Eugenics

Six men wrongly classified as "morons" and held for years at a state school for the retarded asked Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney on Wednesday to remove such terms from their records -- and for an apology. They also are seeking unspecified compensation for the labor they were forced to perform at the Fernald State School in Waltham, where they were confined from the 1940s to the early 1960s.

It was a dark chapter in American history. For more than half a century, California and other states forcibly sterilized 60,000 mentally ill people as part of a misguided national campaign to eliminate crime, "feeblemindedness," alcoholism, poverty and other problems blamed for dragging society down. On Tuesday, Gov. Gray Davis apologized, placing California in a small group of states that have issued formal regrets.

To make amends for a state program that sterilized 7,600 people against their will, North Carolina's governor created a panel last year to probe the history of the effort, interview survivors and consider reparations. In Oregon, then-Gov. John Kitzhaber last year apologized in person to some of the 2,600 people sterilized there, and he created an annual Human Rights Day to commemorate the state's mistake. On the day Virginia Gov. Mark R.

In a basement at Caltech, 59 gray boxes contain thousands of documents that reveal in detail how an influential group of California men once hoped to help direct the fate of the human race. Within the brittle files is the story of the state's long and largely forgotten effort to sterilize mental patients. Memos show how California civic leaders helped popularize eugenics around the world, including Nazi Germany.