Imbeciles

by Adam Cohen

  Although he would be representing Carrie in her challenge to the sterilization order, Whitehead had a long record of support for sterilization. He had been chairman of the colony’s board in 1916, when Dr. Priddy was sterilizing inmates without benefit of a state statute. Whitehead had supported the superintendent’s expansive reading of existing Virginia law, and the following year, his final one as a board member, he strongly supported Dr. Priddy in his battles with the Mallory family.

  The litigation over Carrie’s sterilization presented a more complicated geometry than the usual situation of two legal adversaries facing off in court. Dr. Priddy, Strode, and Whitehead all had close social, political, and financial ties. Further complicating the relationships was the fact that it was Dr. Priddy who would be paying Whitehead’s legal fees. Carrie was, in every way, the odd woman out—and Whitehead’s performance would reflect this. His representation of Carrie in the trial and subsequent appeals would turn out to be, as the legal historian Paul Lombardo has observed, “not merely incompetent” but “nothing less than betrayal.”

  • • •

  The Amherst County Circuit Court scheduled a trial on Carrie’s appeal for November 18, 1924. That did not leave Strode and Dr. Priddy much time to put together their case. The hearing before the colony’s board had been a relatively simple matter. Strode and Dr. Priddy had offered their uncontroverted account of the facts and showed that they had met the law’s conditions. The board, whose members all knew Dr. Priddy and Strode well, had been inclined to defer to their medical and legal conclusions, and it granted Dr. Priddy’s petition unanimously.

  The trial would be more challenging. A county judge was different from a member of a state hospital board. He had no institutional loyalty to the hospital or to the superintendent—his mandate was more broadly to ensure that justice was served. Even if the judge who heard the case in Amherst County had close ties to Strode and Dr. Priddy, which seemed likely, the case would ultimately be heard by the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals in Richmond, and perhaps even the U.S. Supreme Court. Dr. Priddy and Strode would ultimately not be able to rely on their connections to the decision makers to prevail.

  The biggest difference, however, would be in the law. The colony’s board had accepted the validity of the Virginia sterilization statute and only inquired into whether its provisions were being met. A state court would start with the question of whether the eugenic sterilization law itself was valid, and it might not be an easy one for Dr. Priddy and the colony to prevail on. As Strode had discovered when he researched the matter, when courts across the country had reviewed eugenic sterilization laws, almost without exception the laws had been struck down.

  The eugenicists had won the first such challenge in 1912, when Washington’s sterilization law was upheld by the Washington Supreme Court. The tide, however, had turned quickly. New Jersey, home to the Vineland Training School for Feeble-minded Girls and Boys, had enacted a sterilization law, which had been signed by Governor Woodrow Wilson, the former president of Princeton, and future president of the United States. In 1913 the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the law violated the equal protection clause because it applied to individuals who were in state institutions but not to people in the general population with the same conditions.

  The next year, a federal district court in Iowa struck down a law that authorized sterilization of criminals. The court ruled that it was a “bill of attainder”—a law that pronounced people guilty without a trial—because it said certain categories of criminals had to be sterilized, leaving nothing “for the prison physician to do but to execute” the order. The decision was not directly relevant to Virginia’s law, which required individualized determinations of who should be sterilized. But it was another ruling against sterilization, and one in which the court had expressed particular outrage at the barbarism of the procedure.

  In 1918 the courts in two more states—New York and Michigan—had struck down eugenic sterilization laws. The grounds were the same as in New Jersey: that the laws violated equal protection because they applied only to inmates of state institutions. Those rulings were relevant to Virginia, because Strode had included the same limitation, and they were not helpful to the eugenic cause. The latest legal setback—and in some ways the most discouraging one for the eugenicists—occurred where the movement began. In 1921 the Indiana Supreme Court had struck down that state’s first-in-the-nation eugenic sterilization law. The court ruled that the 1907 law violated the due process clause.

  In all, from 1913 to 1921, eight laws were challenged, and after the success in Washington, the eugenicists had lost in the next seven states: New Jersey, Iowa, Michigan, New York, Nevada, Indiana, and Oregon. State and federal courts decided these cases on a variety of constitutional grounds: equal protection, due process, and cruel and unusual punishment. The rulings pointed to a range of problems with the laws—that they applied only to a portion of a state’s population or did not provide sufficient procedural protections. Read on their own terms, the decisions suggested that the specifics of the statutes mattered a great deal, and laws that were not drafted properly would be struck down.

  There was another way of reading the cases, however: as an expression of general societal unease with eugenic sterilization. There had been enough enthusiasm for sterilization that in a short period of time laws were adopted across the country. Nevertheless, it was now clear that not everyone was caught up in the eugenic mania, and the resistance was not just coming from the courts. In several states, governors vetoed eugenic sterilization laws and delivered strongly worded indictments. Nebraska’s governor insisted his state’s sterilization bill seemed “more in keeping with the pagan age than with the teachings of Christianity,” and he declared in his veto message that “man is more than an animal.”

