Imbeciles

by Adam Cohen

  Wilhelm’s disavowal had not had the effect it should have. Although she wrote to Dr. Priddy on October 15, Laughlin was still citing her as the source for his contention that Vivian was mentally defective in the interrogatories that he signed before a notary on November 6. Apparently, after Dr. Priddy received Wilhelm’s letter, he had not bothered to tell Laughlin not to include the information about Vivian in his interrogatories. And apparently he had not advised Strode not to submit the interrogatories to the court—even though it was now clear that they contained inaccuracies.

  It was critical for Strode to come up with expert testimony about Vivian’s mental abilities before trial. There would have to be someone other than Wilhelm who could testify that Carrie’s daughter was feebleminded. Estabrook, who had arrived in Virginia on the eve of trial, was now prepared to do this. He had examined Vivian, who was nearly eight months old, on his hurried eugenic fieldwork rounds. And he had reached the conclusion that Strode hoped he would: that she was mentally defective.

  Strode also had two compelling expert witnesses within the ranks of his own trial team. Dr. Priddy was prepared to testify about eugenic sterilization, a subject with which he had great familiarity, and about Carrie and Emma Buck, who were living under his supervision. Dr. Joseph S. DeJarnette, who had decades of experience in treating Virginia’s mentally ill and defective, would also testify in support of the sterilization law he had worked so hard to enact.

  The expert witnesses would be a cornerstone of Strode’s case, but they would not be enough. As he knew well, fact witnesses who could testify about Carrie and her family—and help make the case that Carrie was the sort of person who fell under the sterilization law—would be necessary. In a letter to Dr. Priddy, Strode explained that they would particularly need witnesses from the Charlottesville area “to give first hand testimony as to Carrie Buck’s kinpeople” because they would “not be allowed in a case of this sort to have hearsay testimony upon that point.”

  In the days leading up to trial, Strode and Dr. Priddy—and Estabrook, out in the field—had worked energetically to assemble a witness list. They had succeeded in locating schoolteachers, social workers, and neighbors who knew Carrie and her family—on both her mother’s and her father’s sides. Once Strode had identified his witnesses, he sent out word: their presence was required at the Amherst County Circuit Court on Tuesday, November 18 at 10:00 a.m. “to testify and the truth to say in behalf of the Defendant in a certain matter of controversy.”

  • • •

  The Amherst County Courthouse fell short of the southern ideal of the imposing judicial edifice, towering magisterially over the town square. In William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun the courthouse was “the center, the focus, the hub . . . tall as cloud, solid as rock, dominating all.” In Amherst County, Virginia, it was a drab brown brick building, perched precariously on a small hill. Its most prominent ornamentation was a monument, installed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, in tribute to the men of the county who had risked their lives for the “noble cause.”

  Anyone who saw in this homage to the slaveholding South an augury of how the Amherst County Circuit Court would rule on eugenic sterilization might also have considered the court’s own name. Lord Jeffrey Amherst, the British royal governor of Virginia, was famous for his bloody wars against the Indians—and for the idea of giving them smallpox-laced blankets. “You will Do well to try to Inoculate the Indians, by means of Blankets,” General Amherst wrote to one of his officers, “as well as to Try Every other Methode, that can Serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race.”

  On the blustery fall morning of November 18, 1924, with Judge Bennett Gordon presiding, Strode started the testimony in Buck v. Priddy by calling the colony’s first witness, Anne Harris. Harris was a district nurse from Charlottesville who purported to know a good deal about the Buck family. Harris testified that she had known Emma Buck for more than a decade. When asked what she knew about her, Harris responded with a fusillade of negative recollections. Emma was “on the charity list for a number of years, off and on—mostly on.” She was “living in the worst neighborhoods.” And she “was not able to, or would not, work and support her children.” They were, Harris said, “on the streets more or less.”

