Imbeciles

by Adam Cohen

  The “man contracting syphilis”: “Carrie Buck Trial Transcript, 51–100,” 73–74.

  Arthur Estabrook: Ibid., 75.

  Estabrook described the work: Ibid., 76–77.

  Strode asked Estabrook: Ibid., 77–78.

  After a forty-five-minute lunch break: Ibid., 81.

  Estabrook began his analysis: Ibid., 81–82.

  Given Emma’s parents: Ibid., 82.

  Estabrook responded: Ibid.

  If that was all: Ibid.

  “I gave the child”: Ibid., 83.

  Whitehead once again did little: Ibid., 84–87.

  Estabrook had designated: Ibid., 81–82.

  Estabrook diagnosed other relatives: Abraham Myerson, review of Mongrel Virginians: The Win Tribe, by Arthur H. Estabrook and Ivan McDougle, The Annals of the American Academy, n.d., 165.

  Dr. Priddy began by reciting: “Carrie Buck Trial Transcript, 51–100,” 88.

  Dr. Priddy responded that: Ibid., 88–89.

  That would cost: Ibid., 89.

  Strode asked what: Ibid. 90–91.

  “Every human being”: Ibid., 91–92

  And they understood: Ibid.

  Between 1916 and the winter of 1917: Ibid., 92, 93.

  He told the story of one boy: Ibid., 93.

  “this girl here”: Ibid., 96.

  “I understand,” he said: Ibid., 97.

  Unfortunately, it was not: Alice Dobbs to John Bell, Feb. 13, 1928, unnamed folder, Carrie Buck and Doris Buck Figgins Sterilization, ca. 1920s–1980s file, Central Virginia Training Center Papers.

  When he was done: “Carrie Buck Trial Transcript, 51–100,” 97; Lombardo, Three Generations, 135.

  Most of all, Whitehead: Harry Laughlin, The Legal Status of Eugenical Sterilization: History and Analysis of Litigation Under the Virginia Sterilization Statute, Which Led to a Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States Upholding the Statute (Chicago: Chicago Municipal Court, 1930), 20.

  she had never been told: 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), 218.

  J. E. Wallace Wallin: Steven Noll, Feeble-Minded in Our Midst (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 31–32.

  Wallin wondered how: Carl Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 141.

  He could have evaluated: “Record Sheet for the Standard Revision of the Binet Simon Tests,” Carrie Buck and Doris Buck Figgins Sterilization, ca. 1920s–1980s file, Central Virginia Training Center Papers.

  There were scientists: Walter Berns, “Buck v. Bell: Due Process of Law?,” Western Political Quarterly 6, no. 4 (Dec. 1953): 767.

  He understood that: Diane Paul and Hamish Spencer, “Did Eugenics Rest on an Elementary Mistake?,” in Thinking About Evolution: Historical, Philosophical, and Political Perspectives, ed. Rama S. Singh et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 105; Lombardo, Three Generations, 143.

  Davenport had testified: Lombardo, Three Generations, 143.

  In his 1914: Harry H. Laughlin, “The Scope of the Committee’s Work,” in Report of the Committee to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means of Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the American Population (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Eugenics Record Office, 1914), 46–47.

  One of the pieces of expert writing: “Carrie Buck Trial Transcript, 1–50,” 30, 37.

  Most of the genes: Paul and Spencer, “Did Eugenics Rest on an Elementary Mistake?,” 112; Lombardo, Three Generations, 146.

  The reality was: Carol Isaacson Barash, Just Genes: The Ethics of Genetic Technologies (New York: Praeger, 2008), 5.

  Carl Murchison: Degler, In Search of Human Nature, 140.

  “I am willing to say”: Ibid., 143; American Association for the Study of the Feeble-Minded: Proceedings and Addresses of the Forty-Second Annual Session Held at Buffalo, New York, May 31 and June 1, 1918 (American Association for the Study of the Feeble-Minded, 1918), 130.

  If Buck v. Priddy was appealed: Graham Hughes, “Common Law Systems,” in Fundamentals of American Law, ed. Alan Morrison (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 22.

  He added that: Albert Priddy to Caroline Wilhelm, Nov. 26, 1924, Carrie Buck and Doris Buck Figgins Sterilization, ca. 1920s–1980s file, Central Virginia Training Center Papers, unnamed file.

  On December 11, he wrote: Aubrey Strode to Arthur Estabrook, Dec. 11, 1924, box 3, Estabrook Papers.

