I'm going to thank my hosts.
This has been a wonderful visit to Michigan.
We had a wonderful afternoon with
medical students today who
were just terrific and the
questions that they ask me and the interest that
they showed. So I appreciate very much for
coming out tonight on what is not
terribly cold night for Michigan, but
for the rest of the country still kind of
chilly.
I'm going to try to take you through in
the next forty or fifty minutes
an overview of
this thing with the name Eugenics and
how it played out in the United States
and how they are connections between the
way played out in the United States and in 
the way it reached
its most
infamous in Nazi Germany.
I hope those connections will be
obvious by the time I'm finished,
but I want to remind you at the
beginning that this is an
extraordinarily complex story that no
one can do justice to short time or even
one book.
It's something we're still
learning a lot about and so you have to
keep your mind open to different
ways of thinking about our history.
When I say "our" history I am talking about
Michigan as much as anywhere else,
but also world history.
So with that,
let me get into
the
actual exhibit.
The first thing I need to do,
this is really embarrassing moment. I
didn't bring my slide.
Now this is where if you have
teenage children,
they would be going "Gosh, Dad."
The one thing that I want to
talk about in terms of the exhibit
itself is that
I certainly don't
take any credit for it, but I was
really happy to be around when it
was being conceiving and people were talking
about it
and was able to give it a little bit of background
information for
the researchers who put it together
and actually loaned this book,
which I have a good fortune to have
bought when it was
quite inexpensive.
It has a fantastic
cover and it
became part of the exhibit and traveled all
over the world.
When the exhibit
was first released and opened in
Washington, D.C., it got
a lot of attention and I was
a very happy that there was a whole
panel of it. It's here in a smaller
version, but there was a whole panel in
Washington
that included this picture of Carrie Buck
the and her mother, Emma
in the nineteen twenties
when they were
on the verge of facing a trial
that would eventually sterilize
Carrie. So thousands of people have learned
about this case, which I spent a lot of
my life studying,
from this traveling exhibit
in this country as well as in Europe and
so I think that's a great plus.
There's still a lot to learn about
eugenics
and so before I get to the bookcase I
want to give you some insights about
parts of the movement that you make
not have heard of.
In the beginning it's really just
said "What is this thing called
eugenics?"
There have been many books written
about it. You've got several people in
the audience like
Professor Stern,
Professor Marty Karnik, who's also here,
who've written extraordinary books about
eugenics and how it
found an expression here in
America, 
but the starting point for just about
everybody is to talk about marriage
between
ideas in biology,
which really began with the famous
monk, Gregor Mendel
shown here from
you know maybe the eighteen sixties
who now I have found students in
middle school even are studying
ideas of heredity that Mendel gave
us in the middle of the
nineteenth-century
and which remained hidden really for
most of the world until the early
twentieth century.
Here is his
article
"Experiments in Plant Hybridization"
in which he describes his own experiments
and
how he'd bred in his backyard there at
the monastery, pea plants and how he
could try certain traits
that would appear and disappear in
different generations and
and by doing the studies over several
generations dozens and dozens
he was able to say
that there were certain rules certain
laws of heredity that
he came up with.
The descriptions of what we know as
dominance and recessive traits
and how those things could pop up 
in a regular fashion
from generation to generation.
Now Mendel's rules, Mendel'slaws, become
part of the story
somewhat later on. At least
by around nineteen hundred
at which time
people start looking more seriously at
the work of Francis Galton.
A British
gentleman who
had the good fortune of
traveling a lot.
Kind of like his cousin Charles
Darwin, he was able to go to Africa and
places
and look at the natural history of
plants and animals.
We celebrated Galton's centennial
of his death just last year so it hasn't
been that long ago
that he was writing
and the book that he is most famous
for, I think now,
is a book that was published in 1883
called "Inquiries into Human Faculty and
Its Development"
and the reason we pay attention to this
book is because
somewhere in the very first
chapter
he talks about a new idea. The idea
itself was not really new.
It had been around for a long time.
We always talk about Plato thinking this
way as well, but Galton gave voice to new
word
and the new word was eugenics
and that word he defined is "All the
influences that tend in however remote
a degree
to give to the more suitable race or
strains of blood a better chance
of prevailing speedily over the less
suitable
than they otherwise would have had.
Well that's a mouthful.
The word itself, eugenics, is from the
break. It simply means to be well-borned
or good birth.
It encompassed a large
number of ideas
and we need to remember that
book and this definition came out
for most English speakers before
Mendel's laws and Mendel's article had
even been translated;
nevertheless,
this is one part of the
story of eugenics.
Golton theorizing about it as a
social
mechanism for deciding which
people would have children and
which might not.
Even at a time when the science
that might of address those things were
non-existent.
The major demonstrations not
only men overall, but also vicemen
comes up with a whole book on what
he called the germplasm but we might
call DNA.
That hadn't come out yet so
these ideas are floating around about
the same time but they're not
necessarily
running into each other until
after the twentieth century.
Now we think of eugenics today,
in general, is almost a curse. I saw a
survey just this week
that was done
a bunch of Americans in a bunch of
Germans and the one thing that these two
hundred people could agree on was
when somebody said eugenics that was a
bad thing.
They didn't have a tremendous amount of
understanding of the history of the
concepts,
but everybody connected it
to the Nazis.
So what I'm going to try to do this evening
is to clarify what the connections 
are--what some of them are,
but also to clarify that it doesn't
tell the whole story. The story is
extraordinarily rich and complicated
and eugenic certainly is
a dirty word today, but that wasn't
always the case.
To give you a few examples:
there was a time,
this is nineteen thirteen
when the Surgeon General of the Public
Health Service
was asked
unofficially to examine two
people who were getting going to get married
and he did that and he said they would fit
and he issued what the New York Times
called the first eugenic certificate.
