One Summer: America, 1927

in any meaningful sense, if at all. She read newspapers every day and enjoyed the new craze for crossword puzzles. An academic who later interviewed Buck described her as ‘not a sophisticated woman [but] neither mentally ill nor retarded’.
    Nonetheless, when given the new Stanford version of the Binet–Simon test, which eventually became the modern IQ test(and it is interesting to reflect that the IQ test was invented not to determine how smart people are but how stupid), Carrie Buck was held to have a mental age of nine while her mother didn’t quite make it to eight. Officially they both fell into the classification of ‘moron’.
    The case came before the US Supreme Court in the spring of 1927. The court ruled by a vote of eight to one that Buck should be sterilized. The majority opinion was written by 86-year-old Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr – a man of such long life that he had fought as an infantryman in the Civil War.
    Holmes summarized the situation concisely: ‘Carrie Buck is a feeble-minded white woman. She is the daughter of a feeble-minded mother in the same institution, and the mother of an illegitimate feeble-minded child.’ He agreed with Laughlin that sterilization was necessary in society ‘to prevent our being swamped with incompetence’. Then he gave his solution: ‘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. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.’
    Then came the ringing conclusion that has been quoted ever since: ‘Three generations of imbeciles are enough.’
    Only one justice, Pierce Butler, dissented from the majority view, and he did not offer a written opinion to explain his dissent. Holmes was supported by all the other justices, who included Chief Justice and former US President William Howard Taft and the liberal Louis D. Brandeis.
    Thanks to this ruling, states now had the right to perform surgery on healthy citizens against their will – a liberty never before extended in any advanced country. Yet the case attracted almost no attention. The New York Times gave it a small mention on page nineteen. The News Leader of Richmond, Virginia, where the matter was a local story, didn’t report it at all.
    Slowly sentiment began to turn against negative eugenics. Many serious geneticists, like Thomas Hunt Morgan of Columbia University, would have nothing to do with it, and in the summer of 1927 Harvard quietly declined a gift to endow the university with a chair in the subject.
    Harry H. Laughlin, however, seemed unstoppable. He became increasingly – and in retrospect very oddly – hostile to epileptics, insisting that they must either be sterilized or by some means confined during their reproductive years. The oddity in this is that it is now known that Laughlin was secretly an epileptic himself. He sometimes had seizures at Cold Spring Harbor, which his colleagues overlooked or covered up even as they were condemning sufferers elsewhere.
    In the 1930s, Laughlin sowed the seeds of his downfall as he began to establish warm relationships with Germany’s newly emergent Nazis, some of whom came to Cold Spring Harbor to study American methods and findings. In 1936, the University of Heidelberg awarded Laughlin an honorary degree for his commitment to race purification. The following year Laughlin and Cold Spring Harbor became US distributors of a Nazi documentary called The Hereditarily Diseased , which argued that it was foolishly sentimental to keep retarded people alive.
    This was more than many people could countenance. At a convention of the American Jewish Congress in New York, the keynote speaker, Bernard S. Deutsch, attacked Laughlin in the bitterest terms. ‘Dr. Laughlin’s “purification of race” theory is as dangerous and as spurious as the purified Aryan race theories advanced by the Nazis, to which it bears suspicious resemblance,’ Deutsch said. The Carnegie Institution, the Eugenics Record Office’s chief source of funding, appointed Herbert Spencer Jennings, a respected geneticist from Johns Hopkins University, to review Laughlin’s work. Spencer found that Laughlin had falsified data, manipulated findings to support racist conclusions and generally perpetrated scientific fraud for over a quarter of a century. Laughlin