Imbeciles

by Adam Cohen

  Led by Chief Justice William Howard Taft, the former president, the Supreme Court in 1927 upheld eugenic sterilization generally—and Carrie’s sterilization specifically—by an 8–1 vote. From left to right: James Clark McReynolds, Edward T. Sanford, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., George Sutherland, William Howard Taft, Pierce Butler, Willis Van Devanter, Harlan Fiske Stone, Louis Brandeis.

  Harry Laughlin, the nation’s leading eugenics advocate, insisted that fifteen million Americans had to be sterilized to save the nation from a looming hereditary threat. His wife, Pansy, an amateur playwright, wrote a light comedy in which the female characters learn that a money-hungry Jewish peddler is not an appropriate choice for marriage.

  Carrie and her mother, Emma Buck, were both declared feebleminded on scant evidence and committed to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded, where Carrie was sterilized for eugenic reasons.

  Carrie’s former foster mother, Alice Dobbs, raised Carrie’s daughter, Vivian, whom the state falsely declared to be feebleminded—a key part of its claim that Carrie posed a eugenic threat.

  Charles Davenport (right), the Harvard-educated founder of the Eugenics Record Office on Long Island, shared with Laughlin (left) a passion for the science of animal breeding and lured him from small-town Missouri to be the organization’s first superintendent.

  Dr. Albert Priddy, the founding superintendent of the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded, was the driving force behind the legal case to uphold eugenic sterilization in Virginia, and he chose Carrie to be at the center of it.

  Irving Whitehead, Carrie’s lawyer, was a former chairman of the colony’s board and a close friend of the men lined up against her—and he consistently betrayed his client’s interests in the litigation over whether she should be sterilized.

  A center of eugenic sterilization, the Virginia colony, where Carrie was sterilized in 1927, likely performed the procedure on more women for eugenic reasons than any other institution in the country.

  Aubrey Strode, the lawyer for the colony in its effort to sterilize Carrie, may not have been a strong supporter of eugenic sterilization, but he drafted Virginia’s sterilization law, and his success in Buck v. Bell laid the legal groundwork for as many as seventy thousand Americans to be sterilized.

  Laughlin’s testimony to Congress as its officially designated “Expert Eugenics Agent” played a large role in the enactment of the Immigration Act of 1924, which shut the door on Jews, Italians, and other groups that he insisted posed a eugenic threat to the nation.

  Acknowledgments

  Book writing holds many pleasures, and surprises both negative and positive. In writing this one, an unfortunate surprise came early on when a helpful librarian at the University of Virginia informed me that I was welcome to use the Aubrey Strode papers—but that I should know in advance that there were 158 boxes of them, and they were not organized in any way. A happier surprise came when I was looking for the original Buck v. Bell files in the Amherst County Courthouse. When the clerk’s search turned up nothing in the courthouse’s neatly organized 1924 file drawers, she asked if this was a “famous case.” When I said it was, she called out to a colleague to get out “that box under your desk”—and I was handed a cardboard box overflowing with history.

  Although writing can be a solitary endeavor, no one completes a nonfiction book without an enormous amount of help—including from those who came before. Anyone working on Buck v. Bell follows in the formidable footsteps of Paul Lombardo, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Strode, and essential books and law review articles on the case, and on eugenics more broadly. Professor Lombardo’s work was a constant source of inspiration and guidance. I also benefited from excellent scholarship on the case by J. David Smith and K. Ray Nelson, Harry Bruinius, Victoria Nourse, and Walter Berns; on eugenics by Daniel Kevles, Gregory Michael Dorr, Steven Noll, Philip R. Reilly, Edwin Black, Randall Hansen, Desmond King, Edward J. Larson, and Stephen Jay Gould; on Harry Laughlin by Garland E. Allen and Frances Hassencahl; and on Oliver Wendell Holmes by G. Edward White, Liva Baker, Sheldon Novick, Yosal Rogat, Albert Alschuler, and Mary Dudziak.

