Imbeciles

by Adam Cohen

  Carrie’s final years were difficult. While living in their modest home in the countryside outside of Charlottesville, Carrie and her husband, Charlie, were found to be suffering from malnutrition and exposure. They were taken first to the University of Virginia Hospital and then to the District Home in Waynesboro, a facility for the indigent elderly.

  Carrie was deeply devoted to Charlie, a District Home social worker later recalled. With no children or grandchildren to care for, she doted on her husband, often using her allotment at the canteen to buy snacks and cigarettes for him. Some of the staff thought Carrie cared for Charlie too much, and put his interests too far above her own.

  Carrie was an active member of the District Home community. She participated in its social activities, including reading groups, and enjoyed theater and music. The home’s social worker remembered Carrie as an “alert and pleasant lady,” and she recalled one more thing: like many others who knew Carrie, the social worker said she was not mentally deficient, and certainly no imbecile.

  Carrie died in January 1983, about six months after Doris. Carrie’s body was taken back to her hometown of Charlottesville, where she was buried in the Dobbs family plot, near the graves of her daughter, Vivian, and John and Alice Dobbs, who had taken her in as a young girl—and then cast her out.

  In the end, three main themes ran through Carrie’s life. One was hard work. When Carrie was taken in by the Dobbses, she was less a foster child than a housekeeper, and before long she was also being hired out to the neighbors. Because the Dobbses ended her education after the fifth grade, Carrie’s employment options were limited. She spent a lifetime doing poorly paid manual labor: cleaning homes, washing dishes, harvesting crops. She was, by all accounts, a good and dedicated worker.

  A second theme was deep devotion to family, despite a lifetime of obstacles. She was close to her mother, Emma, caring for her both when they lived together in the colony and when they lived far from each other. For years, Carrie wrote to the colony asking after Emma, sending her things, and trying to arrange times to see her. She was also close to her half sister, Doris, despite the difficult lives they both led. Carrie was a devoted wife to two husbands. She also managed to see her daughter, even though the state took her baby away and gave her to another family—and that family insisted on keeping Carrie at a distance.

  The final theme running through Carrie’s life was precisely what the Supreme Court had refused to see: a quiet intelligence. Carrie’s lively mind is preserved for posterity in the many letters she sent to the colony. Neatly written and well composed, they reveal a thinking, caring woman with a love for life.

  Carrie’s friends and employers all appear to have considered her smart, and there is no record of anyone questioning her intelligence once the campaign to sterilize her was over. A friend from the retirement home where Carrie lived late in life recalled that she was devoted to something Oliver Wendell Holmes had no interest in: reading newspapers. “Carrie watched for that paper—she lived to get that paper,” the friend recalled.

  An academic who visited Carrie in her later years found that she was reading the newspaper daily and “joining a more literate friend to assist at regular bouts with the crossword puzzles.” The professor thought that Carrie was “not a sophisticated woman, and lacked social graces,” but he was also convinced that “she was neither mentally ill nor retarded.”

  Carrie never got over what the state of Virginia did to her. When reporters tracked her down five decades after the fateful procedure, she told them she was sad about it—once she found out what it was. “I didn’t want a big family,” she said, but she had wanted to have “a couple of children.” Sadness was not the only feeling she was left with. “Oh yeah, I was angry,” she said. “They done me wrong. They done us all wrong.”

  Conclusion

  Oliver Wendell Holmes’s opinion in Buck v. Bell, with its bold declaration that “three generations of imbeciles are enough,” gave the eugenic sterilization movement “a constitutional blessing and an epigrammatic battle cry.” Harry Laughlin announced that the ruling marked the end of eugenic sterilization’s “experimental period.” Now he said, “eugenical sterilization will be looked upon by the American people as a reasonable and conservative matter.” Laughlin had long advocated an expansive national program of sterilization—and now he believed his dream was on the verge of becoming a reality.

  Buck v. Bell breathed new life into the sterilization movement. In the years leading up to it, the eugenicists had encountered substantial opposition in courts and statehouses across the country. Now supporters of sterilization laws were emboldened, and their opponents were suddenly on the defensive.

  In 1928, a new governor took office in Mississippi, and he declared in his inaugural address that his state had spent an enormous amount “to advance our civilization, to educate and uplift our people yet our feeble-minded, epileptic, insane, paupers and criminals can reproduce without restriction, thus continuing to corrupt our society and increase tax burdens on our people.” That same year, the Mississippi legislature adopted a sweeping eugenical sterilization law, with little opposition. William Faulkner, who began work in 1928 on The Sound and the Fury, immortalized his state’s newfound eugenic fervor in the novel, in which Benjy Compson, the “idiot” of the family, is castrated.

  The sterilization movement gained greater force in 1929, when nine states enacted laws, three of them—Arizona, West Virginia, and Maine—for the first time. The momentum continued over the next several years. In 1931 ten state legislatures considered sterilization bills, and in five states they became law. By that year twenty-eight of the nation’s forty-eight states had laws authorizing eugenic sterilization.

