The eugenics movement in the United States is a sordid story of unbounded arrogance, hypocrisy, classism, racism, and blatant disregard for the principles upon which our country was founded. Perhaps it would not be worth learning about if we as a nation were in no danger of repeating similar atrocities.

But it is worth learning about. Edwin Black, who previously documented IBM’s role in the Nazi Holocaust, documents the sordid history of the U.S. eugenics movement in his 2003 book, “War Against the Weak – Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race”. From the introduction of his book:


Though the roots of the eugenics movement in the United States go back to the late 19th Century, it did not establish legal legitimacy until the first state sterilization statute was passed in Indiana in 1907. That statute was based largely on similar but vetoed 1905 Pennsylvania legislation titled “Act for the Prevention of Idiocy”, which “mandated that if the trustees and surgeons of the state’s several institutions caring for feebleminded children determined procreation is inadvisable, then the surgeon could perform such operation for the prevention of procreation as shall be decided…”

Still, for the two following decades, most states, even those that enacted sterilization laws, were reluctant to proceed very far in implementing eugenic policies. The eugenics movement needed legitimacy via a test case to take before the U.S. Supreme Court.


The case for the sterilization of Carrie Buck

In 1920, Carrie Buck’s mother, Emma, was brought before a Commission on Feeblemindedness in Virginia. Hearing officials noted that Emma had syphilis, characterized her moral character as “notoriously untruthful”, and answered “No” to a question on the standard form asking if Emma “conducted herself in a proper conjugal manner”. That was enough to officially deem Emma as feebleminded and have her committed (1*) to a “Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded”, where she would remain for the rest of her life.

Emma’s daughter Carrie was then consigned to the family of J.T. Dobbs, a peace officer, to raise her. Carrie did well in school, but the Dobbses withdrew her from school (2*) in the 6th grade so that she could spend more time on housework and be loaned out to other families for housework as well. In 1923, at the age of 17, Carrie was raped and became pregnant. Dobbs then filed commitment papers, claiming that Carrie was feebleminded, testifying that “Carrie had experienced hallucinations and outbreaks of temper and had engaged in peculiar actions.” On that basis, Carrie was quickly declared “feebleminded” and committed (3*) to the Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded.

By that time, Virginia had had so many “unfit” committed to its institutions that they were becoming a financial burden. The desired solution, strenuously advocated by the eugenics movement, was sterilization, which would allow states to release their “unfit” in the secure knowledge that they wouldn’t pass on their dangerous genes to future generations. But courts throughout the United States had reacted unfavorably to sterilization laws, so states were reluctant to proceed very far along that path. What was needed was a U.S. Supreme Court setting precedent.

The eugenics movement leaders considered Carrie Buck to be an ideal test case because there were already two generations of diagnosed “feeblemindedness” in the family (Carrie and Emma). If Carrie’s daughter Vivian could also be so branded, they could then make the case for sterilization of Carrie based on documented three generations of feeblemindedness. But Vivian was only 7 months old, and her social worker noted that there was nothing in her medical records that indicated feeblemindedness. But under intense questioning the social worker admitted that “There is a look about it that is not quite normal, but just what it is, I can’t tell”. That was good enough, given Vivian’s family history, for the leader of the American eugenics movement to declare Vivian to be feebleminded (4*).

The state of Virginia then advocated for Carrie’s sterilization, based on three generations of feeblemindedness. For Carrie’s defense, the state appointed an attorney who was a staunch eugenics advocate. The case was duly appealed up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Buck v. Bell that “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or let them starve... society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”


1*) J. David Smith and K. Ray Nelson. The Sterilization of Carrie Buck, 1989, pages 15-16.
2*) Smith and Nelson, pages 1-3, 5-6, 18.
3*) Paul A. Lombardo, “Eugenic Sterilization in Virginia: Aubrey Strode and the Case of Buck V. Bell”.
4*) Harry H. Laughlin, “Analysis of the Hereditary Nature of Carrie Buck”, The Legal status of Eugenic Sterilization, pages 16-17.


The opening of the sterilization floodgates

A few months after the USSC decision, Carrie Buck was sterilized in October, 1927. Her daughter Vivian was enrolled in school, despite the diagnosis of imbecile, and made the honor role prior to dying of an infection at the age of eight.

With the USSC Buck v. Bell decision of May 1927, and with a great amount of lobbying from the eugenics movement, many states lost their hesitancy about going down the sterilization path. During the 18 years between the passage of Indiana’s first state sterilization law of 1907 and 1925, there were 6,244 state-sanctioned sterilizations and castrations (5*), an average of about 347 per year. Fifteen years later, by 1940, there were an additional 29,634 sterilizations or castrations (6*), an average of 1,976 per year, almost six times the annual rate prior to the USSC decision.

