Finishing Schools

The Girls' Industrial School at Beloit, Kans., is a gloomy looking "corrective" institution whose normal student body is composed of girls under 19 convicted of minor crimes. Last January, when Democrat Walter A. Huxman replaced Republican Alfred Landon as Governor of Kansas, the superintendent of Beloit, Republican Lulu Coyner was replaced by Democrat Blanche Peterson. Kansas' onetime (1933-35) Democratic Congresswoman Mrs. Kathryn O'Loughlin McCarthy recently paid a call on Mrs. Peterson. Result of her call was an uproar which last week made Beloit front page news throughout the U. S.

As Mrs. McCarthy and Mrs. Peterson were chatting they came to the subject of furniture. Said Mrs. Peterson: "Now I hope we can buy some new rugs for the school, since we won't have to pay so much for sterilizations." Questioned further, she told her visitor that during her predecessor's regime, 62 of Beloit's inmates had been surgically rendered incapable of having children, that 22 more had been scheduled for similar operations when she took office. Having verified from the ledgers of the institution that approximately $4,000 had been paid for sterilizations during two years of Lulu Coyner's regime, Mrs. McCarthy was last week noisily demanding that the State investigate the matter. In puritanical Kansas, sterilization is an old issue. Forty years ago the head of the State School for Insane Youth was accused of sterilizing his charges, never denied doing so. In 1917, Kansas legalized sterilization. Since then 1,750 sterilizations have put the State third highest on the list of 29 which permit such treatment.

State law specifically lists idiocy and social disease as the only legal causes, requires a 30-day notice of hearings to interested parties. Since Beloit's notably modest entrance requirements are an I. Q. of better than 50 and absence of venereal disease, and since, according to Mrs. McCarthy, inadequate notice was often given, she maintained the sterilizations were doubly illegal.

Mrs. McCarthy indicated that sterilization at Beloit under Lulu Coyner was roughly the equivalent of a slap on the wrist at more conventional finishing schools; that school records showed one girl was sterilized because she had a bad temper, others because they were "incorrigible," "obstreperous" or partial to "fights;" that parents' pleas seldom influenced Lulu Coyner's and the board's decisions to incapacitate almost one half of her charges for childbirth.

A Kansas City Star correspondent promptly found an 18-year-old Beloit student who described her experience: "All of us girls had been threatened before with sterilization unless we behaved ourselves. I knew it wouldn't do any good to kick although I didn't want it done. . . . My mother heard . . . after it was over and protested. ... I thought for a while that life had very little left for me but I have since changed and want to be a beauty operator. . . ." The mother of another Beloit inmate, a Mrs. Betty Benson, somewhat ambiguously declared that her sterilized daughter Bertha was "the best fitted of my six children to have babies." In Lyons, Kans., a man whose 19-year-old sister had been paroled to him said she had been sterilized "apparently . . . because accused of insubordination."

That Mrs. McCarthy, whose husband was a Democratic Senator in Landon's Legislature, was not entirely disinterested in producing evidence reflecting discredit on the Landon administration, Kansas was well aware. During her Congressional term, a bitter argument preceded her removal from a park board post to which Mrs. McCarthy felt herself entitled for life. Answer to her charges by Will T. Beck, former member of the State Board of Administration, was that "most of the girls sterilized were sexual perverts, obstreperous, fighters or near degenerates. . . . Parents or guardians . . . were notified. . . . Few appeared to protest." Mr. Beck also produced a letter from enthusiastic Lulu Coyner, now retired to Longview, Wash., describing her sterilizations as "the finest service to society the Girls' Industrial School has ever contributed." Said Chairman William H. Burke of Kansas' current board.of administration: "It has not been the policy nor will it be the future policy of the present board to adopt sterilization measures . . . unless in such extreme, obvious and isolated instances as to leave not the slightest question or doubt as to its justification."

The National Training School for Girls, in Washington, D. C., when plump, hard-working Carrie Weaver Smith became its superintendent last year, compared to the Girls' Industrial School at Beloit roughly as a slum kindergarten compares to Bryn Mawr. Inmates of the N.T.S.G. were some 60 members of the U. S. capital's worst young female riffraff. Most were colored, some white. The majority were three-time offenders. Practically all had either syphilis or gonorrhea. The plant was an obsolete brick building, with badly ventilated rooms and few sanitary facilities. On the theory that the deplorable conditions at the N.T.S.G. existed partly because no one knew about them, Carrie Smith set out to make them known. Her campaign reached its peak when she got Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt interested in her problems. Mrs. Roosevelt was so appalled that, after describing the school's condition in her column, she mercifully invited all the girls in the School to the White House, gave them tea on the lawn.

Results of Mrs. Smith's publicity campaign were ironic. She found that before she took charge of the school, riots had been a routine affair. During her regime they became less frequent but because of the White House party and because Congress had appropriated $100,000 for improvements, anything that happened in the National Training School for Girls was newsworthy. Last summer, a controversy between white and colored inmates as to whether Joe Louis was a better boxer than Jimmy Braddock started a free-for-all fight. Month ago, a fire alarm set off to increase the excitement of a school rumpus brought police to the scene.

Last week in Washington, the District Board of Public Welfare decided that, despite her able extracurricular activities, Dr. Smith was not giving the students of the N.T.S.G. the kind of discipline they deserved, asked her to resign. When Carrie Smith refused, the District Commissioners discharged her, replaced her with a male superintendent and a female jail matron as assistant.

If the District Commissioners hoped by ousting kindly Dr. Smith to frighten her pupils into good behavior, they were sadly disappointed. Immediate consequence was the liveliest riot of the year. First the inmates of the school, armed with knives, sticks, milk bottles and baseball bats, surrounded the main building to demand Dr. Smith's return. Three days later, enraged when the staff got eggs and they got hash for breakfast they revolted again, forced the staff to call police to restore order.

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