In his position as the head of the
Public Health Service
there were
contests for who could write the best sermon
on eugenics and there were many people who did
it without a contest
So eugenic marriage,
the mating of
healthy productive people to each other,
and the avoidance of
of unions that would
maybe lead to children who were sickly
or not well.
That was something that was talked about
in the pulpits. There was even
satire on the topic--lots of it.
Lots of cartoons.
This is a copy of a piece of
sheet music that was written by
Scott Fitzgerald when he was an
undergraduate at Princeton
and there's a book called
he bread of all this
of the show that he put together called
Fifi Fefe
and in the middle of it here's a story
about
love or eugenics.
So this was very much a part of
popular culture. You can read about it in
newspapers and magazines. You could
argue about it with your friends
and you can see that some people to get
so seriously
that they got their children involved in
all kinds of contests. Here are two kids
in Los Angeles nineteen fifteen
who are both
perfect scores in the
better baby contest
and their mothers both agree
that when they grow up they're going to
get them back together because, of course,
they would make a great couple.
"Parents plan future
union and eugenics name," it says.
When the image of health was
linked with eugenic ideal
this highlighted the kind of
promise
to future generations
and at a time when most Americans lived
on the farm or have been born on the
farm
this idea made sense. Everybody
knew how the birds and the bees did it and
certainly all the cows and the goats did
it the same way. There was a pretty clear 
understanding of how
generation worked and how reproduction
worked
in animals and so why not extend the way
that animals were managed via animal
husbandry,
plants as well,
to human beings and so you see a
headline here
about a social register of fitter
families
and better babies now science can apply
to human stock the same
principles which have
develop champion cow
and horses, etcetera.
When families who pursued this ideal
presented themselves they were
celebrated by their communities 
and nobody thought eugenics was a curse
then. The fitter family contests that were
sponsored by the American Eugenic
Society happened all over the country,
but this happens to be the picture of
the contest that happened at the
Michigan State fair in nineteen twenty
five.
At that fair
some of the judges,
I've marked just one of them,
there are some other people here who are
quite interesting, but
Leon Whitney was the Executive Secretary
of the American Eugenic Society at the time
and he's the same fellow that a few
years later in nineteen thirty four
publishes this book which is in the
exhibit now.
The Case For Sterilization.
There are many close connections between
and ideas of animal husbandry,
ideas of human improvement, of
healthiness
prosperity of progress in
scientific advance that are tied into
the way people thought about 
eugenics.
Now if you find that unconvincing, let me
see if I could go a little bit further.
What would convince you that America had
bought the idea that progress in the
name of science in eugenics is a good
idea?
well, I think I've got the thing that
might get you there.
Madison avenue picked it up.
Madison Avenue use the word eugenics to
sell products. "Can eugenics bring us
better foods?"
This is a kind of funny because it's
going backwards, at least looking at
historically, and they're saying well you
know the thing about eugenics and better
babies.
By the way, we can use it to make better
corn too.
By choosing
the breeds of corn that are put together
and so this becomes part of advertising.
We're in Michigan and
you all know an awful lot about motor
cars historically. Let me show you just
the last one.
The Chalmer Motorcar Company
advertises their
machines using eugenics.
This ad ran between nineteen fifteen and
nineteen sixteen in lots of different
publications.
What it says in the small print is
"This car is a greater and better car
than its forefather.
Into it has been bred and built a
summary of motor eugenics."
Well, I can't do any
better than that. My point
is simple.
The allure of health
and productivity
efficiency, and
the future of happy babies was a large
part of the reason that people were
attracted to this idea eugenics.
My focal point today though is not 
the hopeful
or even the sometimes
frivolous face that eugenics
may have taken,
but actually the
the much darker side.
The darker side which expressed
itself
in laws such as the "Racial Integrity"
Laws that were
in place in America for generations.
Actually for hundreds of years, but
got a new edge
through the nineteen teens and
twenties when
states begin to rewrite them and
focus on the idea that
the mating of people of different races
would lead to mongrelized 
groups
Who would have all kinds of
physical problems
and who have social problems as well. They
would pass these "Racial Integrity" Laws
so-called
to prohibit those marriages
and those laws were in place in the
United states
all the way up until nineteen sixty seven
when the United states Supreme Court
struck
them down in a case called Loving versus
Virginia.
Another part of the eugenic story
which touches probably even more people
is
how eugenics played into
immigration restriction law.
Here we have a picture that I
think one of these is also on the
exhibit,
showing officers from the Public Health
Service who are testing
men, women, and children at Ellis Island as
they got off of
ships
from overseas,
to see whether they had the right
stuff. They were given IQ test, some
of the very first IQ tests were
field tested there.
They were tested for physical
conditions. They were
assessed to see if maybe they carried
that
strange and problematic germ of feeble
mindedness, which would make them
likely to not have a job. Likely as the law
said to become a public charge and
those people were rejected.
The law that was put in place first in
nineteen sixteen and then later
strengthen in the nineteen twenty
four, was the Immigration Restriction Act.
It was
a law that was strongly supported by
people in the genetics movement as well
as others.
So that's a second
piece of law that was in place for a
long time that one all the way up into
the nineteen sixties as well.
The third batch of laws,
the one which I'll spend most of
my time talking about tonight,
was focused on laws that would
allow for the mandatory sexual
sterilization of people
primarily in state institutions.
Institutions like 
asylums,
hospitals,
homes for people with a variety of
disabilities,
and certainly
beginning also
prisons and
other places were criminals were kept.
