Without Mercy: The Stunning True Story of Race, Crime, and Corruption in the Deep South

by David Beasley

  And for Rivers, a former schoolteacher married to a teacher, the New Deal programs alone were not enough. Under the Rivers administration, the state raised teacher salaries in 1937, more than doubling the total payout, although black teachers continued to earn only 60 percent as much as white teachers. The raises were necessary, Rivers said, because without a raise, some teachers were earning the same as “negro janitors” at the state capitol. He topped Roosevelt with programs such as free textbooks for public schools, a goal of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia since the 1920s. The shiny textbooks arrived at schools in the fall of 1938, just as Rivers was running for a second two-year term. One book on Georgia history included a full-page picture of Rivers and six pages on his accomplishments as governor. The insert caused the price of the book to increase from 45 cents a copy to 63 cents, one of the governor’s opponents charged.12

  Rivers literally rewrote the school history books to make sure his accomplishments were duly noted. But the books were printed before the bills came due.

  Rivers scraped through the remainder of his second two-year term by cutting programs, borrowing money, and shifting funds from one department to another, but even with all those machinations the state still owed schoolteachers millions in back wages. The teachers were not sure when or if their next paycheck would arrive.

  Rivers could barely maintain the basic services of state government. “If the state government were a private business, it would already be bankrupt,” Eugene Talmadge would later say, feeling vindicated in his prediction that the massive expansion of state government under the New Deal would eventually lead to financial ruin for Georgia.13

  For all his efforts to help Georgia’s downtrodden by fighting disease, Rivers found himself in charge of a state government that was forced to turn down pleas for help from desperate, dying patients suffering from cancer and other ailments. “I have a cancer and it is worse all at once,” a woman from Tallapoosa wrote Rivers on May 6, 1939. Her doctor had told her she needed to seek treatment at a hospital in Atlanta. “He thought the quicker I went the better,” the woman wrote. And she suffered from other medical problems as well. “I also have a mouth of teeth that needs to be pulled,” she wrote. “Are there any funds for things like that? If there are, I assure you no one needs it any worse than I.”14 She lived with her daughter and son-in-law. The son-in-law was out of work. The Great Depression was still on.

  Rivers asked the Georgia Department of Public Health to investigate. The diagnosis was “cancer of the breast which has discharged for eight years.”

  The county commissioners offered to pay the woman’s transportation costs to Atlanta for an examination; but “there are no funds in the county for treatment, even if treatment were possible at so late a date,” a public health nurse reported.

  And the state of Georgia had no money for this woman either, and told her so in a cold, blunt letter on May 19, 1939. “Since state funds for those suffering from cancer have been exhausted,” wrote the head of the state’s cancer control division, Dr. R. Nesteller, “I regret, that this office cannot authorize treatment of your case at present.” He told the patient, “Your case will be given attention as soon as funds are made available for this purpose.”15

  There were hard-luck stories like this throughout the state as Georgia began to run out of money in 1939.

  There was the woman from Irwinton who wrote Rivers in May 1939, complaining, “I have been sick ever since last year, in bed part of the time and sitting up part of the time. I need to be in a hospital. Ever one says that is where I need to be. I don’t eat nothing. I don’t want nothing.” Her age, she told the governor, was “30 or 31 years old, I have forgot.” A doctor in Milledgeville X-rayed her stomach “but he didn’t tell me what my trouble was. They told me to just drink tomato juice and fruit juice.”16

  She learned firsthand the cold reality of the economics of medicine at a time when, as massive as the New Deal relief programs were, there was no Medicare, no Medicaid, often no option for the poor but to go home and die.