  Emma was, in Harris’s opinion, “absolutely irresponsible.” “Numerous charity organizations” gave Emma and relief “at different times,” Harris testified. In response to Strode’s question about “what the trouble was with” Emma, Harris said: “She didn’t seem to be able to take care of herself. She would not work.”

  When Strode asked about Emma’s children, Harris said, “Well, I don’t know anything very definite about the children, except that they don’t seem to be able to do more than their mother.” Despite her disclaimer about knowing little, Harris went on to say a great deal about the children, including casting doubt on their legitimacy. Emma’s husband was absent, Harris testified, but she continued to have children. There was “no question,” Harris said, “of them being her husband’s.”

  Harris also had definite views on the intellectual capabilities of Emma’s children. Asked if they were “mentally normal children,” Harris responded, “No sir, they are certainly not.” She guessed that Emma had a mental age of twelve, and that her children had the mentality “of a child four or five years younger.”

  Strode wanted to know about Carrie’s sister, Doris. In response to his question about whether Doris was “a full sister,” Harris replied, “I should say not,” attributing her opinion to “hearsay” and “general reports.” Asked what else she knew about Doris, Harris said she was “a very stormy individual” and a “very violent child.” She had been placed in a children’s home and spent time with “some people in the country,” Harris said, “and they had a very stormy time with her, and they could not do anything with her.”

  When Harris’s direct testimony was over, Carrie’s lawyer, Irving Whitehead, rose to cross-examine her. There were many points he could have pursued. Harris had testified that Carrie had a mental age of about seven or eight, without offering any basis for her opinion. Whitehead could have pressed Harris on whether, in her experience, seven- or eight-year-olds generally successfully reached sixth grade, as Carrie had. He might also have asked if Emma’s difficulties could have stemmed from poverty and lack of support rather than mental deficiency—and whether Doris’s “stormy” personality might have been a result of growing up in poverty on the streets and being separated from her mother at a young age.

  Instead, Whitehead cross-examined Harris in a way that actually bolstered the colony’s case. In her direct testimony, Harris had not mentioned any bad behavior by Carrie, but under Whitehead’s questioning, she recounted how a school superintendent had called and told her Carrie was misbehaving. “She told me that Carrie was writing notes, and that sort of thing, and asked what should she do about it,” Harris said. Could Carrie’s notes have been considered “anti-social”? Whitehead asked. “I should say so,” Harris replied.

  Strode then called a series of educators to testify about the academic deficiencies of Carrie’s relatives. First was Eula Wood, Doris’s teacher for the prior six weeks. Wood said she knew “very little about” Doris, but she testified that Carrie’s half sister had been demoted from second grade because she had not been able to do second-grade work. Wood testified that even though Doris was eleven or twelve, she was “still in the first grade.” Asked by Strode if Doris was “a dull child,” Wood testified that she was “dull in her books.”

  Wood’s testimony left many openings for cross-examination. There were, no doubt, other possible explanations for why Doris might have had trouble with second grade. Wood could have been asked about the possible impact of growing up on the streets and then being taken from her mother and put in a children’s home. She could have been pressed on her odd answer to the question of whether Doris was a “dull child”—that she was “dull in her books,
” which could have meant she was not studying rather than that she lacked innate intelligence. But Whitehead chose not to cross-examine Wood.

  Another teacher, Virginia Beard, testified that she taught Roy Smith, Carrie’s half brother. He was fourteen and did not do passing work in the fourth grade, she said. His problem was that he “tried to be funny—tried to be smart.” She also said he was “below the grade of the other boys of his age in school.” When Strode pressed Beard on whether Smith was “weak-minded,” she responded, “Well, I don’t know.”

  Whitehead’s brief cross-examination of Beard, like his questioning of Harris, did more harm than good. He asked Beard if it was usual for a fourteen-year-old like Smith to be in the fourth grade. No, she said, a fourteen-year-old would normally be in the eighth grade. With this question, Whitehead did a better job than Strode had of eliciting testimony from Beard that Carrie’s half brother was mentally deficient.

