In 1924 President Calvin Coolidge — a Vermonter — signed the most restrictive immigration law in American history. Many believe this act later contributed indirectly to the deaths of thousands of refugees from Hitler’s Germany, who were effectively barred from entering the United States. The law was the product of a growing national fear that the country’s original Anglo-Saxon stock was being diluted by “improper” breeding.
That fear was fanned by a popular movement called eugenics — a movement that sought to save Western Civilization by encouraging “good” families to reproduce and preventing “bad” ones from doing the same. Eugenicists — taking Darwin’s principle of natural selection into their own hands — sought to weed out the “feeble-minded” and physically defective by sterilizing individuals deemed likely to produce such unworthy offspring. For the most part these people were poor and/or nonwhite.
A leader in the American eugenics movement was University of Vermont zoology professor Henry Perkins, whose tireless efforts brought about a state sterilization law in 1931. Under his aegis, more than 200 Vermonters — predominantly women — were rendered incapable of bearing children.
Behind this terse recitation of facts lies an unsavory chapter of Vermont’s past, moldering in state archives until brought to light in 1991 by an enterprising history graduate student named Kevin Dann. Since the publication of Dann’s article in a Vermont History journal, information has slowly leaked out about Vermont’s role in the crude precursor to genetic engineering. It has been gathered as evidence of discrimination by the Abenaki community in its legal battle for sovereignty against the State. It has been the subject of newspaper articles, including one in The Boston Globe just last month. And it is now the inspiration for an art installation where Perkins himself was a virtual founding father: the Fleming Museum.
Eugenics. Racism. Sterilization. Social policy. What’s art got to do with it? Ask Michael Oatman. A painter and installation artist, Oatman was invited last year by Fleming curator Janie Cohen to guest-curate a show at the museum using items from its permanent collection. Cohen notes that Oatman’s work “is part of a recent movement in contemporary art in which artists have cast a fresh eye on history and on the objects and formats through which museums present history.” It occurs as museums nationwide are examining their white, male, Eurocentric bias. For the Fleming and the University of Vermont specifically, Oatman’s invitation resulted in a unique and unexpected airing of some rather dirty laundry.
Oatman is a Vermonter and Champlain Valley Union High School grad. After he acquired degrees in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and SUNY Albany, he returned to Burlington as an adjunct professor in the UVM art department. Long interested in local history — and something of an amateur sleuth — Oatman, now 31, began to pore over the Fleming’s background and artifacts. He quickly discovered Henry Perkins. Serendipitously, he also learned of the zoologist’s obsession with upgrading the Vermont gene pool — and came across a goldmine of Perkins’ former possessions. Like a 12-foot genealogical chart outlining the lineage of two Vermont boys that was shown at the 1932 Eugenics Congress in New York. Like hundreds of slides of plant, animal and human characteristics, used in Perkins’ courses on genetics. A chart from the U.S. Draft Board indicating the sizeable number of and reasons for rejectees from Vermont. Documents from the Eugenics Survey of Vermont, a 10-year study of Vermont families, and its offshoot survey, the Vermont Commission on Country Life.
These and dozens more objects from the museum’s collection — most obtained at the time Perkins was its inaugural curator — piqued Oatman’s interest “in the idea of collecting data and objects. Essentially,” he says, “Perkins collected people.”
Oatman’s installation, called Long Shadows: Henry Perkins and the Eugenics Survey of Vermont, took one year to research and create. And hunting down objects — the enormous topographical map of Vermont under glass, a shrunken monkey head, books, charts, slides, paintings and period furniture — was the easy part. In the Fleming’s largest gallery, Oatman has fabricated an office/study for Perkins — but not the professor’s spare quarters as seen in yellowed photos. This one is elaborately furnished — an overstuffed metaphor for what Oatman imagines Perkins’ psychological state to have been. “I’ve presented a dense, claustrophobic space in which to make my point,” he says. “This room is a symbol for Perkins’ paranoia.”
