The Gene

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

  Indeed, Wells had only articulated what many in Galton’s inner circle felt deeply but had not dared to utter—that eugenics would only work if the selective breeding of the strong (so-called positive eugenics) was augmented with selective sterilization of the weak—negative eugenics. In 1911, Havelock Ellis, Galton’s colleague, twisted the image of Mendel, the solitary gardener, to service his enthusiasm for sterilization: “In the great garden of life it is not otherwise than in our public gardens. We repress the license of those who, to gratify their own childish or perverted desires, would pluck up the shrubs or trample on the flowers, but in so doing we achieve freedom and joy for all. . . . We seek to cultivate the sense of order, to encourage sympathy and foresight, to pull up racial weeds by the roots. . . . In these matters, indeed, the gardener in his garden is our symbol and our guide.”

  In the last years of his life, Galton wrestled with the idea of negative eugenics. He never made complete peace with it. The “sterilization of failures”—the weeding and culling of the human genetic garden—haunted him with its many implicit moral hazards. But in the end, his desire to build eugenics into a “national religion” outweighed his qualms about negative eugenics. In 1909, he founded a journal, the Eugenics Review, which endorsed not just selective breeding but selective sterilization. In 1911, he produced a strange novel, entitled Kantsaywhere, about a future utopia in which roughly half the population was marked as “unfit” and severely restricted in its ability to reproduce. He left a copy of the novel with his niece. She found it so embarrassing that she burned large parts of it.

  On July 24, 1912, one year after Galton’s death, the first International Conference on Eugenics opened at the Cecil Hotel in London. The location was symbolic. With nearly eight hundred rooms and a vast, monolithic façade overlooking the Thames, the Cecil was Europe’s largest, if not grandest, hotel—a site typically reserved for diplomatic or national events. Luminaries from twelve countries and diverse disciplines descended on the hotel to attend the conference: Winston Churchill; Lord Balfour; the lord mayor of London; the chief justice; Alexander Graham Bell; Charles Eliot, the president of Harvard University; William Osler, professor of medicine at Oxford; August Weismann, the embryologist. Darwin’s son Leonard Darwin presided over the meeting; Karl Pearson worked closely with Darwin on the program. Visitors—having walked through the domed, marble-hemmed entrance lobby, where a framed picture of Galton’s pedigree was prominently displayed—were treated to talks on genetic manipulations to increase the average height of children, on the inheritance of epilepsy, on the mating patterns of alcoholics, and on the genetic nature of criminality.

  Two presentations, among all, stood out in their particularly chilling fervor. The first was an enthusiastic and precise exhibit by the Germans endorsing “race hygiene”—a grim premonition of times to come. Alfred Ploetz, a physician, scientist, and ardent proponent of the race-hygiene theory, gave an impassioned talk about launching a racial-cleansing effort in Germany. The second presentation—even larger in its scope and ambition—was presented by the American contingent. If eugenics was becoming a cottage industry in Germany, it was already a full-fledged national operation in America. The father of the American movement was the patrician Harvard-trained zoologist Charles Davenport, who had founded a eugenics-focused research center and laboratory—the Eugenics Record Office—in 1910. Davenport’s 1911 book, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, was the movement’s bible; it was also widely assigned as a textbook of genetics in colleges across the nation.

  Davenport did not attend the 1912 meeting, but his protégé Bleecker Van Wagenen, the young president of the American Breeders’ Association, gave a rousing presentation. Unlike the Europeans, still mired in theory and speculation, Van Wagenen’s talk was all Yankee practicality. He spoke glowingly about the operational efforts to eliminate “defective strains” in America. Confinement centers—“colonies”—for the genetically unfit were already planned. Committees had already been formed to consider the sterilization of unfit men and women—epileptics, criminals, deaf-mutes, the feebleminded, those with eye defects, bone deformities, dwarfism, schizophrenia, manic depression, or insanity.