  Over the summer: Aubrey Strode to Charles Nash, Aug. 6, 1924, box 154, Aubrey Strode Papers, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia (hereafter cited as Strode Papers).

  Strode ended up: Charles Nash to Aubrey Strode, Oct. 1, 1924, box 154, Strode Papers.

  In late November: Aubrey Strode to Charles Nash, Nov. 29, 1924, box 154, Strode Papers.

  He told the law review: Ibid.

  In a November 2 letter: Albert Priddy to Aubrey Strode, Nov. 2, 1924, box 11, Central Virginia Training Center Papers.

  Dr. Priddy said he would: Albert Priddy to Irving Whitehead, Dec. 12, 1924, box 11, Central Virginia Training Center Papers.

  On January 13, 1925: Bruinius, Better for All the World, 69; “Buck v. Bell,” Encyclopedia Virginia, http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/buck_v_bell_1927.

  Dr. Priddy “took a profound”: Lombardo, “Eugenic Sterilization in Virginia,” 208–9.

  a history of the colony: W. I. Prichard, “History—Lynchburg Training School and Hospital,” Mental Health in Virginia 11 (Summer 1960): 46.

  The court stayed: Laughlin, Legal Status of Eugenical Sterilization, 20–21; Aubrey Strode to John Bell, Feb. 12, 1925, box 11, Central Virginia Training Center Papers.

  Strode wrote to: Strode to Bell, Feb. 12, 1925.

  “It is agreeable”: John Bell to Aubrey Strode, Feb. 13, 1925, box 11, Central Virginia Training Center Papers; J. S. DeJarnette, “Eugenic Sterilization in Virginia,” reprinted from Virginia Medical Monthly (1931), box 88, Records of Western State Hospital, Library of Virginia.

  New court papers: Final Order, Buck v. Bell file, Clerk’s Office, Amherst County Courthouse, Amherst, VA.

  Dr. Bell had practiced medicine: “Physical Examination of a Patient on Admission to the State Colony,” J. H. Bell, June 5, 1924, Carrie Buck and Doris Buck Figgins Sterilization, ca. 1920s–1980s file, Central Virginia Training Center Papers; Lombardo, Three Generations, 150

  As Dr. Bell saw it: Dr. John Bell, “The Protoplasmic Blight,” delivered to the Clinic on Mental Diseases at the Meeting of the Medical Society of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, Oct. 22, 1929, box 88, Western State Hospital Papers.

  On June 1, 1925: Petition for Appeal, Buck v. Bell, No. 1700, Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia, State Law Library of Virginia.

  three constitutional objections: Ibid., 2–3.

  two classes of “defective” people: Ibid., 4–8.

  a 1913 ruling: Ibid.; Smith v. Board of Examiners, 88 A. 963, 966 (N.J., 1913).

  cases in two other states: In re Thomson, 169 N.Y.S. 638 (Sup. Ct. 1918), aff’d Osborn v. Thomson, 171 N.Y.S. 1094 (App. Div. 1918); Haynes v. Lapeer Circuit Judge, 201 Mich. 138, 166 N.W. 938 (1918); State Bd. of Eugenics v. Cline, No. 15,442 (Or. Cir. Ct. Dec. 13, 1921).

  the Iowa and Nevada laws: Petition for Appeal, Buck v. Bell, No. 1700, Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia, 1-8; Siegel, “Justice Holmes, Buck v, Bell, and the History of Equal Protection,” 113–14.

  One of his main due process objections: Reply Brief for Appellant, Buck v. Bell, Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia, 3–4, “Whitehead Virginia Supreme Court Brief” (2009), Buck v. Bell Documents, Paper 38, http://readingroom.law.gsu.edu/buckvbell/38.

  Strode’s legal brief: Br
ief for Appellee, Buck v, Bell, 143 Va. 310 (1925), 2, 4, 8–12.

  Strode compared compulsory sterilization: Id. at 27–29.

  eugenic sterilization was a “parallel case”: Id. at 19–21.

  since it was not punitive: Ibid., 21.

  “all the requirements of due process”: Lombardo, Three Generations, 152.

  despite the warning: Smith v. Board of Examiners, 88 A. 963, 966 (N.J. 1913); In re Thomson, 169 N.Y.S. 638 (Sup. Ct. 1918), aff’d Osborn v. Thomson, 171 N.Y.S. 1094 (App. Div. 1918); Haynes v. Lapeer Circuit Judge, 201 Mich. 138, 166 N.W. 938 (1918); State Bd. of Eugenics v. Cline, No. 15,442 (Or. Cir. Ct. Dec. 13, 1921); Harry Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization in the United States (Chicago: Psychopathic Library of the Municipal Court of Chicago, 1922), 440.

