Three Hoosier Leaders of the National Eugenics Movement
Hey everyone! This is my first blog post of a series I'm doing in honor of my thesis topic. Currently, I'm in graduate school and pursuing my degree in Public History. In a nut shell, Public History goes outside the boundaries of academia and seeks to involve the public, which is why I am using this blog as a tool to share interesting things I find!
My thesis topic mainly focuses on the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center in Butlerville, Indiana. While it is currently used as an amazing immersive training experience for the United States Military, it was once used as a mental institution, from 1919 to 2005. My thesis will track the history of this hidden historic gem in Indiana history.
A major point I'm focusing on in my thesis is Muscatatuck's role in the national and local eugenics movement in the United States during the early and mid-twentieth century. In this institution's early years, some of the patients that were deemed "feeble-minded" were sent away to be forcibly sterilized so as to prevent these people from reproducing. Though Muscatatuck did not have this operation done on-site, this caused me to dig further into Indiana's role in the eugenics movement.
Sources I have found lead me to believe that though Muscatatuck was not a major base for forced sterilization, it was an encapsulation of the societal consensus about how those deemed mentally inferior than the average human should should be treated. For many, the answer to that treatment was eugenics, or to control, limit, reduce, or even eradicate people deemed "degenerate" from reproducing. To set the stage for the first few of my blogs, I am going to share how Indiana not only played a role in the eugenics movement, it was one of the leading states to promote eugenics policies such as forced sexual sterilizations.
For this post, a majority of my information I got was from A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era, by Paul A. Lombardo. For more information on this book, I have hyperlinked the image to Amazon!
A major discovery in my readings was how three leaders in the national eugenics movement were from Indiana: Oscar McCullouch (1843-1891), David Starr Jordan (1851-1931), and Harry Clay Sharp (1871-1940). Each man brought the state and the nation closer to normalizing and legalizing forced sexual sterilizations.
Oscar McCullouch (1843-1891)
McCullouch was raised and educated in Illinois. He felt called to go into ministry and soon was a pastor at his first church in Wisconsin. He eventually moved to Indianapolis where he served as pastor in a church where membership was failing. Using his business skills that his father ingrained in his brain, McCullouch was able to save the church and make excellent connections with charities and other community organizations in Indianapolis. An interesting aspect about McCullouch's mindset was that he accepted Darwinian evolution. He believed that science was an excellent way to understand the universe God created.
In the late 1880s, McCullouch failed to convert a group of people he called, "'a tribe of degenerates'" (Lombardo, p. 15). According to Paul A. Lombardo, this group was called the Tribe of Ishmael. They were, "an impoverished group that lived along the banks of the White River who had first come to Indiana when it was not yet a state" (p. 15). This group often spent their winters in Indianapolis where they held odd job and never owned permanent property. The tribe claimed they were descendants of escaped indentured servants, English tinkers, and escaped or freed slaves.
McCullouch could not comprehend why this group preferred to migrate as opposed to settle down in one spot. He believed they were a "parasitic race" and that they should be "isolated and prevented from reproducing" (Lombardo, p. 16). At one point, McCullouch entertained the thought of taking children from this tribe and raising them in traditional American homes since he believed this group of people were "devil grass" that could be controlled through being "uprooted" (Lombardo, p. 16).
Though McCullouch did not go far with his individual idea of eugenics, he did set the stage for others to not only share his ideas, but act on them as well. One of the men he inspired to further pursue this idea was David Starr Jordan.
David Starr Jordan (1851-1931)
After earning a bachelor's degree at Cornell University and a master's degree at Harvard, Jordan enrolled in a one-year proprietary program at the Medical College of Indianapolis in 1875. As he progressed in his medical education, Jordan was becoming more prominent and well-known in his academic circle. In 1879, Jordan left Indianapolis and headed for Bloomington where he became Indiana University's (IU) president in 1885.
Jordan and McCulloch crossed paths at church and they kept up with correspondence until McCulloch's death in 1891. It was McCulloch who introduced Jordan to who the Tribe of Ishmael were and it was Jordan who provided McCulloch with sources that helped McCulloch uphold that through evolution, this tribe was "'human parasitism'" (Lombardo, p. 17).
Jordan spent 30 years at IU where he taught his students that while all of them were superior to other people who were not in college, each student was either less or more superior mentally than their peer. In 1909, Jordan went on to chair the first committee on eugenics for the American Breeders Association. He wrote various books that promoted a eugenics outlook on society. Jordan felt it was "an evolutionary obligation for humanity to cull the least productive of its members and to encourage the best and the brightest to reproduce more of their kind" (Lombardo, p. 17).
