Re-examining Supreme Court support for sterilization

— -- Eugenics remains a blot on the history of American science, a pseudoscientific racist movement that led to the sterilization of perhaps 60,000 people nationwide in the first half of the 20th Century. Support for eugenics came from members of the American Medical Association, the National Academy of Sciences and pillars of "progressive" society ranging from Woodrow Wilson to Alexander Graham Bell.

"Three generations of imbeciles is enough," declared Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the 1927 Supreme Court case, Buck v. Bell, that enshrined involuntary sterilization of the "feebleminded" — the long-sought goal of eugenicists — as the law of the land. The three generations in the case, Carrie Buck, her mother, Emma, and daughter, Vivian, it turns out weren't imbeciles; Carrie was an average student and Vivian, taken from her mother and placed in the home of the family whose nephew had fathered her, made the honor role once in her short life.

"Buck earns a place in the legal hall of shame not only because Holmes' opinion was unnecessarily callous but also because it was based on deceit and betrayal," writes legal historian Paul Lombardo of Georgia State University in Atlanta, in his just-released book, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell. Scientists and lawyers, including Carrie Buck's defense attorney, conspired against her, Lombardo finds in old records.

Eugenics started with British scientist Francis Galton's 1869 book Hereditary Genius, where he argued his cousin Charles Darwin's discovery of "natural selection," the process by which creatures with genetic traits supporting survival out-reproduced other members of their species, meant bad news for humanity, thanks to civilization. Without natural selection to remove the congenitally rotten from the gene pool, argued Galton, statistics suggested that virtue and smarts would be trampled by the over-breeding of less wonderful folks.