Virginia Ran A Secret Eugenics Program That Didn’t End Until 1979
The story of Carrie Buck, a woman who was sterilized after being sexually assaulted, underscores the draconian nature of the legislation
Eugenics was popular in the United States long before Nazis like Dr. Josef Mengele used it as a pretext to conduct crimes against humanity and to promote ‘racial purity.’ In the state of Virginia, eugenics laws persisted well into the later part of the 20th century — sterilization was legal there until 1979 to keep those deemed mentally unfit from procreating and to prevent “miscegenation,” that is, interracial couples producing offspring.
The victims of Virginia’s draconian sterilization laws number at around 8,000 individuals, and they include a woman named Carrie Buck who was declared “feebleminded” after she was raped and her foster family had her committed.
Along with sterilization, eugenicists promoted the “science of racial purity” by arguing that interracial marriage harmed America’s purity. On the same day that Virginia passed the law that sterilized Buck, they also passed the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which made it a crime for whites to marry non-whites. That law would not be overturned until Loving v. Virginia in 1967.
Eugenics Was Marketed As A Science That Could Improve Society
At the beginning of the 20th century, eugenics was seen by some as a cutting-edge science that could improve society. The term was coined in 1883 by Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, and it held the promise of giving people the power to improve the human race. Galton theorized two ways that eugenics could help society, which he called “positive” and “negative” eugenics.
Positive eugenics promoted the use of education, tax incentives, and payments for healthy children to encourage the “right” people to procreate. In this scheme, a large family of the “right” kind of people would have lower taxes, for example. Education was supposed to convince “fit” people to procreate for the common good, while tax credits and bonus payments for children were also intended to encourage childbirth. But there was also a darker side to the eugenics movement that encouraged states to pass laws that would stop “unfit” people from procreating.
Eugenicists Targeted Interracial Marriages And People Defined As “Feebleminded”
Negative eugenics sought to actively discourage “unfit” people from procreating. Some of the methods were relatively tame, such as encouraging the “unfit” to voluntarily not have children, but eugenicists also encouraged the government to pass laws to restrict which Americans could procreate. Many miscegenation laws, designed to stop interracial marriages, were passed using the (completely bunk) “scientific” argument that “race mixing” degenerated the country’s genetic pool.
Arguments against interracial marriage existed long before the rise of eugenics, as the 1864 cartoon arguing that Lincoln’s policies would create a “miscegenation ball” (pictured above) shows. But eugenics provided a “scientific” argument to ban interracial marriage. In 1913, 29 states had laws forbidding interracial marriages, and 22 of them penalized those unions with fines or prison terms.
Sterilization Laws Claimed The “Feebleminded” Were A Drain On Society
In the early 20th century, “feebleminded” was a broad category that included all sorts of people. It was defined as anyone who demonstrated abnormal behavior or very low scores on IQ tests, and feeblemindedness was linked to promiscuity, criminality, and social dependency. Negative eugenics promised a solution to these alleged social problems by ensuring that the feebleminded could not reproduce. The argument claimed that science could provide social and economic benefits to society by identifying the “unfit” and stopping them from reproducing.
In 1914, eugenicist Harry Laughlin, who was head of the Eugenics Record Office, proposed a “eugenical sterilization law” that would stop the feebleminded from reproducing. Laughlin defined the category incredibly broadly, proclaiming its contents as “socially inadequate” people who were “maintained wholly or in part by public expense.” Laughlin included the feebleminded in this category, along with the “insane, criminalistic, epileptic, inebriate, diseased, blind, deaf, deformed, and dependent.” Laughlin argued that these conditions were somehow genetic, and the only way to protect the public interest was sterilization.
Laughlin also targeted “orphans, ne’er-do-wells, tramps, the homeless, and paupers,” claiming that they were corrupted and should not be allowed to procreate.
The Story Of A “Feebleminded Tavern Girl” Convinced Americans To Pass Sterilization Laws
Eugenicists used Martin Kallikak as an example of the dangers of feebleminded people in the gene pool. Allegedly, Kallikak was an American Revolutionary War soldier who had children with two women: one was an upstanding Quaker woman who had seven “worthy children.” According to The Kallikak Family, a 1912 book written by eugenicist Henry Herbert Goddard, these descendants became “respectable citizens, men and women prominent in every phase of life.”
But Kallikak also had children with a “feebleminded tavern girl.” Their son became known as “Old Horror” and went on to have 10 children, creating a disreputable ancestral line. They were “the lowest types of human beings,” proving that even one child born by a “feeble-minded” mother could destroy America’s gene pool and cost society through the burden of “unfit” people.
