Imbeciles

by Adam Cohen

  With public opinion a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to castration laws, the eugenicists set their sights on a new approach: eugenic marriage restrictions. Connecticut, the first state to act, adopted an 1895 law barring “epileptic, imbecile, or feeble-minded” individuals from marrying if the woman was under forty-five. The penalty was up to three years in prison—and up to five years for anyone who aided in such a marriage. Other states soon followed. The majority had eugenic marriage laws by 1914, and forty-one states would by the mid-1930s.

  Marriage prohibitions were a major advance for the eugenics movement: they were the first laws to endorse the goal of reducing reproduction by the “unfit.” Many eugenicists insisted that they did not go far enough, however, and that defective people would continue to have children, with or without a marriage license. One of the nation’s leading eugenicists was direct about it: “No cheap device of a law against marriage,” he protested, was going to solve the problem of hereditary defects.

  Eugenicists began to rally around a tactic they saw as more promising: “segregation” of the unfit. The idea was simple: identify the feebleminded and other people who should not have children, and place them in state institutions during their reproductive years. In The Kallikak Family, Goddard advocated “segregation and colonization”—locking away the feebleminded in state colonies. If such a system had been in place during the Revolutionary War and the “feeble-minded girl” that Martin Kallikak had children with had instead been “segregated in an institution,” Goddard said, the defective line of the Kallikak family would not have existed.

  Dr. Walter E. Fernald of Massachusetts spoke for many eugenicists when he wrote in a journal article that “institutional segregation of uncared-for feeble-minded persons . . . during the child-bearing period is probably the most potent plan for reducing the number of feeble-minded in succeeding generations.” Goddard insisted that the most important thing was to get to the unfit while they were young. “Determine the fact of their defectiveness as early as possible, and place them in colonies under the care and management of intelligent people who understand the problem,” he advised. “Train them, make them happy; make them as useful as possible, but above all, bring them up with good habits and keep them from ever marrying or becoming parents.”

  There was an obvious problem with the segregation model: cost. Locking people up for their entire reproductive cycle imposed a large burden on state taxpayers. The public might support a few colonies for the feebleminded, but it was unlikely they could be persuaded to pay to warehouse the number of people the eugenicists believed had to be locked away.

  Supporters of segregation struggled to find ways to make the economics work. Goddard argued that if large numbers of the unfit were “colonized,” many almshouses and jails could close, and the savings spent on more colonies. He also urged colonies to find ways to exploit child labor. If “feeble-minded children were early selected and carefully trained,” he said, “they would become more or less self-supporting in their institutions, so that the expense of their maintenance would be greatly reduced.” Even with all of Goddard’s enterprising ideas, many eugenicists were convinced that “segregation and colonization” could not be done on a large enough scale to solve the problem posed by the unfit.

  • • •

  While eugenicists were desperately looking for a method of carrying out their program, new options were emerging—alternatives to barbaric castration, ineffective marriage laws, and expensive segregation—and they were coming from medical science. In 1899 Dr. Albert J. Ochsner, a surgeon at St. Mary’s Hospital and Augustana Hospital in Chicago, published a paper, “Surgical Treatment of Habitual Criminals,” in the Journal of the American Medical Association. He described a new procedure that rendered a man sterile by severing his vas deferens—what came to be known as a vasectomy. Unlike castration, it was not disfiguring and did not upset a man’s hormonal balance. Dr. Ochsner advocated that the procedure be used to prevent criminals from passing on their hereditary defects.

  Inspired by this work, Dr. Harry C. Sharp, a surgeon at the Indiana Reformatory, began performing vasectomies on inmates. In 1909 Dr. Sharp published “Vasectomy as a Means of Preventing Procreation in Defectives.” He revealed that he had performed sterilizations on forty-two inmates under the age of twenty-six, and argued that many more such procedures were needed. Dr. Sharp called for sterilizations to be conducted in every “almshouse, insane asylum, institute for the feeble-minded, reformatory or prison,” and he urged doctors to lobby their state legislatures to allow these institutions “to render every male sterile who passes its portals.”

