A Century of Eugenics in America From The Indiana Experiment To The Human Genome Era Bioethics and The Humanities

A century of Eugenics in America
Bioet h ic s a n d t h e H u m a n i t i e s
E r ic M . M e s l i n a n d R ic h a r d B . M i l l e r , e di t or s
A
c e n t u r y of
E u g E n i c s
in a m e r i c a
From the Indiana Experiment

to the Human Genome Era
E di t e d b y
Pau l A . L om b a r d o
Indiana University Pr ess

Bloomington & Indianapolis
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iupress.indiana.edu A century of eugenics in America : from the

Indiana experiment to the human genome
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For C on n i , C h r i s , a n d C l a r e
C on t e n t s
· Preface & Acknowledgmentsâ•… ix
· Introduction: Looking Back at Eugenicsâ•… Paul A. Lombardoâ•… 1
· Part 1. The Indiana Origins of Eugenic Sterilization

1 The Hoosier Connection: Compulsory Sterilization
as Moral Hygieneâ•… Elof Axel Carlsonâ•… 11
2 The Indiana Way of Eugenics: Sterilization
Laws, 1907–74â•… Jason S. Lantzerâ•… 26
· Part 2. Eugenics and Popular Culture

3 From Better Babies to the Bunglers: Eugenics
on Tobacco Roadâ•… Paul A. Lombardoâ•… 45
4 “Quality, Not Mere Quantity, Counts”:
Black Eugenics and the NAACP Baby Contestsâ•…
Gregory Michael Dorr & Angela Loganâ•… 68
· Part 3. State Studies of Eugenic Sterilization

5 From Legislation to Lived Experience: Eugenic Sterilization in
California and Indiana, 1907–79â•… Alexandra Minna Sternâ•… 95
6 Eugenics and Social Welfare in New Deal
Minnesotaâ•… Molly Ladd-Taylorâ•… 117
7 Reassessing Eugenic Sterilization: The Case of
North Carolinaâ•… Johanna Schoenâ•… 141
8 Protection or Control? Women’s Health, Sterilization Abuse,
and Relf v. Weinbergerâ•… Gregory Michael Dorrâ•… 161
· Part 4. Eugenics in the Human Genome Era

9 Are We Entering a “Perfect Storm” for a Resurgence of
Eugenics? Science, Medicine, and Their Social Contextâ•…
Linda L. McCabe & Edward R. B. McCabeâ•… 193
10 Modern Eugenics and the Lawâ•… Maxwell J. Mehlmanâ•… 219
· List of Contributorsâ•… 241

· Indexâ•… 243
P r e fac e & Ac k now l e d g m e n t s
In 1907, Indiana passed the first involuntary sterilization law in the world
based on the theory of eugenics. In time more than 30 states and a dozen
foreign countries followed Indiana’s lead in passing sterilization laws;
those and other laws restricting immigration and regulating marriage
on “eugenic” grounds were still in effect in the United States as late as
the 1970s.
The centennial of Indiana’s pioneering enactment provided an oppor-
tune time to evaluate the historical significance of eugenics in America.
On April 12, 2007, after more than two and a half years of planning, a
group that included scholars, state officials, and members of the public
assembled in Indianapolis for the culmination of the Indiana Eugenics
Legacy Project. The project was designed to advance historical research
on eugenics, to deepen our understanding of the varied ways “eugenics”
was expressed intellectually, legally, and socially, and to help draw lessons
from history for current policy makers.
The project included several specific events. Foremost among them
was a public symposium held to mark the eugenic centennial. On that
occasion the Indiana State Library launched an exhibit on the history
of eugenics in Indiana as scholars engaged in panel discussions on the
implications of eugenic policies. Professor Daniel Kevles, historian and
author of In the Name of Eugenics (1985), provided a keynote lecture, as
did Joe Palca, science journalist for National Public Radio. The highlight
of the centenary activities was the unveiling of a historical marker that
now stands on the grounds of the State Library, explaining Indiana’s role
in the eugenics movement.
ix
xâ•… · â•… P r e fa c e a n d A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
The Indiana secretary of health appeared on behalf of the governor

to condemn past eugenic abuses, adding her voice to that of the Indiana
legislature, which adopted a formal resolution decrying its role in eugenic
history. The Indiana Supreme Court held a conference on eugenic history
in its own courtroom. The coalescence of all three branches of state gov-
ernment to reflect on and repudiate the abuses that took place as part of
America’s eugenic past was unprecedented. Of particular significance was
the appearance of Jamie Coleman, a woman whose challenge to the le-
gality of her own involuntary sterilization in Indiana reached the United
States Supreme Court in the 1978 case of Stump v. Sparkman. She attended
the symposium and unveiled the historical marker.
The project also generated educational activities. In addition to the
Supreme Court seminar, a graduate school course on eugenics was held
at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. Articles were
published in the Indiana Magazine of History and Traces of Indiana and
Midwestern History, and several presentations were given by project par-
ticipants at state and national meetings such as the Indiana Association of
Historians, the American Public Health Association, and the American
Society of Law, Medicine, and Ethics. The exhibit that was displayed at
the State Library in Indianapolis was digitized for permanent display
online. By all measures, the project was a success.
In the past 25 years, scholars in the United States and several other
countries have documented the wide appeal of eugenics, and students
of contemporary science have used that research as a warning about po-
tentially troubling applications of the breathtaking new discoveries in
genetics. This volume, the final product of the Indiana Eugenics Legacy
Project, builds on that growing literature. The Indiana eugenic centen-
nial provided an opportunity to undertake original historical research.
In contrast to the many wide-ranging scholarly and popular surveys of
eugenics already available, this book was planned as an exploration of the
detailed and varied history of eugenics in America at the state and local
levels, beginning with its appearance in Indiana.
Authors of several recent historical works that analyzed regional
and state eugenic programs were invited to participate, along with other
scholars from the fields of law, genetics, and bioethics. Grant funding
supported the committee of scholars to travel to Indianapolis to attend
public events and to discuss their papers for a commemorative volume.
P r e fa c e a n d A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s â•… · â•… xi
This group produced new scholarship that probed practices in Indiana,

Georgia, California, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Alabama, along
with other papers that explored perspectives on bioethics, law, race, and
eugenics. Our goal was to create a volume that would contribute to the
ongoing national discussion about the meanings of “eugenics” and how
those meanings played out in specific and concrete contexts.
I want to thank several key people who were instrumental in bringing
the Indiana Eugenics Legacy Project to fruition. First on the list is Eric
Meslin, director of the Indiana University Center for Bioethics. When I
contacted Eric in 2004 with a reminder that the centennial of the Indiana
sterilization law was approaching, he enlisted the expertise of IU histo-
rian William Schneider. Bill led the Legacy Project, managing the efforts
to secure funding and bringing together the wide diversity of people who
eventually contributed to the project’s success. We then asked Alexandra
Stern of the University of Michigan to join our planning group. Her own
experience as a historian with an in-depth knowledge of Indiana’s eugenic
past represented another welcome resource. Without the skills of Eric,
Bill, and Alex, this project would not have occurred.
Judi Izuka Campbell, a research associate in the Medical Humani-
ties & Health Studies program, provided invaluable assistance in man-
aging project logistics. Another IU colleague, David Orentlicher, used
his considerable skills as physician, lawyer, and member of the Indiana
House of Representatives to shepherd the eugenics resolution through
the General Assembly. Thanks to Judi and David for their contributions
to the project.
Special thanks are also due to the National Institutes of Health’s Hu-
man Genome Institute’s Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues program, which
provided funding for the 2007 symposium and support for this volume.
I also want to thank Dean Steven Kaminshine of the Georgia State Uni-
versity College of Law for providing summer support that allowed me to
complete the work of compiling this volume.
Paul A. Lombardo
April 2010
A century of Eugenics in America
I n t r oduc t ion
Looking Back at Eugenics
Eugenics. A quick internet search identifies that word as the invective du

jour in public discourse, shorthand for everything evil. Most often those
who brandish the “E” word condemn it as the nadir of “pseudo-science”
and make explicit reference to Hitler and the Holocaust. And after many
years of absence from public consciousness, terms like eugenicist are now
regularly employed to skewer a political opponent, to condemn the teach-
ing of evolution, and to oppose some feature of health care reform. The
specter of eugenics is also commonly invoked to question the use of new
technologies and the pursuit of science more generally. Clearly the mean-
ing of the term eugenics, praised a century ago as a science made up of “fact
not fad,”1 and used to signal the study of those “hereditarily endowed with
noble qualities,”2 has undergone a sea change.
Part of the reason for the recent reemergence of eugenics as an almost
exclusively pejorative term is the expansion of scholarship that has ex-
plained the origin of the U.S eugenics movement. 3 Many people are still
shocked to hear that practices such as eugenic sterilization began in the
United States long before they were taken up in totalitarian settings such
as Nazi Germany. Because of the power of that historical trajectory, a
linkage is assumed—both too often and too quickly—between anything
“eugenical” and the rise of the Third Reich.
But historians of eugenics have been saying for decades that from the
first enunciation of Galton’s “brief word to express the science of improv-
ing stock,”4 eugenics took on an ever-changing variety of meanings, 5 and
that those sometimes complementary, sometimes contrasting meanings
generated “competing and evolving varieties of eugenics.”6
1
2â•… · â•… Pa u l L o m b a r d o
The essays in this book do not propose a single definition that cap-
tures the meaning of eugenics. They are instead attempts to describe and
analyze the many ways that term was used to justify cultural shifts, social
programs, and laws in the United States. There is no extended discussion
of the “eugenics movement” in these essays either, both because most of
the nationally prominent eugenic organizations have already been well
studied and because the general focus here is not on national trends but on
how those trends played out in ways that were unique and local. Eugenics
took many forms, and different agendas were launched “in the name of
eugenics.” 7 This book traces the career of several of those agendas, with
particular attention to legal activities at the state level. The first eight es-
says are by historians; seven of them are about features of sterilization law
in one or more states. While sterilization is clearly only one expression of
the group of ideas we think of as eugenics, it still draws historical attention
because it was practiced so regularly in the United States for so long. It
also generated legal and administrative records that are the raw material
of much historical study.
The eighth historical essay is about race and the way eugenic thinking
of one kind was adopted even by those who might have been victimized
under “eugenics” of another stripe. Race is touched upon in several other
chapters, and that is hardly surprising, since racially and ethnically dis-
criminatory laws, from Jim Crow to genocide, represent some of the most
notorious examples of the policies we understand as eugenics.
The book is completed with two essays from perspectives outside of
history: law and biomedical science. They too allude to history, but also
bring our inquiry up to date with reflections on the era of the human
genome. The book as a whole can be broken down into four parts, as
summarized below.
Par t 1. The I n diana Origins

of E ugenic S t eri l i z at ion
Two essays place Indiana as first among all the states to begin the “ex-
perimental stage” of eugenics, with specific attention to Dr. Harry Clay
Sharp, a prime mover in the legalization of eugenic surgery, followed
by an in-depth view of the state legislative process that yielded the first
sterilization law.
I n t r o du c t i o nâ•… · â•… 3
Elof Carlson reminds us that the roots of twentieth-century eugenics

had burrowed deep even before that word was coined. Oscar McCulloch’s
nineteenth-century tale of the Tribe of Ishmael relied on earlier degener-
acy theory to convince readers of the social costs of wandering tribes and
the problem families they nurtured. McCulloch’s fixation on the Ishmael-
ites—a group not responsive to his charitable reforms—foreshadows the
later account in this book of the Bunglers, another pseudonymous clan
that seemed impervious to a reformer’s efforts.
Carlson surveys a broad sweep of social and cultural history, reaching
back to the history of English Poor Laws for an explanation of how new
ideas on the role of public philanthropy developed in turn-of-the-century
Indiana. He also highlights the importance of the new technology of
surgical vasectomy, which became available to Dr. Sharp when his career
as prison physician was just beginning and was viewed for a time as thera-
peutic for the criminals to whom it was applied. Its use as a eugenic tool
to isolate the seeds of criminality within those already convicted of crime
was considered a value-added feature of the novel surgical technique.
Jason Lantzer moves the discussion of Indiana’s 1907 sterilization law
forward, tracing it to interest group politics. Rather than focusing on a
grassroots movement, he details the small cadre of reformers, politicians,
and physicians whose first efforts at eugenic law resulted in denying mar-
riage licenses to the poor and disabled and eventually produced steriliza-
tion laws that in various incarnations remained in place in the state for
almost seven decades. Lantzer explores the political and legal climate
surrounding Indiana’s sterilization laws during that period and explains
how the law changed over time to fit the idiosyncratic needs of advocates.
He also identifies the changing targets of â†œI ndiana sterilization law, which
included criminals, the “feebleminded,” the mentally ill, and people with
epilepsy. Similar insights about the officials who administered steriliza-
tion laws and the changing motives they articulated are evident in later lo-
cal accounts of sterilization in this volume. The next two articles provide
examples of the broad reach of eugenics in American culture.
Par t 2 . E ugenics an d P opu l ar C u lt ure
A common theme among most of these essays is the role of economic

pressures, real or imagined, on the adoption of practices described as “eu-
4â•… ·â•… Pa u l L o m b a r d o
genic.” The work of novelist Erskine Caldwell confronted Georgians with

the problems of poor families in their midst during the Great Depression.
Caldwell’s insistent focus on the most desperate families—described in
both his fiction and his newspaper reportage—heightened attention to
proposals for a sterilization law as the solution to intergenerational famil-
ial poverty. Chapter 3 connects the career of Georgia’s 1937 sterilization
law to debates over poverty and eugenics fueled by Caldwell’s work.
The second essay in this group identifies the power of eugenic think-
ing in unlikely places: among the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois in the Na-
tional Association for the Advancement of Colored People magazine, the
Crisis, and other Du Bois publications in Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control
Review. Gregory Dorr and Angela Logan review the writings of Du Bois
alongside other African American leaders. They find a brand of “black
eugenics” that de-emphasized interracial differences and instead encour-
aged reproduction of quality traits among the most “fit” members of black
society. They analyze a baby contest sponsored by the NAACP, started as
a vehicle for raising money to combat the scourge of lynching. The contest
succeeded as a funding vehicle, while simultaneously highlighting the
growth of the “talented tenth” within Du Bois’s own community.
Par t 3. S tat e S t u dies of

E ugenic S t eri l i z at ion
The next four chapters are case studies that further explain how eugenic
sterilization law was applied in key states. Alexandra Stern details the use
of eugenic sterilization in mental institutions in California and compares
western practices to the application of surgery in the correctional system
in Indiana. Her chapter introduces us to the lives of those most affected
by sterilization law—institutionalized patients. Their stories are revealed
through hospital records and other archival material containing accounts
of both resistance to sterilization and acquiescence to its application by
the families of those subject to sterilization laws.
Molly Ladd-Taylor looks at the control of sterilization by local welfare
officials in Minnesota during the New Deal. There, sterilization occurred
as part of a child welfare policy and was just one part of what its support-
ers considered a systematic approach to management of social conditions.
Procedures for commitment to state institutions as well as the process of
public guardianship were closely linked to decisions about which people

would be sterilized. In a system that often appeared coercive, patient ac-
quiescence to sterilization could sometimes represent a truly voluntary
acceptance of permanent birth control. Ladd-Taylor also points out the
distance between the wishes of fervid “eugenicists” in Minnesota and
their less ideologically driven counterparts who controlled the steriliza-
tion bureaucracy in that state.
Johanna Schoen frames her discussion of North Carolina steriliza-
tion history within the story of an operation that occurred in 1968, at a
time when most states had all but abandoned the practice. At that late
date, the emphasis in North Carolina was on young black women, and
those who endured surgery were often known to be victims of rape and
incest. Public rhetoric about fears of burgeoning welfare rolls sounded
alongside concern about sexual activity outside of marriage. The number
of surgeries done in North Carolina was partially explained by a unique
feature in that state’s law. It was the only state in the country that allowed
social workers to petition for sterilization of people living outside of hos-
pitals and asylums in the community at large.
The final essay in this group chronicles the legal case that finally in-
terrupted the widespread use of sterilization in public institutions in the
mid-1970s. Gregory Dorr draws our attention to Alabama, another south-
ern state, but one where most sterilization occurred outside the limiting
rubric of any “eugenics” law. Dorr links the case of Relf v. Weinberger to
policies launched as welfare reform during the presidency of Richard
Nixon. Illegitimate mothers provided a political target for Nixon just as
they had for politicians in Carrie Buck’s day, and extending sterilization
beyond institutions was accomplished via Nixonian welfare policy, just as
it was by the expansive North Carolina law portrayed by Johanna Schoen.
Dorr completes his account of the national sterilization politics during
the Watergate era with a discussion of the significance of sterilization
regulation to reproductive autonomy more generally.
Par t 4. E ugenics in t he
H uman G enome E ra
The book is rounded out with two essays by scholars from the biomedical
sciences and law: reflections by a geneticist and a physician/geneticist on
the reappearance of eugenic thinking during the human genome era, and
a legal scholar’s analysis of the ways that eugenic motives are embedded
in modern law.
Linda and Edward McCabe approach their topic as scientists and
clinicians who are surveying the landscape in their own field of genetics.
They are aware that at its inception genetic science was closely aligned
with eugenics, and they ask how much our current attitudes and prac-
tices mirror those of their predecessors, who embraced toxic features of
hereditarian thinking. The McCabes find disquieting similarities in the
language of genetic determinism that has reappeared in the age of the Hu-
man Genome Project, and they decry both the oversimplified portrayal
of hereditary mechanisms and the exaggerated claims made on behalf
of “genomics” that have resulted. Government agencies or other enti-
ties (like insurance companies) raise particular concerns when they are
positioned to exert social or legal control to intrude on the reproductive
decisions of individuals.
The final essay, by Max Mehlman, subjects practices he describes
as “neoeugenic” to legal analysis. They involve situations when govern-
ment, through law or policy, encourages, discourages, prohibits, or re-
quires reproduction. Mehlman notes that governments are rarely neutral
about reproduction, and in this context active regulation in the form of
laws passed (e.g., sterilization laws), court cases decided (e.g., wrongful
birth claims), and programs funded (e.g., welfare payments for contra-
ception or tax credits for childbearing) must be considered along with
inaction—such as allowing private entities like internet dating services
or in vitro fertilization clinics to screen customers based on race, social
class, aptitude, or disability. The usual subjects appear as the objects of
regulation, and as always, they include the poor, minorities, criminals,
and the disabled, as well as those whose sexual practices deviate from
common norms.
In the attempt to accurately characterize the ideas and practices that have
come to be described as “eugenics,” this collection supplies us with much
to consider. Four points of particular importance emerge.
First, in practice—as it played out in law and social policy—the defi-
nition of eugenics was always changing. To some it meant cutting the tax
burden generated by welfare dependent mothers by preventing the birth
of more children of poverty. To others, it meant encouraging the most

prosperous and successful to multiply, while impeding the replication
of the deviant, the disabled, the diseased, or the criminal. Still others
used eugenics as a touchstone for their fears that “inferior” racial groups
were growing and must be interrupted lest they overrun a less fertile but
“superior” race.
Second, making “eugenic” ideas into law was always the result of
individual efforts and idiosyncratic motives; the administration of those
laws over a span of many years was undertaken by different people with
changing motivations. Any of the meanings of eugenics suggested above
might take precedence when laws for sterilization, marriage restriction,
or racial separation were written, amended, or renewed.
Third, the rationales that lawmakers and other officials voiced in sup-
port of “eugenic” practices were clothed in ideas that had popular reso-
nance. What “eugenics” meant for the seven decades it was imbedded in
U.S. law depended on what other ideas were used to justify it. Those ideas
could include hereditary degeneracy, social and economic efficiency, neo-
Malthusian population policy, or “sins of the father” religious determin-
ism. The popularity of eugenics over time as a catchword that described
the aspirations and fears of those who used it was bolstered by the vague-
ness of the term itself. It borrowed meaning from the social and political
agendas of the people who found practical uses for it no less than from
those who first offered it as an idea.
Finally, eugenics made for strange alliances. As the essays in this
volume have shown, it could bring together preachers like Oscar Mc-
Culloch with educator/scientists like David Starr Jordan. It could also
link activists as seemingly disparate as Margaret Sanger and W.E.B. Du
Bois. Those who wish to understand what eugenics meant in the twenti-
eth century, as well as those who shout “eugenics” as a heckler’s keynote
in today’s political debates, would do well to review these essays. In them
they would find that context is critical; both the idea of eugenics and the
practices it led to had many faces.
No t es
1.â•‡Dr. W. C. Rucker, “More ‘Eugenic Laws’: Four States Consider Sterilization
Legislation and Nine Contemplate Restrictions on Marriage—None of Proposed Laws
Satisfactory from Eugenic Viewpoint,” Journal of Heredity 6 (1915): 219.
2.â•‡Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (London:
Macmillan, 1883), 17.
3.â•‡For useful surveys of scholarship on eugenics, see Philip J. Pauly, “The Eugenics
Industry—Growth or Restructuring?” Journal of the History of Biology 26 (Spring 1993):
131–45; Frank Dikotter, “Race Culture: Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics,”
American Historical Review 103 (April 1998): 467–68.
4.â•‡ The entire quotation is: “We greatly want a brief word to express the science of
improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but
which, especially in the case of man, takes cognisance of all influences that tend in how-
ever remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance
of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The
word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea.” Galton, Inquiries, 17n1.
5.â•‡ Mark Adams, ed., The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and
Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 221.
6.â•‡ Paul Weindling, “The Survival of Eugenics in 20th-Century Germany,” 52
American Journal of Human Genetics 52, no. 3 (March 1993): 643–49.
7.â•‡ The title of Daniel Kevles’s now classic work, In the Name of Eugenics (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), captures the diversity of objectives that various
people pursued, using eugenics as their rationale.
Pa r t on e
The Indiana Origins of

Eugenic Sterilization
on e
The Hoosier Connection: Compulsory

Sterilization as Moral Hygiene
E l of A x e l C a r l s on
Two important Indiana intellectuals, Oscar McCulloch (1843–91) and

David Starr Jordan (1851–1931), provided the rationale for the state’s (and
the world’s) first compulsory sterilization law in 1907. Their writings on
“degenerates” influenced physician Harry Clay Sharp (1871–1940), who
put the law into practice. McCulloch was a minister of the Plymouth
Congregational Church in Indianapolis, Jordan was president of Indiana
University in Bloomington, and Sharp was a prison physician in Jeffer-
sonville. This chapter demonstrates the influence of McCulloch’s and
Jordan’s ideas on the eugenics movement and why these influences moved
Sharp to champion the sterilization law.1
Although Indiana led the world in implementing eugenic steriliza-
tion, the idea of state-mandated eugenics was not native to the “Hoosier”
state. European and American physicians had considered similar inter-
ventions in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. But it was the con-
vergence of degeneracy theory, the replacement of charity with precepts
of Social Darwinism, and the popularization of biological measures of
“social worth” that allowed supporters to propose sterilization as a ratio-
nal and enlightened social policy.2
Degeneracy theory found its origins in the urbanization surround-
ing the Industrial Revolution and the social problems created by the late
nineteenth century’s boom-bust economy. Accidents, ill health, and the
tragedies of life (loss of a spouse, becoming orphaned, abusive home
environments) that could lead to unreliability at work or unemployment
compounded the structural economic challenges that strained Ameri-
can life. 3
11
12â•… ·â•… E l of A x e l C a r l s o n
Even as the economy changed, ideas about the nature, scope, and
object of charity—a long-standing feature of America’s Christian tradi-
tion—shifted across the country. After the 1850s, many philanthropists
who had initially viewed the less fortunate as worthy objects of assis-
tance came to understand the poor, diseased, and physically infirm as
defective in body or mind, often undeserving of charity.4 This ideological
change led to a cultural divide, giving rise to a need among the advan-
taged (whether with power, health, or wealth) to control the increasingly
scorned disadvantaged.
Finally, the biological interpretation of life—holding that the physi-
ological imperfections that led to degeneracy were themselves marks of
an individual’s inherent biological inferiority—gained great social cur-
rency among educated elites who wielded political power. The theory
of French scientist Jean Baptiste Lamarck that characteristics acquired
during life would be passed down as a function of heredity, led some
scientists to the optimistic view that a good environment had the poten-
tial to reverse bad heredity. The Lamarckian view that prevailed into the
1880s was challenged and eventually supplanted by a view of heredity
developed by August Weismann in Germany. Weismann’s experiments
demonstrated that the key to heredity was lodged in the reproductive tis-
sue and that heredity was isolated from most environmental influences
that change our body tissues and organs. This more restrained notion of
genetic malleability from one generation to the next suggested more pes-
simistic conclusions about the likelihood of ameliorating the conditions
of human society.
These intellectual trends combined with new surgical procedures—
specifically, less-invasive sterilization techniques that did not castrate
the patient—to bolster the popularity of surgical eugenic intervention
as an enlightened public policy. The favored method for sterilization
in men was vasectomy, a procedure rarely used before the 1890s. 5 Va-
sectomy provided the means for breaking the chain of heredity not by
changing an individual’s genetic endowment but by ensuring that only
the most genetically fit would procreate, thereby increasing the quantity
and distribution of fit traits in the population. Preventing the unfit from
passing on their defective heredity was a kind of eugenic public health
program.6
T h e H o o s i e r C o n n e c t i o nâ•… · â•… 13
McCulloch’s role was to popularize the shift from an enabling char-

ity to reproductive isolation of those considered unfit to reproduce. Jor-
dan provided biological legitimacy to plans for isolating the unfit, using
evolutionary arguments about degeneracy and fitness. Sharp extended
the therapeutic powers of medicine by applying ideas of eugenics to the
reproductive system. Degeneracy was recast as a disease, and vasectomy
represented an efficient, humane way to prevent its transmission.
T he R ise of Dege n erac y T heor y
Degeneracy theory arose about 1600 in response to a problem that had

been growing in Europe since the Protestant Reformation. Prior to the
Reformation, the tradition had been for the church, and not the state, to
care for the poor and the unfortunate. England’s Queen Elizabeth I secu-
larized public philanthropy by authorizing Poor Laws, which shifted the
responsibility for the destitute from the church to individual counties. By
the time of the Industrial Revolution some 250 years later, both the num-
bers of the poor and the taxes to care for them had increased dramatically.
Industrialization, urbanization, and the attendant political unrest led to
legislative attempts to reform the Poor Laws. By the 1830s, most middle-
class taxpayers were persuaded that “degenerates”—paupers, criminals,
prostitutes, alcoholics, psychotics, and the mentally retarded, along with
people considered physically disabled—were not the result of social or
economic problems that could be ameliorated by Poor Laws; rather, they
were medical problems. Isolating the unfit or deporting them to colonies
was one solution. The New World was the first dumping ground, and
Australia was the second, as the movement to isolate the unfit gained
approval.
These ideas about fitness gained currency in the United States after
the Civil War. During the late nineteenth century, English social theorists
advanced many strategies to resolve the problem of the poor, including
the notion that the West was a “safety valve” for overcrowded urbanites.
Sometimes the poor were auctioned off to do labor for little or no pay for
those who won the bid. Sometimes the “unfit” were herded together in
poor houses. Almshouses and workhouses were supposed to be self-sup-
porting, but frequently their residents did not generate sufficient income
14â•… · â•… E l of A x e l C a r l s o n
to meet their needs, and the facilities were forced to rely on local or state
taxes to cover their operating expenses. Sometimes the unfit were placed
in asylums, but that, too, was expensive. Increasing numbers of institu-
tionalized individuals required more generous state support to build and
maintain adequate facilities.7
Who were these unfit people? Some were children, too young (espe-
cially if orphaned) to support themselves. They may have suffered from
a chronic illness or birth defects that made their employment difficult
and their needs more than a family could provide. The fragile economic
balance of the family wage could be shattered when women lost their
husbands to accident, illness, or the all-too-common desertion. An adult
might be mentally retarded, blind, deaf, or physically or mentally inca-
pacitated. Before there was a science that could discern and interpret the
causes of these disorders, most people assumed that misfortune was an
act of God. As society secularized and advances in science and medicine
offered interpretations that seemed equally plausible or even superior to
religious determinism, degeneracy theory emerged, relying on the au-
thority of science to explain the existence and experience of society’s less
fortunate members.
Instead of asking, “Why does God allow bad things to happen to
good people?” American intellectuals increasingly asked, “What is it
about an individual’s inherent biology that makes him bad?” Was “na-
ture” or “nurture” responsible for misfortune? Bad environments could be
reversed, but often when that “social therapy” was done through charity
and asylum reform movements, the “treatment” was expensive, and many
of those treated did not respond. The blind remained blind. The retarded
remained retarded. The psychotic remained psychotic. Paupers lapsed
back into their impoverished neighborhoods and degraded, poverty-
stricken habits.
By the 1880s, many environmental reforms had been tried and found
wanting. The seeming intractability of degeneracy and its social conse-
quences frustrated those looking for a quick response to the problems of
modern living. At this point reformers and physicians, newly embold-
ened by their successes in public sanitation, public hygiene, and public
health, stepped in to promote a new, simple, preventive remedy for long-
standing social problems. Hygiene became the watchword of efficient
reform.8 Those who were most touched by degeneracy and therefore most
in need of reform clustered together in problem families or clans. Oscar

