Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Buck v. Bell About this episode Buck v. Bell is the 1927 SCOTUS decision that upheld the constitutionality of laws allowing involuntary sterilization of people deemed to be “unfit.” Most of these laws have been repealed, but Buck v. Bell has never been directly overturned.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:04 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argentix. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We've all tumbled down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose, and it leaves us more anxious than informed. Our feeds are full of wellness trends, but how do we know what's real, what's exaggerated, and what's just wrong?
0:47 Holly Frey? Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association breaks it all down. Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends, not to cancel them, but to understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. So listen to Health vs. Hype wherever you get your podcasts.
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2:10 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.
2:21 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
2:24 Holly Frey? And I'm Holly Frey.
2:26 Tracy V. Wilson? I've been thinking about terrible US Supreme Court decisions for some reason.
2:31 Holly Frey? Gosh, I can't imagine why.
2:33 Tracy V. Wilson? Well, I mean, if you're imagining that the reason is because of that request to have the Supreme Court overturn Obergefell, that's not the reason, because that happened after I emailed you this outline.
2:46 Holly Frey? Yeah.
2:46 Tracy V. Wilson? Like, three hours later were all the headlines about the Supreme Court being asked to overturn Obergefell. I had been thinking about that conceptually. I had been more thinking about birthright citizenship.
2:59 Holly Frey? Uh huh.
3:00 Tracy V. Wilson? Anyway, just, I've been thinking a lot about the Supreme Court. And that reminded me that for a long time, I've wanted to do an episode on Buck versus Bell, which has come up in past episodes of our show related to the eugenics movement. Buck versus Bell is the 1927 Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of laws allowing or mandating the involuntary sterilization of people who were deemed to be somehow unfit. We've talked about the existence of this case and the outcome before, but we have not really talked about the details of what led up to it. Most of these sterilization laws that
3:45 Tracy V. Wilson? this relates to have been repealed in the US, but Buck versus Bell has never been directly overturned. There's like a patchwork of other decisions and legal lines of reasoning that kind of undermine it today, but the decision itself still stands. And at the same time, the lines of thought that led to Buck versus Bell continue to influence how disability and disability rights are discussed today. The text of the decision is one of the straightforwardly offensive things that we will be reading from in this episode. And the case also involved a rape allegation that was never investigated.
4:29 Tracy V. Wilson? Also, part of the underlying philosophy of the eugenics movement is the incorrect, and again, offensive idea that disabled people are a burden on society and the cause of a range of societal problems and therefore should not exist. So I want to say upfront that disability is a normal part of the human experience and society is what creates these systemic burdens through ableism, by refusing to see every person is having the same innate worth and by refusing to provide the care and support and tools that would be needed to make the world accessible. We're in the United States here, we are totally up for spending infinite money on parking spaces, but balk at the idea of making some of them accessible.
5:14 Holly Frey? Yeah.
5:15 Tracy V. Wilson? As an example.
5:17 Holly Frey? Yeah. The buck in Buck versus Bell was Carrie Elizabeth Buck, born on July 2nd, 1906. Her father Frank Buck was a tenor and her mother was Emma Harlow Buck. Carrie had a brother named Roy and a sister named Doris. And their lives are not documented very well and a lot of the documentation that does exist comes from court testimony that was being used to build the case that Carrie should not be allowed to reproduce. So that testimony can't necessarily be taken at face value.
5:49 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1920, when Carrie would have been about 14, her mother Emma was admitted to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded near Lynchburg, which had originally been founded in 1910 as a colony for men with epilepsy. Emma was 48 and she was described at that time as a widow and as having a history of illnesses that included pneumonia, rheumatism, and syphilis. When she was admitted, she was described as being nervous and restless and was diagnosed with having a mental deficiency.
6:24 Tracy V. Wilson? Records from that colony describe her as a moron, which was one of the terms that was being used as a diagnosis of intellectual disability.
6:34 Holly Frey? When Emma was admitted to the colony, her daughter Carrie had been in foster care for about a decade. Carrie's foster parents were John and Alice Dobbs, who lived in Charlottesville, Virginia. The Dobbses later claimed that Carrie had started to show evidence of feeble-mindedness at the age of 10 or 11. So, "feeble-minded" was this catch-all term that was being used to describe people with a whole assortment of traits and behaviors. And this included people with learning disabilities, mood disorders, mental illnesses, behavioral disorders, and drug or alcohol addictions, as well as unmarried women who were sexually active or who behaved irresponsibly or, quote, "wildly", just as examples.
