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

When we think of notorious U.S. Supreme Court rulings we normally remember Dred Scott v. Sandford or Plessy v. Ferguson. According to Georgia State College of Law professor Paul Lombardo, we should also recall Buck v. Bell.

In that near-unanimous 1927 decision the Supreme Court ruled that it was constitutional for the state of Virginia to order the sterilization of people with mental disabilities. In words whose consequences have cascaded down through history, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., writing for the majority and referring to the plaintiff ’s family, declared that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Remarkably, unlike other infamous Supreme Court rulings, Buck v. Bell has never been overturned.

In its day, however, Buck v. Bell proved to be a legal shot in the arm for the U.S. eugenics movement. Eugenics, a term meaning “well-born,” had been introduced by the British polymath Francis Galton in the late nineteenth century, and by the twentieth century was generally defined as the science of good breeding. Following Buck v. Bell, and in the name of eugenics, thousands were sterilized in various states around the country by either vasectomy for men or tubal ligation for women. Many of these victims were residents of state institutions but some were referred to state boards of health by physicians. The eugenic sterilization trend began to peter out after World War II, but some state sterilization laws remained on the books into the 1970s (Virginia’s was not repealed until 1974). Eugenic sterilization was still making headlines at the end of the twentieth century when the governors of California and Virginia formally apologized for their states’ involvement in the wave of sterilizations triggered by Buck v. Bell.

Meanwhile, Buck v. Bell inspired eugenicists around the world, notably scientists in Hitler’s Third Reich who proceeded to sterilize some 400,000 Germans before the outbreak of World War II. Some scholars have connected the German sterilization law of 1933 to the campaign in the Third Reich which saw 200,000 men, women, and children murdered in the name of euthanasia, the horrendous medical experiments performed on inmates of the Nazi death camps, and ultimately the Holocaust itself. As one observer at the 1946–47 Nuremberg Trails noted, the extermination of Europe’s Jews, Gypsies, and other groups could be traced to “small beginnings” within the eugenics movement.

Thus, Buck v. Bell has left a sizable imprint on twentieth-century history, and no scholar has examined the case in more depth than Paul Lombardo. For years Lombardo has been researching the story behind the case surrounding Carrie Buck, the Virginia woman whom the state planned to sterilize. (Lombardo even succeeded in interviewing Carrie Buck just before she died in 1983.) When the court ruled against Buck, she underwent the operation in 1927.

The story Lombardo tells in his new book is heart-breaking and riveting. To Lombardo “Carrie Buck was the victim of an elaborate campaign to win judicial approval for eugenic sterilization laws” (xi). Her legal fate was a miscarriage of justice. She, her mother, and daughter, it turns out, were not “imbeciles.” Her own lawyer, himself a sterilization advocate, went through the motions, while the state called one expert witness after another to testify in support of eugenic sterilization. The justices, with one exception, rallied behind Holmes’s brief and emphatic opinion. Even Louis Brandeis, often thought to be a defender of the right to privacy, concurred with Holmes.

Yet Lombardo admits that Buck v. Bell was more than a legal frame-up. Despite growing evidence in the 1920s that like did not necessarily beget like, a wide variety of prominent Americans from all parts of the political spectrum advocated sterilization as a useful measure for reducing rates of poverty, crime, and disability. Even those who were critical of state sterilization laws, like Henry Sigerist, the open admirer of the Soviet...