McCulloch became known for his discovery of one such clan.
O scar McC ulloch a n d the C harit y

Moveme n t i n I n dia n apolis
Oscar McCulloch’s father wanted him to pursue a business career, but

McCulloch felt called to the church. Raised and educated in Illinois, Mc-
Culloch’s first church was in Wisconsin. Moving to Indianapolis, he took
over a church with falling membership, uninspired services, and heavy
debts. He used the business skills his father had emphasized to fill the
church coffers and to provide many social services for the surrounding
community, including a free library, a soup kitchen, housing, jobs, child-
care, and a literacy program for the poor. McCulloch’s reform activism
soon filled the church with parishioners, and as he gained recognition
in Indianapolis society, he used his prominence and power to organize
the city’s scattered, redundant charities and make them more effective.
He befriended the leaders of the Knights of Labor and championed the
poor laborers who entered the union movement. Meanwhile, he took
an interest in science and attracted intellectuals to his church. He was
comfortable with the findings of science, including Darwinian evolution,
believing that humans had a lot to learn about God’s universe and that
science was a major source of new insights.
McCulloch was proud of his successes, but in the early 1880s he
encountered one failure that puzzled him. He tried to help a “tribe of
degenerates”—an impoverished group that lived along the banks of the
White River who had first come to Indiana when it was not yet a state.
They called themselves the Tribe of Ishmael, and they traveled in cara-
vans during the spring and summer.9 They wintered in Indianapolis,
supporting themselves with odd jobs. They owned no fixed property
and shunned permanent jobs. The tribe claimed descent from itinerant
English tinkers, escaped indentured servants, escaped or freed slaves
mostly of the Fulani migratory African tribes, and Native American
Shawnees, another migratory tribe. The Ishmaelites dressed in color-
ful garments out of keeping with conventional, middle-class sartorial
norms, and they loved their nomadic tradition, though it clashed with the
stolid, staid lifestyle valued by reformers. McCulloch could not under-
stand why they preferred to migrate rather than settle down. They lived
on the margins of society, paradoxically flouting the obvious benefits of
joining the middle class through thrift, industry, and sobriety. He felt
that their shiftless behavior evinced an essential degeneracy of character
and constitution.
McCulloch viewed the Tribe of Ishmael as a parasitic race with a peri-
patetic lifestyle. The Tribe grew in number because it was supported by the
charity of others, rather than its own thrift and industry. The Ishmaelites
were inordinately represented on the tax rolls because their chronic pen-
ury, exacerbated by winters in economic lean times, left them dependent
on public assistance. McCulloch thought the Ishmaelites incorrigibly de-
fective and believed they should be isolated and prevented from reproduc-
ing. Taking a page from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, McCulloch even en-
tertained the idea of removing Ishmaelite children from their parents and
raising them in “upstanding” foster homes to see if the cycle of nomadic
living could be overcome by a proper environment. Ultimately, emphasiz-
ing his judgment that the Ishmaelites were subhuman, he compared them
to “devil grass” or weeds that could only be controlled by being uprooted.
During regular conversations, David Starr Jordan, a biologist who had
joined McCulloch’s church, confirmed the minister’s conclusions.10
David S tarr Jorda n a n d the

E volution ar y I n terpretation
of Dege n erac y
Jordan received his bachelor’s degree at Cornell University and a master’s

degree at Harvard. In 1875, he took a medical degree at the Medical Col-
lege of Indianapolis, a one-year proprietary program typical of Ameri-
can medical education before its great late nineteenth-century reforms.
Jordan was on the faculty of Butler University in Indianapolis when he
met McCulloch. During those years, Jordan’s educational pedigree and
his growing repute in academic circles marked him as a promising intel-
lectual who was beginning to attract attention.
Jordan was both talented and ambitious. He published frequently in
his field of ichthyology and explored the evolutionary histories of North
and South American fish. He left Indianapolis for Bloomington in 1879,
joining the faculty at Indiana University and ascending to the univer-
sity’s presidency in 1885. While in Indianapolis, he regularly encountered

McCulloch at the only church he ever attended. Jordan felt close to Mc-
Culloch intellectually and corresponded with him until McCulloch’s
death in 1891. It was McCulloch who first made him aware of the Tribe of
Ishmael, and Jordan provided references on parasitism and evolution for
McCulloch to use in his quasi-biological interpretation of the tribe as an
example of degenerate “human parasitism.”
For 30 years—at Indiana University, and later at Stanford—Jordan
taught a course that he called “Bionomics,” a senior capstone course on
the social and ideological impact of biology. In the course, Jordan ad-
dressed contemporary issues through applied biology. Influenced by
Francis Galton’s ideas on human variation, Jordan reminded his students
that while they were intellectually superior to most other people, they
also were differentiated among themselves—only a few would become
eminent, and most would fill the ranks of America’s able but not terribly
distinguished professionals.11 Just as some people are born to be physical
giants or dwarfs, Jordan argued, some are born to rank as the best or the
least mentally.
It is thus no surprise that Jordan chaired the first committee on
eugenics for the American Breeders Association in 1909.12 Moreover,
many of his books promoted a eugenic outlook on society. He felt it was
an evolutionary obligation for humanity to cull the least productive of
its members and to encourage the best and the brightest to reproduce
more of their kind. At the same time, however, he was a pacifist; eugen-
ics taught him that countries recruited their ablest young men to go
out and kill each other off in war, artificially and disproportionately
allowing the dull and physically weak, out of harm’s way safe at home,
to procreate. Jordan’s move from Indiana to the inaugural presidency of
Stanford University—founded with the money of a rational, scientific
railroad magnate—ensured that he continued to be widely read across
the nation as educated elites tracked his efforts at this promising new
bastion of modern education.13 The story of the Ishmaelites, promul-
gated by McCulloch with assistance from Jordan, continued to resonate
in Indiana, the home of Dr. Harry Sharp, even after McCulloch’s death
and Jordan’s western relocation. Sharp would become famous for lead-
ing the movement to eradicate such degenerate clans through eugenic
sterilizaÂ�t ion.
H arr y C la y S harp a n d the

H ygie n e Moveme n t
Sharp was born and raised in Indiana, but he completed medical school in
Louisville, Kentucky, in 1896. As a student, he learned of the new public
hygiene movement initiated by German medical schools, relying to a
major degree on the work of bacteriologist Rudolf Virchow. In addition to
his cytological discoveries, Virchow had championed the novel idea that
it is a government’s duty to protect and care for the health of its citizens.
He initiated meat inspections, garbage disposal, purification of water
supplies, and free health examinations for all schoolchildren in the name
of public health and hygiene.
The state of American medical education in the late nineteenth cen-
tury was generally unsophisticated, and the most promising American
physicians did postgraduate work in Europe, especially seeking out ap-
pointments in Germany to study with Virchow or his students. Although
Sharp never made this intellectual pilgrimage, he did the next best thing:
he read and studied the latest publications about preventive medicine in
the important and increasingly reliable American medical journals.
Sharp’s first job was prison physician in Jeffersonville, across the
Ohio River from Louisville. The physical conditions of the prison and its
inmates, suffering from endemic disease and malnourishment, appalled
Sharp. Many prisoners died of tuberculosis, typhus, and typhoid fever.
The kitchen was inadequate to prepare proper meals, and prisoners ate a
watery swill better suited for feeding pigs. At night, inmates tossed their
excrement into a trough that ran between the cells; in the morning, a
guard would hose the urine and feces out of the trough.
Sharp documented the horrid abuses he witnessed in biannual reports
to the governor, prepared in the prison print shop. He charged that by
neglecting the health of those for whom it cared, the state was guilty of ho-
micide. While prisoners paid their debt to society, they surrendered their
freedom but need not surrender their humanity, Sharp said. He argued that
the prison’s inflated death rate was largely preventable by simple, relatively
inexpensive reforms. He asked for sanitary privies to be installed in the
cells, the construction of an adequate kitchen, and the provision of a bal-
anced diet. The governor and the legislature acquiesced, and in later years
Sharp was pleased to report a dramatic reduction in the death rate.14
In addition to practical reform in the prison, Sharp remained inter-

ested in the theoretic foundations of mental hygiene. His first scientific
publication focused on hysteria—a theory that attributed emotional
breakdowns in women to female anatomy. Men were also subject to ner-
vous exhaustion caused by the hectic pace of modern industrial and urban
life. Collectively, European physicians referred to these mental symptoms
as neurasthenia, a symptom of degeneracy. Many important thinkers,
such as English philosopher Herbert Spencer, who coined the term Social
Darwinism, believed that society should purge itself of degenerate com-
ponents. One way of accomplishing such a purge for future generations
was through the surgical solution of sexual sterilization.
S etti ng the S tage for

Compulsor y S terili z ation
In 1899, Sharp read an article in the Journal of the American Medical Asso-
ciation by Albert Ochsner (1858–1925), a physician at the Chicago Medical
School who had studied with Rudolf Virchow. Ochsner was a founder
of the College of Surgeons, and he had been using vasectomies—a pro-
cedure developed in Sweden and England in 1890—as an experimental
treatment for enlarged prostate glands. Ochsner had several patients who
were in their forties or fifties, and they resumed sexual activity after their
surgery. This suggested to Ochsner that degeneracy, too, could be treated
by vasectomies: severing an otherwise healthy person’s spermatic cord
resulted only in sterilization, not impotence. Vasectomy offered the possi-
bility of rendering men infertile without subjecting them to the cruelty of
destroying their sexual function. Ochsner argued that degeneracy would
rapidly disappear if degenerates were sterilized as a routine procedure; ac-
cepting the then-current notion that “like begets like,” vasectomy would
prevent defective men from reproducing “more of their kind.”15
After reading Ochsner’s article, Sharp initiated his own eugenic pro-
gram by operating on a young man named Clawson. According to Sharp,
Clawson’s problem was excessive masturbation. Sharp had learned in
medical school that masturbation was a cause of degeneracy. That belief
was more than two centuries old and held that loss of semen through
any sexual excess, including masturbation, would lead to physical and
mental degeneracy that would subsequently reappear in the next genera-
tion. Less an innovator than an opportunist, Sharp was simply melding

what he read by Ochsner with what he had learned in medical school.
There was nothing inherently sinister or malevolent in Sharp’s approach
to medicine or in his concern for his prisoners’ health. He reported that
Clawson’s health improved, he gained weight, he exhibited a more cheer-
ful demeanor, and his excessive masturbation ceased. Sharp concluded
that the correlation between surgery and improvement represented a
causal relationship: vasectomy had improved Clawson’s health and cured
his moral degeneracy.16
Sharp then prevailed upon Clawson to recruit his fellow prisoners,
persuading them to seek vasectomy as treatment for masturbation.17
Sharp’s published reports and papers do not reveal exactly how many
vasectomies he carried out before 1907, but it is clear that surgeries began
years before the process was sanctioned by law. Beginning in 1901, Sharp
had petitioned the governor to urge the legislature to pass a compulsory
sterilization law to prevent degenerates from passing on their condiÂ�tion.
It took six years, but in 1907 Sharp’s pleas caught the ear of Governor
J. Frank Hanly (1863–1920), who sympathized with this medical ap-
proach to moral problems. Sharp reported 456 surgeries between1899
and 1909; eventually, he claimed to have performed between 500 and 600
operations. Sharp used his success in Jeffersonville to initiate a national
campaign for compulsory sterilization. He attended the annual meetings
of the American Medical Association and gave talks on the benefits of
vasectomies for reducing degeneracy. He no longer stressed vasectomy
as a treatment for masturbation, as he had in his first years after reading
Ochsner.
Sharp became sterilization’s first nationally successful advocate.
He was appointed by Jordan’s American Breeders Association eugenics
committee to study compulsory sterilization. He also developed a close
relationship with Harry Laughlin, superintendent of the Eugenics Record
Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. Through Jordan and Laughlin,
Sharp came to know the guiding light of American eugenics, Charles
Davenport. Davenport was the founder of the Eugenics Record Office
and another charter member of the eugenics committee of the American
Breeders Association.18 But despite Sharp’s growing national connections
to eugenics, back in Indiana the law passed through his efforts had come
under attack.
Governor Thomas Marshall, the Democrat who replaced Hanly,

felt the law was unconstitutional. He ordered Sharp to stop performing
sterilizations. Eventually, the Indiana courts upheld Marshall’s position,
overturning the law in 1919. By that time, however, Sharp was overseas in
France as a surgeon in the U.S. Army. After the World War I armistice,
he became a practicing physician for the Veterans Administration and
abandoned his lobbying efforts for sterilization. His last professional
post was with the Veterans Hospital in Lyons, New Jersey. As the Nazi
sterilization laws became large-scale state policy, Sharp was interviewed
about his reactions in a 1937 article in the Journal of Heredity. Apparently
somewhat embarrassed at the development of sterilization law in the
preceding 30 years, he commented, “We did not know enough about
science then.”19
S terili z ation after the

“ I n dia n a E x perime n t ”
Sharp was successful in initiating a movement that eventually led to more

than 30 states passing compulsory sterilization laws. Harry Laughlin
eventually replaced Sharp as the major advocate for those laws. With the
help of legal scholars, Laughlin designed his own Model Sterilization Act,
crafted to survive constitutional challenge. The Laughlin model provided
a framework for Virginia’s 1924 sterilization law, which would be scruti-
nized by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927.20 In the case of Buck v. Bell, Jus-
tice Holmes spoke for an eight-member majority, concluding that “three
generations of imbeciles are enough” and upholding the constitutionality
of state-sanctioned compulsory eugenic sterilization. Sharp played no
direct role in this drama. By 1927, his role had shifted from eugenics advo-
cate-physician to a practicing physician in a veterans hospital. Although
sterilization was about to undergo explosive policy growth, there was un-
certainty among the leading lights in mental health and genetics about the
relationship among “degeneracy,” “feeblemindedness,” disease suscepti-
bility, and genetics. Rather than Sharp’s keen, bright tool, sterilization
was beginning to appear to be a rather blunt instrument. The causes of
mental retardation and psychosis did not fit a typical Mendelian pattern;
to the degree that hereditary components existed, they were not passed
on in an obvious like-for-like transmission. As a result, sterilizing some-
one who exhibited negative traits would have a limited effect on curbing
the incidence of unexpressed, recessive factors carried by healthy people.
The economic disaster of the Great Depression multiplied the number
of poor, homeless, disabled, and mentally disordered wandering outside
of institutions—those who were formerly called “unfit.” Moreover, the
economic cataclysm laid low many erstwhile “superior” professionals in
fields as varied as law, finance, banking, politics, business, and education.
In responding to the widespread deprivation, the Roosevelt administra-
tion shifted legislators’ and the public’s views regarding social problems,
their origins, and the most efficacious modes of amelioration. Relief and
recovery, not prevention and sterilization, became the watchwords of the
government’s approach to the economic catastrophe.
L ooki ng B ack at the Compulsor y

S terili z ation Moveme n t
It is remarkable that something as malevolent in its outcome as compul-

sory sterilization was assessed by one of its initiators not in moral terms
but as a failure of scientific knowledge. It is clear that at his death Dr.
Sharp did not see Ochsner’s suggestion or his own advocacy as immoral,
although both used or urged involuntary means of carrying out a social
experiment for which evidence was inadequate or disputable at the time.
Nevertheless, it is too easy to dismiss Oscar McCulloch, David Jordan,
and Harry Sharp as misguided zealots, elitists bent on perverting “honest
science” into pseudoscience in the name of social control. These men were
not monsters, and the parts they played are not roles in a simple morality
play where history and circumstance can be portrayed as the clash of pure
good and absolute evil. Instead, these men shared a faith in the ability of
science to explain the world and a belief that the government should play a
greater role in solving social problems by using the tools and explanations
that science supplied. They lived in an era before the “rights revolution”
of the 1960s and 1970s, at a time when most Americans believed that the
good of larger society was greater than the rights of the individual. Steril-
ization, for these men and many other Americans, was as broadly conso-
nant with the political tenor of their times as it is intensely dissonant with
today’s political tone. Forgetting this unnecessarily scapegoats these men
and misses the real point of investigating their lives: not to place blame
and calumny, but instead to understand why solutions that today appear
obviously flawed held such immense appeal in the past.
Yet, although one should acknowledge the ways in which Mc-
Culloch, Jordan, and Sharp were merely “men of their times,” one must
admit that they shared a false view of the relationship between society
and heredity. The notion that those individuals they described as “unfit
to reproduce” would rapidly spread their defects to an innocent popula-
tion was and is simply false. Ultimately, civilization and human rights
were far less imperiled by “the unfit” than by the authoritarian solutions
promoted by those who saw in eugenics an anodyne for the problems
of modern living. While no one is born with an inerrant Promethean
foresight, it is not beyond our capacity to listen to critics, to open legal
proposals to vigorÂ�ous debate, and to go slowly as we adopt scientific
approaches to social and moral problems. 21 Better to err on the side of
caution and human dignity than to stumble blithely into the path of
tragedy and inhumanity.
Notes
1.â•‡ The best source on Jordan’s life is his autobiography: David Starr Jordan, The
Days of a Man, 2 vols. (Yonkers on the Hudson, N.Y.: World Book, 1922). For McCulloch,
see Genevieve C. Weeks, Oscar Carlton McCulloch, 1843–1891: Preacher and Practitioner
of Applied Christianity (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1976). No biography
of Sharp exists beyond William M. Kantor, “Beginnings of Sterilization in America: An
Interview with Dr. Harry C. Sharp,” Journal of Heredity 28 (1937): 374–76.
2.â•‡ For a comprehensive history of this transition, see Elof Axel Carlson, The Unfit:
A History of a Bad Idea (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Press, 2001).
3.â•‡ The first book-length treatment of degeneracy theory was offered by Benedict
A. Morel, Traité des Dégénérescences de l’Éspèce Humaine (Paris: Chez J. B. Balliére,
1857). Max Nordau, Degeneration (New York: D. Appleton, 1895) was also influential
on middle-class thinking in the 1890s. His popularization of neurasthenia as a modern
induced disease began in Nordau, Conventional Lies of Our Civilization (Chicago: Laird
and Lee, 1884).
4.â•‡ Richard Dugdale, The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, and Disease (New
York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1875). While a careful reading of this book shows Dugdale
to be an environmentalist, his interpretations were ignored and the work was used to
justify hereditarian notions of degeneracy. See Elof A. Carlson, “Richard L. Dugdale
and the Jukes Family: A Historical Injustice Corrected,” Bioscience 30 (1980): 535–39.
See also Henry M. Boies, Prisoners and Paupers (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1893).
Boies accepted the view that criminals and the poor represented instances of hereditary
degeneracy.
5.â•‡ David Wolfers and Helen Wolfers, Vasectomy and Vasectomania (St. Albans,
UK: Mayflower Books, 1974). This polemical book gives a good overview of the proce-
dure’s development in Europe and then in the United States. The authors err in depict-
ing Dr. Sharp as a somewhat demented and idiosyncratic physician.
6.â•‡ The surgical procedures for women were salpingectomy and salpingotomy, in-
volving partial excision or removal of the fallopian tubes and subsequent ligation.
7.â•‡ E. M. Leonard, The Early History of English Poor Laws (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1900).
8.â•‡ Philip R. Reilly, The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the
United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).
9.â•‡ Oscar C. McCulloch, “The Tribe of Ishmael: A Study in Social Degradation,”
in Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction, Held at Buffalo,
July 1888 (Indianapolis: Charity Organization Society, Plymouth Church Building,
1888). See also Hugo B. Leaming, “The Ben Ishmael Tribe: A Fugitive Nation of the
Old Northwest,” in The Ethnic Frontier, ed. Melvin G. Holli and Peter d’A. Jones (Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1977), 97–142. The most thorough explication of the
Ishmael story to date is Nathaniel Deutsch, Inventing America’s “Worst” Family: Eugen-
ics, Islam, and the Fall and Rise of the Tribe of Ishmael (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2009).
10.â•‡ See David Starr Jordan, Footnotes to Evolution: A Series of Popular Addresses
on the Evolution of Life (New York: Appleton, 1898), chapters 11 (“Degeneration”) and
12 (“Hereditary Inefficiency”). Jordan’s ideas about pauperism being a form of human
parasitism were reinforced by E. Ray Lancaster, Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism
(London: Macmillan, 1880).
11.â•‡ The Herman B Wells Library at Indiana University, Bloomington, has several of
these unpublished commencement addresses in its collection.
12.â•‡ The American Breeders Association was founded in 1903 in response to the
rising interest in Mendel’s Laws, rediscovered in 1900 by three European investigators:
Karl Correns, Hugo DeVries, and Eric von Tschermak. The association established its
own journal and in 1909 set up a eugenics committee as a third wing of its interests in
heredity—the other two being plant and animal heredity. See American Breeders Maga-
zine 1 (1913): 126–29.
13.â•‡ Jordan expressed his eugenic views in “The Blood of the Nation,” Popular Sci-
ence Monthly 59 (1901): 90–100, 129–40; Jordan, The Human Harvest (Boston: American
Unitarian Association, 1907); Jordan, Unseen Empire: The Plight of Nations That Do Not
Pay Their Debts (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1912); and Jordan, The Hered-
ity of Richard Roe (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1913). For his pacifist eu-
genics, see Jordan and Harvey Ernest Jordan, War’s Aftermath: A Preliminary Study of the
Eugenics of War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914).
14.â•‡ Sharp’s reports to the governor (1896–1912) are included in the biannual Com-
munication of the State Prison Reformatory at Jeffersonville; copies may be found in the
Herman B Wells Library.
15.â•‡ S. A. J. Ochsner, “Surgical Treatment of Habitual Criminals,” Journal of the
American Medical Association 32 (1899): 867–68.
16.â•‡ Harry C. Sharp, “Vasectomy as a Means of Preventing Procreation in Defec-
tives,” Journal of the American Medical Association 53 (1909): 1897–1902.
17.â•‡ Kantor, “Beginnings of Sterilization in America,” 376.
18.â•‡ On Laughlin and Sharp, see Frances Janet Hassencahl, “Harry M. Laughlin,
‘Expert Eugenics Agent’ for the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization,
1921 to 1931” (Ph.D. diss., Case Western Reserve University, 1971).
19.â•‡ Kantor, “Beginnings of Sterilization in America,” 376.
20.â•‡ Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court,
and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
21.â•‡ See Elof Axel Carlson, Times of Triumph, Times of Doubt: Science and the Battle
for Public Trust (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press,
2006).
t wo
The Indiana Way of Eugenics:

Sterilization Laws, 1907–74
J a s on S . L a n t z e r
The 1907 passage of the world’s first eugenic sterilization law was an ex-
ample of interest group–initiated legislation. However, it was also unlike
similar legislation during the Progressive Era, such as the prohibition
of alcohol, because it did not originate or grow from a grassroots move-
ment.1 Rather, the legislation passed because a small group of reformers
persuaded politicians of both parties to enact the law. While the people
who used scientific, moral, agricultural, and economic arguments to get
the law passed are important, they are not the whole story. They then
built support for sterilization among the general population after the law
passed, helping to keep it on the books for nearly 70 years. Analyzing the
political processes that produced laws like this is vital to understanding
not only the society within which eugenicists lived but also the type of
society they hoped to create.
Although there has been relatively little historical attention to In-
diana’s eugenic past, the state was on the cutting edge of Progressive
reforms, including eugenics. Hoosier reformers—both inside and out-
side the legislature—possessed the necessary mixture of zeal, belief in
scientific progress, activist government, and fear of the future for eugenic
sterilization to become a reality. At first, the newly enacted law was con-
troversial, and it lacked widespread support among the public, which
doubted the well-born science’s ability to remake society. After the courts
ruled the initial law unconstitutional, its replacement, which integrated
relevant scientific advances, enjoyed wider acceptance. With the passage
of time and quiet enforcement, the sterilization law no longer attracted
political attention. It benefited from the power of inertia; opponents con-
26
T h e I n d i a n a Wa y o f E u g e n i c s â•… · â•… 27
sidered the issue “settled.” A new round of potentially fractious legislative

agitation would be required to repeal the rarely used law; hence a bad idea
remained on the books for nearly 70 years.2
C reat i ng t he Wor l d ’ s
F ir s t S t eri l i z at ion Law
Eugenics, the “science of the well born,” embodied a fundamental clash

between scientific understanding and the Horatio Alger mythology
of the American dream. Americans of the early twentieth century be-
lieved in the pioneer spirit of the country. Many believed, and more
were bombarded with the message, that anyone could make something
of himself, no matter what his origins might be. And yet, amidst this
celebration of individual initiative and “luck and pluck,” eugenics be-
came widely accepted, despite being based on the argument that genes
and heredity—not initiative, environment, and effort—determined a
person’s destiny. 3
The conflict between the American dream and the eugenic dream
created tension over sterilization and remained a part of the unfolding
story of Indiana eugenics until the law was finally repealed. The politi-
cians who crafted the first eugenic sterilization law understood this cul-
tural tension, for they lived in a country that was being transformed by
industrialization, immigration, and urbanization.
Reformers who sought to mediate the problems of modern society by
invoking scientific authority and incorporating it into public policy and
law were known as Progressives.4 Eugenic sterilization, though it seems
retrograde and authoritarian today, was a part of the Progressive ethos,
advocated by scientific professionals and supported in many states by a
broad upper- and middle-class constituency of educated reformers—
people who believed that they knew what was best for society. Ameri-
can eugenicists took pride in the fact that they followed “cutting-edge”
scientific social theory. As one supporter put it, “Our country has been
the pioneer in this movement and is today the foremost champion and
advocate of the cause in the world.”5
Eugenicists believed that the number of people from inferior ge-
netic stock with primitive moral sensibilities was rapidly increasing. The
“feebleminded,” “morons,” and “degenerates” comprised the “defective,
28â•… · â•… J a s o n S . L a n t z e r
delinquent, and dependent classes.” They wasted both private and public
philanthropy and, some thought, threatened to destroy American civi-
lization itself. Many eugenicists argued that since people could not es-
cape their eugenic destiny, the only solution was to stop the “unfit” from
procreating. Eugenic reformers made common cause with public health
advocates on the basis of seeking “to strengthen family and civilization
by regulating fertility” and promoting the birth of people biologically
predisposed to physical and mental health. The question facing eugenic
reformers was whether or not society had the will to obey the iron dic-
tates of heredity and do what was necessary to stop the multiplication
of the unfit.6
The support of many in the scientific community not only gave the
champions of eugenic sterilization an aura of prestige but also conferred
the power of moral authority. Eugenics became a secular faith among the
scientifically inclined who asserted that by obeying the commandments
of biology, humanity could usher in a social millennium. Drawing on a
quasi-Christian idiom of human perfectibility and salvation, the eugenics
message also struck a chord with many religious people, including many
liberal, mainline Protestants. In Indiana, where mainline Protestantism
(though not always liberal theology) was dominant, the blending of sci-
ence and religion by eugenicists facilitated eventual cultural acceptance.
In fact, the man who helped bring eugenics to Indiana was a minister. The
Reverend Oscar C. McCulloch was the senior pastor of Indianapolis’s
Plymouth Congregational Church. His duties brought him into contact
with a group of families he labeled the “Tribe of Ishmael,” whom he be-
lieved were at the root of the city’s criminal activity and social problems.
McCulloch concluded from his research on the Ishmaelites that some
harsh remedies were in order.7
McCulloch’s work stimulated elite support for reform. He counted
among his friends, admirers, and parishioners some of the most influen-
tial people in the state. Among them were David Starr Jordan, the noted
biologist and president of Indiana University.8 Other allies included
Governor (and later Vice President) Thomas Hendricks, Congressman
William H. English, and Senator (and later President) Benjamin Harri-
son. Together, these men represented an early bipartisan consensus that
would continue for decades and contribute to the support that eugenic
measures received at the statehouse.9
Eugenicists referred to McCulloch’s study to argue for tighten-

