Eugenics

The case of Buck v. Bell originated in the pseudoscience of eugenics. Coined in 1883 by Charles Darwin's cousin, Sir Francis Galton, the word eugenics means being "well born." According to Galton, encouraging marriage and procreation among fit people while decreasing reproduction among the unfit would speed human evolution toward perfection.

Eugenics captured Americans' attention at the turn of the twentieth century. Many reformers believed that social problems such as alcoholism, criminality, poverty, prostitution, vagrancy, and venereal disease stemmed from unfit people's heredity. Reformers claimed that the "feebleminded"—mentally impaired individuals—disproportionately comprised the antisocial class menacing civilization.

Authorities used intelligence tests to identify the feebleminded, segregating them in institutions to prevent their procreation. Institutionalizing people was expensive. Eugenic sterilization promised savings: once sterilized, individuals could be released without fear of procreating. Sterilized feebleminded people could support themselves, rather than burdening society.

Virginia and Forced Sterilization

Leading advocates of eugenics in Virginia included Walter Plecker, first registrar for the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics and one of the most aggressive lobbyists for the 1924 Racial Integrity Act, and Dr. Albert Sydney Priddy, superintendent and physician of the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded in Lynchburg. Priddy had the colony's lawyer, Aubrey Strode, draft Virginia's sterilization bill, which was signed into law on March 18, 1924. Priddy and Strode then looked for a test case to prove the law's constitutionality.

Carrie Buck's family became a model for eugenic reform. Born in Charlottesville on July 2, 1906, to a poor mother named Emma A. Harlow Buck, Carrie Buck, at age three, was removed from her mother's care and placed with foster parents, John and Alice Dobbs. Judging Emma to be promiscuous for having a child out of wedlock and a "low grade moron," authorities committed her to the Virginia Colony in 1920. In the summer of 1923, the Dobbs's nephew raped Carrie Buck and she became pregnant. To hide their shame, the Dobbses had Buck declared feebleminded and committed to the Virginia Colony with her mother. On March 28, 1924, Buck gave birth to a daughter, Vivian, and the Dobbses became Vivian's foster parents. In June, just before the sterilization act went into effect, Buck was sent to the colony.

Priddy and Strode believed they had their test case. Having Carrie Buck, her mother Emma, and Buck's half-sister Doris in the colony demonstrated the heredity of feeblemindedness. They ordered Buck's sterilization and found a lawyer, Irving Whitehead, who was a former member of the colony's board, to represent her. Priddy, Strode, and Whitehead colluded to give the sterilization law a strong showing.

Whitehead filed Buck v. Priddy in the Amherst County court in November 1924. After establishing that Emma, Carrie, and Doris Buck were all feebleminded, Strode called a social worker to testify about Carrie Buck's daughter Vivian. The social worker declared Vivian "not quite a normal baby." Three generations of alleged feeblemindedness, and Whitehead's weak defense of Buck, secured victories in Amherst County and the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals by June 1925. Priddy died between cases, but eugenics enthusiast Dr. John H. Bell succeeded Priddy as superintendent and as the suit's nominal defendant. Buck v. Bell then went before the Supreme Court of the United States.

Strode and Whitehead argued the case on April 22, 1927. Justice Holmes delivered the 8 to 1 decision on May 2, 1927. In the majority opinion, Holmes reasoned, "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 … Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Justice Butler, the lone dissenter, did not file an opinion explaining his objection. On October 19, 1927, Dr. Bell sterilized Carrie Buck.

The Legacy of Buck v. Bell

Between 1927 and 1972, doctors at Virginia's state hospitals sterilized another 8,300 Virginians. At the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, Nazi defendants testified that their eugenics laws were based on Virginia's precedent. The Nazis sterilized more than 400,000 people—a prelude to the extermination of approximately seventeen million "unfit" people, six million of whom were "inferior" Jews, in the Holocaust.

Although compulsory sterilization is now seen as an abuse of human rights and eugenics is a discredited science, Buck v. Bell was never overturned, and Virginia did not repeal its sterilization law until 1974. On December 29, 1980, the American Civil Liberties Union filed the civil lawsuit Poe v. Lynchburg Training School and Hospital on behalf of all sterilization victims, male and female. (Men comprised roughly one-third of the total number of sterilizations.) The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia ruled that because Buck v. Bell continued to be the controlling authority, the sterilizations were legal. After all, Buck had already established the constitutionality of sterilization and the minimum standard for due process and equal protection. To the court, the fact that the law had been repealed was beside the point. What the court also found, however, was that the allegations that hospital authorities did not scrupulously follow procedure were plausible, compelling, and worthy of further invesitgation. Failure to follow procedure would have left the state liable to violations of due process and legal protection. As a result, the plaintiffs and the state of Virginia later settled out of court, with the state agreeing to attempt to locate all persons who were sterilized and inform them of the consequences of the operation, and to provide them with counseling and medical treatment.

Historians have since found evidence that neither Carrie Buck nor her daughter was mentally retarded and that Bell's sterilization relied on a false diagnosis. Vivian Dobbs, Carrie Buck's daughter, was placed on the honor roll at her elementary school in 1931, a year before she died at the age of eight. Carrie Buck died in a nursing home in Waynesboro on January 28, 1983, and was buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Charlottesville. On May 2, 2002, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Buck decision, Virginia governor Mark Warner apologized for Virginia's eugenics program, calling the movement "a shameful effort in which state government never should have been involved." A state historical highway marker was dedicated to Buck v. Bell in Charlottesville on that day.