  “Nearly ten percent of the total population . . . are of inferior blood,” Van Wagenen suggested, and “they are totally unfitted to become the parents of useful citizens. . . . In eight of the states of the Union, there are laws authorizing or requiring sterilization.” In “Pennsylvania, Kansas, Idaho, Virginia . . . there have been sterilized a considerable number of individuals. . . . Many thousands of sterilization operations have been performed by surgeons in both private and institutional practice. As a rule, these operations have been for purely pathological reasons, and it has been found difficult to obtain authentic records of the more remote effects of these operations.”

  “We endeavor to keep track of those who are discharged and receive reports from time to time,” the general superintendent for the California State hospital concluded cheerfully in 1912. “We have found no ill effects.”

  * * *

  I. Indeed, the mean height of the sons of exceptionally tall fathers tended to be slightly lower than the father’s height—and closer to the population’s average—as if an invisible force were always dragging extreme features toward the center. This discovery—called regression to the mean—would have a powerful effect on the science of measurement and the concept of variance. It would be Galton’s most important contribution to statistics.

  “Three Generations of Imbeciles Is Enough”

  If we enable the weak and the deformed to live and to propagate their kind, we face the prospect of a genetic twilight. But if we let them die or suffer when we can save or help them, we face the certainty of a moral twilight.

  —Theodosius Grigorievich Dobzhansky, Heredity and the Nature of Man

  And from deformed [parents] deformed [offspring] come to be, just as lame come to be from lame and blind from blind, and in general they resemble often the features that are against nature, and have inborn signs such as growths and scars. Some of such features have even been transmitted through three [generations].

  —Aristotle, History of Animals

  In the spring of 1920, Emmett Adaline Buck—Emma for short—was brought to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded in Lynchburg, Virginia. Her husband, Frank Buck, a tin worker, had either bolted from home or died in an accident, leaving Emma to care for a young daughter, Carrie Buck.

  Emma and Carrie lived in squalor, depending on charity, food donations, and makeshift work to support a meager lifestyle. Emma was rumored to have sex for money, to have contracted syphilis, and to drink her wages on weekends. In March that year, she was caught on the streets in town, booked, either for vagrancy or prostitution, and brought before a municipal judge. A cursory mental examination, performed on April 1, 1920, by two doctors, classified her as “feebleminded.” Buck was packed off to the colony in Lynchburg.

  “Feeblemindedness,” in 1924, came in three distinct flavors: idiot, moron, and imbecile. Of these, an idiot was the easiest to classify—the US Bureau of the Census defined the term as a “mentally defective person with a mental age of not more than 35 months”—but imbecile and moron were more porous categories. On paper, the terms referred to less severe forms of cognitive disability, but in practice, the words were revolving semantic doors that swung inward all too easily to admit a diverse group of men and women, some with no mental illness at all—prostitutes, orphans, depressives, vagrants, petty criminals, schizophrenics, dyslexics, feminists, rebellious adolescents—anyone, in short, whose behavior, desires, choices, or appearance fell outside the accepted norm.

  Feebleminded women were sent to the Virginia State Colony for confinement to ensure that they would not continue breeding and thereby contaminate the population with further morons or idiots. The word colony gave its purpose away: the place was never meant to be a hospital or an asylum. Rather, from its inception, it was designed to be a containmen
t zone. Sprawling over two hundred acres in the windward shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, about a mile from the muddy banks of the James River, the colony had its own postal office, powerhouse, coal room, and a spur rail-track for off-loading cargo. There was no public transportation into or out of the colony. It was the Hotel California of mental illness: patients who checked in rarely ever left.

  When Emma Buck arrived, she was cleaned and bathed, her clothes thrown away, and her genitals douched with mercury to disinfect them. A repeat intelligence test performed by a psychiatrist confirmed the initial diagnosis of a “Low Grade Moron.” She was admitted to the colony. She would spend the rest of her lifetime in its confines.

