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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
Adam Cohen graduated from Harvard Law School and was an education-reform lawyer before becoming a journalist. He is assistant editorial page editor of The New York Times, where he has been a member of the editorial board since 2002. He was previously a senior writer for Time magazine. He is the author of several books including Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America, The Perfect Store: Inside eBay, and Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck. He is the co-author of American Pharaoh: Richard J. Daley - His Battle for Chicago and the Nation.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this detailed and riveting study, Cohen (Nothing to Fear) captures the obsession with eugenics in 1920s America, especially as that foment is illustrated in the case of Carrie Buck, a young girl consigned to be sterilized by Virginia's Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. Cohen follows the traumas of Buck's life, including her foster childhood with the Dobbs family, who treated her more as slave than daughter; her rape byher foster mother's nephew; and her foster family committing her to the colony. Along the way, readers meet several players in Carrie's poignant case, including Harry Laughlin, the manager of the Eugenics Record Office and leading expert in the cause of eugenic sterilization; Aubrey Strode, the trial lawyer representing the state hospital's interests against Carrie; and Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court justice notable for a lack of interest in facts, whose philosophy "left scant room for the disadvantaged and the weak." In the midst of the pro-eugenics era, the court upheld Carrie's sterilization, giving little thought to the woman who was a dedicated worker, devoted to family, and possessed of a quiet intelligence. Cohen's outstanding narrative stands as an exposé of a nearly forgotten chapter in American history. Agent: Kris Dahl, ICM. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In 1927, the Supreme Court upheld eugenic sterilization in Buck v. Bell, which allowed the state of Virginia to sterilize a young woman named Carrie Buck. Buck, to use the jargon of the time, was labeled feebleminded. As Cohen (Nothing to Fear, 2009) notes in this searing study, some of the most distinguished men in the annals of American law sealed Carrie Buck's tragic fate, including chief justice and former president William Howard Taft, the progressive Louis Brandeis, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., considered one of our greatest legal minds. Cohen describes the massive popularity of the eugenics movement, which, he notes, permeated the popular culture from best-selling books to mass-market magazines. The driving force behind its popularity the collective fears of native-born, white, middle-class Protestants about a changing America are as relevant today as then. As far as Buck herself is concerned, Cohen points out that she was of perfectly normal intelligence and that rather than being of loose morals she was, in fact, a victim of rape. In this important book, Cohen not only illuminates a shameful moment in American history when the nation's most respected professions medicine, academia, law, and the judiciary failed to protect one of the most vulnerable members of society, he also tracks the landmark case's repercussions up to the present.--Sawyers, June Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
FEW AMERICAN JURISTS are as revered as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. A United States Supreme Court justice for close to 30 years, Holmes wrote seminal opinions that were clear and clever and elegantly phrased. It was Holmes who defined the limits of free speech in 1919 by noting that the law did not protect someone "falsely shouting fire in a theater." And it was Holmes who thoughtfully amended those words a decade later by writing that nothing in the Constitution was more sacred than "the principle of free thought - not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate." By most accounts, Holmes, an upper-crust Bostonian, served the nobler instincts of America's privileged classes. That is why his reckless majority opinion supporting forced sterilization in a 1927 case remains an enigma. Was it an isolated misstep or something more: an indictment of Justice Holmes and the Progressive movement he appeared to embrace? America in the early 20th century was awash in reform. As giant corporations took root, so too did calls to check their power. Laws were passed setting maximum hours and minimum wages, limiting child labor, preserving natural resources and breaking up the "trusts" that were said to be destroying fair competition. Not all of these laws worked out as planned, and some were