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A Simple Act of mothering….

A Simple Act of mothering….

By Anna Morrow

Eu — gen — ics (yoo-jen’iks) n The study of hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding.( the American Heritage dictionary 1994)

This is the definition I found when I innocently or ignorantly had to look up this word. I consider my self intelligent despite my lack of formal education. I have however gone my entire forty years without ever knowing that such a word, much less the practice of it , existed. I feel no shame at not knowing about eugenics . I am, however, stunned that such an atrocious part of American history could have been so well hidden from public view. It makes me wonder what else is going on that I don’t know about. Lots I guess. The following is a story about a girl I met while reading the words of her legacy, as I tried to uncover the weird pseudo-science of eugenics. Her name is Carrie Buck.

When Carrie was born her mother could not have imagined the impact her child’s life would have on the world. Nor could she intervene to end the judgement which would be passed on to Carrie, by the simple act of mothering. Like herself, her daughter would endure a life marked by the erroneous claims made of her, and irrevocably altered by what would be decided about her by people of power, wealth and influence. Born into poverty, at a time in history when poverty was seen as evidence of genetic inferiority, Carrie’s fate was tainted before she had even taken her first breath. Her mother was an alleged prostitute (an allegation never proven) and was therefore committed to Virginias state institution: The Lynchburg Colony. Lynchburg was Americas largest asylum where "feeble minded" people

( economically unproductive, poor white trash) where lawfully institutionalized.

Feeble minded was a catchall term targeted at white people that were: poor, blind, deaf, deformed, alcoholic, drug addicted, tubercular, syphilis, leprous, criminal, orphaned, homeless, raped, abandoned, runaway, bastards.

Because of her mother’s institutionalization, Carrie was sent to live with a "host family" near Lynchburg. (It is unclear as to whether or not this family is related to Carrie or perhaps chosen as a wealthy family indented to "rub-off" on Carrie.) While in their care she was raped by a nephew of the family and became pregnant. The boy, the culprit, was never charged. Carrie, however, was then put into Lynchburg with her mother, for becoming pregnant out of wedlock. She was placed their by her foster father. Once there she was labeled a "moral delinquent ... of the moron class."

The director of the Lynchburg Colony, Dr. Albert Priddy, was a firm believer in and strong supporter of the Eugenics movement in America. He was anxious to find a test case that he could bring before the courts that would prove the existence of hereditary feeble mindedness. Carrie Buck was his answer. He found in Carrie not 1, not 2, but with the birth of her daughter Vivian, 3 generations of "feeblemindedness". Carrie’s fate was now sealed.

Laughlin and Priddy worked closely together to orchestrate a cynical campaign to bring before the courts. Their hope and belief was that a favorable ruling would strengthen the Eugenics movement in America. The case went all the way to the Supreme court and on May 2, 1927 the supreme Court upheld Virginia’s right to sterilize the feebleminded. In a decision written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes the court argued that the same logic and legal thinking which was used to uphold mandatory vaccinations could be used to defend the involuntary serializations of the feeble-minded. In the chilling words of Holmes "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…. 3 generations of imbeciles is enough!"

The vote was 8 to 1 in favor of forced sterilization based on hereditary feeblemindedness. The result was a new wave of sterilization legislation modeled on the Virginia law found legal by the Supreme court. Lest you think that this is some obscure bit of history, please keep in mind that this case has never been over turned and it remains the US supreme courts thinking on eugenics to this day. Sterilization laws remain of the statute books of 22 US states.

In 1927 , five months after she was placed at the Lynchburg Colony, Carrie had the dubious honor of being the first person sterilized under the new law. She was 18. Her sterilization was performed with little public notice and yet her case was to achieve a place in legal history and in the history of social sciences. The precedent it set would influence social policy around the world. It would provide the basis for the model which would be used in Nazi Germany for their race hygiene program. In the United States, within ten years 27,000 compulsory sterilization’s would be performed.

