From Part Three of:
James G. Hanes was a master at selling hosiery, and he was just as successful at selling an expanded program of eugenic sterilization to the people of North Carolina.
In the spring of 1947, Hanes helped found the Human Betterment League of North Carolina, bringing cash, a Manhattan advertising agency and slick mass mailers to promote an idea that almost every other state was writing off as a mistake.
North Carolina had been doing sterilizations since 1929, but in a haphazard way. By 1947 the legislature still hadn't authorized money for a full-time clerk or even a permanent office for the Eugenics Board of North Carolina. The flawed science of eugenics made exaggerated claims that mental illness, genetic defects and social ills could be eliminated by sterilization.
As in many states, officials had pushed a eugenics program in the 1920s and 1930s, but the idea had lost support on both the political and scientific fronts. Sterilizations in North Carolina had peaked at 202 in 1938 and then fallen to 117 in 1945.
The Human Betterment League changed all that. It gave the eugenics board new legitimacy and political clout at a time when it needed it most.
And clout was something that James G. Hanes and the Winston-Salem elite had in abundance. Hanes Hosiery was the largest-selling nationally advertised brand, and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. was the biggest tobacco company in the nation. Hanes also served on the Forsyth County Board of Commissioners for 22 years, 20 of those as its chairman.
“I think Winston-Salem (of that era) was a little bit exceptional, in North Carolina or in the South, really,” said Bob Korstad, a professor of history at Duke University. His book about race and labor relations in Winston-Salem during the 1940s is scheduled to be published next year.
“There is this small intertwined elite that sees Winston-Salem as kind of a feudal manor in a way. These people had an incredible amount of wealth, and a lot of political influence — even on the national level. They just assumed that they were the best men, and that they knew what was right for people.”
Good intentions
Although there was some individual variation of opinion as to the value of the distribution of material containing possible controversial statements, there was unanimous agreement that valid educational publicity is essential.
— Human Betterment League minutes, 1947
Like any well-organized business, the Human Betterment League seemed to have every base covered. Hanes was joined by Alice Shelton Gray, a trained nurse and another member of the local elite. Further bolstering the ranks were Dr. C. Nash Herndon, a leader in the medical-genetics department at the Bowman Gray School of Medicine; Dr. Clarence Gamble, the Harvard-educated heir to the Procter & Gamble fortune and an important figure in the fledgling birth-control movement; and Dr. A.M. Jordan, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The group had money, political connections and a conviction it was doing the right thing.
The founding members are dead now, but records from the era describe two key events in the evolution of the Human Betterment League. During World War II, a large number of draftees from North Carolina had been rejected by the military as “mentally unfit.” Hanes had been upset by the news and decided to identify the problem and find a solution.
Perhaps unknown to Hanes, the “mentally unfit” label was flawed. It was true that many men from the state had been rejected by the military, but that catch-all category included legions of farm boys — black and white — who had strong backs and common
sense but so little schooling that they couldn't read or write. In response, the Army designed a new IQ test that used pictures instead of words to deal with a problem that was hardly unique to North Carolina.
Still, Hanes charged ahead, paying for a massive survey that gave IQ tests to about 10,000 students in the Winston-Salem school system. The results suggested that alarming numbers of the children were “feebleminded,” and soon there were editorials appearing in the Winston-Salem Journal suggesting that there was a problem across the state.
"Miss Wulkop served tea'
Gamble had been promoting birth control since the late 1930s, and he met Alice Gray through those campaigns. Gamble was sure that eugenic sterilization was a good idea, but after World War II few states were willing to consider the kind of aggressive program that he wanted. Gamble contributed time, money and a keen public-relations sense to the Human Betterment League. He also paid for most of the sterilizations in Orange County during one year, and he paid for the research that went into the book Sterilization in North Carolina, written by researcher Moya Woodside.
A mailing list of circ. 40,000 has been prepared, consisting of upper class college students, faculty members, physicians, nurses, ministers, public officials, etc. To them have been sent 110,000 items.
— Human Betterment League minutes, 1948
“They were willing to start this huge publicity campaign about why North Carolina should continue the program, and why sterilization was so incredibly valuable even though all of science by that time started saying "No, this is really the wrong thing to do, and this is really unscientific,'” said Johanna Schoen, an assistant professor of women's history at the University of Iowa who has been researching the eugenics board for more than 10 years.
Though he considered himself a progressive believer in birth control, Gamble had an especially nasty edge, Schoen said.
