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Imbeciles

The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck

ebook
2 of 2 copies available
2 of 2 copies available
Longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction
One of America’s great miscarriages of justice, the Supreme Court’s infamous 1927 Buck v. Bell ruling made government sterilization of “undesirable” citizens the law of the land

 
In 1927, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling so disturbing, ignorant, and cruel that it stands as one of the great injustices in American history. In Imbeciles, bestselling author Adam Cohen exposes the court’s decision to allow the sterilization of a young woman it wrongly thought to be “feebleminded” and to champion the mass eugenic sterilization of undesirable citizens for the greater good of the country. The 8–1 ruling was signed by some of the most revered figures in American law—including Chief Justice William Howard Taft, a former U.S. president; and Louis Brandeis, a progressive icon. Oliver Wendell Holmes, considered by many the greatest Supreme Court justice in history, wrote the majority opinion, including the court’s famous declaration “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Imbeciles
is the shocking story of Buck v. Bell, a legal case that challenges our faith in American justice. A gripping courtroom drama, it pits a helpless young woman against powerful scientists, lawyers, and judges who believed that eugenic measures were necessary to save the nation from being “swamped with incompetence.”  At the center was Carrie Buck, who was born into a poor family in Charlottesville, Virginia, and taken in by a foster family, until she became pregnant out of wedlock. She was then declared “feebleminded” and shipped off to the Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded.

Buck v. Bell
unfolded against the backdrop of a nation in the thrall of eugenics, which many Americans thought would uplift the human race. Congress embraced this fervor, enacting the first laws designed to prevent immigration by Italians, Jews, and other groups charged with being genetically inferior. 
Cohen shows how Buck arrived at the colony at just the wrong time, when influential scientists and politicians were looking for a “test case” to determine whether Virginia’s new eugenic sterilization law could withstand a legal challenge. A cabal of powerful men lined up against her, and no one stood up for her—not even her lawyer, who, it is now clear, was in collusion with the men who wanted her sterilized.
In the end, Buck’s case was heard by the Supreme Court, the institution established by the founders to ensure that justice would prevail. The court could have seen through the false claim that Buck was a threat to the gene pool, or it could have found that forced sterilization was a violation of her rights. Instead, Holmes, a scion of several prominent Boston Brahmin families, who was raised to believe in the superiority of his own bloodlines, wrote a vicious, haunting decision upholding Buck’s sterilization and imploring the nation to sterilize many more.
Holmes got his wish, and before the madness ended some sixty to seventy thousand Americans were sterilized. Cohen overturns cherished myths and demolishes lauded figures in relentless pursuit of the truth. With the intellectual force of a legal brief and the passion of a front-page exposé, Imbeciles is an ardent indictment of our champions of justice and our optimistic faith in progress, as well as a triumph of American legal and social history.
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  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from March 14, 2016
      In this detailed and riveting study, Cohen (Nothing to Fear) captures the obsession with eugenics in 1920s America, especially as that foment is illustrated in the case of Carrie Buck, a young girl consigned to be sterilized by Virginia's Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. Cohen follows the traumas of Buck's life, including her foster childhood with the Dobbs family, who treated her more as slave than daughter; her rape byher foster mother's nephew; and her foster family committing her to the colony. Along the way, readers meet several players in Carrie's poignant case, including Harry Laughlin, the manager of the Eugenics Record Office and leading expert in the cause of eugenic sterilization; Aubrey Strode, the trial lawyer representing the state hospital's interests against Carrie; and Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court justice notable for a lack of interest in facts, whose philosophy "left scant room for the disadvantaged and the weak." In the midst of the pro-eugenics era, the court upheld Carrie's sterilization, giving little thought to the woman who was a dedicated worker, devoted to family, and possessed of a quiet intelligence. Cohen's outstanding narrative stands as an exposé of a nearly forgotten chapter in American history. Agent: Kris Dahl, ICM.

