Imbeciles

by Adam Cohen

  Soon after his arrival in Cold Spring Harbor, Estabrook embarked on his first major eugenics research project. With financial support from Mrs. E. H. Harriman, he went off to study what he would later describe as a “highly inbred rural community of New York State.” He found the community to be plagued by alcoholism, sexual misbehavior, and other social inadequacies.

  In August 1912 Estabrook and Davenport jointly published The Nam Family: A Study in Cacogenics. The “Nam” of the title was a bit of eugenics wordplay: it was “man” spelled backward—a linguistic expression of the backwardness the authors believed they had found. The Nam Family was the latest in the line of “criminal anthropology” books that traced back to Richard Dugdale’s The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity: also Further Studies of Criminals, which had been published thirty-five years earlier. In keeping with their positions at the Eugenics Record Office, Estabrook and Davenport injected more eugenic “science” than earlier books of this sort had included. They insisted that the role of heredity in determining the “indolence,” “alcoholism,” and “licentiousness” in families like the Nams “cannot be doubted.” The book’s subtitle was an attempt to drive this point home: “cacogenics” was a combination of the Greek words for “bad” (caco) and “gene” (genics).

  In The Nam Family, Estabrook and Davenport wrote about a rural New York community that was, the authors explained, the product of the union of a “roving” white patriarch of Dutch lineage and an “Indian princess.” That union led to generations of men and women, they said, with unusual levels of alcoholism, lack of ambition, and other dysfunction. Although the authors said their primary aim was to present “bare facts” about the Nam family, they also offered advice. Doing nothing about the Nam family’s problems was not a viable option, they said. “No State can afford to neglect such a breeding center of feeble-mindedness, alcoholism, sex-immorality, and infanticide as we have here,” they wrote. “A rotten apple can infect the whole barrel of fruit.”

  Estabrook and Davenport considered the possibility of using trained nurses to teach members of the community housekeeping skills and hygiene, but they decided it would not work. Such efforts would, they said, be nothing more than “supplying a veneer of good manners to a punky social body.” The authors also raised the idea of scattering the Nam community, but concluded that would just create more “centers of indolence and alcoholism—for like seeks to mate with like wherever it finds itself.”

  There was one solution Estabrook and Davenport believed could solve the problem of the Nam family: mass segregation. The children and youth whose family history suggested they would produce inferior offspring could be institutionalized for thirty-five to forty years, until there was no danger of their reproducing. It was, the authors conceded, “perhaps the most expensive” solution, but if it were done the Nams “would leave no progeny” and “the worst of the strain would . . . be brought virtually to an end.”

  Estabrook and Davenport were open to the idea of sterilizing all the Nams. “Asexualization,” as they called it, would have the same effect, they noted, of ending all Nam progeny. It was doubtful, however, that “public sentiment would favor such treatment,” they said, even though sterilization of the community was “quite within the province of the State.”

  In 1916 Estabrook released his second book, The Jukes in 1915, a follow-up to Dugdale’s 1877 classic. Working from family records in the New York Prison Association archives, Estabrook identified more than two thousand descendants of the same family Dugdale had made famous. Estabrook had traveled to places where Jukes now lived and conducted eugenics research. “It has been persistently carried on for three years in fourteen States of the Union,” he reported. “Every Juke possible to see has been personally visited.”

  Estabrook discovered that over time the Jukes had improved their status, becoming more intelligent and less socially isolated. But there were still high rates of defects of all kinds, and he cataloged them meticulously in the style of eugenic fieldwork. In a typical entry, Estabrook described one member of the family, the “second child of VI 7,” as “mentally incapable of work in school.” The woman “became a harlot, later married, had one child, continued her harlotry, and was finally divorced by her husband,” he wrote. “Her neat and well-dressed appearance does not give the impression of the character she has become.”

