Breeding a Better America

“Race Cleansing in America” by Peter Quinn, in American Heritage (Feb.–Mar. 2003), 28 W. 23rd St., New York, N.Y. 10010.

“Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” declared Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for the 8 to 1 majority of the Supreme Court in 1927. The ruling affirmed the right of the state of Virginia to sterilize a young woman named Carrie Buck against her will. The daughter of a “feeble-minded” woman, Buck had been institutionalized three years before, at age 17. She was already the mother of a child born out of wedlock.

The Court’s decision was a landmark victory for the eugenics movement in America, notes historical novelist Quinn, who is working on a book about the movement. Within five years, 28 states had compulsory sterilization laws. The annual average number of forced sterilizations increased tenfold, to almost 2,300, and by the 1970s, when the practice had largely ceased, more than 60,000 Americans had been sterilized.

Eugenics (both the theory and the word) originated with British biologist Francis Galton (1822–1911), who saw a clear link between achievement and heredity, and thought enlightened governments should encourage “the more suitable races or strains of blood” to propagate, lest they be overwhelmed by their fast-multiplying inferiors.

Emerging in America in the late 19th century, the eugenics movement gathered strength as immigrants from southern and eastern Europe flooded into the country. In 1903, with the strong backing of President Theodore Roosevelt, Congress barred the entry of anyone with a history of epilepsy or insanity. Four years later, the unwanted list was expanded to include “imbeciles,” the “feeble-minded,” and those with tuberculosis. Meanwhile, doctors took up the cause of compulsory sterilization, and Indiana became the first state to authorize its use on the “unimprovable” in state-run institutions.

In 1910, Charles Davenport, a Harvard-trained biologist, founded the Eugenics Record Office (ERO), in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, to press for eugenics legislation. The lobby received generous support from wealthy individuals such as Mary Williamson Harri­man, the widow of railroad magnate E. H. Harriman, and John D. Rockefeller, and from foundations such as the Carnegie Institute and the Rock­efeller Foundation. An ERO mod­el statute provided much of the basis for the 1924 Virginia law under which Carrie Buck was sterilized.

Before long, however, scientific and medical advances began to cast serious doubt on the theory of eugenics, says Quinn. “Hered­itary feeble-mindedness was shown in many instances to be the incidental result of birth trauma, inadequate nutrition, untreated learning disabilities, infant neglect, or abuse, often enough the consequences of poverty rather than the cause.” The ERO closed its doors in 1939.

Four decades later, the director of the hospital in which Carrie Buck had been sterilized sought her out. “It was transparently clear,” Quinn writes, “that neither Buck nor her sister [who had also been sterilized] was feeble-minded or imbecilic. Further investigation showed that the baby Carrie Buck had given birth to—Justice Holmes’s third-generation imbecile—had been a child of normal intelligence.”