ing marriage laws. In Indiana, this move coincided with the need to
streamline and standardize the marriage certificate process across the
state’s 92 counties, which was supported by a broad coalition. In 1905
Representative Jackson Boyd of Putnam County introduced Indiana
House Bill 118: “A bill for an act regulating the issuance of licenses to
marry.” The Committee on Rights and Privileges attached amendments
to the bill, including one that refused a license to anyone who had been
declared an “imbecile, epileptic, of unsound mind or under guardian-
ship as a person of unsound mind.” It also applied to “any male person
who is or has been within five years an inmate of any county asylum or
home for indigent persons,” as well as to anyone with “an incurable or
transmissible disease.” Also barred from matrimony were intoxicated
applicants or those addicted to drugs. After only minor discussion, the
House voted 52 to 35 to pass the bill.10 Deliberations in the Senate were
similarly brief, and the bill was signed into law with little fanfare.11 This
first victory for “eugenic marriage” set a pattern for future votes on eu-
genics in Indiana.
Many other states passed tougher marriage laws in the 1910s, but
advocates soon realized that such statutes were not enough to halt the
multiplication of the feebleminded.12 They needed another type of profes-
sional to advance their cause, one cloaked in the dispassionate rationality
of scientific professionalism.13 As Albert Edward Wiggam put it, “If His
[God’s] will is ever to be done on earth as it is in Heaven, it will have to
be done through the instrumentalities of science.”14
In Indiana, the “instrumentality” was a cadre of physicians. The group
included Brookville’s Henri G. Bogart, who promoted sterilization across
the state, and Harry C. Sharp, the head physician at the Jeffersonville Re-
formatory, who popularized the vasectomy. Other important advocates
were Dr. Amos Butler of the Board of State Charities, John N. Hurty of
the State Board of Health, and Sharp’s superior, William H. Whittaker,
superintendent of the Jeffersonville Reformatory.15
Sharp first performed vasectomies on prisoners for therapeutic, not
eugenic, effects. He intended to curb sexual activity, specifically mastur-
bation, which scientists linked to general degeneracy and insanity.
In 1907, the reform cadre decided to validate Sharp’s experimental
vasectomy practice, but relied on eugenic arguments to drive the legisla-
tive agenda. Both Dr. Sharp and Whittaker, who had supported Sharp’s
early surgeries, lobbied legislators. Sharp told lawmakers that his patients
thus far had volunteered for the procedure and that his operations were
quick and, though done without anesthesia, relatively pain-free. Whit-
taker argued that the procedure would prevent crime, cut institutional
costs, and free the state from a considerable economic burden. The doc-
tors’ advocacy and the lawmakers’ knowledge that they had to validate
an ongoing practice or face potential liability as well as scandal soon pro-
duced results.16
Supporters of the sterilization bill identified a fellow medical pro-
fessional to carry the legislation. Dr. Horace G. Read, the representa-
tive from Hamilton and Tipton counties, had been briefed by Whittaker
about the Jeffersonville experience and was convinced of the need for a
sterilization bill. Perhaps more important, according to one Indianapolis
paper, “it is understood that Governor Hanly is in sympathy with the
measure and will sign the bill.”17
Indiana sterilization supporters were aided in their legislative ef-
forts by earlier attempts to pass sterilization laws in other states. Both
Michigan (1897) and Pennsylvania (in 1901 and 1905) had attempted and
ultimately failed to enact some form of sterilization statute. In Pennsyl-
vania’s case, the law had been vetoed despite the support it had in the
medical and scientific communities.18 Indiana sterilization boosters took
note. They lined up both legislative and gubernatorial support before
they submitted a virtual copy of the bill that failed in Pennsylvania in
1907.19
Even with this planning, Read’s bill did not have an easy time in the
state legislature. It was first sent to the Committee on Medicine, Health,
and Vital Statistics. When opposition formed, Read withdrew it and had
it sent to his Committee on Benevolent and Scientific Institutions in-
stead. In the end, the House voted in favor of the bill by a margin of 59
to 22.20 The bill also faced some initial Senate opposition, and in the vote
there, the margin was closer still, with 28 senators supporting the legisla-
tion while 16 objected.21 Governor J. Frank Hanly’s signature made the
bill the world’s first eugenic sterilization law. All these legislative mach-
inations provided eugenic reform with a democratic veneer, although
the law passed with virtually no public input and relatively little public
discussion.
C ha l l e ng e s to t he New Or der
The Indiana law became the benchmark for the rest of the nation. Sup-
porters believed it would allow the state to resolve its “degenerate prob-
lem” and become a national model of social reform. Sharp even wrote
an instructional pamphlet on vasectomy that he distributed around the
country as he gave public talks on the need for sterilization. Sharp’s ex-
pert opinion was sought for testimony in legal cases about sterilization.
“The Indiana Plan, as it was sometimes called, was appealing because it
seemed rational and required no more than an office visit to carry out
the operation.”22
The eugenics cadre worked hard to safeguard their pet reform. To
deflect attention from Sharp’s early extralegal surgeries, W. H. Whittaker
promised Governor Hanley that only inmates sentenced to Jeffersonville
after the law’s passage would be candidates for sterilization. Whittaker
also pledged to use surgery in a “conservative” manner, by establishing
procedures that would ensure that only those prisoners who would actu-
ally benefit from the operation would be considered. Whittaker assured
Hanly that public sentiment favored eugenic sterilization, and he cited
letters he had received.23 But despite these efforts, the law remained vul-
nerable to changes in the political climate.
In 1908, Democrats won control of the statehouse. The new gov-
ernor was Thomas Marshall, a lawyer from Columbia City, who soon
expressed doubts about the law’s constitutionality. Sharp struggled to
protect the law as it faced attack. He crafted guidelines to aid his suc-
cessors at Jeffersonville to continue the sterilization program. 24 Sharp
assured the governor that the law was safe from challenge and that none
of the men he had operated on would sue since there was “no damage
done.” 25
But Marshall also heard from sterilization opponents. One letter he
received from a Plymouth, Indiana, lumberyard owner asked Marshall
to “stop the brutal mutilation of the inmates of the Indiana State insti-
tutions.” Noting the powers of institutional officials, the lumberman
claimed: “It is an easy matter to get the consent of a man when you have
him in your power.” Setting aside Sharp’s entreaties, Marshall ordered a
halt to sterilizations shortly after taking office, and the moratorium lasted
for over a decade.26
More than the governor’s misgivings about the law were at work in
halting Indiana sterilizations. Nationally, eugenic sterilization advocates
realized that the number of operations would need to increase dramati-
cally for laws to have the predicted societal impact.27 This would require
expanding the scope of the law to increase the number of people liable
to be sterilized, which would require building support for enhanced leg-
islation at the grassroots level. Additionally, more information must be
gathered on the “feebleminded problem” in the state.
Several states had mounted eugenic surveys meant to assess states’
“mental hygiene” and identify the “feebleminded” in the 1910s. Demo-
cratic governor Samuel Ralston followed this trend in 1915, establishing
the Committee on Mental Defectives (CMD) to study degeneracy in
Indiana. Composed of lawmakers and doctors, the CMD confirmed the
position of the medical community regarding the wisdom of instituting
state eugenic policies. With the aid of New York’s Eugenics Record Of-
fice (ERO) and the U.S. Public Health Service, the committee eventually
classified over 56,000 Hoosiers as prospective candidates for steriliza-
tion because of their feeblemindedness, insanity, or epilepsy.28 Repeat-
edly invoking the “menace of the feebleminded,” the CMD’s surveys
described the state’s problems in such dramatic terms that the otherwise
radical nature of eugenic policies was submerged beneath a rhetoric of
fear. The committee believed that increased state control of relief efforts
was needed to curb local charitable policies that provided an incentive
for multiplication of the “degenerate” classes. Although short-term tax in-
creases might be needed to fund the state bureaucracy that would manage
the feebleminded, the committee claimed that the costs of eliminating
them in future generations would eventually yield savings.29
The CMD published reports in 1918 and 1919, but before its final 1922
report was completed, sterilization seemed to be in jeopardy. At the be-
hest of Republican governor James Goodrich, the law’s constitutional-
ity finally faced a formal challenge. In 1921 Justice Howard Townsend, a
Goodrich appointee, led the Indiana Supreme Court in ruling the 1907
law unconstitutional. The Court decided that denying a public hearing
to inmates who faced sterilization violated the Constitution’s due pro-
cess clause. 30 Despite these policy setbacks, voices arguing for eugenic
solutions continued to be heard. After a decade of popular discussion of
eugenics in the press, in schools, and in churches, most of America was fa-
miliar with the language of eugenics. The outbreak of the First World War
and concern about the mental fitness of draftees also prompted increased
discussion on the topic. 31 The CMD was only a local manifestation of this
larger national trend.
Although Indiana’s highest court had invalidated the 1907 law, later
in the 1920s sentiment in favor of sterilization again ripened. Senator C.
Oliver Holmes of Gary, a member of the CMD, became sterilization’s new
legislative champion. His hometown newspaper, the Gary Post-Tribune,
advocated a return to sterilization. The paper pointed to the apparently
increasing number of feebleminded people in the state and the taxpayer
expense that their care represented, arguing that mass sterilization rep-
resented the state’s only hope. 32
In 1925, Holmes authored Senate Bill 86, proposing reinstatement of
the sterilization policy and creation of the post of “state eugenicist” to
oversee its widespread enforcement. The proposal encountered problems
shortly after the bill was introduced. Alarmed, Holmes offered amend-
ments that he hoped would mollify the opposition. The Senate voted 31
to 12 in favor of the bill, but the House tabled it. 33 In 1927, Holmes tried
again. While the 1925 bill would have granted the state’s eugenics officer
the authority to sterilize virtually anyone, the 1927 bill authorized only
the sterilization of people in institutions and granted them the right to
a review process. Holmes found willing sponsors for this less expansive
legislation; the Senate passed the bill “with little objection,” 35 to 10.
The House followed the Senate’s lead, passing the bill by a margin of 78
to 8. 34
The restoration of sterilization in Indiana coincided with a larger
national push for new laws that followed Buck v. Bell, one of the most
infamous United States Supreme Court decisions. The majority decision,
written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., placed sterilization of the
feebleminded squarely under the police power of the government’s public
health mandate. The procedure would prevent successive generations
of “imbeciles” from burdening the state and society. 35 But Indiana’s law
was not an echo of Buck’s success; the Supreme Court ruling in Buck oc-
curred after Indiana updated its eugenics law. What happened in Indiana
resulted from success in popularizing and normalizing eugenics. 36
The eugenic message adapted to changing social and political con-
text. Eugenic reforms had overcome initial opposition by blending moral,
34â•… ·â•… J a s o n S . L a n t z e r
economic, and public health arguments together in the 1920s. Eugenics

thrived during the Depression by changing its rhetoric from a “top-down”
defense of civilization by elites to a “bottom-up” call for personal sacrifice
on behalf of the greater good. Indeed, the 1930s saw three times the num-
ber of sterilizations than did the 1920s. The fear that “degenerates” might
overwhelm the nation remained real for many Americans. 37
M a k i ng t he Law F i t t he Time
The 1927 sterilization law was not Indiana’s final act of eugenic legislation.
Despite general acceptance of eugenic tenets, state-sponsored steriliza-
tion needed consistent revision in the years ahead. In the 1930s, Indiana’s
Democratic governor Paul V. McNutt was urged by advocates to create
“a sterilization law with teeth.” In response to similar entreaties, in the
span of six years the law was updated three times, in 1931, 1935, and 1937.
The House actually passed two different sterilization bills in 1931: one
dealt with the procedure for institutionalizing sterilization candidates;
the other authorized the “sterilization of all persons convicted of com-
mitting a felony in which human life has been threatened.” The Senate
endorsed the first by a margin of 31 to 8 but balked at supporting the latter
measure. 38
In 1935, the House considered a bill crafted by a coalition of urban
and rural representatives that would permit the “sterilization of persons
committed to insane hospitals.” Language borrowed from Harry Laugh-
lin’s 1914 Model Sterilization Act and incorporated into the Virginia stat-
ute upheld in the Buck case was repeated in the bill, which prescribed
eugenic sterilization to prevent reproduction among “probable poten-
tial parents of mentally incompetent or socially inadequate children.” A
court-appointed physician would “certify as to whether he believes the
best interest of society and the individual will be served by sexual ster-
ilization.” While the bill created the right to appeal, it also immunized
officials and doctors involved from being sued for participating in the
process. The bill was sent to the Committee on State Medicine and Public
Health, chaired by a physician who was also one of the sponsors, Horace
R. Willan, of Martinsville in Morgan County. The committee favorably
reported the bill four days later. On March 5, the House passed the bill
61 to 22, with 30 to 9 Senate ratification quickly following. 39 The steriliza-
tion bill’s easy passage in the upper house can perhaps be explained by
the fate of Senate Bill 304, which had called for “the castration of persons
convicted of certain crimes.” Though this bill had initial support, the
controversial nature of asexualizing criminals engendered lengthy de-
bate and narrow defeat (21–23). The House measure, which eliminated
procreative capacity while leaving sexual function intact, seemed much
more moderate.40
In 1937, Hoosier politicians passed legislation that added epilepsy
and incurable “primary and secondary” types of feeblemindedness to
the list of conditions justifying sterilization. The House passed the two
bills 68–15 and 69–12, respectively; the Senate followed suit by margins of
32–8 and 26–12.41 Only in the 1933 and 1939 legislative sessions did eugenic
reformers fail to amend their laws. In 1933, the House considered two bills
that dealt with sterilization. House Bill 265 called for the sterilization of
criminals in Indiana’s prison system. Although the Committee on State
Medicine and Public Health recommended the bill’s passage, it was even-
tually withdrawn.
In some ways, the Second World War was a reckoning for the Ameri-
can eugenics movement as it came face to face with the horrors of the Nazi
final solution. But in other ways, the 1940s remained an active period for
sterilization advocates in both Indiana and the nation. Indiana’s steriliza-
tion rate hit its highpoints during and just after the war, recording 132, 123,
and 159 procedures in 1940, 1945, and 1946. The three-year total of 414
equaled 26 percent of all people sterilized in Indiana between 1936 and
1962. The war did have an indirect impact: as doctors entered the armed
forces, it was often difficult to find surgeons to perform the procedures—
perhaps explaining the dip between 1940 and 1945.42
Sterilization of criminals suffered a setback in Skinner v. Oklahoma
(1942),43 when the United States Supreme Court struck down a law to
sterilize three-time offenders on “equal protection” grounds. The flaw in
Oklahoma’s law was that white-collar felons were spared surgery, whereas
it was prescribed for petty criminals such as chicken thieves. The Court
doubted the value of eugenics in fighting crime, though its skepticism was
not extended to the sterilization of the “mentally defective.”44
In the post-Skinner environment, the Indiana Senate attempted to
cede all “powers and duties in connection with sexual sterilization” to
the Indiana Council for Mental Health. While the legislation cleared the
Senate 43–0, the House sent the bill to its Committee on Social Security,
where it died from inattention.45
In 1951, the legislature adopted new procedures for appealing a ster-
ilization order. Representatives George S. Diener of Marion County and
Betty Malinka of Lake County introduced House Bill 275 to expand the
appeals process to include both the local circuit court and the Indiana
Council for Mental Health. The bill was approved by the House by a vote
of 78 to 10. The Senate also passed it, 32 to 15. On March 5, Democratic
governor Henry F. Schricker signed the bill into law.46 It was the final
amendment of eugenic sterilization procedures in Indiana, and it gave
more rather than fewer rights to patients. By then it was clear that Indiana
lawmakers had gone as far as they were going to go in expanding the reach
of sterilization law. When the House attempted to enlarge sterilization’s
scope in 1955 by extending sterilization to patients in state psychiatric
hospitals, the measure died in committee.47
R epe a l
The law was now functioning primarily under the control of medical pro-
fessionals, a policy that had been urged when Sharp and his cadre first
pushed for a sterilization law. Indiana’s Mental Health Department, cre-
ated in 1945, oversaw the state’s sterilization program. Largely thought
to operate above the political fray, the sterilization board consisted of a
circuit court judge, a doctor in general practice, a doctor who specialized
in the treatment and care of mental diseases, the chief executive officer of
the State Welfare Department, and the chief executive officer of the State
Board of Health. Each member of this bureaucracy was appointed by the
governor. But like most other states, by the late 1950s, Indiana saw fewer
and fewer institutionalized sterilizations. Medical professionals and oth-
ers were starting to question the value of the law.48
In a routine legislative cleanup of the statute books, the state legisla-
ture formally repealed the 1907 sterilization law in 1963, over 40 years after
it was declared unconstitutional.49 Opponents of sterilization would wait
more than 10 years before the remaining sterilization law was repealed.
In 1972 Speaker of the House Otis Bowen was elected governor of
Indiana. Midway through Bowen’s first term in 1974, James Drews, the
representative from LaPorte, Marshall, and Starke counties, authored a
repeal measure, House Bill 1238. It passed 65 to 29. In the Senate, the bill
was cosponsored by Senators Walter Helmke of Allen and DeKalb coun-
ties and Robert Garton of Bartholomew and Johnson counties, giving it
statewide support. It passed by a margin of 45 to 5. 50 Garton recalled the
repeal process:
My primary recollection of House Bill 1238 . . . was my feeling at the time
that we had made a lot of progress in treating and caring for individuals
who were mentally ill or suffered with epilepsy. I realized the old laws
allowed the superintendent of a mental health institution or hospital to
sterilize patients who were mentally ill or suffering from epilepsy. Even
though the superintendent had to receive approval from the institution’s
governing board, the patient’s legal guardian or next of kin, and a Circuit
Court judge, it was still amazing that sterilization could be considered as
treatment in the best interests of an individual or society. It was equally
surprising that the law was not repealed until 1974. . . . If nothing else, the
repeal of Public Law 60-1974 proved that public sentiment and even ex-
pert advice are sometimes wrong, resulting in unforeseen consequences. 51
The repeal legislation was signed on February 13, 1974, by Gover-

nor Bowen. It brought an end to state-sponsored eugenic sterilization
in Indiana. Bowen, a World War II veteran who went on to become an
obstetrician-gynecologist and future secretary of Health and Human
Services in the Reagan administration, recalled: “When the legislature
became aware of it [forced sterilization/eugenics law] (and me as well)
[repeal] just seemed the right thing to do and was done with minimal
fanfare.”52 Between 1907 and 1974, however, well over 2,500 people had
been legally sterilized in Indiana. 53
No t e s
1.â•‡ Jason S. Lantzer, Prohibition Is Here to Stay (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of
Notre Dame Press, 2009).
2.â•‡ Alexandra Minna Stern, “We Cannot Make a Silk Purse Out of a Sow’s Ear”:
Eugenics in the Hoosier Heartland,” Indiana Magazine of History 103 (March 2007):
3–38.
3.â•‡Diane B. Paul, Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present (Amherst, N.Y.:
Humanity Books, 1995), 11.
4.â•‡ Robert M. Crunden, Ministers of Reform: The Progressives’ Achievement in Ameri-
can Civilization, 1889–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984); La Reine Helen
Baker, Race Improvement of Eugenics: A Little Book on a Great Subject (New York: Dodd,
Mead, 1912), 108–11.
5.â•‡ J. H. Landman, “The Human Sterilization Movement,” Journal of Criminal Law

and Criminology 24 (July/August 1933): 403.
6.â•‡ William Cecil Dampier-Whetham and Catherine Durning Whetham, The Fam-
ily and the Nation: A Study in Natural Inheritance and Social Responsibility (New York:
Longmans, Green, 1909), 2–3, 11, 69, 214–15, 220.
7.â•‡Oscar C. McCulloch, “The Tribe of Ishmael: A Study in Social Degradation,”
Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, 1888 (Indianapolis:
Charity Organization Society, Plymouth Church Building, 1888), 154–59; Oscar C.
McCulloch, The Open Door: Sermons and Prayers by Oscar C. McCulloch, Minister of
Plymouth Congregational Church, Indianapolis, Indiana (Indianapolis: William B. Bur-
ford, 1892); Genevieve C. Weeks, Oscar Carleton McCulloch, 1843–1891: Preacher and
Practitioner of Applied Christianity (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1976). In
addition to McCulloch’s study, follow-up reports on the “tribe” were conducted in 1890
by J. Frank Wright and in 1916 by Arthur Estabrook.
8.â•‡ Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding
in Modern America (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 22, 84–85, 133.
9.â•‡Stephen Ray Hall, “Oscar McCulloch and Indiana Eugenics” (Ph.D. diss., Vir-
ginia Commonwealth University, 1993), 41, 121, 245.
10.â•‡ Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Indiana, 64th Session of the
General Assembly (Indianapolis: William B. Burford, 1905), 26–27, 38–39, 49. While
Hanly did not mention this bill in his gubernatorial address, he did call for stronger di-
vorce laws, the creation of more hospitals for the insane, and the creation of an epileptic
colony.
11.â•‡ Ibid., 253–54, 891–93, 1457; Journal of the Senate of the State of Indiana, 64th Ses-
sion of the General Assembly (Indianapolis: William B. Burford, 1905), 1512–16, 1722–23.
12.â•‡ Christine Rosen, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugen-
ics Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 67–69.
13.â•‡David J. Bodenhamer and Hon. Randall T. Shepard, eds., The History of Indiana
Law (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 71.
14.â•‡ Albert Edward Wiggam, The New Decalogue of Science (New York: Garden City,
1925), 19
15.â•‡ New York Times, November 1, 1940; Angela Gugliotta, “‘Dr. Sharp with His
Little Knife’: Therapeutic and Punitive Origins of Eugenic Vasectomy—Indiana, 1892–
1921,” Journal of the History of Medicine 53 (October 1998): 371–406; Hall, “Oscar Mc-
Culloch and Indiana Eugenics,” 254–57; Dennis L. Durst, “Evangelical Engagements
with Eugenics, 1900–1940,” Ethics & Medicine 18 (Summer 2002), http://www.ethics
andmedicine.com; Indianapolis Star, September 26, 1921. Other reformers joined these
men, including Elizabeth Grannis of the National Christian League for the Promotion
of Purity, an offshoot of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.
16.â•‡ Indianapolis Star, March 7, 1907; New York Times, November 1, 1940.
17.â•‡ Jan Shipps, “J. Frank Hanly: Enigmatic Reformer,” in Gentlemen from Indiana:
National Party Candidates, 1836–1940, ed. Ralph D. Gray (Indianapolis: Indiana Histori-
cal Bureau, 1977), 238–68.
18.â•‡ Mark H. Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963), 50.
19.â•‡Gugliotta, “‘Dr. Sharp with His Little Knife,’” 388.
20.â•‡ Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Indiana, 65th Session of the
General Assembly (Indianapolis: William B. Burford, 1907), 367, 437, 613, 1341–42.
21.â•‡ Journal of the Indiana State Senate, 65th Session of the General Assembly (India-
napolis: William B. Burford, 1907), 1302, 1317, 1723, 2220.
22.â•‡ Anderson Herald-Bulletin, February 26, 1996; Harry C. Sharp, “Vasectomy: A
Means of Preventing Defective Procreation” (Jeffersonville, Ind., 1909); Osborn v. Board
of Examiners, 169 N.Y.S. 638 (1918).
23.â•‡ W. H. Whittaker to Governor J. Frank Hanly, February 8, 1908, “Temporary
File: Governor Marshall Papers in Regards to Sterilization,” Indiana State Archives,
Indianapolis.
24.â•‡Gugliotta, “‘Dr. Sharp with His Little Knife,’” 396–400.
25.â•‡Sharp to Marshall, May 13, 1909, Temporary File: Governor Marshall Papers in
Regards to Sterilization, Indiana State Archives.
26.â•‡ William O’Keefee to Marshall, January 12, 1909, Temporary File: Governor
Marshall Papers in Regards to Sterilization, Indiana State Archives; Jason S. Lantzer
and Alexandra M. Stern, “Building a Fit Society: Indiana’s Eugenics Crusaders,” Traces
of Indiana and Midwestern History 19 (Winter 2007): 4–11.
27.â•‡ H. E. Jordan, “Surgical Sex-Sterilization: Its Value as a Eugenic Measure,” Amer-
ican Journal of Clinical Medicine 20 (1913): 983–87.
28.â•‡Lantzer and Stern, “Building a Fit Society”; Robert L. Osgood, “The Menace of
the Feebleminded: George Bliss, Amos Butler, and the Indiana Committee on Mental
Defectives,” Indiana Magazine of History 97 (December 2001): 253–77; Indianapolis Star,
December 7, 1923, May 30, 1928, October 23, 1932, September 27, 1938; Anderson Herald-
Bulletin, February 26, 1996. Members included Dr. S. E. Smith, Dr. Charles P. Emerson,
Dr. George F. Edenharter, and Monsignor Francis H. Gavisk.
29.â•‡Lantzer and Stern, “Building a Fit Society”; Meetings, December 17, 1915, March
17, 1916, Minutes Committee on Mental Defectives 1915 folder, Committee on Mental
Defectives, Indiana State Archives, Indianapolis; Field Worker Files, Series VII, box
1, Eugenics Record Office Papers, Manuscript Collection 77, American Philosophical
Society Library, Philadelphia; F. D. and F. H. Streighthoff, “Indiana: A Social and Eco-
nomic Survey” (Indianapolis: W. K. Stewart, 1916), 200–203; Anderson Herald-Bulletin,
February 26, 1996.
30.â•‡George A. H. Shideler to Governor James P. Goodrich, September 9, 1919,
folder 2, box 159, Indiana Reformatory Correspondence, Documents and Reports,
Papers of Governor James Goodrich, Indiana State Archives; Williams v. Smith, 190
Ind. 526 (1921).
31.â•‡ Rosen, Preaching Eugenics, 94–96, 111, 149.
32.â•‡ Meeting, August 8, 1924, Minutes Committee on Mental Defectives 1915 folder,
Committee on Mental Defectives, Indiana State Archives, Indianapolis; Gary Post-
Tribune, February 3, 1925.
33.â•‡ Journal of the Indiana State Senate, 74th Session of the General Assembly (India-
napolis: William B. Burford, 1925), 92, 197–98, 203, 321, 330–31, 394, 537–38; Indianapolis
Star, February 24, 1927; Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Indiana, 74th
Session of the General Assembly (Indianapolis: William B. Burford, 1925), 452–53, 604.
34.â•‡ Indianapolis Star, February 24, 1927; Journal of the Senate of the State of Indiana,
75th Session of the General Assembly (Indianapolis: William B. Burford, 1927), 285, 356,
618, 1018; Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Indiana, 75th Session of the
General Assembly (Indianapolis: William B. Burford, 1927), 565, 601, 842.
35.â•‡ Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927); Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbe-
ciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Press, 2008).
36.â•‡Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Hered-
ity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 61–63.
37.â•‡ Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality and Eugenics from the
Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001),
98–99, 107; New York Times, June 21, 1932.
38.â•‡ Indianapolis Star, February 3, 1931; Journal of the House of Representatives of
the State of Indiana during the 77th Session of the General Assembly (Ft. Wayne, Ind.: Ft.
Wayne Printing Co., 1931), 173, 229, 259, 386, 569; Journal of the Senate of the State of Indi-
ana during the 77th Session of the General Assembly (Ft. Wayne, Ind.: Ft. Wayne Printing
Co., 1931), 477, 695, 717.
39.â•‡ Indianapolis Star, February 23, 1935; Journal of the House of Representatives of
the State of Indiana during the 79th Session of the General Assembly (Ft. Wayne, Ind.: Ft.
Wayne Printing Co., 1935), 694, 770, 1082.
40.â•‡ Journal of the Senate of the State of Indiana during the 79th Session of the General
Assembly (Ft. Wayne, Ind.: Ft. Wayne Printing Co., 1935), 702, 931, 1025, 1027, 1059, 1068,
1221, 1302.
41.â•‡ New York Times, March 9, 1937; Journal of the House of Representatives of the State
of Indiana during the 80th Session of the General Assembly (Ft. Wayne, Ind.: Ft. Wayne
Printing Co., 1937), 165, 489–90; Journal of the Senate of the State of Indiana during the
80th Session of the General Assembly (Ft. Wayne, Ind.: Ft. Wayne Printing Co., 1937),
1191–92, 1215.
42.â•‡ “Eugenic Sterilization in Indiana,” Indiana Law Journal 38 (1962–63): 288;
Philip R. Reilly, The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United
States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 129.
43.â•‡ Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535 (1942).
44.â•‡See generally Victoria F. Nourse, In Reckless Hands: Skinner v. Oklahoma and
the Near-Triumph of American Eugenics (New York: Norton, 2008).
Assembly (Indianapolis: Bookwalter, 1949), 247, 413.
46.â•‡ Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Indiana during the 87th Ses-
sion of the General Assembly (Indianapolis: Bookwalter, 1951), 222–23, 529, 633–34, 710,
974, 1051; Journal of the Senate of the State of Indiana during the 87th Session of the General
Assembly (Indianapolis: Bookwalter, 1951), 522, 547, 586–87, 672–73, 747.
Assembly (Indianapolis: Bookwalter, 1955), 833; Journal of the House of Representatives of
the State of Indiana during the 89th Session of the General Assembly (Indianapolis: Book-
walter, 1955), 328, 910–11.
48.â•‡ C. O. McCormick, “Is the Indiana 1935 Sterilization of the Insane Act Function-
ing?” Journal of the Indiana State Medical Association 42 (September 1949): 919–20.
49.â•‡ Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Indiana, 93rd Session of the
General Assembly (Indianapolis: Hollenbeck, 1963), 264, 273–74; Journal of the Senate
of the State of Indiana, 93rd Session of the General Assembly (Indianapolis: Hollenbeck,
1963), 58, 167, 499.
50.â•‡ Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Indiana during the 98th Ses-
sion of the General Assembly, 32, 129, 803; Journal of the Senate of the State of Indiana during
the 98th Session of the General Assembly 310, 332, 348, 686.
51.â•‡ Hon. Robert Garton to author, August 14, 2006 (copy in author’s possession).
52.â•‡ Hon. Otis R. Bowen to author, September 28, 2005 (copy in author’s posses-
sion); Otis R. Bowen, Doc: Memories from a Life in Public Service (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2000).
53.â•‡ Laws of the State of Indiana 1974 (Indianapolis: Central Publishing Co., 1974),
262; Laws of the State of Indiana 1975 (Indianapolis: Central Publishing Co., 1975), 738;
Stern, “We Cannot Make a Silk Purse Out of a Sow’s Ear,” 3–38, 182–210.
Pa r t t wo
Eugenics and Popular Culture

three
From Better Babies to the Bunglers:

