Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell
by Paul A. Lombardo
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"Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Few lines from Supreme Court opinions are as memorable as this declaration by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in the landmark 1927 case Buck v. Bell. The ruling allowed states to forcibly sterilize residents in order to prevent "feebleminded and socially inadequate" people from having children. It is the only time the Supreme Court endorsed surgery as a tool of government policy. Paul Lombardo's startling narrative exposes the Buck case's show more fraudulent roots. In 1924 Carrie Buck--involuntarily institutionalized by the State of Virginia after she was raped and impregnated--challenged the state's plan to sterilize her. Having already judged her mother and daughter mentally deficient, Virginia wanted to make Buck the first person sterilized under a new law designed to prevent hereditarily "defective" people from reproducing. Lombardo's more than twenty-five years of research and his own interview with Buck before she died demonstrate conclusively that she was destined to lose the case before it had even begun. Neither Carrie Buck nor her mother and daughter were the "imbeciles" condemned in the Holmes opinion. Her lawyer--a founder of the institution where she was held--never challenged Virginia's arguments and called no witnesses on Buck's behalf. And judges who heard her case, from state courts up to the U.S. Supreme Court, sympathized with the eugenics movement. Virginia had Carrie Buck sterilized shortly after the 1927 decision. Though Buck set the stage for more than sixty thousand involuntary sterilizations in the United States and was cited at the Nuremberg trials in defense of Nazi sterilization experiments, it has never been overturned. Three Generations, No Imbeciles tracks the notorious case through its history, revealing that it remains a potent symbol of government control of reproduction and a troubling precedent for the human genome era. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
The argument toward the end, that support for Roe v. Wade is logically connected to opposition to Buck v. Bell (and support for Buck connects to opposition to Roe) is fascinating, and explains certain political alignments that hadn't made sense to me till now.
A superb book much wider in scope than one would suspect from the title. This really covers almost all of the eugenics movement in the US from the late nineteenth century to today. A little heavy on legal minutiae, but really good.
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Author Information
2 Works 154 Members
Paul A. Lombardo is a Regents' Professor and the Bobby Lee Cook Professor of Law at Georgia State University. The author of A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era, he has played A key role, as both a historian and a lawyer, in the movement to solicit state apologies and legislative denunciations of show more past eugenics laws. show less
Common Knowledge
- People/Characters
- Carrie Buck
- Important events
- Buck v. Bell
Classifications
- Genres
- Politics and Government, Nonfiction, History, General Nonfiction, Science & Nature
- DDC/MDS
- 344.7304 — Society, government, & culture Law Labor, social service, education, cultural law North America [Option B: Law > Eastern Europe Russia]
- LCC
- KF224 .B83 .L66 — Law Law of the United States Law of the United States (Federal) Criminal trials
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 102
- Popularity
- 317,029
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (3.63)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 5
- ASINs
- 4