  Strode also called the superintendent of the County Home, John W. Hopkins, whose testimony was especially odd. Hopkins testified that he knew Roy Smith, slightly, from his occasional stays at the facility. Hopkins said he did not know “anything particular” about Smith, but that in their brief encounters the boy had struck him as being “right peculiar.” His basis for his diagnosis was a single, brief conversation they had, in which he found Smith’s answer to a question about who he was waiting for to be odd. Hopkins testified about another relative of Carrie’s, Richard Dudley, who also struck him as “right peculiar,” and Richard’s son Arthur, who he believed was “a little peculiar.”

  There was one kind of educator missing from Strode’s lineup: anyone who had taught Carrie. It was a notable omission, because Carrie’s mental abilities were of far greater legal significance than those of her relatives. Carrie had made it as far as the sixth grade, so there were likely a number of educators available who would have remembered her as a student. Strode’s failure to call any of them suggested that none was prepared to testify in the way he would have liked.

  Next, Strode called Caroline Wilhelm, the Red Cross social worker who had accompanied Carrie to the colony, who was now Albemarle County’s secretary of public welfare. In her testimony, Wilhelm made what seemed to be an accidental admission that the Dobbses had lied to have Carrie sent to the colony. Wilhelm testified that it all began when John Dobbs approached Mary Duke, who was the secretary of public welfare at the time, and reported that Carrie “was pregnant and that he wanted to have her committed somewhere.” In their petition to the Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court, they had claimed Carrie was feebleminded and epileptic—not that she was pregnant. If the problem had been that Carrie was pregnant, she should have been offered services related to her pregnancy—not sent to a colony for the feebleminded and selected for eugenic sterilization.

  That troubling admission aside, Wilhelm followed the colony’s script in her testimony. She agreed with Strode that if Carrie was released from the institution while still capable of childbearing she was “likely to become the parent of deficient offspring.” She also said she believed Carrie was likely to give birth to illegitimate children, based on “her past record” and her mother’s “three illegitimate children.” Strode asked Wilhelm if, based on her personal dealings, she regarded Carrie as “obviously feeble-minded.” Wilhelm said that she did, “as a social worker,” though she did not explain the basis for her opinion. Carrie was a “distinct liability” to society, Wilhelm said.

  Strode asked Wilhelm if she had any impressions of Carrie’s baby, Vivian. On October 15, barely a month earlier, Wilhelm had written to Dr. Priddy protesting that she had not reached any conclusion about whether the baby was mentally defective. Now, however, she gave Dr. Priddy the opinion he was looking for. She said she had examined Vivian two weeks earlier, and the baby, who was just under eight months old, had seemed like “not quite a normal baby.”

  The only explanation Wilhelm offered for her diagnosis was that she had seen Vivian at the same time as she saw the Dobbses’ grandchild, who was three days older, and there was “a very decided difference in the development of the babies.” When Strode pressed further, Wilhelm said there was “a look about it that is not quite normal, but just what it is, I can’t tell.” Wilhelm conceded that her opinion about Vivian might have been prejudiced by her “knowledge of the mother.”

  In cross-examining Wilhelm, Whitehead once again elicited important information that undermined his own case. Wilhelm had been unconvincing in explaining how she had concluded Vivian was feebleminded. Whitehead asked her an open-ended question that allowed Wilhelm to elaborate. “Mrs. Dobb[s’s] daughter’s baby is a very responsive baby,” Wilhelm said in reply to Whitehead’s question. “When you play with it, or try to attract its attention—it is a baby that you can play with.” Carrie’s baby, Wilhelm said, “seems very apathetic and not responsive.”

  Whitehead’s cross-examination allowed Wilhelm to make several more points that were harmful to Carrie’s case. In response to a question, Wilhelm explained—as she had not before—that Carrie’s pregnancy was further evidence of her feeblemindedness. A “feeble-minded girl is much more likely to go wrong,” Wilhelm told Whitehead. In her direct testimony, Wilhelm had not called Carrie “immoral,” but in his cross-examination, Whitehead got the witness to lodge that accusation at his client. “Now, this girl, according to your viewpoint she has an immoral tendency?” Wilhelm replied: “Certainly.”

