Article 52

RACE CLEANSING IN AMERICA

A nationwide gene-purity movement promoted methods that eventually were adopted by the Third Reich and everyone from John D. Rockfeller to W.E.B. Du Bois supported it.

by Peter Quinn

Carrie Buck was in her third year at the StateColony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded in Lynchburg,Virginia, when the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed thestate’s right to sterilize her. Seventeen at the time she hadbeen institutionalized, the child of a feeble-mindedmother and the mother to an illegitimate daughter of herown, Buck had refused to submit to sterilization, and thecase had finally made its way to the nation’s highestcourt. Writing for a lopsided eight-to-one majority (whichincluded Justices Louis Brandeis and Harlan Fiske Stoneas well as Chief Justice William Howard Taft), Justice Ol-iver Wendell Holmes left no doubt about either the over-all legality of the procedure or its appropriateness forMiss Buck.

“It is better for all the world,” Justice Holmes assertedin Buck v. Bell, “if instead of waiting to execute degenerateoffspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecil-ity, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfitfrom continuing their kind. The principle that sustainscompulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cuttingthe Fallopian tubes.” In the case of Carrie Buck, hermother, and her daughter, the requirement of steriliza-tion was glaringly self-apparent. “Three generations ofimbeciles,” Holmes concluded, “are enough.”

None of the justices who decided Buck’s fate ever sawor met her. They relied in part on the expert opinion of Dr.Harry Hamilton Laughlin to help them make up theirminds. Though Laughlin had never met her either, a re-port had been sent to him at the Eugenics Record Office,in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. After reviewing thedocumentation, including a score on the Stanford-Binettest that purportedly showed Buck had the intellectual ca-pacities of a nine-year-old, Laughlin concluded that shewas part of the “shiftless, ignorant and worthless class ofanti-social whites of the South” whose promiscuity of-fered “a typical picture of the low-grade moron.”

Laughlin passed over the possibility that Buck’s sup-posed imbecility might be the sullen withdrawal of anabused, frightened girl with little formal education, whohad been given away by her mother at the age of four. Healmost certainly had no knowledge that she had beenraped and impregnated by a friend of her foster parentsand sent away to have her baby in the confines of an insti-tution so there would be no public scandal. For Laughlin,the notion that Buck’s “feeble-mindedness” could be any-thing but hereditary was “exceptionally remote.”

Buck had been made a test case of Virginia’s compul-sory sterilization law, which was in good measure basedon a “model” statute Laughlin himself had drafted, andhe believed that if the Supreme Court upheld Buck’s ster-ilization, it would lead to the widespread passage of sim-ilar legislation in other states. Once this happened, theeugenics movement would have a potent weapon againstthose who, in his own words, “through inherent defectsand weakness are an economic and moral burden … anda constant source of danger to the national and racial life.”

Rendered in May 1927, Buck v. Bell’s judicial endorse-ment of compulsory sterilization proved the landmarkvictory many eugenicists had sought. Several states actedquickly to pass new or revised sterilization laws. By 1932,28 states had such legislation in place. The annual averageof forced sterilizations increased tenfold, from 230 to al-most 2,300, and one year reached nearly 4,000. By the1970s, when compulsory sterilization had largely ceased,more than 60,000 Americans had been subjected to theprocedure and eugenics had had a long life in America asa pervasive public force.

Eugenics—the theory as well as the word (whichmeans “wellborn”)—originated with Francis Galton, acousin of Charles Darwin. Inspired by Darwin’s theory ofnatural selection, Galton’s study of the family back-grounds of prominent members of British society led himto the conclusion that achievement and heredity were

1

Article 52. RACE CLEANSING IN AMERICA

clearly linked. He declared in his 1869 book Hereditary Ge-nius: An Inquiry Into Its Laws and Consequences: “It is in themost unqualified manner that I object to pretensions ofnatural equality.” A wise and enlightened state, in Gal-ton’s view, would encourage “the more suitable races orstrains of blood” to propagate and increase their numbersbefore they were overwhelmed by the prolific matinghabits of the pauper classes.