Sometimes people or societies recognize their misdeeds only when they see the same trait in others. Such was the fate of the American eugenics movement. Black explains in his introduction to “War Against the Weak”:



5*) Harry H. Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization 1926; Historical, Statistical, and Legal Review of Eugenical Sterilization in the United States, p 60.
6*) Human Betterment Foundation, Legal Status of Eugenical Sterilization


Fast forward to present

Thus, as eugenics came to be associated with our mortal enemy of World War II, the eugenics movement faded out of site. Yet, today we do things that are, in my opinion, just as bad, and which are characterized by many (though not all) of the same underlying dynamics:

Highest incarceration rate in the world
According to a December 2006 U.S. Justice Department report, there were 2.2 million people incarcerated in U.S. prisons or jails, representing a 33 year continuous rise in the U.S. prison population. The U.S. incarceration rate of 737 per 100,000 residents is now the highest rate in the world. Russia is a distant second, with 611 per 100,000 residents, and the highest rate in Europe is England/Wales, at 148 per 100,000 residents. The United States, with only 5 % of the world’s population, holds one quarter of the prison population of the world within its borders. Of the total U.S. prison population in 2004, more than one quarter, 530,000, were imprisoned for drug offenses, and almost a tenth of these were for marijuana only. And many of those are for mere possession, rather than manufacturing or selling. For example, of 700,000 marijuana arrests in 1997, 87% were for mere possession, and 41% of those incarcerated for a marijuana offense are incarcerated for possession only. This is not surprising when one considers that most non-violent first time offenders guilty of drug possession today in the United States get a mandatory minimum sentence of 5 years with no parole, or 10 years with no parole if a large quantity of drugs is involved.

The racial and class disparities in the United States for imprisonment for drug offenses are similar to the racial and class disparities seen in the victims of the eugenics movement. Though the Federal Household Survey shows that there are five times as many non-Hispanic white illegal drug users as black users, blacks constitute a highly disproportionate percent of the population arrested for (37%) or serving time for (42% of those in federal prisons and 58% of those in state prisons) drug violations.

Whenever and wherever victimless crimes are prosecuted and punished, the opportunity for arbitrary enforcement of the law based on racism, classism or other nefarious factors is magnified tremendously.

Adding to the damage done to individuals is the damage that these laws do to families, thus creating a vicious cycle. It is likely that the major reason for single parent households in our country today is the huge number of imprisoned men.

Imperial violence
What our Iraq War has shown more than anything else is how little concern the elite sponsors of U.S. policy value human lives, especially the lives of foreigners of different racial/ethnic background than us.

Keeping in mind that all justifications for the Iraq War have turned out to be lies, our illegal war against Iraq has created over a million Iraqi dead (the vast majority civilians) and more than four million refugees, out of a population of just over 25 million. What are some of the dynamics of the US military presence in Iraq that have allowed this to happen?

A report by a coalition of non-governmental groups called the Global Policy Forum sheds a lot of light on some of the reasons for the tragedies that so many Iraqis have suffered under the U.S. occupation. The report explains that U.S. forces:


U.S. prisoners outside of the United States
Whereas our internal incarceration rate is by far the highest in the world, our imprisonment of prisoners outside of the United States is even more disproportionately high. There are: known U.S. operated prisons at Guantanamo Bay and in Iraq and Afghanistan, where torture and other grave abuses of human rights occur routinely; Secret U.S. prisons throughout the world where similar or worse abuses occur routinely; and “extraordinary rendition”, whereby U.S. officials kidnap (or otherwise gather into their custody) men or boys and transport them to prisons in countries where few or no barriers to the most horrendous kinds of torture exist, in full knowledge that those men are likely to be systematically tortured and never released until dead.

Stephen Grey, Amnesty International’s Award-Winning Journalist for Excellence in Human Rights Reporting, in his book “Ghost Plane”, meticulously documents the illegal and horrendous system of torture and other human rights abuses that George Bush has perpetrated upon the world as part of his so-called “War on Terror”. Here are excerpts of the U.S. torture program from the introduction to Grey’s book:


How many prisoners do we have? Estimates of how many prisoners have disappeared into the Bush administration’s Gulag system cannot be precise because of the secrecy. Estimates have varied from 8,500 to 35,000. An AP story estimated around 14,000:


Colonel Larry Wilkerson, former Chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had put the blame on Dick Cheney for much of the administration’s “torture guidance”, claims that the number of “disappeared” approximates 35,000.


The connection between past and present

Similarities between the U.S. eugenics movement and the above noted circumstances of the present day include a blatant disregard for human rights, unbounded arrogance, racism, and classism. The young man who is locked away for five years for possession of a minute quantity of illegal drugs because he is black, poor, and can’t afford decent legal representation; the Iraqis who are killed, chased out of their homes, or locked away for several years with no opportunity to question their detainment because they happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time; all these people have much in common with Carrie Buck: They are helpless victims against a system controlled by powerful men who don’t have any sympathy for the most basic universal human rights.

And as with the Nazi Holocaust, these are all elite driven activities. Most Americans have no more enthusiasm for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the highest incarceration rate in the world, or a world wide gulag system today than they had for the eugenics movement in the early decades of the 20th Century. Yet, as with the German peoples’ reaction to the Nazi Holocaust, partly because of lack of information, and partly because of apathy, most Americans have sat passively by and allowed these things to take place without much protest.

The eugenics movement in this country was defeated in large part because its similarity to Hitler’s eugenics program was too stark to avoid recognizing it as such. Hitler was our wartime enemy, and the exposure of his many atrocities caused such revulsion among most Americans that everything he did was greatly suspect in their view.

But that was a long time ago. A minority of today’s Americans were alive during Hitler’s day, fewer still were old enough to remember, and too many of them have either forgotten or never learned the lessons of the Nazi Holocaust. So, when today’s Americans witness the starkest and most widespread violations of human rights ever committed by our country’s leaders, they don’t recognize them for what they are. Instead, most Americans maintain a naïve faith in the decency (if not the competency) of their leaders that is totally unwarranted by any serious examination of the facts.

The U.S. Constitution provides no guarantee against fascism or any other kind of tyranny. It only provides a blueprint that enables us to maintain freedom and democracy as long as we care enough about those things to recognize when they are in grave jeopardy and exercise sufficient vigilance to maintain them.