  Whitehead ended his cross-examination of Wilhelm by offering a concise summary of the eugenicists’ rationale for sterilizing his client. “Your idea,” he asked Wilhelm, is that Carrie would become “less of a liability” if she was sterilized—“she could be turned over to somebody and under careful supervision be made self-supporting?” Wilhelm said that was just what she believed.

  Strode’s next witness was Mary Duke, who had been Wilhelm’s predecessor as superintendent of public welfare when the Dobbses were looking to remove Carrie from their home. Duke described having met Emma Buck, whom she visited as part of her charitable duties. Duke said she “understood at the time she was of bad character” and that attempts were being made to institutionalize her, but she had lost track of what became of Emma.

  Duke recounted how John Dobbs approached her to do something about Carrie, who he said was feebleminded. In her testimony, Duke did not mention what Wilhelm had just told the court: that Dobbs had come to report that Carrie was pregnant. Duke said that she then went to meet with Alice Dobbs, who told her that Carrie “was a good worker when watched” but that she was inclined to get into trouble. Alice Dobbs told Duke that they had sent Carrie to church and Sunday school, but they still could not trust her. When the Dobbses left Carrie for a few days over the summer, Alice Dobbs said, “they did not watch her closely enough.”

  Duke had extremely limited contact with Carrie. She saw Carrie when she was being committed to the colony, but, she said, “I never had any dealings with her.” Despite this lack of familiarity, Duke did not hesitate to give an opinion about Carrie’s mental ability. “She didn’t seem to be a bright girl,” Duke testified.

  Next, Strode moved on to his expert witnesses. The first to testify was Dr. Joseph S. DeJarnette, the Western State Hospital superintendent who had worked with Dr. Priddy to get the eugenic sterilization law passed. Dr. DeJarnette testified that he had been affiliated with Western State, the largest of Virginia’s four state mental hospitals for whites, for thirty-six years. He estimated that in that time he had treated more than eleven thousand “mental defectives.”

  With Dr. DeJarnette’s expertise established, Strode moved on to Virginia’s sterilization law. Dr. DeJarnette testified that when a feebleminded person was sterilized, it was “the best thing” that could be done for “the patient and for society.” Strode asked if feeblemindedness was a definite condition that was “judicially ascertainable,” and Dr. DeJarnette insisted it was. He agreed with Strode’s assertion that there
were “well recognized tests that may be applied that would safely classify those that are feebleminded.”

  In explaining the need for sterilization, Dr. DeJarnette offered support for “differential fecundity,” the eugenicists’ claim that feebleminded women were more likely to reproduce. They will have “three children to every one child a college graduate will have,” he said with scientific precision. Feebleminded women were “easily over-sexed,” Dr. DeJarnette testified. “It depends on their looks as to how the boys or men will take advantage of them.”

  Dr. DeJarnette also testified that feeblemindedness was hereditary. “That is, if the parents are feebleminded and the children are feebleminded, you have every right to believe it is from inheritance,” he said. There were occasional cases in which a child might become feebleminded due to an injury. But in the overwhelming number of cases, Dr. DeJarnette testified, feeblemindedness was “inherited.” “I think Mendel’s law covers it very well,” he said.

  Dr. DeJarnette delivered a discourse on Mendel’s hereditary theory in response to a question, moving from pea plants to animals to humans in a muddle of scientific ignorance. He had “never worked the law out” and had “no accurate knowledge of it because inheritance is such a complicated thing,” he conceded. Still, he told the court that if a feebleminded woman had children, it was likely “one fourth of them will be feebleminded.” When “both parents are feebleminded,” he said, “it is practically certain that the children will all be feebleminded.”