7:20 Holly Frey? Sometimes people who were described as feeble-minded were just living in poverty without a lot of access to education and resources. Although men could also be diagnosed as feeble-minded, more of the focus was on women.
7:34 Tracy V. Wilson? In a law passed in 1916, the Commonwealth of Virginia defined "feeble-minded" this way, quote, "any person with mental defectiveness from birth or from an early age, but not a congenital idiot, so pronounced that he is incapable of caring for himself or managing his affairs or of being taught to do so, and is unsafe and dangerous to himself and to others and to the community, and who consequently requires care, supervision, and control for the protection and welfare of himself, of others, and of the community, but who is not classable as an insane person, as usually interpreted."
8:17 Holly Frey? So Carrie supposedly started showing signs of being feeble-minded around age 10 or 11. And that is also around the time that the Dobbses took her out of school. She had done fairly well up until the sixth grade. And after this, she did domestic work around the Dobbs home. A couple of sources on this case described this as the Dobbses taking her out of school because they wanted her as a household servant.
8:43 Tracy V. Wilson? Then when Carrie was 17, she became pregnant. And the Dobbses started claiming that she was of low moral character. They also had other foster children and they were worried about what would happen if child welfare workers learned that they had a pregnant teenager in the house. So the Dobbses said that they could not afford to care for Carrie anymore. And they petitioned for her to be admitted to the Virginia State Colony for epileptics and feeble minded.
9:11 Holly Frey? Everyone seems to agree that the father of Carrie's baby was Clarence Garland. That was Alice Dobbs's nephew. Carrie and Clarence knew each other from school and Clarence had come to visit her during the summer of 1923, when Alice Dobbs, who was the one who was really responsible for the children, was out of town. In Carrie's words, during this visit, Clarence forced himself on her and took advantage of her. At one point, she also said he had promised to marry her, but did not. Rape was obviously illegal under Virginia law, and so was seduction under a promise of marriage. But Carrie's allegations were never investigated.
9:53 Tracy V. Wilson? Carrie underwent a commitment hearing and was ordered to be admitted to the Virginia Colony, which is where her mother also was, on January 23rd, 1924. But the colony was not accepting pregnant patients. Officials did think that she should be removed from the Dobbs home, though. So Carrie was sent to live with another family until after the birth of her daughter, Vivian Alice Elaine Buck, on March 28th, 1924.
10:22 Holly Frey? Although the Dobbses had claimed they couldn't afford to take care of Carrie, they did agree to take custody of her daughter under the condition that they be allowed to send Vivian to the colony if she showed any signs of feeble mindedness. So Carrie's child was sent to live with relatives of the man that she alleged had raped her.
10:43 Tracy V. Wilson? Carrie arrived at the colony on June 4th, 1924, and Robert G. Sheldon became her state-appointed guardian. A few months later, on September 10th, the colony prepared a list of patients who were candidates for sterilization under Virginia's Sterilization Act of 1924. Carrie was one of the people on that list.
11:05 Holly Frey? So, we need to back up for a minute and talk about this law and the eugenics movement that it was part of. As people started learning more about genetics and heredity in the 19th century, eugenicists started to propose that human reproduction be approached along the same lines as breeding livestock for the betterment of the human race. The term "eugenics" was coined by Francis Galton in 1883, basically meaning "good breeding." This movement included both positive eugenics, or encouraging people with so-called "good genes" to have more babies together, and negative eugenics, or preventing people with supposedly "bad genes" from reproducing.
11:48 Tracy V. Wilson? Some of the traits that eugenicists were concerned with do have some kind of genetic component, but they also blamed so-called "bad genes" for things like juvenile delinquency, immorality, criminal behavior, and that catch-all of feeble-mindedness. These ideas were also interconnected with scientific racism. There was an underlying assumption that people with European ancestry, specifically northern and western European ancestry, had the best genes.
