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2 1 9 The Supreme Court decision in Buck provided a firm precedent and legal foundation for state sterilization laws. Yet arguments against surgical eugenics persisted, and when public debate over the need for a sterilization law in Oklahoma began in 1929, the superintendent of one of the state’s largest asylums spoke up against the measure. Dr. D. W. Griffin of Central Oklahoma State Hospital contended that a sterilization law would easily be open to abuse and that some “defectives” came from the best families in the state, making it impossible to predict who would have problem children.¹ When the law passed in 1931, doctors like Griffin were reluctant to operate without patient and family consent, and no surgeries were done for a year. By 1932, the pressure to put the law into use was growing, and a test case was initiated at Griffin’s Central Oklahoma State Hospital. The subject of the case was Samuel W. Main, a resident there. In some ways Sam Main’s case resembled Carrie Buck’s. Main was found to be “a probably potential parent of socially inadequate offspring” because his pregnant wife and four children lived on public relief. But unlike Buck, Main had a serious mental illness; he had been diagnosed as manic-depressive. Facing the prospect of five children and no source of income, Main and his wife agreed that he should be sterilized.² By the time In re Main was heard in the Oklahoma Supreme Court, courts in Kansas, Utah, Nebraska, Idaho, and North Carolina had relied on the U.S. Supreme Court’s reasoning in Buck, quoting the Holmes opinion in support of their own state laws. The Oklahoma court also followed the Buck precedent, and Main’s surgery was first in a program that was soon extended to other state institutions, where the operation became a condition of release.³ Dissenting voices persisted. The fear of surgery moved one patient to pen an anonymous memoir entitled Behind the Door of Illusion. “Inmate Ward 8” declared that “the spectre of sex sterilization has been thrust over us.” The Skinner v. Oklahoma 16 2 2 0 | Three Generations, No Imbeciles patients at the Oklahoma asylum where he lived were “frightened, wrought up, angry and muttering.” Newspapers, not wishing to offend a “narrow or prudish reader” avoided the subject, leaving patients in ignorance about the true scope of the sterilization program. The nameless author claimed that the sterilization law was designed for two types of patient: those with “social diseases, or abnormally sexed.” The “legal safeguards” in the law were of no value, he said, because none of the patients could afford a lawyer and many were mentally unprepared for legal involvement. The law remained in place despite open disagreement among physicians about what forms of insanity might be inherited. “Inmate Ward 8” also revealed that before the law was enacted, secret castrations had been done, adding to the confusion among patients who did not understand that vasectomy, not castration, was the operation they might face.⁴ The Oklahoma accounts of abuse were not unique. As people were reading Behind the Door of Illusion, an Oregon newspaper reporter was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for her series on the commitment and sterilization of children. Her investigation of over one hundred cases revealed “incompetent testing methods” for choosing surgical cases as well as a generally unfair application of the law at the Oregon State Institution for the Feebleminded .⁵ When some linked Oklahoma sterilizations with events in Germany , a local columnist and eugenics booster did not dispute the characterization but simply noted that “Hitler is right for once.”⁶ Francis Galton himself listed the eradication of crime on his eugenic agenda, and he saw sterilization as one method that advanced the crime- fighting plan. Similarly, U.S. criminologists saw a role for eugenics in sentencing . They argued that judges should be allowed to take hereditary propensities into account to set longer terms of imprisonment.⁷ Prison, like custody in a colony for the feebleminded, segregated criminals from the rest of the population and effectively prevented parenthood. But many saw sterilization as a more permanent and much less expensive eugenic tool. Some of the earliest surgical experiments, such as Lloyd Pilcher’s reform school operations and Harry Sharp’s jailhouse “therapy,” took place in a correctional setting. Crime prevention was a theme that persisted from the time of the earliest experimental surgeries through the date of the Buck decision , and...

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