  Before her mother had been carted off to Lynchburg in 1920, Carrie Buck had led an impoverished but still-normal childhood. A school report from 1918, when she was twelve, noted that she was “very good” in “deportment and lessons.” Gangly, boyish, rambunctious—tall for her age, all elbows and knees, with a fringe of dark bangs, and an open smile—she liked to write notes to boys in school and fish for frogs and brookies in the local ponds. But with Emma gone, her life began to fall apart. Carrie was placed in foster care. She was raped by her foster parents’ nephew and soon discovered that she was pregnant.

  Stepping in quickly to nip the embarrassment, Carrie’s foster parents brought her before the same municipal judge that had sent her mother, Emma, to Lynchburg. The plan was to cast Carrie as an imbecile as well: she was reported to be devolving into a strange dimwit, given to “hallucinations and outbreaks of temper,” impulsive, psychotic, and sexually promiscuous. Predictably, the judge—a friend of Carrie’s foster parents—confirmed the diagnosis of “feeblemindedness”: like mother, like daughter. On January 23, 1924, less than four years after Emma’s appearance in court, Carrie too was assigned to the colony.

  On March 28, 1924, awaiting her transfer to Lynchburg, Carrie gave birth to a daughter, Vivian Elaine. By state order, the daughter was also placed in foster care. On June 4, 1924, Carrie arrived at the Virginia State Colony. “There is no evidence of psychosis—she reads and writes and keeps herself in tidy condition,” her report read. Her practical knowledge and skills were found to be normal. Nonetheless, despite all the evidence to the contrary, she was classified as a “Moron, Middle Grade” and confined.

  In August 1924, a few months after she arrived in Lynchburg, Carrie Buck was asked to appear before the Board of the Colony at the request of Dr. Albert Priddy.

  A small-town doctor originally from Keysville, Virginia, Albert Priddy had been the colony’s superintendent since 1910. Unbeknownst to Carrie and Emma Buck, he was in the midst of a furious political campaign. Priddy’s pet project was “eugenic sterilizations” of the feebleminded. Endowed with extraordinary, Kurtz-like powers over his colony, Priddy was convinced that the imprisonment of “mentally defectives” in colonies was a temporary solution to the propagation of their “bad heredity.” Once released, the imbeciles would start breeding again, contaminating and befouling the gene pool. Sterilization would be a more definitive strategy, a superior solution.

  What Priddy needed was a blanket legal order that would authorize him to sterilize a woman on explicitly eugenic grounds; one such test case would set the standard for a thousand. When he broached the topic, he found that legal and political leaders were largely sympathetic to his ideas. On March 29, 1924, with Priddy’s help, the Virginia Senate authorized eugenic sterilization within the state as long as the person to be sterilized had been screened by the “Boards of Mental-health institutions.” On September 10, again urged by Priddy, the Board of the Virginia State Colony reviewed Buck’s case during a routine meeting. Carrie Buck was asked a single question during the inquisition: “Do you care to say anything about having the operations performed on you?” She spoke only two sentences: “No, sir, I have not. It is up to my people.” Her “people,” whoever they were, did not rise to Buck’s defense. The board approved Priddy’s request to have Buck sterilized.

  But Priddy was concerned that his attempts to achieve eugenic sterilizations would still be challenged by state and federal courts. At Priddy’s instigation, Buck’s case was next presented to the Virginia court. If the courts affirmed the act, Priddy believed, he would have complete authority to continue his eugenic efforts at the colony and even extend them to other colonies. The case—Buck v. Priddy—was filed in the Circuit Court of Amherst County in October 1924.

  On November 17, 1925, Carrie Buck appeared for her trial at the courthouse in Lynchburg. She found that Priddy had arranged nearly a dozen witnesses. The first, a district nurse from Charlottesville, testified that Emma and Carrie were impulsive, “irresponsible mentally, and . . . feebleminded.” Asked to provide examples of Carrie’s troublesome behavior, she said Carrie had been found “writing notes to boys.” Four other women then testified about Emma and Carrie. But Priddy’s most important witness was yet to come. Unbeknownst to Carrie and Emma, Priddy had sent a social worker from the Red Cross to examine Carrie’s eight-month-old child, Vivian, who was living with foster parents. If Vivian could also be shown to be feebleminded, Priddy reasoned, his case would be closed. With three generations—Emma, Carrie, and Vivian—affected by imbecility, it would be hard to argue against the heredity of their mental capacity.