12:21 Holly Frey? This movement did have critics from its very beginnings. One of those was G.K. Chesterton, who we talked about on the show in March of 2023. But eugenics was incredibly widely accepted, especially in North America and Europe, but also in other parts of the world. In the U.S., by the late 1920s, most high school biology textbooks presented eugenics as an established fact. Eugenics was also taught in hundreds of colleges and universities around the country. And there were eugenic supporters among some of the same populations that were targeted by the movement.
12:59 Tracy V. Wilson? And there were laws related to this. Obvious examples include laws that prohibited people with epilepsy and the so-called feeble-minded from getting married. The first of these laws in the US was passed in Connecticut in 1896. There were also laws allowing or mandating that such people be sterilized, starting with a law in Indiana in 1907. But laws prohibiting interracial marriage were also eugenics laws because they were meant to protect white racial purity. So was the Federal Immigration Act of 1924, which limited immigration from some countries
13:41 Tracy V. Wilson? while banning it from others, with no quotas on the countries that were considered to be genetically desirable.
13:49 Holly Frey? After Indiana's 1907 sterilization law, other states passed laws of their own. Although eugenics was generally accepted, these laws could be controversial. In addition to people who opposed the basic idea of eugenics, there were religious denominations that saw it as an affront to a divine commandment to be fruitful and multiply. There were people who also thought government-mandated surgeries were tyranny, along with anything else that limited personal autonomy and freedom. Some sterilization bills were vetoed, and some laws were repealed after different legislators took office. Many of the early sterilization laws also faced court challenges and were struck down,
14:32 Holly Frey? including Indiana's law, which was ruled unconstitutional by the Indiana Supreme Court in 1921.
14:40 Tracy V. Wilson? Carrie Buck lived in Virginia, as we've said, and we will get to Virginia's eugenics laws after a sponsor break.
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14:53 Tracy V. Wilson? Hey, everybody. It's Tracy from Stuff You Missed in History Class. That's Alan Goya, a planning engineer at AT&T. He's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, defining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.
15:14 Speaker 04 It was going to rival anything that was already built. And that takes quite a bit of people, different teams, to all be on the same page.
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16:32 Tracy V. Wilson? but thanks to ADT Blue, you can DIY trusted ADT home security in a snap. Head to ADT.com/BLU to build your system today. And to hear more about home protection and other grown-up topics, check out new episodes of Grown Up Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
16:58 Holly Frey? We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeart Media's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.
17:40 Holly Frey? Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
18:01 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy
18:46 Tracy V. Wilson? only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
19:06 Tracy V. Wilson? Virginia's 1916 Act to Define Feeble-Mindedness, which we read from earlier, didn't specifically allow sterilization procedures on the so-called "feeble-minded," but it did include language allowing medical and surgical treatment that would, quote, "tend to the mental and physical betterment of patients." Superintendent Albert Sidney Pretty of the Virginia Colony used that language to justify sterilizing patients there, arguing that it was for their mental and physical betterment.
19:41 Holly Frey? This included Willie Mallory and her daughter Jessie, both of whom were held at the colony and sterilized. Another of Willie's daughters, Nanny Mallory, was also held with a plan for her to be sterilized. Willie's husband, George, filed suit, and while the court ruled that these surgeries had been medically necessary, it also ordered the colony to release the Mallorries.
20:06 Tracy V. Wilson? While Superintendent Pretty was interpreting that 1916 law as allowing these sterilizations, he and the board at the colony also recognized that continuing to do them could put them at legal risk. So Pretty went to his attorney, his longtime friend, Aubrey Strode. Strode was serving in the Virginia Senate, and Pretty talked to him about getting legislation passed that would explicitly allow sterilization surgeries on the feeble-minded and protect the people who were performing them.
20:39 Holly Frey? Strode drafted a bill that was patterned after a model eugenical sterilization law that had been included in Harry Hamilton Loughlin's 1922 book Eugenical Sterilization in the United States. This book documented the sterilization laws that had been passed in the US, along with the various legal and legislative challenges they had faced. Loughlin had kept all these challenges in mind when drafting the model law, and he had written it with the goal that, if it ever became law, courts would find it to be constitutional.
