“Three Generations of Imbeciles Are Enough”: The U.S. Eugenics Legacy
June 25th, 2009Via: USA Today:
Paul Lombardo hadn’t planned on a three-decade detour when he stopped at a greasy-spoon restaurant for breakfast in February 1980. Lombardo, then a graduate student at the University of Virginia, picked up a newspaper to read as he ate his bacon and eggs.
And the rest is history, literally and figuratively. For almost 30 years, Lombardo has tried to uncover the full story of the wrongs he read about that day.
The article he had stumbled across was about two sisters sterilized in the 1920s by the state of Virginia for being “feeble-minded.” The younger sister hadn’t even known she’d had a tubal ligation. She didn’t learn until she was in her late 60s that the surgery hadn’t been for appendicitis. The older, more famous sister — Carrie Buck — was the subject of the now infamous lawsuit over the legality of the operation, Buck v. Bell, that was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
He read that although Carrie Buck was the first victim of a 1924 sterilization law, 8,300 Virginians had involuntary sterilization until the practice was stopped in the 1970s. The law itself was repealed in 1974. “It was startling,” says Lombardo, 59, now a legal historian at Georgia State University in Atlanta.
He had not known of eugenics — the “science” of human improvement through controlled breeding — as more than a vague concept. Learning that there had been many eugenics programs in the United States in the 20th century and that the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in favor of Buck’s sterilization amazed him.
“Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote in the 1927 ruling. Lombardo says: “This woman got railroaded. And one of the giants of the Supreme Court was driving the train.”
In the years that followed, Lombardo’s Ph.D. dissertation focused on the attorney who fought to have Buck sterilized. In 1985, he published more research in the New York University Law Review, saying that key “facts” of the Buck case were simply not true and that Buck never received any real legal representation.
He has written journal articles and made many speeches on the subject, finding himself returning to the details of the story again and again. The case was “part of my intellectual life for so long that in some senses it was my … ‘hobby’ is not the right word,” Lombardo says. ” ‘Obsession’ would probably be closer.”
Last fall, his book Three Generations, No Imbeciles was published. In February, he traveled to Rome to speak on the dangers of eugenics at a Vatican conference. He is working on a book titled 100 Years of Eugenics: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Project.
What about the Bush clan? How many more generations of imbeciles will we have to endure from their tainted cesspool of a genome?