One Summer: America, 1927

David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford, and included scientists and academics from many of America’s best universities – Harvard, Princeton, Yale and the University of Chicago, among others.
    The committee also included a brilliant but eccentric French surgeon, Alexis Carrel, from the Rockefeller Institute in New York. Carrel’s extreme views on eugenics – which were in some respects little short of mad – would contribute significantly, even dangerously, to Charles Lindbergh’s opinions, but mercifully that was still some way off.
    Laughlin, meanwhile, was tireless in his efforts to root out and limit human inferiority wherever it arose. The House Committee onImmigration and Naturalization appointed him its expert adviser and assigned him the task of determining the comparative degeneracy of various ethnic groups. To persuade the members of how urgently reforms were needed, Laughlin filled the committee chamber with photographs of drooling mental defectives, all identified as recent immigrants, beneath a banner reading ‘Carriers of the Germ Plasm of the Future American Population’.
    Congress could not resist the authority of the committee or Laughlin’s horrifying propaganda, and it quickly pushed through the 1921 Dillingham Immigration Restriction Act followed by the 1924 National Origins Act. Together these ended America’s open-door immigration policy. By 1927, more people were being deported from Ellis Island than were coming in through it.
     
    That more or less settled the problem of imported inferiority, but left the issue of home-produced backwardness, of which there was a separate abundance.
    Laughlin and his supporters turned their attention to that challenge with, if anything, even more enthusiasm. They conducted tests on large blocks of people and repeatedly produced unnerving results. They reported that up to 80 per cent of all prisoners and half of servicemen were feeble-minded. New York alone was calculated to contain as many as 200,000 mentally subnormal people. Altogether, it was believed, about one third of the American population was dangerously backward.
    The solution, in Laughlin’s view, was sterilization on a massive scale. He believed in sterilizing not merely the insane and mentally deficient, but also orphans, tramps, paupers, the hard of hearing and the blind – ‘the most worthless one-tenth of our present population’, as he put it with a certain conspicuous absence of compassion.
    In 1927, the question of how freely the state could exercise the power of sterilization came to a head in a legal case known as Buck vs Bell. The case focused on a seventeen-year-old girl in Virginianamed Carrie Buck, who was deemed to be of low intelligence and had recently given birth to an illegitimate child, in consequence of which she was now confined in the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded at Lynchburg. Her mother was already an inmate there. In 1924 Carrie Buck was selected for sterilization by the colony’s superintendent, Dr John H. Bell (hence Buck vs Bell).
    The heart of the case was that not only was Carrie Buck mentally incompetent, but so were her mother and daughter – three straight generations of defectives. The family, it was argued, was clearly incapable of producing other than mental defectives and ought to be sterilized for its own good and the good of society. The evidence against the family was hardly overwhelming. Laughlin, the state’s chief witness, pronounced against the Bucks without ever having met or examined any of them. He declared that Carrie Buck came from a ‘shiftless, ignorant and worthless class’ of Southerner and should be rendered incapable of producing more of her kind on grounds of class alone.
    The charge of simple-mindedness against Vivian, the daughter, was made purely on the word of a social worker who examined the child once and thought there was something ‘not quite normal’ about her, but she freely added: ‘I should say that perhaps my knowledge of the mother may prejudice me in that regard.’ The child was just six months old at the time; no tests then existed for determining the mental capabilities of such a young person. In fact, Vivian was later shown to have normal, possibly even above average, intelligence. She died of an intestinal disorder aged just eight, but her performance at school to that point was entirely capable, and once she even made the honour roll. Carrie Buck herself was clearly not retarded