See:
Breeding Better Vermonters. The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State. Gallagher, Nancy L. Hanover and London, University Press of New England. 1999
at:
http://www.galtoninstitute.org.uk/Newsletters/GINL0112/Breeding_Better_Vermonters.htmwherein you'll find these nuggets (among others):
"The presiding passion governing his work, Gallagher argues, was his sense of crisis about Vermont and the place within it of the old Vermonter Yankee aristocracy of which he was a representative. Vermont was changing, threatened by the collapse of the small self-sufficient family farm and its replacement by larger commercially organized agriculture. There was a flight from the land, a decline of many small towns and drift to larger urban areas or out of the state altogether. Tourism was the chief area of economic expansion and, ironically, this expansion was largely due to the marketing of an image of ‘old Vermont’ of rural simplicity and small family farms just at the very moment of its disappearance."
***
"Gallagher’s book is a story of the limitations upon eugenic intervention in Vermont’s social and political life. She describes the impact of these limitations at a national level during the period from 1931-4 when Perkins was the vice president of the troubled American Eugenics Society. But they were brought home first and most forcibly through his work in Vermont. First his pedigree family studies, besides the usual faults which historians of eugenics have pointed out in these investigations, ran into difficulties with the community at large when in the course of amassing several thousand family networks he discovered that many of’ the ‘better’ Vermonter families had links to the ‘social problem groups’ he had identified. More to the point, most educated Vermonters were trying to recreate a sense of community in rural Vermont not shatter it by finger pointing. Under mounting disapproval Perkins quietly dropped and, in some cases, repudiated aspects of these studies by the late 1920s.
Next, although Vermont passed a voluntary sterilization law in 1931, Perkins’s abrasive and incautious advocacy of sterilization in 1927-8 alienated Vermont’s political and cultural community. French Canadians retreated behind the protection of the Roman Catholic Church and some families hired lawyers. Finally no significant difference was discovered in the incidence of mental deficiency among the Vermont school population from the rest of America or any group within Vermont from another. Given the rather aggressive assertions about ethnicity and IQ of some in the American Eugenics Society and his correspondents at Cold Spring Harbor at this time, Perkins did not broadcast this result."