  In the author’s daunting task of trying to understand long-ago events, librarians are the unsung heroes. The keepers of the Aubrey Strode Papers at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia were patient and kind. The librarians at Truman State University’s Pickler Memorial Library were incredibly helpful—including on sites to see in and around Kirksville, Missouri. I am also indebted to the Library of Virginia, which holds the papers of the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded; the University at Albany library, where the Arthur Estabrook papers reside; the American Philosophical Society library in Philadelphia, which has the Charles Davenport papers; the New York Public Library, whose vast and well-deployed resources were invaluable; the Amherst County Clerk’s Office; and the Virginia State Law Library—with a special thanks to Ben Almoite.

  In turning thoughts and ideas into a book, editors and publishers are an author’s greatest allies. I do not know what good deeds I did in a past life to deserve the legendary Ann Godoff as both my editor and my publisher. Penguin has been brilliant and wonderfully supportive on every aspect of this book. When Ann sent me the cover design her team came up with for me to weigh in on, she wrote with typical panache that she was “mad about” it. Well, I am mad about her. Much gratitude to my amazing copy editor, Maureen Clark, who made everything better and saved me from so many troubles, and to the excellent Casey Rasch, Bruce Giffords, William Heyward, and Juliana Kiyan. Those good deeds in a past life also got me the best literary agent there is, Kris Dahl of ICM, to whom I am unendingly grateful.

  Friends have been a source of enormous pleasure and immeasurable support as I worked on this book. Liz Taylor has been my partner in literary crime since, so many years ago, she was transferred to Chicago and called to tell me that there was no major biography of Mayor Richard J. Daley—a gap we worked together to fill. Paul Engelmayer has been a wonderful friend since our college newspaper days. I was fortunate that such a remarkable thinker and writer, who also happens to be a federal judge, took the time to read the whole manuscript and provide insightful comments.

  Great and brilliant friends were willing to listen, again and again, to my half-formed thoughts about eugenic theory, due process and the police power, and the folkways of Boston Brahmins—and to drag me away from it all with dinners around New York City; excursions to Woods Hole, Fire Island, North Salem, East Hampton, Park Slope, and Montgomery, Alabama; and, of course, the incomparable annual Engelmayer fishing trip—all settings where it was mercifully difficult to work on footnotes. Much appreciation and love to Michael Abramowitz, Caroline Arnold, Elisabeth Benjamin, Noah Benjamin-Pollak, Kathy Bishop, Tony Blinken, Lavea Brachman, Amy Chua, Carolyn Curiel, Claudia Dowling, Michael Dubno, Loren Eng, Laura Franco, Patti Galluzzi, Amy Goodman, Jason Grumet, Amy Gutman, Laura Haight, Eileen Hershenov, Matthew Klein, Mark Kirch, Aisha Labi, Maria Laurino, Barbara Maddux, Emily Mandelstam, Peter Mandelstam, Carol Owens, P. J. Posner, David Propp, Jim Rosenthal, Jed Rubenfeld, Dorothy Samuels, Amy Schwartz, David Shipley, Tina Smith, Shan Sullivan, Mindy Tarlow, Olivia Turner, Peter Vigeland, Eric Washburn, and Maya Wiley.

  Family was an unending source of support and inspiration—my wonderful father, Stuart Cohen; brothers Harlan and Noam; sister-in-law Aviva Michaelov; and those magical new arrivals, Kika and Nuli, who light up any room they enter.

  While I was working on this book, the world lost three people who cared deeply about the issues it raises. Charles M. Young was an enormously gifted writer, a kind soul, and a good friend. Elaine Rivera was an irreplaceable friend and journalistic colleague, and a relentless champion of the Carrie Bucks of the world. Finally, my incomparable mother, Judge Beverly Sher Cohen, was able to read the whole manuscript but not to see it published. The sense of justice that drew me to this book’
s subject I owe entirely to her.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  “The eugenics movement”: “Virginia Governor Apologizes for Eugenics Law,” USA Today, May 2, 2002.

  “Three generations of imbeciles are enough”: Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200, 207 (1927).