Eugenics on Tobacco Road
E ug e n ic s a n d P opu l a r C u lt u r e
From the first decade of the twentieth century until approximately 1940,
eugenics was a word that most Americans could expect to encounter regu-
larly. Important citizens made the term respectable, and repetition by
schoolteachers, doctors, politicians, and preachers made it an expansive
term of reference and eventually a part of popular culture. Mentions of
“the well-born science” were common in newspapers and popular maga-
zines, in novels, movies, and plays. Yet there was no universal, uniform
definition for eugenics; the term encompassed everything from proud
pedigrees to healthy births. Over time the invocation of “eugenics” be-
came almost clichéd, as it was employed to signal approval for a wide va-
riety of public policy initiatives. By the time a Chicago politician decided
in 1915 to run for alderman as “the eugenic candidate,” the term had come
to stand for “not just ‘good heredity’ but goodness itself.”1
In recent years, historians of American literature and popular culture
have identified how pervasive eugenic language and themes became in
the first third of the past century. 2 As a result of this scholarship, allusions
to eugenics in the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald or its satiric invocation
by Sinclair Lewis or Ernest Hemingway are no longer unusual. 3 While
such references have increased, fiction writers are rarely credited with
affecting the passage of law. One underexplored link in the history of
eugenics concerns just such a relationship between the Georgia steriliza-
tion law, passed in 1937, and Georgia native son Erskine Caldwell. Both
the personal and literary dimensions of Caldwell’s life were touched by
45
46â•… · â•… Pa u l A . L o m b a r d o
ideas we now associate with America’s eugenics movement. His work

was indirectly responsible for a great deal of public debate that ultimately
culminated in his home state’s sterilization law, the last such law passed
in America.4
E ug e n ic s i n Ge org i a
The political history of the sterilization movement in the South was ana-
lyzed in detail by Edward Larson in Sex, Race, and Science, a work that
placed Georgia in the context of several “Deep South” states that took
up eugenics. 5 More recently, scholars such as Karen Keely and Betty Nies
have described the intersection of popular culture and eugenics, focus-
ing on themes in the work of novelists like Erskine Caldwell.6 This essay
builds upon the insights of those scholars, linking the popular to the
political and showing that while Georgia seemed slow to adopt eugenic
legislation, it nevertheless was in the forefront among states where “eu-
genics” was a familiar topic and a mainstay of popular culture. Voices
from the press and the pulpit explored the eugenic value of vital statistics
and public health, the proper place of eugenics in the schools, the eu-
genic importance of “fitter families,” and the place of eugenic themes in
entertainment. Those voices were heard alongside the more commonly
remembered, but later articulated, arguments for marriage restriction
laws to protect “racial integrity” or laws to impose sterilization on the
“unfit” in the name of eugenics. This survey of eugenics in Georgia culmi-
nates in an account of Erskine Caldwell’s role in the sterilization debates
in the 1930s.
From the first years of the twentieth century, news reports focusing
on eugenics in Georgia were extensive. Georgians learned that classes
on eugenics would be part of the National Corn Exposition in 1913 and
that a “department of eugenics” was a critical need within the planned
Child Welfare Exhibit in Atlanta that year.7 When the 1914 Better Ba-
bies show proved a “splendid success,” leaders of the Women’s Christian
Temperance Union saw it as the “first step toward eugenics in Atlanta”
and predicted that the capital city would be the “pioneer southern city” to
embrace the new science.8 Not everyone welcomed the “wave of agitation
over eugenics” that America was experiencing, and some felt that religion
was being displaced by a materialistic fetish.9
F r o m B e t t e r B a b i e s t o t h e B u n g l e r s â•… · â•… 47
As support for instruction in eugenics gained momentum, the state

commissioner of schools was pressed to make a place within the public
school curriculum to study the “science of good birth.” He declined, say-
ing that some matters were “too delicate to be handled by teachers” and
were best left to parents.10 Others opposed the idea because they judged
teaching about the “laws of inheritance” and “scientific marriages” as
difficult as the labors of Hercules. Trying to put such knowledge in the
hands of children was like asking them to run with scissors or to play
“with something that resembles dynamite.”11
E ug e n ic M a r r i ag e : M e dic a l Ce r t i f ic at e s
But it was hard to escape popular curiosity about eugenics when even
baseball-star-turned-preacher Billy Sunday used it to emphasize inter-
generational guilt as part of his “sins of the fathers” evangelism.12 The
language of eugenics boosters, mixing nineteenth-century degeneration
theory with the newest in Mendelian heredity and Galtonian biometry,
provided a convenient shorthand for attacking drunkenness, sexual ex-
cess, and socially problematic behaviors of all kinds.
One legislator declared himself a believer in eugenics after seeing
Damaged Goods, a film billed as a lesson of “sin’s consequences” that
played in Atlanta to record crowds.13 Describing the movie as a “won-
derful sermon,” Colonel Walter Andrews was converted to the need for
“strong laws upon the subject of eugenics.” He planned to introduce a
bill to require a syphilis test and a medical certificate as a requirement of
marriage licensing “for the sake of future generations.”14
When legislation to require a “bill of clean health” of men before
marriage was proposed, it generated great controversy. One lawmaker
objected that there was “entirely too much reformatory legislation” be-
ing introduced. He resisted making couples dependent on the medical
profession and “quack doctors” who had no scruples about issuing bogus
medical certificates.15 When an amendment was offered to extend the
scope of required testing to women, the bill died after two days of de-
bate.16 Similar measures designed to protect “the children of tomorrow”
were rejected in 1921, 1923, and 1924, often following attempts to expand
the required health tests to women.17 The Georgia Medical Society of-
fered yet another bill in 1928.18 But like other attempts to enact mar-
riage laws prohibiting unions between potentially “defective” parents,

campaigns for marital “social hygiene” in the name of eugenics never
succeeded in Georgia.
One commentator said that the fine “scientific” tone of eugenics
ignored human experience. She openly satirized eugenic propaganda,
particularly the popular notion of “race suicide,” which suggested that
Americans of Anglo-Saxon descent were having too few children, and
that mating with other ethnic groups would muddy the gene pool of “Old
Americans.” Her “common sense” argument was: “Throw a pile of mud
in a stream and about a mile down the stream you don’t find anything
but pure water. Say do you know the answer to the eugenic stuff? Good
food, clean work, fresh air and chuck the booze.”19 But others found a way
to more readily adapt the new hereditary science to bolster traditions
stretching back to the state’s colonial heritage.
The On e Drop Ru l e : The E ug e n ic s

of R ac i a l I n t e g r i t y
To most Georgians living at the turn of the twentieth century, white su-
premacy was a settled reality. There was, however, always the threat that
the “supremacy of the Caucasian” could be undermined in the future by
“degrading strains of alien blood.” Even though southern states main-
tained antique laws of racial separation, most having been adopted during
the colonial era, the need to be vigilant in forestalling the “unspeakable
evils that would follow race amalgamation” was an issue revisited regu-
larly. Some even called for national laws to penalize racial interbreeding
or “miscegenation.”20 Comparing interracial relations to polygamy, con-
cerned Georgians argued that just as the Mormons had been forced by
federal courts to give up plural marriage, Congress could stop race mixers
by passing national legislation.21
Members of Georgia’s medical profession joined their colleagues
elsewhere and argued for racial separation by linking public health and
eugenics. An infrastructure for more stringent “racial integrity” enforce-
ment was created with the passage of Georgia’s public health and vital
statistics laws in 1914. Regularly maintained records of birth, death, and
marriage provided the framework for tracking data on race and doubled
as a way to emphasize the importance of keeping the “germ-plasm” of
different races separate.22 In 1914, the leaders of Georgia’s women’s clubs

urged their members to support the passage of a public health law that was
“social, not self-centered” and benefited from “rational eugenic policies,
[and] rational social work directed toward reforms.”23 “Public health” had
its own cachet; club leaders made no mention of race.
The value of modern, scientifically derived laws in maintaining
the color line became more obvious when states like Virginia amended
their older “antimiscegenation” statutes using openly eugenic arguments
about the need to keep white bloodlines pure. After national leaders of
the eugenics movement, like Harry Laughlin, Lothrop Stoddard, and
Madison Grant, helped the founders of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of Amer-
ica pass Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act in 1924, eugenicists there turned
to other states.24 The Virginia governor wrote to every other governor
in the country, enclosing a copy of his state’s new law. 25 Responses to
the letter were forwarded to Dr. Walter Plecker, coauthor of the law and
Virginia’s state registrar in the Bureau of Vital Statistics. Plecker man-
aged the complex problem of registering citizens at the time of birth,
policing registration at marriage and death, and guarding Virginia’s ra-
cial purity.
Atlanta lawyer James C. Davis was a member of the Georgia General
Assembly who wanted a law in his state that would mirror the Virginia
legislation. Davis requested information on the Virginia law and in re-
sponse received 50 copies of Plecker’s booklet, Eugenics and Racial Integ-
rity in Relation to the New Family. This booklet included a copy of the law
itself and laid out the eugenical arguments that provided its foundation.
At Plecker’s suggestion, Davis contacted antimiscegenation activist John
Powell with an invitation to speak before the Georgia House of Represen-
tatives.26 Powell’s role as coauthor of the Virginia law had already drawn
attention in the Atlanta press,27 and in accepting Davis’s invitation, Powell
attributed his initial idea for the Virginia law to a conversation he had with
an earlier Georgia governor. Powell was therefore particularly excited
about the prospect of coming to Atlanta to speak to Georgia lawmakers.28
In preparation for Powell’s visit, members of the press urged legislators
to come up with a “practicable scheme that will cut down the production
of African American mongrels.” But the difficulty of devising a law “with
teeth” that could be used to enforce racial purity standards was not lost
on advocates.29
50â•… ·â•… Pa u l A . L o m b a r d o
The Davis Racial Integrity Bill was introduced in the 1925 Georgia
legislative session. Although it passed the House of Representatives, it
reached the Georgia Senate too late for serious consideration and failed to
pass. In 1927, the next full legislative year, Davis shepherded the bill suc-
cessfully through the process and eventually had the pleasure of report-
ing to Powell and Cox that it enjoyed unanimous support in the Senate,
attracted only three negative votes in the House, and had been signed
into law by the governor. 30 Eugenics lent a scientific gloss to legislation to
uphold “racial integrity” in Georgia, but its ultimate effect was merely to
support existing social relations and bolster a culture of white supremacy.
Proposals to enact sterilization laws for eugenic purposes were more radi-
cal. Their supporters eventually overcame opposition by amplifying fears
of spreading degeneracy and inflating concerns about the moral, social,
and economic threats of crime and mental defect.
The P ol i t ic s of S u rg e r y: C u t t i ng
Co s ts a n d C u t t i ng Pat i e n ts
The first stirrings of interest about a sterilization law for Georgia appeared
in the 1912 comments of a physician at the Milledgeville State Asylum
speaking on “Sterilization: The Only Logical Means of Retarding the
Progress of Insanity and Degeneracy.”31 Within a year, Georgia physi-
cians took up the cry for state-sponsored sterilization. Their concern was
focused on increasing numbers of the “criminally insane, idiots, rapists
or moral degenerates” lodged in state institutions, and their bill was ad-
vanced by a physician/legislator as “a wise and humane” version of “sci-
entific legislation.”32
Declaring that “heredity governs the development of the human race,”
Dr. W. L. Champion urged his legislative colleagues to “safeguard the
inÂ�terests of the unborn” and guarantee “the priceless heritage of physical
perfection and masterful mind” to future generations. He argued that
“confirmed criminals” and rapists should be castrated. 33 But as with ear-
lier attempts at eugenic lawmaking, some criticized mandatory surgery,
calling it “premature faddism” and “hair-trigger” experimentation. 34 The
bill failed.
Proclaiming the “medical gospel,” one doctor declared eugenic ster-
ilization the centerpiece of the movement for public health laws. Holy
Scripture demanded eugenics laws, he said, “so that the creature of the
future may be a better specimen of manhood and womanhood; that there
may be fewer inebriates and cripples, that our alms houses, hospitals,
penitentiaries, chain gangs and asylums may have fewer inmates, and that
our streets may be free of beggars and perverts.”35
Since the next best thing to sterilization was segregation of the “unfit”
to contain their fertility, some pressed for more extensive use of intel-
ligence tests in the public schools to identify “feebleminded children”
and place them in state institutions.36 Soon there was lobbying for an
institution to house mentally deficient children. Institution building was
expensive, but supporters were quick to point out that the cost of housing
was less than the cost of caring for criminals who would be the inevitable
children of “defectives” living at large. Provision for the feebleminded was
sold as a step in the battle against crime. 37
In a series of essays printed in the Atlanta Constitution, the superin-
tendent of Georgia’s Gracewood Training School for Mental Defectives
reemphasized the need to identify and segregate feebleminded people
living in the community. Repeating conventional wisdom among eu-
genicists, he argued that feebleminded girls were the source of venereal
disease and illegitimacy, that more than 40 percent of prostitutes were
feebleminded, and that “30 percent of the children in orphanages were
defective.”38 The social costs generated by the feebleminded were the
lynchpin of his argument for institutionalization. He said that money was
wasted on attempting to rehabilitate defectives in reformatories, or trying
to educate the defective in schools, yet too little money had been spent to
maintain or expand the state facility that would—by quarantining defec-
tives and preventing their mating—represent a step in preventing those
costs. 39 Society should look at the “occasional fool” not as a curiosity
that each community should tolerate but as an “active, dynamic enemy
to the community life, who goes on propagating his kind with terrible
fertility, corrupting the law, morals and health of society, never paying
his way, and always living at the expense of others.”40 But the ultimate
preventative, embodied in a eugenic sterilization law, remained elusive
to Georgia’s eugenic reformers. By 1929 more than 20 states had adopted
sterilization laws; that same year the Georgia State Asylum was carrying
a deficit of almost $2.5 million. As the budget shortfall was announced, a
sterilization law was proposed.41 But again, it failed to pass. Three years
later, the Georgia Medical Society offered another sterilization bill. It in-
cluded provisions for appointment of a medical board that would choose
candidates for sexual surgery.42 It also failed.
The year 1932 was the deepest point of economic crisis for most of the
United States. Although the cloud of worldwide depression settled over
Georgia earlier and lasted longer than it would for the rest of the country,
serious consideration of sterilization in Georgia did not gain traction un-
til most other states already had sterilization laws. Perhaps at first Georgia
lawmakers were unconvinced by the eugenicists’ apocalyptic vision; per-
haps voters did not favor drastic medical interventions—even upon the
most marginal citizens. But when those convictions finally changed, at
least part of the reason for the popular acceptance of sterilization in Geor-
gia was due to the controversy engendered by novelist Erskine Caldwell,
a Georgia native.
S t e r i l i z at ion L aw i n Ge org i a : F rom

Tob acco Roa d to t he C a pi tol D ome
Caldwell’s father, Ira, was a teacher and a Presbyterian minister who also
worked as a journalist. Beginning in 1926, he wrote a weekly column for the
Augusta Chronicle in which he invited his readers to consider the issues of
the day. “Let’s Think This Over” became a regular feature of the paper, and
as Erskine Caldwell’s reputation as a writer matured, the senior Caldwell
developed a following of his own, writing about topics as varied as lynch-
ing, the chain gang, and high interest rates. He invariably took the position
of social progressive, a bold posture from his home in rural Georgia.
In 1929, Dr. John Bell spoke to the national meeting of the American
Psychiatric Association in Atlanta. Bell was well known for his victory in
the famous U.S. Supreme Court case of Buck v. Bell, which had settled the
constitutionality of eugenic sterilization laws. Bell’s talk, advocating the
sterilization of epileptics, was reported in the press.43 Only a week later,
Ira Caldwell raised “The Eugenics Question” in his column. He doubted
the value of eugenic sterilization, noting that some state experiments in
surgery were launched with the expectation that “the race could be lifted
to higher levels of intelligence” by surgery on “the mentally deficient.”
Caldwell claimed that new research showed many less promising children
had been born of prosperous parents, calling into question the surgical
solution. Caldwell conceded that it was impossible to separate environ-

mental influences from those of heredity. So he pressed to clean up the
environment in which poor children were raised, urging at least as much
attention to “bad social inheritance” as to “bad blood.” Ira Caldwell’s po-
sitions on eugenics were nuanced. He did not dismiss eugenics entirely,
but was skeptical about its immediate utility. “Probably the eugenic laws
will in the end render civilization a service,” he said, “but at the present
time the science is too new, too uncertain to be wholly reliable.”44
Caldwell then began an experiment, convinced that social ameliora-
tion was the key to attacking poverty. He helped a family of desperately
poor farmers move from their hovel on the fringes of the county closer
to the village he lived in with all of its trappings of civilization—schools,
shops, and churches. He arranged a job for the father, school lessons for
the children, and had the family enrolled as members of a local church.
The whole community pitched in to better the family’s lot, yet the experi-
ment proved a failure. The children dropped out of school, the father quit
his job, and before long the family had moved back to its ruined shack.45
Caldwell despaired and seemed to have given up on the idea that
changing the environment could change the motivation and habits of
people he characterized as sunk in the “quicksands of ignorance.” He
worked out his disappointment by writing a series of articles, five in all,
published in Eugenics: A Journal of Race Betterment, the official journal
of the American Eugenics Society. The series carried the fictitious name
Caldwell had assigned to the family, “The Bunglers,” and it was illustrated
with pictures he had taken of the family.46
The articles appeared alongside the journal’s other discussions of
“dysgenics,” describing in detail the distressing conditions in which the
Bunglers lived. Not altogether pessimistic, Caldwell suggested that the
Bunglers, and millions like them, were created by a complex set of fac-
tors including “social, economic, and biologic forces” far beyond their
control.47 Caldwell’s series was not a eugenic jeremiad about “poor white
trash” and the way in which their plight was determined by the inevitable
workings of biology. He claimed instead that despite their many short-
comings, the Bunglers were “honest, hard-working people” who did not
drink and rarely got into trouble with the law.48 Nevertheless, Caldwell
ended his comments on a much more negative note. Too many Bunglers
were afoot, he said, and they were “to all practical purposes, idiots” who
dragged society down. They contributed to the “sociological morass in

which the society is more and more engulfed.” Perhaps as many as 50
percent of these social “idiots” could be rehabilitated over time. But in
the short run, sterilization of them and others of their ilk would lessen
the pressure on society to carry the burdens they generated. In a passage
consistent with the pronouncements of most supporters of eugenic inter-
ventions, Caldwell concluded, “Ignorance, stolid stupidity, thick necks,
and low brows are the greatest perils of a republic.”49 Unless these dangers
were addressed, the problem would not abate.
Few people would read Ira Caldwell’s essay on the grinding poverty
of his corner of Georgia; fewer still could understand his struggle with
his beliefs. He was pushed alternately toward compassion and a sense of
responsibility for his clan of Bunglers, then away from them in disgust and
a final admission that only eugenics would offer an appropriate solution to
the replication of their kind. In many respects, Caldwell’s inner turmoil
mirrored that of his region—pulled toward the attractions of modern,
industrial life, but repelled by its social leveling and racial intermingling.
In contrast, Caldwell’s son Erskine would be read by millions; he would
reject the eugenics “solutions” he learned both at college in Virginia and
as a lament of despair from his father.
Erskine Caldwell was born in Georgia, and he grew up on the state’s
eastern flank in the village of Wrens, 30 miles from Augusta and the South
Carolina border. There he saw rural life as it was lived, riding at times
with his father through the countryside, ministering to landowners and
sharecroppers alike.
Caldwell’s grandmother’s lineage qualified him for a scholarship
funded by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which paid his way
to attend the University of Virginia. There he was exposed to some of the
giants of the field of eugenics, including Robert Bennett Bean.50 Caldwell
visited the asylums and poorhouses in the countryside around “Mr. Jef-
ferson’s University” with Bean and saw firsthand how the new science of
eugenics worked. He also learned how the problematic “germ-plasm” of
defective citizens contributed to their station in life. 51
No doubt as a result of his father’s influences, Caldwell was a race
liberal, something that could not endear him to the Anglo-Saxon Club
sympathies of the Virginia campus in the 1920s. As someone whose own
limited resources landed him on one of the lower rungs of the social lad-
der at the patrician university, he was forced to work as a janitor in a pool

hall to make ends meet. Taking a job that generally fell only to black ser-
vants hardly increased his standing in the hierarchical world of Virginia
privilege, and Caldwell’s first year at the university could not have been
pleasant.
Caldwell developed his skill for blunt social critique early in his writ-
ing career. In his first published article, written in college at Virginia,
Caldwell berated his home state, describing life there in a piece entitled
“Georgia Cracker.” He railed about Georgia as a place “whose inhabit-
ants do cruel and uncivilized things; whose land is overrun with bogus
religionists, boosters, and demagogues; whose politics are in the hands
of Klan-spirited Baptists; and yet whose largest city boasts of being ‘the
greatest city in the greatest state in the world.’”52 But for the fact that it was
printed in a tiny, obscure journal, Caldwell’s comments would certainly
have drawn the wrath of fellow Georgians.
Caldwell dropped in and out of college at Virginia, finally leaving two
years short of graduation. Then he worked in Atlanta as a reporter at the
Atlanta Journal, learning how to write alongside Margaret Mitchell, later
the famed author of Gone with the Wind. In 1931 Caldwell left Georgia and
moved to New York City, determined to write about the vision that fired
his father’s reformist passions and ultimately his frustration. Erskine had
seen with his own eyes “the poverty and hopelessness and degradation”
in the rural South. 53 He left the familiar settings of his youth for the gritty
realities of New York, taking some of his own experience and sense of the
gritty realities of the rural South with him.
The story of the Bunglers that Ira Caldwell sketched in Eugenics be-
came the basis for Erskine Caldwell’s novel Tobacco Road. Jeeter and
Dude Bungler found a new, fictional life as Jeeter and Dude Lester. Other
characters from the eugenics journal reappeared in the novel with barely
masked physical marks of defect and behaviors that mirrored the real peo-
ple Ira Caldwell had described. The novelist breathed dramatic life into
the people of his home county, picturing them in rundown hovels reeking
of squalid poverty and adding touches of sex and scandal guaranteed to
shock 1930s sensibilities. Caldwell became famous when Tobacco Road
was published. He would later be criticized in the South, particularly in
his home state of Georgia, for the unflattering, scandalous, pulp fiction
vision of the region he created. 54
The Tob acco Roa d to

Ge org i a S t e r i l i z at ion
About the time the furor over Tobacco Road was settling, an article
appeared below a banner headline in the Atlanta Sunday paper. It ex-
plained that sterilization would be one of the major legislative objectives
of the Medical Association of Georgia for the year, and the program was
described by the Association’s president, Dr. Charles H. Richardson.
Richardson repeated the claim that institutional care for social defec-
tives was too expensive. The proposed law could eventually “save the
government a billion dollars a year.” Doctors who supported the pro-
posal wanted a commission of their colleagues to decide who would be
sterilized. “I would not be in favor of sterilization should it be within
the power of politicians to control any part of it,” said Dr. W. E. Barber,
a former president of the Fulton County Medical Society. Finding a
German example he hoped to emulate, another medical society spokes-
man proclaimed that the “sterilization project of Hitler in Germany is
a step in the right direction.” While the recent Nazi government enact-
ment “might seem a bit drastic on the surface,” he said, “it is being used
wisely,” and it actually was less expansive than sterilization laws in some
American states. 55
Doctors who initiated the sterilization campaign conceded that the
lay public might be able to do a better job of swaying legislators than the
professional men had. 56 To that end, Emory University biologist Robert C.
Rhodes lectured Rotarians and Masons about eugenics, calling steriliza-
tion a “matter of good citizenship.”57 Momentum built for the measure as
members of the Georgia Humane Society also pressed for a state steriliza-
tion law. 58 These pleas gained added force as the state cut back on funds for
institutionalization. E. E. Lindsey, chairman of the State Board of Control
for Charitable Institutions, announced that because of reduced state rev-
enue, there would be a 25 percent reduction in the budget appropriation for
his agency. That cut came despite the fact that “mental deficiency appear[s]
to be on the increase.” Lindsey identified sterilization as the best “means
of checking the rapid increase in insanity.” In Georgia, like other states,
sterilization was seen as a budget management, cost-cutting measure. 59
Lindsey argued that sterilizing institutional patients would help “to reduce
the burden of taxation.”â†œ60 Driving the point home, Lindsey emphasized
that hereditary defects were a “financial problem for the state government
and the taxpayers.”â†œ61
While the campaign for sterilization in Georgia grew, Erskine CaldÂ�
well was living in New York. Caldwell’s novel Tobacco Road had been
adapted for the stage and had been playing on Broadway for two years
when he wrote a newspaper series documenting the poverty he had por-
trayed in his fiction. The New York Post published his four articles, begin-
ning with a scene of a “poverty-swept” Georgia landscape, where “chil-
dren are seen deformed by nature and malnutrition, women in rags beg
for pennies, and men are so hungry that they eat snakes and cow-dung.”
According to Caldwell, the state stood idly by providing no relief as rural
citizens starved. Caldwell characterized Governor Eugene Talmadge as
a “dictator” who did not believe in “relief.” Caldwell charged that city-
dwelling Georgians denied the existence of the naked denizens of the
rural areas and their “deformed, starved, and diseased” children. 62
A subsequent Caldwell article decried the economic exploitation of
rural laborers under the oppressive sharecropping system that often re-
sulted in debt peonage.63 Other Caldwell dispatches portrayed teenage
girls dying from anemia and tenant farmers beyond the reach of govern-
ment relief.64 Caldwell’s final essay was the coup de grace. He described a
two-room house populated by three families of farm laborers. One small
child, afflicted with rickets and anemia, licked an empty paper bag that
held only the smell of its previous contents—hog fat. His belly was swol-
len with malnutrition; “he was starving to death.” In the other room, two
infants lay on the floor in front of the fire. With no other sustenance, they
attempted to nurse from the family dog, repeatedly returning to suck “the
dry teats of a mongrel bitch.”â†œ65
Caldwell had weathered earlier criticism from Georgians for his por-
trayal of life in his native South in novels like God’s Little Acre and To-
bacco Road. During occasional visits to family, the local press grudgingly
acknowledged him as “a writer of considerable note” who had “carved
himself a niche in the literary hall of fame.”â†œ66 But when reports of his new
crusade as muckraking reporter reached his home state, the locals took
great offense. Declaring Caldwell’s account “untrue” and “unfounded,”
they demanded an investigation of conditions in Jefferson County to
disprove Caldwell’s libelous portrait. Georgia boosters, “incensed” over
Caldwell’s “sordid tale of squalor and depravity,” rose to defend their
region’s wounded pride. A government relief agency bureaucrat disputed

