The Heritage Month Project: "A Distinct Alien Race" and Eugenics

This is it, folks. My last reading post for National Immigrant Heritage Month  related to Franco- Americans and the very fine A Distinct Alien Race by David Vermette.

I have no recollection of ever hearing about the eugenics movement in school, though I was a history minor in college.  In the early twentieth century eugenics, the belief that humanity could be improved through selective breeding, became popular enough in the United States that in 1927 the Supreme Court in Buck v Bell found that "The Virginia statute providing for the sexual sterilization of inmates of institutions supported by the State who shall be found to be afflicted with an hereditary form of insanity or imbecility, is within the power of the State under the Fourteenth Amendment."

Eugenics was a national and international movement, culminating in the Holocaust. 

It wasn't until around 25 years ago while I was taking my one graduate course, which was on essay writing (I aced it, since I know you're all wondering), that I stumbled upon eugenics. I was working on an essay for that class that would one day become Dinner at Shirley Farr's House. At that point, the essay was about a local rube (me) who managed to get into a wealthy person's house by way of the restaurant someone had opened in it after her death, enjoyed the place, and then it became even more of a wealthy person's place, ruining her bliss. I decided I should see if I could find anything about Shirl on-line. The woman definitely used her wealth to help her community. She also used it to support something called The Eugenics Survey of Vermont. and did so for ten years. The survey involved research on families as part of the Vermont Eugenics Project, and it would eventually lead to Vermont's own sterilization law in 1931. (It was one of 30 states to have one.) The goal was to reduce the "population of Vermont's "social problem group."

And What Does This Have to do With Franco-Americans, Gail?

Well, it has plenty to do with them, as Vermette says in his chapter on eugenics in A Distinct Alien Race. He refers to a writer named Madison Grant who believed that the U.S. needed to "prevent an infusion of so-called inferior breeding stock to maintain its racial purity." There's lots of quotes  concerned about who was--and was not--fit to reproduce. 

Various groups tended to turn up as targets for eugenicists and French Canadians were among them. (You see them mentioned in writing about Vermont's eugenics survey.) Grant said of them "The Quebec Frenchmen will succeed in seriously impeding the progress of Canada and will succeed even better in keeping themselves a poor and ignorant community of little more importance to the world at large than are the Negroes in the South." (Hitting two groups at once!) Vermette says that Grant classified Canadiens as "the lowest form of whiteness in his racial scheme."

During this period, the issue of whether or not French Canadians are mixed race came up again. Vermette says that genealogists today are divided on how much early French and Native American marriage actually occurred, but it was a common believe in the U.S. in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and that was a reason for considering Franco-Americans nonwhite and thus inferior. (Another case of hitting two groups at once.)

Vermette gives the Vermont Eugenics Project its own section in his eugenics chapter. He quotes a letter to Dr. Henry F. Perkins, the head of the Vermont project, from Charles Benedict Davenport the creator of the Eugenics Record Office. "Did you know, that in the study of defects found in drafted men, Vermont stood at or near the top of the list...? This result I ascribe to the French Canadian constituents of the population which, I had other reasons for believing, to contain an undue proportion of defectives."

One of the interesting aspects, yes, there is more than one, of the eugenics movement is that terms like "defective" do not appear to have ever been defined. Another interesting aspect? It was a Progressive reform.

Vermont's Eugenics Project particularly targeted the poor, the disabled, French Canadians, and Native Americans. Two hundred and fifty-three sterilizations were performed there between 1931 and 1957.  You can also find a breakdown of sterilizations due to eugenics by state.

Eugenics Today? Positive vs Negative Eugenics

Now, there were two aspects to the eugenics movement:

The one sometimes referred to as negative, involved forced sterilizations of people considered unfit to reproduce. Negative eugenics gets a lot of attention for very obvious reasons. In addition to the unpleasantness going on in this country, books on eugenics by American writers were cited by Hitler and his buddies as influences. (Vermette and others.) Hitler...his buddies...the Holocaust.

This past spring, the word "eugenics" turned up in the press in response to some comments from a government leader on the topic of neurodivergence. 

