Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell

Notes

2 9 5 prologue. The Expert Witness 1. Wilhelm to Priddy, October 15, 1924, Colony File no. 1392. Each inmate was assigned a number at admission to the Colony; case files containing all notes on admission and subsequent progress reports, medical notes, and correspondence are collected under that number. 2. Strode to Estabrook, November 6, 1924, Arthur H. Estabrook Papers, University at Albany, Albany, New York; hereafter AHE Papers. 3. Strode to Estabrook, October 10, 1924, AHE Papers. 4. Jessie Estabrook to A. H. Estabrook, October 23, 1924, AHE Papers. 5. Arthur Estabrook to Aubrey Strode, November 8, 1924; and Aubrey Strode to Arthur Estabrook, November 6, 1924, AHE Papers. 6. Trial transcript, Buck v. Priddy, 82–93. 7. Arthur H. Estabrook and Charles B. Davenport, The Nam Family: A Study in Cacogenics, Eugenics Record Office Memoir no. 2 (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Eugenics Record Office, 1912) 1. 8. Charles L. Brace, “Pauperism,” North American Review, vol. 120, April 1875, 315– 34, quotation at 321. 9. Arthur H. Estabrook, The Jukes in 1915 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1916) iii, 78. 10. Estabrook, Jukes, 56–58, 85. 11. Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927) at 207. chapter 1. Problem Families 1. Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (London: Macmillan , 1883) 24n11. 2. Nicholas Wright Gillham, A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics (New York: Oxford, 2001) 13. 3. Francis Galton, “Studies in Eugenics,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 11, July 1905, 11–25, quotation at 25. 4. Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985) 4, 85. n o t e s 5. Karl Pearson, The Life, Letters, and Labours of Francis Galton, vol. 3a (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1930) 411–25. 6. Francis Galton, Memories of My Life (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1909) 311, 323. 7. Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years’ Work among Them (New York: Wynkoop and Hallenbeck, 1872) 42–43; and Samuel Gridley Howe, quoted in Penny L. Richards, “Beside Her Sat Her Idiot Child: Families and Developmental Disabilities in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” in Mental Retardation in America: A Historical Reader, ed. Steven Noll and James W. Trent Jr. (New York: New York University Press, 2004) 65–84, quotation at 70. On degeneracy generally, see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 8. Exodus 34:6–7; Deuteronomy 5:9. 9. Nicole Hahn Rafter, Creating Born Criminals (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1997) 36–37. 10. “Hereditary Crime,” Scientific American, vol. 32, January 9, 1875, 18. 11. “The Generation of the Wicked,” Scientific American, vol. 32, February 27, 1875, 128. 12. “Medical Notes,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, vol. 42, January 28, 1875, 112–13, quoting the American Medical Weekly. 13. Oliver Wendell Holmes [Sr.], “Crime and Automatism,” Atlantic Monthly, vol. 35, April 1875, 466–81, quotation at 475–76. Writers in other popular journals echoed Margaret’s story; see, for example, Charles L. Brace, “Pauperism,” North American Review , vol. 120, April 1875, 315–34. 14. Richard Dugdale, The Jukes: A Study of Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity, 4th ed. (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1884) 8, 13, 15, 27, 70. Both Dugdale and Holmes Sr. would later be consulted for books like T. W. Shannon, Eugenics (Marietta, OH: S. A. Mullikin Co., 1916) 5. 15. An extended account of the environmental emphasis of the Jukes study may be found in Elof Axel Carlson, The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2001). 16. Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty, 43. 17. J. H. Kellogg, Plain Facts for Old and Young (Burlington, IA: Segner and Condit, 1884) 109–11. 18. Rev. Oscar C. McCulloch, “The Tribe of Ishmael: A Study in Social Degradation ,” in Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, ed. Isabel C. Barrows (Boston: George Ellis, 1888) 154–59. 19. Frank W. Blackmar, “The Smoky Pilgrims,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 2, January 1897, 485–500; and Florence H. Danielson and Charles B. Davenport, The Hill Folk: Report on a Rural Community of Hereditary Defectives, Eugenics Record Office Memoir no. 1 (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Eugenics Record Office, 1912). Several of the earliest studies were collected in a single volume by Nicole...