  Estabrook reported finding elaborate hereditary patterns of such defects as feeblemindedness, laziness, and “harlotry.” In one eugenic analysis, he examined the grandchildren of Althea, described as “of an erotic make-up,” and her mate, Otto, “a steady, industrious, plodding man” who died in an accident while intoxicated. After assessing the grandchildren’s varying degrees of sexual proclivity, Estabrook concluded that it was “probable” that the “eroticism” exhibited by two of them was a remnant of “the licentiousness . . . of their ancestors.”

  Estabrook found that decades after Dugdale first discovered them, the Jukes were still defective. There were, he conceded, family members who were “perhaps normal mentally and emotionally,” but there were many more who were not. “One half of the Jukes were and are feeble-minded, mentally incapable of responding normally to the expectations of society,” he wrote, “satisfied with the fulfillment of natural passions and desires, with no ambition or ideals in life.”

  The conclusions of The Jukes in 1915 were very different from those of the 1877 original. Dugdale, the prison reformer, had traced the Jukes’ problems to their poor environment and argued for greater efforts to ameliorate their conditions. Estabrook, the eugenics field worker, insisted their problems were largely bad genes: “No matter what the degree of perfection to which we raise the standard of environment, the response of the individual will still depend on its constitution and the constitution must be adequate before we can attain the perfect individual, socially and eugenically.”

  Estabrook also disagreed with Dugdale on what should be done. As he had in The Nam Family, Estabrook called for eugenic solutions. Once again, he argued that the two most effective approaches would be segregation and “asexualization.” He still believed sterilization was not practical because public sentiment was against it. But if the six hundred living feebleminded and epileptic Jukes could be segregated, he said, “at the end of fifty years the defective germ-plasm would be practically eliminated.”

  For his next major study, Estabrook traveled to Indiana, which held a special status in the eugenics community for having enacted the nation’s first eugenic sterilization law. Once again, he did a follow-up to a famous field study—this time, Oscar McCulloch’s investigation of the extended family he had called “the Tribe of Ishmael.” McCulloch had focused on the family’s purported high levels of criminality and pauperism. In his follow-up, Estabrook investigated the family’s intelligence levels and blamed their low status on high rates of feeblemindedness. As he had with the Nams and the Jukes, Estabrook concluded that most of the Ishmaelites were still “cacogeneic folk” who “spread the anti-social traits of their germ plasm with no check by society.”

  Estabrook’s work on the Ishmaelites had some notable weaknesses. His claim that much of the family was feebleminded was undermined both by the fact that they had not been given intelligence tests and by the fact that so many of them were employed in respected trades and professions. Members of the family had also assimilated into the surrounding society to the point where it was not clear they could legitimately be considered a distinct class. In the end, despite his years of work and the considerable expenses incurred, Estabrook’s study of the Ishmaelites was not published in book form, likely because leaders of the eugenics movement “considered the work to be highly problematic.”

  After his Indiana project, Estabrook studied a mixed-race community of about five hundred people near Lynchburg, Virginia. He published his fieldwork in 1926, with Professor Ivan McDougle of Sweet Briar College, under the title Mongrel Virginians: The
Win Tribe. The community’s ancestors were white, black, and Native American, and the “Win” of the title was an acronym for White-Indian-Negro.

  Estabrook was “among the American eugenicists most obsessed with race,” and in Mongrel Virginians his crude prejudices were on full display. The authors described one member of the community, whom they called “Ichabod Ross,” as having “much the appearance of a ‘darky with thick lips.’” Another was said to have “no characteristics of an Indian whatever” but rather “the appearance of ‘a mean white woman with a little Negro in her.’” The authors invoked an array of racial stereotypes, which they put forth as science, such as their casual assertion that “as is well known, the negro is ‘full’ of music.”