21:12 Tracy V. Wilson? Virginia's version of this law was passed in March of 1924. It authorized the superintendents of Virginia's state-run hospitals in the state colony for epileptics and feeble-minded to perform sterilizations, or cause them to be performed, if it was in the best interests of the patients and society. This applied to, quote, "any patient confined in such institutions afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity that are recurrent: idiocy, imbecility, feeble-mindedness, or epilepsy, provided that such superintendent shall have first complied with the requirements of this act."
21:55 Holly Frey? The law also outlined various steps that needed to be taken before a surgery could be performed, and it specified that, quote, "neither any of said superintendents nor any other person legally participating in the execution of the provisions of this act shall be liable either civilly or criminally on account of said participations."
22:16 Tracy V. Wilson? As we said earlier, in September of 1924, the staff at the colony prepared a list of candidates to be sterilized under this law, and Carrie Buck was one of them. But Superintendent Pretty and the board wanted to make sure that this law would be upheld in court so that they would not be criminally liable before he went ahead with actually doing all of these surgeries. So he issued the order for Carrie to be sterilized and then asked her guardian, Robert G. Shelton, to appeal it.
22:49 Holly Frey? Carrie Buck was chosen for this case because her mother, Emma, was also a resident at the colony and had been diagnosed as a moron, and because Carrie also had a child of her own who Pretty assumed would be feeble-minded. The idea behind these laws was that so-called "feeble-minded" people should be stopped from reproducing so they would not pass down their genetic taint to another generation. So Emma, Carrie, and Vivian Buck were supposed to serve as proof that feeble-mindedness was inherited, and that it was in everyone's best interest to prevent Carrie from becoming pregnant again. Pretty went through the steps to issue an order for Carrie to be sterilized, and, at
23:32 Holly Frey? Pretty's request, her guardian, Robert G. Shelton, appealed it.
23:36 Tracy V. Wilson? Pretty's attorney was Aubrey Strode, the state senator who had drafted the law. The board of the colony appointed Irving P. Whitehead to represent Carrie Buck. Whitehead had been a founding member of the Board of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded, and had been serving on that board when it approved the sterilizations of Willie and Jessie Mallory. He was also a longtime friend of both Strode and Pretty. And so if you're thinking, this sounds like somebody who would be working to protect the interests of Pretty and the colony, rather than of Carrie Buck, you are correct.
24:16 Holly Frey? This case was heard before the Amherst County Circuit Court on November 18th, 1924. Strode called several witnesses from the Charlottesville area who claimed to know of Carrie or her family, or families like the Bucs. But most of them had not spent much time with her, if any. Strode also called expert witnesses, including Dr. Joseph S. De Jarnet of Virginia's Western Lunatic Asylum, who had taken the nickname "Sterilization De Jarnet," and Dr. Arthur Estabrook of the Eugenics Record Office. The Eugenics Record Office was a pro-eugenics research center, originally founded by the
24:57 Holly Frey? Carnegie Institution of Washington as the Station for Experimental Evolution. Estabrook was also author of a book called "The Jukes in 1915," which was part of a genre called Eugenic Family Studies, and was one of the most famous books in that genre. Harry Hamilton Loughlin, author of the Model Eugenics Law, also provided a written deposition that largely rehashed previous letters to him. This included describing the Bucs as belonging to the, quote, "shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of antisocial whites of the South."
25:34 Tracy V. Wilson? When he was called to the stand, Pretty said that Carrie Buck, now 18 years old, would probably remain fertile for another 30 years, and that if she was not sterilized, her progeny would become an increasingly enormous burden on the state. He said that if she were held at the colony for the rest of her life to try to keep her from having more children, that would cost the state about $200 a year. But if she were sterilized, she could be released from the colony and go back to living with the Dobbs family and eventually become a self-sufficient member of society.
26:09 Holly Frey? Whitehead didn't really press any of Pretty's witnesses from Charlottesville about whether they had any direct knowledge of Carrie Buck or the Buck family. He also didn't ask for more detail when Red Cross nurse Caroline Wilhelm described the infant Vivian Buck as having, quote, "a look about it that is not quite normal." That statement wasn't based on any kind of test or diagnostic criteria, and it was the only evidence Strode had to offer that Vivian had inherited some kind of negative trait from her mother. And Whitehead also didn't point out various contradictions that came up over the course of the testimony. He objected to the inclusion of Loughlin's deposition, but didn't offer
26:53 Holly Frey? any witnesses of his own.
