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Victoria F. Nourse. In Reckless Hands: Skinner v. Oklahoma and the
Near-Triumph of American Eugenics.
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393065294>  New York: W. W.
Norton, 2008. 240 pp. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-393-06529-9. 

Paul A. Lombardo. Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme
Court, and Buck v. Bell.
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0801890101>  Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2008. Photographs. xiv + 365 pp. $29.95
(cloth), ISBN 978-0-8018-9010-9. 

Reviewed by Lynne Curry
Published on H-Law (June, 2009)
Commissioned by Christopher R. Waldrep

Intellectual Seduction: The Promise and Perils of Eugenics 

In the first half of the twentieth century, a right to control one's own
body did not exist in the same sense that we take rather for granted
today.  The state enjoyed broad powers to infringe on individual rights
in the name of protecting the public's health and safety.  While this
application of the state's "police powers" has a very long history in
law, at the turn of the twentieth century changing medical
understandings of the etiology of contagious diseases inspired new
confidence that law could be employed in the service of preventing
deadly epidemics, such as smallpox and diphtheria.  In 1905, the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled in Jacobson v. Massachusetts that states can require
individuals to be vaccinated, thereby establishing a crucial precedent
for public health law and policy.  It was within this context that
eugenics, a pseudo-scientific movement advocating social control over
human reproduction, took root and thrived.  "Eugenics" is an umbrella
term that covers a wide range of ideas, policies, and programs, within
which varying weights were assigned to the relative influences of nature
and nurture.  Some eugenicists, analogizing from the germ theory of
disease, argued that the United States faced an extreme risk of
degeneracy due to the unchecked breeding of the physically, mentally,
and morally unfit whose defective "germ plasm" threatened to undermine
the health and welfare of future generations.  Such fears were
translated into state laws, founded on the Jacobson precedent, that
mandated the sexual sterilization of the reproductively unworthy, with
or without their consent--and often without their knowledge.  In 1907,
Indiana became the first state to mandate sterilization; by 1940, thirty
states had enacted laws aimed at preventing criminals and the mentally
"defective" from procreating.  Legal challenges resulted in two landmark
Supreme Court cases, Buck v. Bell (1927) and Skinner v. Oklahoma (1942).
Both opinions remain well known and, for differing reasons,
controversial today.  Given the contemporary resurgence of scientific
and popular interest in genetic explanations for a range of physical
ailments and human behavior, both rulings are highly relevant as well.
It is therefore most fortunate that two excellent and engaging books
have arrived bringing renewed attention to these cases.

Paul A. Lombardo's previous work has established him as the leading
authority on Buck v. Bell and his first book-length treatment of this
notorious case provides its most thorough examination to date.  The
narrative is divided into eighteen rather short chapters, a somewhat
unusual structure that enables Lombardo to embed each step in the case's
development within the larger context of American eugenics, allowing us
to see how the case both reflected and shaped the movement.
Eugenicists, many of whom were associated with the Eugenics Record
Office in Cold Springs Harbor, New York, exercised a profound and
disturbing influence on law and social policy, including drafting a
model compulsory sterilization law and then vigorously campaigning to
have it replicated in the states.  While much of this material will not
be new to historians, Carrie Buck's story becomes even more compelling
steeped in the rich detail that Lombardo provides.  Buck was an
extremely poor, barely educated, seventeen-year-old rape victim, who in
1920s Virginia became a pawn of a blatantly self-serving cast of
incredibly shady characters.  Mandatory sterilization laws had met with
mixed success in state courts, and therefore in Virginia a small circle
of eugenicist lawmakers, doctors, and institutional directors conspired
to write and enact a statute and then manufacture a test case to gain a
judicial stamp of approval for their own project.  Lombardo vividly
presents the patently absurd case concocted purporting to show that Buck
was both "feeble-minded" herself and the daughter and mother of
feeble-minded females, rendering her a genetic threat to the population
and a fit subject for the operation. (Her younger sister was also
sterilized.)  Buck's lawyer, himself a major crusader in Virginia's
sterilization campaign, "violated every norm of legal ethics" in
deliberately failing his client at each step in the case, leaving Buck
quite literally defenseless (p. 155).  Here, readers may be disappointed
that Lombardo notes, but does not fully consider, the meaning and
consequences of Buck's status as an impoverished white female in the
South of the 1920s.