  “sap the strength”: Id. at 207.

  the “defective human”: Angela Franks, Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), 38.

  Alexander Graham Bell became chairman: “Frontispiece: Alexander Graham Bell as Chairman of the Board of Scientific Directors of the Eugenics Record Office,” Eugenical News, August 1929.

  “forbidden to leave offspring behind them”: Theodore Roosevelt, “Twisted Eugenics,” Outlook, Jan. 3, 1914, 30–34, 32; Philip R. Reilly, The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 43.

  Prominent scientists formed organizations: Kenneth Ludmerer, Genetics and American Society: A Historical Appraisal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 92.

  Others were more severe: Nicole H. Rafter, ed., The Origins of Criminology: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2009), 237; Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 259.

  hereditary improvement: Daniel Siemens, “The ‘True Worship of Life’: Changing Notions of Happiness, Morality, and Religion in the United States, 1890–1940,” in Fractured Modernity: America Confronts Modern Times, 1890s to 1940s, ed. Thomas Welskopp and Alan Lessoff (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2012), 52; Eugene F. Provenzo and John P. Renaud, eds., Encyclopedia of the Social and Cultural Foundations of Education (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2009), 330; Albert Edward Wiggam, The Decalogue of Science (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2012).

  Clergymen competed: “Eugenics Is Theme in Sermon Contest,” Pittsburgh Press, Feb. 24, 1930.

  The “inspiring, the wonderful”: Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 67.

  Hollywood released a feature-length horror movie: Martin Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of “Defective” Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 6.

  New York’s American Museum of Natural History: Edwin Black, War Against the Weak (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003), 236.

  The congress opened: Henry Fairfield Osborn, “The Second International Congress of Eugenics: Address of Welcome,” Science 54 (Oct. 7, 1921): 313.

  At the Sesquicentennial Exposition: Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 62.

  Eugenics was taught: Siemens, “The ‘True Worship of Life,’” 50; Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 69; Encyclopedia of the Social and Cultural Foundations of Education, 330.

  Prominent professors were outspoken: Kerry Soper, “Classical Bodies Versus the Criminal Carnival: Eugenics Ideology in 1930s Popular Art,” in Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s, ed. Susan Currell and Christina Cogdell (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 278.

  “Love or Eugenics”: Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 58.

  The driving force: Siemens, “The ‘True Worship of Life,’” 50.

  The eugenicists claimed: Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 195–96.

  “Thank God we have”: Ellison DuRant Smith, “Shut the Door,” in A History of the U.S. Political System: Ideas, Interests, and Institutions, ed. Richard A. Harris and Daniel J. Tichenor (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010), 3:181.

  Within six years: Reilly, Surgical Solution, 39.

  Fears of “the rising tide of feeblemindedness”: Lewis Terman, “Feeble-Minded Children in the Public Schools of California: The Menace of Feeble-Mindedness,” School and Society 5 (Feb. 10, 1917): 161–65.

  A leading psychologist: Henry Herbert Goddard, The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 589.

  The eugenicists insisted: H. H. Laughlin, “Calculations on the Working Out of a Proposed Program of Sterilization,” Official Proceedings of the National Conference on Race Betterment (Battle Creek, MI: Race Betterment Foundation, 1914), 1:489; Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 48.

  “Race Suicide for Social Parasites”: William Belfield, “Race Suicide for Social Parasites,” JAMA 50 (1908): 55; Reilly, Surgical Solution, 34.

  He was the most prominent advocate: Harry Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization in the United States (Chicago: Psychopathic Library of the Municipal Court of Chicago, 1922), 489; Lombardo, Three Generations, 48.

  It was Laughlin: Laughlin, “Calculation on the Working Out,” 489; Lombardo, Three Generations, 48.

  Scientific American editorialized: Reilly, Surgical Solution, 42.

  Some of the nation’s leading lawyers: Mark A. Largent, Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 64–65.

  The Municipal Court of Chicago: Reilly, Surgical Solution, 63; Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization, v.