Caldwell’s report, saying he was “making money at the expense of his own
home people.” County commissioners promised a full investigation of all
families in need of assistance.67
Calling Caldwell’s earlier work in Tobacco Road “grossly overdrawn,”
the Augusta Chronicle quoted in detail from the New York Post series, find-
ing the conditions Caldwell depicted beyond belief. The “outstanding
citizens of Jefferson County” would not allow such “wretchedness, pov-
erty, and depravity to exist,” the editorial declared. The paper demanded
a grand jury investigation to prove that Caldwell was merely a turncoat
sensationalist and to absolve the local citizenry of the implication that
they were “heartless heathens.”â†œ68
Some Georgians decided to take the battle north, writing directly to
the New York Post. One man questioned Caldwell’s account of men eating
cow dung, saying that he had never seen such a thing, but he left open the
possibility that the novelist was “referring to his own experience.” The de-
fective system of poor relief, he said, was due to the number of “Yankees”
who administered the welfare system and, in an attempt to effect racial
equality, distributed “much to the Negroes and little to the whites.”â†œ69
But Caldwell’s report was not unique. Another series investigating
conditions in the South was begun by the Scripps-Howard news chain,
and the story of “Bootleg Slavery” was featured in Time magazine, com-
plete with excerpts from the Caldwell series. The magazine supported
Caldwell’s assessment and concluded that “a vast stretch of the South was
the scene of humanity hit bottom.” Conditions in the region were so bad
that the inhabitants could not even get “the three M’s—Meal, Molasses
and Meat—a diet that nourishes pellagra but not men.” Now the battle
was joined in earnest.70
Georgians attacked the magazine, calling its repetition of the
Caldwell slanders “willful exaggeration or inexcusable ignorance,” “far-
fetched tripe,” and labeling Caldwell himself a “neurasthenic egomaniac.”
However, Caldwell’s father, Ira, supported him, sending a telegram that
asserted: “Erskine Caldwell’s story essentially true.” 71 A father’s defense
was expected, and it did little to assuage bruised Georgian pride.
The Augusta newspaper charged ahead with the promised investi-
gation. To its surprise, it found that some families were in utter need
of rehabilitation. Some, “living in want and squalor, [were] victims of
their own shiftlessness and ignorance.” Ira Caldwell guided reporters

to some of the farms Erskine had described, where they confirmed that
some homes were “unfit for human habitation.” They also uncovered “un-
mistakable evidences of malnutrition, disease and moral degeneration.”
“Several prominent citizens” agreed on “corrective measures” to address
those conditions whenever they were found. Foremost on their list of
solutions was “scientific sterilization” to remove society’s “worst enemy,
the dregs of itself.” 72
The completed investigation confirmed many details in the picture
Caldwell had painted. The elder Caldwell said that such conditions were
“the result of poverty and ignorance bred through generations.” His own
objective in assisting the investigation was to prevent “the development
of such people in the future.” 73 Buttressing these lay observers’ conclu-
sions, a social worker wrote that such degraded people as those Caldwell
described should be sent to institutions. Their homes should be leveled
and burned, she said. Setting aside sentimentality, she declared: “These
people are a cancer on society, a menace to themselves and the state; and
to perpetuate their condition only increases their number.” 74 Blaming
the victims salved the collective conscience of Caldwell’s critics. Time
summarized the controversy and the Augusta Chronicle reportage, which
concluded that 1 percent of east Georgia’s poor were outcasts from civili-
zation and could only be treated by sterilization. By then a bill to ensure
that result had passed the Georgia House and was pending before the
Georgia Senate.75 The result of the Caldwell controversy was clear to the
Augusta Chronicle. Although they faulted the novelist, who “laundered
our dirty linen and rattled the skeletons in our closet before hundreds of
thousands of people,” they conceded that the episode had a constructive
conclusion, because “people are aroused” to find a remedy to the social
ills that had been put on display. The adult members of the 10–35 families,
the “flotsam and jetsam in the sea of human misery” identified in the
paper’s investigation, should become wards of the state, “taken care of
until they themselves pass out” of existence through death. As for their
children, they should be sterilized so that “their race will be extinguished
with the next generation.” The newspaper noted that after many years
of advocacy, working “with forward looking, patriotic Georgians,” the
sterilization bill had been adopted by both legislative houses and was
awaiting the governor’s signature, representing “the first step forward
in our great social problem.” 76 The bill created a state board of eugenics
and allowed superintendents of state asylums to recommend candidates
for sterilization. A final amendment also allowed chain gang wardens to
name cases for surgery.77
Not everyone agreed with the legislation. The New Republic followed
the Caldwell flap and congratulated the Augusta Chronicle on its “entire
truthfulness” in investigating local conditions. The review proved that
“there are Jeeter Lesters in the world and that something should be done
to remedy the conditions under which they are forced to live.” 78 Address-
ing rural conditions rather than the reproductive potential of the poor
seemed the best course to other outside observers. But back in Georgia
the Atlanta Constitution saluted the sterilization measure, saying it ap-
pealed to “the common sense and reason of the people.” The newspaper
also quoted the newly deceased Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., whose famous
epigram a decade earlier signaled Supreme Court endorsement of eugenic
sterilization: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”79 Deep South-
erners seldom accorded such tribute to the opinions of former officers of
the Grand Army of the Republic.
Although the legislature had adopted the sterilization bill, in a pique
of partisan revenge, Governor Eugene Talmadge refused to sign it. Turn-
ing to Adjutant General Lindley W. Camp, Talmadge said: “Lindley, you
and I might go crazy some day and we don’t want them working on us.”80
His quip underscored the personal rather than policy concerns prompt-
ing his veto. The sterilization bill was only one of the more than 165 other
bills Talmadge vetoed that session.
Talmadge’s veto “turned back the hands of the clock,” declared the
Augusta Chronicle. The veto was one of the governor’s “most egregious
mistakes,” and it “struck a blow in behalf of illiteracy, degeneracy, imbe-
cility, insanity and crime.”81 Surely the governor’s spite was out of step
with the best southern traditions and most forward-looking boosters’
hopes. But in neighboring Alabama, Governor Bibb Graves also vetoed a
sterilization bill that year, while to Georgia’s northeast, a bill introduced
by freshman South Carolina state legislator Strom Thurmond became
law.82 Sterilization, it seemed, was an issue intensely sensitive to local
context.
After the veto of the Georgia sterilization law, Caldwell further in-
flamed local opinion when his 1935 dispatches from Georgia were collected
in a book entitled Some American People. In the book, he condemned the

plan to sterilize sharecroppers and the failure of such eugenic policies,
which do not “remedy the cause of the conditions” that generate social
problems. While conceding that sterilization might be appropriately ap-
plied in “certain individual cases,” Caldwell rejected the measure for the
“thousands of Southern tenant farmers . . . in an economic condition
that demands much more than superficial thought.”83 In his later work
Caldwell would repeatedly emphasize the plight of poor southern share-
croppers as a situation that could be improved without resort to surgical
intervention.
With a new governor in place in 1937, legislators from Caldwell’s
home county reintroduced the sterilization bill, which passed the Georgia
House of Representatives easily.84 Then, “without comment or debate,”
the Senate unanimously adopted the measure, designed “for immuniza-
tion from procreation of all insane persons and habitual criminals.”85
When the legislative session ended, Governor E. D. Rivers signed the
bill without fanfare, making Georgia the final state to adopt a eugenic
sterilization law.86 The Journal of the Georgia Medical Society applauded
the law as an appropriate step to address the “constant increase in the tax
burden.”87
In 1936, photographer Margaret Bourke-White toured the South
with Caldwell collecting images for another book, You Have Seen Their
Faces.88 The book’s illustrations included actual pictures of the Bungler
clan, revealed first in the journal Eugenics, then immortalized as fiction
in Tobacco Road. You Have Seen Their Faces was condemned in Augusta
as “balderdash” and “propaganda.”89
When the stage version of Tobacco Road was scheduled to play in Au-
gusta, the sheriff from Caldwell’s home town of Wrens wrote to protest.90
The play was received “with good nature and applause” in Augusta, but
in Atlanta, a new municipal censorship board banned the play as “sacri-
legious” and “generally vulgar and profane.”91
In 1940, as Tobacco Road was ending its record-setting seven-year run
on Broadway, Ira Caldwell traveled to Washington to meet government
officials in an attempt to lure money for a “rehabilitation community”
that would lift the inhabitants of the real “Tobacco Road” out of poverty.
Revisiting the family that he first described as the “Bunglers,” the elder
Caldwell tried once again to better their lot. If they were provided with
medicine to “wipe out their malaria” and had access to “clean and sturdy
houses surrounded by a few fertile acres,” they could “lift themselves out
of their dilemma,” Caldwell argued.92
By then Tobacco Road had found a new incarnation as a movie, and
the senior Caldwell acted as tour guide to Hollywood filmmakers who
visited the region looking for authentic settings for the film.93 With an eye
to a possible windfall for the local economy, the people of eastern Geor-
gia seemed to forget their irritation with Erskine Caldwell. The Augusta
Merchants Association endorsed plans to bring the world premiere of the
movie to town.94 The local paper felt the “violent controversy” had passed
and there would be no protest.95
But the flap was hardly over. Some theater patrons were disappointed
that the film had been stripped of the salty language that provided such
scandal in the book and the play.96 On the other hand, the mayor of Au-
gusta complained that it was “the most degrading and unwholesome film”
he had ever seen. Perhaps more important, it portrayed his city as a small
“backwoods community” rather than the bustling metropolis of more
than 100,000 souls that it now was. Although he instructed the city at-
torney to sue the movie producers for $500,000 for their slanderous por-
trayal of Augusta, Caldwell apparently did not take the threat seriously,
and nothing came of the lawsuit.97 Erskine Caldwell, known for so long
as the narrator for the “unwashed, unshaved, unclothed, uneducated, and
unintelligent white trash of a poverty stricken district,” left the “vermin-
ous Georgia loafers” of Tobacco Road behind.98
No evidence remains of a federal response to Ira Caldwell’s pleas;
he died a few years later just as World War II was coming to an end, with
the country in the middle of its long climb out of the Great Depression.99
During the next three decades, some 3,300 Georgians endured surgery
under Georgia’s sterilization law. Though it was in place only 33 years, in
a tally of surgical statistics, Georgia ranks fifth among all states in the to-
tal number of eugenic operations. Between 1950 and 1960, approximately
200 involuntary operations occurred every year at the state’s mental hos-
pital. In 1959 a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative series revealed that
sterilizations at Georgia’s Central State Hospital had been performed
routinely on any patient of childbearing age and that the surgeries were
often done not by a doctor but by a nurse. An advisory committee later
recommended that all eugenic sterilizations be discontinued.100
In 1966, new legislation was written sanctioning voluntary steril-

ization for purposes of birth control for married couples.101 Additional
amendments to those provisions eventually led to elimination of the law
for eugenic sterilization, which was repealed in 1970.102
In 2007, the Georgia Senate passed a resolution of “profound regret”
for eugenic sterilization legislation. The resolution leveled blame for pas-
sage of the 1937 measure at “Darwinian principles” along with “progres-
sive” academicians, scientists, politicians, and newspaper editors; those
with “religious” objections were credited with opposing it.103 No mention
was made of Erskine Caldwell or the Bunglers of Tobacco Road.
No t e s
1.â•‡ Martin Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of “Defective” Babies in
American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1996), 54.
2.â•‡Some studies that have highlighted eugenic themes in literature are Donald
J. Childs, Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Daylanne K. English, Unnatural Selec-
tions: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chapel Hill: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, 2004); Sylvia J. Cook, “Modernism from the Bottom
Up,” in Reading Erskine Caldwell: New Essays, ed. Robert L. McDonald (Jefferson, N.C.:
McFarland, 2006); and Karen Ann Keely, “The Pure Products of America: Eugenics and
Narrative in the Age of Sterilization” (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 1999).
3.â•‡Among the most cited popular fiction that includes references to eugenics
are Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), and Arrowsmith (1925); F. Scott
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925); and Ernest Hemingway, Torrents of Spring (1926).
Fitzgerald began his references to eugenics as a student at Princeton, where he wrote
the lyrics for a ditty entitled “Love or Eugenics” for a Triangle Club production. Banned
from participating in the play due to poor academic performance, Fitzgerald appeared
in drag, dressed as a chorus girl. See F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fie! Fie! Fi-Fi! A Facsimile of
the 1914 Acting Script and Musical Score (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,
1996).
4.â•‡ This connection is suggested, for example, in Dan B. Miller’s biography Erskine
Caldwell: The Journey from Tobacco Road (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 219.
5.â•‡ Edward J. Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
6.â•‡ Karen A. Keely, “Poverty, Sterilization, and Eugenics in Erskine Caldwell’s
Tobacco Road,” Journal of American Studies 36 (2002): 23–42; Betsy L. Nies, “Defending
Jeeter,” in Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s,
ed. Susan Currell and Christina Cogdell (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 120–39.
7.â•‡ W. E. Gonzales, “National Corn Exposition and Its Big Meaning,” Atlanta Con-
stitution, January 25, 1913; “Need of Child Welfare Exhibit Is Arousing Much Interest,”
Atlanta Constitution, September 21, 1913.
8.â•‡ “Eugenics for Atlanta Is Strong Prediction,” Atlanta Constitution, November 19,
1914.
9.â•‡A. T. Spaulding Jr., “How Mendel’s Laws Discredit Eugenics,” Atlanta Constitu-
tion, March 9, 1914. The Better Babies gave way to the more formally organized Fitter
Family contests run by the American Eugenics Society. In 1924, an important year for
Georgia eugenics, the family of a school principal took the gold medal at the Fitter Fami-
lies contest at the Georgia State Fair. See “School Principal and Family Take Fair Top
Honors,” Savannah Press, November 6, 1924.
10.â•‡ “Britain Is Opposed to Eugenics in Schools,” Atlanta Constitution, January 9,
1914.
11.â•‡ “No Eugenics in Schools,” editorial, Atlanta Constitution, January 11, 1914.
12.â•‡ Paul Jones, “Governor and Mayor Are Lauded by Sunday,” Atlanta Constitution,
November 5, 1917.
13.â•‡ “Damaged Goods,” Atlanta Constitution, January 8, 1916.
14.â•‡ “Walter Andrews Now Believer in Eugenics,” Atlanta Constitution, January 2,
1916.
15.â•‡ “Eugenics Bill Bitterly Fought by Senator Kea,” Atlanta Constitution, July 13, 1920.
16.â•‡ “Kill Marriage Bill after Two Day Fight: Senators Defeat Bill Requiring Certifi-
cate of Health before Issuance of License,” Atlanta Constitution, July 14, 1920.
17.â•‡ “Eugenics Bill Rejected,” Washington Post, August 2, 1921; “Kennedy Offers
Eugenics Bill,” Atlanta Constitution, July 7, 1923; “Legislators Open Determined Plan to
Clear Slate,” Atlanta Constitution, July 20, 1924.
18.â•‡ Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia 17 (1928): 308–309.
19.â•‡ Ellis Parker Butler, “Suzanne on Race Tinkering,” Atlanta Constitution, June 7,
1914.
20.â•‡ “Racial Integrity as a National Question,” editorial, Atlanta Constitution, Febru-
ary 7, 1907.
21.â•‡ “Racial Marriage a National Problem,” editorial, Atlanta Constitution, August
21, 1908.
22.â•‡ “The Two Go Hand in Hand,” editorial, Atlanta Constitution, June 21, 1914.
23.â•‡ “The Public Health Bill,” Atlanta Constitution, July 12, 1914.
24.â•‡ Paul A. Lombardo, “Miscegenation, Eugenics & Racism: Historical Footnotes
to Loving v. Virginia,” University of California, Davis Law Review 21 (1988): 422–52.
25.â•‡ Walter A. Plecker to Rev. Wendell White, May 10, 1924, E. S. Cox Papers, Duke
University [hereafter Cox Papers].
26.â•‡ James C. Davis to John Powell, May 25, 1925, John Powell Papers, University of
Virginia [hereafter Powell Papers].
27.â•‡ “Appeal Is Made to Keep Blood of Whites Pure,” Atlanta Constitution, February
13, 1924.
28.â•‡ Powell to Davis, May 30, 1925, Powell Papers.
29.â•‡Sam W. Small, “Wide Interest Is Aroused in Racial Integrity Bill,” Atlanta Con-
stitution, June 28, 1925.
30.â•‡Davis to Powell, August 22, 1927, Powell Papers.
31.â•‡Dr. G. I. Garrard, cited in Peter G. Cranford, But for the Grace of God: The Inside
Story of the World’s Largest Insane Asylum, Milledgeville! (Augusta, Ga.: Great Pyramid
Press, 1981), 68.
32.â•‡ “Doctors of Georgia Plan Bill for Sterilization of the Criminally Insane,” At-
lanta Constitution, April 18, 1913; “A Worthy Measure,” Atlanta Constitution, May 30, 1913.
One out-of-state advocate of eugenic surgery described the operation as the solution for
the “vexing negro problem.” Since more than 50 percent of all convicted criminals are
blacks, he said, sterilization of the prison population would necessarily apply primarily
to that group. “Declares Sterilization Is Solution of Negro Problem,” Atlanta Constitu-
tion, April 20, 1913.
33.â•‡ W. L. Champion, “Sterilization of Confirmed Criminals, Idiots, Rapists, Feeble-
Minded, and Other Defectives,” Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia 3 (1913): 112–
14, at 113.
34.â•‡ “Remaking the Universe,” Atlanta Constitution, June 28, 1914.
35.â•‡ W. B. Hardman, “The Medical Gospel of the Twentieth Century,” Journal of the
Medical Association of Georgia 4 (1914): 71–75.
36.â•‡ “Anderson Urges Mentality Tests,” Atlanta Constitution, March 30, 1919.
37.â•‡ “The Feebleminded,” Atlanta Constitution, June 2, 1919.
38.â•‡ “The Cost of Feeblemindedness,” Atlanta Constitution, May 29, 1922.
39.â•‡ “Financial Aspect of Feeblemindedness,” Atlanta Constitution, May 31, 1922.
40.â•‡ “What Feeblemindedness Means to the Community and What the Community
Can Do to Protect Itself,” Atlanta Constitution, June 4, 1922.
41.â•‡ “State Sanitarium Short of Funds,” Augusta Chronicle, April 18, 1929.
42.â•‡ “State Legislation,” Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia 21 (1932): 335.
43.â•‡ “Sterilization of Epileptics Urged,” Augusta Chronicle, May 14, 1929.
44.â•‡I. S. Caldwell, “The Eugenics Question,” Augusta Chronicle, May 20, 1929; I. S.
Caldwell, “Are We Going Up or Down?” Augusta Chronicle, December 5, 1929.
45.â•‡ Miller, The Journey from Tobacco Road, 125.
46.â•‡I. S. Caldwell, “The Bunglers: A Narrative Study in Five Parts,” Eugenics 3 (1930):
202–10 (part 1); 247–51 (part 2); 293–99 (part 3); 332–36 (part 4); and 377–83 (part 5).
Comment on “quicksands of ignorance” on 295.
47.â•‡Ibid., 207.
48.â•‡Ibid., 332.
49.â•‡Ibid., 383.
50.â•‡R. J. Terry, “Robert Bennett Bean, 1874–1944,” American Anthropologist, n.s.,
48 (1946): 70–74; Miller, The Journey from Tobacco Road, 77. (Miller mistakenly thought
Caldwell had studied with Bean’s son, William.)
51.â•‡ Erskine Caldwell, Call It Experience: The Years of Learning How to Write (New
York: Duell, Sloan and Pierce, 1951), 34–35.
52.â•‡ Erskine Caldwell, “Georgia Cracker,” Haldeman-Julius Monthly 4 (November
1926): 39–43, at 41.
53.â•‡Caldwell, Call It Experience, 81.
54.â•‡See, for example, “Erskine Caldwell: Phenomenon,” Gastonia (N.C.) Daily GaÂ�
zette, March 2, 1935 (“a notch above the filthy little sex booklets”; “nice picking for the
literary rag man”; designed for “the entertainment of sex-greedy filth scavengers”).
55.â•‡ “Atlanta Doctors to Drive for Sterilization,” Atlanta Constitution, February 4,
1934.
56.â•‡ “Report of the Committee on Public Policy and Legislation,” Journal of the
Medical Association of Georgia 23 (1934): 304.
57.â•‡ “Legal Sterilization Advocated in Address by Emory Biologist,” Atlanta Consti-

tution, March 4, 1934; “Sterilization Is Urged by Biologist to Protect Unborn from Unfit-
ness,” Atlanta Constitution, April 14, 1934.
58.â•‡ “Sterilization by State Urged by Georgians,” Atlanta Constitution, April 29, 1934.
59.â•‡ “Lindsey Urges Sterilization as Insanity Ban,” Atlanta Constitution, March 29,
1934.
60.â•‡ “Sterilization in California,” Atlanta Constitution, April 27, 1934.
61.â•‡ “Sterilization Act Expected to Come before Assembly,” Atlanta Constitution,
November 25, 1934.
62.â•‡ Erskine Caldwell, “Georgia Poverty Swept, Says Caldwell,” New York Post, Feb-
ruary 18, 1935.
63.â•‡ Erskine Caldwell, “Landowners Find Help Gives Them Edge on Laborers,” New
York Post, February 19, 1935.
64.â•‡ Erskine Caldwell, “Georgia Land Barons Oust Dying Girl and Her Father,” New
65.â•‡ Erskine Caldwell, “Starving Babies Suckled by Dog in Georgia Cabin,” New
66.â•‡ “Erskine Caldwell, Noted Author, Is Visitor in Augusta,” Augusta Chronicle,
December 23, 1933.
67.â•‡ “Caldwell Story Called Untrue; Probe Ordered,” Augusta Chronicle, March 5,
1935.
68.â•‡ “What Will the Good People of Jefferson County Say of This?” Augusta Chroni-
cle, March 4, 1935.
69.â•‡Letter to the Editor, “Share Cropper Conditions Denied,” New York Post, March
6, 1935.
70.â•‡ “Farmers,” Time 25 (March 4, 1935): 13.
71.â•‡Letters: “Share Croppers,” “Crackpot Version,” “Caldwell’s Hog Waller,” and
“Father,” all in Time 25 (March 25, 1935): 5–8.
72.â•‡ “Investigation Is Made to Determine Basis Caldwell Had for All His Writings,”
Augusta Chronicle, March 10, 1935.
73.â•‡ “Erskine Caldwell,” Augusta Chronicle, March 14, 1935.
74.â•‡ “From a Social Worker,” Augusta Chronicle, March 17, 1935.
75.â•‡ “Along Tobacco Road,” Time 25 (March 25, 1935): 59–61.
76.â•‡ “The Caldwell Issue and Long-Range Rehabilitation,” Augusta Chronicle, March
24, 1935.
77.â•‡ “House Votes Sterilization,” Atlanta Constitution, March 7, 1935. On chain
gangs, see also Augusta Chronicle, March 8, 1935.
78.â•‡ New Republic, March 27, 1935, 173.
79.â•‡ “Sterilization Bill Passes the House,” Atlanta Constitution, March 9, 1935.
80.â•‡ “Talmadge Vetoes Bill to Sterilize Criminals, Insane,” Atlanta Constitution,
March 27, 1935.
81.â•‡ “The Governor’s Veto of the Sterilization Bill,” Augusta Chronicle, March 27,
1935.
82.â•‡ “Sterilization Bill Is Vetoed by Graves,” Atlanta Constitution, June 26, 1935;
“Sterilization Okayed for Carolina Insane,” Atlanta Constitution, May 19, 1935.
83.â•‡ Erskine Caldwell, Some American People (New York: Robert M. McBride, 1935),
236.
84.â•‡ “Vote Sterilization of State’s Insane,” Savannah Press, February 9, 1937.

85.â•‡ “Sterilization Bill Passed,” Atlanta Georgian, February 19, 1937.
86.â•‡ “Sterilization Bill Accorded Governor’s OK,” Atlanta Journal, February 24, 1937.
87.â•‡Avary M. Dimmock, “Human Sterilization,” Journal of the Medical Society of
Georgia 26 (August 1937): 423–25.
88.â•‡ Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces (New
York: Modern Age Books, 1937).
89.â•‡ “Half-Truths Worse Than Lies,” Augusta Chronicle, March 28, 1938.
90.â•‡ “Opposes Showing of ‘Tobacco Road,’” Augusta Chronicle, October 16, 1938.
91.â•‡ “Augustans Accept ‘Tobacco Road’ with Good Nature and Applause,” Augusta
Chronicle, November 18, 1938; “New Board Bans ‘Tobacco Road,’” Augusta Chronicle,
November 22, 1938.
92.â•‡ William Gober, “Senior Caldwell Hopes to Rehabilitate Tobacco Road,” Au-
gusta Chronicle, August 11, 1940.
93.â•‡ Joel Huff, “Hollywood Trio Here Inspecting ‘Tobacco Road,’” Augusta Chroni-
cle, November 5, 1940.
94.â•‡ “City Briefs,” Augusta Chronicle, January 1, 1941.
95.â•‡ “No Longer an Issue,” Augusta Chronicle, March 2, 1941.
96.â•‡ Harry Gage, “Augustans Are Disappointed in ‘Tobacco Road’ Picture,” Augusta
Chronicle, March 4, 1941.
97.â•‡ “Augusta Mayor Lambasts Makers of ‘Tobacco Road,’” Augusta Chronicle,
March 6, 1941; “Work to Begin on Suit against ‘Tobacco Road,’” Augusta Chronicle,
March 15, 1941.
98.â•‡George Tucker, “New York,” Augusta Chronicle, June 19, 1941.
99.â•‡ “Rev. I. S. Caldwell Dies in Columbia,” Augusta Chronicle, August 18, 1944.
100.â•‡A series of letters from the former legal counsel to the Medical Association of
Georgia clarify the events that led to passage of the voluntary sterilization law as well
as the eventual repeal of the Georgia eugenic sterilization act. See John. L. Moore Jr. to
Julius Paul, October 10, 1968, November 4, 1968, and February 22, 1972, copies in pos-
session of the author. See also Gayle White, “Involuntary Sterilization in Georgia: Why
Did It Happen?” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, February 4, 2007.
101.â•‡ “Voluntary Sterilization Act,” Georgia Acts 1966, p. 453.
102.â•‡ “Voluntary Sterilization Act,” Georgia Acts 1970, p. 683. The 1970 law retained
provisions for sterilization of people who are “irreversibly and incurably mentally in-
competent” and could not raise children safely. That law was successfully challenged
and declared unconstitutional for failing to provide procedural and evidentiary protec-
tions for those subject to sterilization. See Motes v. Hall County Department of Children
and Family Services, 251 Ga. 373, 1983. The faulty provisions were amended, and current
Georgia law continues to allow sterilization of the mentally disabled following a court
order.
103.â•‡ Georgia Senate Resolution 247 (2007), “Expressing profound regret for Georgia’s
participation in the eugenics movement in the United States.” For details of the resolu-
tion and the political machinations that accompanied it, see Paul A. Lombardo, “Dis-
ability, Eugenics, and the Culture Wars,” St. Louis University Journal of Health Law and
Policy 2 (2009): 57–79.
fou r
“Quality, Not Mere Quantity,

Counts”: Black Eugenics and
the NAACP Baby Contests
Gr e gory M ic h a e l Dor r a n d A ng e l a L og a n
In the past decade, Americans have rediscovered their nation’s eugenic

past. Governors and legislators in Virginia, Oregon, North Carolina,
South Carolina, California, Indiana, and Georgia have made proclama-
tions of apology, adopted resolutions of regret, and voiced general repu-
diations of past eugenic laws and other efforts to purify the citizenry by
skimming allegedly antisocial traits from the gene pool through practices
such as compulsory sterilization. Popular accounts of eugenic history in
the media have depicted racist white elites abusing “unfit” populations—
specifically the mentally retarded, lower-class women, and racial and eth-
nic minorities. At least two films on the U.S. eugenics movement have
been made from this perspective.1
These media depictions were consistent with the bulk of scholarship
on the eugenics movement. For approximately 30 years, most historians
of eugenics have focused on prominent white scientists, psychologists,
and eugenic propagandists. More recently, attention has turned to “sec-
ond tier” white eugenicists and state-level studies of the pro-eugenics rank
and file, illustrating the pervasive nature of eugenic ideology across white
American culture. The influence of hereditarian ideas within the African
American community has received much less attention. Most studies po-
sition African Americans as the targets of eugenic control and repression,
or as vocal—if disempowered and ignored—critics of eugenics. These
accounts strip black historical actors of their agency and oversimplify the
American eugenics movement.2
Hereditarianism and eugenics held strong appeal for various segments
of the African American community. While very few African Americans
68
“Qua l i t y, n o t m e r e Qua n t i t y, C ou n t s ” â•… · â•… 69
accepted the claims made by black polemicists like William Hannibal