This slide shows the
page from the official
Supreme Court report
that was issued in the case of
Buck v. Bell
Finally decided in May of 
nineteen twenty seven
this was a formal challenge.
A formal legal challenge brought to a law
that was written
in Virginia, passed in nineteen
twenty-four
and was described in his preamble as
an act that was meant "to prevent
the procreation of feebleminded, insane,
epileptic, inebriate,
criminalistics, and other degenerate
persons with inferior
hereditary potentialities.
peremptory tension out
These people were called in the law
the socially inadequate.
The man who drafted a
good portion of that law, or at least
a model sterilization law from which
much of the language was taken
for the Virginia Statute,
was named Harry Laughlin and he
was the Superintendent
of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold
Spring Harbor,
New York.
It became a major part of his
career to
study
sterilization and to write
about it. He wrote a major book
about it that was published in nineteen
twenty two but that book
included a copy of the model law that he
had been responsible for drafting in
nineteen fourteen.
In it he initially described
a socially inadequate person. He said
that was someone who would
failed in comparison to normal persons
to
maintain himself as a useful member
of the organized life
of the state
and then he talked about the socially
inadequate classes.
They were the feebleminded, the insane,
the criminalistics, the epileptic,
the inebriated,
the diseased, the blind, the deaf, the deformed,
the dependent,
including orphans
ne'er-do-wells, tramps
the homeless, and paupers.
He included just about everyone
who might be considered different,
who might be considered non-productive,
and who might be considered
expendable,
at least, by his way of 
thinking
Laughlin figures in a large way in this
case of Buck v. Bell because he
ends up giving testimony in the form of
a written deposition.
He didn't actually go to trial, but he said
his comments in writing
in a sworn deposition
and in it, he describes the
family, Carrie Bucks family, as
people who generally belonged to the
shiftless,
ignorant,
and worthless class of antisocial whites
of the south.
Harsh words from Harry Laughlin, but not
the only harsh words he
uses.
This is that family.
This is Carrie Buck on the left.
A seventeen-year-old
girl from
Charlottesville, Virginia
and her mother,
Emma Buck
at this time
in her forties.
Carrie-this picture is
actually taken on a bench
at the institution called the Virginia
Colony for the 
Epileptic and Feebleminded.
It was founded in nineteen ten
and only this year
it was about to close, I am told.
They were
pictured
sitting there the day before the trial
in November of nineteen twenty-four,
which would lend
credence to the law, but would also
eventually
seal Carrie Bucks fate
in history.
She had been committed to that
institution
in nineteen twenty-four.
She met her mother there whom she
hadn't seen for at least a dozen years,
Emma, the mother, had been accused of
being a moral degenerate.
She was a suspected of being a
prostitute. She was
declared to be feebleminded
and unable to take care of herself
and Carrie was also labeled as 
feebleminded.
The reason was that only three months before
she got there, she had a baby
and this is the baby.
The problem was Carrie wasn't married
and so she, like her mother, was called a
moral degenerate-someone who was
supposedly hereditarily
inflicted with the likelihood of being
promiscuous.
The baby, Vivian. is shown here.
She was examined by doctors
and other experts
and they testified at the trial that she
was not quite
normal.
Another person said she's just not quite
right. I'm not sure what it is, but
there's something not normal about her.
So this made the Buck family, Carrie, 
Emma, and Vivian, the three generations,
really the perfect example of what the
Virginia's
nineteen twenty-four law,
just written,
meant to address-problem families,
families that were suffering from
 
mental and moral defects,
poverty that spanned generations,
criminality perhaps sexual excess,
and probably most importantly a tendency
to consume
more than a small share of
tax support services.
These were the focal points for
eugenics law.
It was meant overtime to eliminate the
conditions
like crime and disease and poverty
as well as eliminating from future
generations the people
who carried those conditions, or so it
was thought
in their germplasm but we would call
their DNA.
So Carries is chosen as the person
who will test
the new law.
She is opposed
by this man
whose name is John Bell, Doctor Bell.
Eventually,
more about that later, but eventually he
was the person in charge of
the Virginia Colony where Carrie was an
inmate,
and ultimately he's the person who
did the sterilization operation on her.
Hence we have the case named Buck,
Carrie Buck v.Bell, John Bell.
Now when that trial
that happened the day after Carrie and her
mother were sitting on the bench,
the park bench there.
When the trial was over
the court records showed the
testimony of some ten people
and they all agreed that Carrie Buck
was socially inadequate.
They all agreed that the phrase
that have been used
was accurate
and that she was the mother 
of a similarly defective daughter
and that conditions such as those that
she had, and
that her mother had.
Conditions like
feeblemindedness were hereditary.
They would always reoccur so 
long as such people were allowed to have
children.
So that was the evidence presented in the
case. I'm going to come back to this slide.
There was an attempt to prove the theory
that all of those conditions
like poverty and disease and
improper sexuality,
would be wiped out
by the state if mandated surgery was
applied to young people like Carrie Buck.
The family was represented by the
evidence captured in this pedigree
suggesting that hereditary moral
degeneracy and illicit sex were,
as well as mental defects were
conditions that reverberated
through three generations of her family.
Now let's pull back a little bit
for a moment
and asked the bigger question:
how in the world that
this happened and how did this happen in
the United States?
It happens at least
when it happens because the ideas
of eugenics have been widely
publicized boasts the positive ideas
that for the family contest, the better
babies 
you know better living through
public-health. Those things have
been
trumpeted for many years by
nineteen twenty-four
and organizations like the Eugenics
Record Office and the Associated
Eugenics Research Association, the
American Eugenics Association, who
presented things like this logo, which in
the nineteen twenties was used to
describe
eugenics men.
the self-direction of human evolution,
which took all of the branches of
knowledge everything there from
statistics to genealogy to medicine
to genetics and they
drew like a tree draws from its roots
to make this science 
of human engineering possible.
