Eugenics, though a concept present to some degree for a large part of human history, began to gain significant traction among some Western intellectual and political circles in the 19th century. Advocates for eugenics argue that certain genetic traits in humans are more desirable than others, and that those who possess undesirable traits should be sterilized or otherwise removed from the genetic pool. Some eugenicists support the ideology on the basis that certain racial or ethnic groups are superior to others, while others seek to eliminate certain physical or mental disabilities from the population. While Nazi Germany and the Greek city-state of Sparta are probably history’s most famous proponents of eugenics, the practice also has an unfortunate history in the United States. This three-part article series will attempt to briefly overview three different historical outlooks of eugenics in America.
Carrie Buck was on July 3, 1906, in Charlottesville, Virginia to Emma and Frederick Buck. While Frederick had abandoned the family shortly after Carrie’s birth, Emma was admitted to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, an institution that housed Virginians deemed mentally unfit to be a part of society. Carrie Buck initially had a normal childhood under her new foster parents, earning average grades in school, and later, as was relatively common for young girls at the time, removed from school to help with domestic work. However, her life was forever changed at age 17 when she was raped and impregnated by her foster mother’s nephew. To cover up the family’s embarrassment from the incident, her foster parents committed Buck to the same institution that her mother was in, accusing her of feeble-mindedness and promiscuity. Carrie Buck’s newly born daughter, Vivian, was deemed to be similarly mentally feeble, although later in life she actually excelled in school. Shortly after Carrie’s admittance, the Colony’s Board of Directors authorized her sterilization via salpingectomy, an irreversible procedure that removes the patient’s Fallopian tubes.
Seeking to test the legal legitimacy of the practice of forced sterilization through the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924, the Colony’s superintendent, Albert Sidney Priddy (though later succeeded by John Hendren Bell), asked Buck’s state-appointed guardian, Robert G. Shelton, to challenge the order for her sterilization. Shelton appealed the order both to the Amherst County Circuit Court, and the Supreme Court of Virginia. After the order for Carrie’s sterilization was affirmed in each of those lower courts, he appealed one final time to the highest court in the country, the United States Supreme Court, in BUCK v. BELL, Superintendent of State Colony Epileptics and Feeble Minded.
Buck’s attorney, Irving P. Whitehead, argued that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited the Commonwealth of Virginia from performing involuntary sterilization, because a citizen was being deprived of her rights without due process of law. Meanwhile, the Colony’s attorney, A. E. Strode, cited the apparent (though not actual) genetic defects in the Bucks’ bloodline, instead arguing that the sterilization was justified under the premise that removing those defects from the Commonwealth’s collective gene pool was in the best interests of the state. On May 2, 1927, the Court delivered its verdict: ruling 8-1 in favor of Bell. The lone dissenter in the case was Justice Pierce Butler, whose Catholic faith likely influenced his decision. He did not write a dissenting opinion.
From the majority opinion of Buck v. Bell (1927):
It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting 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.
Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
The significance of Buck reaches far beyond the case of Carrie Buck herself. It essentially legitimized all similar eugenic practices in the United States, and is no doubt one of the largest stains on the country’s legacy when it comes to eugenics. In fact, defense teams for Nazi officials during the Nuremburg trials used Buck in their arguments, using the decision to expose a terrible hypocrisy in American criticism of Nazi ideologies during WW2.
While Skinner v. Oklahoma ruled 1942 that criminals could not sterilized as punishment for their crimes, it did not ban the type of state-mandated sterilization that was affirmed by Buck. Forced sterilization of ordinary citizens deemed mentally unfit was still legal in Virginia until 1974, with the last such operation in the country being performed in Oregon in 1981. Today, Buck v. Bell is used as a symbol of the struggle for disability rights in the United States, and demonstrates how disabled Americans were one of the many groups in the country who faced outright discrimination and oppression during this time period.
History for Empathy 