Imbeciles

by Adam Cohen

  Carrie’s first few months in Bland went well. In May Mrs. Newberry wrote to tell Dr. Bell that Carrie was “getting on nicely” and that “we like her very much.” Carrie worked well with her and her husband, she said, though she was sometimes stubborn when Mr. Newberry’s mother tried to tell her what to do. That was “the only fault we find so far,” Mrs. Newberry said, and she was sure Carrie would “do better.”

  Carrie was enjoying her freedom. She tried to get Dr. Bell to grant her a formal discharge from the colony, and Mrs. Newberry reported that Carrie talked often about her hopes of being permanently released. If that happened, it would be the first time in her adult life that she would be in charge of her own destiny, not needing the colony’s approval to take a new job or move. It would also free her of the threat that always hung over her: if her employers were unhappy with her, she might be returned to live at the colony.

  But Dr. Bell was not ready to let Carrie go. He wrote to her in August denying the request. “I do not think it advisable to discharge you,” he said, “as you have no home of your own, and are not capable of looking after your own affairs at the present time.” Dr. Bell insisted he was acting in Carrie’s interest, so she would have a home to return to if she needed it. He told her to wait at least another year.

  While Carrie was away from the colony, she made efforts to keep in touch with her family. Over the summer she wrote to a colony staff member about her unsuccessful efforts to contact Doris. Carrie also said she had received a letter from her mother, who had asked her for some things, and she wanted to know if it would be all right for her to send them. Emma, Carrie, and Doris tried repeatedly over the years to correspond and to see each other, though the challenges they faced were considerable.

  In December 1928 Carrie’s situation in the Newberry household took a turn for the worse. She wrote Dr. Bell to tell him she was “getting along very well.” She had “a real nice home,” she said, “and you don’t know how much I appreciate it.” There was a problem, however, and she expected Mrs. Newberry would soon write him about “some trouble I have had.” Carrie said she hoped Dr. Bell would not “put it against me and have me to come back” to the colony. He had promised her a discharge “in a years [sic] time,” she noted, “but I guess the trouble I had will throw me back in getting it but I hope not.”

  Carrie was correct—Mrs. Newberry did write to Dr. Bell. She had never seen “a better girl to work” than Carrie, who was “as obedient with Mr. Newberry and myself as can be,” Mrs. Newberry reported, “and tries so hard to please us with her work and we like her very much.” But there was a problem. Carrie was “beginning her adultery again,” Mrs. Newberry told Dr. Bell. “I say again for I believe she is an old hand at the business,” she wrote.

  Mrs. Newberry insisted that she had done what she could to put Carrie on a moral path. She tried to “impress upon Carrie the importance of living a clean pure life,” she said. And Carrie promised to “conduct herself right, or try as best she can” because she “hates the idea of going back to Lynchburg.” If Carrie “lives right we will give her a home as long as she wants it,” Mrs. Newberry said. But if not, she would not be able to stay, because “we cannot have this conduct in our house.”

  Dr. Bell’s reply was not encouraging. Carrie’s “sexual delinquency is probably a thing that will have to be contended with for many years,” he wrote, “unless she should find herself a suitable husband and . . . settle down.” He asked Mrs. Newberry to keep in mind that Carrie had “a sister who was also delinquent” and that “they come from a long line of mental defectives and delinquents.” The Newberrys were no doubt doing their best, he wrote, “and I hope that she appreciates it.”

  Just after that flurry of letters—perhaps because he was not interested in continuing to supervise Carrie’s activities in such detail—Dr. Bell finally granted Carrie’s request: on January 1, 1929, she was formally discharged from the colony. In Carrie’s first days as a free woman, her life remained much the same. She continued to live with the Newberrys, who still kept Dr. Bell informed about her activities.

  There was one change—or at least the suggestion of one. In a letter to Dr. Bell, Mr. Newberry added in a postscript that he did not “know for sure yet whether” Carrie “will marry or not.” In case she did, he asked Dr. Bell to “please keep a good girl in reserve for me as I will want one.” It was the first time the Newberrys had made such a reference, and it seemed they might have had a reason for doing so.