  Even with the new enthusiasm, there continued to be opposition. The main obstacle to sterilization laws remained the Catholic Church and its members. In states where the church “could mobilize sufficiently,” one study found, eugenic sterilization bills “often against the odds, failed.” In New Jersey, reform groups, including the League of Women Voters, pushed for a eugenic sterilization law to replace the one that had been struck down by the New Jersey Supreme Court. New Jersey, however, was about 26 percent Catholic—one of the highest percentages of any state—and the church and its supporters played a major role in stopping the sterilization bill.

  One leading eugenicist complained bitterly that when sterilization bills were being considered throughout the country “the Catholics descend upon the capitol in numbers—priests, nuns and laity—and attack the bill as ‘against the will of God’ and ‘an attack on the American home.’” This opposition was effective even in states with relatively few Catholics. In Colorado, which was about 12 percent Catholic, church leaders and laity helped to defeat four consecutive eugenic sterilization bills. In Ohio, which was less than 15 percent Catholic, several bills “crashed . . . against the rocks of Roman Catholic opposition.”

  Not all of the opposition came from Catholics. The Supreme Court’s decision had not done away with the discomfort a considerable number of people of all sorts, state legislators included, felt about sterilization. In the wake of the ruling, Kentucky’s state legislature voted down a eugenic sterilization bill. One lawmaker helped to rally opposition to the bill by arguing that if it had been enacted in an earlier generation, “there would not be so many fools [in the legislature] now.”

  Despite this resistance, in the years after the Supreme Court’s decision, the number of eugenic sterilizations increased sharply, due both to new laws and to an increased willingness to use those that were already in place. In 1925 there were just 322 sterilizations of institutionalized people nationwide. In the two-year period from 1928 through 1929, there were 2,362—more than triple the annual rate from before the court’s ruling.

  There was also a significant change in the gender of the people being sterilized. At the end of 1927, men made up about 53 percent of all of the legal sterilizations that had b
een performed in the United States. Over the next five years, 67 percent of the institutionalized people who were sterilized were female. Many of the women, institutional records show, were admitted for the express purpose of being sterilized and then released. The “clearing house” model Laughlin, Dr. Priddy, and Dr. DeJarnette proposed was increasingly becoming a reality.

  Not surprisingly, there was also a pronounced class bias to who was sterilized. Poor women like Carrie and Doris Buck were the most common victims of the eugenic sterilization boom. The procedures were performed so often on poor white southerners that they acquired a nickname: “Mississippi appendectomies.”

  Virginia was one of the main drivers of the increase in sterilizations. Before the Supreme Court’s ruling, there had been no eugenic sterilizations in Virginia—or at least no legally sanctioned ones. Ten years after the court’s ruling, there were more than one thousand. The people who were sterilized, like Carrie and Doris, were often not told what was being done to them. Many tried to have children and did not understand why they were unable to conceive.

  Virginia’s sterilizations occurred in all five state hospitals, but almost half of them occurred at the colony. The sterilization program reached its peak in the 1930s and 1940s, when the colony was likely performing the most sterilizations of any hospital in the country. “It was as routine as taking out tonsils,” according to one newspaper account. “Men on Tuesdays, women on Thursday[s].”

  The impact of the Supreme Court’s ruling was felt beyond the United States. Over the next few years, European countries began to adopt eugenic sterilization laws along the American model. Denmark enacted “voluntary” sterilization in 1929, and forced sterilization of “mental defectives” in 1934. Sweden and Norway also enacted sterilization laws in 1934, followed by Finland in 1935, Estonia in 1936, and Iceland in 1938. An American medical researcher who traveled to Europe to study eugenic developments noted that the United States had “pioneered” eugenic sterilization for the rest of the world.

  Nazi Germany adopted its Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring in the summer of 1933. The Nazis also established an elaborate system of Hereditary Health Courts—the Erbgesundheitsgerichte—to decide who should be sterilized. Laughlin, who was proud of his influence on German eugenics, published an article in the Eugenical News by a leading Nazi attesting that “Germany learned from the United States” when it drafted its own sterilization laws.

  The influence of American eugenics reportedly reached the highest levels of the Nazi regime. Otto Wagener, a high-ranking economic adviser to Adolf Hitler, quoted Hitler as saying: “I have studied with great interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.”

  The German eugenic sterilization program operated on a scale that eclipsed its American model. The law authorized sterilization for many of the reasons in Laughlin’s model law, including feeblemindedness, alcoholism, and epilepsy. The Nazis also used sterilization against Jews and people of partial Jewish background, Roma, the children of German women and black French soldiers, and other disfavored racial and religious groups. When the Final Solution was adopted, provisions were made for Germans with mixed Aryan and Jewish blood to be sterilized as an alternative to extermination. The hereditary courts issued 375,000 sterilization orders, but some estimates of the number of people sterilized by the Nazis are far higher.