26:56 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, there are many lines of questioning that he could have pursued, but did not. Albert Pretty had been seriously ill during the preparation for the trial and the trial itself, and he died of cancer on January 13, 1925. Then, a few months later, on April 15, Judge Bennett T. Gordon issued his decision in the case, describing Virginia's sterilization law as, quote, "a valid and constitutional enactment and not obnoxious to the objections urged against it, as contrary to the provisions of the Constitution of the State of Virginia and of the United States."
27:36 Tracy V. Wilson? In his decision, he also affirmed that Carrie was feeble minded, as was her mother, and quote, "apparently so was her baby."
27:45 Holly Frey? Since the point was to get the Supreme Court's opinion on the case, the next step was an appeal. Dr. John Hendren Bell, newly appointed superintendent of the Virginia Colony, took Priti's place in the court proceedings. Strode prepared a brief that incorporated testimony from Carrie's original commitment hearing, as well as the earlier trial. He also made a number of constitutional arguments, keeping in mind all the legal arguments that had already been documented in Harry Hamilton Loughlin's book Eugenical Sterilization in the United States.
28:20 Tracy V. Wilson? Meanwhile, Whitehead's much shorter brief argued that the law would violate Carrie Buck's right to due process and equal protection under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, and that it would deprive her of liberty and property.
28:35 Holly Frey? The Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals upheld the lower court's ruling on November 12th, 1925. The next appeal was to the United States Supreme Court, under Chief Justice William Howard Taft, former president of the United States, and a eugenicist. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in September of 1926.
28:56 Tracy V. Wilson? We'll have more about this after a sponsor break.
29:03 Holly Frey? We've all done it. Tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends. Not to cancel them,
29:46 Holly Frey? not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
30:06 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesay have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So, listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends,
30:50 Tracy V. Wilson? proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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33:17 Tracy V. Wilson? Attorney Aubrey Strode's Supreme Court brief in Buck versus Bell argued that Virginia's eugenic sterilization law was constitutional. His arguments were informed by legal challenges that had already been made to other states' sterilization laws, many of which, as we've said, had been documented by Harry Loughlin. This included arguing that Virginia's law was not cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, since these sterilizations were not being performed as punishment for committing a crime.
33:53 Tracy V. Wilson? He also argued that the patients were given due process before these surgeries were authorized. And he argued that because the law protected public health and safety by keeping dangerous and undesirable people from reproducing, it was a valid use of the state's police power.
34:14 Holly Frey? Whitehead continued to represent Carrie Buck, and he argued again that the law violated her rights to due process and equal protection under the Fifth and 14th Amendments, generally being less detailed and thorough than Strode was.
34:28 Tracy V. Wilson? I feel like I could have put the word "represent" in scare quotes in that sentence.
34:34 Holly Frey? Yes, he was physically there.
34:36 Tracy V. Wilson? He showed up and did enough of a job that people didn't immediately go, "You're not doing your job, man." The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case on April 22, 1927, and issued its decision less than two weeks later. The Supreme Court upheld the lower court's ruling 8 to 1, meaning that Virginia's sterilization law was constitutional.
35:04 Holly Frey? Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. authored the court's opinion, which incorporated a lot of language that was already widely used within the eugenics movement. This opinion was also exceptionally short, at under three pages. If you've ever read a Supreme Court opinion, that's so short. That's scribbles. That's, that's scratch paper.
35:26 Tracy V. Wilson? That's notes.
35:27 Holly Frey? It recapped the steps that were required to approve a sterilization surgery under Virginia's law, saying those steps met the constitutional standard for due process.
35:39 Tracy V. Wilson? From there, it said, quote, "The attack is not upon the procedure, but upon the substantive law. It seems to be contended that in no circumstances could such an order be justified. It certainly is contended that the order cannot be justified upon the existing grounds. The judgment finds the facts that have been recited, and that Carrie Buck is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring likewise afflicted, that she may be sexually sterilized without detriment to her general health, and that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization." And thereupon makes the order. In view of the general declarations of the legislature and the specific findings of
36:24 Tracy V. Wilson? the court, obviously, we cannot say as matter of law that the grounds do not exist. And if they exist, they justify the result. We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility.
