Imbeciles

by Adam Cohen

  Colony records suggested another reason for the sterilizations. Dr. Priddy described most of the women as “feebleminded,” but he generally also included a reference to their being overly sexual. They were “immoral,” “over-sexed,” or “man-crazy,” in his words—and he made references to their purported histories of prostitution or promiscuity. The women’s clinical diagnoses included such conditions as “sexual degeneracy” and “nymphomania.” These were traits, Dr. Priddy believed, that had to be eugenically removed from the population.

  • • •

  It was only a matter of time before Dr. Priddy’s aggressive program of sterilization under the vague authority of the new law got him into trouble. The source of the trouble was Willie Mallory, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of nine. Willie had come to the colony after being arrested at home in Richmond and charged with running a house of prostitution. The Mallorys had experienced setbacks over the years, but at the time of her arrest, her husband, George, was working at a sawmill, and Willie had a factory job. Willie was also generally acknowledged to be a good mother. When she was arrested, she had a baby in her arms.

  Willie’s arrest led to her being brought before a Commission of Feeblemindedness with two of her daughters, Jessie and Nannie. Willie would later testify that the hearing was anything but scientific. The doctor who examined her asked “foolish” questions, she said, such as whether she could tell if there was salt in bread and if she knew how to tie her shoes. When Willie was found to be feebleminded, she insisted that the hearing was rigged.

  The Commission of Feeblemindedness ordered that Willie and her daughters be sent to the colony. Willie escaped and went back home to take care of her children. The police found her in Richmond and brought her back to the colony. About six months after she arrived, Dr. Priddy sterilized Willie and her daughter Jessie. The colony released them, but Dr. Priddy imposed a particularly cruel condition on their freedom. Neither could return to live with her family. Willie had to stay with her eldest daughter, Bessie, who lived with her own family more than twenty miles outside Richmond. Jessie went to live with Mrs. J. W. Murphy, who was even farther away.

  Dr. Priddy had sterilized about eighty inmates with no resistance, but Willie Mallory was different. In November 1917 she sued him for “wrongful and illegal assaults, and batteries.” Specifically, she charged that Dr. Priddy placed her “under ether, or other anesthetic,” and then performed an operation “sterilizing her, and unsexing her, and destroying her power to bear children.” It caused Willie “great physical and mental pain,” the suit said. She also filed a motion to have Nannie discharged from the colony and returned to her family.

  Dr. Priddy mounted a spirited defense. He claimed, as usual, that he had operated not to sterilize, but to treat unrelated medical problems. From his examination of Willie, he said, “it was determined that an operation was not only desirable, but absolutely necessary.” Dr. Priddy did not give any details about Willie’s condition or why she had to be sterilized. He insisted, however, that the 1916 law authorized him to operate. Dr. Priddy also claimed that Willie had consented—that the procedure was explained to her and she “expressed not only a willingness, but a desire to have the operation performed.”

  While the parties awaited a verdict, Willie’s husband wrote to Dr. Priddy, demanding Nannie’s release. George Mallory said he feared she would be the next Mallory woman sterilized. “I want to know when I can get my child home again,” he wrote. “She is not feeble minded.” He ended with a threat. “I have told you not to” operate “on my child,” he told Dr. Priddy, and warned there would be “trouble” if he did.

  Dr. Priddy was neither intimidated by George Mallory’s threats nor moved by his plea for his daughter. He responded with a letter full of self-confidence and condescension. Willie and Jessie had been sterilized, he said, “because they asked me to do so and it was done for diseases they had.” He warned George that if he sent another letter like his last one “I will have you arrested.”

  Even with the new authority in the 1916 law, Dr. Priddy was on uncertain legal ground. Courts were beginning to recognize the importance of patient consent, and they were increasingly ruling against doctors who operated without it. In 1914 New York’s highest court had issued an influential ruling that supported Willie. In Schloendorff v. Society of New York Hospital, the eminent judge Benjamin Cardozo had declared that a “surgeon who performs an operation without his patient’s consent commits an assault, for which he is liable in damages.”

