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Longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction
One of America’s great miscarriages of justice, the Supreme Court’s infamous 1927 Buck v. Bell ruling made government sterilization of “undesirable” citizens the law of the land
In 1927, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling so disturbing, ignorant, and cruel that it stands as one of the great injustices in American history. In Imbeciles, bestselling author Adam Cohen exposes the court’s decision to allow the sterilization of a young woman it wrongly thought to be “feebleminded” and to champion the mass eugenic sterilization of undesirable citizens for the greater good of the country. The 8–1 ruling was signed by some of the most revered figures in American law—including Chief Justice William Howard Taft, a former U.S. president; and Louis Brandeis, a progressive icon. Oliver Wendell Holmes, considered by many the greatest Supreme Court justice in history, wrote the majority opinion, including the court’s famous declaration “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Imbeciles is the shocking story of Buck v. Bell, a legal case that challenges our faith in American justice. A gripping courtroom drama, it pits a helpless young woman against powerful scientists, lawyers, and judges who believed that eugenic measures were necessary to save the nation from being “swamped with incompetence.” At the center was Carrie Buck, who was born into a poor family in Charlottesville, Virginia, and taken in by a foster family, until she became pregnant out of wedlock. She was then declared “feebleminded” and shipped off to the Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded.
Buck v. Bell unfolded against the backdrop of a nation in the thrall of eugenics, which many Americans thought would uplift the human race. Congress embraced this fervor, enacting the first laws designed to prevent immigration by Italians, Jews, and other groups charged with being genetically inferior.
Cohen shows how Buck arrived at the colony at just the wrong time, when influential scientists and politicians were looking for a “test case” to determine whether Virginia’s new eugenic sterilization law could withstand a legal challenge. A cabal of powerful men lined up against her, and no one stood up for her—not even her lawyer, who, it is now clear, was in collusion with the men who wanted her sterilized.
In the end, Buck’s case was heard by the Supreme Court, the institution established by the founders to ensure that justice would prevail. The court could have seen through the false claim that Buck was a threat to the gene pool, or it could have found that forced sterilization was a violation of her rights. Instead, Holmes, a scion of several prominent Boston Brahmin families, who was raised to believe in the superiority of his own bloodlines, wrote a vicious, haunting decision upholding Buck’s sterilization and imploring the nation to sterilize many more.
Holmes got his wish, and before the madness ended some sixty to seventy thousand Americans were sterilized. Cohen overturns cherished myths and demolishes lauded figures in relentless pursuit of the truth. With the intellectual force of a legal brief and the passion of a front-page exposé, Imbeciles is an ardent indictment of our champions of justice and our optimistic faith in progress, as well as a triumph of American legal and social history.
From the Hardcover edition.
- Sales Rank: #1327903 in Books
- Published on: 2016-03-01
- Released on: 2016-03-01
- Formats: Audiobook, CD, Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 11
- Dimensions: 5.80" h x 1.10" w x 5.10" l,
- Running time: 810 minutes
- Binding: Audio CD
Review
“This well-written narrative of legal history demonstrates what happens when the powerful and elite in society fail to protect the powerless and poor…Imbeciles combines an investigative journalist’s instinct for the misuse of power, a lawyer’s analytic abilities, and a historian’s eye for detail to tell this compelling and emotional story…[The book] serves as a cautionary tale about what may happen when those who have, or obtain, power use the institutions of government and the law to advance their own interests at the expense of those who are poor, disadvantaged, or of different ‘hereditary’ stock.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
“[IMBECILES is] the story of an assault upon thousands of defenseless people seen through the lens of a young woman, Carrie Buck, locked away in a Virginia state asylum. In meticulously tracing her ordeal, Cohen provides a superb history of eugenics in America, from its beginnings as an offshoot of social Darwinism—human survival of the fittest—to its rise as a popular movement, advocating the state-sponsored sterilization of ‘feeble-minded, insane, epileptic, inebriate, criminalistics and other degenerate persons.’”—David Oshinksy, The New York Times Book Review (cover review)
“In this detailed and riveting study, Cohen captures the obsession with eugenics in 1920s America… Cohen's outstanding narrative stands as an exposé of a nearly forgotten chapter in American history.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“IMBECILES indicts and convicts any number of villains, albeit with proper judicial restraint. Cohen mostly lets the facts speak for themselves…[and] skillfully frames the case within the context of the early 20th century eugenics movement…[The book’s] considerable power lies in Cohen’s closer examination of the principal actors…Buck v. Bell has never been overturned. But thanks to Adam Cohen, we shall never forget it.” —Boston Globe