37:08 Tracy V. Wilson? Society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
37:25 Holly Frey? The principle of compulsory vaccination is a reference to Jacobson versus Massachusetts, which the court had decided in January of 1905. In that case, the Supreme Court had upheld a compulsory smallpox vaccination law, ruling that, quote, "It is within the police power of a state to enact a compulsory vaccination law, and it is for the legislature and not for the courts to determine in the first instance whether vaccination is or is not the best mode for the prevention of smallpox and the protection of the public health."
37:59 Tracy V. Wilson? Jacobson versus Massachusetts established a basic standard for when public health measures could overrule a person's individual liberty and still be considered constitutional. The measures in question had to be necessary to protect public health, reasonable and proportional, and they had to prevent harm. So in the context of vaccines and Jacobson versus Massachusetts, the general public was being protected through requirements that people be vaccinated for smallpox, and those requirements were reasonable and proportional. In the context of Buck versus Bell, according to this court decision,
38:39 Tracy V. Wilson? the general public was being protected from the feeble-minded and their associated societal burdens by removing their ability to bring about another generation of feeble-minded people. And according to the reasoning of this decision, surgically sterilizing them was reasonable and proportional.
38:59 Holly Frey? The decision continued, quote, "But it is said, however it might be if this reasoning were applied generally, it fails when it is confined to the small number who are in the institutions named and is not applied to the multitudes outside. It is the usual last resort of constitutional arguments to point out shortcomings of this sort. But the answer is that the law does all that is needed when it does all that it can, indicates a policy, applies it to all within the lines, and seeks to bring within the lines all similarly situated so far and so fast as its means allow. Of course, so far as the operations enable those who otherwise must be kept confined to be returned to the world and thus open
39:43 Holly Frey? the asylum to others, the equality aimed at will be more nearly reached."
39:49 Tracy V. Wilson? In other words, Virginia's law didn't violate the constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the laws by applying only to people who were institutionalized, in part because people could then be freed from asylums once they'd been sterilized, and that would make more room in the asylums for more people to be sterilized.
40:10 Holly Frey? The one dissent in this case was Associate Justice Pierce Butler. He did not author a dissenting opinion, and the reasons for his dissent are not clearly documented anywhere. It's sometimes attributed to his being Catholic. He was the child of Irish immigrants who had fled the Great Famine in the mid-19th century. The Catholic Church was not broadly against the idea of eugenics, but it was generally opposed to measures that involved some kind of contraception or sterilization.
40:41 Tracy V. Wilson? After the Supreme Court decision on October 19th, 1927, Dr. John Hendren Bell performed a salpingectomy, or a surgical procedure to remove the fallopian tubes, on 21-year-old Carrie Buck. She remained in the Colony Infirmary, recovering until November 3rd, and a little over a week later, she was furloughed from the Colony. Although there was a proposal for her to go live with the Dobbs family, where her daughter was, the Dobbses apparently didn't think that was a good idea. So she was designated as a ward of the Coleman family, and sent to live with them. The Coleman's returned Carrie to the Colony
41:23 Tracy V. Wilson? after she allegedly used a dishpan as a chamber pot, something that Mrs. Coleman seems to have thought was a prank.
41:32 Holly Frey? Not long after Carrie was readmitted to the Colony, her 13-year-old sister Doris was sterilized there without her knowledge during an operation in which her appendix was also removed.
41:44 Tracy V. Wilson? Carrie Buck was later released from the Colony again, and went to live with Mr. and Mrs. A.T. Newberry, who at first were authorized to return her to the Colony, if they deemed it necessary. Carrie was formally discharged from the Colony on January 1st, 1929, at the age of 22.
42:05 Holly Frey? Carrie's daughter Vivian, who was now known as Vivian Dobbs, made the honor roll at her elementary school in the spring of 1931. The following year, she died of enterocolitis at the age of 8. This was probably a complication of a case of measles. Carrie had not seen her daughter again after first being separated from her, and no one told her about Vivian's death. She found out about it much later.
