Improving the Stock
In 1927 the Supreme Court ruled, eight to one, that a state could sterilize a woman against her will, and the decision has never been overturned.
Buck v. Bell is the plainest fact in this whole study. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., writing for the majority, held that “the principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes,” and closed with a sentence that needs no gloss: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The statute he upheld was Virginia’s, and Virginia’s was modeled on a template written by a man named Harry Laughlin. The ruling opened the way to sterilization programs in some thirty states. It was weakened later, and distinguished, and quietly disowned — but never formally overruled. The idea that runs through everything else here as a tendency is, in this one case, still on the books as law.
Behind the ruling stood a machine built in the open. Laughlin’s Model Eugenical Sterilization Law came out of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, which Charles Davenport had founded in 1910 on a grant from the widow of the railroad magnate E. H. Harriman, and which the Carnegie Institution took over funding in 1917. Its work was the mass collection of family pedigrees — an archive assembled to certify that defect ran in the blood. None of this was secret. It was philanthropy, statute, and testimony, conducted by named men with letterhead, and the same great fortunes that endowed libraries endowed the filing cabinets that argued for the surgery.
The instruments came from the nursery. Henry Goddard imported the Binet–Simon scale — a test its French author had built to find and help struggling children — coined the word “moron,” and in 1912 carried the test to Ellis Island, where he reported that great fractions of the Jewish, Italian, and Hungarian arrivals were feebleminded. Robert Yerkes took the same instrument to scale: as head of the Army’s wartime testing, he examined roughly 1.75 million men. This is the scale-jump — the measuring tool, built for one child in one clinic, turned on a whole population and an entire immigration stream.
Then some of the builders took it back. By 1928 Goddard had publicly reversed two of his central claims, conceding that feeblemindedness was neither incurable nor grounds for institutional segregation. Carl Brigham, who had read a racial hierarchy off Yerkes’s Army data in 1923 and fed it into the immigration debate, retracted in 1930 in flat terms: his conclusions “were without foundation,” and the “study with its entire hypothetical superstructure of racial differences collapses completely.” The recantations are on the record beside the harm, which the recantations did not undo — the book and the test had already done their work in law and at the docks. An operator disowning his own tool is rare enough to record. It came too late to matter.
The reach crossed the ocean. The Human Betterment Foundation in Pasadena promoted California’s sterilizations — the largest such program in the country — and in 1934 its secretary praised the new Nazi sterilization law in print; German racial hygienists in turn cited the American example, and in 1936 Heidelberg gave Laughlin an honorary degree for his. That the American model was studied and admired abroad is documented. That American eugenics authored the German catastrophe is a larger claim, and the most careful scholarship of the tie stops well short of it: the ceiling is Stefan Kühl’s account of mutual admiration and a studied template — an influence, not a hand on the wheel.
Even the respectable version stayed respectable. The British Eugenics Society had Francis Galton — who coined the word and called it “the science of improving stock” — as its first honorary president, and Darwin’s own son as its chairman, and over the years its rolls are said to have reached well past the movement’s core, into the Fabian circle and, in the late 1930s, to Keynes. Those membership claims rest on the secondary record, not yet on the society’s own rolls. What the archive supports is a milieu that took eugenics seriously — a great many well-connected people, in learned societies and government offices, who would have been offended to hear it called a plot.
So the theater is dense, documented, and grim past any need to embellish it: a court, a statute, a record office, two mass instruments, a foundation, a society, a degree from Heidelberg — the impulse that elsewhere in this study measured and scheduled the child, here turned to sorting and culling the stock, and reaching as far as the Supreme Court and the German statute book. The same fortunes, the same milieu, the same law crossing the water — and behind them one old idea: humanity as stock to be graded and improved by a fit few, worked out by many hands who mostly never coordinated and sometimes recanted. They did not need to agree. The idea was everywhere, and the idea was enough.
Grounded in. The reference nodes underneath — hover to read each.