In March 1913, Woodrow Wilson resigned as governor of New Jersey to become the 28th president of the United States.

In accordance with the terms of the state Constitution, Senate President James F. Fielder, a Democrat from Jersey City, succeeded Wilson as acting governor, a job Fielder intended to convince voters he deserved in his own right at the next election in November. Like any good politician with ambition, Fielder needed an issue, a societal ill he could promise to fix. He found his issue in the wilderness of the Pine Barrens, where he had heard unflattering tales about a local population of half-wits known as "pineys."

According to a newspaper account, Fielder traveled by automobile to Burlington County that summer amid a phalanx of aides and newspapermen. There, the acting governor and his entourage were introduced to a 31-year-old Southampton farmhand and his 18-year-old bride, the man's third marriage to date, with no record of divorce from the previous two.

The farmhand recently had been released from jail on bigamy charges, which authorities were forced to drop when it was revealed his previous two wives had been married to other men at the same time they were exchanging wedding vows with him. So technically, the farmhand had never previously been legally married and, ipso facto, he was not a bigamist.

For the benefit of the people present, the acting governor quizzed the farmhand on the month and year, but the man drew a blank. The wife was not much better, somehow managing to work into a conversation that she had no idea who her father was as multiple spouses were an unintended family tradition.

"The state must segregate and sterilize these people, particularly the mature ones," Fielder said in the Boston Evening Transcript. The news made the wire services.

"New Jersey Degenerates" was the headline in the Boston newspaper on June 28, 1913. "Terrible Conditions Found by Governor Fielder Among the 'Pineys' — Segregation and Sterilization Advocated."

"Sea Girt, June 28 — Gov. James F. Fielder got back to the New Jersey summer capital from a trip through the pine woods of Burlington County, where he saw for himself some of the degenerate and imbecile families called 'the Pineys'."

Pineys were a menace to New Jersey was the conclusion the wire report attributed to the acting governor.

Fielder was elected governor in November 1913 but no one in New Jersey was sterilized.

Fielder was a product of his time. During the early 20th century, public health advocates in much of the western world believed preventing people who were criminal or who suffered from mental illness or mental disability from reproducing was a way of perfecting human evolution — a pseudo-science called eugenics.

New Jersey passed its own compulsory sterilization law for so-called "feeble-minded" people in 1911, but the state Supreme Court became one of the first to strike it down as unconstitutional in 1913, according to extensive research on the subject by the University of Vermont in 2011.

Nevertheless, the state Legislature continued to fund a state commission to investigate the "Sterilization of Defectives," according to the official 1914 Legislative Manual of the State of New Jersey.

Jersey Roots is a look at the history of Monmouth and Ocean counties. Have a local historical topic you would like more information about? Contact Erik Larsen at elarsen@app.com

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