Imbeciles

by Adam Cohen

  Early news reports were sympathetic to Loving, and repeated his account: that Estes had gotten Elizabeth drunk and had sexually assaulted her, and that the judge had been forced to respond. It was believed at the time that a woman compromised as Elizabeth had been might be unable to marry or find a respectable place in society, making her father’s outrage, his supporters insisted, thoroughly justified. The Charlottesville Daily Progress’s headline captured this sentiment: “Father Invoked Unwritten Law/Loving Slays Author of Daughter’s Ruin.”

  As the trial approached, the Estes family’s version came out. They insisted the idea of drinking whiskey had been Elizabeth’s. They denied an assault had taken place, and they said that when she returned from the buggy ride Elizabeth had not mentioned one. Loving, they charged, was a “heartless” killer, who had shot Estes without allowing him to give his version of events. Some news reports said Elizabeth had denied that Estes attacked her, and put the blame on her father, who, she said, was angry that she was dating a member of the Estes family.

  Popular opinion in Nelson County had begun to turn against Loving. To avoid a hostile jury, Strode and the other defense lawyers asked for a change of venue, which the presiding judge granted, moving the trial south to Halifax County. When the procedings began, reporters descended from across the country to watch the drama unfold. The testimony went well for Loving. Elizabeth helped her father considerably by taking the stand and talking about having been attacked by Estes.

  In his closing argument, Strode made an emotional, honor-based appeal to the jurors. He invoked chivalry and reverence for southern womanhood, and he talked about the agony the judge went through on learning what had been done to his daughter. “I do not undervalue life, but there is something sweeter to all Virginians—the purity of our women,” Strode said. “We have written in our laws that if a man attempts to attack one of our daughters he has forfeited his life.” Strode’s performance received good reviews. “Mr. Strode spoke with much fervor,” a newspaper reported, “and two or three of the jurymen seemed to be not a little moved.” After deliberating less than an hour, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.

  The Loving case was a professional success for Strode, and it won him points with some of his most important political supporters. But it was hardly a great moral victory. Many newspapers and local observers objected to the decision of the Halifax County jury, rejecting the idea that an “unwritten law” justified killing a young man in cold blood. One news report was particularly blunt, declaring the jury’s verdict “a menace to human life.”

  In 1907 Strode ran for reelection to the state senate. In his campaign, he emphasized his advocacy for progressive causes during his first term. His campaign literature noted that he had gotten a bill passed in the senate to strengthen the state’s Pure Election Law, which allowed for elections to be voided when voting rules were violated. Strode had also supported new laws that created a state highway commission and a state convict road force, an inexpensive way of improving the roads. He reported that he had worked for a bill to allocate an additional $300,000 for public schools, though it did not pass. He did, however, succeed in lowering the entrance fee at the University of Virginia from $40 to $10. Strode continued to promote greater educational opportunity for underprivileged Virginians. “I believe that appropriations to colleges should be made only if they reduce the cost of attendance so that aspiring poor boys and girls can attend them at the least expense,” he said.

  Strode also ran on increasing pensions for Confederate veterans. In his campaign literature, he stated that with his support funds available for Confederate pensions had been increased to $50,000 more than had ever been appropriated before. This was still, he said, “far less than I thought their due.” In a letter to a Confederate veteran, Strode promised to work for further increases, and to raise the property caps, so veterans and their widows would not need to be “paupers” to get benefits.

  Strode was becoming an influential force in the state capital, but he had larger political ambitions. He left the legislature to campaign for Congress in 1912. Amherst County was represented by Henry D. Flood, a Democratic machine loyalist Strode accused of “aligning . . . with reactionary interests and forces.” Strode had considerable success running in Amherst and Nelson Counties, but his progressive, reform-minded politics did not play well in much of the larger congressional district. His hopes for higher office thwarted, in 1915, Strode ran for his old state senate seat. On August 3 he won the election and was returned to the legislature. The following year, Strode again announced his interest in the congressional seat, and received “a good deal of urging” to enter the race, as he told one supporter. As before, he had little success in taking on an entrenched incumbent and the powerful political machine that was propping him up.

  In the 1915 state senate campaign, the issue of grandfather clauses reemerged, and the passage of a decade had done nothing to alter Strode’s views on the subject. That June, months before the election was to be held, the Supreme Court struck down grandfather clauses as a violation of the Fifteenth Amendment, which barred federal or state governments from abridging the right to vote on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. When it appeared that whites would have to pay the poll tax, there were calls for eliminating it entirely, but Strode was opposed to doing so. Given the “rapid education of the colored races,” he warned, literacy tests soon would not be enough to prevent blacks from voting. There was hardly any price, he said, “too much to pay if necessary to prevent the return of the negro vote to politics in Virginia.”

  For all of his progressive beliefs, Strode never abandoned his allegiance to Jim Crow. Toward the end of his career, however, there would be times when he pushed in modest ways to moderate an ugly racial system. In 1940, when he was a municipal judge, blacks complained that the segregated Lynchburg courthouse had a single bathroom for black men and women, while white men and women had separate facilities. Strode told the city manager that the complaint was “well founded” and he directed the city manager to provide separate men’s and women’s rooms for blacks “without delay.”