  At the Nuremberg trials, where the victorious Allies prosecuted Nazi leaders for war crimes, the charges included mass sterilization. Otto Hofmann, the head of the SS Race and Settlement Office, one of the Nazis charged with mass sterilization, defended himself in part by referring to the American states that had adopted eugenic sterilization laws—and the Buck v. Bell decision. One of Hofmann’s submissions included a quote from Holmes’s opinion, which was mangled by being translated into German and back into English:

  In a judgment of the [United States] Supreme Court . . . it says, among other things: “It is better for everybody if society, instead of waiting until it has to execute degenerate offspring or leave them to starve because of feeble-mindedness, can prevent obviously inferior individuals from propagating their kind.”

  The classic 1961 movie Judgment at Nuremberg captures in dramatic fashion how the Nazi defendants used the case. At a key moment in the trial, a defense lawyer asks the witness if he is aware that “sexual sterilization was not invented by National Socialism,” but had “advocates among leading citizens in many other countries.” He then reads an excerpt from Buck v. Bell, ending with “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The Nazi lawyer then states triumphantly that the words were those of “that great American jurist, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.”

  • • •

  For Aubrey Strode, Buck v. Bell was the capstone to a distinguished legal career. Few lawyers ever appear before the Supreme Court, much less win a case that helps to set social policy for the nation. Strode’s victory was all the greater because he had been involved with the issue from the beginning. He had sponsored the legislation that created the colony, drafted the eugenic sterilization law, advised the hospital board on a strategy for winning in the courts, and then litigated all the way to the highest court in the land. Strode was lauded for his role in the case and received little criticism. He did not live long enough to see popular opinion turn against sterilization.

  For all of his hard work—and his permanent place in eugenics history—there is little evidence Strode was a great believer in eugenic sterilization. Toward the end of his life, Strode was asked to create a written account of how Virginia’s sterilization law came about. His retelling of the events underscored how unenthusiastic he appeared to be at critical junctures. It could even be read as the story of someone who was swept up in a cause with which he did not entirely agree and worked from the inside to minimize the damage.

  Strode’s account began in 1921, when he was counsel for the colony, and Dr. Priddy approached him about drafting a eugenic sterilization bill. Strode had been a member of the legislature himself when many states were enacting such laws, but he had never been moved to introduce a bill on his own. Indeed, when a eugenic sterilization bill was introduced by Dr. Charles Carrington, there is no evidence Strode supported it. On the day it came up for a vote, he was present and voted on other bills, but he apparently did not vote on eugenic sterilization.

  Rather than accept the assignment to draft a sterilization bill, as many lawyers might have under the circumstances, Strode instead investigated how these laws had fared in the rest of the country. He then told the State Hospital Board, Dr. Priddy’s bosses, that in every case he could find where such a law had been challenged, it had been defeated. Strode succeeded in persuading his client not to pursue the law.

  In his account, Strode recalled that Dr. Priddy approached him again two years later, telling him that the hospital board and the governor still wanted a eugenic sterilization law. This time, Strode did draft a bill, though one that was far narrower in several important respects than the model statute he was given as a guide. When Strode’s bill became law, the board asked him, he recalled, whether “it might safely proceed under the Act.” Many states were carrying out sterilizations under even more expansive laws, with fewer procedural protections. but Strode once again put on the brakes.

  Strode persuaded the State Hospital Board not to begin sterilizing anyone until the law was tested in the courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court, if it got that far. If he had not given that advice, the hospitals might have sterilized hundreds, even thousands, of people before any sort of legal challenge was mounted. Strode’s advice delayed sterilizations in Virginia by three years, and created a significant possibility that none would occur at all.

  After his victory in the Supreme Court, Strode had a new opportunity to show enthusiasm for the eugenic steriliza
tion cause. He could have become one of the public faces of the movement and spoken out in support of sterilization. Instead, he seemed content to let the matter drop. Shortly after the ruling, the Virginia Law Review—for which he had already written one article about eugenic sterilization—invited him to write about his Supreme Court triumph. It was an honor many lawyers would have been quick to accept, and many eugenics advocates would have seen the invitation as an opportunity to lay out the next steps in the battle. Strode informed the editor in chief, however, that he doubted that “this matter would justify” an article or that he could “find the time in the near future” to write one.

  Unlike most of the other major participants in Buck v. Bell, Strode almost never spoke publicly about sterilization once the case ended. Dr. John Bell, whose name had replaced Dr. Priddy’s in the Supreme Court case and who performed Carrie’s sterilization, lectured widely on eugenic sterilization. He spoke to the Medical Society of Virginia on the importance of the procedure in protecting the commonwealth from the tide of “degenerates and defectives” that was threatening to engulf it. Addressing a national audience at the American Psychiatric Association, Dr. Bell called eugenic sterilization a key spoke of the “wheel of social progress.”

  Like Dr. Priddy before him, Dr. Bell used the colony annual reports as a platform to promote eugenic sterilization. The program was, he insisted, working well. In the 1932 report, he said nearly all of the inmates who were sterilized had been returned to their families, relieving the state of “the immense financial burden incident to the care of them and the long line of defective descendants that would naturally have followed.” In the following year’s report, Dr. Bell wrote: “Now is the time to apply the pruning knife with vigor and without fear or favor.”