Thomas—who posited the hereditary inferiority of his own race—many
blacks endorsed the Nation of Islam’s (NOI) proto-genetic-engineering
eschatology. Followers of â†œNOI leader Elijah Muhammad believed the evil
breeding experiments of Yakub, the “big head scientist,” resulted in the
white race and its political domination of blacks. Other African Ameri-
cans flocked to Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Associa-
tion (UNIA), adopting his zeal for maintaining black racial purity and
his advocacy of race separation that echoed the eugenically tinged “racial
integrity” programs propounded by segregationist whites. Yet all three of
these thinkers, their organizations, and the counternarratives they built
to combat white scientific racism emerged after an earlier—and to some
degree subtler—form of African American hereditarianism. In fact, the
theories of Thomas, Muhammad, and Garvey each responded as much to
the shortcomings of this earlier class-biased and race-neutral black eugen-
ics as they did to the racist provocations of white eugenicists. 3
This essay maps the broad contours of what might be called “assimi-
lationist” eugenics—a perspective that viewed racial difference as insig-
nificant, but adopted more fundamental eugenic notions about distinc-
tions between “fit” and “unfit” people. This theory of human breeding,
applicable to all people regardless of race, could appeal to blacks. Assimi-
lationist eugenics grew out of older traditions of African American racial
egalitarianism. Popularized by public intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois,
and inculcated among the black elite by educators like Thomas Wyatt
Turner, assimilationist eugenics informed the thinking of many upper-
class blacks during the first third of the twentieth century. Contrasting
Du Bois and Turner’s assimilationist eugenics to Thomas’s arguments
for black inferiority, Muhammad’s quasi-scientific Afrocentrism, and
Garvey’s racial purity crusade underscores the intellectual thread woven
through all four ideologies. All of these men believed in eugenics’ central
dogma that (a) human beings could be sorted into the relatively “fit” and
“unfit” and (b) society as a whole could be improved by ensuring the
propagation of the fit and reducing procreation among the unfit. While
they differed over what attributes characterized fitness and determined
membership in that valorized group, they agreed that concrete programs
could translate thought into action, uplifting the race.4
70â•… ·â•… G r e g o r y M i c h a e l D o r r a n d A n g e l a L o g a n
The second part of this essay analyzes the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People’s baby contests, a key component of
the assimilationist eugenic agenda. More than infant beauty pageants,
these competitions blended ideology and activism. Baby contests popu-
larized race-neutral, class-inflected eugenic ideals, drafting these heredi-
tarian principles into the NAACP’s fight against the fruits of white eugen-
ics: segregation, antimiscegenation law, and lynching. The baby contests
highlight how middle-class African Americans co-opted and inverted
the repressive ideas and programs of “mainline” racist white eugenicists,
recasting them into arguments and policies that supported class-inflected
social justice through African American racial uplift. 5
A ssimi l ationist E ugenics
Or ig i n s
From the moment Sir Francis Galton coined the word eugenics in 1883,
the notion of scientifically improving humanity through better breed-
ing captivated modern thinkers. Whether advocating increased pro-
creation among the “fit”—so-called positive eugenics—or demanding
negative eugenic interventions like immigration and marriage restriction,
sterilization, and segregation to reduce the propagation of the “unfit,”
theorists remained convinced that eugenics promised utopian improve-
ment for humanity. A host of social problems—alcoholism, criminal-
ity, pauperism, prostitution, tuberculosis, venereal disease, and above
all “feeblemindedness”—might be eradicated by preventing the birth of
those genetically predisposed to these maladies. Definitions of fitness and
unfitness corresponded to native-born, white Americans’ racial, class,
and ethnic prejudices, underscoring the eugenics movement’s overlap-
ping scientific and cultural imperatives. But despite affinities between
eugenics and white supremacy, black folk recognized promise and power
in the new science, too.
Any discussion of African Americans’ eugenic beliefs must be placed
against the backdrop of white and black support for “popular eugenics”:
the ambient, if nebulous, belief in the existence of “fit” and “unfit” babies
blessed or cursed with “good” or “bad” physical and behavioral charac-
teristics. Popular eugenics—like the more organized, white-dominated
mainline movement itself—swept over American society during the 1910s

and 1920s. It is hardly surprising that white and black Americans often
analogized human heredity to the domestication and “improvement” of
animals and plants—a comparison fostered by direct experience with
stockbreeding and farming. Census data indicated that until 1920 the
majority of the U.S. population lived in rural areas; 90 percent of African
Americans lived in farm settings until the Great Migration took over a
million blacks from the rural south to industrial jobs, predominantly in
northern and eastern cities. Familiarity with the basic concepts of hus-
bandry and horticulture demystified eugenic concepts; attendance at
(and enjoyment of) county and state fairs’ stock, crop, and baking compe-
titions made “better babies” and eugenic “Fitter Families” contests seem
more like an entertaining diversion than a program for social control. 6
Like their white counterparts, many African Americans had heard
the conventional wisdom, or concluded from direct experience, that “fit”
and “unfit” individuals existed. Just looking around, they saw evidence of
imperfection in their neighbors who were mentally slow, physically disfig-
ured, or morally lax. Many Americans, regardless of race, became inter-
ested in finding a “fit” mate and having “fit” children—both to enhance
their progeny’s life prospects and to fulfill their social responsibility to
improve the population. By emphasizing familiar premises of hereditary
determinism and genetic improvement—rather than black inferiority
(Thomas), deranged black scientists and genetically engineered white
devils (NOI), or light-skinned “race traitors” and the need for black “ra-
cial purity” (UNIA)—assimilationist eugenic theorists wedded popular
ideas to more esoteric scientific concepts, appropriating the power of sci-
ence to serve integrationist political ends. In constructing a “scientific”
counternarrative to combat the “scientific” racism of mainline white eu-
genicists, assimilationist eugenicists sought to “fight fire with fire,” turn-
ing racist theory on its head.7
T h e or y
W.E.B. Du Bois led the intellectual assault on the hereditarian doctrines

undergirding the mainline eugenics movement. Du Bois’s efforts to define
race as a historical entity, his attempts to debunk purported racial differ-
ences in intelligence, and his steadfast objection to racial supremacy have
72â•… · â•… G r e g o r y M i c h a e l D o r r a n d A n g e l a L o g a n
often been cited as evidence of his hostility toward hereditary determin-

ism and eugenics. Although Du Bois railed against white supremacists
who used the “objectivity” of “eugenic science” to mask their racism, a
close reading of â†œDu Bois’s work reveals his nuanced deployment of heredi-
tarian ideas in his social theorizing. For Du Bois, the complexity of human
development exceeded the “either-or” simplisms of heredity versus envi-
ronment, nature versus nurture. He maintained a healthy respect for the
notion of genetic fitness, even as he remained mindful of environment’s
power in shaping human destiny. Du Bois’s intellectual formulation of
the “Talented Tenth”—those African Americans he believed destined to
lead the larger black population to equality—was shot through with this
sophisticated hereditarianism. 8
Rather than debating the relative influence of “nature” or “nurture,”
Du Bois’s hereditarianism described an arc from racial essentialism to
intellectual elitism. In his controversial 1897 address “The Conservation
of Races,” he acknowledged that “there are differences—subtle, delicate,
and elusive, though they may be—which have silently but definitely sepa-
rated men into groups.” Du Bois believed that most of these observable,
socially salient “racial” differences resulted from the influence of histori-
cal and cultural context (environment). Blacks’ destiny, according to Du
Bois, was neither biological extinction (through race war) nor “absorption
by the white Americans” (through either acculturation or interbreed-
ing). Instead, “it is our duty to conserve our physical powers, our intel-
lectual endowments, our spiritual ideals” through “race organization, by
race solidarity, by race unity,” in other words, through efforts to improve
the sociopolitical environment of African Americans. Yet, whatever the
power of environment, African Americans’ experience was also shaped
by heredity.9
Political and cultural solidarity needed to be augmented by eugenic
biology: proper breeding. Only procreation among fit blacks would eradi-
cate the race’s “heritage of moral iniquity,” an infirmity that Du Bois de-
scribed as the “hereditary mass of corruption from white adulterers” that
was genetically instilled in some mixed-race children during slavery and
after and then, thanks to Jim Crow, concentrated in the black population
through interbreeding. Only a dual assault, through rearing and breed-
ing, could meliorate slavery’s social and biological legacy. Unlike white
eugenicists who rhetorically acknowledged the coequal importance of
heredity and environment before privileging heredity’s effect on indi-

viduals and groups, Du Bois affirmed the nature/nurture dialectic and
tracked its variable effect on African American destiny.10
In his famous 1903 essay, “The Talented Tenth,” Du Bois wrote, “the
Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.”
This “revolutionary group of distinguished Negroes . . . persons of marked
ability” were “leaders of a Talented Tenth, standing conspicuously among
the best of their time” who represented social, political, and biological
salvation. Using language resonant with medical and eugenic ideas of
purity and superiority and emphasizing it with capital letters, Du Bois
asserted that African Americans must cultivate “the Best of [their] race
that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death
of the Worst in their own and other races.” Underscoring the identity of
class and quality, Du Bois acknowledged that environmental consider-
ations conditioned the ability of the fit to improve the inferior: “From
the very first, it has been the educated and intelligent of the Negro people
that have led and elevated the mass, and the sole obstacles that nullified
and retarded their efforts were slavery and race prejudice.” Slavery and
racism, however, were more than simply environmental constraints. Du
Bois averred that “slavery was but the legalized survival of the unfit and
the nullification of the work of natural internal leadership.” Despite slav-
ery’s dysgenic effects, the Talented Tenth had managed to survive. Du
Bois charged these elite African Americans with rising and pulling “all
that were worth the saving up to their vantage ground.” Not every black
should be saved—only those “fit” ones whose salvation would improve
and advance the race by expanding the ranks of the fit within the black
population.11
Du Bois’s incipient (and ultimately short-lived) political and biologi-
cal isolationism evolved into his belief in the essential biological equality
of the races. As early as 1899, Du Bois had identified a “submerged tenth”
among blacks comprised of the “lowest class of criminals, prostitutes, and
loafers”—exactly the sort of people white eugenicists would excoriate as
the “shiftless, ignorant and worthless class of antisocial whites” some 25
years later. By 1904, Du Bois argued that “the Negro races are from every
physical standpoint full and normally developed men [that] show abso-
lutely no variation from the European type sufficient to base any theory
of essentially human difference upon.” While the races were biologically
equal, that did not mean that there were not fit and unfit individuals
within each race—merely that the races, as groups, defied hierarchical
organization. Du Bois wrote that “the Negroes have their degenerate
types in the dwarfs and Hottentots—so have the Europeans; they have
their mixed types of all degrees and kinds of mixture—so have the Eu-
ropeans. But it is an unproved and to all appearance an unprovable thesis
that the physical development of men shows any color line below which
is black pelt and above the white.” That individuals might be ranked ac-
cording to innate ability, however, was both possible and, from Du Bois’s
self-proclaimed intellectual vantage point, self-evident.12
In 1910 Du Bois declared that “there are human stocks with whom it
is physically unwise to intermarry, but to think that these stocks are all
colored or that there are no such white stocks is unscientific and false.”
Perhaps thinking of his own multiracial heritage, Du Bois argued that ra-
cial intermarriage was “not necessarily undesirable and race blending may
lead, and often has led, to new, gifted, and desirable stocks and individu-
als.” Individual fitness, not race, was the yardstick for measuring biologi-
cal worth. This premise anchored Du Bois’s conception of the Talented
Tenth as “a carefully bred, selected, and trained elite.”13
Just as racial harmony could result, in the near term, from the leader-
ship of and cooperation among the “best” whites and blacks, long-term
African American advance depended upon the prolific reproduction of
the Talented Tenth. Social improvement and political equality would be
ensured as the multiplying fit gradually replaced the unfit. Instead of re-
gressing toward the mean, the future African American population would
be socially and biologically uplifted to the status of the present Talented
Tenth of all races. Assimilationist eugenics, like mainline white eugenics,
represented a call for biological meliorism to serve sociopolitical ends.14
The hereditary superiority of the Talented Tenth appears throughout
Du Bois’s writing, but he never neglects environment. He argued that
all environmental legacies of slavery (like disfranchisement, Jim Crow,
racism, and what today might be labeled “environmental racism”—the
shunting of blacks to unsanitary urban ghettos and parasite-infested rural
margins) must be removed to ensure the maximum attainment of black
potential. But heredity also deserved its due. Not all inequality stemmed
from the environment. In Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois confirmed his belief
in “the rule of inequality:—that of the million black youth, some were
fitted to know and some to dig.” He made this inborn individual fitness
the basis of his call for education according to inborn ability, regardless
of race, class, gender, or other cultural considerations. He pronounced
in 1912 that, to achieve their rightful leadership role, “the Talented Tenth
must be created based upon the commitment of honest colored men and
women not to bring aimless rafts of children into the world, but, as many
as, with reasonable sacrifice, we can train to largest manhood.” Acknowl-
edging the coequality of heredity and environment, Du Bois further de-
clared that African Americans, “having procreated reasonably, must then
seek out colored children of ability and . . . find that Talented Tenth (in the
next and subsequent generations) and encourage it by the best and most
exhaustive training in order to supply the Negro race and the world with
leaders, thinkers and artists.” Reasonable, eugenic breeding and euthenic,
environmental conditioning would save the race.15
Environmental influences (training, social background) had to be
matched with hereditary ability (genius, inborn aptitudes). In the August
1922 issue of the Crisis, Du Bois further articulated his eugenic goals: “The
Negro has not been breeding for an object; therefore, he must begin to
train and breed for brains, for efficiency, for beauty.” He enlarged on this
theme in October, when he wrote, “Birth control is science and sense
applied to the bringing of children into the world, and of all who need
it we Negroes are the first.” Du Bois, like many of his white eugenicist
contemporaries, felt that “we in America are becoming sharply divided
into the mass who have endless children and the class who . . . have few or
none.” Surely upper-class folk could provide their children with enriched
environments and experiences. Their ability to do so, however, was predi-
cated on their success, which was itself grounded on their inborn fitness.
Fitness was both a cause and signifier of their upper-class status: a positive
hereditary legacy they would pass on to their children.16
Du Bois sought the widest audience for these ideas. The NAACP’s
house organ, the Crisis, under Du Bois’s founding editorial leadership,
became the mouthpiece for assimilationist eugenics and a “eugenic ‘fam-
ily album,’ a visual and literary blueprint for the ideal, modern black indi-
vidual.” The Crisis quoted psychologist Albert Sidney Beckham’s opinion:
“Eugenics will improve the Negro of the future.”17 The magazine also ad-
vanced assimilationist eugenics in subtle ways. The “Men of the Month”
issues, for instance, were devoted to “establishing the ‘college-bred,’
middle-class, urban, intellectual man as the authentic representative of

an ideal racial family.” This “New Negro” man was intended to serve as
“visual confirmation of the genetic uplift of the race.” The magazine, how-
ever, sought more than tallying examples of black “manhood” to counter
white claims of innate African American “savagery.”18
The October “Children’s Number,” which began the year of the publi-
cation’s inception and ended the year Du Bois resigned as editor, featured
stories, editorials, and pictures of youth and babies. The issue emphasized
the importance of uplifting the race through increasing and promoting
the Talented Tenth’s progeny. Compilations of outstanding achievements
by children and young adults served two purposes: they countered “racist
representations of blacks by the white press” and kept black folk updated
on and encouraged by recent achievements.
For its first eight years, the Children’s Number promoted the achieve-
ments of select children, chosen to represent the proper confluence of
environment and heredity. Du Bois conceded, “True, these are selected
children,” but they were harbingers of “a large and larger class of well-
nourished, healthy beautiful children among the colored people,” the
eugenic progeny of the fit. The 1927 edition listed “five exceptional Negro
children” not by name but by intelligence quotient—implying the chil-
dren’s hereditary fitness. Although Du Bois decried white eugenicists’
use of intelligence testing to rank races, he acknowledged heredity’s role
in shaping intellect and used one of the eugenicists’ most prized tools—
IQ tests—to counter scientific racists’ accusations of black intellectual
inferiority.19 He and his supporters invoked heredity in support of the
eugenic breeding of the Talented Tenth among all races.
In 1932, Du Bois contributed an essay on birth control to Margaret
Sanger’s Birth Control Review. Du Bois accepted the conventional eugenic
wisdom that “the more intelligent class” of all races used contraception.
But because the unfit cohort was disproportionately large among blacks,
“the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites,
is from that part of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able
to rear their children properly.” He complained that African Americans
“must learn that among human races and groups, as among vegetables,
quality and not mere quantity really counts.” If his advice was followed,
“In time efficiency and brains are going to be well-bred in the American
Negro race.” Du Bois adhered so strongly to this notion that he allowed
this article to be reprinted, unchanged, in 1938. In principle, Du Bois as-

sumed that distinctions in ability could be scientifically and objectively
measured and eugenically reproduced not between the races, implying a
permanent barrier, but among the races. White-dominated culture and
science, however, blinded by prejudice, ignored black merit and biologi-
cal potential and sought to limit fitness to the white race. Other black
intellectuals shared Du Bois’s meritocratic, antiracist view and worked
hard to popularize it.20
T e ac h i ng
Dr. Thomas Wyatt Turner adhered to a more explicitly hereditarian

worldview than Du Bois. The son of former slaves, a devout Catholic, a
charter member of the NAACP, and a founder of its Washington, D.C.,
chapter, Turner maintained three identities often believed incompatible
with support for eugenics. Nevertheless, after graduating from How-
ard University in 1901, Turner taught biology and eventually eugenics
at Tuskegee, Howard, and Hampton universities. He first encountered
eugenics during the summer of 1904, when he studied at the Long Island
Biological Laboratory under Dr. Charles Benedict Davenport, the dean
of American eugenics and a determined, if genteel, racist. Turner’s career
would exemplify how African American intellectuals, including scien-
tists, could exploit eugenics’ ideological flexibility to harmonize their
racial, religious, and reformist beliefs.21
Turner taught generations of students about the power of heredity
in human affairs. After a decade (1901–12) at Tuskegee, Turner joined the
Howard faculty and began teaching eugenics in 1913. Turner used Paul
Popenoe and Roswell Johnson’s mainline classic, Applied Eugenics, as his
text. He also assigned Davenport’s famous essay, “Eugenics and Euthen-
ics,” suggesting Turner’s effort to equilibrate the influence of heredity and
environment. Still, examining his Sex Hygiene students in 1915, Turner
asked them to “Define Eugenics. Explain how society may be helped by
applying eugenic laws.” A 1920 exam asked almost the same question.
Turner expected his students to learn and adopt the major hereditarian
tenets of eugenic improvement. 22
Like Du Bois and other black intellectuals, Turner identified the
Talented Tenth—people like himself and his students—as the eugeni-
cally fit who should procreate to improve the black population. Turner
agreed with Du Bois that the “best” blacks were every bit as “fit” as the
“best” whites, ignoring race and accepting the class biases of white eu-
genicists. Asserting that educational and economic achievement signi-
fied the power of heredity allowed African American leaders to consider
themselves “racial exemplars” in the most essential biological terms. Their
intellectual and socioeconomic success became a self-justifying prescrip-
tion and prognosis for black eugenic salvation.
Assimilationist eugenic theory thus found a ready partner in the pe-
riod’s most widespread, class-based, intraracial reform ideology, known
colloquially as “racial uplift.” This impulse was characterized by the no-
blesse oblige of the Talented Tenth and encapsulated in the National
Association of Colored Women’s motto: “Lifting as We Climb.” Turner
argued that if African Americans used biology and eugenics to “uplift”
the race to meet white norms on the fundamental biological level, then
cultural disparities would vanish.
Eugenical uplift would undermine white appeals to biology as jus-
tification for black inequality, taking heredity out of the interracial na-
ture/nurture debate. Forced to admit human beings’ fundamental genetic
similarities, whites would have to concede that inequity resulted from the
environmental constraints of racism, not genetic essence. Assimilation-
ist eugenic uplift, in this context, provided a method for regaining black
citizenship.23
Turner taught mainline beliefs regarding the “inferiority” of the
feebleminded, even as he reconfigured these notions to create a scien-
tifically inflected liberation ideology for African Americans. He declared
the feebleminded “incapable of competing on equal terms” with normal
people. Most white eugenicists contended that this inability to compete
also characterized black/white group relationships, implying that all
blacks were inherently feebleminded. Turner rejected this suggestion,
asserting that “defectiveness is not a reversion but direct inheritance,”
debunking the white shibboleth that blacks were devolving to “savagery,”
and distancing “normal” fit blacks from “unfit,” “retarded” blacks and
whites. Defectives, according to Turner, existed in and should be elimi-
nated from both races—for the good of the entire human race. Eliminat-
ing the unfit would foster the interracial collaboration among elites that
Du Bois foretold in Souls.24
For Turner and mainline eugenicists, all sound public policy must
stem from a biological understanding of life. Social reform must “look
to the improvement of the individual as well as to the improvement of
the race,” it must “make society better by working upon the individual
units of society,” and it would ideally “aim not only at ameliorating the
conditions of life but also at bettering life itself.” Just as white eugenicists
distrusted sociology’s environmental emphasis, Turner believed that the
sociologist “must be primarily a biologist,” if he hoped to achieve substan-
tive reforms.25
Ethical public policy and “sound citizenship” depended upon merg-
ing the scientific method with civics instruction. Turner averred that con-
temporary Americans were “nearer the goal of universal brotherhood”
than the founders, “because the pursuit of science has developed a larger
sympathy among men, by teaching them that they are truly of one flesh,
with a common parentage.” For Turner, biology explained humanity’s
phenotypic distinctions in terms of the underlying organic similarity of
all human beings.26
Turner recast racial disparities into an associational rather than a seg-
regationist framework. Inverting white eugenicists’ “race suicide” thesis,
Turner argued for the relative impermanence of “civilization” in the face
of the greater durability of human life. His ringing denunciation of cul-
tural superiority surely would have alarmed white readers even as it reas-
sured his black audience. He predicted, “The proud, haughty, domineer-
ing people of today may be the cringing, begging, sycophantic paupers of
tomorrow.” After all, he reasoned, “we have record of the rise to power and
the decadence of various human tribes—black, yellow, and white,” and
while we “cannot know what characteristics or lines of conduct have the
greatest survival value,” he felt that “it should be the chief aim of courses
in Human Biology to seek out and stress every factor which makes for
peaceful, harmonious cooperation among races and among nations.”
Turner thus refocused the eugenic quest away from ensuring racial supe-
riority, a quixotic venture requiring a static conception of fitness belied
by life’s dynamism. Turner’s assimilationist eugenics freed him from the
trap of biological superiority while acknowledging heredity’s power. 27
Turner taught assimilationist eugenics to thousands of students over
more than 30 years. Yet, for these ideas to perform their antiracist, socially
meliorative function, they had to be taught to those beyond the Talented
Tenth. “Average” African Americans (and ultimately whites, too) needed

to internalize and act upon assimilationist eugenic principles. To spread
the word, in 1927 Turner volunteered for the American Eugenics Soci-
ety’s list of eugenics lecturers. Years earlier, the NAACP baby contests
provided another way to reach the public. 28
B aby Contests: E ugenics

and F und -raising
On March 20, 1925, a precocious 5-year-old girl closed the Newport News,
Virginia, NAACP baby contest in verse:
Good friends, we welcome you tonight
To this our baby show,
Just what we are trying here to do
I’m sure that you all know.
These babies all are hard at work
For the National Association;
If you will help and do not shirk,
We’ll have a better nation.
Our mothers dear, as you can see,
Have worked to win the prize,
Just who will be the lucky one
We can not now surmise.
But whether the babies win or lose,
Let us all stop and pause,
And realize by buying votes
We’ve helped a worthy cause.
So once again we welcome you,
With hearts all full of glee,
Let us join in and give three cheers
For the N.A.A.C.P.29
The poem outlined the contest’s intended goals and hinted at its inspira-
tion, guiding rationales, and purposes. Held between 1924 and 1934, and
often overseen by NAACP Field Secretary William Pickens, these baby
contests were designed with a twofold agenda. First, the NAACP sought
to capitalize on a vogue in baby pageants and “Better Baby” and “Fitter
Family” contests sweeping the majority white populace, adapting them to
the black community and using them to raise funds for the NAACP’s so-
cial justice campaigns. Second, these contests implicitly promulgated the
assimilationist eugenics promoted by thinkers like Du Bois and Turner.
Marrying eugenic theory with practical fund-raising, the NAACP’s baby
contests established a movement within the movement, one Du Bois
dubbed the “Tenth Crusade,” a sobriquet redolent with imagery of Chris-
tian salvation and noblesse oblige. The Tenth Crusade’s ultimate goals of
eugenic improvement might be understood as a class-biased attempt at
intraracial social control. Nevertheless, the movement’s proximate aim—
raising money to fund the NAACP’s battle against lynching—sought
to improve life for all African Americans, regardless of class, birth, or
“fitness.”
E ug e n ic C on t e s t s ac r o s s t h e C ol or L i n e
Scholars have traced the ways African American uplift ideology was
shaped by, and in return shaped, the mainstream white eugenics move-
ment. Yet, with the exception of Garveyite and white eugenic racial pu-
rity efforts, historians have overlooked programmatic similarities be-
tween black assimilationist and white mainline eugenics. Examining the
NAACP’s baby contests clarifies the structural affinities between black
and white eugenics.
White eugenicists pioneered “Better Babies” and “Fitter Families for
Future Firesides” competitions. Conducted at international expositions
and state fairs across the country, these competitions—and their atten-
dant eugenic exhibits—appeared at roughly 7 to 10 venues annually be-
tween the 1910s and the 1930s. Competitions peaked during the late 1920s,
when as many as 40 potential sponsors annually solicited the Eugenics
Record Office for guidance in hosting contests. Tens of thousands of
white (and some black) attendees learned about eugenics and the goal of
having a “goodly heritage” from these well-publicized competitions. 30
Staged in the “human stock” sections of the fairgrounds, eugenics
exhibits and contests explicitly analogized human and animal breeding.
As Mary T. Watts, the co-organizer of the first Fitter Families Contest,
said, “While the stock judges are testing the Holsteins, Jerseys, and white-
faces in the stock pavilion, we are judging the Joneses, Smiths, and the
Johns.” The stakes were high: contest brochures declared that the “science
of human husbandry must be developed, based upon the principles now

followed by scientific agriculture, if the better elements of our civilization
are to dominate or even survive.” Any “healthy” family could enter—they
need only answer a lengthy questionnaire that elicited their “eugenic his-
tory.” Judges—physicians, psychologists, social workers, and eugenics
field workers—evaluated each family member for signs of superiority
(special accomplishments and talents) and sought to ferret out mental,
physical, and social defects. Individual scores were then compiled to ar-
rive at a family’s “grade.” Final scores of B+ or above earned a bronze
medal with “Yea, I have a goodly heritage” inscribed on its face. Organiz-
ers and eugenicists argued that the medalists’ genetic fitness was “worth
more than livestock sweepstakes or a Kansas oil well,” because “health is
wealth and a sound mind in a sound body is the most priceless of human
possessions.”31
This philosophy rang true for Du Bois, Turner, and many of their
contemporaries among the black intelligentsia. They, too, concurred in
the tautology that a healthy human race would be made up of healthy indi-
viduals. Witnessing the success white eugenicists achieved in mobilizing
public interest, opinion, and money through eugenics contests, NAACP
activists developed similar competitions: to address the “racial threats”
confronting African Americans and to gin up support for assimilationist
eugenics. These contests were the first systematic attempt to capitalize on
eugenic interests in the black community. 32
S t r a ng e F ru i t: Ho w Ly nc h i ng
P r om p t e d B a b y C on t e s t s
During the first third of the twentieth century, African Americans faced
more immediate dangers than the dropping birthrate or “race suicide”
that alarmed their white contemporaries. Between 1882 and 1944, Ameri-
can trees often bore “strange fruit”: the bodies of some 4,700 African
Americans, mostly men, often lynched by mobs, particularly in the South.
Between 1909 and 1918, lynching claimed the lives of 687 people, of whom
590 were African Americans. Combined with race riots that rocked cities
for days and the segregationist laws that whites insisted preserved peace
by managing interracial contact, the lynching epidemic represented the
nadir of American race relations. 33
For Du Bois—whose motivation to organize what became the

