by Adam Cohen
The University of Virginia soon became one of the South’s leading institutions of higher learning. Its lecture halls, libraries, and student residences filled up with young minds pursuing Jefferson’s forward-looking ideals. By the early twentieth century, the University of Virginia had grown so large that Charlottesville was hardly recognizable as the agricultural and transportation center it had once been. It was now primarily a university town whose leafy neighborhoods were, as one guidebook observed, “undisturbed by the bustle of commerce.”
Carrie had grown up in the shadow of this rarefied intellectual world, but her family had never been a part of it. She belonged to what one scholar of the region has called the “southern poor white caste.” Carrie’s people were a step up in the social hierarchy from blacks, who were relegated to the bottom as a matter of law. In the post–Civil War South, one study observed, class lines were sharply drawn and “the status of the white poor” was in most cases “fixed and rigid.” Carrie’s family, however, was an exception to the general rigidity of class lines in the South at the time. It had moved—downward.
Before the Civil War, Carrie’s paternal grandfather, Fleming Buck, had been a property owner and slaveholder. His fortunes shifted after the Confederacy fell and slavery ended. When Fleming Buck died in 1868, he left his widow and two young sons with land but no free labor to work it. Carrie’s father, Frank Buck—who was one of these two sons—left the hardscrabble farming life behind to become a tinner. As it turned out, however, the prospects for tinners in the impoverished post–Civil War South were not much better than for hardscrabble farmers. With low-cost metal flooding in from the North, tin prices were low, and Frank had difficulty making a living.
Carrie Buck’s mother, who was born Emma Adeline Harlowe, belonged to another family with a downward economic and social trajectory. Her father, Richard Harlowe, was a farmer who worked his own land. Emma’s mother, Adeline Dudley Harlowe, died in childbirth. While Emma’s father was alive, he eked out a modest living, but when he died after injuring his spine, Emma was left with little. She dropped out of school after the fifth grade, though she could read and write and had good penmanship.
When Emma was turning twenty-four, in 1896, she married Frank Buck. They were still married ten years later, when Carrie was born, but the marriage ended soon afterward. There were rumors about what became of Frank, including reports that he had abandoned the family. Records at the Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded would later say Frank had been “accidentally killed.” Whatever the reason, Emma was left to raise Carrie on her own.
Emma’s opportunities for earning a living were limited. Times were hard in Virginia, as they were across the South, which still had not recovered from the Civil War. The job prospects for a single woman like Emma ranged, as one historical account put it, from “bleak” to “desperate.” Emma had the added burdens of a modest education and a small child to care for. The people who would later lock Emma away said she turned to prostitution, a line of work that would have been available to her in Charlottesville’s thriving red-light district, though the record is unclear. Emma did receive help from the city’s charitable organizations. Anne Harris, a nurse involved in outreach to the poor, recalled that Emma “was on the charity list for a number of years, off and on—mostly on.”
Emma and her baby drifted through some of Charlottesville’s poorest neighborhoods. In the absence of a husband, she took up with other men, eventually giving birth to two more children, Carrie’s half sister, Doris, and half brother, Ray. Emma’s men no doubt provided her with financial help, though likely not enough. Harris recalled that during this period Emma and her young children struggled to survive and “they were on the streets more or less.”
Emma’s life on the margins put her relationship with Carrie at risk. The Progressive Era, which began in the 1890s, had reshaped the nation’s social and economic relations—and, among other things, ushered in a new concern about the children of the poor. There was growing sentiment among child welfare advocates, who had taken to calling themselves “child-savers,” that children of the poor were best off not in their own families, or in state facilities, but in middle-class homes. Reformers had pushed for new laws to facilitate foster care and adoption and encourage better-off families to take in children from deprived backgrounds.
Given this popular sentiment, it was not difficult for the Dobbses to take Carrie from her mother, with the offer of a better life. As an officer of the peace, John Dobbs had come across the Buck family in his travels around town and concluded that Emma was not caring for her children well enough. He and Alice decided to take Carrie home for themselves. When the municipal court gave its approval, Carrie joined a family that included John and Alice Dobbs and their daughter, who was slightly older than Carrie.
Carrie’s life in the Dobbs household bore little relation to the idealized vision of adoptive families that the “child-savers” promoted. “I had good days and I had bad days,” Carrie would later say. The Dobbses treated Carrie much differently than their own daughter, offering her little in the way of parental love or support. Carrie called her foster parents by their last names, as a servant girl would—never “Mother” and “Father.”
Carrie attended grade school, but her education was cut short, as her mother’s had been. The reason was not a lack of intelligence, contrary to the claims that would later be made. Carrie’s school records show that she performed well and was promoted at the end of each year. Though she occasionally got into trouble for writing notes to boys, Carrie was far from a delinquent. She had proceeded from grade to grade without incident, and had left school only when the Dobbses removed her, likely so she could do more housework. Her last teacher marked her down as “very good—deportment and lessons.”