  The landscape for eugenic sterilization, which had been so promising in 1913, was now decidedly less so—and the judicial momentum was strongly against it. Dr. Priddy and the other supporters of the Virginia sterilization law would need to create the strongest possible case. They had drafted the law with considerable care, drawing on expert advice on how to make it resistant to constitutional challenge. Then they had chosen, in Carrie Buck, a plaintiff they believed demonstrated particularly well why eugenic sterilization was necessary.

  Now they needed a eugenic sterilization expert—a respected academic authority—who could persuade skeptical judges that the law and the sterilization order were necessary. In a letter to Dr. Priddy, Strode explained that they needed someone who could bolster their arguments with the most credible and convincing scientific evidence. Dr. Priddy agreed, and there was one name at the top of both men’s lists. It was the man who had written the treatise on eugenic sterilization, and the model statute, that Strode had relied on in drafting the Virgina law: Harry Laughlin.

  Four

  Harry Laughlin

  In 1924 the drive to enact eugenic sterilization laws was a truly national movement. It had begun in the Midwest, in Indiana, in 1907, and quickly spread to the East and West Coasts—the next two states to adopt laws were Connecticut and California. The states that followed over the next seventeen years were in every region of the country: they included South Dakota, New Jersey, Nevada, Kansas, Maine, and Alabama. The sterilization movement was national in other ways as well. It had prominent citizens in its ranks, drawn from the worlds of science, medicine, law, and politics, and it was receiving extensive attention in newspapers and magazines.

  This large national movement had an undisputed nerve center: the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. The Eugenics Record Office was a gathering place for eugenics scientists and a training ground for eugenics field researchers. It was a clearinghouse of public education materials and, as its name suggested, a repository for eugenics records. It was also, above all else, a force for eugenics advocacy and propaganda.

  The Eugenics Record Office had been founded by Charles
Davenport, a onetime Harvard zoology professor, but it was managed day to day by Harry Laughlin, who was arguably the nation’s most influential eugenicist. Laughlin had just won the greatest victory of his career: helping, as a special adviser to Congress, to enact an immigration law that made eugenic principles the guiding force in admitting—and, more important, excluding—new Americans.

  Now Laughlin was returning to the issue he cared about above all others: eugenic sterilization. He had been working for years to increase the number of sterilizations carried out nationally, through his prolific writings and energetic advocacy. As many as fifteen million Americans would need to be sterilized, he insisted, to save the nation from the looming threat of hereditary disaster.

  Laughlin hoped the nation was headed toward this goal, but he could not be sure, in part because the legal landscape was so uncertain. It was not clear that, in the end, eugenic sterilization would be held to be constitutional. Laughlin had made affirming the constitutionality of eugenic sterilization a personal crusade—he had recently published a lengthy book intended to persuade the courts to uphold sterilization laws. If the United States adopted a national program of mass eugenic sterilization—as now appeared possible—there would be no one more responsible than Laughlin. He had arrived at this lofty perch from far away—and from very humble origins.

  • • •

  Harry Hamilton Laughlin was born on March 11, 1880, in the small college and coal-mining town of Oskaloosa, Iowa. Laughlin’s father, George Hamilton Laughlin, taught ancient languages at Oskaloosa College, a small school affiliated with the Disciples of Christ. Shortly after Harry’s birth, George Laughlin became the college’s president.

  George Laughlin was a charismatic man. A biographical sketch noted his “excellent physique” and “dark brown eyes” that had not “lost any of their original fire and expressiveness.” He embodied the two great passions of the Laughlin family: knowledge and deeply felt religious faith. When he was not working as a professor or a college administrator, he was a clergyman in the Disciples of Christ Church.

  The family moved frequently, following George Laughlin’s peripatetic academic career. When Harry was three, they settled in Hiram, Ohio, where the elder Laughlin became president of Hiram College, another Disciples of Christ–affiliated school. Next, they moved to Wichita, Kansas, where George Laughlin once again taught ancient languages, this time at Garfield University. The family finally settled in Kirksville, Missouri, where Harry’s father took positions as chairman of the English Department at the First District Normal School and pastor of Kirksville Christian Church.

  Laughlin’s parents had met as college classmates at Abingdon College in Illinois—his mother was valedictorian, while his father had to settle for salutatorian. Deborah Ross Laughlin was the family’s flinty moral center. When she was not busy raising her five sons and five daughters in a series of rough-and-tumble towns on the American frontier, she was active in her church and an array of moralistic causes.

  Deborah Laughlin was an advocate for women’s suffrage and temperance, and a strong supporter of Christian missionary work. A compelling public speaker, she regularly addressed church congregations, women’s groups, and, on occasion, political rallies. She was especially drawn to the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which was founded in Cleveland in 1874. The group, whose motto was to “Agitate, Educate, Legislate,” organized housewives to kneel down in prayer outside establishments that sold liquor. Deborah Laughlin led antidrinking “pray-ins” in front of saloons, and at her urging Harry signed a temperance pledge, which he kept his entire life.

  The Laughlin family was proud of its lineage. Laughlin’s background was English, Scottish, Irish, German, and French—the northern European stock he would later insist was superior to other nationalities. His mother’s ancestry qualified her for the Daughters of the American Revolution. His father’s family claimed kinship to President James Madison.

