by Adam Cohen
Paul Popenoe: Paul Popenoe, Applied Eugenics (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 284; Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 65.
Their primary interest: Larson, Sex, Race, and Science, 2, 93; Randall Hansen and Desmond King, Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race, and the Population Scare in Twentieth-Century North America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 15.
One Louisiana doctor: Larson, Sex, Race, and Science, 2.
It defined every person: Wilbur Miller, ed., The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America: An Encyclopedia (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2012), 2221.
“We stand at a crisis”: Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (1916; repr., New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), 228; John P. Jackson Jr. and Nadine Weidman, Race, Racism, and Science: Social Impact and Interaction (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004) 111; Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920; repr., New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921), 229, 299.
“Whoever will take”: Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006), 84.
The reference is to The Rising Tide of Color: Alberto Lena, “Deceitful Traces of Power: An Analysis of the Decadence of Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby,” in Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase, 2010), 49.
A 1915 Atlantic Monthly: S. J. Holmes, “Some Misconceptions of Eugenics,” Atlantic Monthly, Feb. 1915, 222–27.
In the early days: Higham, Strangers in the Land, 150–51.
“Courses in Eugenics”: “Courses in Eugenics Increase in Colleges of This Country,” New York Times, Nov. 20, 1927.
New Orleans Times-Picayune: Larson, Sex, Race, and Science, 109–10.
Harry F. Ward: Rosen, Preaching Eugenics, 136.
“The Refiner’s Fire”: Hall, Conceiving Parenthood, 260; Rosen, Preaching Eugenics, 124.
Many years later: Jeremy Bergen, Ecclesial Repentance: The Churches Confront Their Sinful Pasts (New York: T&T Clark International, 2011), 108–9.
“As the Eugenics Movement”: “Repentance for Support of Eugenics,” http://www.umc.org/what-we-believe/repentance-for-support-of-eugenics.
There were high-profile eugenics conferences: Robert Rydell, World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 43; Joseph Soares, The Power of Privilege: Yale and America’s Elite Colleges (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 21.
The Museum of Natural History: Rydell, World of Fairs, 44–47.
The Kansas Free Fair: Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 514; Encyclopedia of Anthropology, H. James Birx, ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2006), 1046.
A volunteer: Rydell, World of Fairs, 49–50.
“All the newspapers”: Edward Caudill, Darwinian Myths: The Legends and Misuses of a Theory (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 101–3; Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 62.
In the film: Edward J. Larson, “Biology and the Emergence of the Anglo-American Eugenics Movement,” in Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins, ed. Denis R. Alexander and Ronald L. Numbers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 186; Meghan Schrader, “The Sound of Disability: Music, the Obsessive Avenger, and Eugenics in America,” in Anxiety Muted: American Film Music in a Suburban Age, ed. Stanley C. Pelkey II and Anthony Bushard (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 165.
Early eugenicists in the United States: Mary L. Dudziak, “Oliver Wendell Holmes as a Eugenic Reformer: Rhetoric in the Writing of Constitutional Law,” Iowa Law Review 71 (1986): 846 93n.
In 1855 Gideon Lincecum: Lois Wood Burkhalter, Gideon Lincecum, 1793–1864: A Biography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 93–94; Largent, Breeding Contempt, 11; Larson, Sex, Race, and Science, 27.
“Did you never see [a] eunuch?”: Burkhalter, Gideon Lincecum, 93–98.
Dr. W. R. Edgar: “Asexualization of Criminals and Degenerates,” Michigan Law Journal 6, no. 12 (Dec. 1897): 289–92.
Dr. F. Hoyt Pilcher: Trent, Inventing the Feebleminded, 193; Stephen Murphy, Voices of Pineland: Eugenics, Social Reform, and the Legacy of “Feeblemindedness” in Maine (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2011), 26.
Dr. Pilcher’s methods: Ian Robert Dowbiggin, Keeping America Sane: Psychiatry and Eugenics in the United States, 1880–1940 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 76; Largent, Breeding Contempt, 22–23.
public opposition: Susan Baglieri and Arthur Shapiro, Disability Studies and the Inclusive Classroom (New York: Routledge, 2012), 73.
The penalty: Connecticut State Board of Charities, Biennial Report of the State Board of Charities of Connecticut (1905), 130.