It was not unusual in the early 1900s for poor children to be put to work, particularly in the South. In some southern states, nearly 30 percent of textile workers were between ten and fifteen years old. Reformers had begun to mobilize against child labor. In 1906, the year of Carrie’s birth, the left-wing writer John Spargo had written a muckraking book, The Bitter Cry of the Children, which decried “the enslavement of children” and lamented that “this great nation in its commercial madness devours its babes.” But even as progressives fought child labor, the business and political establishments, especially in the South, defended it. Parents “should be left alone,” one southern governor insisted, “and allowed to manage their own children [and] . . . their own affairs.”
With her education complete—or as complete as the Dobbses would allow—Carrie was freed up to do domestic work full-time. She had more time to help Alice Dobbs with chores around the house. She was also now available for the Dobbses to hire out during the day to do paid housework for the neighbors. With Carrie performing “servants’ chores” for paying customers, as well as for her own foster family, the arrangement that the Dobbses insisted had begun as an “act of kindness” was looking increasingly like a shrewd financial move.
Carrie’s day-to-day existence was not entirely joyless. She found time for hikes on the hills around Charlottesville, and went fishing with boys from the neighborhood. It was a life with a great deal of responsibility and drudgery, but her basic needs were being met. From time to time, Carrie ran into her mother and half siblings on the street, and she could see that her family could not always say the same.
In 1920, just as Carrie was about to turn fourteen, her mother’s life changed dramatically. Emma was taken in and deposited at the municipal court. It was not clear what she would be charged with. Emma could have been accused of vagrancy or prostitution, but on April 1 Judge Charles D. Shackelford convened a Commission of Feeblemindedness to consider claims that she had a “mental peculiarity” that caused her to exhibit “a lack of moral sense and responsibility.”
Judge Shackelford probed Emma’s life history. Emma said she had been born in Albemarle County forty-seven years ear
lier and currently lived in Charlottesville. She was a widow with three children—none of them, she insisted, mentally defective. Asked her profession, she offered none, though she said she had inherited money from her father. Emma said she had been convicted of prostitution, though women in that era were charged as prostitutes for a wide range of activities, including vagrancy.
After hearing all the evidence, Judge Shackelford ruled that Emma was “feeble-minded”—though she had not been given a formal intelligence test—and “without means of support.” The court directed that Emma be committed without delay to the Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded. Five days after the hearing, a social worker traveled with Emma by train to Lynchburg, the nearest city to the colony. A hospital orderly was waiting to take her from the Lynchburg station to her new, court-ordered home.
On her arrival at the colony, Emma was given a vigorous cleaning and a medical examination. The institution’s records described her as “well-nourished” and “fat” but “pale, nervous and restless.” She was found to be suffering from rheumatism, pneumonia, and syphilis. The examiner observed what appeared to be track marks on Emma’s arms, suggesting she might have used intravenous drugs. The records included a list of the belongings she brought with her: “$4.80, waist shirt, overshoes, 1 pr. shoes, 1 pr. hose, 1 coat, hat, undershirt 2, skirt.” The clothing, it was noted, was “in very bad condition.”
In keeping with the colony’s standard practice, Emma was given an intelligence test. The colony used a version of the Binet-Simon, the leading test at the time and one that was highly unreliable. On the basis of her performance, Emma was judged to have an IQ of 50 and designated, in her intake records, as “Mental Deficiency, Familial: Moron.” As a result of the diagnosis, she would be locked up for the rest of her life.
• • •
Four years had passed since Emma’s arrival at the colony, and Carrie was now facing her own inquisition. The Dobbses’ petition was assigned to Judge Shackelford, the same judge who had sent Emma away. The Commission of Feeblemindedness that heard Carrie’s case was made up of Judge Shackelford and two Charlottesville medical doctors whom he had appointed: Dr. J. F. Williams and Dr. J. C. Coulter, who was the Dobbses’ family physician.
In their petition, John and Alice Dobbs said they had taken care of Carrie since she was “three or four,” and she had not developed symptoms of being feebleminded or epileptic until she was “ten or eleven years of age.” Carrie’s symptoms grew progressively worse and she became “so affected” that they could “no longer control or care for her.” Though it should not have been relevant to the commission, the Dobbses said their only income was Mr. Dobbs’s salary, and they were “no longer able to care for” Carrie “financially.”
The Dobbses submitted interrogatories with more information about Carrie’s condition. Taken together, the petition and interrogatories presented a picture that bore little relation to the truth. The Dobbses said Carrie was “feebleminded,” but that was contradicted by her academic records, which showed that she had reached the sixth grade, with generally good grades and comportment, before the Dobbses pulled her out of school.
As to her medical condition, when asked “At what age was any mental peculiarity first noticed?” the Dobbses wrote “since birth,” even though they had only known Carrie from the age of four. Their answer to the question “At what age did epilepsy first appear?” was “since childhood.” But they answered no when asked “Is she now or has she ever been subject to epilepsy, headaches, nervousness, fits or convulsions of any kind ?” The Dobbses offered no medical or school records to support their claim that Carrie suffered from epilepsy. Years later, when Carrie was released from the colony, the superintendent, a doctor who had observed her closely for years, would flatly state, “She is not an epileptic.”