  “When you haven’t got no way to pay a doctor, they sure won’t do much,” the Irwinton woman wrote. “The reason I am writing is because I want to find out if you can get me any help. If there ever have been any body that needed any help, it looks like I do. I am cripple and haven’t got no body to look to for any help.”17

  At Rivers’s direction, a public health nurse stopped by the home.18 But she concluded that the government could not provide any help. “I’m sorry,” the nurse wrote her supervisor. “It appears I can do nothing to assist with this case.”19

  And there was the woman whose brother lost his jawbone to disease. Doctors said they could make him a new jawbone out of one of his ribs, if only the state could help pay for the operation. But it couldn’t.20

  The list of desperate letters went on and on, but the state of Georgia found itself so broke that it was unable to respond in 1939.

  The state temporarily closed the Georgia School for the Deaf and released two thousand patients from the State Hospital for the Insane in Milledgeville, which was so crowded that patients were sleeping on mattresses in hallways. The patients who would be released were harmless, the Atlanta Constitution assured readers. “They are no more than hopeless cripples,” the hospital’s assistant superintendent, Y. H. Yarbrough, said. If families could not or would not claim the mental patients, they would be returned to their county governments. The hospital, meanwhile, was closed to any new patients.21

  And the state was forced to release patients from the state’s Training School for Mentally Defective Children, also known as Gracewood, near Augusta, only a few miles from the impoverished area so hideously portrayed by Erskine Caldwell in Tobacco Road. Some 250 white children, who were labeled “feeble minded,” lived at Gracewood, while another thousand were on a waiting list for the home. In later years, these children would be described as mentally retarded or mentally disabled, a condition that even today can be difficult to define. There was no similar home for black children in Georgia.

  The Augusta Junior League, a service organization of wealthy white women, took Gracewood under its wing, volunteering there and constantly advocating for more state support for the facility. In 1935, the Junior Leaguers pushed a state law allowing patients at state institutions such as Gracewood to be forcibly sterilized, against their will and against the will of their families.

  Junior Leaguer Nora Nixon, a playwright and the wife of a prominent Augusta attorney, convinced Ellis Arnall, then a member of the state legislature, to introduce the sterilization bill.22 It was touted as a cost-cutting move for the state. More than two hundred prominent Augusta citizens, including the vice dean of the University of Georgia School of Medicine, signed a letter that went to each member of the Georgia legislature. Its message was blunt. “How much of our money are you willing to contribute to the growth of a yearly increasing crop of halfwits?” the letter asked. Georgia was spending $50,000 a year to operate Gracewood, and that covered only 256 patients, the letter said.23

  The U.S. Supreme Court had cleared the way for forced sterilization in 1927 by upholding the state of Virginia’s program. The case centered on the forced sterilization of a white woman named Carrie Buck, who was committed to the State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded. “She is the daughter of a feeble minded mother in the same institution, and the mother of an illegitimate feeble minded child,” the court said. Left unsaid was that Carrie Buck had been raped, and that is how her “illegitimate feeble minded child” was conceived.

  Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for the majority, wrote a short, cryptic sentence about Carrie Buck, her mother, and her child that would be remembered decades later: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Only one justice, a Catholic named Pierce Butler, dissented, but he did not issue a written opinion.24

  In the four years after the Supreme Court ruling in the Buck case seventeen states enacted sterilization laws, part of the eugenics movement, which pu
shed for human improvement by encouraging some people to have children while discouraging others from doing so.

  In his book War Against the Weak, author Edwin Black writes that the goal of the eugenics movement in the United States was to “breed a super race, and not just any super race. They wanted a purely Germanic and Nordic super race, enjoying biological dominion over all others.”25

  When Hitler and the Nazi Party gained power in Germany in 1933, they immediately embraced eugenics and forced sterilization, inspired by the U.S. movement and using it as a model. And they made it perfectly clear that the goal of eugenics was to build a white master race. “I have studied with great interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction of people whose progeny would in all probability be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock,” Hitler told fellow Nazis.26