Other states soon followed: Larson, Sex, Race, and Science, 22; Reilly, Surgical Solution, 26; Dowbiggin, Keeping America Sane, 76.
“No cheap device”: Larson, Sex, Race, and Science, 23.
In The Kallikak Family: Goddard, Kallikak Family, 101–5.
Dr. Walter E. Fernald: Walter E. Fernald, “Some of the Limitations of the Plan for Segregation of the Feeble-Minded,” Ungraded (May 1918): 171.
“Determine the fact”: Larson, Sex, Race, and Science, 25.
If “feeble-minded children”: Goddard, Kallikak Family, 106.
“Surgical Treatment of Habitual Criminals”: Hanson and King, Sterilized by the State, 74; Kenneth Ludmerer, Genetics and American Society: A Historical Appraisal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 91.
“Vasectomy as a Means”: Largent, Breeding Contempt, 29–30; Paul A. Lombardo, “Eugenic Sterilization in Virginia: Aubrey Strode and the Case of Buck v. Bell” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1982), 19.
Dr. Sharp called for sterilizations: Reilly, Surgical Solution, 32.
salpingectomy: Reilly, Surgical Solution, 34.
Of the eighty-nine operations: Reilly, Surgical Solution, 34, 98.
Carl Degler: Larson, Sex, Race, and Science, 32.
One leading eugenics group: Ibid.
“Race Suicide for Social Parasites”: Reilly, Surgical Solution, 34–35; William Belfield, “Race Suicide for Social Parasites,” JAMA 50 (1908): 55.
One survey found: Reilly, Surgical Solution, 35.
The leaders and medical staff: Nicole Hahn Rafter, Creating Born Criminals (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 56.
Dr. S. D. Risley: Reilly, Surgical Solution, 32–33.
American Breeders’ Association’s Committee on Eugenics: Largent, Breeding Contempt, 51; Edward McNall Burns, David Starr Jordan: Prophet of Freedom (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1953), 1.
Isabel Barrows: Rafter, Creating Born Criminals, 56.
Josephine Shaw Lowell: Jill Fields, An Intimate Affair: Women, Lingerie, and Sexuality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 137; Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 259.
many Catholics believed sterilization violated: Hansen and King, Sterilized by the State, 137; Rosen, Preaching Eugenics, 20.
In many states: Hansen and King, Sterilized by the State, 131–33.
“God created these poor unfortunates”: Ibid., 133–34.
Oregon had an Anti-Sterilization League: Harry Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization in the United States (Chicago: Psychopathic Library of the Municipal Court of Chicago, 1922), 43; Largent, Breeding Contempt, 96.
Many opponents agreed: Davis v. Berry, 216 F. 413 (S.D. Iowa 1914).
New Jersey’s eugenic sterilization: Reilly, Surgical Solution, 52–54.
In 1897 the Michigan legislature: Hansen and King, Sterilized by the State, 84.
Dr. Barr had been an outspoken supporter: Largent, Breeding Contempt,
36; Baglieri and Shapiro, Disability Studies, 73.
The Act for the Prevention of Idiocy: Black, War Against the Weak, 66.
Pennsylvania’s legislature passed the bill: Ibid.; Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 109; Lombardo, Three Generations, 22.
Pennypacker used his veto message: Vetoes by the Governor, of Bills Passed by the Legislature, Session of 1905 (n.p.: Wm. Stanley Ray, 1905), 27; Black, War Against the Weak, 66; Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 109.
With his veto: Samuel Whitaker Pennypacker, The Autobiography of a Pennsylvanian (Philadelphia: John Winston Company, 1918), 382.
“Gentlemen, Gentlemen!”: Largent, Breeding Contempt, 70.
“confirmed criminals, idiots”: Reilly, Surgical Solution, 31–33; Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization, 15.
To help make the case: Hansen and King, Sterilized by the State, 78.
In 1907 Indiana became the first state: Largent, Breeding Contempt, 30; Reilly, Surgical Solution, 32–35.
In 1909 California enacted: Reilly, Surgical Solution, 32–35.
Dr. F. W. Hatch: Reilly, Surgical Solution, 36; Lombardo, Three Generations, 26.
People eligible for the procedure: Hansen and King, Sterilized by the State, 80; Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 79.
Bethenia Owens-Adair: Reilly, Surgical Solution, 39; Notable American Women 1607–1950: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Edward T. James (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 1:659; Peter Boag, Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 207.
