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About Cottage Grove sentinel. (Cottage Grove, Or.) 1909-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 29, 2018)
10A • COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL • AUGUST 29, 2018 Off -Beat Oregon: How a little-known activist stopped state forced-sterilization By Finn J.D. John For The Sentinel I n 1913, the Oregon state legislature passed a eugen- ic-sterilization law that had been written for it by one of the state’s most prominent citizens. Th e law’s author was Bethe- nia Owens-Adair, the fi rst fe- male medical doctor in Oregon history. She had retired from practice eight years earlier and devoted herself to three big so- cial-activism projects: women’s suff rage, the temperance move- ment — and eugenics. She was winning all three of these battles. Th e previous November, Oregon voters had enacted full voting rights for women in state and local elec- tions. Prohibition, she knew (or at least strongly suspected), would follow just as soon as all the newly enfranchised women could get to the polls for the 1914 election. And the sterilization law’s passage that year represented victory on the third front: eu- genics. Essentially, eugenics is an at- tempt to apply the techniques of dog breeding to the enhance- ment of the human gene pool. One could not, of course, simply kill the less desirable specimens, the way dog breed- ers once did. But one could, with the right kind of legisla- tion, spay or neuter them. And that, essentially, was the solu- tion Dr. Owens-Adair recom- mended. Her victory had been a long time coming. She’d fi rst intro- duced a eugenics bill in the legislature, with the help of her state rep. in 1907. It would have required that “habitual crim- inals, moral degenerates and sexual perverts” — including people caught engaging in “the crime against nature” — a eu- phemism for homosexual ac- tivity — “or other gross, bestial and perverted sexual habits” — should, before being released from state institutions (prison, insane asylum, juvenile deten- tion, etc.) be sterilized. Th e bill didn’t pass in 1907. Eugenics hadn’t quite come into its own as a topic of popu- lar interest yet. Time was on its side, though. In scientifi c circles, the theory of hard Darwinian gene-driven evolution was becoming dom- inant. And it wasn’t much of a leap from “our genes control our lives” to “hey, that drunk guy in the corner of the bar must have really lousy genes, let’s do something to keep him from passing them on.” Th at sentiment didn’t have enough support in 1907. Or in 1909, when Dr. Owens-Adair reintroduced it. But in 1913, it did — enough support to over- ride the governor’s veto. (Gov. West took care to explain, though, that while he agreed with the bill’s sentiment, he didn’t think it provided enough protection against possible abuse.) But that’s when the irresist- ible force that was Bethenia Owens-Adair encountered the immovable object that was Lora Little. Lora Cornelia Little was born in 1856 in Minnesota. She married an engineer in the late 1880s, and settled into the life of a rural housewife. Soon the couple had a son, Kenneth. Th e turning point in her life came in 1896 when her son was vaccinated for smallpox. Over the subsequent year or so, the little tyke started getting ear in- fections, and fi nally he caught diphtheria and died. Lora Little was crushed. And angry. Very, very angry — es- pecially as well-meaning so- cial-hygienists, many of them physicians, started pushing for the vaccination that had, she thought, killed her son to be made mandatory for all Min- neapolis schoolchildren. Little developed a cordial and enduring hatred of the mainstream medical profes- sion, and over the subsequent decade she developed a med- ical philosophy of her own — one somewhat similar to that of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, or of Sylvester Graham (the inven- tor of the Graham Cracker). Diseases of all types, she pos- ited, were symptoms of an un- balanced life; and eating right (whole grains, lots of vegeta- bles, very little meat) and living right (no booze or unnecessary sex, getting proper sleep, etc.) was the key to staying healthy and never getting sick. Drugs upset that balance. Vaccinations and inocula- tions upset that balance. Mainstream doctors (or “al- lopaths,” as they were perjora- tively called), who used those tools, were hurting people — people like little Kenneth — in their battle to establish their medical tradition as the domi- nant one. In 1898 Little started pub- lishing a magazine called “Lib- erator.” Th e magazine was a big success, although it appears to have wrecked her marriage. In 1906 she built on that success to publish a book, a work in the spirit of the muckrakers titled “Crimes of the Cowpox Ring: Some Moving Pictures Th rown on the Dead Wall of Offi cial Science,” in which she recount- ed her experience in losing Kenneth. Her book, magazine, and co- pious letters to the editors of local newspapers made a signif- icant contribution to anti-vac- cine sentiment in Minneapolis. And then, in 1911, she moved to Portland and settled in the Mount Scott neighborhood. She immediately opened a health institute, the Little School of Health, and began seeing patients and teaching classes. She also began writing letters to the editor of the Port- land Morning Oregonian — lots of letters. She started a column in the neighborhood weekly, the Mount Scott Herald, titled “Health in the Suburbs.” She was a force to be reck- oned with in her new home. Portraits of her show a poised, confi