Imbeciles

by Adam Cohen

  PENGUIN PRESS

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  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2016 by Adam Cohen

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  Photograph credits

  Library of Congress: insert Image 1, Image 2, Image 3; courtesy of Harry H. Laughlin Papers, Special Collections Department, Pickler Memorial Library, Truman State University: Image 4, Image 7, Image 12; Arthur Estabrook Papers, University at Albany, State University of New York: Image 5, Image 6; Library of Virginia: Image 8, Image 9, Image 10, Image 11

  eBook ISBN 978-1-101-98083-5

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Cohen, Adam (Adam Seth), author.

  Title: Imbeciles : the Supreme Court, American eugenics, and the sterilization of Carrie Buck / Adam Cohen.

  Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015044207 | ISBN 9781594204180 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Buck, Carrie, 1906–1983—Trials, litigation, etc. | Involuntary sterilization—Law and legislation—United States. | Eugenics—Law and legislation—United States. | Involuntary sterilization—Law and legislation—Virginia. | BISAC: HISTORY / United States / 20th Century. | LAW / Legal History. | LAW / Civil Rights.

  Classification: LCC KF224.B83 C64 2016 | DDC 344.7304/8—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015044207

  Version_1

  For Beverly Sher Cohen

  Professing to be wise, they became fools . . .

  ROMANS 1:22

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  One Carrie Buck

  Two Albert Priddy

  Three Albert Priddy

  Four Harry Laughlin

  Five Harry Laughlin

  Six Aubrey Strode

  Seven Aubrey Strode

  Eight Oliver Wendell Holmes

  Nine Oliver Wendell Holmes

  Ten Carrie Buck

  Conclusion

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Introduction

  On May 2, 2002, the governor of Virginia offered a “sincere apology” for his state’s “participation in eugenics.” In an effort to improve the genetic quality of its population, Virginia forcibly sterilized at least 7,450 “unfit” people between 1927 and 1979, more than any other state but California. “The eugenics movement was a shameful effort in which state government never should have been involved,” the governor declared. “We must remember the commonwealth’s past mistakes in order to prevent them from recurring.”

  Virginia’s apology came on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the United States Supreme Court’s ruling in Buck v. Bell. In that dark legal landmark, the court upheld eugenic sterilization and allowed the state to sterilize Carrie Buck, a young woman wrongly labeled “feebleminded.” The court that decided Buck v. Bell included some of the most distinguished men in the annals of American law. The chief justice was William Howard Taft, who had served as president before ascending to the bench. Louis Brandeis, the towering progressive who had made his name as “the people’s attorney,” signed on to the majority opinion, as did Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., widely considered to be one of the greatest legal minds—if not the greatest—in American history.

  It was the legendary Oliver Wendell Holmes who wrote the 1927 ruling, and he included in it one of the most brutal aphorisms in American jurisprudence. Holmes, the Harvard-educated scion of several of Boston’s most distinguished families, was scornful of the poorly educated Carrie and her working-class mother. Based on scant information about the two Buck women—and about Carrie’s daughter, who was a small child at the time—he famously declared: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

  Holmes’s opinion for an 8–1 majority did not merely uphold Virginia’s sterilization law: it delivered a clarion call to Americans to identify those among them who should not be allowed to reproduce—and to sterilize them in large numbers. The nation must sterilize those who “sap the strength of the State,” Holmes insisted, to “prevent our being swamped with incompetence.” In words that could have been torn from the pages of a eugenics tract, he declared: “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”

  • • •

  The United States in the 1920s was caught up in a mania: the drive to use newly discovered scientific laws of heredity to perfect humanity. Modern eugenics, which had emerged in England among followers of Charles Darwin, had crossed the Atlantic and become a full-fledged intellectual craze. The United States suddenly had a new enemy: bad “germplasm,” and those who carried it. The “unfit,” the eugenicists warned, threatened to bring down not only the nation but the whole human race.

  America’s leading citizens led the charge to save humanity. John D. Rockefeller Jr., the world’s wealthiest man, funded scientific research into how what he called the “defective human” could be bred out of the population. Alexander Graham Bell became chairman of the Board of Scientific Directors of the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, the leading organization advocating eugenic sterilization. And former president Theodore Roosevelt took to the pages of a national magazine to insist that the unfit must be “forbidden to leave offspring behind them.”

  Prominent scientists formed organizations to research and promote eugenics, with names like the Committee to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means of Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the American Population. Social reformers embraced biology as the fastest route to their goal of a better world. Some spoke gently of the need for laws to prevent the unfit from passing on their defects. Others were more severe, like the upper-class New York advocate for the mentally ill who warned her fellow philanthropists that they put society at risk when their well-meaning charity helped “men and women who are diseased and vicious to reproduce their kind.”

