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

4 Studying Sterilization

4 2 Even before the Eugenics Record Office began its work, Charles Davenport was involved with the American Breeders Association Committee on Eugenics, and he used that forum to advocate further research to advance the new field.¹ He hoped to deter the potential “volunteer army of Utopians, freelovers, muddy thinkers” and the like who had already tried to claim the “banner of Eugenics.” Insisting on “hard headed, critical and practical study,” he urged readers to contribute pedigree charts showing unusual familial conditions and inherited diseases.² ABA President Bleecker Van Wagenen chaired the Committee on Eugenics . He met Davenport during philanthropic work at the New Jersey Village of Epileptics. The committee soon expanded to include eugenic activists H. H. Goddard and Harry Laughlin. Davenport told his colleagues that six hundred collected pedigrees provided plenty of evidence that feebleminded “defectives”should“berestrainedfrompassingontheircondition.”³Laughlin later made the implication of Davenport’s statement concrete, proposing the appointment of a committee to study the results of the “experiment in sterilization” made by the few states who had initiated legislation in that area.⁴ Van Wagenen’s group began compiling data on sterilization in 1911. Within three years the committee would issue the most thorough study of sterilization ever done in America, and it would form the basis for an extensive treatise on that subject by Harry Laughlin. The report would also provide the road map for states that wished to establish the constitutionality of eugenical sterilization. Van Wagenen summarized the preliminary sterilization study in a paper presented to a meeting of the First International Congress of Eugenics in London in 1912. The group he chaired included three physicians and over a dozen notable consultants such as geneticist Raymond Pearl and anatomist Lewellys Barker, both of Johns Hopkins University; Nobel laureate Studying Sterilization 4 Studying Sterilization | 4 3 surgeon Alexis Carrel of the Rockefeller Institute; Yale economist Irving Fisher; and Henry Goddard.⁵ At the meeting, Van Wagenen declared that people of “defective inheritance ” should be “eliminated from the human stock.” Included among the “socially unfit” were the feebleminded, paupers, criminals, epileptics, the insane, the congenitally weak, people predisposed to specific diseases, the deformed, the blind, and the deaf. U.S. Census data from previous decades demonstrated that the number of people in institutions—such as prisons, hospitals, and asylums—totaled over 630,000 and was growing as a percentage of the population. Another three million people of “inferior blood” were not yet in institutions, and seven million others—10 percent of the total population —were carriers of hereditary maladies. All told, this mass of problematic heredity was “totally unfitted to become parents of useful citizens.”⁶ The remedies Van Wagenen proposed to prevent proliferation of such hereditary “defectives” ranged from the laissez-faire approach of doing nothing to segregation for life to prevent childbirth. Other options included restrictive marriage laws, euthanasia, environmental betterment, and eugenics education. Sterilization, the committee’s focal point, was another possible remedy. Van Wagenen gave a short history of state sterilization laws accompanied by a brief legal commentary on the constitutional feasibility of a new law. Several case studies filled out the report, complete with pedigree charts of families related to criminals and defectives who had been sterilized in Indiana and New Jersey.⁷ Van Wagenen admitted that public support for sterilization was still undeveloped and that legal change to date had been the result of a small and “energetic group of enthusiasts” whose efforts had amounted to a “hobby.”⁸ He concluded by predicting that the sterilization laws in the United States would have to face legal challenges in the courts before many more compulsory operations were performed. Van Wagenen suggested that much more research was needed to determine the physical and psychological results that followed an operation. He believed that existing sterilization laws had been adopted prematurely and argued for further research, but no immediate action.⁹ The fuzziness of eugenic pronouncements led commentators who heard about Van Wagenen’s 1912 London presentation to remark on the number of “bright people” who “vied with each other to show the world how little is known” about sterilization.¹⁰ 4 4 | Three Generations, No Imbeciles Charles Davenport also attended the London meeting, and he presented a summary of state laws that restricted marriage on a variety of grounds, including mental or physical disability. Critical of much of the legislation, Davenport declared that the “only way to prevent the reproduction of the...