Galton’s beliefs were mirrored in the work of CesareLombroso, an Italian physician who warned of the “ata-vistic being who reproduces in his person the ferociousinstincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals.”(Robert Louis Stevenson made Lombroso’s theory the ba-sis of his novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.) Lombroso wrote:“There exists, it is true, a group of criminals, born for evil,against whom all social cures break as against a rock—afact which compels us to eliminate them completely, evenby death.”

In 1874 Richard Dugdale, a wealthy English expatriatesocial reformer, made a tour of upstate New York jails.Acquainted with Lombroso’s notion of hereditary crimi-nality, he focused in particular on a jail in which six in-mates were related and found that they shared a familytree perennially abloom with social deviates. He calledthem the “Jukes,” and gave the pseudonym to his book.

Dugdale insisted that human behavior was influencedby several factors, environment among them, but it wasthe portrait of a self-perpetuating clan of reprobates thatthe public focused on and embraced. He said he foundamong the 700 Juke descendants 181 prostitutes (”har-lotry may become a hereditary characteristic,” he specu-lated), 42 beggars, 70 felons, and 7 murderers. The Jukesbecame a staple of eugenic literature, a spur to similarcase studies, and a symbol of all those whose poverty andaberrancy were seen as expressions of the ineluctable dic-tates of biology. A decade after The Jukes appeared, theeminent German biologist August Weismann added tothe notion of eugenic predestination his theory of a hered-itary “germ plasm,” an embedded legacy that dictated in-dividual physical, mental, and moral traits and was thecollective basis of rigidly distinct race differences.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, severalforces had joined together to give the eugenics movementnew power and prominence, foremost among them thegrowing concern over the quality and quantity of thecountry’s newest immigrants. By the 1890s a large—and,to many old-stock Americans, alarming—wave of for-eigners was arriving. Between 1898 and 1907, annual im-migration more than quintupled, from 225,000 to1,300,000, and its primary source was no longer NorthernEurope but Italians, Slavs, and Jews from southern andeastern Europe.

Along with the alarm over hordes of foreign defectivesswarming into America was a growing perception of a fe-cund stratum of feeble-minded whose numbers, if left un-checked, would fatally weaken the germ plasm of thecountry’s Anglo-Saxon majority. These feeble-minded

were often said to have formidable procreative power:“weak minds in strong, oversexed bodies.”

It wasn’t long before the presumptions of eugenicsabout the unfit and the growing threat they posed beganto find their way into law. With the enthusiastic endorse-ment of President Theodore Roosevelt, a true believer inthe threat posed by “weaker stocks,” Congress voted in1903 to bar the entry of persons with any history of epi-lepsy or insanity. Four years later, the restriction was ex-panded to include imbeciles, the feeble-minded, andthose with tuberculosis. Connecticut became the first ofseveral states to forbid marriage by those “epileptic, im-becilic or feeble-minded,” but such laws proved hard toenforce. A far more feasible method of controlling repro-duction by those deemed unfit was the development ofsurgical sterilization.

In 1897 A. J. Ochsner, chief surgeon at St. Mary’s Hos-pital and Augustana Hospital in Chicago, published a pa-per entitled “Surgical Treatment of Habitual Criminals”that would have widespread impact. He described per-forming vasectomies and wrote that with the physicalelimination of “all habitual criminals from the possibilityof having children,” crime would decrease significantly.A similar treatment “could reasonably be suggested forchronic inebriates, imbeciles, perverts and paupers.”

Other doctors took up the cause of compulsory steril-ization. In 1907 Indiana became the first state to authorizeits use on criminals, idiots, rapists, and imbeciles housedin state-run institutions and judged by a medical panel tobe “unimprovable.” In a few years, 15 states had followedsuit. Yet despite this legislative success, implementationwas blocked in some states by gubernatorial veto and inothers by the state courts. Only in California, where fearof “race-suicide” was fueled by anxieties over Asian im-migration, did legislation result in a significant programof eugenic sterilization.