But while the positive aspect of eugenics isn't, shall we say, as dark, it is...impactful. Positive eugenics encourages the improvement of humanity through selective breeding by actually encouraging breeding, but of the right sort of people. We're talking white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, or at least western European. In A Distinct Alien Race, Vermette quotes someone who made a distinction between European French and French Canadian, for instance. No one was encouraging French Canadians to reproduce. The French they were more open to. 

An argument can be made that today's pronatalist (probirth movement) may have a positive eugenics tone to it, one involving large white families. Some pronatalists also have a goal of producing lots of children with high IQ. I say may, because it's difficult to speculate about how wide-spread a goal is when the same couple is featured in articles about it.

To Recap

A Distinct Alien Race is an excellent, well-documented history of a group that has seemed invisible to me most of my life, even though I'm a member of it. At one point the author, David Vermette, describes Franco-Americans as "a mostly forgotten, white-identified ethnic enclave in New England." 

It seems bizarre to me that that could happen to a people who were despised as much as Franco-Americans were one hundred plus years ago. However, history tells us that there are far worse things that can happen to a culture.

Comptez votre bénédictions.

The Heritage Month Project: "A Distinct Alien Race" and the Ku Klux Klan

My reading for National Immigrant Heritage Month continues.

I grew up in central Vermont and graduated from the state's university. While there, I had a suitemate (later one of my bridesmaids) who grew up in the northern part of the state. One day she casually mentioned that her grandfather had been active in the Ku Klux Klan in Vermont. (No recollection how the conversation came about.)

I was ignorant back then and not shy about showing it. Everybody knew that the Klan was anti-Black, right? And back then Vermont was not known for its extensive Black population. So, I laughed and said, "Who were they against?"

"French Canadians."

Ayeah, I stopped laughing.

And that, mesdames et monsieurs, is why Klan activity in relation to Franco-Americans is something I was aware of a little earlier in life than I was, say, Little Canadas.

David Vermette has a fascinating chapter on the the KKK and its activities in relation to Franco-Americans in A Distinct Alien Race.

The Klan in the Early Twentieth Century

As Vermette tells it, in the early twentieth century, the Klan became very business-like.  The Ku Klux Klan Corporation was formed in 1915. In 1920, its Imperial Wizard (a former minister) hired a public relations firm. There were members who functioned as traveling salesmen, going into new towns to drum up new members. They ran ads in newspapers and offered special promotions. Protestant ministers, for instance, could join for free. New members paid a membership fee, and bits and pieces of that fee were doled out to various people in the Klan hierarchy. Members bought their hoods and robes from the Klan, and that fee was spread out amongst higher ups, too. It sounds very much like a pyramid scheme.

As with all kinds of businesses, the Klan wanted to grow, and it did. It had quite an impressive membership by the 1920s and was pulling in real bucks. To continue growing, it had to branch out to other parts of the country, such as New England. I was right. Back in my day, there was not a large Black population in New England, and the same was true in the '20s. (Before my day!) But as Vermette says in his book, "Since, in most cases, New Englanders had little occasion to interact with non-whites, distinctions of language and faith served as the practical basis for othering minorities."

In other words, New England had a lot of French-speaking Catholics. According to Vermette, in the early part of the twentieth century it also had a lot of Klan members.

The Klan and Franco-Americans

The Klan response to Franco-Americans was "logical" to the extent that Franco-Americans were both Catholic and foreign. Foreign-ish, even if they were born in the United States, because they maintained their language. The fear that Franco-Americans were too close to their homeland and would thus be able to join with French Canadians in some kind of French Catholic takeover was renewed during this period. To deal with that the Klan encouraged the passage of laws that would enforce English-only instruction in schools, and they were successful with that in some New England states. Dealing with Catholicism was harder. In the South, the Klan worked through the Democratic Party, but in the north Democrats tended to be working class and...Catholic.

And recall that French Canadians and Franco-Americans were sometimes considered mixed race because of the possibility of intermarriage between early French settlers and native people. In addition to being Catholic and French speaking, for the Klan Franco-Americans were not truly white the way European immigrants were. 

Vermette's chapter on the Klan in New England is fantastic in terms of both explaining the Klan's response to Franco-Americans there (conflicts between pro- and anti-Klan groups, bombings, and the burning of a Franco-American parish school, for instance) and in terms of Klan history, itself. It left me wondering why, given the times we live in, we're not hearing about a resurgence of Klan activity.

Perhaps, given the times we live in, those who might otherwise be interested don't feel there's a need for it.