  As Georgia debated eugenics in 1935, Dr. Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, wrote in an opinion piece widely distributed to newspapers through the Associated Press that doctors had no way of telling whether a patient’s mental disability was caused by genetics or environmental factors. This was particularly true in Georgia, where venereal disease and malnutrition were rampant; malaria, pellagra, hookworms, and other diseases and parasites were widespread; poisoning from wicked bootleg whiskey and lead was common; and prenatal health care was poor or nonexistent, with babies often born at home, sometimes with the aid of a midwife, sometimes not. “Actually, we do not yet know enough to take mass action,” Fishbein warned. “Let Germany and the Fascist nations try their experiments in sterilization on a pseudoscience basis. To us in America, it is difficult to justify a compulsory policy of human sterilization.”27

  That same year, Hermann J. Muller, an American Nobel Prize–winning geneticist, attacked eugenics as a way for racists, Fascists, Hitlerites, and “reactionaries generally” to back their bias with “false science.”28

  Georgia’s medical community and the prim and proper ladies of the Augusta Junior League apparently failed to see the parallel between the sterilization program they were advocating in Georgia and the one embraced by the Nazis. The Georgia legislature in 1935 promptly passed the sterilization bill, while Ed Rivers was the Speaker of the House of Representatives. But Governor Eugene Talmadge refused to sign the legislation.

  Talmadge was many things: a country lawyer, a blatant racist and Klan sympathizer although not a card-carrying member, an opponent of big government. As a farmer, Talmadge understood eugenics. Yet he also understood that human beings were not cattle, not breeding stock. When signing the veto, Talmadge turned to Lindley Camp, the state’s adjutant general, and said, “Lindley, you and I might go crazy some day and we don’t want them working on us.”29

  Two years later the bill was back, sponsored by the Speaker of the House, Roy Harris of Augusta, who had been Ed Rivers’s campaign manager in the 1928 gubernatorial race. Rivers, the longtime Klansman, was now governor, and Hiram Wesley Evans, the Klan’s imperial wizard, was an honorary colonel on the governor’s staff. By this time, Rivers had also given Evans control of the state’s lucrative highway asphalt business.

  The sterilization bill applied only to state prisoners and those in state homes or hospitals “likely to procreate children or a child who by reason of inheritance would have a tendency to serious physical or mental deficiency.” Patients and prisoners or their representatives could appear before a board to make their case against sterilization, and the eugenics board’s decisions could be challenged in court. The bill called for sterilizations to be performed by vasectomy for males, salpingectomy (removal of a fallopian tube) for females. The legislature passed the bill on February 23, 1937, and Rivers signed it into law six weeks later, a signature that would lead to 3,300 forced sterilizations over the next three decades, focusing in the beginning on white women and in later decades on black women and black men.30

  As historian Edward Larson notes, Georgia’s forced sterilization program was initially targeted at the all-white Gracewood home for “feeble minded” children near Augusta, near Caldwell’s mythical or not-so-mythical land of Tobacco Road.

  Historian Paul Lombardo believes Caldwell’s writings were “indirectly responsible” for much of the debate that led Georgia to begin forced sterilization, although Caldwell himself did not favor it.

  Long before Caldwell’s fiction, as far back as 1923, Hiram W. Evans, imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, had warned that it was not enough just to be white. There were among the white population “monstrosities” who needed to be purged, through eugenics and even euthanasia, to purify the Anglo-Saxon race, Evans said.

  Prisoners, 80 percent of whom were black, largely escaped forced sterilization, which was repealed in 1970. Georgia was the last state in the nation to enact a forced-sterilization program. Although wards of the state could now be forcibly sterilized, for the public at large, birth control, abortion, and voluntary sterilization remained illegal in Georgia and would remain so for another two decades.31

  It took more than two years for the Georgia Eugenics Board to hold its first meeting, due to confusion in the wording of the statute over exactly who would serve on the panel. In the meantime, frustration was building across the state from those anxious to get on with sterilizations.