  After attending the local Kirksville schools, Laughlin enrolled at the First District Normal School, which would later be renamed Truman State University, where his father taught. Even as a college student Laughlin was convinced of the critical importance of ancestry. In “Cosmopolitanism in America,” a paper he wrote in 1899, he declared that it was “generally conceded that . . . science and invention are preparing every portion of the globe for the happy and prosperous abode of the white man.” It was, he insisted, “an established law of Ethnology that races inferior in intellect morals and action recede before the expansive march of superior blood.” In later life, Laughlin would often be described as a eugenics evangelist who combined his father’s academic inclinations and his mother’s religious fervor. That intellectual moralism was already evident during his student days in Kirksville. In “Cosmopolitanism in America,” Laughlin predicted that “eventually the world will be inhabited by an enlightened race, Caucasian in blood, Christian in religion and free in government.”

  Laughlin remained in Kirksville after graduating from college in 1900. He became a teacher at, and then principal of, Kirksville’s small high school. In 1902 he married Pansy Bowen, the daughter of a teacher at the school. After his marriage, Laughlin moved to Iowa, where he accepted a better-paying job as principal of a larger school, Centerville High School. Laughlin came home three years later to become superintendent of the Kirksville Public Schools. In 1907 he moved into higher education, joining the faculty of his alma mater, the First District Normal School, where he became the sole member of the Department of Agriculture, Botany, and Nature Study.

  Laughlin’s academic interest was breeding. He did not limit his study to books and scholarly articles. A profile in a local newspaper reported that he was involved in “many interesting experiments in chicken raising.” In his first year at the college, Laughlin wrote to a prominent East Coast genetics expert named Charles Davenport to discuss crossbreeding of long-tailed Yokohama and other varieties of chickens. Davenport, the director of the Department of Experimental Biology of the Carnegie Institution in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, and Laughlin, the small-town agriculture professor, struck up a friendly correspondence about their shared interest in poultry breeding.

  Davenport decided he had found a kindred spirit. He arranged to meet Laughlin in person in January 1909, when he would be in Missouri for a meeting of the American Breeders’ Association, an organization that brought animal and plant breeders together with academic experts on heredity. Laughlin persuaded Davenport and his wife to add a visit to Kirksville to their trip. The couple stayed with the Laughlins and Davenport spoke to a local audience on his area of expertise. “Your visit here has aroused great interest in the subject of heredity,” Laughlin wrote Davenport afterward. “Your lectures were greatly appreciated.”

  The two men continued their correspondence and Davenport sponsored his new friend for membership in the American Breeders’ Association. The next year, Davenport invited Laughlin to attend a summer session at Cold Spring Harbor. Laughlin traveled to New York, and the two men continued to bond over animal breeding. When he returned to Missouri, Laughlin wrote to Davenport to say that the summer had been “the most profitable six weeks that I ever spent.” Laughlin had found in Davenport a mentor who would set his life in a whole new direction.

  • • •

  Charles Benedict Davenport was born in Stamford, Connecticut, in 1866, into a family with elite roots in Puritan New England. The Davenports traced their American chapter back to the Reverend John Davenport, a prominent Puritan clergyman who left his native England to help build a new world. Reverend Davenport, who cofounded the colony of New Haven in 1638, was considered “the most puritan of New England puritan leaders”—a man whose biography reported that he died “waging a desperate struggle to preserve the old New England Way.”

  Charles Davenport’s father, Amzi Benedict Davenport, was a deeply religious man who tried mightily to impress upon his twelve children the extraordinary qual
ity of their ancestry. After intensive research of the family tree, he published History and Genealogy of the Davenport Family in 1851, and an enlarged edition in 1876, which traced the Davenport lineage back to England in 1086. The book—the title page of which attributed authorship to “A. Benedict Davenport (of the twenty-fourth generation)”—was described as “the most elaborate work of that sort ever published in this country.”

  Charles Davenport attended Harvard University, from which he received an A.B. in 1889 and a Ph.D. in biology in 1892, and then began teaching zoology, briefly at Harvard and later as an assistant professor at the newly established University of Chicago. As part of his research, Davenport wanted to breed relatively large animals, which the university lacked the farming facilities to support. He began to look for a new academic home that would allow him to carry out his breeding work.

  Davenport decided to establish his own academic center. He approached the Carnegie Institution, which had recently been founded by the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, with a sizable endowment. Davenport secured annual funding for an institution to study “hereditary evolution, more particularly by experimental methods.” In 1904 he founded the Station for the Experimental Study of Evolution in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, on the north shore of Long Island. Davenport left academia to become its first director, and to do his own scholarly research.

  The Station for the Experimental Study of Evolution’s focus was the study of nonhumans. Davenport, however, was becoming increasingly interested in human heredity. He wrote a paper—coauthored with his wife, Gertrude, a fellow zoologist—on heredity in human hair traits, and other papers on inheritance of skin and eye color. Davenport suspected that mental traits, such as personality and a disposition toward delinquency, followed hereditary patterns of inheritance as much as physical traits did, and he was eager to research the question.