Eight years later: Hansen and King, Sterilized by the State, 91.
At that point, twelve states: Reilly, Surgical Solution, 39.
Some were especially broad: Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization, 21.
Kansas’s law: Ibid., 21.
H. L. Mencken: H. L. Mencken, “The Sahara of the Bozart,” in The American Scene: A Reader, ed. Huntington Cairns (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 157–58; Dorr, Segregation’s Science, 107–9.
In the 1910s and 1920s: Larson, Sex, Race, and Science, 41.
The strongest support: Dorr, Segregation’s Science, 11; Hansen and King, Sterilized by the State, 77.
“anxious for their region”: Wayne Flynt, review of Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South, by Edward J. Larson, Florida Historical Quarterly (Fall 1995): 226.
“an epicenter of eugenical thought”: Gregory Michael Dorr, “Assuring America’s Place in the Sun: Ivey Foreman Lewis and the Teaching of Eugenics at the University of Virginia, 1915–1953,” Journal of Southern History (May 2000): 276.
Forced sterilization: Dorr, Segregation’s Science, 63.
Ivey Foreman Lewis: Dorr, “Assuring America’s Place in the Sun,” 258; Dorr, Segregation’s Science, 72.
“In the 20th century”: Dorr, “Assuring America’s Place in the Sun,” 277–78.
The idea of the melting pot: Ibid., 272.
Robert Bennett Bean: Dorr, Segregation’s Science, 77–79.
Lemuel Smith: Dorr, “Assuring America’s Place in the Sun,” 276n62.
Harvey Ernest Jordan: Lombardo, Three Generations, 211.
a national leader in racist eugenics: Robert Bennett Bean, “Some Racial Peculiarities of the Negro Brain,” American Journal of Anatomy 5, no. 4 (1906): 353–432.
The legislature created the board: Lombardo, “Eugenic Sterilization in Virginia,” 87–88; Hansen and King, Sterilized by the State, 105.
“The child of normal parents”: Lombardo, “Eugenic Sterilization in Virginia,” 88, 89–90.
He advocated a law: Ibid., 93–94.
A. Einer: Dorr, Segregation’s Science, 112, 249n8.
Dr. H. W. Dew of Lynchburg: Ibid., 111, 114.
“We must have a sterilization law”: Lombardo, “Eugenic Sterilization in Virginia,” 107.
Dr. Charles Carrington: Charles Richmond Henderson, Preventive Agencies and Methods (New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1910), 61; Dorr, Segregation’s Science, 115–16.
Dr. Carrington described: Dorr, Segregation’s Science, 115–16.
Dr. Bernard Barrow: Bernard Barrow, “Vasectomy for the Defective Negro with His Consent,” Virginia Medical Semi-Monthly (Aug. 26, 1910): 226–28; Dorr, Segregation’s Science, 116.
“to prevent procreation”: Lombardo, “Eugenic Sterilization in Virginia,” 104–5.
Dr. Carrington’s bill failed: Ibid., 105–7.
Dr. Priddy, the superintendent: J. S. DeJarnette, “Sterilization Law of Virginia” (typed manuscript), Records of Western State Hospital, box 88, Library of Virginia.
That distinction belonged: Ibid.
Dr. DeJarnette came from: “Joseph Spencer DeJarnette,” Encyclopedia Virginia, available at http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/DeJarnette_Joseph_Spencer_1866-1957#start_entry.
Dr. DeJarnette graduated: Ibid.; Jeffrey W. McClurken, Take Care of the Living: Reconstructing Confederate Veteran Families in Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 155.
He then joined: “Joseph Spencer DeJarnette,” Encyclopedia Virginia; Lombardo, Three Generations, 121.
He urged the state legislature: DeJarnette, “Sterilization Law of Virginia”; Lombardo, “Aubrey Strode,” 110–11.
Dr. DeJarnette was the first: DeJarnette, “Sterilization Law of Virginia.”
“In the treatment of all diseases”: Dorr, Segregation’s Science, 123.
He lectured to medical associations: Lombardo, “Aubrey Strode,” 112, 115.
Dr. DeJarnette even composed: Dorr, Segregation’s Science, 124.
“Oh, you wise men”: J. S. DeJarnette, “Mendel’s Law,” Records of Western State Hospital, box 88, Library of Virginia.