  Holmes had long been: Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Ideals and Doubts,” Illinois Law Review 1 (1915): 10; William Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 18.

  Before the Civil War: Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393, 403 (1857).

  In the Jim Crow era: Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).

  During World War II: Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944).

  And midway through the modern gay rights era: Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186, 194 (1986).

  a prominent law school dean: Erwin Chemerinsky, The Case Against the Supreme Court (New York: Viking, 2014), 4.

  In its aftermath: Leuchtenburg, Supreme Court Reborn, 15.

  And at the Nuremberg trials: Jonathan Peter Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2009), 238.

  The second edition of American Constitutional Law: Laurence Tribe, American Constitutional Law, 2nd ed. (Mineola, NY: Foundation Press, 1988), 1339.

  A recent 953-page biography of Brandeis: Melvin Urofsky, Louis D. Brandeis: A Life (New York: Pantheon, 2009), 874.

  Board of Eugenics: Julie Sullivan, “State of Oregon Will Admit Sterilization Past,” Oregonian, Nov. 15, 2002; Nadine Attewell, Better Britons: Reproduction, Nation, and the Afterlife of Empire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 4.

  nearly 150 female prisoners in California: “Following Reports of Forced Sterilization of Female Prison Inmates, California Passes Ban,” Washington Post, Sept. 26, 2014.

  “the Century of Biology”: Craig Venter and Daniel Cohen, “The Century of Biology,” New Perspectives Quarterly 21, no. 4 (Nov. 1, 2004): 77.

  In a later case: Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535 (1942).

  In the twenty-first century: Vaughn v. Ruoff, 253 F.3d 1124 (8th Cir. 2001).

  The Code of Hammurabi: Jackson Spielvogel, Western Civilization, vol. 1, To 1715 (Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2008), 10–11; Hammurabi, The Code of Hammurabi (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2009), 7.

  In the Massachusetts Bay Colony: Donald Black, The Behavior of Law (New York: Academic Press, 1976), 21.

  The legal theorist Donald Black: Ibid.

  CHAPTER ONE: CARRIE BUCK

  She would later recall: J. David Smith and K. Ray Nelson, The Sterilization of Carrie Buck: Was She Feebleminded or Society’s Pawn? (Far Hills, NJ: New Horizon Press, 1989), 1.

  an “act of kindness”: Petition in the Matter of the Commitment of Carrie E. Buck, an Epileptic and Feeb
leminded Person, in the Court of the Honorable Charles D. Shackelford, Justice of the Peace and Judge of the Juvenile & Domestic Relations Court for the City of Charlottesville, Virginia, Buck v. Bell file, Clerk’s Office, Amherst County Courthouse, Amherst, VA

  it was time for her to leave: Harry Bruinius, Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 41, 51–52.

  John Dobbs made an appointment: “Carrie Buck Trial Transcript, 51–100” (2009), Buck v. Bell Documents, Paper 32, http://readingroom.law.gsu.edu/buckvbell/32, 57, 61; Homer Richey to Dr. Albert Priddy, Mar. 10, 1924, Carrie Buck file, Library of Virginia.

  At their meeting: “Carrie Buck Trial Transcript, 51–100,” 57.

  She had never met Carrie: Ibid., 62.

  Mrs. Dobbs told Duke: Ibid.

  Instead, they petitioned: Petition in the Matter of the Commitment of Carrie E. Buck, 121.

  The term “feebleminded”: Victoria Nourse, “Buck v. Bell: A Constitutional Tragedy from a Lost Work,” Pepperdine Law Review 105-6 (2011): 39.

  The Dobbses’ petition: Petition in the Matter of the Commitment of Carrie E. Buck; Paul A. Lombardo, “Eugenic Sterilization in Virginia: Aubrey Strode and the Case of Buck v. Bell” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1982), 121.

  Carrie Elizabeth Buck was born: Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 103.

  Charlottesville was the seat of Albemarle County: Jean L. Cooper, A Guide to Historic Charlottesville & Albemarle County, Virginia (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2007), 22–24; Lombardo, Three Generations, 103.