  Around the same time, members of Lynchburg’s black community objected to the restriction on black doctors who treated black patients at the city hospital. They were allowed to see their patients’ charts but not to prescribe drugs, which only white physicians could do. Strode was told that Lynchburg was not unusual in this regard—and that, in fact, no hospitals in Virginia allowed black doctors to treat their patients in hospitals. Strode investigated the matter and found that to be true, but he argued in a letter to the State Department of Public Welfare that the city should still change its policies. “I should like to see Lynchburg pioneer in extending what I would regard as fairer treatment at the City Hospital to the colored physicians,” he wrote.

  In his letter urging the new policy, Strode went on to give his views on race relations. “We have here in the South some several million negroes destined perforce to remain with us,” he said. Strode believed there must be “social separation . . . if we are to preserve as we must our racial integrity.” But he also advised that “justice to fellow human beings as well as promotion of the general welfare counsel that they should have full opportunity to develop their capabilities.”

  Strode was more enlightened, and well ahead of his times, with respect to the rights of women. He was an outspoken advocate for greater educational opportunities for Virginia women, which was perhaps not surprising, given that he was the son of one female educator, the husband of another, and the brother of six sisters. Strode was particularly intent on opening up the University of Virginia. In a letter setting forth his views, he wrote that “it would be impossible within a reasonable limit for a letter to state all of the grounds upon which I think the State, when able, should begin to share with its women the benefit of its really great University.”

  Virginia was one of the few states that did not
make any provisions for women to attend college. Not only was the University of Virginia all male, but it refused to open a “coordinate college” like Radcliffe at Harvard, Barnard at Columbia, or Newcomb College at Tulane. In 1910 Strode introduced a bill to establish a coordinate college at the University of Virginia, but it failed to pass. There was substantial opposition among faculty, alumni, and students. Many did not believe women had the intellectual capacity, and they worried women would upset the school’s traditions, including its honor system.

  Strode’s opponent when he ran to reclaim his state senate seat in 1915 was one of the critics. Bland Massie, who had served four years in the state senate, had opposed the senate bill to create a coordinate college for the University of Virginia. In a campaign leaflet, Strode attacked Massie for resisting. “We have seen the good effect” of higher education for women, Strode insisted. After he was elected, Strode declared in a letter that he hoped the day was “not far distant when the girl of talent in Virginia, even though she may be poor, will find that the very best education that the State gives anybody is open to her too . . . if she be willing to strive for it.”

  Strode and the other supporters of a coordinate college for the University of Virginia came close in 1916. They succeeded in getting a bill passed in the state senate, but after six hours of debate lost 48–46 in the House of Delegates. Two years later, the legislature voted to open the University of Virginia graduate schools, except engineering and law, to women. It also decided that the College of William & Mary, another state-supported school, would be open to men and women equally. It would take many years, but Strode lived to see the legislature vote in 1944 to designate Mary Washington College a women’s college affiliated with the University of Virginia.

  When Strode returned to the state senate, he kept up his ties to the Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded. He continued to serve as its counsel, working on a variety of legal matters, many of them routine. When Dr. Priddy wanted to buy a used Ford for the colony, Strode checked that the seller owned it free and clear, and he provided a form bill of sale. When Dr. Priddy had trouble with a company he had contracted with to supply coal, he called on Strode. When Dr. Priddy wanted advice on how to help an inmate protect her small farm from her brothers, who wanted to take it over and appropriate the rental income, he again turned to Strode.

  In the state senate, Strode continued to work with Dr. Priddy on legislation of interest to the colony. He sponsored bills that expanded the power of state hospitals to identify people as feebleminded and to commit them, and, at Dr. Priddy’s request, the bill that began to lay the groundwork for eugenic sterilization by authorizing “medical and surgical” treatment of inmates at facilities for the feebleminded.

  In May 1918, in the waning months of World War I, Strode applied to the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps. Strode, who was now forty-three, was too old to be a regular enlistee, but the JAG Corps would give him a chance to use his professional abilities to aid the war effort. He secured the appointment with the help of Congressman Flood, who was not only supporting a highly qualified applicant, but sending a potential electoral challenger out of the country indefinitely.

  Strode began his service in Washington, D.C., where he got his introduction to the military justice system. He also traveled across the South on a mission to recruit lawyers. In January 1919, two months after World War I ended, Strode was sent to France, where he served under General John J. Pershing in the American Expeditionary Forces headquarters. In May Strode was promoted from major to lieutenant colonel, and a few months later, he was discharged from the army.

  Not long after Strode returned home, Dr. Priddy approached him for help in drafting legislation to protect superintendents from lawsuits like the one brought by the Mallory family. Strode drew up two bills—one requiring inmates challenging their detention to sue in the county in which they were being held, and one declaring that all inmates who were sent to a state hospital by a court or a commission were “lawfully committed.” These bills became law, though they did not provide Dr. Priddy all of the protection he wanted.

