The Gene: An Intimate History - Siddhartha Mukherjee Page 0,39

New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, packing the streets and tenements and inundating the markets with foreign tongues, rituals, and foods (by 1927, new immigrants comprised more than 40 percent of the populations of New York and Chicago). And as much as class anxiety had driven the eugenic efforts of England in the 1890s, “race anxiety” drove the eugenic efforts of Americans in the 1920s.I Galton may have despised the great unwashed masses, but they were, indisputably, great and unwashed English masses. In America, in contrast, the great unwashed masses were increasingly foreign—and their genes, like their accents, were identifiably alien.

Eugenicists such as Priddy had long worried that the flooding of America by immigrants would precipitate “race suicide.” The right people were being overrun by the wrong people, they argued, and the right genes corrupted by the wrong ones. If genes were fundamentally indivisible—as Mendel had shown—then a genetic blight, once spread, could never be erased (“A cross between [any race] and a Jew is a Jew,” Madison Grant wrote). The only way of “cutting off the defective germplasm,” as one eugenicist described it, was to excise the organ that produced germplasm—i.e., to perform compulsory sterilizations of genetic unfits such as Carrie Buck. To protect the nation against “the menace of race deterioration,” radical social surgery would need to be deployed. “The Eugenic ravens are croaking for reform [in England],” Bateson wrote with obvious distaste in 1926. The American ravens croaked even louder.

Counterpoised against the myth of “race suicide” and “race deterioration” was the equal and opposite myth of racial and genetic purity. Among the most popular novels of the early twenties, devoured by millions of Americans, was Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes, a bodice-ripping saga involving an English aristocrat who, orphaned as an infant and raised by apes in Africa, retains not just his parents’ complexion, bearing, and physique, but their moral rectitude, Anglo-Saxon values, and even the instinctual use of proper dinnerware. Tarzan—“his straight and perfect figure, muscled as the best of the ancient Roman gladiators must have been muscled”—exemplified the ultimate victory of nature over nurture. If a white man raised by jungle apes could retain the integrity of a white man in a flannel suit, then surely racial purity could be maintained in any circumstance.

Against this backdrop, the US Supreme Court took scarcely any time to reach its decision on Buck v. Bell. On May 2, 1927, a few weeks before Carrie Buck’s twenty-first birthday, the Supreme Court handed down its verdict. Writing the 8–1 majority opinion, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. reasoned, “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, 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.”

Holmes—the son of a physician, a humanist, a scholar of history, a man widely celebrated for his skepticism of social dogmas, and soon to be one of the nation’s most vocal advocates of judicial and political moderation—was evidently tired of the Bucks and their babies. “Three generations of imbeciles is enough,” he wrote.

Carrie Buck was sterilized by tubal ligation on October 19, 1927. That morning, around nine o’clock, she was moved to the state colony’s infirmary. At ten o’clock, narcotized on morphine and atropine, she lay down on a gurney in a surgical room. A nurse administered anesthesia, and Buck drifted into sleep. Two doctors and two nurses were in attendance—an unusual turnout for such a routine procedure, but this was a special case. John Bell, the superintendent, opened her abdomen with an incision in the midline. He removed a section of both fallopian tubes, tied the ends of the tubes, and sutured them shut. The wounds were cauterized with carbolic acid and sterilized with alcohol. There were no surgical complications.

The chain of heredity had been broken. “The first case operated on under the sterilization law” had gone just as planned, and the patient was discharged in excellent health, Bell wrote. Buck recovered in her room uneventfully.

Six decades and two years, no more than a passing glance of time, separate Mendel’s initial experiments on peas and the court-mandated sterilization of Carrie Buck. Yet in this brief flash of six decades, the gene had transformed from an abstract concept in a botanical experiment to a powerful instrument of social control. As Buck v. Bell was being argued in the Supreme Court in