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

Adam Cohen’s new book shines a stark light on “one of the most spectacular miscarriages of justice in U.S. history,” said Victoria Nourse in Nature. In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state of Virginia had the right to sterilize Carrie Buck, a poor young white inmate at the state asylum for the so-called feebleminded. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his 8-1 majority opinion, famously wrote off Buck’s rights with this line: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Most likely, Buck suffered no mental disabilities, yet that fact didn’t matter to the men deciding her fate. Cohen’s “lively, accessible, often heart-wrenching” account makes clear that they were in the grip of a monstrous idea, and that Carrie Buck was far from the last of their victims. “That’s the trouble with reformers. They are so sure, and so wrong,” said Amity Shlaes in The Wall Street Journal. Holmes and the men who brought the case had bought into the pseudoscience known as eugenics: They believed that criminality and mental disabilities were hereditary, and that society would benefit if people who carried those traits were prevented from reproducing. At least 60,000 other U.S. women were forcibly sterilized in the decades following Buck v. Bell, and Hitler used the Ameri - can example to bolster his case for mass sterilization—and then for genocide.

Carrie Buck’s story proves “deeply, almost physically, infuriating,” said Dana Goldstein in The New Republic. Though she remains a cipher, we learn that she completed five years of schooling before her foster parents forced her to quit, and that they sent her away after she became pregnant at 17 and accused a family member of rape. No heroes emerge—even Buck’s defense lawyer was collaborating with the men who viewed her case as a chance to legalize sterilization nationwide. But while the main players here are the villains, we do get a late glimpse of Buck as a nursing home resident, and she’s no “imbecile.” She enjoys music and crosswords, and lives to read the daily paper.