42:33 Tracy V. Wilson? On May 14, 1932, Carrie Buck married William D. Eagle. She had kept in touch with staff at the Virginia Colony, including Dr. Bell and a nurse named Roxy Berry, who had been one of the attendants during her sterilization surgery. Over the years, Carrie wrote them a series of letters, many of which asked about her mother's health and whether it was okay for her to send things that her mother Emma had asked her for. Carrie also tried to make arrangements for Emma to be released from the colony and come to live with her and her husband. That never happened, and Emma Buck died of pneumonia there in 1944.
43:14 Tracy V. Wilson? Somehow Carrie and her brother Roy didn't get the telegram that was sent to notify the two of them of their mother's death. They knew that she was sick, though. They went to the colony to visit her, only to learn that she had died a couple of weeks before. By that point, Carrie had been widowed. Her husband William died on July 23, 1941. In 1965, she got married again to Charles A. Dedimore. In 1979, Carrie's sister, now known as Doris Figgins, learned that the reason that she had never been able to get pregnant was that she had been sterilized while at the Virginia Colony 50 years before.
43:59 Tracy V. Wilson? Doris died three years later in 1982. Near the end of her life, Carrie met Paul Lombardo, who went on to write "Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck vs. Bell," which is considered the definitive work on this case and the people involved with it. At the time, he was a law student. Carrie and her husband Charlie were living in a state-operated home after it had become clear that they needed more support than they could get living on their own. During this meeting, Carrie told Lombardo, quote, "They done me wrong. They done us all wrong." Carrie Buck Eagle Dedimore died a few weeks after this meeting, on January 28, 1983, at the age of 77.
44:44 Holly Frey? As we've discussed, feeble-mindedness was sort of an umbrella category that just does not hold up under scrutiny. Beyond that, there is general agreement today that Emma's diagnosis is suspect because it was based mainly on unreliable IQ tests and that neither Carrie nor her daughter Vivian was disabled. This does not mean that Carrie's sterilization was somehow more tragic than it would have been if she had a disability. Disabled people's bodies and bodily autonomy are not worth less than that of non-disabled people. The point is that the justification for her sterilization and the Supreme Court case that upheld it was not even true.
45:25 Tracy V. Wilson? After Buck versus Bell upheld Virginia's sterilization law as constitutional, other states and Puerto Rico began passing their own laws. By 1937, 32 states had some kind of compulsory sterilization law, and five other states had carried out procedures without some kind of law on the books. It's believed that at least 60,000 people in the United States were sterilized without their consent over the course of more than 50 years. As had happened with Doris Buck Figgins, sometimes people were not even told this was what was happening, and they thought they were having surgery for some other reason. While the Bucks were white, these surgeries were
46:10 Tracy V. Wilson? disproportionately performed on Black women and other women of color. Fannie Lou Hamer popularized the term Mississippi appendectomy to describe the forced sterilization of Black women in the Southern United States.
46:24 Holly Frey? And there were also sterilization programs in other parts of the world. Nazi Germany passed its law for the prevention of offspring with hereditary diseases in 1933. This paved the way for approximately 2 million sterilizations in Nazi-occupied Europe.
46:43 Holly Frey? After World War II, Buck versus Bell was cited as a defense during the Nuremberg Trials. There are also other connections between American and Nazi eugenics. For example, in 1936, the University of Heidelberg, which was under Nazi administration, awarded Harry H. Loughlin an honorary doctorate in medicine for his contributions to, quote, "the science of racial cleansing."
47:08 Tracy V. Wilson? We said at the top of the show that Buck versus Bell has never been directly overturned. One case that might have done that was Skinner versus Oklahoma, which followed Oklahoma's passage of its Habitual Criminal Sterilization Act of 1935. That law required a person to be sterilized if they had been convicted of three or more felonies of moral turpitude. The Supreme Court ruled that this was unconstitutional because it was a cruel and unusual punishment and was applied arbitrarily. But it did not apply this ruling to involuntary sterilizations more broadly.
47:47 Holly Frey? In 1980, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit on behalf of thousands of women who had been sterilized under Virginia's eugenics law. This led to Poe versus Lynchburg, which was ultimately settled at the district court level in 1985 without overturning the original law.
