The Gene: An Intimate History - Siddhartha Mukherjee Page 0,38

extraordinary, Kurtz-like powers over his colony, Priddy was convinced that the imprisonment of “mentally defectives” in colonies was a temporary solution to the propagation of their “bad heredity.” Once released, the imbeciles would start breeding again, contaminating and befouling the gene pool. Sterilization would be a more definitive strategy, a superior solution.

What Priddy needed was a blanket legal order that would authorize him to sterilize a woman on explicitly eugenic grounds; one such test case would set the standard for a thousand. When he broached the topic, he found that legal and political leaders were largely sympathetic to his ideas. On March 29, 1924, with Priddy’s help, the Virginia Senate authorized eugenic sterilization within the state as long as the person to be sterilized had been screened by the “Boards of Mental-health institutions.” On September 10, again urged by Priddy, the Board of the Virginia State Colony reviewed Buck’s case during a routine meeting. Carrie Buck was asked a single question during the inquisition: “Do you care to say anything about having the operations performed on you?” She spoke only two sentences: “No, sir, I have not. It is up to my people.” Her “people,” whoever they were, did not rise to Buck’s defense. The board approved Priddy’s request to have Buck sterilized.

But Priddy was concerned that his attempts to achieve eugenic sterilizations would still be challenged by state and federal courts. At Priddy’s instigation, Buck’s case was next presented to the Virginia court. If the courts affirmed the act, Priddy believed, he would have complete authority to continue his eugenic efforts at the colony and even extend them to other colonies. The case—Buck v. Priddy—was filed in the Circuit Court of Amherst County in October 1924.

On November 17, 1925, Carrie Buck appeared for her trial at the courthouse in Lynchburg. She found that Priddy had arranged nearly a dozen witnesses. The first, a district nurse from Charlottesville, testified that Emma and Carrie were impulsive, “irresponsible mentally, and . . . feebleminded.” Asked to provide examples of Carrie’s troublesome behavior, she said Carrie had been found “writing notes to boys.” Four other women then testified about Emma and Carrie. But Priddy’s most important witness was yet to come. Unbeknownst to Carrie and Emma, Priddy had sent a social worker from the Red Cross to examine Carrie’s eight-month-old child, Vivian, who was living with foster parents. If Vivian could also be shown to be feebleminded, Priddy reasoned, his case would be closed. With three generations—Emma, Carrie, and Vivian—affected by imbecility, it would be hard to argue against the heredity of their mental capacity.

The testimony did not go quite as smoothly as Priddy had planned. The social worker—veering sharply off script—began by admitting biases in her judgment:

“Perhaps my knowledge of the mother may prejudice me.”

“Have you any impression about the child?” the prosecutor asked.

The social worker was hesitant again. “It is difficult to judge the probabilities of a child as young as that, but it seems to me not quite a normal baby. . . .”

“You would not judge the child as a normal baby?”

“There is a look about it that is not quite normal, but just what it is, I can’t tell.”

For a while, it seemed as if the future of eugenic sterilizations in America depended on the foggy impressions of a nurse who had been handed a cranky baby without toys.

The trial took five hours, including a break for lunch. The deliberation was brief, the decision clinical. The court affirmed Priddy’s decision to sterilize Carrie Buck. “The act complies with the requirements of due process of law,” the decision read. “It is not a penal statute. It cannot be said, as contended, that the act divides a natural class of persons into two.”

Buck’s lawyers appealed the decision. The case climbed to the Virginia Supreme Court, where Priddy’s request to sterilize Buck was affirmed again. In the early spring of 1927, the trial reached the US Supreme Court. Priddy had died, but his successor, John Bell, the new superintendent of the colony, was the appointed defendant.

Buck v. Bell was argued before the Supreme Court in the spring of 1927. Right from the onset, the case was clearly neither about Buck nor Bell. It was a charged time; the entire nation was frothing with anguish about its history and inheritance. The Roaring Twenties stood at the tail end of a historic surge of immigration to the United States. Between 1890 and 1924, nearly 10 million immigrants—Jewish, Italian, Irish, and Polish workers—streamed into