The use of eugenics against poor people in America
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by Anna Morrow Eu- gen- ics (yoo-jen’iks) n The study of hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding. (American Heritage dictionary 1994) This is the definition I found when I innocently or ignorantly looked up the word. I consider my self intelligent despite my lack of formal education. However, I have gone my entire forty years without ever knowing that such a word, much less the practice of it, existed. I feel no shame at not knowing about eugenics. I am, however, stunned that such an atrocious part of American history could have been so well hidden from public view. The following is a story about a girl I met while trying to uncover the weird pseudo-science of eugenics. Her name is Carrie Buck. When Carrie was born her mother could not have imagined the impact her child’s life would have on the world. Nor could she intervene to end the judgement which would be passed on to Carrie, by the simple act of mothering. Like herself, her daughter would endure a life marked by the erroneous claims made of her, and irrevocably altered by what would be decided about her by people of power, wealth and influence. Born into poverty, at a time in history when poverty was seen as evidence of genetic inferiority, Carrie’s fate was tainted before she had even taken her first breath. Her mother was an alleged prostitute (an allegation never proven) and was therefore committed to Virginias state institution: The Lynchburg Colony. Lynchburg was Americas largest asylum where "feeble-minded" people (economically unproductive, poor white trash) where lawfully institutionalized. Feeble-minded was a catchall term targeted at white people that were: poor, blind, deaf, deformed, alcoholic, drug addicted, tubercular, syphilis, leprous, criminal, orphaned, homeless, raped, abandoned, runaway and bastard. Because of her mother’s institutionalization, Carrie was sent to live with a "host family" near Lynchburg. The family took Carrie in to work as a live in maid for a meager salary While in their care she was raped by a nephew of the family and became pregnant. The boy, the culprit, was never charged. Carrie, however, was put into Lynchburg with her mother, for becoming pregnant out of wedlock. She was placed their by her foster father. Now in the state’s care she was labeled a "moral delinquent ... of the moron class." The director of the Lynchburg Colony, Dr. Albert Priddy, was a firm believer in and strong supporter of the Eugenics movement in America. He was anxious to find a test case that he could bring before the courts that would prove the existence of "hereditary feeble-mindedness". Carrie Buck was his answer. He found in Carrie not one, not two, but with the birth of her daughter Vivian, three generations of "feeble-mindedness". Carrie’s fate was now sealed. Dr. Priddy worked closely with Harry H. Laughlin, a biologist who was a most forceful advocate for compulsory sterilization in the United States. Laughlin wrote the law on which the Virginia and German eugenics statutes were based. He spent most of his career campaigning for sterilization of what he called the "most worthless one-tenth of our present population." Together they orchestrated a cynical campaign to bring before the courts. Their hope and belief was that a favorable ruling would strengthen the Eugenics movement in America. The case went all the way to the Supreme court and on May 2, 1927 the Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s right to sterilize the feebleminded. In a decision written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes the court argued that the same logic and legal thinking which was used to uphold mandatory vaccinations could be used to defend the involuntary serializations of the feeble-minded. In the chilling words of Judge Holmes "It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…. three generations of imbeciles is enough!" The vote was 8 to 1 in favor of forced sterilization based on hereditary feeble-mindedness. The result was a new wave of sterilization legislation modeled on the Virginia law found legal by the Supreme court. Lest you think that this is some obscure bit of history, please keep in mind that this case has never been over turned and it remains the US supreme courts thinking on eugenics to this day. Sterilization laws remain on the statute books of 22 US states. In 1927 , five months after she was placed at the Lynchburg Colony, Carrie had the dubious honor of being the first person sterilized under the new law. She was 18. Her sterilization was performed with little public notice and yet her case was to achieve a prominent place in legal history and in the history of social sciences. The precedent it set would influence social policy around the world. It would provide the basis for the model which would be used in Nazi Germany for their race hygiene program. In the United States, within ten years 27,000 compulsory sterilization’s would be performed to poor whites and Native American peoples. Shortly after her surgery Carrie was paroled form the Lynchburg institution. She would go on to marry twice, but would be saddened throughout her life for no being able to have any other children. She spent most of her adult life helping others as a trusted caregiver to elderly people. One of her employers said that "Carrie could not have been mentally retarded. Her competence was obvious in the quality of care she gave to those who depended on her. Sadly, this opinion can be substantiated by the fact that the Stanford- Binet IQ test which was given to Carrie and used to evidence her feeble-mindedness, would later be proven inadequate and disqualified. When Carrie died in a nursing home in 1983 she was buried next to her daughter Vivian. Vivian had been placed with the same family that institutionalized her mother . She was taken from Carrie as soon as she was born, under one condition: that Vivian be taken in at the Lynchburg Colony the moment she showed signs of feeble-mindedness. The statute of limitations for determining feeble-mindedness was eight years. Vivian died in 1932 at the age of nine. The cause of death was cited as measles. As a sad and final note to the maternal blood line of the Bucks, young Vivian was called "very bright" by her teachers. She was an honor student. Between 1915 and 1979 (when the last eugenics language was removed form State law) more than 8000 children in the state of Virginia were sterilized because the state decided they were unfit to reproduce. Victims were taken from their families and forced to live in the Lynchburg Colony, where they were beaten, abused and put into solitary confinement. Virtually anyone could in authority could label someone "feeble-minded" and pack them off to an institution. By today’s standards, just about anyone could be diagnosed as being a misfit for any number of real or perceived mental disabilities. The eugenicists cast their net wide, targeting any human shortcoming that they believed to be a "hereditary disease" so that the could stamp it