Compulsory sterilization had its detractors, including scientists who
argued that eugenicists' assumptions about how genetic inheritance
actually worked were fundamentally flawed, as well as some Roman
Catholics who objected to any artificial interference in human
reproduction.  But, Lombardo argues, much of the debate over sexual
sterilization took place among dueling experts, while the general public
maintained steady support for such laws, particularly when they were
advanced as a means to spare taxpayers the burden of supporting the
"unfit" in public institutions.  Further, recent advances in surgery had
enabled eugenicists to argue that sexual sterilization procedures
involved only minor physical inconveniences to the patient, analogous to
undergoing a vaccination. This claim, although medically dubious, was
reflected in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's assertion that the law
compelling Buck's salpingectomy (removal of the fallopian tubes)
violated no constitutional rights but rather merely demanded "lesser
sacrifices" by the unfit on behalf of society's greater good.  Lombardo
examines Holmes's notorious, rhetorically jarring opinion avidly
supporting states' power to compel sterilization.  The book then
analyzes the ruling's influence in subsequent decades.  After a chilling
look at the collaboration between some American eugenicists and their
counterparts in Nazi Germany, Lombardo discusses subsequent
manifestations of state regulation of human reproduction in the United
States, which continued well after World War II.  The book's last
chapter is a moving account of Buck at the end of her life, when the
author met and briefly interviewed her.  An epilog reconsiders the case
in light of current nature-versus-nurture debates engendered by new
biotechnologies and the Human Genome Project.  Useful appendices provide
the full text of the Buck v. Bell opinion, the text of the 1924 Virginia
Eugenical Sterilization Act, and an interesting table listing state
sterilization laws and the number of operations performed under them.

Victoria F. Nourse places economic and social inequality at the center
of her examination of Skinner v. Oklahoma.  While Justice William O.
Douglas's opinion today is remembered (and decried) primarily for its
assertion that human reproduction is a fundamental human right, Nourse
asserts that "the case was neither argued nor decided as a case about
rights" (p. 165).  Rather, the Supreme Court struck down the Oklahoma
law requiring sterilization for those found guilty of committing
particular crimes, because it violated, in both spirit and practice, the
essential American fight to end blood aristocracy--a principle at the
heart of both the American Revolution and the Civil War.  Eugenics,
Nourse argues, was simply an attempt to reassert blood aristocracy under
the veneer of science.  In a lively and compelling account, Nourse
invokes the world of Jack Skinner and the inmates of MacAlester Prison
in Depression-era Oklahoma.  Sterilizing criminals enjoyed widespread
support from a public that feared rampant lawlessness and violence in
the bleak years of the 1930s.  But it was precisely this aspect of
Oklahoma's 1935 statute--that it could not be defended as a public
health measure--that proved its eventual undoing.  Unlike the
defenseless Buck, the MacAlester inmates fought back, writing essays for
the local paper and staging violent riots and two bloody prison breaks.
They had an invaluable ally in Claud Briggs, a self-made lawyer who as a
state legislator skillfully negotiated language in the sterilization
bill that softened it for a future court challenge--a challenge that he
himself made in the courts by serving as Skinner's counsel.

Nourse also situates the story of Skinner v. Oklahoma within the history
of eugenics, which she aptly deems an "almost irresistible intellectual
seduction" (p. 13).  But Nourse's discussion of the eugenics movement is
less sweeping than Lombardo's, leaving room for a more thorough
exploration of issues of class, race, and gender, all of which are
essential elements in the story she tells.  Prisoners associated
sterilization with castration and therefore they fought the law out of
fears for their manhood, a very legitimate anxiety given the prison
environment where younger and weaker men were routinely raped and forced
to inhabit a permanent, inferior status.  "A 'girl' convict who forgot
his place," Nourse points out, "could find himself beaten or even
killed, simply for drinking out of the 'boys' water barrel" (p. 59).
Prison officials regularly punished inmates by forcing them to wear
women's clothing.  Nourse does not fully explore the meaning and
consequences of naturalized female inferiority in eugenical thought.
She does, however, carefully consider race, arguing that it was
intrinsically woven into eugenic conceptions of "superior" and
"inferior" as eugenicists sought to naturalize social inequalities by
embedding them in the physical body.  Recognizing this danger, Justice
Douglas's opinion rejected the Oklahoma law's singling out of some
crimes but not others as punishable by sterilization, an arbitrariness
"as invidious a discrimination as if it had selected a particular race
or nationality for oppressive treatment" (p. 170).  Like Lombardo,
Nourse also addresses the ties between American and German eugenics as
well as the relevance of Skinner to current social policy debates in
which science and politics are messily entangled.  A very minor note is
that the book's first page is designated numerically as 13 rather than
1, which made me wonder if additional material was somehow omitted when
the book went to press.

Each of these fine books will inform and enlighten legal scholars as
well as historians of medicine, science, and American social history in
the twentieth century.  Readers will be both intrigued and disturbed by
what they encounter in the riveting stories of Buck and Skinner.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it
through the list discussion logs at:
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl
<http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl> .

Citation: Lynne Curry. Review of Nourse, Victoria F., In Reckless Hands:
Skinner v. Oklahoma and the Near-Triumph of American Eugenics and
Lombardo, Paul A., Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the
Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell. H-Law, H-Net Reviews. June, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23964
<http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23964>  

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/> . 

 


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