  Back at the colony, Doris was now eligible for parole. Having been sterilized, she could be released into the world with no danger that she would become pregnant and give birth to feebleminded offspring. She was placed with families, much as Carrie had been, and ran into the same difficulty—being chastised for her interest in meeting men. After steadily lobbying Dr. Bell, on December 5, 1930, Doris was formally discharged from the colony. She told Dr. Bell that she was going to be married.

  Although her daughters were now free, Emma remained at the colony. Carrie looked for opportunities to spend time with her mother. On December 19, 1930, she wrote to Dr. Bell to ask if she could come back to celebrate the holidays with Emma. Dr. Bell agreed, and said that if she called the colony from the train station someone would meet her there. Carrie spent Christmas with her mother, who had not been feeling well. On December 27 Mrs. Newberry sent $7 to the colony to pay for Carrie’s transportation back to Bland.

  In Dr. Bell’s years of corresponding with Carrie about work placements, travel, parole, and discharge, one thing stands out: he did not write to her, or make plans for her, as if she was a “Middle grade Moron” with a mental age of nine, as the colony insisted she was. It is hard to imagine that Dr. Bell would send Carrie letters full of instructions and logistics, and tell her to take long train rides on her own and call when she got to the station, if he truly believed he was dealing with someone with the mental capacity of a nine-year-old.

  Carrie’s own letters also belied the colony’s claims about her intelligence and mental age. They were, on the whole, well written, in neat handwriting. There were occasional grammatical errors—but no more than appeared in the letters that her employers were sending to the colony at the same time. She expressed complicated ideas, like her warning to Dr. Bell in her December 1928 letter of a negative report that was likely to come from the Newberrys, and her effort to lobby him not to further delay her furlough as a result. In other letters, she expressed concern for her mother and sister, and arranged to visit Emma and send her gifts. Carrie’s letters revealed her to be precisely what she was: an undereducated woman of perfectly normal intelligence.

  The wedding that Mr. Newberry appeared to be hinting at finally occurred on May 14, 1932. Carrie, who was now twenty-five, married William D. Eagle, a sixty-three-year-old widower. A Lutheran minister performed the ceremony at the Newberry home in Bland, and the couple celebrated with a trip over the border to West Virginia.

  Carrie’s new husband, who had four daughters and two sons from a prior marriage, was a jack-of-many-trades. He listed his occupation as carpenter on their marriage license, but he had also been a justice of the peace and a deputy sheriff. In a May 17 letter to Dr. Bell, Carrie—now Mrs. W. D. Eagle in her correspondence—explained that she and her husband had been “going” together for three years. He was a “good man,” she wrote, and three days into the marriage she was “getting along alright so far.” As usual, Carrie inquired after her mother and asked Dr. Bell to tell her “I will send her some things when I can.”

  Carrie settled into a quiet domestic life. The Eagles joined the Methodist Church and attended services and Sunday school. Carrie and her husband grew much of their own food, planting onions, cabbages, tomatoes, lettuce, and pepper seed. Carrie canned what they did not eat, so they would have food for the winter, and to send to her mother at the colony.

  About seven weeks after Carrie’s wedding, on July 3, her daughter, Vivian, died f
rom a stomach infection following the measles. Vivian, who had been living with the Dobbs family, was eight years old. Carrie was never able to live with her only child, or to spend much time with her. She did tell a colony superintendent she had been able to see “Babie,” as she called Vivian. Her daughter was, Carrie said, “so very sweet.”

  In March 1933 the colony received a letter from one of the nation’s leading eugenicists asking about Vivian. Paul Popenoe of the Human Betterment Foundation in Pasadena, California, was seeking photos of Carrie, Emma, and Vivian. Carrie’s case was a “milestone” for eugenics, Popenoe said, and he thought it should be properly documented. Dr. Bell could take a photograph of Emma, who was still at the colony, but he asked Carrie for a photo of herself and Vivian. Carrie sent a photographic negative of herself and her husband, asking that he return it. She told Dr. Bell that she did not have a photograph of Vivian. Neither she nor Dr. Bell was aware that Vivian had died the previous summer.