“WE HAVE BEEN INVADED,” WROTE DR. HAISELDEN, “OUR STREETS ARE INFESTED

WITH AN ARMY OF THE UNFIT.”

Beyond sterilization, another Chicago surgeon, HarryHaiselden, provoked a storm of controversy in 1915 byactively publicizing his practice of killing defective new-borns by leaving them untreated. He even produced thefirst pro-eugenics propaganda film, The Black Stork, a si-lent movie that remained in circulation for the next 30years. In his campaign for eugenics, Dr. Haiselden left nodoubt that the foremost danger lay in what he termed“lives of no value.” He told the mother of a baby he let diethat had it lived, it would have been “an imbecile andpossibly criminal.” He drew an equally bleak picture ofAmerican society at large. “We have been invaded,” hewrote. “Our streets are infested with an Army of the Un-fit—a dangerous, vicious army of death and dread….”

2

ANNUAL EDITIONS

Shrill as this sounded, Haiselden’s was no voice in thewilderness. HALF WITS PERIL MANY proclaimed afront-page headline of Hearst’s Chicago American in No-vember 1915. Look around, Haiselden admonished at theend of his autobiography, at the “horrid semi-humansdrag themselves along all of our streets” and then ask,“What are you going to do about it?”

The American eugenics movement was diffuse and de-centralized, encompassing a wide variety of interests. Ata popular level, social hygienists and health enthusiastsemphasized staying physically fit and finding an equallyfit marriage partner. The “beautiful baby” contests held atstate fairs and amusement parks were one manifestationof the interest in “good breeding.” Articles on mate selec-tion and the science of the “wellborn child” frequentlyran in newspapers and magazines. At a more elite level,the hard-core disciples of Galton’s beliefs saw the needfor a forceful and focused agenda of legislative action.The founding of the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) in 1910provided the adherents of that agenda with a coordina-tion and direction previously lacking.

Charles Davenport, a Harvard-trained biologist and thefounder of the ERO, first obtained funding from the Carn-egie Institute in 1904 to establish a Station for ExperimentalEvolution at Cold Spring Harbor, New York. Davenportwas convinced by Mendel’s laws of heredity that behaviorand moral traits were passed on in the same way as eyecolor, and he published a book-length study in 1919 titledNaval Officers: Their Heredity and Development, in which heidentified a single recessive gene as responsible for “thalas-sophilia”—love of the sea— to explain why naval careersseemed to run in certain families.

Seeking to start a second institution at Cold Spring de-voted solely to eugenics, Davenport found a sympatheticsupporter in Mary Williamson Harriman, widow of therailroad magnate E. H. Harriman. She remained a finan-cial mainstay of the ERO until 1917, when the CarnegieInstitute assumed responsibility for annual operating ex-penses. These twin sources of funding were indicative ofthe generous support the eugenics movement would re-ceive from some of America’s wealthiest families andfoundations. The Philadelphia soap millionaire SamuelFels was a regular contributor, and John D. Rockefellerwas the ERO’s second-largest supporter.

Subsequently, the Rockefeller Foundation expandedthis commitment on an international scale. Beginning inthe 1920s, the foundation backed the research of Germaneugenicists and helped establish the Kaiser Wilhelm Insti-tute for Anthropology, Eugenics and Human Heredity, inBerlin. The Russell Sage Foundation funded research onthe feeble-minded and endorsed eugenic solutions, par-ticularly for “feeble-minded girls of child bearing age.” InMichigan, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, brother of the cerealmanufacturer, organized America’s First Race BettermentConference in Battle Creek, in 1914, and set up a specialschool for “eugenic education.” Charles Brush, a Cleve-land millionaire and one of the founders of the Brush

Electric Company, created his own eugenic organization,and Dr. Clarence Gamble, heir to the Gamble soap for-tune, started more than 20 sterilization clinics and was aforce in the eugenics movement until the middle of thecentury.

