Editorial Content for Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck
Contributors
Reviewer (text)
It was not America’s proudest moment, but the facts, as carefully set forth by author and senior writer for Time magazine Adam Cohen, are dolefully undeniable. One influential segment of the population was as set on ridding the nation of undesirables as were the Nazis, who used the tenets of our eugenics movement to bolster their plans to exterminate their own “mongrel races.”
At the center of the case that went to the Supreme Court in 1927 was a young woman, Carrie Buck, a victim of rape while in foster care and working as a servant for her adoptive family. Carrie’s birth mother already had been institutionalized in a “colony” in the state of Virginia on the grounds that she was poor and possibly prostituting herself to feed her children. The correct remedy for Carrie, who, it was reasoned, must be feeble-minded because she had gotten herself in an unacceptable situation, was sterilization (salpingectomy). The murky rationale for using her plight as a test case for involuntary sterilization was that she and her mother were imbeciles (a scientific term at the time). And the state unhesitatingly asserted that her infant daughter certainly must be mentally inferior as well. Those three generations constituted an obvious danger to society.
"Cohen paints a disturbing picture of the widespread American eugenics movement, led by well-placed citizens who were concerned that the country was slipping into disorder through the incursion of immigrants who were ignorant, alcoholic, tubercular, swarthy and short."
The law permitting sterilization of the unfit (poor, deformed, moronic, epileptic) was seen as no different from laws allowing a state to vaccinate people against smallpox. When the case, Buck vs. Bell, went to the Supreme Court, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes grandly opined that government, which called on “the best citizens for their lives,” also should be able to “call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices.” The approval for sterilizing Carrie Buck passed the Supreme Court with only one dissension, from a Catholic justice. Dr. Bell, who had examined Carrie when she arrived at the colony, was the surgeon who would later perform her sterilization.
Cohen paints a disturbing picture of the widespread American eugenics movement, led by well-placed citizens who were concerned that the country was slipping into disorder through the incursion of immigrants who were ignorant, alcoholic, tubercular, swarthy and short. We were losing our best stock, the northern European white races. Eugenicists touted the benefits of sterilization and isolation of inferior types, using the newly devised Binet-Simon intelligence test as a means of identifying “mongrels.” Distinguished scientists offered support to the American Breeders Association, which concentrated its efforts not on cattle, but on harlots, immigrants and paupers.
Carrie Buck lived a long life, and her letters to family members show not only caring and concern, but “what the Supreme Court had refused to see: a quiet intelligence.” For those who believe such things can’t happen here, or never did, IMBECILES makes salutary reading, and perhaps may generate renewed respect for such modern inconveniences as privacy rights, child protection and the right of women to bear children.
Teaser
Adam Cohen tells the story of one of the darkest moments in the American legal tradition: the Supreme Court’s decision to champion eugenic sterilization for the greater good of the country. In 1927, when the nation was caught up in eugenic fervor, the justices allowed Virginia to sterilize Carrie Buck, a perfectly normal young woman, for being an “imbecile.” Exposing this tremendous injustice --- which led to the sterilization of 70,000 Americans --- IMBECILES overturns cherished myths and reappraises heroic figures in its relentless pursuit of the truth.
Promo
Adam Cohen tells the story of one of the darkest moments in the American legal tradition: the Supreme Court’s decision to champion eugenic sterilization for the greater good of the country. In 1927, when the nation was caught up in eugenic fervor, the justices allowed Virginia to sterilize Carrie Buck, a perfectly normal young woman, for being an “imbecile.” Exposing this tremendous injustice --- which led to the sterilization of 70,000 Americans --- IMBECILES overturns cherished myths and reappraises heroic figures in its relentless pursuit of the truth.
About the Book
One of America’s great miscarriages of justice, the Supreme Court’s infamous 1927 Buck v. Bell ruling made government sterilization of “undesirable” citizens the law of the land.
New York Times bestselling author Adam Cohen tells the story in IMBECILES of one of the darkest moments in the American legal tradition: the Supreme Court’s decision to champion eugenic sterilization for the greater good of the country. In 1927, when the nation was caught up in eugenic fervor, the justices allowed Virginia to sterilize Carrie Buck, a perfectly normal young woman, for being an “imbecile.”
It is a story with many villains, from the superintendent of the Dickensian Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded who chose Carrie for sterilization to the former Missouri agriculture professor and Nazi sympathizer who was the nation’s leading advocate for eugenic sterilization. But the most troubling actors of all were the eight Supreme Court justices who were in the majority --- including William Howard Taft, the former president; Louis Brandeis, the legendary progressive; and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., America’s most esteemed justice, who wrote the decision urging the nation to embark on a program of mass eugenic sterilization.
Exposing this tremendous injustice --- which led to the sterilization of 70,000 Americans --- IMBECILES overturns cherished myths and reappraises heroic figures in its relentless pursuit of the truth. With the precision of a legal brief and the passion of a front-page exposé, Cohen’s IMBECILES is an unquestionable triumph of American legal and social history, an ardent accusation against these acclaimed men and our own optimistic faith in progress.
Audiobook available, narrated by Dan Woren