  Dr. Bell began to look for a photograph of Vivian. He contacted the Charlottesville chapter of the Red Cross, which had been responsible for taking both Emma and Carrie to the colony, and asked if it could help in the search. Margaret Faris, who worked for the Red Cross, agreed to try. The Red Cross visited Alice Dobbs and learned that she had a photo of Vivian, but they were unable to obtain it. Dobbs emphatically refused to lend it, Faris told Dr. Bell. Dobbs urged the Red Cross to write to Dr. Bell “to discontinue your investigation as the child was . . . considered a member of her own family.”

  A month earlier, the Red Cross had learned more about Carrie’s daughter. It had interviewed Dobbs to find out how Vivian, whom it had placed with the Dobbs family, was doing. Dobbs told the Red Cross workers that Vivian had died the previous summer—and she set the record straight about her intelligence. Nearly nine years after a Red Cross social worker had labeled Vivian “not quite a normal baby,” Dobbs told the Red Cross something very different: that she had completed the second grade and “was very bright.”

  Dobbs’s assessment of Vivian’s mental ability was supported by objective evidence—school records. Vivian Alice Elaine Dobbs, as the family named her, attended Venable Public Elementary School in Charlottesville. The Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould examined Vivian’s school records and found that she received strong grades in “deportment” and did reasonably well in her academic subjects. Vivian was left back one term for failing math and spelling, and made the honor roll another term. In Gould’s view, she had “performed adequately, although not brilliantly.” He concluded that Vivian was a “quite average student” and “perfectly normal.”

  Carrie was living a simple life in Bland. In a letter to Dr. Bell on August 19, 1933—the depths of the Great Depression—she reported that her husband “works regularly,” but money was still tight. “We live out in the country,” she wrote. “We have a pig and a nice garden.”

  Now that Carrie had settled into a home of her own, she wanted to get her mother out of the colony. She asked Dr. Bell if Emma could come to stay with her. Carrie promised she would see to it that her mother was “well taken care of” and had “plenty to eat.” Carrie was also in touch with Doris. She said she had recently received a letter from her half sister, who reported that her husband had left her. “I am sorry about that,” Carrie wrote, adding that she “was hoping she would do well.”

  Dr. Bell responded two days later, saying that if Carrie wanted to take her mother in “and you can support her and take care of her, and it is agreeable to your husband, it will be all right with me.” He cautioned Carrie to “think it over well, however, before you take any steps in the matter.” In September Dr. Bell took a leave of absence due to ill health, and soon after he resigned. When he did, Carrie’s close connection to the leadership of the colony ended, and her letters became more infrequent. Emma was never released into Carrie’s care.

  Carrie and her husband soldiered on as the Great Depression raged. With the economy battered, employment was scarce in small southern towns like Bland. Mr. and Mrs. Eagle took whatever jobs they could find, including working as caretakers of the local high school in the late 1930s and early 1940s. A neighbor who knew Carrie during these years remembered her as a quiet woman who gave every appearance of being “mentally sound.”

  World War II began, and Carrie continued her life of quiet domesticity. In October 1940 she wrote to Dr. G. B. Arnold, who was now superintendent of the colony, to ask after Emma. Carrie had not heard from her mother in some time, and wanted to see how she was doing and to send some supplies. Dr. Arnold responded that Emma was “still well and healthy,” if getting a bit more frail. “She remains happy most of the time,” he said.

  When William Eagle died, Carrie left Bland, moving across the state to Front Royal. Her new home was near large orchards, where she could get seasonal work picking apples. Now that Carrie was on her own, it was a struggle for her to support herself. She did housekeeping for families in the area and washed dishes in a local restaurant, along with the agricultural labor. The work was physically demanding, and Carrie’s health suffered. Her weight fell to just one hundred pounds at one point.