eviscerated in the courts. But a new force had been unleashed, aiming to serve the greater good not by destroying big business but by curbing its abuses. Progressivism was always more than a single cause, however. Attracting reformers of all stripes, it aimed to fix the ills of society through increased government action - the "administrative state." Progressives pushed measures ranging from immigration restriction to eugenics in a grotesque attempt to protect the nation's gene pool by keeping the "lesser classes" from reproducing. If one part of progressivism emphasized fairness and compassion, the other reeked of bigotry and coercion. "Imbeciles," by Adam Cohen, the author of "Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America," examines one of the darkest chapters of progressive reform: the case of Buck v. Bell. It's the story of an assault upon thousands of defenseless people seen through the lens of a young woman, Carrie Buck, locked away in a Virginia state asylum. In meticulously tracing her ordeal, Cohen provides a superb history of eugenics in America, from its beginnings as an offshoot of social Darwinism - human survival of the fittest - to its rise as a popular movement, advocating the state-sponsored sterilization of "feebleminded, insane, epileptic, inebriate, criminalistic and other degenerate persons." According to the New York attorney Madison Grant, whose immensely influential 1916 tract, "The Passing of the Great Race," became standard reading for eugenicists - Hitler himself is said to have called it "my bible" - about 10 percent of Americans produced unworthy offspring and had to be stopped. It's not surprising that Buck v. Bell was decided in the Roaring Twenties, a decade even more culturally charged than the one we live in today. The Ku Klux Klan was riding a wave of anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic fervor, creationists were battling Darwinists over the teaching of evolution, and Prohibition was pitting rural Protestant values and prejudices against a looser, more diverse urban culture. In Washington, Congress was busily writing the most restrictive immigration law in our history, the National Origins Act, to protect the country from foreign contamination. In the words of The Saturday Evening Post: "If America doesn't keep out the queer, alien, mongrelized people of Southern and Eastern Europe, her crop of citizens will eventually be dwarfed and mongrelized in turn." ACCORDING TO THOMAS C. LEONARD, who teaches at Princeton, the driving force behind this and other such laws came from progressives in the halls of academia - people who combined "extravagant faith in science and the state with an outsized confidence in their own expertise." "Illiberal Reformers" is the perfect title for this slim but vital account of the perils of intellectual arrogance in dealing with explosive social issues. Put simply, Leonard says, elite progressives gave respectable cover to the worst prejudices of the era - not to rabble-rouse, but because they believed them to be true. Science didn't lie. But barring undesirables was only half the battle; the herd also had to be culled from within. In 1907, Indiana became the first state to legalize forced sterilization, starting a landslide endorsed by progressive icons like Theodore Roosevelt and the birth control champion Margaret Sanger. And when eugenicists needed an ironclad case to bring before the Supreme Court, Virginia's medical elite supplied it in the person of Carrie Buck. The facts of her case, endorsed by Dr. John Bell, superintendent of Virginia's Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, went like this: Carrie's mother, Emma Buck, a "feebleminded woman," had been remanded to the colony in 1920, by which time Carrie had been placed in foster care. There had been no trouble until Carrie's teenage years, when she became rebellious - and pregnant. Abandoned by her foster parents, Carrie was examined by a judge and two doctors, who determined that she was feebleminded, and that her infant daughter, Vivian, most likely was too. Here, indeed, was an ideal candidate for sterilization - a woman of low intelligence and poor family lineage, "oversexed" and "excessively fertile." Though the Virginia courts had already ruled in favor of sterilization, the state agreed to wait until the Supreme Court heard the case. It would be hard to imagine a less sympathetic body. Chief Justice William Howard Taft had ties to the eugenics movement, and four of the associate justices constituted a reactionary clique later nicknamed the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. There is no formal portrait of the Supreme Court for the 1924 term because one of the members refused to sit next to Louis Brandeis, the court's first Jewish member. Several years later, two of the justices would lobby against the nomination of Benjamin Cardozo