  Mongrel Virginians was a classic example of the type of fieldwork the Eugenics Record Office championed, but critics pointed out how flawed its techniques were. Writing in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Abraham Myerson, a neurology professor at Tufts University, called the book “absolutely unscientific in method.” Mongrel Virginians was “an exposé of small community moral depravity recorded from the lips of neighbors,” he wrote, in which “the most trifling morsels of gossip, with arbitrary interpretations, with no possibility of verification since many of the characters are dead, form the basis of judgment.” Driving his point home, Myerson concluded his review by calling Mongrel Virginians a “really absurd and useless book!”

  Mongrel Virginians appeared to have a specific racial agenda. The authors began the fieldwork in January 1923, just as a campaign was under way to strengthen Virginia’s laws against race mixing. While they were researching the book, segregationist elected officials were in the process of adopting the 1924 law that established the “one drop” rule in the state. The publisher of Mongrel Virginians promoted it as providing answers to the racial issues Virginia and the rest of the South were wrestling with. “What Happens When White, Indian, and Negro Blood Intermingles?” the headline of a publicity pamphlet asked. According to the publisher, the book would answer such questions as “Is it a fact that any white race subject to continuous contact with the negro, ultimately becomes mongrelized?”

  The authors’ answer to this question was “yes.” Whites, they argued, became “mongrelized”—a word taken from dog breeding—when exposed to other races. And it was Estabrook and McDougle’s opinion, as a review in the Journal of Negro History explained, that “the result of this race admixture has been to produce an inferior stock.” In a letter to the Richmond Times-Dispatch on February 22, 1926, McDougle argued that the intermingling of the races was dragging Virginia down. “While many of the better white families of the State have been sending their sons and daughters into other parts of the country to make fame for themselves, these mongrel groups have remained for the most part in their native habitat and have increased biologically at a much more rapid rate,” McDougle wrote. “As a result it is to a great extent true that there are portions of the State which are rapidly becoming mongrelized.”

  Estabrook was working on Mongrel Virginians when the Virginia trial team decided to invite him to become an expert witness in the case. He was doing eugenic fieldwork in rural Kentucky in the fall of 1924, and Strode had difficulty contacting him. With the trial scheduled to start in a few weeks, Strode appealed to Laughlin for help, and Laughlin asked Estabrook’s wife to send a telegram. “Superintendent Priddy Lynchburg Virginia wants expert witness sterilization test trial,” Jessie Estabrook wired to Kentucky on October 23. “Can you attend.”

  In a November 3 letter to Strode, Estabrook accepted the assignment and said he would attend the trial, which was scheduled to begin on November 18. Strode asked his new expert to come to Virginia a few days in advance, so he could meet Dr. Priddy, Carrie, and Emma. On November 8, Estabrook said he would do his best to adhere to Strode’s schedule, but he warned that his remote location might delay him. “I am a days [sic] ride on horseback from the railroad,” he wrote, “and hence may not make exactly the train I desire.”

  Estabrook’s assignment was a critical one. The proceeding in the Amherst County Circuit Court would be the only chance for the colony to create a factual record about the Buck family and the reasons for sterilizing Carrie. If the trial court’s ruling was appealed, future courts—all the way up to the United States Supreme Court—would make their decisions based on the facts presented at the trial in Amherst County. So far, however, Strode and Dr. Priddy had not been able to turn up much information about Carrie’s family. Strode was direct in his instructions to Estabrook. “We wish to present in this test case as strong a showing of facts as possible, both for the trial court and for the appellate courts,” he said. “We shall not have another opportunity.”

  • • •

  As the trial drew near, it was beginning to look like a small courthouse in Amherst County, Virginia, could become the center of the roiling national debate over eugenic sterilization. And there was a real chance that what happened at trial there—and on appeal—could settle the issue for the entire nation. The testimony of the fact witnesses and expert witnesses, and the legal arguments that were made, in the Amherst County Courthouse would resonate widely. That meant that to a significant degree, the future of eugenic sterilization was now in the hands of a single man: Aubrey Strode.

