I’ve been reading the Stephen Jay Gould omnibus, The Richness of Life, and want to share this from one of his essays, “Carrie Buck’s Daughter.” In 1927, the Supreme Court declared compulsory sterility fine and dandy when Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in Buck v Bell, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Part of the eugenics craze of the late 19th & early 20th century, forced sterilizations for “hereditary defects” (including alcoholism, blindness, and deafness) were so popular that more than 30 states had them on the books by the 1930s. These laws were much challenged, and most states didn’t enforce them, but California did, performing about half the total 20,000 forced sterilizations that occurred in the US by 1935. Infamously, the Nazis based some of their thinking and laws on US precedents. Virginia was another state that was zealous in applying sterilization (care to bet on the color of the majority of the victims?) The 1927 case concerned Carrie Buck, who was 21 at the time and incarcerated in the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded. She was supposedly mentally defective. Evidence was presented that her mother, Emma, was likewise mentally defective; there was also evidence that Carrie’s daughter Vivian was defective, hence Holmes’ “three generations.” Mental deficiency was heredity according to vulgar Darwinism (as Gould points out elsewhere, “social Darwinism” should really be named after Herbert Spencer). Vivian had been examined at six-months, a tad early to be sterilized even by Virginia’s standards, but certainly early enough for the alleged expert, a Red Cross social worker, to declare that she wasn’t “quite normal.” By gawd, three generations were enough! The old men of the Court ruled, and Buck was sterilized (so was her sister, but under cover of an appendicitis).

Vivian died at the age of 8. But in 1980, while Carrie Buck was still alive, the records were brought back to light. Turned out that Carrie Buck was in the Colony because she’d gotten pregnant (raped by a relative of her foster family) and her foster family wanted her out of sight. They dumped her there to get rid of the embarrassment and to cover up the crime. There was no evidence of mental impairment anywhere in the three generations, beyond assumption, pseudo-science, and notoriously flawed IQ tests. Vivian, in the few years of schooling she had, was a perfectly average little kid. The case was really about poverty and sexuality; add “race” to the mix, and we hear its echoes in debates of intelligence, IQ, bell curves, the “cultures” and “pathologies” of poverty, and so on to this day.

Damn, but Gould’s voice is sorely missed in our pestilentially reactionary age.