so as not "to afflict the court with another Jew." Hoping for consensus, Taft picked the august, persuasive Holmes to write the majority opinion. "Carrie Buck is a feebleminded white woman," Holmes began. "She is the daughter of a feebleminded mother in the same institution and the mother of an illegitimate feebleminded child." Alluding to his own service as a Union officer wounded during the Civil War, Holmes, now 86, described sterilization as a trivial concession. "We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives," he declared. "It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices... in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence." Holmes relied on a single case, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, to endorse the state's interest in sterilization. In 1905, the Supreme Court had upheld the right of a locality to take "reasonable" measures to protect the public in a health emergency - in this instance, vaccination during a smallpox epidemic. Though hardly a comparable example, Holmes made the most of it, writing: "The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough." The vote was 8-1 - the lone dissenter being Pierce Butler, one of the infamous Four Horsemen. Butler wrote no opinion and offered no explanation, but as the only Roman Catholic on the court, "he was no doubt aware," Cohen writes, "of the deep reservations the Church had about interference with human procreation." But why did Justice Brandeis, the so-called people's attorney, join the majority? Cohen provides little guidance. Brandeis and Holmes were friendly, he writes, and Brandeis may have been trying to placate Holmes, as well as Taft. Or perhaps Brandeis truly believed in using state power "to create a better world" through sterilization. Both versions are plausible, but the evidence is flimsy. Holmes's opinion was no isolated misstep. He would later describe Buck v. Bell as an assignment that "gave me pleasure." As Cohen says, "eugenics was a movement of people who believed themselves to be inherently superior, and in Holmes it found a fitting judicial standard-bearer." Holmes never questioned the version of Carrie Buck's life provided by Virginia authorities because it was exactly what he wanted to hear. In fact, almost every part of that narrative was untrue. There was no evidence that Emma or Carrie or Vivian was feebleminded. That judgment was first made by local officials who viewed the Bucks as shiftless, immoral women - and Vivian as someone likely to grow up the same way. In ranking Carrie as a "middle-grade moron" - a category somewhat higher than "imbecile" - authorities relied on the notoriously flawed Benet-Simon Intelligence Test, which, when administered to more than a million mostly white recruits during World War I, showed 47 percent of them to be feebleminded. What wasn't known to the court proved to be even more damaging. Carrie, it turned out, had been a perfectly good student before being removed from school in the sixth grade to do servant's work. And her pregnancy - the real charge against her - had resulted from a rape by a relative of her foster family, which then abandoned Carrie to cover up the crime. Bell performed Carrie's sterilization himself, vowing "to apply the pruning knife with vigor and without fear or favor." The logic was simple: Sterilization not only protected the public but also benefited people like Carrie by allowing them to quickly rejoin society instead of spending their reproductive years in an institution. At the colony, the operation became a regular part of daily life - "men on Tuesdays, women on Thursday." At its height from the late 1920s through the 1950s, forced sterilization in the United States would claim tens of thousands of victims, with California and a host of Southern states leading the way. "The procedures were performed so often on poor white Southerners," Cohen writes, "that they acquired a nickname: Mississippi appendectomies." Carrie Buck was discharged soon after her operation, losing custody of Vivian, who died from complications of the measles at the age of 8. Buck married twice and settled into a devoted relationship, working low-end jobs. She read the daily newspaper and loved crossword puzzles. Her great regret was being unable to have any more children. "They done me wrong," she said. "They done us all wrong." Carrie Buck died in 1983. Nineteen years later, on the 75th anniversary of the decision that bears her name, the governor of Virginia issued a "sincere apology" to the victims of involuntary sterilization, "a shameful effort," he said, "in which state government never should have been involved." Yet, as Cohen shrewdly reminds us, Buck V. Bell "has never been overturned." In a world where the Human Genome Project is currently mapping heredity at breakneck speed, that fact alone should send shivers down the spine.