There was more to the story than the Dobbses were telling the commission. In their petition, they did not mention that Carrie was pregnant—or how her condition had come about. Alice’s nephew, a young man named Clarence Garland, had come to visit the previous summer. During the visit, Carrie later said, Clarence, “forced himself on me.” According to Carrie, the pregnancy that Alice Dobbs had blamed on Carrie’s not being trustworthy had actually been the result of rape.
Carrie was a sexually inexperienced young woman at the time of the attack. She played with neighborhood boys, she later recalled, but did not date any of them. “I didn’t run around,” she said, “I wasn’t allowed to.” She was, she insisted, a “good girl.” Carrie said that after Clarence forced himself on her he promised he would marry her, but he instead left Charlottesville.
Carrie’s condition put the Dobbses in a difficult position. Pregnancy outside of marriage carried a considerable stigma, and having Carrie remain in the household would be an embarrassment for the Dobbs family. The situation was made far worse by Carrie’s account of being attacked. If she went public with her story, Clarence could be charged with rape. These problems might be solved, however, if Carrie were quickly and permanently sent away.
In the 1920s it was not difficult to have someone like Carrie institutionalized as feebleminded. The nation was in the midst of a panic over feeblemindedness. The feebleminded, however the term was defined, were regarded as a burden on government and private charity, a menace to public safety, and a threat to the national gene pool. The Survey, an influential social workers’ journal, editorialized that of all of the matters facing state governments “none is more pressing than the care of the feeble-minded” who “involve every social problem.” The Georgia Department of Public Welfare was more blunt in warning about the feebleminded. “What shall it profit Georgia,” the department asked in a report, “if we stop the loss from the boll weevil and fail to stamp out the germs of dependency and delinquency that eat the heart out of the human family itself?”
States had been building institutions at a rapid rate, and sending the feebleminded away in record numbers. In 1904, 17.3 feebleminded people were institutionalized for every 100,000 people in the population. By 1921 the number had nearly tripled, to 46.7. The main purpose of this drive to institutionalize—in state hospitals and specialized schools for the feebleminded—was not better care or training. It was to remove a group deemed to be a threat and to “segregate” them: lock them up in secure facilities where they could not reproduce. “The ultimate aim of the school,” said the head of the newly established North Carolina School for the Feeble-Minded, “is the elimination of feeblemindedness from the race by segregation.”
Many factors were working against Carrie at her Commission of Feeblemindedness inquisition, starting with the fact that she was a woman. The campaign against feeblemindedness was focused on young women, who were deemed both a moral and a demographic threat. The medical establishment had long been sounding the alarm: Dr. Walter E. Fernald of Massachusetts, a leading authority, cautioned that “feeble-minded women are almost invariably immoral and if at large usually become carriers of venereal disease or give birth to children who are as defective as themselves.” Hastings Hart, the director of the Russell Sage Foundation’s child-helping division, warned states that feebleminded girls were “vastly more dangerous to the community” than feebleminded boys, and recommended that “every feeble-minded woman should be faithfully segregated for twenty years.”
Feebleminded women were believed to have unusually strong sex drives and loose morals and, as a result, it was said that they bore more children than other women, a problem known as “differential fecundity.” Henry Goddard, the research director of the Vineland Training School for Feeble-minded Girls and Boys in Vineland, New Jersey, and a pioneer in the field, warned that everything possible must be done to “not allow native morons to breed.” Because of these concerns many states, including Virginia, gave women of childbearing age priority in admission to institutions for the feebleminded.
Given the national panic at the thought of feebleminded women reproducing, Carrie�
�s greatest disadvantage at the inquisition was a simple one: she was pregnant. She was in her seventh month, which would have been noticeable to the commission’s doctors, who conducted a “personal examination.” Dr. J. C. Coulter, the Dobbses’ family physician who was one of the commission’s three members, would presumably already have been aware. As an unmarried, pregnant, feebleminded minor, Carrie embodied the worst fears of those warning against the rising tide of feeblemindedness.
A final factor working against Carrie was the nature of the proceeding itself. Even though she could be locked away for life, she had no right to a lawyer or even an adult guardian to represent her. The Dobbses knew a great deal about the legal issues from the advice of Mary Duke, the secretary of public welfare, and Mr. Dobbs’s experience as an officer of the peace, but Carrie had no one to help her to understand or challenge the claims being made against her, or to introduce witnesses or academic or medical records to defend herself.
The Commission of Feeblemindedness met, as scheduled, on January 23, 1924. The court had deputized Mr. Dobbs as a “Special Constable,” and directed him to serve notice on his wife; Carrie; Carrie’s parents, Frank and Emma Buck; and the two medical doctors on the commission. He completed most of his assignment, but he told the court that Frank and Emma Buck “were not found in my county or city.” Emma, who was by now living at the colony, was apparently not told about her daughter’s hearing or allowed to attend.
Judge Shackelford explained to Carrie what the hearing was about. After considering the evidence, including the doctors’ personal examination of Carrie, the commission formally pronounced her “feeble-minded or epileptic,” a notably vague designation. In brief written findings, the commission said nothing about how it had evaluated her mental abilities or what, if any, evidence it had identified of epilepsy. Judge Shackelford then ordered Carrie to be delivered to the superintendent of the Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded.