At the ERO, Davenport set out to build a network offieldworkers to compile an index of eugenic informationon American families. This included not just medical factsbut such traits as “liveliness, moribundity, lack of fore-sight, rebelliousness, trustworthiness, irritability, missilethrowing, popularity, radicalness, conservativeness, no-madism.” His hope was to create a clearinghouse thatcould give advice to individuals and communities on pre-venting reproduction by defectives, encourage research,and propagate “eugenic truths.” Early on, Davenportmade a decision crucial to the future of the ERO. He of-fered the job of superintendent to Harry Laughlin, a biol-ogy teacher in Iowa with whom he had beencorresponding for several years.

Laughlin envisioned a day when every sort of defec-tive would be barred from entry into the United States.He also hoped to help bring about a new social order“wherein selection for parenthood will not be held a nat-ural right of every individual; but will be a prize highlysought and allotted to the best individuals of provenblood, and those individuals who are not deemed worthyand are by society denied the right to perpetrate theirown traits in subsequent generations will be held in pityby their fellows.” Laughlin would play a significant partin turning eugenic theory into legislative reality.

One of Laughlin’s first assignments with the ERO wasto assist the American Breeder’s Association (ABA). Thefirst formal eugenics group in the United States, with aself-proclaimed mission to “emphasize the value of supe-rior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood,”the ABA included among its original members AlexanderGraham Bell, Luther Burbank, Vernon L. Kellogg, and theStanford University president David Starr Jordan. In 1913Laughlin wrote a report for the ABA that concluded that“approximately 10% of our population, primarilythrough inherent defect and weakness, are an economicand moral burden on the 90% and a constant source ofdanger to the national and racial life.” He recommendedan aggressive policy of involuntary sterilization and be-gan drafting a model law to provide state legislatureswith a working example of how to proceed.

Laughlin found a highly effective ally in Henry H.Goddard. Among the first American social scientists touse intelligence testing, Goddard was looking for thecauses of retardation and mental defectiveness, and hissearch led him to a family in the Piney Woods of New Jer-sey that would function, in Stephen Jay Gould’s words,“as a primal myth of the eugenics movement for severaldecades.”

The family consisted of two bloodlines living in closeproximity, each descended from the same Quaker pro-genitor who left home to fight in the American Revolu-

3

Article 52. RACE CLEANSING IN AMERICA

tion. Before returning to the fold, marrying an uprightwoman, and settling down as a prosperous farmer, thewayward soldier sired an illegitimate son with a feeble-minded tavern wench in a nearby settlement. Two hered-itary roads diverged in those Piney Woods, both of whichGoddard gathered under the pseudonym of the Kallikaks(kallos is the Greek for “beauty”; kakos, for “bad”). One ledto generations of solid, hardworking citizens; the other, toa morass of felony, harlotry, and idiocy. Published in1912, The Kallikak Family was widely quoted. It would beanother 70 years before the photographs in the book,which displayed the imbecilic, almost demonic faces ofthe defective branch of the family, were exposed as hav-ing been heavily doctored to create the desired effect.

The spreading influence of eugenics not only drew ona conservative fear of lower-class behavior, and on the en-thusiasm of middle-class progressives seeking scientificanswers to the dislocations inflicted by industrializationand urbanization, but also attracted support from thoseeven more radically opposed to the status quo. For thebirth-control crusader Margaret Sanger, eugenics was“the great biological interpretation of the human race”that provided “the most adequate and thorough avenueto the solution of racial, political and social problems.”The African-American writer and philosopher W. E. B.Du Bois even accepted the need for “the fit” of each raceto increase their numbers, while vehemently rejecting thenotions of white supremacy spouted by many eugeni-

cists. African-Americans must learn, he wrote, “thatamong human beings, as among vegetables, quality andnot mere quantity count.”

