Joseph DeJarnette
Joseph DeJarnette was one of the founders of the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded and a leading voice in the eugenics movement both in the Commonwealth of Virginia and nationally. He too testified in the Carrie Buck case, providing his opinion on her mental capacity and her inclination towards promiscuity based on his interviews with her teachers and their descriptions of her behavior more than a decade before the trial. DeJarnette repeatedly urged that the number of sterilizations performed in the United States should be increased, and compared American to German efforts unfavorably in 1938.
In a letter written to Aubrey Strode in 1939, who was by then a judge in Lynchburg, DeJarnette wrote, “…we are raising the mentality of our people and saving suffering, murder, accidents, crime – and the greatest crime of all is allowing the feeble-minded people to raise children in a feeble minded environment.” DeJarnette noted in the same letter that about 3300 people had been sterilized in Virginia, and predicted that if the rate continued within a century the state would save $400 million. DeJarnette frequently argued that allowing what he considered to be defectives to marry and procreate amounted to a crime against the state.
Among those, he classified as defectives were the insane, those infected with syphilis, those with tuberculosis, alcoholics, and of course the feebleminded. Dejarnette did not just argue for enforced sterilization, he performed them himself. As superintendent of the Western State Hospital by May of 1930, he claimed to have sterilized 33 women by tubal ligation, sixty men via vasectomy, and another five through the controversial use of x-rays. He continuously implored his colleagues at Virginia’s mental health facilities to increase the pace of their sterilization procedures.
He also hectored the Virginia General Assembly to make the Sterilization Act more comprehensive, increasing the number of persons the state could sterilize. DeJarnette watched the Nazi program as it unfolded in the 1930s and approved of it highly, though he was alarmed that the Germans were outpacing the Americans. He testified to the General Assembly in 1934 that, “…the Germans are beating us at our own game and are more progressive than we are.”
Virginia eventually expressed regret for the eugenics program which the state-operated for many years, but DeJarnette never did. Throughout his career, he carried with him a poem he had written entitled Mendel’s Law: A Plea for a Better Race of Men. The poem argues that simply observing a farm justifies eugenics. All of the animals on the farm are deliberately bred to be the best, but the farmer’s children – whom he refers to as “Low browed with the monkey jaw, ape handed, and silly, and foolish,” are allowed to be born indiscriminately.