  Six

  Aubrey Strode

  In its early days, the campaign for eugenic sterilization in Virginia had involved public education and legislative lobbying. Dr. Albert Priddy and his fellow superintendent Dr. Joseph DeJarnette had been the driving forces. But now that Virginia had a eugenic sterilization law, the focus had shifted. True to Alexis de Tocqueville’s dictum that “scarcely any political question arises in the United States which is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question,” eugenic sterilization had been transformed into a legal case. As a result, Aubrey Strode, the well-respected trial lawyer who represented the state’s hospital board, would now play the largest role.

  Strode was, in one critical respect, an unexpected person to be leading the charge. Unlike Dr. Priddy and Dr. DeJarnette—and Harry Laughlin—he was not a eugenics true believer. As a member of the state legislature, he had worked for better public schools, the right of women to attend college, and other progressive causes. But he had never shown any interest in eugenic sterilization until Dr. Priddy approached him and and asked him to draft legislation on behalf of the colony.

  Even now, as Strode worked on the case, it was not clear how committed he was to sterilizing the “defective.” The first time Dr. Priddy approached him to draw up a law in 1916, he drafted such a weak statute that it soon became clear—when the Mallory family sued—that it did not authorize superintendents to perform sterilizations at all. The second time Dr. Priddy approached Strode, after having gotten the support of the hospital board for a sterilization law, Strode talked the board into dropping the matter.

  When Strode was finally prevailed upon to draft sterilization legislation, he wrote a narrow bill, one that was considerably more limited than the model statute Dr. Priddy had given him. Strode omitted whole categories of defective people. He wrote the bill to apply only to inmates of state mental hospitals, so it covered thousands of people instead of millions. And he advised the board not to allow any sterilizations to be performed until a challenge could be taken all the way to the Supreme Court—a process that could take years, and that might lead to the law being struck down before it could be used.

  Strode might not have been a sterilization enthusiast, but he was a dedicated advocate for his clients. When he accepted a case, he was driven to win. Because of the time and place in which he was born, and the friends and associates he had made over the course of his career, Strode was handed the case of a lifetime—a chance to litigate eugenics on a grand stage and to become a part of legal history. Unfortunately for Carrie, Strode was a highly intelligent man and a skilled litigator who was more than up to the task.<
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  • • •

  Aubrey Ellis Strode was born in Amherst County, Virginia, on October 2, 1873. He was the scion of two old Virginia families who took considerable pride in their ancestry. The Strodes traced their lineage to England in 1066, when Sir John Strode accompanied William the Conqueror on the Norman Conquest. The American branch of the Strode family settled in Virginia, where they built Strode Fort Farm to protect themselves from Indians. Strode’s mother, Mildred Ellis Strode, was part of another family, the Ellises, who were among the state’s earliest settlers. Her ancestor John Ellis was granted land in the second charter of the Virginia Company.

  Aubrey Strode arrived in the world just eight years after the Civil War ended. His family lived at Kenmore, an antebellum tobacco plantation with a two-story brick Greek revival home. With the end of slavery, Kenmore had been transformed into an elegant, if rustic, homestead. It was “one of the most charming old Southern homes that it has ever been my pleasure to see,” one visitor would later recall, a place “flowing with milk and honey” that represented “the best of the South.”

  Strode’s family was deeply connected to the Confederate cause. His father, Henry Aubrey Strode, joined Braxton’s Battery of the Fredericksburg Artillery at the age of sixteen and fought with it until the South surrendered. Strode’s maternal grandfather, John Thomas Ellis, abandoned his position of commissioner of revenue in Amherst County to join the Confederate cause. He was serving as a lieutenant colonel at Gettysburg when, in a Union bombardment just before Pickett’s Charge, he was decapitated by a cannonball. Aubrey Strode keenly felt the weight of his family’s war history. He would later say that “as the son and grandson of Confederate soldiers I both inherited and have cultivated a reverence for those who wore the gray.”