  One of Carrie’s jobs was caring for the parents of a friend. The woman recalled that Carrie kept house and looked after the elderly couple well, and that she was a “nice, kind person.” She also remembered something else: Carrie “knew what she was doing, there was nothing wrong with that woman’s mind.”

  On April 15, 1944, Emma died of bronchial pneumonia at the age of seventy-one. Her life had been a hard one, and she spent the last twenty-four years of it as an inmate of the colony. Having heard Emma was in decline, Carrie and her half brother, Roy, went to see her, but by the time they arrived their mother had been dead for two weeks and her funeral had already been held. “The son and daughter were a bit upset,” Emma’s record stated. “However, they were most considerate and accepted the explanation.”

  • • •

  With Emma’s death, Carrie no longer had reason to remain in contact with the colony. After a few years, the institution lost touch with its most famous former inmate. When a Detroit professor who was researching eugenic sterilization asked about Carrie in 1942, Dr. D. L. Harrell Jr., who was then superintendent, was unable to help. The colony had received “no official reports” of late, he said, but “it is the general impression here that she made a satisfactory adjustment to society.”

  Carrie’s life in Front Royal was uneventful. On April 25, 1965, she married again. Charles Albert Detamore was a sixty-one-year-old orchard worker with whom she shared a geographical connection: both were originally from Albemarle County.

  Five years later, with her health starting to fail, Carrie moved back to Charlottesville with her husband. The couple lived in a dimly lit single-room home on a dirt road. Carrie remained in contact with Doris, and the two women saw each other from time to time. Carrie was living in obscurity, however, unknown to the larger world as the woman at the center of the Supreme Court’s eugenics case.

  Dr. K. Ray Nelson, the director of the Lynchburg Training Center—as the colony had been renamed—had been trying to find Carrie for years. In 1979 he learned of Doris’s location when she wrote to ask for her date of birth, so she could apply for Social Security. He went to visit Doris in Front Royal, where she was living with her husband of thirty-nine years, Matthew Figgins. Dr. Nelson brought along copies of her colony records.

  When Dr. Nelson met with Doris, he read from her file, and informed her that she was sixty-seven—old enough to collect Social Security. He also told her the date that the colony had sterilized her. When he looked up, he could see that Doris and her husband were crying. Doris told Dr. Nelson that she had tried for years to get pregnant, and never realized it was impossible. When she was operated on at the colony, she said, she was told she was getting an appendectomy.

  Doris and her husband were crying because, she said, they “wanted babies bad” and had alwa
ys thought her inability to get pregnant was their fault. Years earlier they had visited a doctor to learn more, and Doris had explained that the scar on her abdomen was from an appendectomy, something she now realized was not true. When she learned from Dr. Nelson that the state had intentionally sterilized her, she told a reporter later, it “just hurt real bad.”

  Dr. Nelson had been looking for Carrie since he assumed his position at the Lynchburg Training Center in 1973. He learned from Doris that she was living in Albemarle County. Dr. Nelson located Carrie and brought the two women back to the colony on July 4, 1980. They found Emma’s grave marker in the “Briar Patch” and, with tears in their eyes, left flowers. Next they visited the building where both Carrie and Doris had been sterilized. Carrie’s legs were weak, and she could not make it upstairs, but Doris returned to the room where her sterilization had taken place more than a half century earlier.

  After Carrie’s visit to the colony, a local newspaper wrote about her—and, for the first time, she began to tell her own story. In an interview with the Lynchburg Daily Advance, she revealed that her pregnancy had been the result of being raped by Mrs. Dobbs’s nephew. When the colony operated on her, she said, it was never explained to her that she was losing the ability to have children.

  Carrie’s account revealed two more important falsehoods in the colony’s case against her. Carrie had never been an “immoral” woman—even as that term was understood in the 1920s. She had been a rape victim. The colony had also failed to tell the truth about the procedural protections it claimed to have extended to Carrie. For all of the guardians and lawyers and hearings and notice, Carrie had never been told the most critical fact: that the colony was trying to operate on her to prevent her from having children.