  “part of a general plan”: Albert Priddy to Harry Laughlin, Oct. 14, 1924, box 11, Central Virginia Training Center Papers; Laughlin, 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), 1:490; Brief for Appellee, Buck v. Bell, 143 Va. 310 (1925), 32–33.

  “Poor the Commonwealth”: Brief for Appellee, Buck v. Bell, 143 Va. 310 (1925), 31–32.

  “We are not permitted”: Id. at 48.

  It rejected all: Buck v. Bell, 143 Va. 310 (1925), reprinted in Laughlin, Legal Status of Eugenical Sterilization, 30.

  Because Whitehead had: Id. at 31.

  It also asserted: Id. at 31, 34.

  The court’s reasoning: Id. at 31; “Carrie Buck Trial Transcript, 51–100,” 92.

  In Carrie’s case: Buck v. Bell, 143 Va. 310 (1925), in Laughlin, Legal Status of Eugenical Sterilization, 31, 34.

  The court also rejected: Id. at 35.

  The court said: Id. at 35.

  The Virginia ruling: Smith v. Wayne Probate Judge, 231 Mich. 409, 425, 204 N.W. 140 (1925); Mary L. Dudziak, “Oliver Wendell Holmes as a Eugenic Reformer: Rhetoric in the Writing of Constitutional Law,” Iowa Law Review 71 (1986): 855; Hansen and King, Sterilized by the State, 86.

  Strode and Whitehead attended: Lombardo, Three Generations, 154.

  “I notice from the paper”: Noll, Feeble-Minded in Our Midst, 73.

  On Strode’s advice: Aubrey Strode to Dr. Don Preston Peters, July 19, 1939, box 29, Strode Papers.

  Robert Shelton filed: Writ of Error, Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia, Jan. 26, 1926, “Carrie Buck Trial Transcript, 101–116” (2009), Buck v. Bell Documents, Paper 33, http://reading room.law.gsu/buckvbell/33.

  “supple tool of power”: Merlo J. Pusey, Charles Evans Hughes (New York: Macmillan, 1951), 2:287, cited in Yosal Rogat, “The Judge as Spectator,” University of Chicago Law Review 31 (1964): 249–50.

  CHAPTER EIGHT: OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

  The praise that has been showered: Charles E. Wyzanski Jr., “The Democracy of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes,” Vanderbilt Law Review 7 (1954): 311, 323.

  Felix Frankfurter: Felix Frankfurter, “Twenty Years of Mr. Justice Holmes’ Constitutional Opinions,” Harvard Law Review 36 (June 1923): 909, 919.

  Holmes had a gift: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Common Law (Boston: Little, Brown, 1881), 1.

  He also had a rare ability: Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919), 52.

  To that august lineage: G. Edward White, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Law and the Inner Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 3.

  Holmes was not: Schenck, 249 U.S. at 302.

  On the occasion: Time, Mar. 15, 1926.

  On his ninetieth: Liva Baker, The Justice from Beacon Hill: The Life and Times of Oliver Wendell Holmes (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 3.

  After his death: Ibid., 8.

  later made into a Hollywood movie: Norman Rosenberg, “The Supreme Court and Popular Culture,” in The United States Supreme Court: The Pursuit of Justice, ed. Christopher L. Tomlins (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 415.

  a bestselling biography: Catherine Drinker Bowen, Yankee from Olympus (New York: Bantam, 1944).

  One critic has: Irving Bernstein, “The Conservative Justice Holmes,” New England Quarterly 23 (1950): 435; William Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 369n54.

  H. L. Mencken: H. L. Mencken, “The Great Holmes Mystery,” American Mercury, May 1932, 123.

  The Yale law professor: Grant Gilmore, The Ages of American Law (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 44; Baker, Justice from Beacon Hill, 10–11.

  only the nation’s fifth largest city: G. Edward White, “The Rise and Fall of Justice Holmes,” University of Chicago Law Review 39 (1971): 51; White, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, 7; U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Population of the 100 Largest Urban Places,” available at https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/tab07.txt.

  Margaret Fuller: Tiffany Wayne, Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism (New York: Facts-on-File, 2006), 101; Meg McGavran Murray, Margaret Fuller, Wandering Pilgrim (Athens: University of Georgia, 2012), xviii; William Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 118.