Next time: Franco-Americans and the eugenics movement. 

A Lit Journal Acceptance and a Story Behind the Story

My new short story, What We Do, has been published in Stonecoast Review Literary Journal. It's going to appear in its print journal, as well, which is wonderful, because print still has some...allure...shall we say? I have been published by a few literary journals in the past, but not many so this is satisfying to say the least. Literary journals are where short stories are published these days, so if you want to write them, it's good to break into that market.

This post from back in 2010 helps explain why I've made so little progress moving into short story writing. Other factors:

• Lack of practice. The eight children's books published prior to 2008 took a lot of time. I've also written a number of unpublished novels since then. Unpublished, but still time consuming.
• Lack of training. I'm trying to address that now with workshops and self-study.
• Lack of focus. By which I mean I'm also interested in writing humor and essays. And within essays I'm interested in writing about eating and maybe nature and travel. (I have a submission in somewhere that I'm claiming fits their nature theme.) I recognize that I'm spreading myself pretty thin in terms of developing a level of knowledge of all those forms.

Back to "What We Do"

This story began decades ago. My interest was in the women as a group, as protectors and defenders. I submitted a much earlier third-person version with no main character, to a women's magazine that doesn't exist anymore. I took an on-line flash fiction class during the first year of the pandemic where I was able to get feedback on this particular story from the instructor. At that point, I had shortened it a great deal and created a first-person narrator--the predator. The story began with a description of the setting, and the instructor made the very valid point that if the story was about the women, I shouldn't be giving up the valuable introduction to the beach.

The most interesting part of her feedback was that she didn't see the strength of the women at all. She accepted the women as being mundane, stereotypical moms being dissed by the author and didn't recognize that they were operating on two levels. 

I needed to address both those points.

I revised and then submitted the story five more times before submitting to Stonecoast.

Why I Think This Story Was Finally Published

1. Stonecoast Review made a call for stories dealing with the theme of "power." I find writing on someone else's themes difficult and rarely do it. However, in this case, I felt I already had a story dealing with power. I pitched What We Do as a story about people who are traditionally viewed as powerless but are not.
2. Traditionally, short stories are supposed to show change in some way. By the time I submitted this story to Stonecoast, I had revised once again and given it a main character who has little respect for the women around her in the opening, recognizes what they are doing, and changes her attitude, which is made clear when she entrusts something valuable to one of them.
3. It also had a new title--What We Do instead of On the Beach, which is what I'd been using for the most recent drafts and submissions. Titles in flash are particularly important. They need to be doing some of the lifting and What We Do does, if for no other reason than that it shows action, which On the Beach does not. On the Beach also puts too much focus on the setting, instead of the women.

You can see what I mean about lack of training holding me back with my short fiction writing. This was a long learning curve for me that I hope will have an impact on my future writing.

Oh, And I Attended a Launch Event for This Issue 

Stonecoast Review held a launch event for this new issue to which I was invited. It was held over Zoom. You know how I sincerely love Zoom. 

I didn't volunteer to read, since I hadn't been to one of these events before and wanted to test the waters. I'm glad I didn't, because at that event I wasn't in children's publishing world or on-line publishing world. I was in academic/literary world with people who had had work nominated for writing awards, who had or were editors of literary journals I'd heard of, who had MFAs and were up for Ph.D.s and who are teachers. I definitely have professional writing accomplishments, but they aren't the same kind of accomplishments these people had. Mine aren't better, they aren't worse, they're just different. 

This was a very different kind of pool for me, and I'm glad to have had an opportunity to wade in it.

The Heritage Month Project: "A Distinct Alien Race" and Little Canadas

My Reading for National Immigrant Heritage Month Continues

One of the many things author David Vermette writes about in  A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans  that I knew nothing about growing up is Little Canadas. I mean I didn't hear about them until the last ten years or so. I had some knowledge of Little Italies, Chinatowns,  Little Polands, and Little Swedens. But I'd never heard of Little Canadas, even though there was supposed to have been one in the early twentieth century in Winooski, Vermont where I was a student teacher in the middle school years later. I now also wonder if the extremely small  town in which my father was born and grew up would qualify as a Little Canada, but one that grew up around farming, not mills. My Gauthier grandfather was 

The Gauthier family on their Vermont farm. 

from eastern Ontario and came here with his wife and older children after WWI, making him and other French Canadians like him different from the French Canadians who came to the U.S. from Quebec in the nineteenth century to find work in mills. My American-born father, who as an adult lived in a neighboring, very nonFrench town, spoke his native language with nearby people he'd grown up with right up until his death. (He didn't speak it in his own adult home, of course, since his wife and daughters didn't understand a word of it.)