  In big cities and small towns, hereditary improvement was the intellectual issue of the day. Albert Edward Wiggam, a popular lecturer, traveled the country promoting the “New Decalogue of Science,” an updated version of the Ten Commandments based on eugenic principles. Women’s clubs filled their agendas with lectures on identifying the hereditarily defective and arranging eugenic marriages. Clergymen competed in national eugenic sermon contests organized on topics like “Religion and Eugenics—Does the Church Have Any Responsibility for Improving the Human Stock?”

  Eugenics permeated the popular culture. Bestselling books explained the concept of “race betterment” to an eager public, and mass-market magazines urged their readers to do their part to breed superior human beings. The “inspiring, the wonderful, message of the new heredity,” Cosmopolitan explained, was that it offered the promise of preventing once and for all the birth of the “diseased or crippled or depraved.” Hollywood released a feature-length horror movie, which filled theaters from coast to coast, showing the frightening consequences of allowing �
�defective” babies to live.

  Conferences and public events were held to promote eugenics research and education. New York’s American Museum of Natural History hosted the Second International Eugenics Congress—and the U.S. State Department sent out the invitations. The congress opened with a plea from the museum’s president about the need to “enlighten government in the prevention of the spread and multiplication of worthless members of society.” At the Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia, celebrating the Declaration of Independence’s 150th anniversary, the American Eugenics Society mounted an exhibit that explained the terrible threat with flashing lights. Every forty-eight seconds, the lights indicated, a mentally deficient person was born in the United States, while only every seven and a half minutes was a “high grade person” born, who would “have [the] ability to do creative work and be fit for leadership.”

  Universities were quick to embrace eugenics and give it their intellectual imprimatur. Eugenics was taught at 376 universities and colleges, including Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley, and Cornell. Prominent professors were outspoken in support, including Earnest Hooton, the chairman of Harvard’s anthropology department, who warned that educated Americans were selling their “biological birthright for a mess of morons,” and called for a “biological purge.” Eugenics was so popular on campus that F. Scott Fitzgerald, as a Princeton undergraduate, wrote a song for the college’s Triangle Show called “Love or Eugenics,” which asked the musical question: “Men, which would you like to come and pour your tea. / Kisses that set your heart aflame, / Or love from a prophylactic dame?”

  • • •

  The driving force behind the eugenics movement of the 1920s was, historians suggest, the collective fears of the Anglo-Saxon upper and middle classes about a changing America. Record levels of immigration were transforming the nation’s ethnic and religious makeup. And with increased industrialization and urbanization, community and family ties were fraying. These anxieties were being redirected and expressed in the form of fears about the unfit.

  The eugenics movement offered two solutions: one for the threat from without and one for the danger from within. Its answer to the foreign threat was new immigration laws to limit the number of Italians, eastern European Jews, and other non–northern Europeans admitted to the country. The eugenicists claimed the groups they wanted to exclude had inordinately high levels of physical and mental hereditary defects that were degrading America’s gene pool. They offered what purported to be scientific evidence, including intelligence tests claiming that between 40 and 50 percent of Jewish immigrants arriving at Ellis Island were mentally defective.

  Congress held hearings at which eugenicists explained the biological deficiencies of various nationalities. Their arguments were well received by senators and representatives who overwhelmingly shared the eugenicists’ prejudices. “Thank God we have in America perhaps the largest percentage of any country in the world of the pure, unadulterated Anglo-Saxon stock,” Senator Ellison DuRant Smith of South Carolina declared, in support of new immigration policies. Acting on these eugenic arguments, Congress adopted the Immigration Act of 1924, which opened the door to more immigrants from northern Europe and shut it on southern and eastern Europeans.

  The eugenicists’ answer to the internal threat was a set of laws designed to prevent the “unfit” from reproducing. They began in 1895 with a law prohibiting various kinds of people deemed to be hereditarily unworthy from marrying in Connecticut and got other states to pass such laws. Next, they promoted “segregation”: placing “defective” people in state institutions during their reproductive years to prevent them from passing their flaws on to a new generation.

  Finally, the eugenicists turned to sterilization, their favored solution. Marriage laws were weak: eugenicists feared defective people would simply reproduce out of wedlock. Segregation was expensive: states could not build enough institutions to house all the people the eugenicists wanted to stop from having children. Sterilization, however, was completely effective, and it could be carried out on a mass scale.

