Content note: this page quotes the period's clinical labels, such as "feeble-minded," "defectives" and "imbeciles," because they are the evidence. They are not this site's words for anyone. It also describes forced sterilization.
What it said
The friendly face of American eugenics was a county fair. Beginning around 1908, "Better Baby" contests at state fairs in places like Louisiana and Iowa examined infants and scored them on cards modeled on livestock judging, and newspapers printed the numbers. The Sunday Oregonian of 5 October 1913 ran a page headed Oregon babies make near-perfect scores at county eugenic tests
.
In 1920 the idea grew from babies to whole households. At the Kansas Free Fair in Topeka, Mary T. Watts and Florence Brown Sherbon held the first Fitter Families contest. Families took medical and intelligence tests and handed in family histories. Winners got a medal bearing a line from a psalm: Yea, I have a goodly heritage
. A photograph from the Kansas fair shows a "Eugenics Building" and a sign for a "Governor's Trophy" for the "Fittest Family."
Behind the ribbons was a bill. At the 1926 Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia, an American Eugenics Society exhibit used flashing lights:
Every 15 seconds $100 of your money goes for the care of persons with bad heredity such as the insane, feeble-minded, criminals and other defectives.
The movement also went to the movies. The Black Stork played in 1917 with the Chicago surgeon Harry J. Haiselden in one of the leading roles. An advertisement for its run at the Oliver Theater promised Every Child has a Right to be Well Born
and described the doctor as one who refuses to operate on hopelessly deformed, defective infants at their birth
.
Who made it and why
None of this was anonymous. The Eugenics Record Office opened at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, in 1910, with Charles Davenport in charge and Harry H. Laughlin as superintendent, and trained field workers to collect family pedigrees. The American Eugenics Society later sponsored the Fitter Families contests in several states. In Pasadena, the private Human Betterment Foundation published pamphlets. State fair boards, health departments, legislatures and courts did the rest.
Indiana passed the first state sterilization law in 1907. About thirty states followed over the next three decades. In 1922 Laughlin published Eugenical Sterilization in the United States with a "model eugenical sterilization law" for legislators to adopt. Virginia's 1924 statute drew on it.
The appeal crossed party lines. The Buck majority included Chief Justice William Howard Taft, a former Republican president, and Justice Louis Brandeis, a leading progressive. Supporters described the program as applied science and public health: fewer people in institutions, less inherited disease, healthier children.
What it got right or wrong
Healthy babies are a good thing, and a fair that weighs infants and checks their eyes is not a crime. The wrong started when a score card at a fair became the public face of a policy of cutting people's bodies without their consent.
The test case shows how thin the science was. Carrie Buck was held at the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, where she was photographed with her mother, Emma, in November 1924. Laughlin sent the trial a written deposition about her family without ever examining her. According to Paul Lombardo's history of the case, he described them as belonging to the shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South
. On 2 May 1927 the Supreme Court upheld the Virginia law, 8 to 1. Holmes wrote for the majority:
Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
In the same opinion he wrote that the state could keep those who already sap the strength of the State
from having children in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence
, and he called sterilization one of the lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned
. Carrie Buck was sterilized that October. Her daughter Vivian, offered to the Court as the third generation, made her school's honor roll before she died at eight. The label was false in the one case the country's highest court examined.
The selling language hid what was done. A 1938 Human Betterment Foundation pamphlet reported that California institutions had sterilized nearly 12,000 insane and feebleminded patients
and assured readers the operation merely cuts and seals the tubes
. "Merely," next to an irreversible operation on a confined patient, is the tell. The $100-every-15-seconds sign has the same flaw: it never compared the figure with any other public cost or showed how much of it heredity explained.
In all, more than 60,000 people were sterilized under American state laws, most of them before the 1970s.
From a fairground to the operating table
This is the clearest case on the site of an idea moving from a fairground to the power to operate on a citizen. The fair contests did not decide who was sterilized; the record shows institutions, boards and courts made those orders. But the contests and exhibits made the policy look like common sense, and the citizens the laws reached were mostly poor people already confined in state institutions, with the least power to refuse.
Bodily integrity is the first liberty. A due-process clause that lets a state cut a woman because a man who never met her called her family worthless protects very little. The libertarian reading here is not a stretch: the state took a choice that belonged to the person, and the courts let it.
Dissent existed. Justice Pierce Butler was the lone vote against the majority in Buck. The Catholic Church condemned eugenic sterilization in the 1930 encyclical Casti connubii. The Human Betterment Foundation's answer was a sneer: its 1938 pamphlet compared the operation favorably with the castration it said Roman Catholics
once practiced for choir voices.
In 1942, Skinner v. Oklahoma struck down Oklahoma's sterilization of certain criminals as punishment. The Court did not overrule Buck, and it never has.
Its legacy
American law traveled. Sweden's 1929 government report on a sterilization bill (SOU 1929:14) reprinted an American map of state laws drawn from Laughlin's notes. Sweden went on to sterilize about 63,000 people between 1935 and 1975; a commission appointed in 1997 found that many operations recorded as voluntary had been a condition of release, marriage or abortion, and a 1999 law paid compensation. German racial hygienists cited American state laws and Laughlin's model law. Heidelberg gave Laughlin an honorary doctorate in 1936, and at the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial the defense cited Buck v. Bell.
Germany went further than any American state: compulsory sterilization of about 400,000 people from 1934 and then the killing program called Aktion T4. The record does not show that American or Swedish eugenics led to a state killing program, and it did not. The precedent was still American, and it was cited by people on trial for murder. The Black Stork argued for a doctor's choice in single cases and no state program followed it; the German film Ich klage an of 1941 appeared while patients were being killed.
The lessons are short. When a campaign gives a medal for "fitness," ask who wrote the scorecard. When it prices a class of people, ask what the figure is compared with. When it calls an irreversible act "merely" something, ask the person it was done to.
Sources
- Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927); Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535 (1942). U.S. Reports, Library of Congress.
- Human Betterment Foundation, Human Sterilization Today (Pasadena, 1938). Library of Congress.
- The Black Stork, Oliver Theater advertisement, November 1917, via Wikimedia Commons; Martin S. Pernick, The Black Stork (Oxford University Press, 1996).
- "Oregon babies make near-perfect scores at county eugenic tests," Sunday Oregonian, 5 October 1913.
- Harry H. Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization in the United States (Psychopathic Laboratory of the Municipal Court of Chicago, 1922).
- Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
- Philip R. Reilly, The Surgical Solution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).
- Steven Selden, Inheriting Shame (Teachers College Press, 1999); Selden, "Transforming Better Babies into Fitter Families," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 149:2 (2005).
- Laura L. Lovett, "'Fitter Families for Future Firesides': Florence Sherbon and Popular Eugenics," The Public Historian 29:3 (2007).
- Stefan Kühl, The Nazi Connection (Oxford University Press, 1994).
- Pius XI, Casti connubii (1930).
- Betänkande med förslag till steriliseringslag, SOU 1929:14; Steriliseringsutredningen, SOU 1999:2 and final report (2000).
- Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide (1995); United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, "Eugenics" and "Euthanasia Program and Aktion T4."
- FRAME case study "Better babies, fitter families: eugenics campaigns in the US, Sweden and Germany," for the chronology, totals and the notes on what is not shown.