  In early 1938, a supervisor with the Fulton County Board of Public Welfare wrote the state health department about a forty-year-old white man, his thirty-five-year-old wife, and their five children. The husband had suffered from epilepsy since he was hit on the head with a club while serving as a U.S. Army prison guard in 1918. The wife “neglected and abused the children,” the supervisor wrote. The wife had an IQ of 44, a mental age of eight years and two months. The county was seeking custody of the five children, the youngest four months old, the oldest thirteen. “However, we are deeply concerned over the possibility of [the husband and wife] having more children,” the supervisor wrote. “The possibility of sterilization has been discussed with both of them but they will not give their consent. Is it possible to have Mr. or Mrs. [last name redacted] or both sterilized without their consent?” The supervisor added, “The family is only one of several which present the same problems and are now under our care.”32

  There were many flaws in the supervisor’s request. The husband’s epilepsy was caused not by heredity but by a brain injury. And the Georgia sterilization law did not apply to either the husband or the wife, because they were not in state hospitals or prisons, were not wards of the state. Here was a government employee advocating expansion of the sterilization program to the population at large even before the program had been launched. Instead of dismissing the sterilization request outright, T. F. Abercrombie, director of the Georgia Department of Public Health, replied that “the case will be considered” once the board of eugenics finally met.33

  Georgia’s budget crisis in 1939 further sparked the push for sterilization, again from Augusta, again from Gracewood. Gracewood was not immune from the massive state budget cuts that resulted from inflated, out-of-control spending and the legislature’s refusal to raise taxes. Roy Harris of Augusta, Speaker of the House and sponsor of the sterilization bill, wrote Abercrombie in March 1939 to say that a “large number” of Gracewood “inmates” would have to be released as state funds dwindled. Gracewood, which was all white, had already asked to sterilize forty “inmates,” but now there was a need to sterilize one hundred “before turning them loose,” Harris wrote. “I can’t see why we should continue to raise, feed and care for a class of insane and allow them to continue to multiply in large numbers from year to year,” the Speaker of the House added.34

  Amid this budget-cutting frenzy, the state board of eugenics met for the first time on April 28, 1939. Its three members were Abercrombie; Dr. Edward W. Schwall, who was superintendent at Gracewood; and Dr. John W. Oden, superintendent of the state psychiatric hospital in Milledgeville. Oden had previously been the superintendent at Gracewood.

 
; The doctors followed Robert’s Rules of Order.

  “Doctor Abercrombie moved, seconded by Doctor Schwall, that Doctor Oden be made chairman,” the minutes of that first meeting state. The three-man board then approved the first batch of 24 sterilizations, “as provided in Section 7, Georgia Laws 1937, Page 416.” The patients, twenty of whom were female, four male, had ten days to appeal the decision.

  The letters to family members and guardians announcing the sterilizations were dry and bureaucratic. “The State Board of Eugenics at its meeting today, April 28, passed upon the application of [the patient] and has ordered her to be sterilized,” read the letter from Abercrombie to a patient’s guardian in Augusta. “We are enclosing a copy of Doctor Schwall’s recommendation for sterilization as provided in Section 8, Page 416, Georgia Laws of 1937.”35

  The decisions were based in part on blatantly incorrect assumptions about hereditary diseases.

  In the late 1930s, Georgia institutionalized and sterilized epileptics. More than seventy years later, doctors know that heredity is only one possible cause of the disorder. The Epilepsy Foundation wrote in 2013, “A family history of epilepsy may be considered a risk factor for epilepsy in the same way that brain injury or prior meningitis is a risk factor.”36 Likewise, doctors now know that there are many known causes of mental disabilities, including genetics, fetal alcohol syndrome, and exposure to toxins, including lead and mercury during pregnancy. Today, doctors know that Down syndrome, one of the leading causes of mental disabilities, is linked to an extra chromosome, “an error in cell division.” But more than seven decades after Georgia began its sterilization program, “it is not known why this occurs,” the National Association for Down Syndrome stated in 2012.

  “Actually, we do not yet know enough to take mass action,” the American Medical Association’s Dr. Morris Fishbein had warned in 1935 in a statement that remains true today despite massive advances in medicine over the years.37