out by surgical sterilization. They rounded up whole families to render them incapable of passing their genes on to future generations. The horrific history of the US Eugenics program is one of the least known injustices in American history. It’s selective breeding philosophy wreaked incalculable damage in the lives of the innocent people it targeted. The state of Indiana passed the first sterilization act in 1907. By the 1930s, nearly two-thirds of the states had eugenics laws, but no states applied them as ardently as Virginia, California and North Carolina. California sterilized more than 20,000 people, the most in the nation. Eventually some 80,000 inmates in state institutions were subjected to compulsorily sterilized, often without their knowledge, always without their permission. The white power structure was determined to preserve the "purity of the white race"; they didn't want "defective whites" lowering the threshold of white purity. The American Eugenics Society (AES) was created and proceeded to organize "Fitter Family Contests" at state fairs. Along with prizes for pig and cow breeding and pie baking, state fairs held Fitter Families Contests to reward those who practiced "good" people breeding. The only good family was a healthy, economically productive one. A 1926 AES display in Philadelphia warned that "some Americans are born to be a burden on the rest". Their self justified solution was to control the reproduction of people they deemed inferior through sterilization. In 1922 Harry Laughlin, acting as the Eugenics agent for the US house of representatives, published the Model Eugenical Sterilization law which defined who would be subjected to mandatory sterilization. This law provided the basis for the eugenics statutes in Virginia as well as Germany. Years later it would be acknowledged that there was a direct link between the US eugenics program and the Nazi regime sterilization program in Germany. Hitler's 1933 Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases contained language that echoed the Virginia statute. Laughlin was also the architect of the notorious Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 that ended the greatest era of immigration in U.S. history. He successfully argued before Congress that the American gene pool was being polluted by intellectually and morally defective immigrants from Europe. The act, which wasn't repealed until 1965, targeted Italians and Eastern European Jews. In 1936, Laughlin received an honorary medical degree from the Nazi-controlled University of Heidelberg for his contributions to the "science of race cleansing". A book titled a Civic Biology from 1930’s written by G.W. Hunter describes popular opinion during that time: "Hundreds of families … exist today, spreading disease, immorality and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They are true parasites. If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetrating such a low and degenerate race." It wasn't until the 1960s that the pace of sterilization slowed in the United States, years after eugenics had been widely discredited as political and social prejudice rather than scientific fact. Yet none of the 30 states that conducted eugenical sterilization ever compensated, apologized to or memorialized the victims. In 1980, newspapers in Virginia uncovered and reported on five decades of involuntary sterilization which had been performed at The Lynchburg Colony. The publication of the story shook the authorities in the state of Virginia. Worried about possible lawsuits, they hoped the storm would simply blow over. It didn't. The Virginia state American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) took an interest in the case and filed a class action suit on behalf of the victims asking for a formal apology, compensation and counseling on behalf of the victims. In the end all that was awarded to the few people still alive, and now in their 80’s,was counseling. Sarah Jane Wiley was sterilized at the Virginia Colony when she was 22. "I wish they hadn't though because I'm crazy about children," she said. "It makes me feel so sad." Wiley was sent to the Colony when she was 12 years old. Ten years later she was sent to the operating room without any idea what was going on. "They didn't tell me nothing. I found out about a month later that they tied my tubes," she said in an interview at her Lynchburg apartment not far from the Colony, now the Central Virginia Training Center for the severely mentally retarded. Wiley's brother, Marvin, and sister, Shirley, also were sterilized at the Colony. Wiley, 63, said the reasons she wound up at the Colony are fuzzy. "My aunt committed me. They called welfare and they put me in the Colony." Wiley was released from the Colony in 1976 and went on to become a licensed practical nurse. Her framed discharge letter hangs on her living room wall. "Best of luck in the future," it says. Jesse F. Meadows, sterilized at the Colony in 1940, has been mostly alone since his wife, Trudy, died in 1989. Since then "it's been one hard and lonely life," he said. "But, thank God, it will be over someday." Meadows was sent to the Colony in June 1940 when he was 17. "My stepmother said she was leaving unless Daddy got rid of me," he said. Meadows remembers his operation five months after arriving at the Colony. "They said it would keep me from having feebleminded children," he said. "There was nothing I could do about it." Meadows, 77, said he always wanted to have children of his own. Now, he lives in a sparsely furnished, second-floor apartment with his 13-year-old Chihuahua, Angel. Mary Donald, 64, was sterilized at age 11. She said she does not know why she was sent to the Virginia Colony and that she was told only that the operation was for her own health. She attributes the breakup of her 10-year marriage to her sterility. "I used to ... lay and cry" about not having children, she said. When I look at my son I can not help but consider the fortunate circumstances of his life relative to eugenics. He was not born into wealth. Neither his father or I inherited high ranking social status or great fortune. Neither did we escape our struggles through poverty unscathed. For this reason alone the "authorities" could have taken my son. For better or for worse my son has been raised partially on welfare; eating food purchased with food stamps, wearing clothes bought by cash grants. He has even been subjected to the loss of our home and endured the hostility, stigma and prejudice of being called "homeless". But what he has never been without is my love for him. And he knows it. He is smart and funny and beautiful and had he been born 50 years ago the agents of eugenics would have deemed me unfit to be his mother and separated us permanently. Bibliography 1. Mass Murderers in White Coats Lenny Lapon 2. Eugenics Gone but Effects Linger Bill Baskervill 3. Advocates for Disabled Worry about Repeat Eugenics Bill Baskervill 4. Video Review: The Lynchburg Story R. Prince 5. Ethnic Cleansing Revisited William C Harris II 6. The Carrie Buck Story exerts from book by David Smith |