    • Kirkus

      Starred review from November 15, 2015
      Attorney, journalist, and bestselling author Cohen (Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America, 2009, etc.) revisits an ugly chapter in American history: the 1920s mania for eugenics. Among "the most brutal aphorisms in American jurisprudence," Oliver Wendell Holmes' 1927 pronouncement in Buck v. Bell--"Three generations of imbeciles are enough"--marked the high point of a shameful enthusiasm among the social elite for ridding the species of so-called mental defectives. With the nation anxious about changes wrought by unprecedented immigration, industrialization, and urbanization, and with marriage laws ineffective and segregation and warehousing of defectives too expensive and castration too barbaric, eugenics enthusiasts turned to mass sterilization as the solution to prevent the feebleminded from reproducing. The movement attracted its share of crackpots, racists, and conservatives intent on preserving an Anglo-Saxon heritage, but a shocking gallery of the very best people--professionals, intellectuals, feminists, and progressives--formed the vanguard. From this class came the principal players in Carrie Buck's case: the physician/supervisor of Virginia's Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded, the drafter of the state's sterilization law who defended it in the Supreme Court, the national scientific expert who affirmed its utility, and the celebrated justice who upheld its constitutionality. The stories of these four men and that of Carrie herself--a teenage girl neither mentally nor morally deficient, as her caretakers charged, and never informed of the purpose and effect the operation Virginia demanded--form the spine of Cohen's compelling narrative. Through them, he also tells a larger story of the weak science underlying the eugenics cause and the outrageous betrayal of the defenseless by some of the country's best minds. Carrie Buck died in 1983. The 8-1 decision, joined by the likes of Chief Justice William Howard Taft and Louis Brandeis, has never been overruled. A shocking tale about science and law gone horribly wrong, an almost forgotten case that deserves to be ranked with Dred Scott, Plessy, and Korematsu as among the Supreme Court's worst decisions.

      COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Booklist

      Starred review from December 15, 2015
      In 1927, the Supreme Court upheld eugenic sterilization in Buck v. Bell, which allowed the state of Virginia to sterilize a young woman named Carrie Buck. Buck, to use the jargon of the time, was labeled feebleminded. As Cohen (Nothing to Fear, 2009) notes in this searing study, some of the most distinguished men in the annals of American law sealed Carrie Buck's tragic fate, including chief justice and former president William Howard Taft, the progressive Louis Brandeis, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., considered one of our greatest legal minds. Cohen describes the massive popularity of the eugenics movement, which, he notes, permeated the popular culture from best-selling books to mass-market magazines. The driving force behind its popularitythe collective fears of native-born, white, middle-class Protestants about a changing Americaare as relevant today as then. As far as Buck herself is concerned, Cohen points out that she was of perfectly normal intelligence and that rather than being of loose morals she was, in fact, a victim of rape. In this important book, Cohen not only illuminates a shameful moment in American history when the nation's most respected professionsmedicine, academia, law, and the judiciaryfailed to protect one of the most vulnerable members of society, he also tracks the landmark case's repercussions up to the present.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

    • Library Journal

      October 15, 2015

      In 1927, when the eugenics movement was sweeping the country, the Supreme Court allowed the superintendent of the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded to sterilize a young woman named Carrie Buck, deemed to be an "imbecile." Among the eight justices voting in the majority in Buck v. Bell were legal luminaries Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Shockingly, Buck v. Bell has never been overturned. Cohen (Nothing To Fear), a former member of the New York Times editorial board, can clarify the legal issues here as a graduate of Harvard Law School.

      Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Library Journal

      December 1, 2015

      The Supreme Court case of Buck v. Bell (1927) made forced sterilization legal in the United States and resulted in the sterilization of 70,000 Americans. Cohen (former senior writer, Time Magazine; Nothing To Fear) examines the eugenics movement that led to the court case and that was used as a model for eugenics in Nazi Germany. In the book's introduction, the author describes 1920s America as "caught in a mania to use newly discovered scientific laws of heredity to perfect humanity." The story of Carrie Buck, who became pregnant after being raped by an acquaintance and was then wrongly institutionalized by the state of Virginia as feebleminded, illustrates society's treatment of the poor, of minorities and immigrants, and other populations considered "undesirable." Throughout the book, the author says that the legal system failed to act in Buck's best interests and consistently ignored her human rights. VERDICT This thought-provoking work exposes a dark chapter of American legal history but is not for the casual reader. Law students, those studying the health professions, and students of social history should read. Recommended for academic, health sciences, and law libraries. [See Prepub Alert, 9/28/15.]--Becky Kennedy, Atlanta-Fulton P.L.

      Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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Languages

  • English

Levels

  • ATOS Level:10.2
  • Lexile® Measure:1270
  • Interest Level:9-12(UG)
  • Text Difficulty:9-12

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