This is something that takes hold
in the first couple decades of 
the twentieth
century
and becomes widely known and
becomes
at least at the beginning subscribe to
by some very important people.
This is a
shot of the letter head of the
Eugenics Record Office's
First Scientific board of
Directors and includes people like
Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of
the telephone.
William Welch, one of the fathers of medical
education in this country. His colleague
at Hopkins
Lewellys Barker.
Irving Fisher,
first PHD from Yale in political
science.
Famous author in economics and writes in
the Wall Street Journal.
Thomas Hunt Morgan, the scientist who
teaches us all about the fruit fly,
Drosophila, and eventually wins the Nobel
Prize in nineteen thirty-three. E.E Southard
who is psychiatrist at
Harvard and they're joined by the staff
people there, Charles Davenport,
biologist himself trained at Harvard
worked at University Chicago
and his
day-to-day Chief
Operating Officer, Larry Laughlin, the
Superintendent of the Eugenics Record
Offices who
comes from Missouri
to New York to
run this hub of eugenics
research in propaganda in America.
If you go there,
you study. You study
how heredity
is passed down
and you read the bulletins that they put
up like "How To Make a Eugenical Family
Study."
You might read the "Trait Book" or "Family 
History" book and learn how to do
pedigrees
and pedigrees are
part of your assignment after learn what
the symbols are. You have to put them
together you have to actually study real
families and describe them
in a scientific way were using these codes,
which tended to focus mostly on 
negative traits like alcoholism,
syphilis, tuberculosis, neuroses
all the conditions that
make people end up in
state institutions.
Not surprisingly since this was a focal
point and then my favorite there at the
bottom wonder or confirm runaway.
There were serious arguments made by
Charles Davenport on how people who were
feebleminded were also feebly inhibited.
They couldn't control themselves. They
were just always moving about-
couldn't keep a job. That sort of thing
So this was taken
quite seriously and people were taught
how to do it.
This is one of the early pedigrees
involving people with epilepsy who lived in
a specific institution in New Jersey
and according to this
pedigree one person gives
rise to a whole family of people who end
up
in the local poorhouse.
Another thing you would have studied
were a bit classic texts about problem
families.
The two most important ones, there were quite
a number of theses, but
the most important ones. "The Jukes"
written in the
nineteenth century and then "The Kallikak Family"
written in the early twentieth century.
The Jukes family
is iconic as 
the story of a group of people who
all end up in prison or their
descendants did.
This was written by a man named Richard Dugdale,
who describe an actual family
that he track to the prisons of
well,
first of the Hudson Valley and the
prisons of New York State.
He first talked about the mother whose was
supposedly the beginning of this problem
family and they called her 
"Margaret, the Mother of Criminals."
Then later he put all his research together
and he wrote this book
and gave her a pseudonym
Ada, Ada Jukes
and he highlighted her legacy with the
chart that showed that nearly
one-quarter of her children
began a life as illegitimate
children and ended up in some kind
of institution.
There was lots of other
charting in the Jukes-lots of medical
pathology.
The point was that the social effective
of this
large family of
vice
was
a tremendous cost to the
communities where the Jukes lived.
The bill for jails, for alms houses, for
stolen property, for medical or legal
expenses
added upset to something like
a million
and a quarter
dollars
in seventy five years
and that didn't even count the money
that was wasted on liquor.
The second study that everybody
looked at when they went to 
Cold Spring Harbor,
mostly for summer programs, they have a
very active 
an education program there,
was this the family of Deborah Kallikak, 
shown here from
famous psychologist
Herbert Goddard’s book
published first in nineteen twelve.
She was at the Vineland Training School
and her family was traced backwards
and Goddard revealed that he had
found
Martin Kallikak from whom all these
children came
ended up in the state institutions.
Martin Kallikak is a kind of parable
himself. He’s a
Revolutionary War soldier.
He’s got a good sides. He’s got bad side.
He, after one particularly difficult battle,
finds himself in the local tavern
where he falls in among bad companions
not the least of whom is a
woman always described as the “feebleminded 
tavern girl”-some wanton
who bears him a son 
who is known as 
“old horror”
who had ten children shown there
and from
“old horror’s” ten children come
hundreds according to this textbooks
still in print in the nineteen sixties.
Hundreds of the lowest type of human
beings
and then 
Martin found the straight and narrow and
he got married.
He left his old ways behind,
married and worthy the Quakerist
and she bore him seven
upright
worthy children
shown there with their
equally worthy hats
and from these seven worthy
children come hundreds of the highest
types of human beings
and this pathology that had grown up around
the Jukes and the Kallikaks persists in
American
general consciousness, but also in
American education.
For dozens and dozens and dozens
of years
people of Cold Spring Harbor
learned how to draw the pedigrees of the 
Kallikak families and Jukes.
This is one that was done by some
students
and they also saw the other propaganda that
was shown at county fairs like the one I
showed you earlier
or in some cases even displayed
under the dome of the rotunda
in the United States Capitol.
These charts that talk about human traits
and how they are hereditary and
how they run in families in the same way
that
color runs in guinea pigs.
“If all marriages were eugenic, we could
breed this out in three generations,”
it says.
The triangle life shows us how
environments is what you have,
education is what you do, but
heritage, your real heritage
is what you are
and that has to do
with to your parents were.
"Selected parents will have better
children.
What you really are was all
settled when your parents were born" 
and this
inside was the great aim. It says 
eugenics
a more
crude, but more direct
perspective
comes in this chart. This is the one that
actually was under the dome of the
Capitol in nineteen
twenty-four when the Immigration
Restriction Law was passed.
