"IT IS not too much to say, I believe, that the idea of eugenics, based upon the science of eugenics, will work the greatest social revolution the world has yet known."
May 6 is Holocaust Remembrance Day, an opportunity to take stock of the horror unleashed upon millions of innocents by ideologies like these, espoused by monsters an ocean away from own community.
Except the remarks above are not the words of any Nazi. They were spoken in 1912, in an address by Dr. H. E. Jordan, who became dean of the Department of Medicine at the University in 1939. And the ideology isn't the product of a Nazi hell; rather, it is the creation of our own white column and red brick world.
The University's history as an epicenter of the American eugenics movement is one of its most shameful secrets. Though much has been investigated, compiled and published on the University's involvement with eugenics, traces of this hateful legacy still remain, the most obvious of which is the home of the Bioethics Department itself.
The Barringer Wing of the Medical Center, which houses the Center for Biomedical Ethics among other clinical departments and offices, is named for Dr. Paul B. Barringer, one of the leaders of Virginia's eugenics research.
The term "eugenics," first coined in the late 19th century, is essentially animal husbandry practices as applied to human beings: ensuring that the strongest members of a species reproduce while preventing the less capable ones from doing so. The University was a national leader in the field of eugenics research, which was the ersatz biology that ascribed racial genetic links to inferior and superior intellectual capabilities.
This pseudo-science, which was taught as a legitimate discipline at this school as well as many others throughout the first half of the last century, was used to justify forced sterilization, racism and segregation. It led directly to the passage of the 1924 Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act which allowed for the sterilization of the "feebleminded," a law upheld by the United States Supreme Court in the 1927 Buck v. Bell opinion.
The legislation was designed to "rid Virginia of defective persons." If the language sounds evocative of Nazi policy, that's because it is.
As noted in an article on the subject by Bioethics Prof. Paul Lombardo, Hitler's 1933 "Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Disease" contains language lifted from the 1924 Virginia statute authorizing involuntary sterilization.
In fact, Virginians like Dr. Joseph DeJarnette, who directed Western State Hospital, lamented our nation's lack of fervor when it came to the process. "Germany in six years has sterilized about 80,000 of her unfit while the United States with approximately twice the population has only sterilized about 27,869 to January 1, 1938 in the past twenty years," he noted in that year. "The fact that there are 12,000,000 defectives in the U.S. should arouse our best endeavors to push this procedure to the maximum."
In one prominent sense, DeJarnette's home state continued on in pursuit of his goal; while most involuntary sterilizations occurred in the 1930s and 1940s in the rest of the nation, the procedures continued to be performed in Virginia until they were outlawed by the General Assembly in 1974.
And though the worst manifestations of this experiment in cruel junk science have since been outlawed, its heritage is still honored in columns and brick, with a building just a step away from Central Grounds. The Barringer Wing's namesake, the last chairman of the faculty (a post abolished with the appointment of our first president in 1904), was a major proponent of some of the most racist claims of eugenics. Dr. Barringer described the racial problems of his era as black Americans on their "return to barbarism like the return of the sow ... to her wallowing in the mire." He was also quoted as crediting the institution of slavery for its civilizing influence, announcing that, "my friends, we can boldly declare the old Southern house servant, male or female, as brought up in the better class of families, was the flood tide product in Negro character."
Whatever Dr. Barringer's contributions as head of the University or as a member of the University's Medical Community, his legacy of racism and cruelty in the name of science far exceeds them. It is well past time for the University to rename Barringer Wing.
May 6 is Holocaust Remembrance Day, as perfect an opportunity as any to take stock of the horrors unleashed by ideologies in our own community. We cannot change the events in our past, but we can take responsibility to keep them there. And we can start with that white column and red brick building just a step from Central Grounds.
Katie Cristol's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at kcristol@cavalierdaily.com.
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