the idea of a state facility in 1906. With the help of Senator Robert Hall, a Lander area rancher, and Dr. Denis Godfrey a Fremont County Representative legislation was passed in February 1907.
Provisions of the bill read “..to establish a home and training school for the feeble minded and epileptic, assigning the lands and property of the State Poor Farm to that purpose making appropriations for the same…”.
Two years later, the State Board of Charities, Secretary of State William Schnitger, and Governor Brooks took a trip to Lander to locate a site for a “school for the feeble-minded and epileptics.”
After reviewing several properties, the group decided to purchase 100 acres on a bluff above the Popo Agie River just east of Lander. They paid landowner Elmer Liams $60 per acre, a total cost of $6000.
They gave the new facility an atrocious, ugly title, “The Wyoming Home for Defectives.”
The first superintendent was Dr. Thomas Maghee, who had served as an Army Surgeon at Fort Augur three decades before.
Dr. Maghee was famous for his examination of the outlaw “Big Nose” George Parrot. Parrot was lynched in 1881 and Dr. Maghee and Dr. John Osborne performed a detailed examination of Parrot’s body, looking for any physical deformities or abnormalities that could have explained his anti-social behavior. Dr. Maghee spent a lot of time examining Parrot’s brain and skull. Dr. Osborne later had a pair of gloves made from Parrot’s tanned skin.
The first patients arrived at the school on June 20, 1912, and by December, there were 23 residents.
Dr. Maghee was able to help many of the residents control the seizures they suffered from epilepsy with drugs and therapy.
Growth of the Wyoming State Training School
On February 21, 1921, the school’s name was changed to The Wyoming State Training School. The population grew to over 150 by the mid-1920s. This included elderly residents and orphans.
Despite the growing spread of eugenics and the call for execution or sterilization of those deemed unworthy, the Wyoming State Training School provided compassionate care for the residents.
The infrastructure grew over the years. In 1931, a gymnasium with a theater was built. Alongside additional housing and classrooms were constructed.
Luckey Pond, a popular fishing area for children below the bluff of the remaining buildings of the State Training School, was named in honor of former students.
In 1972, the State Training School was one of the largest employers in Fremont County, with a peak population of 740 students.
That year, Public Law 94-142 was passed, establishing that students aged three to 21 must be educated in the least restrictive environment. In essence, requiring services to be offered through the local school district rather than at a central, state-operated location.
An entire industry sprang up to help former residents live near their homes. Community Entry Services worked to place residents in the community. Enrollment at the training school began to drop. Land was sold, reducing the campus to 474 acres.
From the 1940s to the 1970s, school groups toured the grounds of the State Training School. This practice would be denied today, but during that time, it provided a glimpse of the lives of the residents that led to many teenagers choosing careers in medicine or social work.
In 2008, the school was renamed the Wyoming Life Resource Center.
Children in need are now helped locally. There are no children at the facility today. Those with special medical needs, behavioral issues, or brain injuries are among those served at the Life Resource Center.
The ebb and flow of how we care for the sick, the elderly, and the defenseless is a measure of our society and of our dedication, or lack of it, toward our fellow citizens.
Abhorrent terms today, like idiot, imbecile, feeble-minded, and moron, were freely used to describe the disabled in the late 19th and through the mid-20th centuries. Those terms are insults today, but were commonly used in print and in medical diagnoses.
The Global Rise of Eugenics
In the wake of the horrific carnage of World War I, a movement blazed into worldwide prominence. It was most often called eugenics. It had its roots in Darwinism and its offspring, Social Darwinism, and dated back to its inception in 1883.
Francis Galton was a cousin of Charles Darwin. In 1883, the English statistician and scientist began the eugenics movement.
Galton examined the effects of selective breeding and culling on domestic cattle, sheep, and horses and believed these techniques could dramatically improve the quality of the human race. His premise was based on survival of the fittest. His movement took it to extremes. Galton saw emerging medicine as an impediment to mankind. In his view, the sick, weak, and disabled should die and be removed from the gene pool.
Many followers quickly gathered in Europe, the United States, and Japan. Some “softened” the removal aspect, substituting sterilization for execution in undesirables.
The eugenics movement walked in lock step with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the modern Klan, which began in Georgia in 1915.
There were two aspects of the eugenics movement: the “positive” and the “negative” approaches.
In the “positive” approach, prime “breeders” were selected to procreate and produce “superior” offspring. This was a concept the Nazis employed in Germany beginning in the 1930s, with the idea of the superior Aryan race. In Germany, young women volunteered to be inseminated by SS Officers chosen because of their blond hair, taller stature, and other Aryan characteristics. They awarded women who reproduced these “ideal” children with the Cross of Honor of the German Mother, “Mutterkreuz.”
That was the “positive” tenet of eugenics.
The “negative” was much more sinister and could be found in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Treblinka. The mass execution of “undesirables” led to the deaths of an estimated 20,000,000 Jews, Poles, Russians, Gypsies, chronically ill, mentally disabled, physically disabled, intellectuals, and political dissidents.
It was eugenics in its most evil personification.
Wyoming Confronts the Eugenics Movement
The United States wasn’t exempt from the eugenics movement, and it had advocates in Fremont County in the 1920s as well, but, thankfully, as a state, Wyoming stood against it.
1921 was a big year for the eugenics movement. Two-thirds of the states passed some form of eugenics laws, and at the national level, the Emergency Quota Act, passed on May 19, 1921, severely restricted immigration from every nation, with exceptions for the “superior” Nordic immigrants from Northern Europe.