Simply put, some people are a burden
that are born by the rest.
So this message of negative eugenics, of
the need to cut down on birth among
problem families,
was something that was not just in the
air. It was starting to be enacted
into the statute books as well.
It combined with religious ideas. People
were
very fond of using this
phrase from the Bible about how "The
sins of the Fathers will be visited upon
children"
and this from a eugenics textbook shows
a man
there was a very versus quoted and he is
shown syphilitic father,
blind son
and none incidentally, the girl has a
brace on her legs. The suggestion is
that the sins of the father
both in physical,
infectious ways, but also in terms
of genetic
conditions are passed down from
generation to generation
This was a favorite troupe of an
Evangelista, Billy Sunday who
was always talking of one
his most favored and most powerful
sermons.
It talked about that Jukes family and the
power of one god forsaken vicious
corrupt man and woman to breed and
propagated and
damn the whole world by their offspring.
So again this is in the air.
It's in the pulpits to the schools.
It's certainly in the medical journals,
in the scientific magazines,
and it's in the newspapers all the
time. Here are just a few
of hundreds and hundreds of headlines
talking about how we need to restrict
marriage. We need to
sterilized people.
Breeding better folks is a way
at the lower taxes so the economic
message
is really
in the foreground.
Now, let's go back to the Buck case.
The lawyers in Virginia
developed the case that the Buck family
was just like the Jukes and the Kallikaks.
So this pedigree shows us the evidence-
a family who was going to swamp the
state
with degenerates children.
They were going to fill up the jails, the asylums,
the welfare rolls, and the
point of the law, the laywers say,
is to stop
this process.
It took three years for Carrie Buck's case
to make it through the courts.
It was appealed.
The judge at the trial level
looked at this evidence.
saw these, this chart was
actually made after the case, but it
represents the evidence that was
presented,
showing Emmit or Emma Buck on the
first generation marked with the
telltale "F" for feeble minded
and her husband Frank also marked
similarly although he was nowhere to be
found.
Actually, he was dead by then, but
there were other men
unnamed shown in the pedigree
who were the fathers of children like
Carrie
and Doris
and Roy Smith
and then Carrie, marking the second
generation also with the "F" for 
feebleminded
gives birth to Vivian Alice Elain Buck,
who is also marked as feebleminded.
So here are
the three generations
and this case arrives after the trial
court judge says yes
this law
is valid. Its appealed to the State Supreme
Court of Virginia and they too
approve it as constitutional and then it's
appealed as planned to United States
Supreme Court
where it arrives in October of nineteen
twenty seven for argument
to a court that includes several real
legal giants.
For example, here's
Louis Brandeis.
Brandeis, of course, being
known 
most popularly for his invocation of the
right to privacy. The right to be left
alone.
He is on the court with people like
Chief Justice William Howard Taft who is
a giant of
a different kind.
He's always
known as the largest president ever. He's
also remembered for any number of
achievements.
 
0:34:36.409,0:34:37.999
He was the
governor of the Philippines during
Spanish-American War. Following that
he's also the only
President United States that also served
as the Chief Justice of the Supreme
Court
and Taft is a formidable figure
in many ways, but he really takes a back
seat as a judge to
the real star of the story and
that's Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Holmes has been on the court by this
time for about twenty five years. He was
the oldest justice.
He was clearly the most famous. He had
been celebrated
on the cover of Time Magazine
only the year earlier when he celebrated
his eighty-fifth birthday.
He was really all but a god to his
admirers who's described by one who's as
the Yankee
who had come down from Olympus
and a good deal of his celebrity
was attributed to the fact that he
was born of a famous father who was also
a writer
and a celebrity in his own
right.
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
had not only been
gained honors as a physician and important
scientists and
studied childbirth fever and wrote about
it,
but he was also novelist and poet, the
editor for the North American View.
He wrote poems that every schoolchild had
learned like the "One-horse Shay" or
"Old Ironsides"
and legend had at that
as Doctor Holmes came down every morning
he would promise 
a different a new portion, an
extra portion of marmalade
to his son
at the breakfast table if only
little Oliver, whom
they called Wendell,
would say something clever.
The boy
later became famous as a judge for
saying many clever things. You've heard
all of them.
First of all, he said that the
first amendment does not protect
reckless action like
falsely yelling fire in a crowded
theater.
He said that even unpopular
a speech could not be
suppressed unless it caused a clear 
and present danger of
violence
and he also wrote a line that still
vexes politicians when he described
taxes as
the price we pay for living
in a civilized society.
In Carrie Buck’s case he added
another line to
what was already
quite an extensive judicial resume.
Chief Justice Taft
gave him the job, they're shown here in
nineteen twenty-two,
the job of writing the court's
opinion. Taft was irritated.
Taft was a real ministrator.
He liked for people to respond when he gave
them work to do. He would give work to the
justices and they’d put it in the drawer
in
not get back to him and be slow and
he really liked Holmes because he said,
Holmes, he wrote home to his wife that
evening I gave Holmes an
assignment and he turned it around in a weekend.
It turns out it was this case.
Holmes wrote his short decision in
just over three days.
The Supreme Court had never dealt with
the merits of government in
mandated surgery before.
much less a law that prescribed
operations that were primarily design
not for individual medical benefit but
for state benefit,
but the evidence in the Buck trial,
according to Holmes was very clear.
They have defected grandmother;
defected mother; defective child.
This certainly proves the logic of the
eugenics law which was
meant to put an end to this parade of
defect.
The law, he said, didn't defend the
Constitution because citizens were often
required to make sacrifices
for the State
and he began a paragraph of his opinion
by stating that “We have seen
more than once that the public welfare
may call upon them
best citizens
for their lives.”
