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October 13, 2008

New book exposes notorious Supreme Court ruling

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[Transcript]

ATLANTA—When the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927 upheld states’ rights to forcibly sterilize those deemed to be “feeble minded” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ opinion notoriously declared that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” A new book by Georgia State University law professor Paul Lombardo casts light on the failings – intentional or otherwise – of the lawyer trying the case and exposes evidence that the family at its center was not who the state portrayed them to be.

LOMBARDO: “The case of Buck v. Bell pitted a young 17-year-old girl in Virginia against Dr. John Bell who wished to sterilize her. Dr. Bell and his colleagues at the Lynchburg Colony for the Epileptic and Feeble Minded were putting in place a new law in 1924 which gave the state the power to sexually sterilize people who had been declared socially inadequate. And that definition included such things as what they called feeble mindedness, mental deficiency, poverty, etc. So the case goes through the Virginia courts, and it reaches, eventually, the United States Supreme Court in 1927 yielding one of the more infamous decisions of that court, an opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., saying of Carrie Buck, her mother and her daughter, all deemed to be feeble minded: Three generations of imbeciles are enough. [length: 1:00]

Lombardo’s book, “Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court and Buck v. Bell” is available this month from the Johns Hopkins University Press. Its subject, the Buck case, which has never been overturned, has been a source of interest for Lombardo for more than 25 tears.

LOMBARDO: It’s true that the decision has never been overturned. I by chance came upon it in the early 1980s when a lawsuit had been brought in Virginia, where I was living, to overturn the Buck case and my interest in the case stemmed from that challenge. I later found records that described the case in great detail and the office records of the attorney who wrote the law and argued it before the Supreme Court. So my interest began as a kind of historical biography of that lawyer. One of the things I argue in the book is that the conclusion of the case was the result of incredibly bad lawyering, sometimes intentionally bad lawyering, on the part of the man who was appointed to represent Carrie Buck. He threw the case. The fix was in. He was not interested in defending her, he was interested in supporting the sterilization program of the institution where she was living. He in fact had supported it as a member of the board of directors of that institution for many years. So it’s interesting as we’re talking about this to realize that many of the most horrific programs of the eugenics movement were helped along by the fact that we went into economic decline in the early 1930s. And it’s fascinating to see someone who is in a legislature today saying straightforwardly “looks likes like hard times are coming, we need to save money, let’s start sterilizing people again.” [length: 1:29]
A lawmaker in Louisiana has proposed to do just that, by offering women living in poverty $1,000 to have their tubes tied. For Lombardo, the scenario echoes the past.

LOMBARDO: The representative down in Louisiana this week said that there were generational families on welfare – one generation after the other – and the only way to break that chain and thereby save tax money, was to sterilize such people. His argument is exactly the same as the argument made in the 30 states who passed sterilization laws. He didn’t bother to spend a lot of time trying to make the genetic argument, he just said it straightforwardly, “we’ll save money this way,” he said, so “why don’t we sterilize them?” [length: 0:31]

Professor Lombardo will be discussing his book Oct. 27 at 7:15 p.m. at the Decatur Library at a Georgia Center for the Book event. For Georgia State University RadioLine, I’m Michael Davis.