  Despite the rise of informed consent, Dr. Priddy prevailed in the lawsuit. The jury, which delivered its verdict in March 1918, accepted the defense’s argument that Dr. Priddy had acted within his medical discretion. It was, however, far from a complete victory. The judge warned Dr. Priddy not to sterilize any more inmates until the law changed.

  Willie’s lawsuit had a significant impact on sterilization in Virginia. After the judge’s warning, it was clear the 1916 law would not protect state hospitals that sterilized inmates. Superintendents were now on notice that if an inmate sued they could be held personally liable for damages. The Mallory case “frightened all the superintendents in the State,” Dr. DeJarnette later recalled, “and all sterilization was stopped promptly.”

  • • •

  Dr. Priddy was unsettled by his near loss in the Mallory lawsuit. It made him more intent than ever on getting Virginia to enact a law that would give him and his fellow superintendents legal authority to perform sterilizations. There was reason to believe such a bill might now have a good chance. The eugenic sterilization movement had been gaining strength across the country. By 1920, thirteen years had passed since Indiana enacted the nation’s first eugenic sterilization statute, and about a third of the states had adopted such laws. The movement had even made inroads in the South. In 1919, North Carolina and Alabama had become the first southern states to enact eugenic sterilization laws.

  Dr. Priddy and Dr. DeJarnette had a eugenic sterilization bill drawn up and introduced in the legislature. The members of the Virginia legislature, however, were not ready for it. When the bill was introduced, it was “was laughed out of committee,” Dr. DeJarnette later recalled. One of the reasons for the laughter was the legislators’ concern over who would be sterilized. “They might get all of us,” the lawmakers joked.

  If Dr. Priddy could not get Virginia to enact a eugenic sterilization law—and for now, it was clear he could not—he wanted some kind of legislation to protect him from lawsuits like the Mallorys’. He went to Aubrey Strode, who was now out of the legislature, and asked him, working as a private lawyer, to draft bills that would protect state hospitals and superintendents.

  Strode wrote two bills for the 1920 legislative session. One required inmates challenging their detention to sue in the county in which they were being held. Willie had been able to sue in Richmond, which meant Dr. Priddy had to travel from the colony for the lawsuit and defend himself on her home turf. The bill, which became law, would mean that lawsuits by prisoners seeking to be released would be tried before judges in the same community as the state hospital—judges who were presumably well known to the superintendents and their lawyers.

  Strode’s second bill decreed that all inmates who were sent to a state hospital by either a court or a commission were “lawfully committed.” Dr. Priddy and his fellow superintendents were worried about having to defend against more lawsuits like Nannie Mallory’s, challenging their confinement. With a single law, the legislature acted to block such suits.

  Dr. Priddy and Dr. DeJarnette did not give up on their hopes for a eugenic sterilization law. In 1921 Dr. Priddy went back to Strode, in his capacity as attorney for the colony. Dr. Priddy told Strode that the State Hospital Board, which supervised all five of Virginia’s mental hospitals, wanted his advice on the possibility of enacting a law authorizing eugenic sterilization.

  Strode agreed to investigate the matter. He researched
the law of eugenic sterilization in other states. In every case he could find where such a law had been challenged in court it had been struck down on equal protection, due process, or other constitutional grounds. Strode thought it was likely that if Virginia passed a sterilization law, it too would be invalidated. Strode also mentioned that he had been in the legislature when it voted down Dr. Carrington’s sterilization bill. It had been rejected, Strode advised, because of “public sentiment” against eugenic sterilization.