That was not an idle comment by Holmes.
It sounded a very powerful memory in his
life.
He had been a member of the
Massachusetts unit that lost the most
soldiers of any Union regiment
during the Civil War.
He was only twenty years old when he
listed. He was sent to the front.
He endured his first wound-a musket ball
in the chest at the Battle of Balls Ridge.
He was nursed back to health,
returned to his unit again, took a second
shot
at Antietam-
almost died there.
He was lost. His father came down from
Boston with a servant and a buckboard and they scoured
the battlefield and couldn’t find him.
They found him in home nearby.
Bandaged him up,
took him back home, nursed him to life 
and then
pressured him again to return.
He didn’t want to, but he returned
only to be shot a
third time at the Battle
of Chancellorsville.
So when Holmes was talking about war,
this was not idle chatter. This was an
experience he never forgot.
He often described his own generation of
one that had been touched by fired his
case. In his case
very literally
and when he died at age ninety-four
as his clerks at the Supreme Court when
into his private closet to take out
his belongings, they found his
Civil War uniform from seventy years
earlier still hanging there-
cleaned and impressed, but with a mended
bullet hole still showing in the chest.
So said Holmes, if he had his comrades
could face death for the country despite
what
people like Carrie Buck might think,
sterilization was really a lesser
sacrifice and  the country could mandate
to forestall what he saw it as a
flood of defects.
He put all these sentiments into his
very brief written opinion
and he said, we have seen more than once
that the public welfare may call upon
the best citizens for their lives.
It would be strange
if it could not call upon those who
already sapped the strength of the state
for these lesser sacrifices
in order to prevent power being swamped
with incompetence.
Holmes believed that life was short.
He believed that early death was even
more likely for these people he
considered unfit.
It would be preferable for them
and for the rest of society
by his lights if they had not been born
at all
and so he
concludes his opinion by saying, “It is
better for all the world,”
not necessarily Carrie Buck,
but the rest of 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.”
Now most judicial opinions
are full citations
especially these days it quite long.
You go to other cases you look for
president you cite that as the rule that
you're applying in this case.
Holmes needed some legal authority
to back up the rhetoric that he'd been
using
and so he looked back to an opinion,
but only one
from a case that had been decided in his
home state of Massachusetts.
The case is called Jacobson versus
Massachusetts,
first decade of the twentieth century,
that occurred right after smallpox
epidemics had been on the east coast
and it was about a public health law
passed that would force people
we're going to school to be vaccinated.
If they didn't
get vaccinated they could be fined five
dollars
and that's what happened in this case
that went to the supreme court.
So Holmes looked at that case and said well the
public health principle of requiring
this intrusive medical prevention
procedure, vaccination.
That’s pretty close.
It in forces the greater medical good of
the community.
We can use that to prohibit the
reproduction of defective by coercive
surgery
and then he said it
the principle that sustains compulsory
vaccination is broad enough to
cover cutting the floating. 
He ends his opinion in a phrase which
becomes
what today we would call the premium
sound bite of the
eugenics movement. The most
powerful slogan that eugenicists ever
had
describes the Buck family pedigree three
generations and says
three generations of the imbeciles are enough.
Seven of the justices including Brandeis
and Taft
and rest,
join him. Only one justice, a man named
Pierce Butler,
decided to vote no, but left no opinion
explaining himself.
So it was an eight to one decision.
That was May of nineteen twenty-seven.
Virginia sterilization laws upheld.
By fall of the year October, Dr. Bell
sterilize Carrie Buck after a brief delay.
Millions of people read about this
and it was really applauded in major
newspapers throughout the United States
and in the wake of the case the
opposition that existed, and there was
some,
seemed to melt away.
Indiana had passed the first sterilization low
in 1907. 
There were other,
half-dozen maybe fourteen, by the time
with Virginia law was passed in
nineteen twenty-four
and then
the number ballooned to more than thirty
states which had sterilization laws. The
last one passed
in nineteen thirty-seven.
Sterilization became
majority national policy in the United
States. As you see here, the states that
were involved.
There were more than sixty thousand people. The
numbers are somewhat elusive but we know
at least sixty thousand
maybe as many as sixty five thousand
facially sterilized
in institutions or another dozen
countries around the world
have laws like this,
but to bring this home just for a bit
and it's tempting to think that eugenics
was from
some other place in some other era, but
I want to show you a couple of the
slides just to show you how
how powerful these ideas were right here in Michigan.
There was a tremendous amount of eugenic
sentiment
that that came from different quarters.
Here's famous doctor Harvey Kellogg
ofthe of the serial family and a
Battle Creek Institution. A sanitarium
there which was
celebrated fare and wide.
Dr. Kellogg
was the head of the Race
Betterment Foundation, which had a number
of
meetings, international meetings, with
people came to talk about these ideas.
There was
around that same timeframe
a whole day dedicated by the state
by different municipalities to
studying eugenics
and the governor, Governor Ferris then
issued a proclamation on that day.
Doctor Kellogg said there should be
eugenics registry
that would lead to a normal
aristocracy of health.
We would create a
group human beings possessed of superior
characters of mind and body
and if that's not enough
the Dean of the Medical School here, 
the famous Dr. Victory Vaughan
was a strong stalwart eugenics movement.
In nineteen fourteen abook was
published
that included essays, twelve essays,
from
people all over the country
who were teachers
and who had given
public lectures in eugenics.
The rule was you had to come from
a certain size college, you had to have
had at least two thousand
people hear the lecture that
you've given
and for many people this was a matter of
counting up the numbers and classes.
