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.
In 1924, 18-year-old Carrie Buck ended up enmeshed in the legal machinations of eugenics advocates. The physician superintendent of the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-minded, Albert Priddy, selected Buck from his charges for sterilization and the subject of the first test of the newly-enacted Virginia eugenics law. In reality, Buck was at the colony because she had been raped and impregnated by the nephew of her foster family the year before. The family sent her to the colony, where her mother resided, to escape scandal. Priddy "quickly began collecting information to demonstrate the hereditary defects he was certain linked Emma and Carrie," writes Lombardo.
After a July 1924 sterilization hearing, in which Priddy declared Buck "congenitally and incurably defective," her legal guardian named a defense attorney for her mandatory appeal to oppose the colony's lawyer, the eugenics advocate Aubrey Strode. "He chose Irving Whitehead, confidant of Priddy, boyhood friend to Aubrey Strode, former colony director, and sterilization advocate." (Priddy died soon after and was replaced as defendant by John Bell, a physician with the State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded in Lynchburg, Va.)
At the court case, experts included physician Joseph "Sterilization" DeJarnette of the Western Lunatic Asylum in Staunton, Va.; scientist Arthur Estabrook, who claimed a "regular mental test" given to the weeks-old Vivian demonstrated her feeble-mindedness; and eugenicist Harry Laughlin whose testimony included articles entitled "Purging the Race," which supported "the right of the state to limit human reproduction in the interest of race betterment," writes Lombardo. Estabrook and Laughlin were both from by the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., which pioneered the model eugenics law on which Virginia's legislation was based.
Whitehead objected little to their testimony. "He offered no witnesses and produced no evidence," Lombardo writes, conceding the judgment of Buck as a "middle-grade moron." After the case, he appeared before the colony board of directors to express his satisfaction with a trial he had lost, and declare it ripe for appeal all the way up to the Supreme Court, set to establish a precedent legalizing forced sterilization of those judged unfit.
"The fix was in," says Lombardo, in a phone interview. After proceeding through Virginia's Supreme Court of Appeals, Buck's case headed in 1926 to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court was then headed by Chief Justice William Howard Taft, the former president, who "for more than 30 years," writes Lombardo, "lent his support to some of the most prominent leaders of the eugenics movement." After hearing arguments from Strode and Whitehead, Taft assigned the writing of the opinion in the Buck case to Justice Holmes.
Holmes "had no compunctions about 'restricting propagation by the undesirables and putting to death infants that didn't pass examination.'," writes Lombardo. Holmes was a friend of the British eugenicist Harold Laski, who often spoke out against charity as "fostering the weaker part of mankind." Holmes parroted the writings of earlier eugenicists, Lombardo notes, when he wrote in his famous opinion: "It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind."
The American Journal of Public Health praised Holmes as "that great jurist" after the 1927 decision. Of course, many scientists of the time opposed eugenics, notably Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, as did lawyers such as Clarence Darrow, who defended evolution in the Scopes Monkey Trial. But the Buck decision stood, and about 30 states adopted involuntary sterilization laws, all based on the dishonest testimony and deceitful lawyering of Buck v. Bell, says Lombardo. It wasn't until national publicity about sterilization abuse in the 1970s that the practice ended. In 1942, the Supreme Court struck down involuntary sterilization of inmates, but the Buck decision has never been repealed.
"Eugenics still fascinates today," says Lombardo, invoked in debates over genetics testing, abortion and the future of medicine. "The attitudes are still around that fostered eugenics. They aren't going away."
As for Carrie Buck, she was sterilized (as was her sister, Doris) and lived her life in poverty before dying in 1982. Her young daughter, Vivian, did not live long enough to be sterilized, dying from the complications of measles in second grade.