“Cohen…tells the shocking story of one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in U.S. history…and demonstrates to a fare-thee-well how every step along the way, our system of justice failed…The last chapter of the case of Carrie Buck, Cohen reveals, hasn't been written…IMBECILES leaves you wondering whether it can happen here — again.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“An important new book…which details the eugenic horror that still haunts the American legal system… Cohen’s narrative of the legal case that enshrined these practices is a page-turner, and the story it tells is deeply, almost physically, infuriating… Cohen reminds us of the simple, shocking fact that while forced sterilizations are rare today, they remain legal because American courts have never overturned Buck v. Bell.”—The New Republic
“Imbeciles is lively, accessible and, inevitably, often heart-wrenching.”—Nature
“Searing…In this important book, Cohen not only illuminates a shameful moment in American history when the nation’s most respected professions—medicine, academia, law, and the judiciary—failed to protect one of the most vulnerable members of society, he also tracks the landmark case’s repercussions up to the present.”—Booklist (starred review)
“The story of Carrie Buck…illustrates society’s treatment of the poor, of minorities and immigrants, and other populations considered ‘undesirable.’… This thought-provoking work exposes a dark chapter of American legal history.”—Library Journal
“Imbeciles is a revelatory book. Eye-opening and riveting. In these pages, Adam Cohen brings alive an unsettling, neglected slice of American history, and does so with the verve of a master storyteller.” —Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here
“Cohen revisits an ugly chapter in American history: the 1920s mania for eugenics…[in this] compelling narrative....He also tells a larger story of the weak science underlying the eugenics cause and the outrageous betrayal of the defenseless by some of the country's best minds…A shocking tale about science and law gone horribly wrong, an almost forgotten case that deserves to be ranked with Dred Scott, Plessy, and Korematsu as among the Supreme Court's worst decisions.”—Kirkus (starred review )
“Adam Cohen knows how to recognize a story and has the gift to tell it with disarming fidelity to facts that make us cringe. In that vein, Imbeciles made me question my longstanding admiration for the mind and character of Oliver Wendell Holmes and my fading hope that the Supreme Court can sometimes save us from ourselves.”—Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution
“‘Three generations of imbeciles are enough’—these are among the most haunting words in the history of the Supreme Court. In Imbeciles, Adam Cohen unearths the secret history of the case that moved Oliver Wendell Holmes to utter that notorious sentence. The book provides a stark portrait of the resilient eugenics movement—and a welcome warning about its sinister appeal.”—Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Oath and The Nine
“A powerfully written account of how the United States Supreme Court collaborated in the involuntary sterilization of thousands of poor and powerless women. Cohen’s Imbeciles is that rarest of books—it is a shocking story beautifully told, and also the definitive study of one of the darkest moments in the history of American law.”—John Fabian Witt, author of Lincoln’s Code and The Accidental Republic
“Imbeciles is at once disturbing, moving, and profoundly important. With the zeal of an investigative journalist and a novelist’s insight, Adam Cohen tells the story of an injustice carried out at the highest levels of government, and how it reverberated across history and remains with us today. Cohen is one of our most gifted writers, and he has turned the story of the Supreme Court and American eugenics into one of the best books I’ve read in decades.”—Amy Chua, John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law, Yale Law School, and author of The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
ADAM COHEN, a former member of the New York Times editorial board and senior writer for Time magazine, is the author most recently of Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he was president of volume 100 of the Harvard Law Review.
From the Hardcover edition.
Most helpful customer reviews
24 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
It is gut wrenching to read how implacably the most powerful segments of society marched toward depriving a poor, uneducated but
By Eileen B. Hershenov
From the vantage point of 2016 it is at one and the same time both strangely anachronistic and dismayingly pertinent to read Adam Cohen's meticulously researched and compellingly written book about the legal high point of the American eugenics movement. Anachronistic, because it is hard for many of us today to understand how so many leading (white) progressive reformers could have signed onto the cause of eugenics so enthusiastically at the same time they advocated for so many other causes that put them ahead of their time in terms of social reform. Margaret Sanger and other leading feminists, Teddy Roosevelt, leading clergy, lawyers, doctors and academics -- so many supported eugenics and, implicitly if not explicitly, the racist and classist pseudo-science that undergirded it. (As Cohen notes, the Nazi Party's eugenics program was explicitly modeled after the American movement.) It's so clearly not part of a progressive agenda we're used to that one can't help but wonder how these socially conscious forebears didn't see how brutal and tyrannical it was to a marginalized group of people. Saying that these reformers were in this instance captured by elitist, moralizing groupthink and ardor for government use of science to reform society doesn't wholly explain it.