CHAPTER THREE: ALBERT PRIDDY
In his first annual report: Paul A. Lombardo, “Eugenic Sterilization in Virginia: Aubrey Strode and the Case of Buck v. Bell” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1982), 115.
He warned of an impending rapid increase: Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Mental Health/Mental Retardation, Central Virginia Training Center, box 7, Central Virginia Training Center Papers, Library of Virginia; 2nd Annual Report, Virginia State Epileptic Colony, 1911, box 17, Central Virginia Training Center Papers; J. S. DeJarnette, “Sterilization Law of Virginia” (typed manuscript), Records of Western State Hospital, box 88, Library of Virginia; Lombardo, “Eugenic Sterilization in Virginia”, 116.
In his 1915 annual report: Gregory Michael Dorr, Segregation’s Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 124–25.
In a 1916 letter: Albert Priddy to Horace Gillespie, Jan. 21, 1916, box 4, Central Virginia Training Center Papers.
Without a “great increase”: Albert Priddy to Harry Laughlin, Oct. 14, 1924, box 11, Central Virginia Training Center Papers.
Dr. Priddy argued: Ibid.
Dr. William F. Drewry: Dorr, Segregation’s Science, 122.
the colony had performed: Lombardo, “Eugenic Sterilization in Virginia,” 118; Dorr, Segregation’s Science, 125.
They had missed: Reilly, Surgical Solution, 46.
Dr. DeJarnette and Dr. Priddy approached: Dorr, Segregation’s Science, 122.
Strode’s bill: Ibid.
Dr. Priddy was quick: Lombardo, “Eugenic Sterilization in Virginia,” 117.
His reading was: DeJarnette, “Sterilization Law of Virginia.”
In his next annual report: Eighth Annual Report of the Board of Directors and Superintendent of the Virginia State Epileptic Colony and the Fourth Annual Report of the Virginia Colony for Feeble-Minded, (1917), 15.
“We have continued”: Dorr, Segregation’s Science, 125.
Dr. Priddy described most of the women: Lombardo, Three Generations, 61.
It was only a matter of time: Steven Noll, “The Sterilization of Willie Mallory,” in “Bad” Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America, ed. Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 41–45; “Willie Mallory Complaint” (2009), Buck v. Bell Documents, Paper 80, http://readingroom.law.gsu.edu/buckvbell/80.
Willie had come: Lombardo, “Eugenic Sterilization in Virginia,” 120; Noll, “Sterilization of Willie Mallory,” 45.
The Mallorys had experienced: Noll, “Sterilization of Willie Mallory,” 44–48; Lombardo, “Eugenic Sterilization in Virginia,” 121–23.
Willie’s arrest: Noll, “Sterilization of Willie Mallory,” 45, Lombardo, Three Generations, 65–66.
The Commission of Feeblemindedness ordered: Lombardo, “Eugenic Sterilization in Virginia,” 121; Lombardo, Three Generations, 66; Noll, “The Sterilization of Willie Mallory,” 49.
Willie escaped: “Sterilization of Willie Mallory,” 45.
About six months: Lombardo, “Eugenic Sterilization in Virginia,” 123–24.
Neither could return: Noll, “Sterilization of Willie Mallory,” 50.
she sued him: “Willie Mallory Complaint”; A. S. Priddy Summons, http://readingroom.law.gsu.edu/buckvbell/80.
Specifically, she charged: “Willie Mallory Complaint.”
She also filed: Noll, “Sterilization of Willie Mallory,” 44–46.
From his examination: Ibid., 52.
He insisted: Lombardo, “Eugenic Sterilization in Virgina,” 126.
Dr. Priddy also claimed: Grounds for Defense, Mallory v. Priddy, in the Circuit Court for the City of Richmond, http://readingroom.law.gsu.edu/buckvbell/16/.
“I want to know”: Lombardo, “Eugenic Sterilization in Virginia,” 127–28.
He responded with a letter: Ibid., 128–29; Noll, “Sterilization of Willie Mallory,” 50–51.
Schloendorff v. Society of New York Hospital: Schloendorff v. Society of New York Hospital, 211 N.Y. 125 (1914); Lombardo, Three Generations, 75; Ruth R. Faden and Tom L. Beauchamp, A History and Theory of Informed Consent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 123.