He composed “poems” that extolled sterilization for “morons.” In one, a young woman and man are led toward sterilization, and Gamble concludes that “the North Carolina MORONS lived happily ever after.”
“It's a very paternalistic model,” Schoen said. “(Women) certainly weren't supposed to choose when to use birth control or when not to use birth control, or when to be sterilized or when not to be sterilized. The model was, the physician knows best.”
There are signs that some in North Carolina were horrified by Gamble. He suggested that the N.C. Mental Hygiene Society use his poem to promote the sterilization campaign; when its leaders firmly declined, Gamble was puzzled.
“Your unfavorable criticism of the story of the two moron families interested me,” Gamble wrote in a January 1947 letter. “It will be helpful if you can tell me the reasons behind this.”
But at least in the beginning, the Winston-Salem elite accepted Gamble into the fold, and genteel manners may have helped smooth any rough edges.
Dr. Gamble spoke informally, reviewing the survey of students in Winston-Salem schools made by psychiatrists working under the supervision of Dr. A.M. Jordan, financed by Mr. James G. Hanes.
Dr. Jordan's findings are arresting and intensely interesting. As presented by Dr. Gamble, with a wealth of collateral comment, they were received with keen concern and an animated discussion followed.
At the adjournment, Miss Wulkop served tea to those present.
— Human Betterment League minutes, 1948
The motivations of the founding members of the Human Betterment League are open to speculation, but their success in getting the attention of others around the state is clear.
Dr. Ellen Winston, the head of the state Department of Social Welfare, noted “the special interest of Mr. Hanes in regard to a more intensive sterilization program” at a 1948 meeting of the eugenics board. The same year, George Lawrence, a member of the Human Betterment League, noted “a greatly increased interest among Welfare Workers in the use of sterilization for their clients and an even more significant change in attitude among surgeons and public health doctors.”
Turkey, politics and Mr. Hanes
Redge Hanes, a grandson of James G. Hanes, remembers the regular Sunday lunch with turkey at his grandparents' house.
“I recall he asked once what we studied in school that week, and I told him Mrs. Barber said Franklin D. Roosevelt was the greatest American president of the 20th century.” Hanes said his grandfather “pounded his hand down and almost broke the table — he said that was a lie.”
At least once, the conversation turned toward the Human Betterment League.
“The idea was one of planning and stability. There was no (birth-control) counseling, no guidance then. He was concerned at the numbers of children in poor families,” Hanes said recently. “There wasn't any mandatory anything. It was that you do have an option.
“What he wanted to do was to give them an option to stop having children, because he saw that as a terrible drain on the public coffers,” Hanes said.
Korstad said that the elite of the city “really saw themselves as progressive social engineers.”
“They're able to exercise power in a lot (of) subtle ways,” he said. “They were obviously pretty sophisticated in the way they did it. They don't resort to the kind of raw power and violence that people did in other parts of the South.”
A huge slum-clearance project was in progress in the city during the late 1940s, Korstad said, and the push for an expanded sterilization program might have been a response to changes in society.
“Think about it also in the context of how the postwar labor needs changed pretty dramatically. You've got this tremendous mechanization (in industry) which is creating, from their point of view, a surplus black population. They don't need sharecroppers families with ten kids anymore,” Korstad said.
A powerful elite did decide what to do and when to do it, but that wasn't all bad, said the Rev. Jerry Drayton, who has been active in the civil-rights movement in Winston-Salem for more than 50 years.
“The circumstances of the time were such that that power was needed to get things done,” said Drayton, who added that with regard to racial issues James G. Hanes used his clout to “do a great job.”
“He started the Urban League. He personally paid for the executive director and he formed a board of directors — 10 blacks and 10 whites,” Drayton said. “He was active with us, the NAACP, quietly. He made a great contribution toward the opening up of Winston-Salem.”
Out of their hands
Mr. Lawrence recently interviewed Mr. J. B. Moore, the newly appointed Director of State Prisons, and found him keenly interested in better enforcement of the sterilization law, especially among women prisoners.
— Human Betterment League minutes, 1949
Within a year of its founding, the Human Betterment League seemed to play a major role in changing the course of the North Carolina sterilization program. Sterilization numbers started to increase dramatically, and by the early 1950s the state had the highest per capita rate in the country.
The minutes of the group note that Hanes gave a luncheon to “some 30 prominent men of Winston-Salem,” Alice Shelton Gray gave a tea for a large group of Winston-Salem women and Gamble got help from Madison Avenue.