The book is pertinent for a number of reasons Cohen references, and for two reasons he couldn't have anticipated when he began it. First of the unanticipated developments is the particular way in which the Republican presidential primary and Donald Trump's ascendancy is buoyed by, and in turn contributes to the huge upswing of anti-immigrant, racist fear mongering. Mass immigration and social disruption (today, globalization and its discontents, and fear of terrorism) are threatening to large numbers of people, just as Cohen notes was the case when the eugenics movement arose. While there are many differences to be noted between that movement of a century ago on the one hand, and today's anti-immigration, anti-minority groundswell on the other, both cite repeatedly to "facts" that do not bear scrutiny and to nativist sentiment of one kind or another.
The second development that gives this book even more relevance is the way in which Justice Scalia's death shines a renewed spotlight on the role the U.S. Supreme Court plays -- or abdicates -- when it comes to protecting the weak and powerless. As Cohen notes, the Court has far more consistently ruled in favor of powerful elites and against those who need the protection of our society and its laws most. Buck v. Bell, the case upholding -- on few facts, and most of them inaccurate -- the forced sterilization of a supposedly feebleminded woman, Carrie Buck, is far from the only case illustrating that proclivity. Examples continue to this day.
It is gut wrenching to read how implacably the most powerful segments of society marched toward depriving a poor, uneducated but, as Cohen shows, perfectly intelligent young woman of her liberty, her dignity, her bodily integrity and her right to choose whether to bear children. And this was a woman who bore a child (the third generation of "imbeciles" in Justice Holmes' infamous term) because she was the victim of rape, not, as her "guardians" said, because she was a feebleminded "defective" who acted immorally due to inherited defectiveness. (The parallels to opponents of abortion who cite to the intention of "protecting" women's health by passing laws closing clinics come to mind.) These powerful forces close over Carrie so disproportionately, it is like watching a tsunami in slow motion, moving to obliterate her in so many ways.
This is a book that would make a good addition to high school and college curricula. And an important read for all of us.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Three Generations of Imbeciles is Enough.
By C. M. Godfrey
About a century ago, eugenics was the accepted science of the day. It focused on the desire to improve the American population by limiting undesirable characteristics that might become inbred in the population. It was widely accepted at the time that many characteristics were inherited including feeblemindedness, epilepsy, and criminality.
This book focuses on the eugenic sterilization movement to prevent the feebleminded from reproducing. Its chapters are centered around the main participants in the case that was finally decided by the U. S. Supreme Court. Carrie Buck is the young woman to be sterilized. Albert Priddy was the Superintendent of the Virginia Colony for the Epileptics and Feeble-Minded who believed strongly that the
feebleminded had to be precluded from reproducing either through institutionalization or sterilization. Harry Laughlin was the outspoken advocate for eugenics who supported not only sterilization but also immigration limited to Northern European Protestants. Aubrey Strode was the careful lawyer who wrote Virginia's eugenic sterilization statute and then defended its constitutionality through the Supreme Court,
and finally Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Boston Brahman Supreme Court Justice who wrote the now infamous opinion that "Three generations of imbeciles is enough."
I recommend this book for detailing a movement and its implications that are no longer widely remembered. The book has a few flaws that do not detract from the more important issues described in the book. It could have used tighter editing. I learned too many times that Indiana passed the first eugenic sterilization statute. The author assumes that Carrie Buck's progression through elementary school was evidence of her intellect and not just social promotion, and there are other places where the author draws inferences that might be subject to other explanations. Finally, the author can be too obvious in sharing his opinions about the events and the participants rather than allowing the story to speak for itself. Nonetheless, it is a compelling read.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
When bad ideas dress up as "Science".....
By cecemae
Excellent history of the driving factor behind the age of the Institution. Not a 'far back' part of our society either. As recently as 1987 the Mansfield "Training School" in Connecticut housed as many as 1200 persons with intellectual disabilities.Prods me to wonder what gross systems and judgments we are engaged in today that, in 30 years, may be mind boggling to people in year 2047. The language of disability seems to change but however we address it, the word becomes "bad." This reflects how we are deeply ashamed and adverse to those we deem as "less than"
the rest of the pack.Unless we really, internally change the word doesn't matter whether its imbecile, moron, retardate, or "special" it will be an insult until we fully include and embrace all members of society. Read this book with an eye to any and all Supreme Court pronouncements!!
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