NAACP originated in a white storekeeper’s display of a lynched man’s
knuckles—lynching represented the acme of inhumanity, an act that
eviscerated white claims to superiority. Truly civilized people would
never engage in such barbarism. Although whites claimed that lynch-
ings only punished atavistic black “savages” who raped white women,
beginning with Ida B. Wells’s The Red Record, African Americans dem-
onstrated that the vast majority of lynchings resulted from black/white
male altercations and minor infractions of Jim Crow; barely a third
stemmed from alleged interracial rapes. Lynching was most often the
result of African Americans fighting oppression head on; from the per-
spective of Du Bois and many others, lynching thus claimed the very
flower of black youth—the best and brightest who were unwilling to
genuflect before racists. 34 Protest and political action embodied direct
opposition to lynching; breeding an improved black population—one
genetically predisposed to achieve beyond white expectation or reproach
—offered another mode of resistance. Du Bois and other assimilation-
ist eugenicists fought white supremacy on both fronts: the political and
the biological. 35
Du Bois railed against mob atrocities in the pages of the Crisis, alert-
ing Americans to the scope and frequency of “The Lynching Industry.”
In 1922, the NAACP placed large ads in major white-owned newspapers
presenting the facts about lynching, rending the threadbare white lie that
murderous vigilantism was civilization’s last resort against black devolu-
tion. That same year, Du Bois helped the “Colored Women of America”
launch what he dubbed the “Ninth Crusade.” Under the leadership of
Mary B. Tolbert, this effort raised over $15,000 to combat lynching. But
more could and would be done. 36
T h e T e n t h C ru s a de : C on t e s t L o g i s t ic s
Ever the pedant, Du Bois denominated NAACP anti-lynching efforts as

the philosophical and numerical successors to what historians had long
known as the “Eight Great Crusades” of Christendom. Success in the
“Ninth” and “Tenth” crusades would exorcise lynching from America,
bringing American civilization closer to the millennial peace promised
in Christian theology. Recognizing the tremendous impact that eugenic
ideology and the Fitter Family contests had on the white community, Du
Bois hoped to adapt similar competitions to promote his agenda. He had
already created something of a platform in the Crisis’s “Children’s Num-
ber.” Meant to demonstrate the innate fitness of African Americans, the
“Children’s Number” also subtly inculcated assimilationist eugenics by
valorizing youthful aspirants to the Talented Tenth as examples of sound
black reproduction. 37
Building on the success of the “Children’s Number,” Du Bois and
William Pickens, the NAACP’s national field secretary, launched a “Tenth
Crusade.” Eugenically fit African American infants and children would be
the foot soldiers in this campaign. Having witnessed the success of baby
contests as grassroots benefits for local chapters in Dayton, Cleveland,
and Jersey City, Du Bois and Pickens believed that national contests could
be cost-effective fund-raisers for the anti-lynching campaign. Presum-
ably, in addition to mobilizing anti-lynching sentiment, identifying and
voting for fit babies would help sensitize participants to the need for (and
benefits of) rational eugenic procreation. 38
The “nationalization” of the contests, and the merging of eugenic
and financial priorities, complicated the straightforward logistics of the
local competitions. At first, proud parents had paid an entrance fee to the
sponsoring chapter to enroll their child in a contest; volunteer judges then
selected the “best” baby. Winners were awarded gold coins; the chapter
retained the proceeds. In July 1924, Pickens circulated a pamphlet outlin-
ing new, uniform competition guidelines.
In “How to Conduct a Baby Contest,” Pickens created a hierarchy
that privileged members of the Talented Tenth. Pickens stipulated that a
sponsoring chapter must organize an executive committee—chaired by
the chapter president’s wife and composed of other influential members
of the community—to oversee the competition. The executive commit-
tee would then appoint a publicity and meetings committee. Committee
members and the chapter’s officers importuned mothers to enter their fit
babies in the contest; they simultaneously recruited the mothers as volun-
teer contest workers. Parent-volunteers were instructed to secure at least
10 additional workers for their child’s “campaign”; each worker should
raise $10 by selling votes for the child at a nickel apiece, NAACP member-
ships, and subscriptions to the Crisis. Theoretically, the “honor” of having
one’s baby selected would translate into a windfall for the association, as
local chapters were instructed to send 75 percent of contest proceeds to

the national office. These funds were then immediately channeled into
the anti-lynching campaign. First, second, and third place winners from
local contests proceeded to the national finals overseen by Pickens him-
self. For his part, Du Bois featured the finalists’ photographs in the Chil-
dren’s Number, hoping for “all the good clear pictures of healthy human
babies that we can get.” Du Bois’s emphasis on “healthy human babies”
subtly reinforced assimilationist eugenics’ central principle—that racial
distinctions had no bearing on fitness. 39
Rather than the “objective” evaluations of eugenic “fitness” that char-
acterized white eugenic contests, the NAACP contests began by assum-
ing fitness in the babies tapped to participate. Motivated by self-interest
in crowning their children “fit” avatars of the race, parents (and their
associates) were also overtly invested in funding the anti-lynching cru-
sade. Personal politics, finance, and assimilationist eugenics thus worked
together for the “greater good,” rather than making the validation of
rarified eugenic “fitness” and elitist social policy the contests’ goal, as in
white Fitter Families and Better Babies competitions. By March 1925, the
“Brown Babies,” as Pickens referred to them, had raised $12,000 for the
anti-lynching cause.40
N A AC P C on t e s t R e s u lt s ,
C on t r ov e r s i e s , a n d L e g ac y
Pickens was beginning to realize the full potential of what was before
him. Local chapters were clamoring for additional recognition and pub-
licity. Given “the money, pains, and loyalty” the chapters had thus far
given the national headquarters, Pickens and Du Bois used the Crisis to
reward local efforts and build momentum. By promoting the Cleveland
chapter’s contest of early 1925, for instance, Pickens hoped to “stimu-
late all pending contests,” as well as “help him organize others.” Du Bois
featured the top three contestants, “along with the names of all chief
contestants, brief notes of the contests, and the names of the officers of
the organizing committees,” in the “Weekly Press Stories” section of the
Crisis. Such public recognition gratified grassroots activists, inspired ad-
ditional contests, increased the overall financial yield, and popularized
assimilationist eugenic precepts.41
This strategy worked well. By January 13, 1926, “the Colored Babies
of the United States had raised more than $31,000.00 to fight for their
own future.” Pickens hoped that “every branch of the Association and
every group interested in its work” would hold contests by early 1926.
Additionally, he felt that “any branches that had held contests in previous
years could and should repeat them,” for “there are always new babies!”
Pickens believed that contests represented “the least expensive and most
successful way for local branches” to raise funds. By June 1926, 156 of the
300 local NAACP branches had held contests, raising another $10,000.
This left “144 branches and a million babies” that should compete by the
fall of 1926 or early 1927, according to Pickens. To spur action, Pickens
mailed a letter claiming that organizing a competition was “simpler than
riding a tricycle.” Not afraid to tap into parental guilt, Pickens wrote that
“any baby” would “enlist in the Crusade” against “color prejudice, unless
some grown-ups stood in the way.”
The Tenth Crusade was so successful that, by the 1930s, Pickens en-
couraged chapters to “expand their market,” and consider hosting age-
group contests for children ages 4–8, 9–12, and 13–15; “Young Women,
Young Widows, Bachelors, Debutantes”; and even pastors. The possibili-
ties seemed endless. Swept up in his own enthusiasm, Pickens apparently
forgot that association members had finite personal finances.42 Each new
category of “eugenically fit” blackness offered the possibility of modeling
eugenic ideals and raising revenue, but proliferating contests also began
to raise tension along with funds. By exercising his editorial prerogatives
through provocative opinion pieces and by promoting certain contest
winners, with little or no input from other association officials, Du Bois
often strained his relationship with the NAACP. Tensions came to a head
in 1934, as Du Bois wrote a controversial series of editorials, “Segrega-
tion—A Symposium.” His May editorial, in which he argued that “there
should never be an opposition to segregation pure and simple unless that
segregation does involve discrimination,” seemed to announce a reversal
of everything he and the NAACP had stood for over the preceding 25
years.
In actuality, Du Bois had simply returned to the arguments he had
made 37 years earlier in “The Conservation ofâ†œRaces”: that racial solidarity
(what a later generation would refer to as “self-segregation” or “congre-
gation in segregation”) ultimately offered the power to “smash all race
separation”—by allowing African Americans the space (environment)

in which they might capitalize on the strengths of the Talented Tenth
(heredity), uplifting the race (hereditarily and environmentally). With
diplomatic understatement, and little appreciation of Du Bois’s nuanced
philosophical provocations, the NAACP board noted that Du Bois’s po-
sition was not “in general agreement with that of the organization,” and
accepted Du Bois’s resignation “with deepest regret” on July 10, 1934.43
With Du Bois’s departure, the content and format of the Crisis
changed. The assimilationist eugenic thrust disappeared with Du Bois.
Coverage of the baby contests diminished significantly, even as the con-
tests themselves dwindled and the general mood in the country drifted
away from eugenics. Nevertheless, baby contests have persisted, sporadi-
cally, even down to today. Present NAACP contests no longer focus on fit
babies. Instead, they promote the educational achievements of high school
students, who compete for college scholarships on the basis of academic
transcripts and essays. Even as the contests have lost their overt eugenic
impulse, this “objective” evaluation of the contestants’ “merits” echoes
earlier white eugenic efforts to judge fitness by assaying intellect.
Analyzing the intellectual history of assimilationist eugenics and the or-

ganization of NAACP baby contests underscores at least four important
implications about African Americans’ flirtations with hereditarian ide-
ology. First, members of the “mainstream” African American intelligen-
tsia—thinkers like Du Bois, teachers like Turner, and their organization,
the NAACP—used the ideological flexibility inherent in eugenic theory
to advance their own political and social programs. Black eugenicists
could and did “fight fire with fire” by inverting and adapting racist whites’
eugenic ideas and turning them toward antiracist, equalitarian ends. De-
spite the obvious class bias inherent in the Talented Tenth, the goal of
assimilationist eugenics was ever the improvement of the status of all
African Americans and, ultimately, the human race.
Second, African Americans promoting assimilationist eugenics
used the same fund-raising/proselytizing media as white mainline eu-
genicists: popular periodicals and baby contests. Du Bois embodied his
hereditarian views in the Talented Tenth; he used the Crisis to promote
his positive, assimilationist eugenic stance. Eugenic theory and political

praxis met and married in the Tenth Crusade. The crusade capitalized
on the eugenic vogue, dampened or deflected the harshest white charges
about black hereditary inferiority, bolstered African Americans’ self-
esteem, and demonstrated the creativity of NAACP fund-raisers.
Third, while the Tenth Crusade baby contests might be viewed as
cynical attempts by black elites to subject lower-class blacks to eugenic
control, the tandem objectives of eugenic improvement and anti-lynch-
ing suggest a broader vision. The positive eugenic thrust—to increase
the number in the Talented Tenth by educating people and using baby
contests to set goals—contrasted with the negative eugenic emphasis
underpinning the most successful white mainline eugenic programs: an-
timiscegenation, immigration restriction, and compulsory sterilization
laws. By tapping into parental desires to promote and improve the quality
of their children, the NAACP was able to raise over $80,000 (roughly $1
million in today’s currency) between June 1924 and December 1930, four
years before the contests ended.44
Finally, this study suggests that African Americans iterated what be-
came the scientific consensus on race—that its hereditary determinants
pale in significance compared to its environmental, cultural origins—
some 30 years before white scientists acceded to it in the UNESCO State-
ment on Race, and almost 80 years before the Human Genome Project
“proved” it. This prescience reveals the socially constructed nature of
scientific understanding. Science is bound by the historical context in
which it is conducted and influenced by the experience of the scientists
conducting it. And these profound influences are antecedent to nonsci-
entists’ popularization of scientific findings. Ultimately, “good” or “true”
science is as dependent on subjective criteria as it is on the purportedly
“objective” findings elicited by the scientific method.45
With the diminution of the racism that separated white and black
scientists at the beginning of the twentieth century, both sides converged
on an understanding of heredity that moved beyond racial purity. The as-
similationist eugenics of Du Bois, Turner, and the NAACP baby contests
comported more closely with both the “facts” of genetics and the realities
of a more integrated society—then and now. Assimilationist eugenics
helped usher in today’s more racially tolerant beliefs, politics, and science.
That said, assimilationist eugenics raised the specter of continuing what
Elof Carlson has called, in his masterful understatement, “a bad idea”:

namely, the notion that some people are “unfit” and therefore less worthy
of respect than others. Whether the legacy of assimilationÂ�ist eugenics and
the promise of genomics and genetic therapies will be realized in human
harmony or invidious distinctions remains to be seen.
Notes
1.â•‡ War against the Weak, 35 mm, 93 min., Endless Films, New York, 2009; Expelled:
No Intelligence Allowed, 35 mm, 97 min., Rocky Mountain Pictures, Salt Lake City, 2008.
2.â•‡ See, for example, Mark H. Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American
Thought (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1962); Daniel J. Kevles, In the
Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1988); Nancy L. Gallagher, Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green
Mountain State (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1999); Gregory Mi-
chael Dorr, Segregation’s Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia (Charlottesville: Uni-
versity of Virginia Press, 2008).
3.â•‡ John David Smith, Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and the American
Negro (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000); Martha F. Lee, The Nation of Islam:
An American Millenarian Movement (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996); Wil-
liam A. Edwards, “Racial Purity in Black and White: The Case of Marcus Garvey and
Earnest Cox,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 15 (1987): 117–42. On Garvey and eugenics, see
Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial
Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004),
230–36.
4.â•‡ This section builds on the work of Marouf A. Hasian Jr., The Rhetoric of Eugenics
in Anglo-American Thought (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 51–71; Kevin K.
Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and Mitchell, Righteous Propa-
gation, 86–88.
5.â•‡ On “mainline” eugenics, see Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 88.
6.â•‡ Susan Currell and Christina Cogdell, eds., Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency
and American Mass Culture in the 1930s (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006); Steven
Selden, Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in America (New York: Teach-
ers College Press, 1999), 39–62. On African Americans and popular eugenics, see Mitch-
ell, Righteous Propagation, 75, 80–81, 86–88, 100–106. On fairs and contests, see Laura
Lovett, Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United
States, 1890–1938 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 131–62; and
Steven Selden, “Transforming Better Babies into Fitter Families: Archival Resources
and the History of the American Eugenics Movement, 1908–1930,” Proceedings of the
American Philosophical Society 149 (June 2005): 199–225.
7.â•‡ Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 80–83; Gregory Michael Dorr, “Beyond Racial Pu-
rity: African Americans and Integrationist Eugenics” (paper presented at the annual
meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Memphis, Tenn., April 2003);
Gregory Michael Dorr, “Fighting Fire with Fire: African American Intellectuals and
Hereditarian Thought, 1890–1942” (invited address, Wake Forest University Social Sci-
ence Research Seminar, Wake Forest, N.C., October 2004).
8.â•‡ On African Americans and nature/nurture (or eugenic/euthenics) distinc-
tions, see Mitchell, Righteous Propagation, 147–49, 230; Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,”
in Writings by W.E.B. Du Bois in Non-periodical Literature Edited by Others, ed. Herbert
Aptheker (Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus-Thomson, 1982), 17–29; Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk
(Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus-Thomson, 1989), 74–90, especially 87.
9.â•‡ David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New
York: Henry Holt, 1994), 170–74. Quotations from Du Bois, “The Conservation of
Races,” in Pamphlets and Leaflets, ed. Herbert Aptheker (White Plains, N.Y.: Kraus-
Thomson, 1986), 2–3, 4, 5.
10.â•‡ Du Bois, “Conservation of Races,” 6; Du Bois, Souls, 9.
11.â•‡ Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” 17–18.
12.â•‡ Du Bois, “Heredity and the Public Schools,” in Pamphlets and Leaflets, 50, 51.
13.â•‡ On the “submerged tenth,” see English, Unnatural Selections, 45. For dysgenic
whites, see Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme
Court, and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 134; Du Bois,
“Marrying of Black Folk,” Independent 69 (October 13, 1910): quotations 812, 813; English,
Unnatural Selections, 44.
14.â•‡ On relations between the “best stocks,” Du Bois wrote, “Here I suddenly saw
that not only in some far future world our Talented Tenth with the talented of all nations
leads all people to salvation.” Non-periodical Literature, 196; see also “Sociology and
Industry in Southern Education,” in Writings by W.E.B. Du Bois in Periodicals Edited by
Others, 4 vols., ed. Herbert Aptheker (Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus-Thomson, 1982), 371; Du
Bois, Souls, 48, 71–72, 136.
15.â•‡ Du Bois, Souls, 70; Du Bois, “Editorial,” Crisis 4 (October 1912): 287; Du Bois,
“The Immediate Program of the American Negro,” Crisis 9 (April 1915): 311.
16.â•‡ Du Bois, “Opinion,” Crisis 24 (August 1922): 152–53; Du Bois, “Opinion,” Crisis
24 (October 1922): 199.
17.â•‡ English, Unnatural Selections, 48; Albert Sidney Beckham, “Applied Eugenics,”
Crisis 26 (1924): 177; Hasian, Rhetoric of Eugenics, 64–69.
18.â•‡ English, Unnatural Selections, 55, 53.
19.â•‡ Ibid., 49. “Five Exceptional Negro Children,” Crisis 34 (October 1927): 258.
20.â•‡ Hasian, Rhetoric of Eugenics, 69–70; W.E.B. Du Bois, “Black Folk and Birth
Control,” Birth Control Review 16 (1932): 166, 167; Du Bois, “Opinion,” Crisis 24 (August
1922): 153.
21.â•‡ Dorr, Segregation’s Science, 98–104.
22.â•‡ Ibid., 101. The exams are in the Thomas Wyatt Turner Papers, University Ar-
chives, Hampton University. Turner probably also taught eugenics at Tuskegee, but
documentary evidence of this is lacking.
23.â•‡ On uplift, see Gaines, Uplifting the Race, xiv–xv; Du Bois, Souls, 79; English, Un-
natural Selections, 35–36. See also Daylanne K. English, “W.E.B. Du Bois’s Family Crisis,”
American Literature 72 (2000): 292. For eugenics and club women, see “Child Welfare
and Mat[e]rnity” (1928), in Records of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs,
1895–1992, ed. Lillian Serece Williams (Bethesda, Md., 1993), reel 7, frames 00355–58.
24.â•‡ Thomas Wyatt Turner, “Feeblemindedness” and “Lecture X—Eugenics,” Turner
Papers.
25.â•‡ Thomas Wyatt Turner, “The Biological Laboratory and Human Welfare,” How-
ard University Record, January 1924, 4, 5.
26.â•‡ Ibid., 7.
27.â•‡ Thomas W. Turner, “The Curriculum and Aims in Biological Teaching,” School
Science and Mathematics 27 (October 1927): 689–90.
28.â•‡ American Eugenics Society, “A List of Eugenics Lecturers (1927),” 14, in “AES
Printing Orders, 1926–1942” folder, American Eugenics Society Records, American
Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia.
29.â•‡ William H. Pickens to James Weldon Johnson, March 10, 1925, Records of the
NAACP, “Branch Files: 1910–1947,” Part I, box I:G208, Records of the National Associa-
tion for the Advancement of Colored People, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.
30.â•‡Lovett, Conceiving the Future, 131–62; Selden, Inheriting Shame, 22–38.
31.â•‡ Quotations from Lovett, Conceiving the Future, 144; Kevles, In the Name of Eu-
genics, 62. Individuals with averages of B+ but with even one subscore lower than B did
not win medals. Selden, Inheriting Shame, 32–33 (and image of medal).
32.â•‡ On earlier beauty contests and black popular eugenics, see Mitchell, Righteous
Propagation, 213–14.
33.â•‡ English, Unnatural Selections, 119. The literature on lynching is massive; estimates
of numbers vary based on the definition of what constitutes a lynching. See Grace Eliza-
beth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1998), chapter 5 and 355n4. For statistics, see Arthur F. Raper, The
Tragedy of Lynching (New York: Dover, 1970), 480–84.
34.â•‡ English, Unnatural Selections, 27.
35.â•‡ Hale, Making Whiteness, 214–15; Lewis, Du Bois: Biography, 226; Ida B. Wells-
Barnett, A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United
States, 1892, 1893, 1894 (Chicago: Donohue and Henneberry, 1895).
36.â•‡ Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade against Lynching, 1909–1950 (Phila-
delphia: Temple University Press, 1980); Patricia A. Schecter, “Unsettled Business:
Ida B. Wells against Lynching; or, How Lynching Got Its Gender,” in Under Sentence
of Death: Lynching in the South, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1997), 309.
37.â•‡ See NAACP, “Crusade 1922” and “Crusade 1923” folders in “Administrative
Files: 1885–1949,” Part I, boxes I:C206 and I:C207, Records of the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.; Du Bois, “The Ninth Crusade,” Crisis 25 (March 1923): 214. The Chil-
dren’s Number ran every October.
38.â•‡ See “Benefits—Baby Contests 1924–1932” folders in box I:C215, NAACP Ad-
ministrative Files. Hereafter baby contest files.
39.â•‡ William Pickens, “How to Conduct a Baby Contest,” baby contest files; Du
Bois, “Opinion,” Crisis 26 (September 1924): 199. For examples of the photos, see EnÂ�
glish, Unnatural Selections, 50–51.
40.â•‡ Baby contest files.
41.â•‡ Ibid.
42.â•‡ Ibid.
43.â•‡ Du Bois, “Segregation,” Crisis 36 (May 1934), quoted in David Levering Lewis,
W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York:
Henry Holt), 336; Du Bois, “Counsels of Despair,” Crisis 36 (June 1934), quoted in ibid.,
345. Du Bois’s resignation and the board’s acceptance appear in Selections from the Crisis,
vol. 2, 1926–1934, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus-Thomson, 1983), 770–72.
This paragraph accepts and extends Lewis’s interpretations of this pivotal struggle be-
tween Du Bois and the organization he founded.
44.â•‡ Baby contest files. Total fund-raising figures could not be calculated.
45.â•‡ Michelle Brattain, “Race, Racism, and Anti-Racism: UNESCO and the Politics
of Presenting Race to the Postwar Public,” American Historical Review 112 (December
2007): 1386–1413.
Pa r t t h r e e
State Studies of
Eugenic Sterilization
five
From Legislation to Lived

Experience: Eugenic Sterilization in
California and Indiana, 1907–79
A l e x a n dr a M i n n a S t e r n
In February 1950, the Fort Wayne State School in Indiana held a steriliza-
tion hearing for Vernon, a young biracial man. Since his original commit-
ment a decade earlier, at the age of 9, Vernon had managed multiple es-
capes from the institution, and it was during one of his recent flights that
the superintendent decided it was necessary to sterilize Vernon “for the
protection of the community.”1 Following the requirements of Indiana’s
sterilization law, the superintendent filed a petition with the Fort Wayne
State School’s Board of Supervisors, asking them to approve Vernon’s
vasectomy based on the medical judgment that he was “definitely feeble-
minded and incurable” and that his welfare and that of society would be
promoted by his sterilization. In addition, notices about Vernon’s steril-
ization hearing were served on him and his parents and sent to Indiana’s
Public Welfare Department. Assuming the surgery occurred 30 days after
the hearing, which was the protocol, Vernon was one of 84 inmates steril-
ized at Fort Wayne in 1950.
One month earlier and 2,000 miles away, the sterilization of a 14-year-
old Latina at the Pacific Colony in Spadra, California, was approved by
the director of the Department of Mental Hygiene. In compliance with
the state’s legal provisions, Pacific Colony’s superintendent checked the
boxes on the sterilization order form indicating that the operation was
warranted because Esperanza, who had spent three years at the institu-
tion, was afflicted with “feeble-mindedness” of the “imbecile grade” and
“perversions or marked departures from normal mentality.” 2 Following
departmental procedures, written consent for Esperanza’s operation had
been obtained from her father. Given that her sterilization request was
95
96â•… · â•… A l e x a n dr a M i n n a S t e r n
processed smoothly and with no objections, Esperanza was almost cer-

tainly one of the 45 patients, 30 of whom were female, who were sterilized
at Pacific Colony in 1950. 3
These two snapshots of institutionalization and sterilization capture
vital aspects of the intersecting histories of eugenics, mental health, dis-
ability, and the state regulation of reproduction in twentieth-century
America. Like many of the more than 60,000 patients and inmates steril-
ized in institutions in 33 states from the early 1900s to the 1970s, Vernon
and Esperanza were teenagers with unstable family situations whose ini-
tial encounters with the county or juvenile court eventually resulted in
commitment to a feebleminded home. Their sterilizations were ordered
based on their mental classification as imbeciles and their alleged de-
structive personalities, associated with thievery, truancy, and petty crime
in Vernon’s case, and “social” and “glandular” problems—euphemisms
for perceived promiscuity and sexual impropriety—in Esperanza’s case.
More broadly, these two examples highlight themes, such as the inter-
play of race, gender, and class, as well as the formidable power of medical
superintendents, clinical diagnosis, and bureaucratic habituation, that
scholars have examined over the past few decades in a fruitful effort to
broaden knowledge about the rise and fall of eugenic sterilization in mod-
ern America.4
Yet the stories of Esperanza and Vernon also point to a series of un-
explored questions. These surgeries were ordered in 1950, at the twilight
of the era of state sterilizations. Within the next five years, operations
in California and Indiana would drop considerably due to overlapping
legal, administrative, and attitudinal changes. Given that studies of ster-
ilization and eugenics overwhelmingly concentrate on the period before
World War II (even though many states maintained robust sterilization
programs even into the 1960s), it is important to explain why sterilizations
did not abate until the mid-1950s and what impelled their conspicuous
decline. Explaining the reasons for this intriguing shift is particularly
instructive for Indiana and California, which shared the distinction of
spearheading eugenic sterilization even as their laws diverged markedly
in terms of acceptance and implementation.
These two stories also are illuminating because they offer glimpses
into the lives of those sterilized and the social worlds of institutions where
thousands of children and adults were committed because of their pre-
F r o m L e g i s l a t i o n t o L i v e d E x p e r i e n c eâ•… · â•… 97
sumed mental defects and behavioral problems. Just as we know very

little about why approximately 15 states never passed sterilization laws in
the twentieth century, puzzling questions remain about why institutions
varied so widely from state to state and in the same state. Some homes
and hospitals carried out hundreds, even thousands, of procedures while
others carried out few, if any. In a related vein, because patient records are
so difficult to find, let alone access, the people whose lives were irrepa-
rably altered by institutional sterilizations are often absent in historical
studies.
Situating the experiences of Esperanza and Vernon in the wider con-
text of eugenic sterilization in Indiana and California can shed light on
lived experiences of reproductive surgery, institutional differences, the
demographics of patient populations, the role of state authorities and
family members in sterilization proceedings, and patterns of change over
time. As windows onto the politics and practices of sterilization in the
mid-twentieth century, these stories help to illustrate the elasticity and
longevity of eugenic practices and ideas in two states that played critical
roles in American eugenics.
Con ve rgi ng a n d Dive rgi ng

S t e r ili z at ion L aws
Indiana and California introduced eugenic sterilization statutes to AmerÂ�

ica, passing the first and third laws, respectively, in 1907 and 1909 (Wash-
ington passed a statute a few weeks before California). 5 Indiana’s steril-
ization law was in many respects a legislative afterthought formulated
to shield Dr. Harry Sharp, the medical superintendent at the Indiana
Reformatory in Jeffersonville, who had started to perform vasectomies on
prisoners in 1899. Initially, Sharp’s justification for these procedures was
therapeutic, specifically to alleviate imprisoned men of excessive mas-
turbation.6 However, over the years, as he honed his surgical technique,
Sharp began to see sterilization not just as a potential cure for supposed
sexual disorders but as a method to prevent the transmission of the bad
heredity of criminals from one generation to the next. As he wrote in the
pamphlet Vasectomy: A Means of Preventing Defective Procreation, “restrict-
ing propagation seems to be universally agreed on as necessary for the
relief of the downward tendency.” 7
98â•… ·â•… A l e x a n dr a M i n n a S t e r n
In March 1907, Sharp and the general superintendent of the Indiana

