The Passing of the Great Race
This was not some marginal cause. American eugenicists persuaded the Harriman, Carnegie, and Rockefeller families to fund a vast eugenic campus at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. Researchers were dispatched to asylums, prisons, hospitals, and poor towns to collect family histories of the supposedly unfit -- which included the mentally ill, the disabled, epileptics, alcoholics, criminals, the immoral, and pretty much anyone else they wanted to throw in. These reports were then collected at the Eugenics Record Office.
Throughout the '20s, eugenicists pushed draconian immigration restrictions through Congress and persuaded most states to pass laws permitting the sterilization of the unfit. The Supreme Court laid the capstone on these laws with the notorious 1927 decision in Buck v. Bell affirming the sterilization of an unwed teenage mother. Drawing on statements of pro-eugenics medical personnel, the court decided not only that Carrie Buck was feebleminded (she wasn't), but that her daughter was clearly doomed to abnormality (she wasn't). The supposed incapacity of Carrie Buck, her mother, and her infant daughter inspired Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' famous conclusion: "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."
�David Plotz review of War Against the Weak by Edwin Black
Mother Jones September/October 2003
This was not some marginal cause. American eugenicists persuaded the Harriman, Carnegie, and Rockefeller families to fund a vast eugenic campus at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. Researchers were dispatched to asylums, prisons, hospitals, and poor towns to collect family histories of the supposedly unfit -- which included the mentally ill, the disabled, epileptics, alcoholics, criminals, the immoral, and pretty much anyone else they wanted to throw in. These reports were then collected at the Eugenics Record Office.
Throughout the '20s, eugenicists pushed draconian immigration restrictions through Congress and persuaded most states to pass laws permitting the sterilization of the unfit. The Supreme Court laid the capstone on these laws with the notorious 1927 decision in Buck v. Bell affirming the sterilization of an unwed teenage mother. Drawing on statements of pro-eugenics medical personnel, the court decided not only that Carrie Buck was feebleminded (she wasn't), but that her daughter was clearly doomed to abnormality (she wasn't). The supposed incapacity of Carrie Buck, her mother, and her infant daughter inspired Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' famous conclusion: "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."
�David Plotz review of War Against the Weak by Edwin Black
Mother Jones September/October 2003