There were some three hundred and twenty
five schools
that responded to a survey back then
that they taught eugenics in
colleges and universities and
one of those was Dr. Vaughan.
His essay was called "Eugenics From
the Point of View
of the Physician"
and he,
just to read you a couple lines,
he said, "Without being alarmist or
pessimistic I wish to say that the
American people is threatened
the spread of mental and moral
degeneracy through the multiplication of
the unfit.
It should be evident
from what I have said that alcoholism,
epilepsy, venereal diseases, feebleminded,
insanity and criminality should be
absolute bars
to parenthood.
To the young man of my audience I wish
to say shun the attractive, frivolous girl.
She is found in every community,
but the object of the eugenist
is not multiply her kind,
but to exterminate her.
He said to deny the possibility of race
betterment is the worst form of infidelity.
It means to be without faith in self and
fellow man and in the creator.
Race betterment, which, of course, includes
independence
upon self-betterment should influence
our daily lives,
form of basis for ethical judgments,
determine our political activities,
and be a strong motive in our religion.
well those kinds of sentiments lead to
sterilization law 
in Michigan, which
piggyback on concerns from around the
country that there was this growing mass
of people
that was
costing the citizens in institutional
care
as well as in
prisons and other such places.
Dr. Paul over who was a member
of the State Hospital Commission was
Enthusatics in his praise of the new
sterilization law
which prevents metal defectors from
bring children into the world.
That was the story
heralded by this headline
and Dr. H.E. Randall,
President the Michigan
Medical Association, joined with famous
eugenicist Paul Popenoe from Pasadena,
California,
talking about the
the effect of these laws in their first
few years.
Sterilization now offered by
Michigan, said Dr. Randall
is not a panacea though it has been a
great benefit.
So, not to pick on Michigan, but just to say
we are all in this together.
Thirty some states,
twelve or more foreign countries,
the one we remember
even though we forget all the rest,
is, of course,
Germany. Germany has faced after the first World
War with this
horrible economic conditions and
begins with a program of what we
might call positive eugenics.
Too many people dying. Not enough babies being born-
let's give an award to mothers who have
healthy babies and so there's the
iron cross,
meant to
increase, the incentivize we would
say today,
rewards for good aryan mothers.
Before too long
the negative side becomes all too
obvious.
Here are some posters that are part of
the propaganda in Germany. One of
the very first laws passed by the Nazi
regime in nineteen thirty-three
in the wake of this kind of propaganda,
is a sterilization law and this is meant
to show how expensive it is to take care
of people in institutions. The poster on the
right
shows this strapping 
young man,
blond-haired blue-eyed, carrying
these other less attractive people
around who were supposed to be
inhabitants of that palatial looking
asylum in the background
and we're told by the poster
you are sharing this load.
Hereditary legal person cost sixty
thousand reich marks a year.
Other posters like that were circulated
saying that the cost of taking
care of people in institutions was
more than the cost of everything else in
government put together.
It turns out that the law passed in
nineteen thirty-three, the law for the
prevention of hereditary diseased
offspring,
goes into effect
in nineteen thirty-four
and the Nazis out do the rest of the
world sterilizing between four
and five hundred thousand people
over the course of several years
before the end of World War II
and the law that is passed in Germany
consciously reflects passages, in
some cases whole sections,
of Harry Laughlin model law, as well as
laws that were actually passed in states
like Indiana,
California, and
the Virginia law
that were challenged in the case of Carrie Buck.
Eventually,
the Buck decision
and that phrase of three generations of
imbeciles are enough
is repeated
when after the second World War
in the nineteen forties and nineteen
forty-seven
the Nazi doctors are put on trial
for the horrific experiments that they
engage in 
and the extermination camps,
science torture in the guise of science, as it is
called by the prosecutors at
Nuremberg.
The attorneys for the Nazi doctors
respond to some of these charges which
included
the charge that experimental surgeries
were done in the camps-chemical
surgeries
some using x-rays that people didn't
know they were exposed to
others with novel kinds of surgery
many cases true torture that those
things were crimes against humanity
and war crimes in which the doctors
could be prosecuted for them.
Their response was to say
you did it too
and then read the into the record the
opinion of all of them. Wendell Holmes
from the case of
Buck v. Bell.
Now that history alone
would probably justify grouping the Buck
decision
as one of the most notorious Supreme
Court cases,
along with cases like the infamous Dred
Scott case we said blacks could never be
citizens or the Korematsu decision
which interned
Japanese-Americans
during World War II,
but I’ve tried in writings for a
number of years, to tell the rest of the
story
and it does seem to me that it makes the
Buck case even more startling.
When you realize that this case began
because
this man D. Alber Priddy,
who was the founder of the Virginia
Colony for
epileptics and the feebleminded back in
nineteen ten.
Dr. Priddy wanted the sterilization law
passed
in the first instance
for one simple reason. That's because
you'd already started sterilizing people.
From nineteen sixteen to nineteen eighteen he
sterilize dozens of women that he
thought were sexually immoral. They've
been picking up picked up on the streets
of 
Richmond, Virginia and other cities
He simply took in the operating
room and sterilize them. 
He was eventually sued by a man
whose wife and daughter had been
sterilize there. 
The case dragged him into the court of Richard.
He was very embarrassed and quite
angry.
He went to his lawyer after he
escape that case. The judge said
you know I’m not going to find you,
I'm not going to give the
plaintiffs money for this case
'cause there's an argument to be made
that maybe they need it for therapeutic
reasons, but don't do this anymore until
there's a law
and so we went to his lawyer and asked
him to draft
pieces a legislation that would allow
for him to be sterilizations
and prevent him from ever being sued for
it.