dent woman in the high celluloid collar and necktie commonly worn by business- men of the day, with steady, fearless eyes. And it was a year or two af- ter Little established herself in Portland that Bethenia Ow- ens-Adair launched her suc- cessful bid to get mandatory sterilization of “undesirables” legalized. ow, of course, eugen- ic sterilization was not Little’s primary target. Th at, in memory of little Kenneth, would always be vaccination. But she saw the two issues as closely related. In both cases, mainstream physicians were as- serting control over other peo- ple’s bodies. And she also saw that the same spirit animated both acts — the technocratic spirit of the Progressive move- ment, the spirit that looked to mold and guide society in more virtuous ways by what- ever means the relevant experts thought best, with scant regard for individual rights. “A bull in a china shop is a gentle, constructive creature compared with a lot of prim and more or less pious folks when they want to clean up so- ciety and the world,” she wrote in her column in the Mount Scott Herald. “Mr. Sudden Re- former sees something he does not like in one of his fellow cit- izens. Very likely it is a reprehen- sible thing. Plenty of evils ex- ist in the lives and habits of all classes. Th is would be a thing of which Mr. Sudden Reformer is not himself guilty. Th erefore he hates it with a mighty loathing. Dwelling on it, he works him- self into a frenzy.” Little now worked herself into something of a frenzy as well. Reaching out to fellow anti-allopaths as well as civil libertarians, she joined (or pos- sibly founded) the Anti-Ster- ilization League, accepted the position of vice-president, and took on the job of collecting enough signatures to refer the law to the voters in November under Oregon’s then-new Ini- tiative and Referendum system. Th e Portland Morning Ore- gonian, which was a vigorous supporter of the Owens-Adair N town just aft er the 1916 elec- tions, in which she had thrown all her resources into a losing ballot-measure battle against her old enemy, mandatory vac- cination, which she predicted would be “thrown down hard at the polls by a people who like to think they own the blood in their veins and feel it is their business what goes into it.” She had a point. But the ex- tenuating circumstances in mandatory vaccination — herd immunity, the disruption of mass-casualty epidemics — were a lot more compelling than they were in eugenic ster- ilization, and her campaign fell just 374 votes short of passage. As for Owens-Adair’s ster- ilization act, it went into eff ect and over the subsequent 75 years the state of Oregon qui- etly sterilized more than 2,600 people — troubled youths in juvenile detention facilities, in- sane-asylum inmates, members of poor families selected by so- cial workers, and penitentiary prisoners Finally, in 1983, the state eu- genics board — renamed, for public-relations reasons, the Board of Social Protection — was quietly dissolved, bringing the whole ignoble experiment to an end. And in 2002, Gov- ernor John Kitzhaber formal- ly apologized to everyone the state had mutilated under the law. It was bad. But had it not been for Lora Little, it likely would have been a good deal worse. Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon State University and writes about Oregon history. Visit www.fi nn- john.com. To contact him or suggest a topic: fi nn2@offb eatoregon.com or call 541-357-2222. Expungement NO Court Appearance DIVORCE & Arrests EARTHLINK INTERNET $155 HIGH SPEED INTERNET , Clear Many Convictions , NO Court Appearances Enjoy big-time Internet speeds without spending big bucks! Get Connected for as low as Get Connected for as low as 14.95/mo. $ 49.99/mo. 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Support Your Community By Supporting law, spluttered and fulminated against the “panicky, supersti- tious individuals” who were trying to block it; but this was a hard case to make in the same newspaper that had been pub- lishing Lora Little’s articulate and convincing (if frequently misguided) letters for years. And as Governor West had pointed out, there really were some serious issues with the law — besides the obvious one, of course. Portland attorney C.E.S. Wood, a prominent Pro- gressive who many doubtless thought they would fi nd on the other side, was one of the most outspoken about the need to stop the law. “Th eir chief argument was that under the proposed law the assent of only two persons was needed to authorize surgi- cal mutilation of the most help- less members of society,” his- torian Robert Johnson writes. “History demonstrated, the opponents asserted, that people with this kind of power tend to abuse it.” It was an argument that res- onated with the public. And so, to Dr. Owens-Adair’s dismay, the voters quashed the law by a substantial majority; 56 percent of them voted to throw it out. Dr. Owens-Adair had lost the battle, but not the war. She took the critique of C.E.S. Wood and Oswald West to heart, and her next eugenic-sterilization bill contained more checks and balances, more processes of notifi cation and appeal, and called for an actual state eu- genics commission to provide oversight. And in 1917, it passed. But by that time Lora Little was out of the picture, having left town to join the nation- al American Medical Liberty League. In the end, perhaps she was less of a force of na- ture than she seemed. She left Local Businesses www.paralegalalternatives.com Divorce in 1-5 weeks Possible! 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