State sterilization laws were passed in 32 states. In Washington state, a forced sterilization bill passed both state houses and was signed into law by Governor Louis F. Hart on March 8. It added more provisions to a similar law passed in 1909. The law allowed the forced sterilization of the “feeble-minded,” insane, epileptic, habitual criminals, moral degenerates, and sexual perverts.
Indiana, a state ruled by the Ku Klux Klan with Klan majorities in the state house and senate, on most city councils, and with a majority of mayors, battled to overrule an Indiana Supreme Court ruling in 1907 that ruled forced sterilization as illegal. In 1927, the Klan-backed legislature and court revised the law, allowing forced sterilization.
The trend was alive in Wyoming in the 1920s, but wasn’t popular at either the local or the governmental level.
Wyoming State Tribune, October 21, 1923
THOUSAND FEEBLE-MINDED PERSONS FOUND IN STATE
DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION ADVOCATES COMPLETE SEGREGATION OF ALL MENTAL DEFICIENTS
“It is estimated that there are 1,000 feeble-minded persons in Wyoming, says a bulletin issued by the Special Class division of the State Department of Education. Under the heading “Wyoming Needs Cooperation in Solving Her Mental Deficiency Problem,” the statement reads:
“Mentally defective persons, by reproducing their kind, provide an endless stream of defective progeny who are a serious drain upon the resources of the nation.” From a bulletin published by the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, 1920.
“The birth rate among the feeble-minded is higher than among the more intelligent classes. Modern charity by providing monetary assistance, and instruction and supervision in better modes of living has favored rapid increase.”
The Wyoming Legislature passed a mild version of eugenics requirements for prospective married couples in 1921. The law required a male blood test to determine if the groom had a venereal disease. The spread of syphilis and gonorrhea was rampant among soldiers returning from battle in France after World War I. While it was ostensibly a medical precaution, it would have opened the door to all the horrors of eugenics-based sterilization occurring in other states.
Northern Wyoming Herald – December 14, 1921
Wyoming’s Eugenics Law Null and Void Says Attorney General
“Attorney General W. U. Walls this week handed down an opinion holding unconstitutional the eugenics law enacted by the Wyoming legislature last winter. He ruled that it was null and void owing to the fact that no reference to the provision requiring an applicant for a marriage license to prove freedom from a venereal disease was made in the title of the bill as it was passed by the lawmakers.
By virtue of his opinion some of the county clerks of the state are issuing marriage licenses without requiring the applicants to secure physicians certificates. Unless an appeal is taken from the attorney general’s findings and there seems to be small likelihood that such an appeal will be taken the law will be treated as invalid and will not be enforced anywhere in the state.
The act was patterned after Wisconsin’s famous eugenics law. Section 16, chapter 160, 1921 Session Laws of Wyoming, reads: “Every male person securing a marriage license must produce a certificate dated within ten days before the date of application for such marriage license, from a licensed physician practicing in the state of Wyoming, showing the applicant to be free from any venereal disease in communicable form.”
Recently Roche S. Mentzer, county and prosecuting attorney of Laramie County, wrote Attorney General Walls respectfully requesting an opinion as to the constitutionality of chapter 160 Session Laws of Wyoming, 1921. He made the request with particular reference to sections 16, 24 and 26 of said chapter.”
The eugenics movement died in the Cowboy State with this ruling, but it still had a few adherents.
Riverton Review – September 27, 1922
FREMONT COUNTY AUTHOR
“Mrs. Laura M. Allan, associate editor of the Courier Dubois, has just been notified that her latest book, The Lost Art, is about to leave the printer’s hands and is nearly ready for the market. The work is an exhaustive treatise on eugenics, the woman question, a critique of social problems, the art of reproduction, prenatal influences and heredity, and is broad and liberal in its scope. The subject matter is presented in a clear and entirely original manner that will entertain as well as instruct.
Mrs. Allan is leaving soon for the East for the purpose of placing this latest work of hers on the market. The book is attractively bound in dark green cloth with gold lettering and sells for $2.50 a volume.
Mrs. Allan has been at work on this book for several years. She believes the printing and binding will be done in Laramie. “
There was a final effort from the Wyoming legislature to enact eugenics legislation in the 1923 session, but Governor William Ross didn’t agree with the legislation and vetoed the bill. It was the final effort by the Wyoming legislature to enact eugenics laws within the state.
Reflection and Warning From the Past
From the dark days of the eugenics extremists to our modern, more human treatment of those in need, it’s been a step-by-step journey.
A voice from Fremont County’s past remains valid today. The author of the column below knew the situation and would be a valid voice today. People, all people, no matter their circumstance, whether they’re gifted or challenged, have a right to live their lives to the fullest. No politician has the right to change that.
Riverton Review July 17, 1914,
MORALITY BY CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT
“Yesterday 2,000 representatives of the Anti-Saloon League and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union marched to the capitol in Washington to demand National Prohibition by an amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
Tomorrow it is likely to be the Anti-Cigarette League that is clamoring for a constitutional amendment to prohibit cigarette smoking or the Anti-Profanity League that insists on a constitutional amendment to prevent swearing, or a Eugenics Society that advocates a constitutional amendment to stop the birth of imperfect babies.
Eventually there will be no need of laws or courts or churches or schools or preachers or charities or prisons. Everybody will have been made wise and good and pure and industrious and healthy and prosperous by amendments to the Constitution.”