For decades, North Dakota allowed the sterilization of those deemed ‘unfit’ or ‘feeble-minded’

FARGO — The main building loomed like a twin-towered fortress over the campus of what originally was called the North Dakota Institution for the Feebleminded at Grafton.

The campus, which serves the developmentally disabled and now is called the Grafton State School, has a notorious past and a prominent place in North Dakota’s embrace of eugenics, the pursuit of producing genetic traits considered desirable.

At least 1,049 victims of sterilization in North Dakota have been documented, with the procedures done between the 1910s and 1962, according to records.

More than half of the sterilizations, 634, were performed in Grafton, with many of the rest done at the State Hospital in Jamestown, according to research by Levi Magnuson, a graduate student in history at North Dakota State University.

North Dakota’s adoption of eugenics practices including targeted sterilization took place within a national movement that took root in the early 1900s and spread to much of the country, reaching a peak in the 1930s.

At its height, a third of the nation’s population lived in the 32 states that had laws allowing sterilization, according to Magnuson. Indiana passed the first sterilization law in 1907.

Before allowing sterilization, North Dakota’s first step along the path to eugenics came with passage of a miscegenation law in 1909, prohibiting marriages between white and Black residents, Magnuson found.

It was the first law in North Dakota, Magnuson believes, to define which groups can or cannot marry.

Four years later, in 1913, North Dakota joined a growing number of states in passing sterilization laws. Although legal, sterilization was at first slow to be adopted in North Dakota.

Some of the hesitancy came from the fact that there was no appeal process for sterilization, a point made by the state attorney general in 1925.

“A lot of it had to do with consent,” Magnuson said. Also, he said, there were concerns about possible legal ramifications for those who performed the procedure.

The law was revised in 1927, including a new appeal process. Also in 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that states can sterilize people, a decision that included the memorable line from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Further clarification came in 1931, Magnuson said, when North Dakota defined a “feeble-minded” person as “… any person, minor or adult, other than an insane person, who is so mentally defective as to be incapable of managing himself and his affairs, and to require supervision, control and care for his own, or the public’s welfare.”

Following the legal clarifications, the onset of the Great Depression and the resulting financial strains caused sterilizations to “skyrocket” in the 1930s in North Dakota, reaching a total of 536 by 1942.

“That was sort of the trend across the U.S.,” as states were forced to slash their budgets, Magnuson said.

Personalities also made a difference. The superintendent of Grafton was hesitant to pursue sterilization, but his replacement, who started in 1932, forged ahead, Magnuson said.

Prison wardens and superintendents of the Grafton State School and State Hospital could suggest candidates for sterilization, but the final decision was left to a Board of Control, he said.

Along with those deemed “unfit” or “feeble-minded,” convicted felons were eligible for sterilization.

Sterilization slowed after World War II, perhaps because of concerns over Nazi Germany’s brutal quest to achieve the “master race,” including the extermination of Jews and others deemed undesirable, Magnuson said.

Still, sterilization continued, and ultimately at least 1,049 sterilizations were performed in North Dakota, 652 women and 397 men, according to Magnuson.

North Dakota figured prominently among states allowing sterilization, ranking 12th. In yearly per-capita terms, the state never left the top 10 and at one point ranked second in the nation.

Magnuson, who recently presented a paper on eugenics in North Dakota at the Northern Great Plains History Conference, was unable to find a demographic breakdown of sterilization victims by race.

Perhaps surprisingly, however, the practice seemed to be largely targeted at white people. “They were a lot more focused on imbeciles, especially white imbeciles,” he said.

A search of newspaper archives indicates that several doctors were influential in the initial acceptance of sterilization in North Dakota, Magnuson found.

During the 1910s, newspaper coverage suggested there was a “general panic” among North Dakota residents over those seen as unfit to have children, he said.

One vocal advocate was Dr. J. Gassick, secretary of the State Board of Health, who argued in 1910 that the state was facing a crisis involving epileptics and the feeble-minded, two groups he said were in need of “control,” according to Magnuson.

Grafton held about 150 patients, but Gassick estimated North Dakota had more than 1,200 feeble-minded or epileptic residents. Failing to curb those populations, he argued, would place such a heavy burden that society would be “overtaxed,” said Gassick, who became one of the state’s first advocates for human sterilization.

Dr. E.P. Quain of the State Hospital was another champion of eugenics, according to Magnuson. Quain called in 1913 for a commission or panel of physicians to decide whether someone should be sterilized and the methods of sterilization. That was the same year North Dakota passed its law allowing sterilization.

“He’s sort of one face I’ve been able to pin down,” said Magnuson, whose master’s dissertation will be about eugenics in North Dakota and South Dakota. He’s a native of Canton, South Dakota, where the state once operated the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, which closed in 1934.

The study of eugenics, long in the shadows, is receiving increasing attention from historians, he said.

“There’s sort of a morbid curiosity factor to it,” Magnuson said, explaining his interest in the subject. “It’s kind of the craziness factor and the fact it didn’t happen all that long ago.”

Eugenics remains a goal for some today, although the discussion is more muted and subtle, he said. Some states, for example, have considered chemical castration of rapists, and genetic engineering would enable selection of favorable traits, he said.

“There’s sort of an element to eugenics that’s still very much alive in modern America,” Magnuson said. “It’s just more coded, a lot less upfront. There’s ideas of eugenics that never died away completely.”