The aftermath of American participation in World War Iprovided an ideal environment for the movement. Thepostwar hysteria over alien radicals and the resurgence ofthe racist, antiforeign Ku Klux Klan signaled a wider will-ingness to curtail dramatically the influx of new immi-grants. Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race,published in 1916, had sounded a call to arms against “themaudlin sentimentalism” that left America’s bordersopen to the riffraff of Europe and that was “sweeping thenation toward a racial abyss.”

When, in 1921 the House Committee on Immigrationand Naturalization took up the issue of postwar controlson foreign entry into the United States, Chairman AlbertJohnson called only one scientific expert, Harry Laughlin.Laughlin was charged with making a statistical survey ofthe impact of recent immigration. His findings, publishedby Congress, repeated what was by now a familiar re-frain: “…the recent immigrants (largely from Southernand Eastern Europe) as a whole, present a higher percent-age of inborn socially inadequate qualities than do olderstocks.” In 1921 Congress took the historic step of impos-ing a quota system on immigration that was based on na-tional origin and limited annual arrivals from Europe to 3percent of those Americans who had claimed a specificcountry as their place of origin in 1910.

In 1990 the Human Genome Project set out to map the basic genetic makeup of our species. Celera Genomics, a private, for-profit corpora-tion, eventually challenged the international nonprofit undertaking represented by the Genome Project and be-gan its own effort. In June 2000, the Genome Project and Celera made a joint public announcement that they had successfully mapped about 90 percent of the genome, with the rest to be completed shortly.

Those involved with the Genome Project reject any connection with the all-en-compassing biological de-terminism that was at the core of hard-line eugenics. While they hope to produce significant therapies for ge-netically influenced or con-trolled diseases, they deny

any wish to revisit the kind of reductionism that seeks the roots of every human quality or quirk in a single gene or a set of them.

Nonetheless, some skep-tics question the purposes and consequences of the fi-nal sequences of human DNA. In a collection of es-says titled It Ain’t Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions, published last year, Richard Lewontin, the Alexander Agassiz Research Professor at Harvard, writes: “The sci-entist writing about the Ge-nome Project explicitly reject an absolute genetic deter-minism, but they seem to be writing more to acknowl-edge theoretical possibilities than out of conviction. If we take seriously the proposi-tion that the internal and ex-ternal codetermine the

organism, we cannot really believe that the sequence of the human genome is the grail that will reveal to us what it is to be human, that it will change our philo-sophical view of ourselves, that it will show how life works.”

Whatever future medical breakthroughs the Genome Project may or may not pro-duce, it is already laying to rest the eugenic belief in distinctly separate races de-fined by fundamental ge-netic differences. Our species is such a recent evo-lutionary phenomenon that we haven’t had time to de-velop into distinct biologi-cal groups in any significant way. The genes responsible for our external differences of skin color and hair texture represent about .01 percent of each

individual’s total genetic makeup. The bulk of the 30,000 or so genes of the human genome are prov-ing to be strikingly alike. In the words of Dr. Eric Lander, a genome expert at the Whitehead Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “There is no scientific evi-dence to support substan-tial differences between groups, and the tremen-dous burden of proof goes to anyone who wants to as-sert those differences.”

Though humans will undoubtedly continue to be divided by culture and environment, it seems that when all is said and done, we really are one big fam-ily. Whether we’ll ever manage to be one big happy family remains to be seen.—P.Q.

4

ANNUAL EDITIONS

That same year, the Second International Congress onEugenics was held in New York City, at the AmericanMuseum of Natural History, home to the recently estab-lished Galton Society—the inner circle of the move-ment—and a center of eugenic fervor. In his openingaddress, Henry Fairfield Osborn, a professor at ColumbiaUniversity and president of the museum, insisted that thebattle “to maintain the predominance of our race” hadstill to be won. He warned that America must learn fromthe example of “national decadence and decline whichundermined the great republics of Greece and Rome” andreject “the appeals of false humanitarianism.” As chair-man of the Exhibits Committee at the conference, HarryLaughlin prepared elaborate displays on the genetic tox-icity of the unfit. He displayed this skill again when Con-gress revisited its immigration restrictions imposed in1921. In the months preceding passage of the Immigra-tion Act of 1924, members of Congress and visitors walk-ing the halls of the Capitol passed charts and posters thatmade clear the looming threat to the nation’s germ plasm.