Dr. Gamble ... enclosed a letter of solicitation he has had prepared by James Gray, Inc., professional ad writers in New York.... He congratulated us upon the showing of increased sterilization in N.C.
— Human Betterment League minutes, 1951
Gamble decreased his involvement with the Human Betterment League and North Carolina by the mid-1950s, and he turned his attention to international birth-control and sterilization programs.
“It becomes this self-propelled thing,” Schoen said. “There are enough people in North Carolina who are committed to it that they don't need a Gamble anymore. The legislature is happy to keep funding (the eugenics board).”
By 1957, the Human Betterment League had sent out more than 575,000 pieces of mail promoting the sterilization program. In the coming years, increasing numbers of sterilizations would be done on people from the general population, especially blacks and women.
Psychiatrists started to openly question IQ tests and the blanket use of the term “feebleminded” to describe a variety of social and medical problems, but outside of the tightly controlled environment of Winston-Salem, others were pushing the program to extremes that worried even some members of the Human Betterment League.
Sterilization as a social punishment Dr. Herndon believes is the wrong approach, social ills should not be confused with mental ills. It is most important to separate illiteracy from mental retardation in the handling of this problem.
—Human Betterment League minutes, 1959
Herndon, of the Bowman Gray School of Medicine, was talking about a bill in the legislature that would have required sterilization for mothers with more than two illegitimate children. Herndon suggested that the Human Betterment League issue a statement distancing itself from the legislation, but “after some discussion it was agreed not to attempt to do this,” the minutes of the meeting read.
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The bill never passed, but the eugenics board promoted the same idea. Welfare rolls were rising throughout the state, and sterilization was seen as one way of reducing costs.
Though the North Carolina sterilization program became racially imbalanced by the late 1950s, Redge Hanes said that outcome was never part of the agenda of the Human Betterment League or consistent with his grandfather's progressive views on race.
“If the discussion (now) is that abuses took place, abuses take place in every program,” Redge Hanes said, adding that he had “not the slightest idea” if his grandfather knew of those problems.
Dr. Charles Hendricks, who came to Winston-Salem in 1968, joined the Human Betterment League a year or two later and served as president. Hendricks, who now lives in Chapel Hill, said that there was no talk of sterilization at league meetings in the later years, but that it was clear that James G. Hanes had been the moving spirit of the group.
Hendricks described Hanes as a “good, generous man,” but doubts that he understood how complex the issues of sterilization and genetics were. “I think he (Hanes) thought he would solve the problems by getting a few people together, and they'll do the sterilizations, and it will help society,” said Hendricks. “Obviously, in retrospect, that was a desperately shortsighted view.”
Whatever the intentions, Schoen said, “Gamble and the Human Betterment League helped something happen in North Carolina that was happening almost nowhere else.”
The sterilization program may have saved taxpayers money, she said, but in the end it failed as social policy.
“The (N.C.) legislature might be willing to fund eugenic sterilization, but the legislature was not yet willing to fund many other things ... in terms of addressing those problems that eugenic sterilization is supposed to address,” Schoen said. “Incredible poverty. Lack of education. It's like this Band-Aid solution — sterilization is the easiest way to deal with it.”
Redge Hanes said his grandfather may have realized that, too. At another Sunday lunch discussion in the late 1950s, the Human Betterment League came up again.
“To a certain extent it was doomed from the start. That was the kind of discussion I recall,” Redge Hanes said of comments his grandfather and father made. “It was that it (the league) just didn't work — the point that my grandfather was interested in was simply not achievable.”
But perhaps because Hanes and others had promoted the sterilization program so successfully, the attitudes that went with it were hard to stop.
When the Human Betterment League held a meeting at the Hotel Robert E. Lee in 1964, Dr. Henry O'Roark, the director of the Forsyth Family Planning Clinic, noted “that from $1,500 to $2,000 can be saved by the county for the prevention of birth of each illegitimate child.”
The eugenics board continued to order sterilizations until 1974. Toward the end of the program 99 percent of the operations were on women and more than 60 percent of those on black women. Korstad said that the old culture of power in Winston-Salem cannot be described as simply one where good intentions sometimes went wrong. It “wasn't an environment where you could have a disagreement with these guys and what they were up to,” he said.
“Winston-Salem as a community, they need to confront some of this,” Korstad said.
By the early 1970s the Human Betterment League shifted its focus to producing educational materials on birth control and genetic counseling. In 1984 it became the Human Genetics League. It finally ceased all work in 1988.
• Kevin Begos can be reached in Washington at (202) 662-7672 or at kbegos@mediageneral.com