  While medical researchers were perfecting the vasectomy, they were also making advances in sterilizing women. A German surgeon, Dr. M. Madlener, developed the salpingectomy, a procedure in which the fallopian tubes are cut and partially removed so a woman’s eggs cannot travel from the ovary to the uterus to be fertilized. Early salpingectomies were far from safe. Of the eighty-nine operations Madlener performed from 1910 to 1920, three ended in fatalities. As they were done more frequently the mortality rate declined, but they remained major abdominal surgery.

  As these new procedures became available, eugenicists had a new cause: laws mandating sterilization of people with hereditary defects. Eugenic sterilization had all of the advantages that previous techniques lacked: it was a modern medical procedure that was far less barbaric than castration; it was completely effective when done correctly; and it was relatively inexpensive—one procedure rendered a person infertile for life.

  Eugenics supporters began to lobby for involuntary sterilization laws at the state level. Given its underlying values, it is not surprising that the eugenic sterilization campaign never became a mass movement. As the historian Carl Degler observed, eugenics was a “necessarily elitist” ideology, which was an impediment to building a truly grassroots movement. The drive for eugenic sterilization laws came largely from societal elites who had an outsize impact on public policy. One leading eugenics group conceded in a report that there were not great numbers of people across the country who were committed to the sterilization cause. The pressure, it said, came from a “very small energetic group of enthusiasts, who have . . . influence in the legislatures.”

  The most important elite advocating eugenic sterilization was the medical establishment. Major medical journals ran articles by prominent academics that endorsed sterilization, often in fiery terms. The normally staid Journal of the American Medical Association took an apocalyptic turn when Dr. William T. Belfield, a professor of surgery at Rush Medical College, took to its pages in 1908 to advocate sterilization laws. The title of his article, which urgently called for sterilizing criminals and mental defectives, was “Race Suicide for Social Parasites.”

  The medical establishment not only spoke out in favor of eugenic sterilization but did so with near unanimity. No prominent medical professors or surgeons publicly opposed the sterilization movement—or if they did, they were not being heard. One survey found that every article on the subject of eugenic sterilization published in a medical journal between 1899 and 1912 endorsed the practice.

  One part of the medical establishment was particularly strong in its support for eugenic sterilization: doctors in state institutions for the feebleminded. The leaders and medical staff of these institutions, which had been founded with therapeutic care in mind, were rapidly joining the eugenics movement and coming to see sterilization as the most practical method of achieving its goals. At a meeting of the Association of American Institutions for the Feeble-Minded in 1905, Dr. S. D. Risley spoke for many in his field when he insisted that sterilization was the only way to save the nation from “the slough of degeneration.”

  Scientists were another group drawn to eugenic sterilization, and they were active in supporting it. Harry Laughlin, the most influential eugenic sterilization advocate, was a scientist, with a doctoral degree in biology from Princeton. The most
prominent organization that promoted eugenic sterilization in the early days of the movement, the American Breeders’ Association’s Committee on Eugenics, had distinguished scientists as members, including its chairman, David Starr Jordan, an ichthyologist who was the first president of Stanford University.

  Reformers and charity workers were among the biggest proponents of eugenic sterilization. Isabel Barrows, a prominent advocate for the mentally disabled, talked of the need for laws that would “as far as possible prevent the birth and reproduction of these imperfect creatures.” Josephine Shaw Lowell, who helped found New York’s Custodial Asylum for Feeble-Minded Women in 1878, was even more blunt. “Promiscuous and criminalistic” women carried a “deadly poison,” she warned. Charitable institutions put society at risk when they allowed “men and women who are diseased and vicious to reproduce their kind.”