This new immigration act proved a collective triumphfor the eugenics movement. It shifted the base year for de-termining national quotas from 1910 to 1890, cutting al-lowable immigration from Eastern and Southern Europeby 80 percent. Yet the supporters of eugenic reformweren’t about to rest now; they switched their focus to astate-by-state campaign to institute compulsory steriliza-tion. Virginia provided the decisive battleground. In1924, the same year as it tightened the state’s antimiscege-nation law (Georgia and Alabama soon followed suit),the Virginia legislature enacted a compulsory steriliza-tion statute based on Laughlin’s model law. Three yearslater, shortly after upholding the constitutionality of Car-rie Buck’s sterilization, Justice Holmes said he felt he“was getting near to the first principle of real reform.”

NAZI MEASURES DROVE SOME IN THE U.S. TO RECONSIDER THEIR

OWN SUPPORT OF EUGENICS, BUT THE MOVEMENT DIDN’T COLLAPSE.

By the end of the 1920s, the imposition of racially basedimmigration controls, the growing use of compulsorysterilization, and the widespread ban on interracial mar-riage gave American eugenicists the right to brag thatthey had made their nation the world’s most advancedeugenic state. German eugenicists in particular had longbeen aware of the progress of their American counter-parts. The National Socialist Physician League head Ger-hard Wagner praised America’s eugenic policies andpointed to them as a model for Germany to follow. Itwasn’t long in happening. As a first order of business, thenew National Socialist regime put in place sweeping eu-genic legislation that demonstrated a comprehensivecommitment to racial hygiene. Now it was the turn of

Americans to look with a mixture of admiration and envyat what was occurring in Germany.

Marie Kopp, an observer for the American Committeeon Maternal Health, reported that the Nazi system of He-reditary Health Courts, which were charged with seekingout the unfit and compelling their sterilization, not onlywas administered “in entire fairness” but was “formu-lated after careful study of the California experiment.”The ERO’s Eugenical News also commented on the resem-blance between the German and American programs,boasting that “the text of the German statute reads almostlike the ’American model sterilization Law.’” In 1936,upon being awarded an honorary degree by the Univer-sity of Heidelberg for his devotion to the cause of racialbiology, Harry Laughlin thanked the university for reaf-firming the “common understanding of German andAmerican scientists of the nature of eugenics.” In Vir-ginia, Dr. J. H. Bell, superintendent of the State Colony forEpileptics and Feeble-Minded and the physician who hadsevered Carrie Buck’s fallopian tubes, lauded Nazi Ger-many’s “elimination of the unfit.”

The Nazis went on to compel the sterilization of up-ward of 375,000 people. Their measures drove some in theUnited States to reconsider their own support of eugen-ics, especially its compulsory and racist aspects. But themovement didn’t instantly collapse. As late as 1942, asterilization bill based on the German law was introducedbefore the New Jersey legislature.

In October 1939 Hitler gave the order to begin the sys-tematic killing of the retarded and mentally ill, an act ofmass murder that proved prelude to a far larger holo-caust. As extreme as it was, the theory behind the destruc-tion of the mentally ill was not exclusive to a small bandof Nazi fanatics. Eugenic euthanasia had been widely dis-cussed for years, both in and out of Germany. In America,as early as the turn of the century, Dr. William DuncanMcKim had suggested a state-run program to weed outthe mentally defective by inflicting a “gentle, painlessdeath” with carbonic acid gas. The eminent physician G.Frank Lydston, a professor of surgery at the University ofIllinois and of criminal anthropology at the Kent Schoolof Law in Chicago, had advocated use of the gas chamber“to kill properly the convicted murderer and the drivel-ing idiot.”

