been sterilized as unfit." When E. Lee Trinkle, a longtime political colleague of Strode and supporter of the eugenics movement, was elected Governor of Virginia in 1922, DeJarnette achieved an influential political supporter for his campaign. In order for the bill to pass the legislature, the men focused on changing public sentiment by broadening the public’s knowledge of eugenic science and the laws of hereditary defect. Governor Trinkle released a report on the critical financial condition of the Commonwealth. Within the report, Trinkle reported that one of the largest contributions to Virginia’s dire financial state was the increased spending on institutionalizing what he called "defectives". Trinkle advocated the compulsory sterilization law as a cost-saving strategy for public institutions that had experienced growth in the incarceration of what he referred to as feeble-minded and defective populations. Trinkle added that legalizing sterilization for the insane, epileptic, and feeble-minded persons would allow these patients to leave the institutions and not propagate their own kind. Virginia's “Eugenical Sterilization Act,” was signed into law by Trinkle on March 20, 1924. DeJarnette testified against Carrie Buck as an expert witness in the important eugenics case Buck v. Bell, in which the United States Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of Virginia's eugenics law, in a case that has been questioned since but never expressly overruled. In 1932, DeJarnette opened a self-supporting, semiprivate mental hospital for middle-income patients,adjacent to Western State which the General Assembly named the DeJarnette State Sanatorium after him. In 1933, when Adolf Hitler rose to power as Chancellor of Germany and instituted the world's most ambitious eugenics program, DeJarnette closely watched its progress and wrote favorably of the Nazi eugenics program. In 1934, he begged the General Assembly to broaden the scope of Virginia's sterilization law; "the Germans," DeJarnette complained, "are beating us at our own game and are more progressive than we are." In 1938, DeJarnette compared the progress of eugenics in the United States unfavorably with that in Nazi Germany, stating "Germany in six years has sterilized about 80,000 of her unfit while the United States with approximately twice the population has only sterilized about 27,869 to January 1, 1938 in the past 20 years... The fact that there are 12,000,000 defectives in the US should arouse our best endeavors to push this procedure to the maximum.". DeJarnette was also a poet of sorts. He wrote a poem entitled Mendel's Law: A