If you've driven through Charlottesville, Virginia, before, you may not have noticed a plain, gray state historical marker commemorating Buck v. Bell, the 1927 Supreme Court case that upheld Virginia's forced sterilization law. That's because the state's role as a national leader in performing thousands of unauthorized sterilizations is a controversial and shameful chapter in its history. The case is named after Carrie Buck, the young plaintiff from Charlottesville who was the first woman to undergo a forced sterilization by doctors armed with the latest research in the developing field known as eugenics, the study of improving the human population by selecting reproductive partners based on their mental and physical characteristics.
Christian Science Monitor journalist Harry Bruinius tackles the history of eugenics in his first book, Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity Bruinius' well-written and well-researched study explains how American ingenuity, combined with a dash of religious zeal along with racism and xenophobia, put a spin on a scientific field that didn't gain momentum until the late nineteenth century.
There are dozens of stories in this forgotten period of American history, but that doesn't stop Bruinius from trying to tell them all. He provides detailed biographical sketches of each character in the eugenics drama, tracing how each person's family lineage contributed to the development of their scientific agenda. Francis Galton, for example, was Charles Darwin's cousin and close confidant. Galton's love of mathematics helped him to develop the statistical calculation known as the bell curve, which is stilled used as a controversial way to determine everything from grade distributions to IQs. Charles Davenport, a Harvard professor and champion of eugenics in America, came from a prominent New England family of Puritans whose religious piety helped lay the foundations of the Protestant work ethic and convinced him that only Americans of Nordic heritage should be fruitful and multiply.
It's hard to believe that eugenics and forced sterilization were once part of mainstream public policy in the United States. But the list of academics, politicians, scientists, and writers who embraced eugenics as a means of eliminating poverty and creating a more beautiful and intelligent race of Americans included President Theodore Roosevelt, Stanford president David Starr Jordan, Margaret Sanger, and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Bruinius does an excellent job of parsing out the various ways in which eugenicists conceived of their “quest for racial purity.” It is helpful to remember that at the same time that eugenics became a respected scientific field in the early 1900s, Jim Crow racism had already migrated to the north, and segregation laws also became de facto designations of levels of humanity in America. The eugenicists, however, equated racial categories with religious or national identity more so than with skin color. They were less interested in relations across the color line than they were in the social hierarchy of European immigrants. Davenport and his colleagues frequently wrote about the threat of Southern Europeans and Jews to American genetic stock. In one of his research papers, Davenport wrote that Jews were responsible for “the greatest proportion of offenses against chastity and in connection with prostitution, the lowest of crimes.”
Davenport's antisemitism, which pervaded his research, did not go unnoticed. The darkest section in the book explains how the Nazis used American eugenics research to justify their plans to commit genocide against European Jews. Bruinius carefully lays the foundations of how Hitler's murderous ambitions were derived from the latest eugenics research by American scientists, many of whom were also openly antisemitic.
Germany's ability to perfect the bureaucratic aspects of eugenics policy proved to be its most deadly weapon in implementing the Holocaust. In just a few years, eugenics had morphed from an abstract American scientific concept to a standard operating procedure throughout the Nazi government. The Germans marveled at the American methodological approach to mapping the gene pool through the establishment of the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. The state-sponsored sterilizations at American mental institutions became a blueprint for how the Nazis would proceed with their genocidal medical experiments. Bruinius notes that after World War II, German war criminals insisted that they were using American research protocols and American public policies as their guides. These arguments would not be strong enough to exonerate them in an American-led war crimes trial, but they are sobering reminders of how governments can distort scientific research for political means.
Bruinius' examination of scientists' unsound attempts to create a eugenics culture in America gives a little bit of levity to what an otherwise depressing subject. The eugenicists believed that that their work would be useless if Americans did not incorporate a “better breeding” philosophy into their daily lives. They urged cultural and religious organizations to organize pageants in which contestants underwent physical examinations and had their pedigrees scrutinized to determine who had the “better baby” or the “fitter family.” The photographs from these contests hilariously illustrate the more absurd efforts to educate the public about eugenics, depicting the winning families posed in symmetrical positions, clad in period-style bathing suits, and flexing their eugenically fit muscles.
Bruinius takes full advantage of his journalistic talents at the end of the book, where he writes a passionate profile of a Denver woman named Lucille and her struggle to cope with her forced sterilization. He describes how Lucille's erratic and sometimes-criminal behavior as a child led her mother to institutionalize her. After years of moving in and out of mental institutions and temporary homes, Lucille was labeled “feebleminded” and sterilized at age 17. The procedure affected her ability to maintain healthy relationships and left her bitter and deeply skeptical of almost everyone she met. Years later, Lucille sued the state of Colorado for damages, but her case was dismissed because the jury concluded that she was intelligent and lucid enough to have filed the charges before the statute of limitations expired. Unable to have children, she angrily explained, “What they did to me was sexual murder.” Now in her late seventies, Lucille lives alone in a nursing home in Denver. As Bruinius points out, Lucille is just one of many women whose lives were shattered by years of unnecessary institutionalization and forced sterilization. Based on the number of suspicious appendectomies (a code used to cover the sterilization procedure) performed in state hospitals in the early twentieth century, Bruinius suggests that thousands of women were forcibly sterilized.
Better for All the World comes at a time when politicians are again debating how to handle scientific misconduct, how to define the limits of scientific exploration, and how to weigh the value of a human life. Stem-cell research, intelligent design, women's reproductive rights, and physician-assisted suicide are all issues that sit at the crossroads of religion, science, and politics and raise ethical questions about how society values human life. Bruinius' book provides the necessary background to contextualize some of these debates, and it is also a reminder of some of the devastating consequences that can result when the line between science and public policy becomes blurred.
LaNitra Walker is a doctoral candidate in art history at Duke University.