Choice Review
Buck v. Bell (1927) usually makes it on to the list of "worst" US Supreme Court decisions--a list typically headed by, for example, Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), Korematsu v. United States (1944), and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). However, even within the constitutional law classroom Buck receives far less critical attention than those others. As journalist Adam Cohen demonstrates, this is a significant oversight. There is much more to Buck than the infamous words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who upheld the Virginia compulsory sterilization law by stating that "three generations of imbeciles are enough." Focusing on that one aphorism obscures the stories of the people who played roles in this human tragedy--not just Carrie Buck, whose familial future was devastated by the sanctioning of her sterilization, but also those policy-makers (beyond Holmes) who determined her fate. Cohen tells those stories with nuanced prose, paying close attention to the influence of sociopolitical factors, most significantly the eugenics movement. Imbeciles is an educational and thought-provoking read. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Helen J. Knowles, SUNY Oswego
Kirkus Review
Attorney, journalist, and bestselling author Cohen (Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America, 2009, etc.) revisits an ugly chapter in American history: the 1920s mania for eugenics. Among "the most brutal aphorisms in American jurisprudence," Oliver Wendell Holmes' 1927 pronouncement in Buck v. Bell"Three generations of imbeciles are enough"marked the high point of a shameful enthusiasm among the social elite for ridding the species of so-called mental defectives. With the nation anxious about changes wrought by unprecedented immigration, industrialization, and urbanization, and with marriage laws ineffective and segregation and warehousing of defectives too expensive and castration too barbaric, eugenics enthusiasts turned to mass sterilization as the solution to prevent the feebleminded from reproducing. The movement attracted its share of crackpots, racists, and conservatives intent on preserving an Anglo-Saxon heritage, but a shocking gallery of the very best peopleprofessionals, intellectuals, feminists, and progressivesformed the vanguard. From this class came the principal players in Carrie Buck's case: the physician/supervisor of Virginia's Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded, the drafter of the state's sterilization law who defended it in the Supreme Court, the national scientific expert who affirmed its utility, and the celebrated justice who upheld its constitutionality. The stories of these four men and that of Carrie herselfa teenage girl neither mentally nor morally deficient, as her caretakers charged, and never informed of the purpose and effect the operation Virginia demandedform the spine of Cohen's compelling narrative. Through them, he also tells a larger story of the weak science underlying the eugenics cause and the outrageous betrayal of the defenseless by some of the country's best minds. Carrie Buck died in 1983. The 8-1 decision, joined by the likes of Chief Justice William Howard Taft and Louis Brandeis, has never been overruled. A shocking tale about science and law gone horribly wrong, an almost forgotten case that deserves to be ranked with Dred Scott, Plessy, and Korematsu as among the Supreme Court's worst decisions. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The Supreme Court case of Buck v. Bell (1927) made forced sterilization legal in the United States and resulted in the sterilization of 70,000 Americans. Cohen (former -senior writer, Time Magazine; Nothing To Fear) examines the eugenics movement that led to the court case and that was used as a model for eugenics in Nazi Germany. In the book's introduction, the author describes 1920s America as "caught in a mania to use newly discovered scientific laws of heredity to perfect humanity." The story of Carrie Buck, who became pregnant after being raped by an acquaintance and was then wrongly institutionalized by the state of Virginia as feebleminded, illustrates society's treatment of the poor, of minorities and immigrants, and other populations considered "undesirable." Throughout the book, the author says that the legal system failed to act in Buck's best interests and consistently ignored her human rights. -VERDICT This thought-provoking work exposes a dark chapter of American legal history but is not for the casual reader. Law students, those studying the health professions, and students of social history should read. Recommended for academic, health sciences, and law libraries. [See Prepub Alert, 9/28/15.]-Becky Kennedy, Atlanta-Fulton P.L. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| 1 Carrie Buck | p. 15 |
| 2 Albert Priddy | p. 36 |
| 3 Albert Priddy | p. 78 |
| 4 Harry Laughlin | p. 103 |
| 5 Harry Laughlin | p. 136 |
| 6 Aubrey Strode | p. 160 |
| 7 Aubrey Strode | p. 179 |
| 8 Oliver Wendell Holmes | p. 212 |
| 9 Oliver Wendell Holmes | p. 251 |
| 10 Carrie Buck | p. 283 |
| Conclusion | p. 299 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 325 |
| Notes | p. 329 |
| Index | p. 383 |
