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.
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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
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