48:06 Tracy V. Wilson? Most of the sterilization laws that were passed in the US in the early 20th century have been repealed today. Virginia repealed its law in 1974 and removed other legal references to sterilization of people with, quote, "hereditary forms of mental illness that are recurrent" in 1979. Virginia also apologized to the victims of its sterilization law in 2002. But there are still laws on the books in various states allowing for involuntary sterilizations in some circumstances, including laws that allow parents, guardians, or other caregivers to approve sterilizations for their disabled children and other dependents.
48:52 Tracy V. Wilson? This is an incredibly sensitive and contentious topic because it involves figuring out how to simultaneously respect disabled people's rights to privacy and bodily autonomy, while also allowing people to make medical decisions for them if they are genuinely unable to communicate their own wishes or make decisions for themselves.
49:15 Tracy V. Wilson? That's Buck versus Bell, one of the worst things that I have researched in a while.
49:19 Holly Frey? Yeah, thanks for this uplifting topic, Tracy.
49:22 Tracy V. Wilson? Well, I wasn't expecting a more Supreme Court explicit badness happening just immediately after I finished writing it.
49:29 Holly Frey? Yeah. Do you have listener mail that's hopefully less horrifying?
49:34 Tracy V. Wilson? I have listener mail. This is from Bobby. So Bobby wrote with a question that we get periodically that I just kind of wanted to revisit. Bobby wrote, "Hi, Tracy and Holly. I'm a huge fan of the show and currently playing catch-up with episodes and up to the Kurt Vonnegut episode. Love it. Some of the episodes in the last couple of weeks, like February to March, you mentioned Democrats and Republicans before they had a platform shift in the mid 20th century. Is that worse than saying 1900s? Ha ha. I don't know if there is much information on that, or even if you could do a whole episode on that, but the switching platforms is very interesting to me, and I often wonder how that happened. When Republicans today say they are the party of Lincoln, I want to scream.
50:18 Tracy V. Wilson? Anyway, that's my little aside. I love your episodes and listen to you all while I'm on the road for work. Thank you so much for keeping me company. Cheers, Bobby." So I wrote back to Bobby, and this is something that we have, I think, mentioned on the show before that I know we've gotten other questions from listeners about before. We don't have an episode on how the platforms of the Democrat and Republican parties in the United States have shifted, and we're not really planning to do one because it is just, in my opinion, not something that translates very well to a narrative podcast episode. A lot of times gets really oversimplified as being related to the Civil Rights Act.
51:01 Tracy V. Wilson? And that is like one moment in almost 100 years of history that involved a lot of different changes and shifts and legislative priorities and sort of shifts in how both parties were focused. Like longer ago in the past, there was more breadth within each of the parties as far as having like a more progressive and a more conservative side.
51:33 Holly Frey? Right.
51:34 Tracy V. Wilson? And all of that changed over a very long time in a way that I just don't know how to make make sense and be interesting to listen to in like a narrative podcast. So one of the resources that I point people to for this often is the Ask Historians subreddit. The Ask Historians subreddit is a really good resource. They have been around for years and really focused on people who have historical knowledge, including historians and other experts, like building up their trust within that community to be able to
52:09 Tracy V. Wilson? answer user questions in a reliable and correct way. And they have a whole page that's basically the changing role of Republicans and Democrats. So if you go to the Ask Historians subreddit, they have in their their subreddit information, like a whole frequently asked questions area, and that is one of them. And it has a lot of just very good, comprehensive answers that are easy to understand for a layperson, kind of walking through how how the parties each have shifted over this more than a century and how their individual platforms have shifted
52:53 Tracy V. Wilson? over the century in a way that I feel like the written text. Is a lot easier to understand than an audio podcast would be. Um, so, uh, I already sent that link to Bobby and thank you Bobby for writing. If anybody else, uh, is curious about that, the Ask Historians subreddit. I know a lot of folks have kind of a gut reaction to the idea of Reddit, but the Ask Historians subreddit is really good. Um, if you jump in there 15 minutes after a question has been asked, you might see random people that have put in answers. Those are very quickly moderated away until a good thorough answer is provided by somebody
53:36 Tracy V. Wilson? in the community and then, uh, that becomes a resource for everybody to read. They have a handy little link that you can click to remind yourself to come back and check for a, an answer later if there's not an answer there yet on a question. If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcast, we are at [email protected] . And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
54:22 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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