Virginia Passed A 1924 Law Legalizing The Sterilization Of Committed People To Protect The “Purity” Of The “American Race”
In March of 1924, Virginia passed a law known as the “Eugenical Sterilization Act.” The act said that individuals confined to state institutions could be sterilized, specifically naming those “afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity that are recurrent, idiocy, imbecility, feeble-mindedness or epilepsy.” The law was intended to protect the purity of the “American race” — short-hand for Anglo-Saxon whites — from the dangers of genetic degeneration.
On the same day, Virginia passed the “Racial Integrity Act.” In tandem, these two acts, which targeted the “feeble-minded” and banned whites from marrying non-whites, were both supported by “scientific” arguments based on eugenics. Both laws used pseudo-science to attack the rights of marginalized groups.
Later that year, Virginia sterilized Carrie Buck, a woman who had been institutionalized at the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. Buck’s case would go all the way to the Supreme Court.
A Eugenicist Said Carrie Buck Was “Ignorant” And “Worthless” So Virginia Could Sterilize Her
The Supreme Court case that determined whether Virginia’s sterilization law was legal centered on one woman: Carrie Buck. Buck had been committed in the Lynchburg Colony, which — along with Virginia’s other state institutions like the Southwestern Lunatic Asylum — began to immediately sterilize people once the law was passed in 1924.
Eugenicist Harry Laughlin prepared a report on Buck’s genetic fitness for the courts trying to determine if the state’s actions were legal. Laughlin proclaimed that Buck had “mental defectiveness… with a mental age of 9 years.” She also had “record during life of immorality, prostitution, and untruthfulness.” She had an illegitimate child who was also declared a “mental defective” at only six months of age.
Laughlin was clear that Buck had no redeeming qualities. “This girl comes from a shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of people,” he concluded. According to this line of thinking, Virginia was right to sterilize her in 1924, because Buck was “a potential parent of socially inadequate or defective offspring.” The Supreme Court considered Laughlin’s report when they decided the case of Buck v. Bell in 1927.
Carrie Buck Was Assaulted And Then Declared “Feebleminded” Because She Was “Immoral”
The truth about Carrie Buck was very different from Laughlin’s proclamation. In fact, Laughlin never even met Buck. She had been born to a woman named Emma Buck who was unable to support her child and placed Carrie in foster care. Carrie grew up with her foster family, the Dobbs, living a very normal life: she attended school, did chores, and sang in the church choir. When she was 16, a nephew of the Dobbs raped Carrie, and she got pregnant.
This rape gave Harry Laughlin an excuse to call Carrie a “prostitute” who led an immoral life and had an “illegitimate child.”
Rather than deal with an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, the Dobbs had Carrie committed, claiming that she was “feebleminded.” In truth, Carrie was poor, pregnant, and had only a sixth-grade education, which fit the stereotypes about shiftless youth. The institution claimed that Carrie, her mother, and her six-month-old daughter were all “feebleminded,” and thus a burden to the state. The “diagnosis” was simply an excuse to discard a young woman as a social burden because her life did not fit with the picture of American Protestant moral values.
In A Shocking Twist, The Supreme Court Decided Buck Was A Menace To Society
The case of Buck v. Bell came before the Supreme Court in 1927. The justices read the trial transcripts from the original trial at the state level and the appeals court trial. Based only on these sources, without meeting Buck herself, the justices voted 8–1 to uphold Buck’s sterilization. The case came down to the state’s right to take away a citizen’s ability to procreate.
Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the majority opinion. He declared that “Carrie Buck is a feeble minded white woman” and “the daughter of a feeble minded mother… and the mother of an illegitimate feeble minded child.” The Virginia state law, according to Holmes, argued that the “welfare of society” allowed the state to sterilize “defective persons who, if now discharged, would become a menace.”
In language that sounded like a recruitment poster for World War I, Holmes argued that people like Buck should be sterilized against their will for the public good. He made this explicit when he stated, “It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for the imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” Speaking directly about Buck, Holmes said, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Legal Sterilizations Continued Into The 1970s, And The Supreme Court Ruling Still Stands
The Supreme Court case determined that it was legal for the state to sterilize people against their will. In Virginia, nearly 8,000 people were sterilized between 1924 and 1979. About half were deemed “mentally ill,” while the other half were called “mentally deficient.” The state law that allowed sterilization at institutions remained in place until 1979, in spite of protests in the 1970s. Across America, more than 60,000 people were sterilized by the government.
Carrie Buck’s own sister was sterilized without her knowledge in 1928. Virginia officials told her that the operation would remove her appendix. She did not realized until 1980 that she had been sterilized against her will. “I broke down and cried,” Carrie’s sister said. “My husband and me wanted children desperately. We were crazy about them. I never knew what they’d done to me.” As for Carrie, she was paroled from the institution and lived until 1983.
The Supreme Court ruling in Buck v. Bell has never been overturned.
