Buck v. Bell

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The eugenics movement was an integral part of the Progressive Era, a period spanning roughly the first two decades of the twentieth century, during which American institutions attempted to adapt to wholesale social and economic reforms. The first state law authorizing sterilization on eugenics grounds—viewed as a valid exercise of state police powers—was passed in Indiana in 1907; other states soon followed suit. In 1914, Harry Laughlin, director of the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, published a “Model Eugenical Sterilization Law” that proposed sterilization of “socially inadequate” groups, classified as the “feebleminded,” “insane,” “criminalistic,” “epileptic,” “inebriate,” “diseased,” “blind,” “deaf,” “deformed,” and “dependent”; as such laws were aimed at relieving society of the burden of supporting the less fortunate, the last category included “orphans, ne'er-do-wells, the homeless, tramps and paupers.” In 1924 Virginia passed a Eugenical Sterilization Act based on Laughlin's model that was eagerly embraced by Albert Priddy, superintendent of the State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded in Lynchburg, Virginia. Priddy had performed forced sterilization at the colony for a number of years, until he was cautioned that the practice could place both him and the colony in legal jeopardy.

In March 1924, Carrie Buck, a seventeen-year-old inmate of the Lynchburg colony, was chosen as the first person to be legally sterilized under the new law. Buck, the mother of a newborn illegitimate daughter, was herself the illegitimate daughter of another colony inmate. Priddy recommended Buck for sterilization because, he said, she had inherited feeblemindedness and moral delinquency from her mother; she was the perfect test case. In order to test the law in court, the colony proceeded to hire two accomplished and respected attorneys: Aubrey Strode, who had helped to push the sterilization law through the Virginia legislature, represented the colony, and Irving Whitehead, a former member of the colony's board and a friend of Strode's, represented Buck, a ward of the state.

At trial, numerous witnesses—some of whom had never even seen Buck—offered evidence of her, her mother's, and her daughter's supposed defects of mind and character. In contrast, Whitehead made no attempt to defend his client, owing to what clearly was conflict of interest. After the trial court upheld the Virginia statute, however, Whitehead appealed the case (now named Buck v. Bell, as John H. Bell had replaced Priddy as superintendent of the colony), which eventually made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Whitehead argued against the state law on equal protection grounds.

Holmes, a longtime student of eugenics, wrote the opinion for the eight-member Court majority. Procedural guarantees, he writes, had been scrupulously followed in Buck's case. Substantively, public welfare interests outweigh those of individuals who “sap the strength” of the state. If the nation's “best citizens” can legitimately be called upon to sacrifice their lives during time of war, he holds, the rights of the “unfit” are not violated by a mandate preventing them from reproducing their kind. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” Holmes infamously concludes.

After the Court handed down its ruling, Carrie Buck was sterilized. In 1985 the historian Paul Lombardo convincingly argued that Buck was not, in fact, “feebleminded” but that her foster family had concocted the case against her after she was raped by one of their relatives. In the interim, Buck v. Bell cleared the way for numerous states to pass their own involuntary sterilization laws. In 1933 the German Nazi government borrowed from Laughlin's model law to create its own justification for sterilizing some 350,000 individuals against their will. The Supreme Court did not hear another eugenics case until 1942, when in Skinner v. Oklahoma the Court struck down a statute prescribing involuntary sterilization of repeat criminals while exempting those convicted of embezzlement. In his opinion for the Court, Justice William O. Douglas underscored the dangers of endorsing pseudosciences such as eugenics:

We have not the slightest basis for inferring that that line has any significance in eugenics nor that the inheritability of criminal traits follows the neat legal distinctions which the law has marked between those two offenses. In terms of fines and imprisonment the crimes of larceny and embezzlement rate the same under the Oklahoma code. Only when it comes to sterilization are the pains and penalties of the law different. The equal protection clause would indeed be a formula of empty words if such conspicuously artificial lines could be drawn.

But Skinner did not overturn Buck (which has never been officially overruled), and forced sterilization of the mentally ill and mentally retarded continued into the 1970s. Virginia's compulsory sterilization law was finally repealed in 1974.