Shortly after her surgery Carrie was paroled form the Lynchburg institution. She would go on to marry twice, but would be saddened throughout her life for no being able to have any other children. She spent most of her adult life helping others as a trusted caregiver to elderly people. One of her employers said that "Carrie could not have been mentally retarded. Her competence was obvious in the quality of care she gave to those who depended on her. There was nothing wrong with the woman’s mind." Sadly, this opinion can be substantiated by the fact that the Stanford- Binet IQ test which was given to Carrie and used to evidence her " feeblemindedness, was later disqualified and proven to be totally wrong.

When Carrie died in a nursing home in 1983 she was buried next to her daughter Vivian . As a final sad note to the maternal blood line of the Bucks, young Vivian, who died in 1932 at the age of 9 ( cause of death cited as "illness"?) was called "very bright" by her teachers. She was an honor student.

Between 1915 and 1979 ( when the last eugenics language was removed form State law) more than 8000 children in the state of Virginia were sterilized because the state decided they were unfit to reproduce. Victims were taken from their families and forced to live in the Lynchburg Colony, where they were beaten, abused and put in solitary confinement.

This is one of the least known injustices in American history. Eugenics comes from a Greek word meaning "well-born". It’s selective breeding philosophy wreaked incalculable damage and the horrific history of the US eugenics program, under which 80,000 inmates in state institutions were compulsorily sterilized. By the 1930s, nearly two-thirds of the states had Eugenics laws, but no states applied them as ardently as Virginia, California and North Carolina. California sterilized more than 20,000 people, the most in the nation.

The white power structure was determined to preserve the "purity of the white race," and they didn't want "defective whites" lowering the threshold of white purity. The desire to "improve" the human stock is frequently related to pseudo-scientific theories put forward by those who wish to demonstrate the "superiority" of a particular group–race, nation, social class, or sex, in terms of blood or "good breeding." Such reactionary nonsense is usually given a spurious "scientific" air to convey an impression of intellectual respectability to the most irrational and abhorrent prejudices. America, the "land of the free," saw the triumph of the eugenics movement in the enactment of laws for the compulsory sterilization of the "biologically inferior." The state of Indiana passed the first sterilization act in 1907

Virtually anyone could in authority could label someone "feeble-minded" and pack them off to an institution. By today’s standards, just about anyone could be diagnosed as being a misfit for any number of real or perceived mental disabilities. The Eugenicists cast their net wide, targeting any human shortcoming that they believed to be a "hereditary disease" so that the could stamp it out by surgical sterilization. They rounded up whole families to render them incapable of passing their genes on to future generations.

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The American Eugenics Society was created ( date?) and proceeded to organize "fitter family contests" at state fairs. Along with prizes for pig and cow breeding and pie baking, state fairs held Fitter Families contests to reward those who practiced "good" people breeding. The only good family was a healthy, economically productive one. A 1926 AES display in Philadelphia warned that "some Americans are born to be a burden on the rest" unless the reproduction of inferior people was controlled.

Harry H. Laughlin, a biologist who was the most forceful advocate for compulsory sterilization in the United States, wrote the law on which the Virginia and German eugenics statutes were based.

Laughlin spent most of his career campaigning for sterilization of what he called the "most worthless one-tenth of our present population." . In 1922 Laughlin, acting as Eugenics agent of the US house of representatives published the Model Eugenical Sterilization law which defined who would be subjected to mandatory sterilization. It was this model that would later be seen as the direct link between the US authorities eugenics program and the Nazi regimes sterilization program. Prominent supporters of eugenics included Alexander Graham Bell, economist John Maynard Keynes and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.

Laughlin was also the architect of the notorious Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 that ended the greatest era of immigration in U.S. history. He successfully argued before Congress that the American gene pool was being polluted by intellectually and morally defective immigrants from Europe. The act, which wasn't repealed until 1965, targeted Italians and Eastern European Jews. In 1936, Laughlin received an honorary medical degree from the Nazi-controlled University of Heidelberg for his contributions to the "science of race cleansing.

A book titled a Civic Biology from 1930’s written by GW Hunter Describes popular opinion during that time: "Hundreds of families … exist today, spreading disease, immorality and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They are true parasites. If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetrating such a low and degenerate race."