  In 1922, Strode made one last attempt to win political office. Congressman Flood had died unexpectedly of heart disease, at the age of fifty-four, in December 1921. The Democratic Party scheduled a special convention to choose a nominee, and within days of Flood’s death Strode began reaching out to his political allies for support. He now had, in addition to his legislative and legal work in Virginia, a war record to run on. Strode’s old allies lined up behind him, including Dr. Priddy and Irving Whitehead—the former colony board chairman who would later represent Carrie Buck—but once again, it was not enough. When the special convention met in Roanoke, Strode failed to win the nomination.

  In July 1922, tragedy again struck Strode’s family. His wife, Rebekah, died in an automobile accident. Strode was left to raise their four young children, all under the age of eighteen. It was not long before he married again. Strode had gotten to know Louisa Dexter Hubbard, a Red Cross nurse from nearby Bedford County, when she made her rounds on horseback in the region, surveying families of returning veterans of the world war. Hubbard had moved to North Carolina for her Red Cross work, but she remained in contact with the Strode family.

  After Rebekah’s death, Hubbard returned to Virginia. In a letter to the clerk of the Circuit Court of Bedford County, Strode requested a marriage license, enclosing $2 and stating: “I am widowed and she is single.” On December 31, 1923, in the bride’s hometown of Forest Depot, Aubrey Ellis Strode, age fifty, and Louisa Dexter Hubbard, age twenty-seven, were wed.

  • • •

  It was at just this time, when he was about to start his new life, that Strode drafted Virginia’s sterilization law. Within Virginia, the law would be the culmination of years of effort by eugenicists, going back to 1909, when Dr. Charles Carrington of the Virginia Penitentiary in Richmond first lobbied the legislature. The last fifteen years had been difficult ones for the supporters of eugenic sterilization in Virginia, but times had changed.

  Strode delivered An Act to Provide for the Sexual Sterilization of Inmates of State Institutions in Certain Cases to an ally in the state senate, Marshall Booker, who introduced it in February 1924. The bill became law, with little opposition, on March 20. Dr. Priddy and Dr. DeJarnette—the superintendent of Western State Hospital, and the first person in Virginia to advocate for eugenic sterilization—had finally achieved their dream.

  With the new law, all five Virginia state mental hospitals were now authorized to conduct eugenic sterilizations. All they were required to do was to follow the statute’s procedures, including holding hearings and offering a right of appeal, before they performed any sterilizations. Dr. Priddy was finally free to turn the Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded into the “clearing house” he hoped it would become: admitting the feebleminded, sterilizing them quickly, and releasing them to make room for new arrivals.

  Strode, however, had a different idea. He had recommended that the state hospitals not proceed with sterilizations until the law could be tested in the courts, up to and including the United States Supreme Court. Instead of preparing to sterilize inmates, the state hospitals were now helping to assemble a test case to determine whether the eugenic sterilization law was constitutional—a case that was now on the brink of going to trial.

  Seven

  Aubrey Strode

  In the fall of 1924, Aubrey Strode was one of Virginia’s most distinguished lawyers—scion of some of the state’s most established families, graduate of the University of Virginia’s college and law school, and a former state senator. In his twenty-five years in the Virginia bar, he had become a seasoned litigator, with considerable expertise in bringing complicated cases to trial. Strode knew the importance of preparation: of developing a compelling theory of the case, and assembling the most favorable evidence and witnesses. He put all of his well-honed skills to work getting ready for the upcom
ing trial in Buck v. Priddy.

  The recruitment of expert witnesses had gone remarkably well. Strode had enlisted Harry Laughlin, the nation’s leading expert on eugenic sterilization, whose written interrogatories could hardly have been more favorable to the colony’s position. Laughlin had stated his opinion that the Virginia eugenic sterilization law was among the best that had ever been enacted, and he had offered his strong support for the specific decision to sterilize Carrie Buck.

  Arthur Estabrook, one of the nation’s leading eugenics researchers, had signed on to provide eugenic fieldwork. As he had promised, Estabrook had come to Virginia to investigate Carrie’s family. He visited the colony, where he examined Carrie and Emma, and traveled across their home county, Albemarle, and met with as many family members as he could locate.

  Based on his research, Estabrook was prepared to offer up some definitive opinions. He had concluded that Carrie was a “feebleminded person,” bringing her within Virginia’s eugenic sterilization statute. And it was Estabrook’s opinion that Carrie’s family had hereditary defects—located, in particular, in the “Dudley germ plasm” of her maternal grandmother, Adeline Dudley Harlowe.

  Estabrook would also provide a critical missing piece in Strode’s case: a mental evaluation of Carrie’s daughter, Vivian. Dr. Priddy had been insisting that Vivian was feebleminded, attributing that assessment to Caroline Wilhelm, the Red Cross nurse—and Laughlin had repeated the assertion in his interrogatory answers. Now that claim was falling apart. In an October 15 letter, Wilhelm had instructed Dr. Priddy that she should not be cited on the subject of Vivian’s mental abilities. “I do not recall and am unable to find any mention in our files of having said that Carrie Buck’s baby was mentally defected,” she wrote. All she could find, she said, was “a letter of May 5th” in which “I said that we should not want to take the responsibility of placing so young a child, whose mother and grandmother are both mental defectives.”