As you drive through the state of Indiana you will see lots of corn and soybeans, probably some windmills, women and men in what looks like turn of the century clothing, riding in buggies, and lots and lots of friendly people. It seems very peaceful, wholesome, and a good place to raise kids. And it can be all that and more.
Looking around you, it's hard to imagine that this state has an ugly legacy that it passed on to many, many other states, and to other people worldwide. Yes, you heard me correctly...a dark and ugly secret that should be the shame of the entire state and every single person in it. If you were a citizen of Indiana from the late 1880's, right up to, believe it or not, 1975, if you were in the custody of the state, you could be forcibly sterilized, or sterilized without your knowledge. In point of fact, you didn't have to be in the state's custody. The last known involuntary sterilization took place in 1975 at the request of a 15 year old woman's mother because "she's a little bit retarded". The mother told her daughter that her appendix was being removed. The woman, now 51 years of age, spoke at the ceremony on April 12, 2007 when a historical marker was erected to acknowledge the 100th Anniversary of the signing of the Indiana Eugenics law, the first piece of eugenics legislation ever signed into law anywhere in the world, and the model upon which Hitler formulated his ethnic cleansing program.
You see, by the late 1800's authorities in the state of Indiana had come to believe that certain socially undesirable traits, such as criminalistic tendencies, mental problems, and pauperism were hereditary in nature. These beliefs were further encouraged by the efforts of Harriet Foster who presented a paper to the Social Sience Administration of Indiana stating that "imbeciles and the feeble-minded often inherit their conditions" and that “intermarriage of consanguineous persons, and intemperance of one or both parents,” are the most frequent reasons certain people have mental problems." in 1879.
In 1881 a preacher named Oscar C. McCulloch studied a group of families in and around Indianapolis. He named this group of people the Tribe of Ishmael. He claimed that his study, which tracked family records back to 1840, proved conclusively that there was indeed human degradation through heredity. He stated that "mental weakness, pauperism, licentiousness, and poor morals" stemmed from genetics. As "proof" he stated, "Note the force of heredity. Each child tends to the same life, reverts when taken out."
These findings were challenged in an article found in the "Encyclopedia of Indiana" written by a man who worked at the Indiana State Archives named Robert Horton. He based his article on the fact that he found many misstatements in the study and concluded that McCulloch saw only what he wished to see. Unfortunately, by that time the damage had been done.
The first three secretaries of the Board of State Charities established heredity as the primary reason for pauperism, crime, and mental problems. The first one, Alexander Johnson, who took the position in 1889 was influenced by McCulloch's study and, very probably, by the fact that McCulloch assisted in getting him named to the position. His memoirs state,"Generation after Generation many of the families to which these defective people belonged had been paupers, in or out of the asylum: their total number and the proportion of feebleminded among them steadily increasing as time went on."
Johnson's successor, Ernest Bicknell, in 1896 released an official report that lamented the hereditary nature of pauperism. It wasn't however until the third of the three, Amos Butler, took office on January 1, 1898, that there was the first official reference of sterilization as a method to prevent insanity and "defectives" in a state document.
On May 8, 1901, Governor Winfield Taylor Durbin signed a law that declared all unsupervised feeble minded women from the age of 16-45 wards of the state.to prevent them from producing future generationd of feebleminded persons.
On March 9, 1905 Governor J.Frank Hanley approved a law that prevented the issuance of marriage licenses to imbeciles and those of unsound minds.
On the fateful day of March 9, 1907, Governor Hanley approved the first ever eugenics law, a law which made sterilization MANDATORY for criminals, idiots, rapists, and imbeciles in state custody.
In 1909 Governor Thomas Riley Marshall halted these sterilizations during his term, questioning the constitutionality of the original law but nothing was done to even amend the law until 1921 when the Indiana Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional because it denied due process of the law granted by the Fourteenth Amendment, which requires the states to provide equal protection under the law to all persons (not only to citizens) within their jurisdictions. However, in the classic practice of "two steps forward, one step back" Governor Edward Jackson approved a law in 1927 which named the courts as the venues of appeal for sterilization decisions by the governing board of an institution. This pretty well guaranteed that those decisions would not be overturned even if the person who objected had the mental ability to request an appeal and the financial ability to pay for legal representation for their appeal, which of course the vast majority did not possess.
The law was amended several times between 1931 and 1951. Citation for the laws passed during that time were made available by IUPUI Professor Jason Scott Lantzer and can be found in the State library archives.
We can only estimate how many people were sterilized under these laws for several reasons. First, the recordkeeping of the various institutions where it was done was not standardized, and it further is not known whether in fact all the sterilizations were even documented. It is thought that there were 1,231 confirmed sterilizations in Indiana from the beginning of the sterilization movement until 1943. From 1943 until 1963 there were 1193 documentated sterilizations.
In breaking down the numbers of reported sterilizations, there were 1576 reported by the State Department of Mental health from 1936 to 1962. The Fort Wayne annual reports for the years 1927-1927 and for 1935-1936 gave their number as 308 sterilizations. From 1937-1953 there were 144 reported by the Muscatatuck Board of Trustees, 35 in the Logansport annual reports from 1931-1943 when they appear to end, seven salpingectomies (removal of the Fallopian tubes) at the Indiana Girls School reports from 1927-1933, as well as several patient records in Fort Wayne from 1933 until 1975! During those periods none were reported from the other Indiana insane hospitals or from the Village for Epileptics.
These figures also do not include the 500 sterilizations reported by Dr. Harry C. Sharp from 1899-1910, or the numbers reported from 1910-1936. In addition, according to a report given by L. Potter Harshman, a psychiatrist at the Fort Wayne State School, there were another 141 sterilizations done between 1931 and 1934. He gave the following breakdown:
Males, ages 6-15: 51 sterilizations; Males, ages 16 and up: 23 sterilizations; Females, ages 6-15: 37 sterilizations; Females, ages 16 and up: 30 sterilizations. Yes, my friends, children as young as six were subjected to this. The repeal of all laws in the state of Indiana regarding sterilization of the mentally ill did not happen until February 13, 1974, only 33 short years ago.
In April of 1975, Governor Otis R. Bowen, the same governor who repealed the sterilization laws also repealed the 1905 marriage law. The 1975 law "removed language that prohibited the issuance of a license to people “under guardianship as a person of unsound mind” and men who in the past 5 years had spent time in a county asylum or home for indigent persons." On May 4, 1977, the language that prohibited the issuance of marriage licenses to imbeciles was finally eliminated as well.
It was a long and bloody battle, fought not on the battlefields but rather on operating tables around the state, a battle waged against the most vulnerable of the state's citizens.
Why, you are probably asking, is this story just coming to light? Through the efforts of the Human, Ethical, Legal and Social Implications program of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health. It is commonly known as the ELSI (Ethical and Legal Social Implications) Project. The reasons for the project are not only to explore and document the use of genetics in a non-medical treatment set of situations but also to bring knowledge and, hopefully, understanding and closure to those who were victims of this legislation. Governors of several states, along with the Indiana governor, have made apologies to the still living victims and to their families, as have the leaders in several European countries that modeled a program after the program first implemented in Indiana. As important, or perhaps more important, are the promises that have been made that reassure these victims that everything humanly possible will be done to insure that this type of legislation is never put into place again.
This type of program was used in the early 1900's in more than 30 states. I cannot find a complete list anywhere. I encourage each of you to investigate your state's laws, if any, regarding eugenics. What you don't know may well hurt you or someone you love.
It happened once. We must stand together to prevent it EVER happening again.