Oddly enough, Jordan was a pacifist because of his eugenics outlook. He believed that war caused the healthiest and ablest men to go off to war and get killed. Thus leaving the "dull and physically weak" behind (Lombardo, p. 17). While McCulloch formulated this idea of eugenics and controlling who did and did not reproduce, Jordan took McCulloch's ideas to the next level through publishing his own works in academic circles and teaching that eugenics was the scientific answer to a wholesome and healthy society. His teachings went on to inspire Dr. Harry Sharp, who became one of the famous leaders of the eugenics movement and was the first man to successfully introduce and practice sexual sterilization in the United States.
Dr. Harry Clay Sharp (1871-1940)
Born and raised in Indiana, Sharp completed medical school in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1896. In his studies, Sharp developed a passion for public health and hygiene, whether this involved water purification, meat inspections, or garbage disposals.
Sharp's first job was as a prison physician in Jeffersonville (across the Ohio River from Louisville). The health of the prisoners was terrible, as was the physical state of the prison. Prisoners died of tuberculosis, typhus, and typhoid fever (Lombardo, p. 18). The prisoners were fed mush, the kitchen failed to be stocked with proper meals, and it was a daily morning chore for the guards to simply hose away the urine and feces from the cells.
In response, Sharp documented the horrendous conditions in his biannual reports and kept petitioning to the governor by asserting that while prisoners "surrendered their freedom" that didn't mean they "surrender their humanity" (Lombardo, p. 18). Changes were eventually implemented and a few years later Sharp was happy to report that there was a dramatic reduction in the death rates.
Along with his views on physical health hygiene, Sharp had a strong position on mental health hygiene. In his first published work, he explained that hysteria was an emotional breakdown usually committed by a woman. Whereas men were more likely to suffer from nervous exhaustion (Lombardo, p. 19). Sharp was inspired by European physicians like Herbert Spencer, who coined the term Social Darwinism. Spencer asserted that society should purge itself of the "degenerate components"- one way, in Sharp's mind, to purge was through a surgical solution; sterilization.
Sharp went on to practice his form of eugenics through his own surgical sexual sterilization method; vasectomies. His first surgery was on a prisoner named Clawson. Clawson fit Sharp's definition of a "degenerate" because Clawson would excessively indulge in the act of self-pleasure. This made Clawson an excellent candidate for sexual sterilization since Sharp learned in medical school such sexual actions were committed by degenerates. After the surgery, Sharp reported that the vasectomy had "improved Clawson's health and cured his moral degeneracy" (Lombardo, p. 20).
Sharp then had Clawson recruit other prisoners to undergo this surgery. It is unclear how many vasectomies Sharp performed before 1907 when forced sterilizations became legal in Indiana. However, we do know that Sharp performed quite a few before this procedure was legal and that he petitioned the Indiana legislature as early as 1901 to make surgical sterilizations legal. Between 1899 and 1909, Sharp reported he performed 456 of these sexual sterilizations. Years later, the numbers rose to 600 (Lombardo, p. 20).
Sharp used this success to promote a nation-wide campaign for sexual sterilizations, thus becoming the first "nationally successful advocate" of sterilizations (Lombardo, p. 20).
As the Twentieth Century progressed, other advocates of sterilizations started taking the stage, like Harry Laughlin, the superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office. The movement expanded into the mid-1900s and men like McCulloch, Jordan, and Sharp laid the foundation for these ideas to grow into a nation-wide movement. They set the stage for court cases and laws to be passed that legalized this form of eugenics. While Sharp's patients supposedly volunteered for these surgeries, soon many of these sterilization became compulsory and people were forced to have these operations.
It's easy for us to look back on these men and cast judgement on their obviously flawed perspectives on humanity. However, Paul Lombardo made an excellent point when he said that rather than scapegoating these men, we need to find a more productive purpose to investigate their life; "not to place blame and calumny, but instead to understand why solutions that today appear obviously flawed held such immense appeal in the past" (p. 23).
That's part of my goal, to better understand why people bought into this worldview. I hope you all learned something about Hoosiers involvement in the eugenics movement! I will be dedicating the next few posts to Indiana and Muscatatuck's involvement in eugenics, as well as the infamous case, Buck vs. Bell, which set precedent for allowing physicians to sterilize people deemed "feeble-minded" against their will.