So the immunity provisions in this law
that was upheld by the Supreme Court
was one of Albert Priddy's
strongest motives for having it passed.
Dr. Priddy
died just after the
case was decided at the trial court
level.
It passed on to Dr. Bell
who became the named plaintiff
on appeal.
Here is Carri Buck who went on to live for
another sixty three years
and all her life she was poor.
When she died she and her family
that survived still carried the shame of
the Holmes opinion.
This is a picture of her from
nineteen eighty-three.
I interviewed her then about
three weeks before she died
and she confirmed to me then that
she was pregnant in nineteen twenty
three not because she
was morally deficient because she had
been assaulted by her boyfriend.
She did not intend to be pregnant.
He disappears from the picture.
Daughter Vivian
grows up
is raised by the same woman who raises Carrie Buck,
sent to the local school,
really taking care of
and
becomes under the name of the Dobbs
family her foster parents,
an honor roll student
for
part of her second year
and then promptly gets the measles that
summer
and dies of some intestinal
disorder
leaving behind only this record which
shows that
she was not 
appropriately describe as feebleminded,
but was, in fact, on the honor roll
and
to the lawyers in the group,if there
are any, the big shame in this case, I
think, falls to the lawyers.
That's because this man, Irving Whitehead,
was appointed, very successful lawyer,
was appointed to represent Carrie Buck,
but he did not.
He was best friends with the
lawyer on the other side
not in itself all that strange in a
little town,
but he was one of the founding directors
of Colony for the Epileptics and the
Feebleminded. He had lobbied for and
voted in favor of sterilization even
before the law allowed for it.
He had appeared
before the board of directors of the
colony as this case was going to the
courts
and was being decided against him
and he said
after he lost,
twice,
the case was in great shape
and it was likely to go to the Supreme
Court which is what they had planned all
along. They could not wish for a better
result.
So Whitehead really betrayed his client.
He defrauded
the court
and the real story of the Bucks
is much more complex than the one
we're left with from the Holmes opinion,
but these details remain hidden.
We also learned years later
that Harry Laughlin
who writes the model sterilization law,
gets an honorary Doctorate in Medicine
from University of Heidelberg on the
occasion of its five hundredth
and fiftieth anniversary
He is given in absentia this degree
for his work
what was called the science of
racial cleansing.
So, that's the Buck case. We look at the
case very differently now.
We look at sterilization very
differently.
There has been a movement to
for states to face this history
and the first one that did that was Virginia
where the Buck case took place
in the same neighborhood where Vivian Buck
went to school. This marker 
put up in two thousand and two on the
seventy-fifth anniversary the Buck
opinion.
I joined with my colleague, 
Alexander Stern, to go to Indiana in two
thousand seven
where we put on a symposium about
eugenics and were happy that our
colleagues there were able to
engineer getting this marker put
up along with apologies from
representatives of all three branches of
government
and most recently North Carolina
also address their history
put this marker up in two thousand
and ten
and are even today debating whether
or not they're going to make
preparations in the form of money payments
to the few people
who are still surviving who were
sterilized in nineteen sixties
and the seventies.
So to end this just, I want to say
that
these seem like old ideas that have probably gone
away by now. That was then, this is now
it's different world,
but I think it's a mistake to think that
way.
It's a mistake because we still
have legislators popping up and I could
give you a drawer full of these if you
were interested, showing how from 
time to time someone will step forward-
public official, educator, legislator
and say the kinds of things that were
exactly the same sentiments that were
mouthed at the 
Buck trial found. This man,
not pick on him, but he is the most
recent man, Martin Harty, was a
legislator up in New Hampshire last
year
and he said there's too many defective
people. You know the mentally ill, the
retarded people, physical disabilities,
drug addictions,
people society would be better without.
He eventually
had to retire.
He had said in another one of his talks
that nature has a way of getting rid of
really stupid people, but
now we're saving everyone who was born.
I wish we had a Siberian so we can ship
them all off and they'd
freeze to death-
clean up the population.
Well clearly politicians can say
that sort of thing these days even
though they may think it,
but the fact that some are more
willing to say it suggests to me that those
ideas are far from gone.
This is a list
of, a small list, of some of the very famous
people
who in one way or the other and I
emphasize one way or the other 'cause
not all of them are in favor of
sterilization and you know
would not have argued in favor
of euthanasia or favorite anything
happened in the death camps,
but at one point or another they all
supported some idea that had to do with
eugenics.
Maybe it was just the better baby
contests or the positive sides of
public health. Maybe it was the negative
sides of
enforced birth control by sterilization,
but you can see it's an extraordinary
list. It includes something like five
presidents of the United States.
It's worthwhile when we remember
eugenics to realize that it wasn't just
a small group of cranks
that the seductive ideas about eugenics
where ideas that all of us at some level
have endorsed. We all love to
see a world where there was no disease or
where there was no crime; where
there was no poverty; where
everybody got along
and if you could
convince yourself that there was a
scientific technological way to pull
that off
that would be a popular idea even today.
Talks like this are meant to remind us
that
we tend to
make a lot of mistakes when were making
decisions for other people particularly
the usual suspects those people who are
blamed for the ills of society when
things get bad in the economy gets tough.
Now I’m going to stop there and show you,
this is a
shameless self-promotion, this is the
book where the story is. Not that you
need the book,
but the website is something I'm
particular proud of because the website
I put up,
in the education community I should be able
to say this,
I put it up for people who teach and for
students
and it includes all of the documents
that were part of the Buck case. All the
legal documents as well as many,
many references that are that are part
of the story
that are available for free 'cause they're
not copyrighted anymore. If you go to that
website you can see those documents
especially the teachers in the audience.
I’m going to stop there and open it
up to questions. Thank you very much.