  “an aristocracy”: Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., The Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes: Elsie Venner (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1891), 5:3.

  “They lived in”: Baker, Justice from Beacon Hill, 22–23.

  a famous Boston poem: Chaim Rosenberg, The Life and Times of Francis Cabot Lowell, 1775–1817 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), 27.

  On her first visit: Betty Farrell, Elite Families: Class and Power in Nineteenth-Century Boston (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), 21.

  Holmes’s father contributed: Charlene Mires, Capital of the World: The Race to Host the United Nations (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 91.

  Their Puritan ancestors’: Roger Williams, On Religious Liberty: Selections from the Works of Roger Williams, ed. Roger Davis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 13; Darlene Stille, Anne Hutchinson: Puritan Protester (Minneapolis, MN: Compass Point Books, 2006), 12.

  In the mid-1800s: Baker, Justice from Beacon Hill, 57.

  The Boston Athenæum: Peter S. Field, The Crisis of the Standing Order: Clerical Intellectuals and Cultural Authority in Massachusetts, 1780–1833 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 108.

  The Holmes family: Baker, Justice from Beacon Hill, 15; Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., autobiographical statement, July 2, 1861, reprinted in Frederick C. Fiechter Jr., “The Preparation of an American Aristocrat,” New England Quarterly 6 (1933): 3, 4–5, cited in White, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, 7.

  He was a direct descendant of: Bowen, Yankee from Olympus, 135; Kathrynn Seidler Engberg, The Right to Write: The Literary Politics of Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2010), 3.

  His paternal grandfather: Bowen, Yankee from Olympus, 1–2.

  Holmes’s maternal grandfather: Mark DeWolfe Howe, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: The Shaping Years 1841–1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 29; White, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, 17.

  Dubbed “the Greatest Brahmin”: Charles S. Bryan, “‘The Greatest Brahmin’: Overview of a Life,” in Oliver Wendell Holmes: Physician and Man of Letters, ed. Scott H. Podolsky and Charles S. Bryan (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009), 3.

  As a physician: Sheldon Novick, Honorable Justice: The Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), 18–19; Bowen, Yankee from Olympus, 81.

  The paper he wrote: Alvin Powell, “How Oliver Wendell Holmes Helped Conquer the ‘Black Death of Childbed,’” Harvard Gazette, Sept. 18, 1997; Bowen, Yankee from Olympus, 80–81.

  Dr. Holmes, who was: Ronald D. Miller, ed., Miller’s Anesthesia (Philadelphi
a: Churchill Livingstone, 2010), 12; Harvard Medical School, “Past Deans of the Faculty of Medicine,” https://hms.harvard.edu/about-hms/facts-figures/past-deans-faculty-medicine.

  Dr. Holmes’s poem: Baker, Justice from Beacon Hill, 33–34; White, Oliver Wendell Holmes, 7.

  As an adult, Dr. Holmes: David McCullough, Brave Companions: Portraits in History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 29.

  In 1857 he joined: Novick, Honorable Justice, 19.

  It is said: Christopher Redmond, Sherlock Holmes Handbook (Toronto: Dundurn, 2009), 68.

  the day after his son’s birth: Howe, Shaping Years, 1.

  The relationship between: White, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, 11.

  Adding to Holmes’s difficulty: Brad Snyder, “The House That Built Holmes,” Law and History Review 30 (2012): 669.

  William James: Howe, Shaping Years, 18.

  Holmes had a warmer: White, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, 16.

  He started out: Howe, Shaping Years, 2.

  Then he attended: White, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, 20, 23–24, 33; Howe, Shaping Years, 5.

  In the summers: Novick, Honorable Justice, 11; Bowen, Yankee from Olympus, 95.

  Holmes followed: Howe, Shaping Years, 6–7, 35.

  Harvard had been the choice: Baker, Justice from Beacon Hill, 72; Bowen, Yankee from Olympus, 106.

  a great-great-uncle had been Harvard treasurer: Bowen, Yankee from Olympus, 85.

  “Any other education”: Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), 54.

  The instruction he received was uninspired: Ibid., 55; Howe, Shaping Years, 36; White, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, 26.

  Holmes was, for his part: Howe, Shaping Years, 39, 45.

  As with almost everything: White, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, 27; “Harvard College Societies,” Harvard Magazine (May 1864), 268–70.

  As President Abraham Lincoln: James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 273.

  “The heather is on fire”: George Ticknor, Life, Letters and Journals of George Ticknor (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1876), 2:433–34; McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 274.