Buck v. Bell
Carrie Buck's Story
Carrie Buck was seventeen years old in 1924, when she was sent to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, after giving birth to an illegitimate daughter, Vivian. Carrie’s mother, Emma, had already been committed to the Colony. A few months after Vivian’s birth, Carrie was declared feebleminded, and dispatched to the Colony. Her arrival coincided with the passage of Virginia’s first sterilization law. Her 1927 challenge to that law, orchestrated by those who wrote it and wished it to gain the approval of the highest court in the land, set eugenic sterilization forever into American history.
The Trial
Carrie Buck's challenge to the Virginia law was conducted by her lawyer, Irving Whitehead, a friend of Strode's and sterilization supporter. Strode himself defended the Colony.
“There is a look about it (the child, Vivian Buck) that is not quite normal, but just what it is, I can’t tell.”
- Caroline Wilhelm, social worker who first committed Carrie Buck to the Colony, testifying in Buck v. Bell
"These people belong to the shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of antisocial whites of the South."
- Albert Priddy, testifying in Buck v. Bell
"The family history record and the individual case histories…demonstrate the hereditary nature of the feeblemindedness and moral delinquency described in Carrie Buck. She is therefore a probable potential parent of socially inadequate or defective offspring…The administrative and institutional forces in any state…require authority to segregate or to sterilize inadequate individuals, under proper legal regulations, if the State is to prevent race degeneracy."
- Harry Laughlin, in a deposition given at Buck v. Bell trial
“I have never worked the law [Mendel's Law of Heredity] out, but it seems from the history of the cases I have had that they work out pretty much that way, but I have no accurate knowledge of it because inheritance is such a complicated thing that unless a man devotes himself particularly to it…”
- Joseph DeJarnette, testifying in Buck v. Bell
“They come there, having had venereal diseases and having had children, and, brother, worse than all, white women come there having negro children.”
- Joseph DeJarnette, testifying in Buck v. Bell
"Whitehead: Doctor, what is, in your opinion as a physician and from your experience as superintendent of that hospital, what in your opinion is the greatest cause of insanity?
DeJarnette: Inheritance.
Whitehead: Have you ever had occasion to trace back along the lines of heredity to find out what was the beginning of the thing?
DeJarnette: No, sir, Adam, I think, was a little off himself on some things.”
- Court records of testimony in Buck v. Bell, reprinted in Three Generations, No Imbeciles
“Estabrook: A feebleminded person is a person who is so weak mentally that he or she is unable to maintain himself or herself in the ordinary community at large.
Strode: Now, what is a socially inadequate person?
Estabrook: That is anybody who by reason of any sort of defect or condition is unable to maintain themselves according to the accepted rules of society.”
“Whitehead: Judging by the fact that she has already given birth to an illegitimate child, and has an immoral tendency, is it your opinion that by sterilization she would be made less of a liability and more of an asset to the State?
Wilhelm: I think it would at least prevent propagation of her kind.”
- Court records of testimony in Buck v. Bell, reprinted in Three Generations, No Imbeciles
The Judgment
The case reached the Supreme Court, ensuring that a ruling would not only unequivocally establish the law's constitutionality but set a precedent for the entire nation.
"Doesn't this squashy sentimentality of a big minority of our people about human life make you puke? Who believe there is an upward and onward – who talk of uplift – who think that something in particular has happened and that the universe is no longer predatory. Oh, bring me a basin." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing to John Wigmore in 1910
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote the opinion of the court.
"An Act of Virginia, approved March 20, 1924, recites that the health of the patient and the welfare of society may be promoted in certain cases by the sterilization of mental defectives, under careful safeguard, &c.; that the sterilization may be effected in males by vasectomy and in females by salpingectomy, without serious pain or substantial danger to life; that the Commonwealth is supporting in various institutions many defective persons who, if now discharged, would become [p206] a menace, but, if incapable of procreating, might be discharged with safety and become self-supporting with benefit to themselves and to society, and that experience has shown that heredity plays an important part in the transmission of insanity, imbecility, &c…
We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.
Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes." - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., writing the opinion for Buck v. Bell
"Doesn't this squashy sentimentality of a big minority of our people about human life make you puke? Who believe there is an upward and onward – who talk of uplift – who think that something in particular has happened and that the universe is no longer predatory. Oh, bring me a basin." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing to John Wigmore in 1910
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote the opinion of the court.
"An Act of Virginia, approved March 20, 1924, recites that the health of the patient and the welfare of society may be promoted in certain cases by the sterilization of mental defectives, under careful safeguard, &c.; that the sterilization may be effected in males by vasectomy and in females by salpingectomy, without serious pain or substantial danger to life; that the Commonwealth is supporting in various institutions many defective persons who, if now discharged, would become [p206] a menace, but, if incapable of procreating, might be discharged with safety and become self-supporting with benefit to themselves and to society, and that experience has shown that heredity plays an important part in the transmission of insanity, imbecility, &c…
We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.
Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes." - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., writing the opinion for Buck v. Bell