Now to look at what's been described as one of the worst Supreme Court rulings in history. In the 1927 case, Buck v. Bell, the court upheld a statute that enabled the state of Virginia to sterilize so-called mental defectives or imbeciles. The person in question was Carrie Buck, a poor young woman then confined in the Virginia state colony for epileptics and the feeble-minded, though she was neither epileptic nor mentally disabled.
In the landmark decision, eight judges ruled that the state of Virginia had the right to sterilize her. Her mother, Emma, as well as Carrie's daughter, Vivian, then only eight months old, were deemed similarly deficient. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote the majority opinion, concluding, quote,"...three generations of imbeciles are enough."The decision resulted in 60,000 to 70,000 sterilizations of Americans considered Unfit to reproduce. The Supreme Court decision had its origins in the eugenics movement, then thriving in the United States. The 1924 Immigration Act was passed with similar intent, to prevent immigration by genetically inferior groups, which included Italians, Jews, Eastern Europeans and countless others, in an attempt to improve the genetic quality of the American population.
Author Adam Cohen writes about the case in his new book, The Supreme Court, American Eugenics and the Sterilization. of Carrie Buck. Adam was previously a member of The New York Times editorial board and a senior writer for Time magazine. He's the co-editor of TheNationalBookReview.com. Adam Cohen, welcome back to Democracy Now!
It's great to have you with us. ADAM COHEN, National Book Review, Great to be here, Amy. AMY GOODMAN, The National Book Review, Tell us the story of Carrie Buck.
In a moment, we'll hear all about how it ties into immigration, eugenics, parallels to what we're seeing today. But start back in the 1920s with Carrie Buck. So, she's a young woman who is growing up in Charlottesville, Virginia, being raised by a single mother.
Back then, there was a belief that it was better, often, to take poor children away from their parents and put them in middle-class homes. So, she was put in a foster family. They treated her very badly. She wasn't allowed to call the parents mother and father. She did a lot of housekeeping for them and was rented out to the neighbors.
And then, one summer, she was raped by the nephew of her foster mother. She becomes pregnant out of wedlock. And rather than help her with this pregnancy, they decide to get her declared epileptic and feebleminded, though she was neither, and she shipped off to the colony for epileptics and feebleminded outside of Lynchburg, Virginia. AMY GOODMAN.
And what happened to her there? DAVID BROOKS. So, she gets there just the wrong time. She just passed eugenic sterilization. law, and they want to test it in the courts.
So they seize on Carrie Buck as the perfect plaintiff in this lawsuit. So they decide to make her the first person in Virginia who will be eugenically sterilized. And suddenly, she's in the middle of a case that's headed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
NERMEEN SHAIKH, And, Adam Cohen, could you explain what kind of medical tests were employed to determine that she was a so-called imbecile? Yeah, terrible testing. These were very primitive IQ tests from the time that really didn't test intelligence at all.
One question she was asked was, what do you do when a playmate hits you? And whatever her answer was to that was somehow deemed to be relevant to whether or not she was an idiot. an imbecile or a moron. AMY GOODMAN.
Those were the categories? DAVID BROOKS. Yes, those were the three categories. And this was a formal hierarchy that was established by the psychological profession at the time and was actually in government pamphlets.
So, if you were of a mental age of two or younger, you were able to get a job. younger, you were called an idiot. If you were between 3 and 7, you were called an imbecile.
And if you were 8 and—between 8 and 12, you were called a moron. And Carrie and her mother, who was also the colony, were deemed to be morons. NERMEEN SHAIKH, And so explain what happened to Carrie after that. DAVID BAKER, Yes.
So, they decide to put her in the middle of this test case to see if the Virginia law is constitutional. And they give her a lawyer who's actually not on her side. It's a former chairman of the Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded's own board of directors.
He clearly wants to see her sterilized. He does a terrible job writing short briefs that don't cite the relevant cases. It goes up to the Supreme Court.
And the court rules eight to one that, yes, the Virginia law is constitutional. And, yes, Kerry, who there's nothing wrong with, should be sterilized against her will. And who was responsible for appointing this lawyer to her? It was the colony itself. So they chose one of their friends.
And she truly had no advocate of any kind on her side. Back then, the American Civil Liberties Union, which had just started up, really was kind of pro-eugenics, or at least some of the members around it were. And.
And there were no advocacy groups to look out for people like Harry. So, explain what this term eugenics was, what the whole movement was, and who was a part of it, Adam. Sure.
So, it started in England by—it was—the phrase—the word was coined by Francis Galton, who was a half-cousin of Charles Darwin. So, this was right after Darwin had discovered evolution and survival of the fittest. Galton and his followers said, well, if nature does this naturally, we can speed survival of the fittest along if we decide who gets to— ...reproduce and who doesn't, if we get the fit people to reproduce and we stop the unfit from reproducing. So that was the idea in England.
It comes over to America, and it's greatly adopted by the leaders in America, I mean, the people who supported eugenics included the president of Harvard University. University, the first president of Stanford, Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, and universities across the country taught eugenics. It was very popular in the popular press and in bestselling books.