At first glance the setting seems relatively normal by post-Victorian standards: heavy, dark furniture, a “fainting couch,” an enormous coffee table formed by the encased topo map, and a large, cluttered desk and work table. Then you notice that the flames in the fake fireplace are on a large video screen, over which quotes from principals in the Vermont eugenics movement scroll past:
“Blood has told, and there is every reason to believe it will keep right on telling.” — Henry Perkins.
“The whole of the French-Canadian population could be wiped out of Middlebury and no one would miss it.” — Paul Moody (then-President of Middlebury College).
Across the room, a second video is projected on an arcadian landscape painting. It’s an actor giving a speech that’s part Perkins, part Oatman. “The most outrageous lines are true,” says the artist. Lines like: “Will Vermont become the dodo of the Union? Will the Union become the dodo of the world?” The end of the 15-minute speech is followed by a darkly quirky song Oatman commissioned from an Albany band, The Weasels. Despite its flippant title — “Anyone For Eugenics?” — the sinister lyrics refer to an incident in which 15 people, allegedly Abenakis, were “taken off of Monument Road” in Swanton in 1932.
In Oatman’s — or rather Perkins’ — imaginary office, even the walls have something to say. Near the entrance, gold-leaf silhouettes of famous Euro-Americans dot the green paint like wallpaper roses. As they approach the corner, however, the gold begins to tarnish, the noble physiognomies devolve. By the time the wall reaches Perkins’ desk, the silhouettes are huge, black and monstrous. And on the other side of the desk, Oatman has fabricated a massive, 3-D “inkblot” that looks like tar — from which Rorschach test protrudes Perkins’ worst nightmare: a dark face with primate-like features.
The room is literally crammed with objects, nearly all of them symbolic. A marble bust of Napolean turned to face the wall. Two bronze cows resting on the coffee table, one grazing peacefully, the other toppled. Classic paintings covered in text, such as a Perkins’ motto, “Make Haste Slowly” — his admonition to do something, now, about the decline of the human race. Dozens of slides, on a light table and in boxes, bearing racial features and deformities. Perkins’ own handprint. Casts from the Natural History Museum representing different races.
Viewers exit the room through a closet — which Oatman says represents how the contents of his exhibit were closeted for years — into a small information room. Here, a plethora of charts and texts attempts to reverse the decades-long secrecy about eugenics.
Oatman’s installation is a lot to take in at once; the visual images alone require some mulling over, for days, before their full import settles in. “I just wanted to hit people in the face, to give them a lot to look at,” says the artist. “I wanted to engineer every object.” His choice of the word “engineer” is significant.
To be fair, Perkins’ life work — and Oatman’s portrayal of it — must be seen in context. Eugenics was initially considered a progressive idea (by whites); even Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was behind it. Vermont was the 25th state to pass a sterilization law, just two years before Nazi Germany’s similarly-worded mandate. In retrospect, the Vermont Commission on Rural Life spawned some relatively innocuous ideas — like the state’s cultivation of a pure, clean image to attract well-heeled tourists. Or even good ones, like the no-billboard law and an emphasis on preserving the state’s natural beauty. Even Perkins tempered his views — albeit reluctantly — by the mid-’30s, joining other members of the American Eugenics Society in acknowledging the rights of individuals to make their own reproductive decisions and the role of environment in shaping intellect and behavior.
Oatman admits he began his project wanting to see Perkins as a monster. “Gradually I came to see him as less a person than as a metaphor for the period, a metaphor for the kind of scientific zeal that gets caught in its own imagery and equipment.
“But if Perkins was a symbol for the times, the question Oatman raises is whether those times are still with us. The 1930s were not the first nor the last era in which moral condemnation and bigotry were cloaked in the guise of Progress. In a decade when California attempts to keep out Mexican immigrants, “ethnic cleansing” involves wholesale butchery in the Balkans, and genetic engineers play God with chromosomes, the idea of racial purity bears renewed scrutiny. In Long Shadows, Oatman has fulfilled his pledge to “make the invisible present.” In the end, perhaps art — and artistic license — best illustrate why truth is stranger than fiction.
This article appears in October 4 • 1995.
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