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Some questions and discussion points for you and your students...
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No one has ever proved that there is a genetic link between “feeblemindedness” and poverty or crime. Even physical disabilities might be the result of a variety of factors. In 1910, psychiatrist Smith Ely Jellife warned: Is it logical to take such an enormous complex of conditions as all the psychoses and try to make them fit in one artificial box? It is the same way with epilepsies. . . . There is no one epilepsy. Convulsions could arise from a hard blow to the head, a motor area thrombus provoked by infection, or poisoning. . . . Is there any heredity here—or chance of it? If eugenics is to be correctly started, we must sharpen up our conceptions, and that very markedly.1 What categories in the model law does Jellife seem to challenge? What aspects of the law does he seem to accept without question? What other causes for “genetic conditions” does he suggest? What is his attitude toward the eugenics movement as a whole? (Ironically, Harry Laughlin could have been sterilized under the statute he drafted. He developed epilepsy as an adult.)
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Review the Supreme Court’s decision in Buck v. Bell and identify key elements in Holmes’s justification for upholding the Virginia law. Who, in his view, are the “best citizens”? What is the implication of his use of such phrases as “a menace” and “swamped with incompetence”? In what ways did Buck not receive “due process at law”? The Supreme Court relied on Laughlin and other eugenicists to make its decision. What does Holmes mean when he says that sterilization is a sacrifice “often not felt to be such by those concerned”? What assumptions is he making? Women’s historian Carole R. McCann writes of his decision: In effect, the Court gave the government the right to determine which women were competent to become mothers. Although Carrie Buck, the woman in the case, was poor and white, the Court’s decision implicitly endorsed elitism and racism. It sanctioned the eugenic logic behind sterilization laws that defined fitness by class and race as much as by intelligence or character.2 What is elitism? Racism? In what sense does the decision endorse either or both? How does the decision define “fitness”?
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What arguments might a more able and impartial lawyer have made on Carrie Buck’s behalf? How might such a lawyer have challenged the scientific testimony in support of her sterilization?
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The Lynchburg Story is a powerful documentary film on the Carrie Buck case and its legacy. The video adds an important element to this case by bringing it down from a legal and scientific plane into the real lives of the people involved. Contact Facing History and Ourselves for information on borrowing this video.
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