  In advising the board not to pursue a eugenic sterilization law, Strode may simply have been doing his job, urging his client not to try to enact a law that would likely not win the support of the legislature—and, if it did, would only be struck down by the courts. Strode’s advice may also, however, have indicated his own lack of enthusiasm for eugenic sterilization. Had he been a true believer, as Dr. Priddy and Dr. DeJarnette were, he might have considered it worth the risk. After his discouraging legal assessment, Strode recalled later, the board “for the time dropped the matter so far as I know.”

  Dr. Priddy continued to use the colony annual reports to argue for a sterilization law. Reflecting Strode’s words of caution, he said that any new law would have to be carefully drawn, but he insisted that for some mentally defective women sterilization was the “only solution of the problem.” He reported that a bill was being prepared for the next legislative session. “It is to be hoped that with the best legal talent to draft such a bill,” he wrote, it will be written with the appropriate “constitutional limits,” and it will be “enacted into a law.” He noted that the governor supported the law, and the State Board of Public Welfare “has always favored it.”

  In the midst of his work to get a eugenic sterilization law enacted, Dr. Priddy married for the first time. In October 1923 the fifty-seven-year-old superintendent wed Mamie Hardy Mitchell of Alexandria, Louisiana. As it turned out, the marriage was destined to be short-lived, and—like a good number of the leading advocates for eugenic sterilization—Dr. Priddy would not have any children of his own.

  • • •

  On the eve of the 1924 legislative session, Dr. Priddy and Dr. DeJarnette “carried” their “troubles” to “A. E. Strode” once again, as Dr. DeJarnette later recalled. They told Strode that the State Hospital Board had asked that Strode draft a eugenic sterilization bill. The board believed that in the time since it last considered the matter, public understanding of heredity and eugenics had increased, and that changes in popular opinion made it more likely the legislature and the courts would now support such a law. The superintendents also said Governor Elbert Lee Trinkle supported a eugenic sterilization law and would sign a bill if the legislature passed it.

  This time, Strode agreed to draft a bill, but once again some of his actions suggested he might not have been enthusiastic about eugenic sterilization. Strode researched eugenic sterilization laws in other states, and he consulted a legal treatise Dr. Priddy had given him, Eugenical Sterilization in the United States, by Harry Laughlin, the assistant director of the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. Laughlin’s book included a “Model Eugenical Sterilization Law” to help states in drafting effective laws that would also survive legal challenge. Strode made a “diligent effort,” he would later say, “to avoid the defects that have brought disapproval from the Courts” of other eugenic sterilization laws.

  Strode’s bill borrowed liberally from Laughlin’s model law, but he narrowed its scope in significant ways. Strode included three of the categories of defect Laughlin had in his model: “hereditary forms of insanity,” “feeble-mindedness,” and “epilepsy”—and he added “imbecility” and “idiocy,” which in the model law were simply covered by “feeblemindedness.” Strode rejected several of the model law’s “socially inadequate” categories: “blind (including those with seriously impaired vision),” “deaf (including those with seriously impaired hearing),” “deformed (including the crippled),” “criminalistic (including the delinquent and wayward),” “diseased (including the tuberculous, the syphilitic, the leprous, and others with chronic, infectious, and legally segregable diseases),” “inebriate (including drug habitués),” and “dependent (including orphans, ne’er-do-wells, the homeless, tramps and paupers).”

  Strode’s decision on what to include—and what to omit—was significant. Laughlin’s model law sought to usher in an era of mass sterilization, in which anyone who was in any way “defective”—including people who were merely poor or who did not hear or see well—could be involuntarily operated on to prevent them from reproducing. Strode’s bill made many fewer Virginians subject to eugenic sterilization.

  Strode added another major limitation to his bill: it authorized sterilization only when the state could show it was in “the best interest of the patients.” The eugenics movement generally did not concern itself with the interests of the people it wanted sterilized. Neither Laughlin’s model statute nor any other sterilization law in the country had this condition. When Virginia’s law was challenged, its defenders would boast that theirs was the only law limited to cases in which “the welfare of the patient will be promoted.” This was a provision that could have created legal difficulties for Strode’s clients, because it gave inmates a legal basis to challenge sterilization orders. But it may also have been an indication that Strode was concerned about the human costs of the eugenic sterilization program he was helping to bring about.