Otherwise, Petite Canadas were neighborhoods that developed around mills and Catholic churches, primarily in the nineteenth century. People shopped in French-run stores, attended French-speaking schools, and may have been able to read locally published French newspapers and go to French doctors. I'd say they could attend French churches, but the Mass was in Latin in the old days, so that wouldn't have mattered as much, though French-speaking priests did appear to be common in them.

According to Vermette, it may have been possible for many French-Canadian immigrants to not have to speak English if they lived in a Little Canada.

What Happened to Little Canadas?

Why do other areas associated with the ethnic identities of immigrant groups still exist, but we find so little left of Little Canadas? Even Chinatowns, which experienced serious racism in the late nineteenth century, are still around and attract visitors. Many of the other ethnic "towns" may have grown up around mills or some other work situation, as Little Canadas did. But when the mills closed down, the big factor in the end of Little Canadas, some aspect of Italian, Polish, Swedish, etc. culture remained. 

Why were Little Canadas different?

My own speculation:

1. Vermette says in A Distinct Alien Race that there was incredible poverty in Little Canadas, at least in those in New England. He talks of housing built for Franco-American workers by the Cabot Company, which owned a number of mills in the area that employed them. Typhoid and diphtheria were an issue in the 1880s. He has quotes from a newspaper editor and doctors from the same time period complaining of the sanitary conditions.  Vermette also has statistics suggesting that education levels stayed low among Franco-Americans into the twentieth century. Among my father's siblings, only one of the eight finished high school. For all I know, she was the only one of the eight to even attempt going to high school. My point being, if the living conditions were not as bad in other ethnic communities and if the groups living in them were able to improve their personal situations with education faster, that would explain why they stayed in them while Franco-Americans got out of Little Canadas, many of which were then just absorbed into the English-speaking world. Lowell, Massachusetts' Little Canada, for instance, was demolished as part of an urban renewal project.
2. Because the French-Canadian immigrants came from a country that bordered the U.S., their need for an ethnic community where they could speak their own language and practice their own faith may not have been as great as it was for people who came from Europe and Asia. People arriving from Italy, Poland, and China in the nineteenth century, for instance, probably had no expectation of ever being able to go home again. But the French Canadians, the only immigrants arriving in this country by train, could "go home again." In fact, there was a great belief at that time that they were here just to make money, and when they'd made enough, they'd go back to Canada with it. (I don't know how many of the French Canadians knew that, since so many of them stayed here.) My husband's family has heartbreaking nineteenth-century letters from Irish parents writing to their children in America, asking them when they're coming home. My father's family, who arrived here in the twentieth century, went back to Canada for funerals and events and had family members coming down here to visit them, which explains why I know some of my father's cousins. That kind of familial interaction may have been enough to satisfy the cultural needs ethnic communities filled for other groups.

Some Fiction Related to this Subject

Last week I happened to stumble upon and start reading The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne by Ron Currie. It's primarily set in 2016 in what's left of a Little Canada in Maine, where the number of remaining French-speaking residents can fit around a kitchen table. So far, it's terrific

Next Time: Franco-Americans and the Ku Klux Klan.

The Heritage Month Project: "A Distinct Alien Race"

As Heritage Months go, June is primarily known as Pride Month. But it is also National Immigrant Heritage Month. (Once again, I want to point out that those links are to archived material from former administrations. It appears that the present one doesn't observe them.) I hope to get to Pride Month in a few weeks. (I have a book!) But I'm beginning June with the first of four posts on my own favorite immigrant group, French-Canadians, and a fine book about their immigration to New England in the nineteenth century, A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans by David Vermette.  