It wasn't until the 1960s that the pace of sterilization slowed in the United States, years after eugenics had been widely discredited as political and social prejudice rather than scientific fact. Yet none of the 30 states that conducted eugenical sterilization ever compensated, apologized to or memorialized the victims. In 1980, newspapers in Virginia uncovered and reported on five decades of involuntary sterilization which had been performed at The Lynchburg Colony. The publication of the story shook the authorities in the state of Virginia. Worried about possible lawsuits, they hoped the storm would simply blow over. It didn't.

The Virginia state American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) took an interest in the case and filed a class action suit on behalf of the victims asking for a formal apology, compensation and counseling on behalf of the victims. In the end all that was awarded to the few people still alive, and now in their 80’s,was counseling.

Here are some of the people involved in the ACLU class action suit:

Sarah Jane Wiley was sterilized at the Virginia Colony when she was 22. "I wish they hadn't though because I'm crazy about children," she said. "It makes me feel so sad."

Wiley was sent to the Colony when she was 12 years old. Ten years later she was sent to the operating room without any idea what was going on. "They didn't tell me nothing. I found out about a month later that they tied my tubes," she said in an interview at her Lynchburg apartment not far from the Colony, now the Central Virginia Training Center for the severely mentally retarded.

Wiley's brother, Marvin, and sister, Shirley, also were sterilized at the Colony. Wiley, 63, said the reasons she wound up at the Colony are fuzzy. "My aunt committed me. They called welfare and they put me in the Colony." Wiley was released from the Colony in 1976 and went on to become a licensed practical nurse. Her framed discharge letter hangs on her living room wall. "Best of luck in the future," it says.

Jesse F. Meadows, sterilized at the Colony in 1940, has been mostly alone since his wife, Trudy, died in 1989. Since then "it's been one hard and lonely life," he said. "But, thank God, it will be over someday."

Meadows was sent to the Colony in June 1940 when he was 17. "My stepmother said she was leaving unless Daddy got rid of me," he said. Meadows remembers his operation five months after arriving at the Colony. "They said it would keep me from having feebleminded children," he said. "There was nothing I could do about it." Meadows, 77, said he always wanted to have children of his own. Now, he lives in a sparsely furnished, second-floor apartment with his 13-year-old Chihuahua, Angel.

Mary Donald, 64, was sterilized at age 11. She said she does not know why she was sent to the Virginia Colony and that she was told only that the operation was for her own health. She attributes the breakup of her 10-year marriage to her sterility. "I used to ... lay and cry" about not having children, she said.

Many of the pseudoscientific, psychiatric and social theories that advocate locking up (i.e. "institutionalization"), sterilization and killing (i.e.euthanasia) of people considered by some to be 'not worthy of living' fall under the heading of eugenics .

The idea that one race or group of people is superior to another is, of course, a racist, political and pseudoscientific, not scientific, idea. Unfortunately, many people considered to be scientists and "social scientists" advocate this type of racism an discrimination. 'Socio-biology' is, a related pseudoscience that claims to give biological reasons (e.g., heredity, chemical imbalances in the blood and brain, etc.) for social and political actions and conditions. Eugenicists and sociobiologists have been blaming the victims of poverty, unemployment, racism and other discriminations for their condition for over a hundred

years now.

Positions of power fueled by wealth, should not be given free reign to decide another persons worth. Practicing tolerance and respect for diversity should be the requirement of authoritarian role-models. Hate is far inferior to and more dangerous than poverty and "feeble-mindedness". The people who thought up Eugenics and their powerful allies should perhaps have been sterilized to keep from passing on their genes of prejudice and hate.

Bibliography ( www.google.com virginia eugenics lynchburg colony)

1. Ethnic cleansing in America William C Harris

2. Hampton Road Bill Baskerville

3. Research Bill Baskerville

4. The Lynchburg Story R Prince

5. STS Seminar Series Molly Ladd-Taylor

6. Truthseekers Review Lenny Lapon

7. From Harvard to Buchenwald Lenny Lapon

8. Carrie Buck Story David Smith

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