  On one point, Strode followed Laughlin’s advice closely: he put strong procedural protections into his bill in an attempt to protect it from constitutional challenges. Like Laughlin’s model, Strode’s bill created an expert body to make decisions about who should be sterilized. Laughlin vested this power in a state eugenicist, while Strode gave it to the people who were paying his bills—the boards of the state’s mental hospitals. Following Laughlin’s guidance, Strode provided that people facing sterilization had a right to a hearing and to be present at it. He also included, as Laughlin had, a right to appeal the decision to the local county court and as high as the U.S. Supreme Court.

  Strode also limited his bill in one more important way. Laughlin’s model statute applied to everyone in the state, whether they were inmates of a state hospital or not. Laughlin urged other states to draft their statutes in this way, for legal reasons. Eugenic sterilization laws had been struck down in three states—New York, New Jersey, and Michigan—as a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because they applied only to hospital inmates, and not to people with the same conditions who were not confined to hospitals. Laughlin emphasized that it would be an enormous strategic mistake to draw up any new laws that applied only to inmates. In his treatise, Laughlin called writing a law that applied only to a narrow part of the population “the only great stumbling block” eugenic sterilization had met, and he instructed that “new laws must take great pains to avoid similar disaster.”

  Despite this emphatic warning, Strode did precisely what Laughlin advised him not to do: he drafted the Virginia law to apply only to inmates of the five Virginia hospitals for the feebleminded: Western State Hospital, Eastern State Hospital, Southwestern State Hospital, Central State Hospital for Negroes, and the Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded. Strode, who was a highly skilled lawyer and had researched the issue extensively, knew that limiting the law in this way would make it vulnerable to an equal protection challenge.

  The question is why he did it. It is possible that Strode was simply acting as an advocate for his clients. He represented the state hospitals, and he drafted a law to let them do all of the sterilizing. It would not help them, however, if the law he drafted were struck down as unconstitutional. Another possibility is that Strode did not believe the legislature would pass a law that applied to everyone in the state, but he thought it might accept his narrower version. But that was unlikely, given how little opposition there would prove to be in the legislature.

  There a
re two more possibilities, which suggest degrees of reluctance on Strode’s part about eugenic sterilization. One is that Strode thought a sterilization law that applied to the whole population of the state would go too far. He may not have been comfortable with making every Virginian eligible to be sterilized by the state. By limiting his bill to inmates of the state’s five mental hospitals, Strode ensured that only a few thousand people would be eligible for eugenic sterilization, rather than millions.

  A final, intriguing possibility is that Strode may not have supported eugenic sterilization, and might have intentionally written the law in a way that made it vulnerable to being struck down. Strode was the brother of six sisters, and a champion of women’s rights. He was also someone who, as a member of the legislature, had not spoken out in favor of eugenic sterilization or introduced a bill of his own. In fact, on the day Dr. Carrington’s eugenic sterilization bill came up for a vote, Strode was present in the legislature, and voted on thirty other bills. He was, however, apparently absent for the vote on the sterilization bill—hardly the act of a man who thought the state desperately needed eugenic sterilization to save itself from ruin.

  If Strode was trying to undermine his own bill, he did one more unusual thing that could have helped to prevent it from ever taking effect. Strode strongly advised the State Hospital Board that if the eugenic sterilization bill passed, the state hospitals should not carry out any sterilizations until the law was tested in the courts—all the way up to the Supreme Court, if the case got that far. It was unusual advice: states generally act on laws once they are passed, rather than wait for them to be tested in the courts, perhaps for years. Strode might have given this advice out of an abundance of caution, or he might have wanted to give the law he was hired to draft every chance to fail.