What's that you say? You weren't aware that Franco-Americans, Americans of French-Canadian descent, even were an immigrant group? Not a real immigrant group? That may be because though the term Franco-American isn't new according to Vermette, it is more common in New England than in other parts of the country. Like him, I never heard the word Franco-American until I was an adult, though I grew up in New England and even around French speaking family and neighbors. (I had only a few American-born French-speaking cousins. By our generation, the language was pretty much gone, but my American-born father didn't learn to speak English until he went to school.) The lack of a well-known unifying name may help explain why we are a very low-profile group. That's in spite of the fact that in early days the French were all over North America. It's also in spite of the fact that, as Vermette explains, in the United States in the late nineteenth and even early twentieth centuries, French Canadian immigrants were...maybe reviled is too strong a word. Something like reviled.

How the Press Treated Franco-Americans in the Nineteenth Century

The press in the nineteenth century had a great deal to say about the French-Canadians moving into the United States according to Vermette. He quotes British-American Citizen from 1889:

"The French number more than a million in the United States...The number of their children is unimaginable for Americans...They are kept a distinct alien race subject to the Pope in matters of religion and politics. Soon, with the Irish, they will govern you, Americans."

Well, the British have always had a thin about the French, haven't they? Should we expect them to feel any differently about French-Canadians?

The New York Times also had things to say about French-Canadian immigrants in the late nineteenth century.

May 1, 1881. "They are, for the most part, ignorant and unenterprising, subservient to the most bigoted class of Catholic priests in the world...They care nothing for our free institutions, have no desire for civil or religious liberty or the benefits of education.,,[T]he feeling which they excite...is not fear or jealousy, but a sort of contempt."

French-Canadian immigrants were believed to be temporary here. They'd only come to the U.S. to make some money and go home with it. The New York Times, 1885, Canadians in New England:

"In such towns as Fall River and Holyoke the French Canadians have nearly shouldered out the native American operatives, who a generation ago impressed foreign observers by their superiority to any persons engaged in similar occupations elsewhere...he [French Canadians] cannot be brought to take any interest in the life around him of a community in which he regards himself as merely a sojourner. He maintains his own churches and no schools. Add to this feeling of alienism that he is absolutely unenterprising, and it becomes evident that he must be a troublesome element in the population."

Notice the term "native American" in the above quote. Vermette says that the descendants of English Protestant settlers in the United States managed to establish themselves as the native, original people here, even though the French had been on the North American continent as long as they had and the original native people had been here for thousands of years. 

Going back to 1878, Vermette quotes another New York Times article:

"...beyond dispute that there is hardly a French Canadian family...that does not inherit strongly-marked traces of Indian blood."

This is a reference to a belief, which Vermette discusses, that French Canadians were mixed race because of intermarriage with native people in earlier years. While I had not actually heard that, I wasn't surprised. Years ago, I'd read that the French settlers in Canada were far less brutal towards the native people there than the English settlers were toward them in the United States. Certainly, there was violence there. But, as I heard it, the French were often more interested in trapping than farming, which meant they didn't feel a need to take as much land, and sometimes married native women. It never occurred to me that that would have some kind of impact generations later. It would come into play during the twentieth century eugenics movement. But that is another blog post.

One attitude toward Franco-Americans in the nineteenth century is particularly interesting for us today. At the end of that century, there was a fear that French Canadians wanted to take New England to create a French Catholic country. The New York Times was on this in January, 1889:

"The tradition is that within a period not included within the present century there will be a country in North America called New France. It is to be constituted of Quebec, Ontario as far as Hamilton, such portions of the maritime provinces as may be deemed worth taking, the New England states, and a slice of New York. No effort is to be made to realize this tradition until the French race in America reach a certain number."

This appears to have been quite a widespread belief, and you can read more about it in an article by Vermette in Smithsonian Magazine, When an Influx of French-Canadian Immigrants Struck Fear Into Americans. 

Vermette says that in a region/culture where there aren't clear physical differences between people, language and religion become far more important in classifying others. You can see that with almost all immigrant groups, but it seems to have been happening in spades with Franco-Americans in the nineteenth century. The attitudes toward Franco-Americans in the past that Vermette reports are so extreme that it's amazing to me that now we are pretty much invisible. 

Given the fear of a French-Canadian plot to take over a section of the United States a hundred and fifty years ago, more or less, it is jaw-dropping to me that there are U.S. folk (at least one, anyway) who now want to push the issue of making Canada a fifty-first state. The reversal is just amazing. 

Coming up next: Little Canadas