  The testimony did not go quite as smoothly as Priddy had planned. The social worker—veering sharply off script—began by admitting biases in her judgment:

  “Perhaps my knowledge of the mother may prejudice me.”

  “Have you any impression about the child?” the prosecutor asked.

  The social worker was hesitant again. “It is difficult to judge the probabilities of a child as young as that, but it seems to me not quite a normal baby. . . .”

  “You would not judge the child as a normal baby?”

  “There is a look about it that is not quite normal, but just what it is, I can’t tell.”

  For a while, it seemed as if the future of eugenic sterilizations in America depended on the foggy impressions of a nurse who had been handed a cranky baby without toys.

  The trial took five hours, including a break for lunch. The deliberation was brief, the decision clinical. The court affirmed Priddy’s decision to sterilize Carrie Buck. “The act complies with the requirements of due process of law,” the decision read. “It is not a penal statute. It cannot be said, as contended, that the act divides a natural class of persons into two.”

  Buck’s lawyers appealed the decision. The case climbed to the Virginia Supreme Court, where Priddy’s request to sterilize Buck was affirmed again. In the early spring of 1927, the trial reached the US Supreme Court. Priddy had died, but his successor, John Bell, the new superintendent of the colony, was the appointed defendant.

  Buck v. Bell was argued before the Supreme Court in the spring of 1927. Right from the onset, the case was clearly neither about Buck nor Bell. It was a charged time; the entire nation was frothing with anguish about its history and inheritance. The Roaring Twenties stood at the tail end of a historic surge of immigration to the United States. Between 1890 and 1924, nearly 10 million immigrants—Jewish, Italian, Irish, and Polish workers—streamed into New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, packing the streets and tenements and inundating the markets with foreign tongues, rituals, and foods (by 1927, new immigrants comprised more than 40 percent of the populations of New York and Chicago). And as much as class anxiety had driven the eugenic efforts of England in the 1890s, “race anxiety” drove the eugenic efforts of Americans in the 1920s.I Galton may have despised the great unwashed masses, but they were, indisputably, great and unwashed English masses. In America, in contrast, the great unwashed masses were increasingly foreign—and their genes, like their accents, were identifiably alien.

  Eugenicists such as Priddy had long worried that the flooding of America by immigrants would precipitate “race suicide.” The right people were being overrun by the wrong people, they argued, and the right genes corrupted by the
wrong ones. If genes were fundamentally indivisible—as Mendel had shown—then a genetic blight, once spread, could never be erased (“A cross between [any race] and a Jew is a Jew,” Madison Grant wrote). The only way of “cutting off the defective germplasm,” as one eugenicist described it, was to excise the organ that produced germplasm—i.e., to perform compulsory sterilizations of genetic unfits such as Carrie Buck. To protect the nation against “the menace of race deterioration,” radical social surgery would need to be deployed. “The Eugenic ravens are croaking for reform [in England],” Bateson wrote with obvious distaste in 1926. The American ravens croaked even louder.

  Counterpoised against the myth of “race suicide” and “race deterioration” was the equal and opposite myth of racial and genetic purity. Among the most popular novels of the early twenties, devoured by millions of Americans, was Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes, a bodice-ripping saga involving an English aristocrat who, orphaned as an infant and raised by apes in Africa, retains not just his parents’ complexion, bearing, and physique, but their moral rectitude, Anglo-Saxon values, and even the instinctual use of proper dinnerware. Tarzan—“his straight and perfect figure, muscled as the best of the ancient Roman gladiators must have been muscled”—exemplified the ultimate victory of nature over nurture. If a white man raised by jungle apes could retain the integrity of a white man in a flannel suit, then surely racial purity could be maintained in any circumstance.