This was a mass movement. People believed we needed to uplift the race. by changing our gene pool. AMY GOODMAN. Where did Margaret Sanger fit into this picture?
DAVID SANGER. She was a eugenicist. And this is a big controversy, where exactly she fit in. She wasn't a leader in the movement. She was in part— AMY GOODMAN.
And explain who she was. DAVID SANGER. Sure. Margaret Sanger was the founder of Planned Parenthood.
She formed a strategic alliance with the eugenicists, in part to get more support for her birth control movement. But she also believed some of this stuff, and she said some bad things at the time. This is a big controversy, though. And on the right, they use it to taint the whole idea of Planned Parenthood. parenthood, which I think is unfair, because Margaret Sanger was actually in the mainstream of a lot of progressive thought at the time.
AMY GOODMAN. As is evidenced by the Supreme Court decision. Now, explain who was on the Supreme Court, who wrote the decision, what these justices believed themselves. DAVID BROOKS.
Yes, so this was actually a very fancy court at the time. The chief justice was William Howard Taft, who had been president of the United States before he became chief justice, the only president to do that. He had also been a professor at Yale Law School. LEONARD NIMOY.
who was known as the people's attorney before he joined the court, a great progressive hero. He was on the court. And then, of course, Oliver Wendell Holmes, probably the most revered justice in American history. He was a legendary figure.
There have been—there's a movie about him. There was a play on Broadway, cover of Time magazine. He was thought to be the wisest of the judges.
And he wrote this terrible decision. NERMEEN SHAIKH, Well, I want to go to something that he said in the decision. This is Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who wrote in the majority opinion for the court. The nation must sterilize those who, quote, sap the strength of the state to prevent our being swamped with incompetence.
He declared, quote, it's better for all the world if, instead of waiting for—to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. JUAN GONZÁLEZ-Very shocking. Sorry. Yeah.
NERMEEN SHAIKH, So, I wanted to ask you about the fact, when you studied at Harvard Law School, and at the time, this justice was considered a hero of the American legal system. So, could you explain who he was, what kinds of positions he took, and how he was still revered? Sure.
He was a heroic figure. He had actually been a professor at Harvard Law School before he joined the U.S. Supreme Court. And even when I was at Harvard Law School, there were portraits of him everywhere.
He's still a very revered justice. But he came out of a certain tradition. He was a so-called Boston Brahmin.
He was from some of the fanciest families in Boston. The Olivers, the Wendells and the Holmes were all old New England families. He was raised by a father, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., who had been the dean of Harvard Medical School. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. actually coined this phrase, Boston Brahmin.
idea was that these fancy families in Boston were like the Brahmins in India, that they were the highest caste. So he believed this. He wrote about eugenics even before this case came along, wrote about it favorably.
So when the case gets to him, he believes that people like Harry Buck, poor, white, uneducated people, are much lesser than him. So it's very natural for him to say, of course we don't need more people like Harry Buck. We need more people like me and my Boston Brahmin neighbors. So that was the philosophy. And it is amazing that to this day, he still— revered in law schools, because these were some pretty repugnant views.
But one reason that can still be the case is that this case is not talked about. When I took constitutional law at Harvard Law School, it was not taught. The leading American constitutional law treatise, 1,700 pages, that goes into great detail about many, many cases, has half a sentence about Buck v. Bell.
They've just sort of forgotten about it and made it not part of Holmes's legacy. AMY GOODMAN. Where did the Nazis fit into this picture, Adam Cohen?
ADAM COHEN. ADAM COHEN. And the reason for that is that the Nazis actually followed up. us.
We were the leaders in eugenic sterilization. Indiana passed a eugenic sterilization law in 1907, well before the rise of the Nazi Party. They were looking to America.
And one of the villains in my book is a man named Harry Laughlin, who runs the—ran the eugenics record office on Long Island. And he was in correspondence with the Nazi scientists throughout this whole period. They were looking to him for advice about how to set up a eugenic sterilization program.
He wrote with pride in his eugenics magazine that they based the Nazi eugenic law on the law on his American law. Well, can you explain— So, that's key. Absolutely. We're not talking about Americans looking to the Nazis, who supported the Nazis.
We're talking about the Nazis using American precedent. Absolutely. And it's shocking, also, the degree to which there was friendship and cooperation between the American eugenicists and important scientists in America and the Nazis. So, Harry Laughlin, this villain of the book, he actually is given an honorary— degree from the University of Heidelberg in 1936—that's a year after they purged all the Jews from the faculty—he was fine with that, because he was actually a Nazi sympathizer.
AMY GOODMAN. Let's go to a break. And when we come back, we're going to continue on this discussion. We'll talk about the U.S. model being a model for the Nazis, but also then how immigration law fits into this picture and what are the parallels with today.
We're talking with Adam Cohen, journalist and lawyer, previously a member of the New New York Times editorial board and senior writer for Time magazine. His brand-new book is called Imbusels—The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck. Stay with us.