Hitlers favorite American: Biological fascism in the shadow of New York City

Growing up in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the early 1900s, young Carrie Buck impressed those she met as serious and self-possessed, someone whose quiet demeanor hinted at a life filled with challenges. Of humble originsher widowed mother had given her up to foster care as a childthe stocky, darkhaired girl didnt let her difficulties get her down. She enjoyed reading the newspaper, liked to fiddle with crossword puzzles, and always made herself useful around the house. She was a bit awkward in social situations, but otherwise she was a thoroughly average teenager. No one had any reason to think differently of her. Then something terrible occurred that changed Carries life forever.

In 1923, when she was seventeen, Carrie Buck was raped by a nephew of her foster parents. The girl became pregnant, and her foster parentsperhaps embarrassed by what their nephew had donedecided to hide the girl away by committing her to the Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and Feebleminded, a mental facility in the town of Lynchburg. Carries birth mother had previously been committed to the same institution, accused of being mentally deficient and promiscuous. The same reasons were given for Carries incarceration. It was a classic case of punishing the victim.

Carrie had her baby in the spring of 1924, the same year that Virginia passed a law permitting the involuntary sterilization of those judged to be mentally impaired. The statute grew out of the early twentieth centurys widely influential eugenics movement, a now discredited cousin of genetics that attempted to improve American society by breeding out a long list of undesirable traits ascribed to minorities, the poor, and certain immigrant populations. At the same time, eugenicists hoped to foster the increase of good breeding traits by encouraging high-grade citizens to go forth and multiply (the word eugenics means well born).

Its no surprise that complacently comfortable white folks conceived and promoted this scheme of biological discrimination. According to eugenicists, if you werent of Nordic or Anglo-Saxon heritage, your genes were second rate. Even if you were white, if you happened to be epileptic, mentally ill, illegitimate, unemployed, homeless, a sexually active single woman, an alcoholic, a convicted criminal, or a prostituteall signs of feeblemindedness or hereditary degeneracyyou were a threat to the purity of the nations gene pool. Eugenicists advocated three ways of dealing with the perceived problem of bad genes: immigration restrictions, the prevention of unfit marriages, and involuntary sterilization of defective individuals in state care, chiefly mental patients and prison inmates.

Carrie Buck had the misfortune of being the first Virginia resident chosen for compulsory sterilization. Her case became a test of the constitutionality of the states new law, a challenge that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. With little justification beyond a family history of poverty and illegitimacy, Carrie and her birth mother were both portrayed as sexually deviant simpletons. Even Carries baby girl was said to be not quite normal. Years later, researchers determined that all three family members were of average intelligence, and that the arguments for Carries sterilization were based on faulty, biased testimony. These people belong to the shiftless, ignorant and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South, one so-called expert declaredwithout ever having met Carrie Buck or her mother.

Despite the flimsy testimony presented in the case, the Supreme Court upheld the Virginia law in 1927 by an eight-to-one margin, with justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. issuing this shocking pronouncement: 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. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough. Shortly afterward, Carrie Buck, a perfectly normal citizen of the United States, was sterilized against her will. It was an outrage destined to be repeated many times overmostly against poor, uneducated womenas the dark age of eugenics spread across the land in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.

Thousands of activists had a hand in creating the conditions that permitted the abuse of Carrie Buck and others like her, but few bear a greater measure of responsibility than biologist Charles Davenport, a man who spent more than three decades leading the campaign for racial purity in the United States. In essence, Davenport and his fellow eugenicists sought to create a master race of white Protestant Yankees, with all the frightening ramifications that implies. (Imagine the banality of an entire nation of Ward and June Cleavers.) Aside from being morally repulsive, their goal amounted to second-rate science, since biological strength lies in genetic diversity, not sameness.

Davenports offenses went beyond the harm he caused here at home. His lengthy collaboration with eugenicists in Nazi Germany contributed to that countrys brutal racial policies. Today, we rightly reject what Davenport and others like him stood for as white supremacy gone berserk. In his own time, though, Davenport was hailed as a trailblazer, an honorable scientist who studied and taught at our nations most prestigious institutions of higher learning. Davenports chilling story demonstrates that when prejudice and public policy mix, the result can be a humanitarian nightmare.

A lanky, goatee-sporting man who favored all-white suits, Charles Benedict Davenport was the product of a puritanical upbringing. He was born in 1866 on his familys farm near Stamford, Connecticut. In his childhood and early teens, he spent the spring and summer months working on the farm. The rest of the year, he lived in Brooklyn, where his domineering father ran a successful real estate and insurance business. Davenport attended Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, earning a bachelor of science in civil engineering in 1886. In 1889, he received a bachelors degree from Harvard University, followed by a doctorate in zoology in 1892.

Even as a student, Davenport wrote prolifically, which he continued to do after being hired as an instructor at Harvard in 1893. A primary area of interest for the young scholar was the study of heredity and selective breeding in animals, a topic his years on the farm gave him practical insight into. His writing earned him a favorable reputation, and in 1899 the University of Chicago offered him an assistant professorship. In 1904, Davenport left Chicago to become the director of the new Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, a genetics research center funded by the Carnegie Institution. It was the perfect place for Davenport to cultivate his interests in evolution, heredity, and eugenics.