  There was no strong, national movement opposing eugenic sterilization. The group that was most organized in its opposition was the Catholic Church. The church had not yet issued an encyclical against eugenic sterilization—that would come in 1930, with Pope Pius XI’s Casti connubii (On Christian Marriage). Even so, many Catholics believed sterilization violated natural law connecting sex to procreation, and they mobilized against sterilization laws. In many states with large Catholic populations, including Massachusetts and Louisiana, the church’s opposition played a crucial role. Politicians in these states, one observer noted, “knew they faced political suicide by backing eugenic statutes.”

  In Louisiana, where half the voters were Catholic, reformers and public health leaders repeatedly backed sterilization bills, but without success. The New Orleans archbishop mobilized statewide opposition to what he called “unnatural legislation.” One legislator, a grand knight in the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic fraternal organization, denounced eugenic sterilization, saying, “God created these poor unfortunates just the same as he did legislators.”

  The rest of the opposition to eugenic sterilization was more scattershot and did not fall into neat categories. Oregon had an Anti-Sterilization League, led by a woman who was hostile to the medical profession after the death of her young son. In other states, the primary obstacle to enacting sterilization laws was a general belief, on the part of legislators and the public, that eugenic sterilization was morally wrong or deeply distasteful. Many opponents agreed with the federal judge who struck down Iowa’s sterilization law, saying it was fraught with “humiliation” and “degradation” and “mental suffering” that “belong[ed] to the Dark Ages.”

  There were a significant number of lawsuits around the country challenging sterilization laws—many successfully—but they did not necessarily represent grassroots opposition. New Jersey’s eugenic sterilization law was struck down when it was challenged by a lawyer appointed to represent an epileptic woman who was to be sterilized. New York’s law was challenged in a test case brought in large part to resolve a dispute among state officials who disagreed about sterilization.

  Even with influential forces in favor of eugenic sterilization, and relatively little organized opposition, state legislatures did not rush to enact legislation—at least, not right away. In 1897 the Michigan legislature considered a bill introduced under the name “An Act for the Prevention of Idiocy.” It authorized the state to castrate criminals and “perverts.” Support for sterilization was not strong in Michigan, and the bill ran into opposition from lawyers who said it was unconstitutional. The legislature declined to pass it, and it would be another sixteen years before Michigan adopted a eugenic sterilization law.

  In 1905 a sterilization bill was introduced in Pennsylvania. One of its main advocates was Dr. Martin Barr, the chief physician of the Pennsylvania Training School for Feeble-Minded Children. Dr. Barr had been an outspoken supporter of Dr. Pilcher, who had been performing castrations at the Kansas State Asylum. Dr. Barr argued in a scientific journal that an advantage of castrating inmates was that “some nice male soprano voices could be obtained for the institutional choir.” The Act for the Prevention of Idiocy provided that if a state institution for the feebleminded believed it was “inadvisable” for some of its inmates to reproduce, it could “perform such operation for the prevention of procreation as shall be decided safest and most effective.” Pennsylvania’s legislature passed the bill, becoming the first legislature in the nation to support eugenic sterilization.

  Governor Samuel Pennypacker, however, refused to sign it. Pennypacker used his veto message to deliver a stern rebuke to the eugenic sterilization movement. “It is plain that the safest and most effective method of preventing procreation would be to cut off the heads of the inmates,” he said, “and such authority is given by the bill.” The legislature failed to realize, Pennypacker said, that “scientists, like all other men whose experiences have been limited to one pursuit . . . sometimes need to be restrained.” The fundamental problem with the bill, he said, was simple: it would “inflict cruelty upon a helpless class in the community, which the State has undertaken to protect.”

  With his veto, Pennypacker—a progressive reformer and an opponent of child labor—became one of the most prominent figures in any field to stand up to the eugenics movement. Despite his serious concerns, Pennypacker was able to keep a sense of humor. Toward the end of his term, when he was addressing a loud and unruly gathering of reporters, he raised his arms to ask for silence and declared: “Gentlemen, Gentlemen! You forget you owe me a vote of thanks. Didn’t I veto the bill for the castration of idiots?”

