A generation of pseudoscience
THREE GENERATIONS, NO IMBECILES:
Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell
By Paul A. Lombardo
357 pp. The Johns Hopkins University Press $29.95
Reviewed by Bob Sanchez
We would all love a perfect society, wouldn’t we? One with no crime, no poverty, no physical or mental illness? Everyone would fit in and be productive and moral. No one would be a burden on others.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the eugenics movement believed that such “perfection” was both possible and necessary to cleanse society and protect it from being overwhelmed by genetic dreck, what one writer called “criminality, harlotry and pauperism.” It was all a matter of identifying “defectives” and preventing them from multiplying. Prominent citizens such as Presidents William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes believed that this would serve everyone’s interests. To some, it meant ridding society of epileptics, beggars, and blacks. To eugenicist Dr. John Bell, it meant “a citizenry purged of mental and physical handicaps.”
The idea was simple: since undesirable traits were deemed to be inherited, one simply had to prevent anyone with such “defective germ plasms” from procreating. In the early 20th century, the movement took hold in a number of states such as Virginia, which passed a law that permitted sterilizing the “unfit” to end the financial burden they placed on the state. Proponents decided to bring a test case to court to validate such laws enacted in thirty states, and a poor white girl named Carrie Buck looked like the perfect subject.
All her life, Carrie Buck insisted she had been raped by her cousin. But she bore a daughter and was sent away to a home for immoral and therefore feebleminded girls, although evidence suggests she was of normal intelligence. Based on superficial inspection, doctors determined Carrie, her mother, and her daughter all to be imbeciles. Imbecility was considered a high grade of feeblemindedness, which itself meant an inability to conform to society’s laws and mores.
The state wanted to involuntarily sterilize Carrie Buck, but eugenics advocates wanted a new sterilization law upheld in court. Carrie was assigned a lawyer who secretly worked with opposing counsel, betraying his client all the way to the Supreme Court. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the unanimous decision in Buck v. Bell, stating coldly that “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Carrie Buck was sterilized and lived until 1982. In the 1930s, Germany’s Nazi regime cited the decision as evidencing international support for their own program of national cleansing. Holmes’s private correspondence shows that he wished defectives dead, not simply sterilized. Early in his career he supported “restricting propagation by the undesirables and putting to death infants that didn’t pass the examination.” As a lay person who once had read only admiring descriptions of the man, I have an entirely new view of Justice Holmes.
Paul Lombardo tells a compelling and heavily documented story of injustice to society’s less fortunate citizens. His sympathy for the abused is evident, but that does not turn Three Generations, No Imbeciles into a polemic. While not overturned in the courts, eugenics laws have either been repealed by the individual states or have fallen into disuse. Still, a 2004 Tennessee congressional candidate named James Hart garnered almost 60,000 votes for his “war on poverty genes” and a promise to protect America from “the less favored race.”
America’s proud history includes dark chapters we all know about, including slavery and Jim Crow. Fewer seem to know of the eugenics movement and its strong push for “racial purity” not that many years ago. Three Generations, No Imbeciles will likely anger you as it did me, but we can take heart that some of the country rejected this cruel form of pseudoscience all along. Armed with knowledge from this excellent book, we can hope we never return to the mistakes of our past.
Bob Sanchez is an associate editor and the webmaster of The Internet Review of Books. His novel, When Pigs Fly, has received rave reviews.
Bob invites you to check out his blog and his website.
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