  Starting with Indiana in 1907, states adopted legislation authorizing forced sterilization of people judged to have hereditary defects. Within six years, twelve states had such laws. They called for sterilizing anyone with “defective” traits, such as epilepsy, criminality, alcoholism, or “dependency”—another word for poverty. Their greatest target was the “feebleminded,” a loose designation that included people who were mentally challenged, women considered to be excessively interested in sex, and various other categories of individuals who offended the middle-class sensibilities of judges and social workers.

  Fears of “the rising tide of feeblemindedness” rose to panic levels. Experts studied the problem intensively and issued reports on subjects like the “menace of feeble-mindedness” among California public school children. A leading psychologist published an influential study arguing that feeblemindedness “underlies all our social problems,” including crime, poverty, and prostitution.

  The eugenicists insisted society’s response had to be commensurate with the enormity of the threat. It was not enough for a few states to sterilize the inmates of their mental hospitals. A nationwide program was required, with each state doing its part. Every American had to be eugenically investigated—and evaluated for possible sterilization. The eugenic sterilization movement’s most prominent leader insisted that to remove the “lowest one-tenth” of the nation, fifteen million people would have to go under the knife.

  • • •

  Virginia was not in the forefront of the eugenic sterilization movement—quite the opposite. What set it apart was its relative cautiousness. Virginia did not enact its sterilization law until 1924, seventeen years after Indiana’s. Then, on the advice of counsel, the state’s mental hospitals decided they would not sterilize anyone until Virginia’s law was tested in the courts—all the way up to the United States Supreme Court. To accomplish this, the hospitals decided to create a test legal case.

  It was Carrie Buck’s misfortune to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. She had been sent to Virginia’s Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded just when the superintendent was trying to find an inmate to put at the center of the test case. Carrie had precisely the personal attributes the eugenicists were looking for: she had been designated feebleminded, and as a woman who had given birth out of wedlock at seventeen, she embodied the eugenic nightmare of the feebleminded reproducing rapidly and flooding the nation with “defectives.” Carrie also came from the sort of family the eugenicists wanted to put in the spotlight. Her mother was also a colony inmate who had been designated feebleminded, and she had other relatives in the institution, which could help the state establish a hereditary pattern.

  There was more to Carrie’s story, but no one was interested in hearing it. She was not, in fact, feebleminded, despite what the state’s unreliable intelligence testing reported. Her school records, which the colony ignored, revealed her to be of perfectly normal intelligence. And the real facts about how Carrie had ended up at the colony—and how she had come to be pregnant—showed that she was not a threat to society, but its victim.

  • • •

  Nations rely on civil society—private institutions devoted to higher values—to promote truth and justice and to keep them on the right path. To maintain freedom of speech and religion, a just legal system, and equal rights for all requires not only good government officials but also enlightened and fair-minded professional classes, nonprofit organizations, and educational institutions.

  Four of the nation’s most respected professions were involved in Carrie Buck’s case—medicine, academia, law, and the judiciary—in the form of four powerful men. They were the kind of influential individuals who were in a position to put a check on the popular mania over eugenics, and to protect the people who were wrongly being branded a threat. In each case, however, these men sided forcefully with the eugenic cause
, and used their power and prestige to see that Carrie was sterilized.

  Albert Priddy was the physician who selected Carrie to be the first person operated on under Virginia’s law. Dr. Priddy served as superintendent of the Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded, where Carrie was an inmate. Before he chose Carrie, he had lobbied the legislature to pass the eugenic sterilization law, and he was a key part of the defense team that worked to get it upheld in court.

  In his campaign for eugenic sterilization, Dr. Priddy had much of the medical profession behind him. Across the country, doctors took a leading role in promoting eugenics and eugenic sterilization, lending their expertise and authority to the cause. Medical journals were full of polemical articles advocating sterilization, with titles like “Race Suicide for Social Parasites.” In the critical years, not every prominent doctor supported eugenic sterilization, but very few spoke out against it.

  Harry Laughlin, the head of the Eugenics Record Office, was the scientist who gave his expert opinion that the Virginia law should be upheld and that Carrie should be sterilized. Laughlin had been a key supporter of the Immigration Act of 1924, arguing that national quotas were needed to keep out genetically inferior Italians and eastern European Jews. He was the most prominent advocate for eugenic sterilization, and the author of a 502-page treatise on the subject. It was Laughlin who proposed sterilizing fifteen million people—and he was doing more than anyone else to make that vision a reality.

  Laughlin, a college professor who had a doctorate in biology from Princeton, was also, to a great extent, representative of his professional peers. Many of the nation’s leading academic scientists publicly supported eugenics and eugenic sterilization, and for decades those who opposed it largely remained silent. Scientific American editorialized repeatedly in support of eugenics, insisting society must tell its “unfit” members, “You may live, but you must not propagate.”