  It was not long before the tide began to turn. In Indiana, Dr. Sharp, who was sterilizing inmates at the state reformatory, was strongly lobbying the legislature to legalize eugenic sterilization. With his support, a bill was introduced aimed at “confirmed criminals, idiots, rapists, and imbeciles.” Under the bill, state institutions would be allowed to sterilize inmates who were medically certified as having “no probability of improvement.”

  To help make the case to the legislature, Dr. Sharp submitted testimonials from the young men he had operated on, attesting that the procedure could be beneficial for those who were sterilized. This time, the eugenicists prevailed: the legislature passed the bill and the governor signed it. In 1907 Indiana became the first state in the nation to legalize compulsory eugenic sterilization.

  Other states soon followed. In 1909 California enacted a sweeping sterilization law. Once again, a doctor with expertise in the field played a key role. Dr. F. W. Hatch, secretary of the State Lunacy Commission, helped draft the California statute, which authorized prisons and state hospitals to carry out sterilizations. People eligible for the procedure included mental defectives, criminals, “moral degenerates,” and “sexual perverts.”

  In Oregon, another doctor, Bethenia Owens-Adair, one of the first female physicians in the West, was the driving force behind eugenic sterilization. With backing from other doctors in the state, Dr. Owens-Adair promoted a bill to allow sterilization of criminals, epileptics, the insane, and the feebleminded. She succeeded in getting a bill through the legislature in 1909, but not in persuading the governor to sign it. Although she failed in her home state, Dr. Owens-Adair, who has been called eugenic sterilization’s “pioneer advocate in the Pacific Northwest,” was influential in getting a similar law enacted the same year in neighboring Washington State. Eight years later, she would succeed in Oregon as well.

  More states adopted sterilization over the next few years until, by 1913, the first legislative wave was complete. At that point, twelve states—Indiana, Washington, California, Connecticut, Nevada, Iowa, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Michigan, Kansas, and Wisconsin—had enacted sterilization laws. The laws varied in who could be sterilized, and in what processes had to be followed. Some were especially broad. Iowa allowed sterilization of “criminals, rapists, idiots, feeble-minded, imbeciles, lunatics, drunkards, drug-fiends, epileptics, syphilitics, moral and sexual perverts, and diseased and degenerate persons.” Kansas�
��s law made it a crime for the managing officer of any state institution to fail to recommend sterilization for any inmate who was deemed unfit to procreate. A supervisor who neglected to have someone sterilized who was covered by the law could be imprisoned for up to thirty days. Taken together, these new sterilization laws established a legal regime of eugenic sterilization that covered a significant portion of the country.

  • • •

  The first wave of sterilization laws did not reach Virginia or any states in the Deep South. Eugenics was promoted largely by progressives, intellectuals, and professionals, and in the South of that era all of these were in comparatively short supply. H. L. Mencken exaggerated outrageously in his famous 1917 essay “The Sahara of the Bozart,” in which he called the American South “almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally as the Sahara Desert.” Nevertheless, it was true that the South trailed the nation by many measures, particularly in the sciences. In the 1910s and 1920s, not a single university in the Deep South offered a Ph.D. in chemistry.

  When eugenics did gain traction in the South, it largely began in the Upper South, in states like Virginia and North Carolina, which were most exposed to influences from the North. The strongest support came from these states’ most progressive sectors: medical doctors, university professors, and reform-minded lawyers. Many members of these groups followed developments outside of the South closely, and they were “anxious for their region to ‘catch up with’ the more enlightened North and West”—and to prove critics like Mencken wrong.

  In Virginia, one of the main centers of eugenic thought was the University of Virginia. In 1903 it hired a new president, Edwin Anderson Alderman, a leading progressive educator. He modernized the medical faculty, bringing in experts in genetics, many of them eugenicists. Under Alderman, the historian Gregory Michael Dorr has observed, the university became “an epicenter of eugenical thought, closely linked with the national eugenics movement . . . and tied to the state mental health professionals who promoted eugenic sterilization.”