In the South, where eugenics had often been advancedas part of a progressivist program of reform, the superin-tendent of the Alabama Insane Hospitals warned his fel-low doctors in 1936 that if compulsory sterilizationwasn’t employed broadly enough, “euthanasia may be-come a necessity.” The year before, Alexis Carrel, inven-tor of the iron lung and winner of a Nobel Prize inPhysiology or Medicine, wrote that the insane should be“humanely and economically disposed of in small eutha-nasia institutions supplied with proper gases.” Even afterAmerica entered the war against Nazi Germany, Dr. Fos-ter Kennedy, a professor of neurology at Cornell MedicalCollege, espoused the notion that retarded children age

5

Article 52. RACE CLEANSING IN AMERICA

five and older—”Nature’s mistakes”—be put to death.He cited Justice Holmes’s reasoning in Buck v. Bell as pro-viding a legal basis.

Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, whichHitler is said to have read and admired, called for puttingaside a “sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life.”Grant envisioned a massive eugenic cleansing that wouldsolve once and for all the problem of the unfit and theiroffspring: “In mankind it would not be a matter of greatdifficulty to secure a general consensus of public opinionas to the least desirable, let us say, ten per cent of the com-munity. When this unemployed and unemployable hu-man residuum has been eliminated together with thegreat mass of crime, poverty, alcoholism and feeblemind-edness associated therewith it would be easy to considerthe advisability of further restricting perpetuation of thethen remaining least valuable types. By this method man-kind might ultimately become sufficiently intelligent tochoose deliberately the most vital and intellectual strainsto carry on the race.”

During World War II, the number of compulsory ster-ilizations in the United States dropped significantly. Thecause was not so much revulsion at Nazi medical prac-tices as a shortage of civilian doctors. The immigrationquotas stayed in place. Joining the chorus of those whoopposed any exemptions was the Chamber of Com-merce of New York State, which had issued a report in1934 demanding “no exceptional admission for Jewswho are refugees from persecution in Germany.” The re-port had been written by Harry Laughlin. In the scien-tific community, however, the currents of geneticresearch and medical advances were sweeping away thecrude presumptions of eugenics.

Dr. Abraham Myerson, a tireless campaigner againsteugenic sterilization, published a study showing that

cases in which mental disabilities had a genetic compo-nent tended to occur proportionally in all socioeconomicgroups. In 1934 he chaired a committee of the AmericanNeurological Association that attacked the whole notionof “racial degeneracy.” Hereditary feeble-mindednesswas shown in many instances to be the incidental resultof birth trauma, inadequate nutrition, untreated learningdisabilities, infant neglect, or abuse, often enough theconsequences of poverty rather than the cause. In 1938 theCarnegie Institute expressed grave doubts to HarryLaughlin about the scientific worth of the ERO. Laughlinresigned the next year. The ERO closed its doors on thelast day of 1939.

The eventual unwinding of America’s eugenics ex-periment came too late for Carrie Buck. In 1979 the di-rector of the hospital in which she had been sterilizedmore than half a century earlier searched her out. Hewas led to Buck by her sister, who had also been steril-ized. (As with many other victims of compulsory ster-ilization, Buck’s sister had been told at the time that theprocedure was an appendectomy). It was transparentlyclear that neither Buck nor her sister was feeblemindedor imbecilic. Further investigation showed that thebaby Carrie Buck had given birth to—Justice Holmes’sthird-generation imbecile—had been a child of normalintelligence. Like thousands of women and men invol-untarily stripped of their capacity to have children,Carrie Buck had not committed any offense against thelaws of nature. Her crime was for the ancient one of be-ing poor and powerless.

Peter Quinn, author of the Civil War-era novel Banished Children of Eve, isat work on a book about the eugenics movement.

From American Heritage, Vol. 54, No. 1, February/March 2003, pages 35-43. Reprinted by permission of American Heritage, Inc., a division of Forbes, Inc.

6