Reformatory, William H. Whittaker, collaborated with a state representa-
tive to introduce an act to “prevent the procreation of confirmed crimi-
nals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists.”8 Urging the passage of this legislation,
Sharp wrote, “No confirmed criminal or other degenerate ever begot a
normal child, and for this reason I enter the plea for society in general
and for the unborn child in particular that this bill be enacted into law.”9
Sharp believed this act simultaneously would save the state thousands of
dollars by allowing for the release of treated inmates and halt the trans-
mission of “mental as well as physical defects” to offspring.10 After the
governor signed this bill into law in April 1907, Sharp wasted no time,
sterilizing 119 men in 1908 (over 10 percent of the reformatory’s average
patient population of 1,100).11 In 1909 he reported that he had sterilized
456 men since 1899 and expressed his impatience to implement the “In-
diana Plan” in facilities beyond Jeffersonville.
Despite Sharp’s enthusiasm, Indiana’s governor, Thomas R. Marshall,
was wary of Sharp’s activities and unsure of the statute’s constitutionality,
and in spring 1909 he ordered a moratorium on sterilizations.12 Subse-
quent governors upheld this de facto ban on sterilizations, a decision in
keeping with the contested status of sterilization laws in the 1910s, as acts
passed in other states were challenged on various grounds and often ren-
dered unconstitutional in the courts. In Indiana, politicians were particu-
larly reluctant to countenance an act with virtually no legal protections
for patients or inmates.13 Seeking some resolution, in 1919 Governor James
Goodrich decided to test the law’s constitutionality. He appointed the
Jeffersonville city attorney to defend Warren Wallace Smith, convicted
of rape and incest, against a sterilization order approved by the Indiana
Reformatory’s board of trustees.14 After a decision for Smith in the Clark
Circuit Court, Dr. Charles F. Williams, the reformatory’s chief physi-
cian, appealed to the Indiana Supreme Court, which in turn sustained
the lower court’s decision in 1921. The Indiana Supreme Court clarified
that the sterilization law violated the state constitution and the U.S. Con-
stitution, specifically the Fourteenth Amendment, by depriving Smith
“of life, liberty and property without due process of law” as well as the
“equal protection of the laws.” This decision also stated “while vasectomy
is physically less severe than castration, in its results it is much the coarser
and more vulgar, and is equally cruel and inhuman.”15
This unambiguous interpretation laid the groundwork and set the

limits for Indiana’s 1927 act, which pertained exclusively to institutions
for the feebleminded, insane, and epileptic, and was written to stress the
preventive health benefits of insulating the populace against defective he-
redity. After the passage of this new act, Indiana carried out the majority
of its sterilizations, about 2,000 (of approximately 2,500 total from 1907 to
1974). Over 1,500 or 75 percent of these were performed at the Fort Wayne
State School, which had been founded as an orphans’ home in 1879 and
designated a facility for feebleminded children in 1890. This institution
housed patients of all ages, who were instructed in basic subjects and
taught gender-specific skills like cooking and table waiting (girls) and
shoemaking and brush making (boys) to be able to work in the hospital
and following possible out-placement and parole.16 In 1920, excess capac-
ity prompted the state to establish the Muscatatuck State School, which
claimed the remaining 500 surgeries.17 From 1927 until the early 1950s, the
superintendents and resident physicians at both of these Indiana institu-
tions saw sterilization as a “progressive step in the state’s mental hygiene
program,” and in 1932 they made it a precondition for release.18
California’s law did not travel along such a disrupted path. Although
revised, amended, and even substantially modified, the Golden State’s
sterilization statute remained on the books without interruption for 70
years. Envisioned by F. W. Hatch, the secretary of the State Commission
in Lunacy [sic], this act was sponsored by Senator W. F. Price of Santa
Rosa in February 1909. It passed the Senate with only one nay vote, passed
the House unanimously, and was signed into law by the governor in April
1909. It granted superintendents the authority to “asexualize” a patient
or inmate if such action would improve his or her “physical, mental, or
moral condition.”19
Although it initially targeted the feebleminded, in 1913 California’s
sterilization law was broadened to apply to an assortment of inmates
and patients, including those in the Sonoma State Home, insane hospi-
tals, and prisons (with the qualification of having been convicted of two
sex crimes or three other crimes and identified as a “sexual pervert”), as
well as idiots and those “afflicted with hereditary insanity or incurable
chronic mania or dementia.” This modification also unconditionally im-
munized any official participating in sterilization procedures, regardless
of patient consent, against civil and criminal liability. Four years later
legislators revised the law again, adding more overt eugenic language.
Now the act pertained to those “afflicted with mental disease which may
have been inherited and is likely to be transmitted to descendents, the
various degrees of feeblemindedness, those suffering from perversion or
marked departures from normal mentality or from disease of a syphilitic
nature.”20 The 1917 amendment also made sterilization a precondition for
institutional release and incorporated the newly approved Pacific Colony,
where Esperanza would be sterilized 33 years later, to the list of affected
institutions. Finally, this revision stipulated that the written consent of,
or a written request from, the parent or guardian was needed to operate
on “any idiot, if a minor.”21 In other words, according to the law, only in
the most extreme circumstances—of a child with a presumed mental age
under three—was consent nonnegotiable.
Performed sporadically at first, the number of sterilizations in Cali-
fornia gradually climbed while the legislation was being revised and ex-
panded. By 1921, California accounted for 2,248 sterilizations—over 80
percent of all cases nationwide.22 This trend continued into the 1920s, as
an extensive eugenics network consolidated in the state, and accelerated
in the 1930s. 23 The pervasive acceptance of a preventive health rationale
for reproductive surgery, the pressures of institutional overcrowding, and
the fiscal constraints caused by the Great Depression led to a consider-
able rise in sterilizations in California in the 1930s. Like in other states,
sterilization was embraced by superintendents as a remedy for excess
commitments, by psychiatrists as a prophylactic measure needed to re-
lease patients into supervised settings, by some inmates and patients as
a viable ticket out of the institution, and by some relatives as a credible
method of normalization and behavioral control. The country as a whole
saw a marked rise in sterilizations during this period, fueled in part by
the 1927 landmark decision Buck v. Bell, in which the U.S. Supreme Court
upheld Virginia’s sterilization statute.24 By 1932, 27 states had laws on the
books, and the annual number of operations nationwide peaked at just
over 3,900.25 Mimicking these trends, operations in California climbed
from several per year in the early 1920s to over 800 by the 1930s; by 1950
over 18,000 sterilizations had been performed in the Golden State.26 In
the end, more than 20,000 surgeries, or one-third of all those nationwide,
were carried out in California institutions, easily making the state the
leader in overall sterilization statistics.
Despite its resemblance to comparable laws around the country,

California’s sterilization act stands out for its omissions. For over four
decades, it provided no legal mechanism for an inmate or patient to chal-
lenge a sterilization order, required no written notification to the patient
and to the parent or guardian except in the case of minor “idiots,” and
offered no opportunity for a hearing at the institutional level. Probably
cognizant of the statutes that had been overturned in states including
Iowa, Michigan, and Indiana, and eager to afford some legal protection
to state agencies and authorities, in the early 1920s the Department of
Institutions mandated that all superintendents send signed sterilization
requests to Sacramento for the director’s approval, preferably accompa-
nied by the written consent of a parent or adult guardian. 27 The fact that
a high percentage of the approximately 15,000 sterilizations received by
Sacramento between 1922 and 1952 included signed consent forms indi-
cates that authorities took this directive very seriously even though it was
not an obligation under the law.
Furthermore, California was exceptional in that its sterilization law
never faced any serious legal challenge.28 Indeed, only one case, Sara Ro-
sas Garcia v. State Department of Institutions, rose to the appellate level. In
1939 when this suit was filed, Sara’s daughter Andrea was a patient at the
Pacific Colony, having become a ward of the Los Angeles County Juvenile
Court one year earlier. Sara was a widow with nine children who ranged
in age from Andrea, 19, to Ricardo, 2. Notwithstanding the pressures of
raising so many children, Sara acquired pro bono legal counsel and filed
a Writ of Prohibition to prevent the Pacific Colony superintendent from
performing a salpingectomy on her eldest daughter. Sara’s attorney argued
that California’s sterilization law violated the Fourteenth Amendment of
the federal constitution and the equal protection and due process clauses
of the state constitution. He added that the surgery would be performed
against Andrea’s “wishes and desires” and that the law gave “no remedy
or method of redress” for the “irreparable damage” she would suffer. Al-
though Sara’s writ was denied in a 2 to 1 decision, Judge J. White lam-
basted the existing law in a terse dissent. In White’s opinion, a steriliza-
tion order, insofar as it deprived a person of the “right of procreation,” was
consequential enough to merit judicial consideration beyond the purely
administrative arena of the Department of Institutions. White wrote that
“the grant of such power should be accompanied by requirements of no-
tice and hearing at which the inmate might be afforded an opportunity to

defend against the proposed operation. To clothe legislative agencies with
this plenary power, withholding as it does any opportunity for a hearing
or any opportunity for recourse to the courts, to my mind partakes of the
essence of slavery and outrages constitutional guaranties.” 29 Despite her
legal resistance, records indicate that ultimately Andrea was sterilized at
Pacific Colony in 1941.
Indeed, requirements mentioned by White were not added until the
early 1950s, when successful Senate (1951) and Assembly (1953) bills de-
leted any references to syphilis (long since understood as bacterial and
not hereditary in etiology) and sexual perversion, removed references to
the feebleminded, “idiots,” and “fools,” terms seen as archaic, from the
purview of the law, and instated patient and next-of-kin notification as
well as channels for legal appeal at the county court level. 30 This substan-
tial revision was supported by the Roman Catholic Bishops of California,
who opposed the existing law in its entirety, and the Department of Men-
tal Hygiene (previously named the Department of Institutions), which
wanted to modernize the nomenclature used to describe the mentally
ill and retarded. 31 Approved by Governor Earl Warren, these significant
amendments also reflected his administration’s commitment to reviewing
and updating California’s mental health and public health programs. 32
These changes had a dramatic impact. What had once been a mere
formality became a much more taxing procedure, deterring many physi-
cians from seeking sterilization orders. 33 From 255 operations in 1951,
the number dropped to 51 in 1952, and by the mid-1950s it hovered below
20, even as three new hospitals and homes opened. 34 For example, at the
Sonoma State Home, which by 1950 had carried out about 5,500 steriliza-
tions, only 4 were performed in fiscal year 1952–53 and 1 in 1953–54. The
superintendent at the time noted the “conspicuous drop” in the number of
surgeries, which he attributed to a variety of factors including the modi-
fied law. 35 The glaring lack of institutional oversight or legal recourse for
patients from 1909 to 1951 helps to explain why, even when compared
per capita to states with much smaller populations, sterilization rates in
California were always high. 36
Comparing Indiana and California, forerunners of eugenic legis-
lation and activism, demonstrates that sterilization laws in the United
States were neither monolithic nor unified. For instance, Hoosier legisla-
tors and superintendents exhibited greater awareness than their West

Coast counterparts of the need for layered procedures that could offer
patients some legal and administrative latitude. Indiana’s lengthy 1927 act
delineated a two-stage procedure by which the superintendent presented
a petition to the institutional governing board, scheduled a hearing to
validate the request, and served copies of the petition on the inmate and
next of kin with at least 30 days anticipation, followed by a board hear-
ing with the inmate and sometimes a relative present for the official ap-
probation. Bracing themselves against the weaknesses of the 1907 and
analogous acts overturned in state courts, the crafters of this legislation
inserted sections that allowed for a right to appeal the decision to the
circuit court (and in the next instance, the Indiana Supreme Court) and
clarified that this law could not be construed to permit castration or or-
gan removal. Yet Indiana legislators also were keen to shield themselves
from potential litigation and establish state authorities as the final arbiters
of sterilization decisions. Emulating California, this act immunized of-
ficials from civil or criminal liability and granted the institutional board
the power to order, despite dissent, the sterilization of any inmate found
“by the laws of heredity” to be a “probably potential parent of socially
inadequate offspring.”37
In practice, Indiana’s 1927 law translated into board hearings where se-
quential sterilization orders were issued, usually based on a feebleminded
diagnosis, and required certification from a physician or psychologist that
an inmate or patient would be the “probably potential parent of socially
inadequate offspring” and that his or her welfare and that “of society will
be promoted by such sterilization.”38 However, unlike California, where
sterilizations were decided solely in the institutional arena, in Indiana a
1931 amendment conferred this authority to the county court, empower-
ing the judge and two testifying physicians to authorize sterilization at
the inquests of the feebleminded, the insane (per a 1935 amendment),
and the epileptic (per a 1937 amendment). Thus Indiana’s sterilization
program was uniquely two-pronged in that it enabled both county courts
and institutional boards to order sterilization. According to Dr. L. Potter
Harshman, Fort Wayne’s psychiatrist and a regular presence at board
hearings, flexibility characterized this dual system. Speaking before an
audience of his colleagues in the American Society for Mental Deficiency,
Harshman admitted that “perhaps this convenient arrangement has the
proportions of being a little too wholesale in the minds of most of you,”

but he justified the policy as “progressive” because it enabled more defec-
tives to be transitioned into home care. 39
Once its dual system was in place, Indiana, which ranked seventh
nationwide in total sterilizations, registered a fairly steady rate of opera-
tions from the 1930s to the 1950s. These peaked at 159 in fiscal year 1945–46
and only began to fall significantly in fiscal year 1955–56, to 36, then to 24
in 1956–57, to 15 in 1959–60, and finally to 2 in 1961–62.40 In contrast to
California, what prompted this decrease was not legislative revision but
the 1956 reorganization of the Department of Mental Health.
In general, the plummeting sterilizations in both Indiana and Cali-
fornia revealed a metamorphosis in approaches to mental retardation.
As a Sonoma State Hospital physician wrote in 1956, mental retardation
was “as much a social and psychological problem as it is a medical one.”41
No longer a hereditary stigma to be eradicated, mental retardation was
increasingly viewed as a condition that should be discussed and treated
openly among doctors, parents, and the retarded themselves. The found-
ing of the National Association of Retarded Children in 1950 and the
increasing devotion of resources to mental health on the federal level
that followed the 1946 creation of the National Institute of Mental Health
symbolized this sea change.42
I n s t i t u t ion al L ives
One month after she was committed to California’s Patton State Hospital
in February 1939, Rhonda, a white 26-year-old mother of three children,
was sterilized.43 According to her sterilization order, Rhonda qualified
for salpingectomy under the law on three counts: she was schizophrenic
and catatonic, infected with gonorrhea, and categorized as an imbecile
with an IQ of 46. Given that Rhonda’s personal history noted that she “got
drunk, left home,” and “associated with other men,” it is not surprising
that her husband provided written consent for the operation just three
days after her commitment.44
Rhonda’s operation took place at the apex of California’s steriliza-
tions, fiscal year 1939, when 828 procedures were performed in nine insti-
tutions. Patton accounted for 180 of these, 98 on men, and 82 on women.45
Located in San Bernardino and established as the main mental hospital
for southern California, Patton opened to its designated patients—the

insane, inebriates, and drug addicts—in 1893. Since the advent of the ster-
ilization era in 1909, Patton’s superintendents had been vocal advocates of
reproductive surgery for therapeutic and eugenic purposes. For example,
in 1916, superintendent Dr. John A. Reily wrote in response to a survey
sponsored by the California Department of Charities and Corrections
that the aim of sterilization was to improve “the standard of the human
race,” adding that the occasional denial of the pleasures of parenthood
was a “small consideration as compared with the vast benefits accruing to
society in the prevention of the propagation of the unfit.”46 Ten years later,
his successor, Dr. G. M. Webster, described the centrality of sterilization
to Patton’s treatment methods: “We are trying, in so far as possible, to
sterilize every male and female who enters the hospital during active
sexual life,” not only to relieve the inmate’s “present mental condition”
and avert future attacks but also to limit “as far as possible the birth of
the unfit into the world.”47
The zeal for the “surgical solution” at Patton, which carried out more
than 4,500 operations between 1909 and 1950, helped to ensure that Cali-
fornia’s mental hospitals performed more total sterilizations (approxi-
mately 12,000) than its feebleminded homes (approximately 8,000).48 To
a great extent, more operations occurred in mental hospitals because
California maintained seven such facilities (Patton, Agnews, Norwalk,
Stockton, Camarillo, Mendocino, and Napa) as opposed to two feeble-
minded homes (Sonoma and Pacific Colony). In terms of sheer popula-
tion size, the mental hospitals housed an average of five times as many
inmates than the feebleminded homes. For example, in 1940, California’s
mental hospitals held 22,953 compared with 4,076 in Sonoma and Pacific
Colony combined.49
All of California’s mental hospitals were crowded; for example, be-
tween 1910 and 1955 the total resident population increased more than
fivefold, from 6,864 to 36,403. Yet Patton was consistently overflowing.
In absolute terms, its population grew from 1,372 in 1910 to 4,128 in 1950. 50
In the 1930s, Patton regularly reported an excess of at least 50 percent.
In 1939, Patton held 3,843 inmates despite a certified capacity of 2,983. 51
In contrast, Stockton State Hospital had a lower percentage of excess
inmates despite a higher patient capacity and population. Even though
its superintendent, Dr. Margaret Smyth, was a tireless proponent of the
eugenic virtues of sterilization, Stockton always reported fewer opera-

tions than its sister institution. 52 Since sterilization was a precondition for
release, it is very likely that Patton’s severe overcrowding played a key role
in its elevated sterilization rates and probably contributed to the brief wait
between commitment and sterilization experienced by Rhonda.
In marked distinction to California, only a handful of sterilizations
took place at mental hospitals in Indiana. Given that Indiana maintained
six such facilities (Logansport, Indiana Hospital for Insane Criminals,
Central State, Evansville, Madison, and Richmond) but only two feeble-
minded homes (Fort Wayne and Muscatatuck), the state’s overwhelming
concentration on the feebleminded is curious. If on paper both states’
sterilization laws applied equally to the insane and the feebleminded,
what accounts for this discrepancy? A partial answer is timing. In Califor-
nia, sterilizations began to accelerate in the early 1920s, just as Indiana’s
1907 law was ruled unconstitutional and about a decade before Indiana
had fully established its two-pronged system of board- and court-ordered
sterilizations. Hence, California had a 10-year lead on Indiana, which
coincided with the decade before many psychiatrists started to lose faith
in the value of sterilization and turn to new treatment modalities such as
electroshock and insulin therapies. As this shift occurred, California’s
feebleminded homes started to outpace the state’s mental hospitals in
sterilization rates, a transition that was complete by the mid-1930s and
involved a gender reversal as more operations began to be performed on
women than men. 53
From today’s vantage point, many of those sterilized, whether in
mental hospitals or feebleminded homes, would be considered mentally
or developmentally disabled. In retrospect, it is also clear that many were
young women and men who ended up in state facilities because of the
social and psychological impact of poverty, lack of education, broken
homes, petty crimes, and societal anxieties over “sexual immorality”—
which for girls might mean sexual activity (whether consensual or forced)
and for boys same-sex intimacy. Beyond fulfilling the eugenic aim of
denying those labeled defective the ability to procreate, sterilization fre-
quently functioned as a form of behavioral management, employed by
superintendents who wanted to discharge disruptive inmates, or relatives
who believed that a loss of reproductive capacity could tame their son,
daughter, or wife. Finally, even though operations were performed based
on laws that avoided the language of punishment or physical retribution,

frequently there was a punitive dimension to eugenic sterilization, par-
ticularly for patients or inmates classified as sexually deviant.
Patient records reveal that parents and spouses often were very in-
volved in sterilization decisions. Rhonda’s husband, for example, swiftly
consented to her sterilization. In the case of Daphne, another patient at
Sonoma, who became a ward of the court at 16 when it was discovered that
she was four months pregnant and infected with gonorrhea, her parents
requested sterilization upon her commitment in 1928. As her steriliza-
tion order explained, Daphne “has recently given her parents renewed
trouble due to her conduct with men and boys; therefore they request her
sterilization.”54 In 1932, the mother of 15-year-old Oliver, also at Sonoma,
asked Butler to perform a vasectomy on her son, classified as a middle
moron with an IQ of 61, because he was “rough with other children and
a menace to the neighborhood when on parole.”55 Similar patterns were
at play in Indiana. In 1942, the parents of 19-year-old Camille readily
agreed to their daughter’s sterilization. Described as “rather attractive”
and “well-developed physically,” Camille was admitted to Muscatatuck
at the age of 16 because she had naively sought out the affections of men
and contracted venereal disease. Three days after a social worker made a
“sterilization visit” to the home of Camille’s parents and told them that
their daughter, whom they missed terribly, would be furloughed only
after a salpingectomy, they sent a note to Muscatatuck asserting that they
were willing to “have their darling sterilized.” Several months after the
required paperwork was processed, and a board hearing held at which
the parent’s note was read, Camille’s surgery was realized at the Indiana
University Medical Center. 56
Some parents vehemently objected to institutional requests to ster-
ilize their children. For example, the same year that Camille’s parents
assented to their daughter’s sterilization, the mother and aunt of a female
minor at Indiana’s Fort Wayne State School went before the board, with
a letter in hand from a physician stating that the proposed sterilization
should not be performed. Nonetheless, the mother and aunt were in-
formed that the operation could only be stopped with expert certifica-
tion that their kin was not feebleminded, a document they apparently
never obtained. After an internal discussion, the board concluded that
the physician’s letter was not sufficient. Claiming that it had made its
decision reluctantly, and iterating that the two petitioners could file an
appeal if desired, the board contended that it was merely following the
law, which had been crafted with “the thought of protection of the inmate
as well as society.”57 Eleven years later, the board heard from another
patient’s mother, who testified that her late husband had professed his
resistance to the sterilization of their institutionalized son, an opinion
with which she concurred. She told the board, “Because I feel when he
[her son] is released from this place, he will want to get married and he
and his wife would like to raise a family.” When the board asked the boy,
also present at the hearing, if he would agree to a vasectomy, he stated
plainly, “I don’t want it.” Given this opposition, the board placed this
decision in abeyance, and extant records indicate that this patient was
never sterilized. 58
The success in thwarting sterilization requests that a small number
of relatives in Indiana achieved was much more elusive in California.
Although superintendents almost always sought written consents from
the parents or adult guardians of their charges, this interaction ended on
a two-dimensional piece of paper. With no board hearings to attend and
legal avenues closed, relatives could do very little to voice their dissent.
For example, in November 1931, Butler wrote to Mr. Romero, the father of
Juan, a minor at the Preston School of Industry, asking him to consent to
his son’s sterilization at Sonoma so “he can never reproduce his kind, for
we know from experience that individuals of his mentality should never
bear off-spring, as they are usually defective in some manner.”59 One of
Mr. Romero’s three sons, Javier, had already been sterilized, and in the
same communication, Butler reminded him that Sonoma was still await-
ing approval for his third son, Pablo. Butler asserted that having three
boys in one family who ended up in correctional facilities was evidence
that “there is a hereditary thread” and that any grandchildren born of
these boys would certainly be defective.60
In order to express his opinion about Butler’s request, Mr. Romero
went to talk to the health officer at the San Francisco Detention Hospital
who had admitted Juan to the Preston School of Industry. According to
the health officer, Mr. Romero was “violently opposed” to Juan’s steriliza-
tion and rejected the claim that he was feebleminded. In the end, racial
discrimination against Mr. Romero and his boys converged with Butler’s
legal authority to sterilize without consent. As the health officer explained
to Butler, Mr. Romero “is, of course, an ignorant, unintelligent Spanish

man, and it is impossible to convince him of the value of the operation
for sterilization either for his son’s protection or for that of society. We
hope that he will not give you a lot of trouble if you find it necessary to
perform the operation at some future date without his consent in order to
be able to parole” Juan.61 Six months after this letter exchange, in March
1932, Butler convened a conference on Juan’s case, and decided that the
presence of three defectives in one family and the thirteen burglaries at-
tributed to Juan warranted his sterilization, which shortly thereafter was
approved in Sacramento.
In addition to highlighting parental interventions in sterilization de-
cisions, Juan’s case points to an important aspect of eugenic sterilization
in California, namely, the disproportionate number of operations carried
out on those with Spanish surnames, most likely persons of Mexican de-
scent, in the state’s feebleminded facilities. Analysis of data from Sonoma
and Pacific Colony for the period from 1936 to 1949 reveals that Spanish
surnamed patients represented an average of 18.5 percent and 26 percent,
respectively, of patients sterilized. These figures are striking given that
admission rates over this 13-year period ranged from below 1 percent to
only as high as 3 percent at Sonoma and Pacific Colony, a discrepancy
that clearly demonstrates that Spanish surnamed patients were targeted
for reproductive surgery. Esperanza represented in multiple ways the pa-
tients sterilized at Pacific Colony. She was Mexican American, classified
as an imbecile, and described as a “destructive girl who has become a
social problem.”â†œ62
Juan’s story also captures the fervor of Butler, who ran Sonoma from
1918 to 1949 and proudly performed approximately 4,000 surgeries. Just
two years after assuming the superintendence of Sonoma, Butler, endors-
ing the 1917 sterilization law (particularly its stipulation that steriliza-
tion be a precondition for discharge), declared that “all defectives who
are capable of propagating, especially the hereditary class,” should “be
asexualized before leaving the institution.”â†œ63 Butler also was convinced
that combating this menace required extending California’s sterilization
program beyond state institutions. By turning Sonoma into something
of a revolving operating room, he made great strides toward this goal.
Butler did what he could to ensure that teenage girls identified as unruly,
promiscuous, and mentally defective by case workers and county officials
were temporarily sent to Sonoma for salpingectomy. This pattern was

documented in 1926 by the prominent California eugenicist Paul Pope-
noe during a site study of Sonoma conducted for the Pasadena-based Hu-
man Betterment Foundation. Popenoe noted, “It appears that something
like 25% of the girls who have been sterilized were sent up here solely” for
surgery. “They are kept only a few months—long enough to operate and
install a little discipline in them; and then returned home.”â†œ6 4 According
to Butler, “sterilization only” cases comprised 21 percent of Sonoma’s load,
and it was routine for persons categorized as “retardates” (possessing an
IQ of 80 or below) to be surgically fixed and released in under a month’s
time.65 Juan, who was transferred from Preston for the purposes of steril-
ization, demonstrates that temporary confinement for “sterilization only”
also impacted boys.
Superintendents like Butler at Sonoma, Webster at Patton, and Smyth
at Stockton, all of whom occupied their posts from the 1920s to the 1940s,
helped to put the Golden State at the vanguard of eugenic sterilization.
The counterexample of Dr. Leonard Stocking, who ran California’s Ag-
news insane hospital from 1903 to 1931, reinforces this point. Stocking was
much more cautious than many of his colleagues with regard to steriliza-
tion. For example, in response to the 1916 questionnaire sponsored by the
California Board of Charities and Corrections, Stocking replied that he
had performed practically no sterilizations, principally because he did
not “think direct benefit to the patient is to be expected unless it may be
in cases where the mental trouble follows and recurs with pregnancy or
childbirth.”â†œ66 His reticence is evident in the official statistics, which show
comparatively fewer operations performed at Agnews during Stocking’s
superintendence and their twofold increase after his retirement. 67
Indiana and California ushered in America’s sterilization era in the early

1900s. In distinct ways each state played a decisive role in the history of
eugenic sterilization. Indiana passed the first law in the country, indeed in
the world, although it soon became defunct, eventually was ruled uncon-
stitutional, and two decades after passage was replaced with a more subtle
act that nonetheless resembled sterilization laws in other states. While
California could not claim the title of first, it unquestionably held the dis-
tinction of most, performing more than twice as many sterilizations as its

closest rival, Virginia (approximately 8,000). One of the primary reasons
for the Golden State’s tremendous number of reproductive surgeries was
that, unlike Indiana, its law was never seriously contested in the courts.
The permanence of California’s act permitted superintendents, who op-
erated with little scrutiny, to make reproductive surgery central to the
modus operandi of their institutions.
Within two decades, divergence had supplanted the initial conver-
gence of sterilization policies in Indiana and California. Yet by the 1950s
the two states resumed parallel tracks. Surgeries decreased substantially
in the early to mid-1950s due, in California, to a dramatic revision of the
law, and in both states, to the administrative reorganization of mental
health agencies and a far-reaching shift in attitudes toward retardation
and mental illness. As with other aspects of American eugenics, such as
antimiscegenation and racially guided immigration laws, sterilization
statutes were not purged from the books until the 1960s and 1970s. For
example, Indiana’s legislature repealed the 1927 law in 1974, and Califor-
nia followed suit five years later, expunging the 1909 act. In each instance,
many legislators were stunned to learn that sterilizations were still per-
formed sporadically, and they were anxious to get rid of laws that seemed
legally crude and socially antiquated.
Ultimately, sterilization statutes in California and Indiana were
translated into surgeries that terminated the reproductive capacity of pa-
tients and inmates committed to a variety of state institutions. Juxtapos-
ing the lived experiences of sterilization in both states reveals significant
differences in terms of affected populations. Whereas in California, more
operations were performed on the mentally ill than the feebleminded, in
Indiana the feebleminded were sterilized to the near exclusion of the epi-
leptic and insane, even though the law was designed to apply to all these
groups. Beyond institution or diagnosis, what remained constant was
the vulnerability of those sterilized, many of whom were minors whose
parents or adult guardians either welcomed or acquiesced to the medi-
cal paternalism of superintendents. Again and again, sterilization cases
from both places reveal that once youths became ensnared in the juvenile
system, their lives—the future of their procreative capacity—often lay
in the hands of experts with biased and categorical ideas about who was
defective and diseased.
Bringing patient stories to the forefront underscores that rather than

a simple story of victimization, eugenic sterilization involved complex
human actors whose lives dramatically intersected with some of the more
egregious chapters in the modern history of mental health, disability, re-
production, and the state. However, without access to a deeper evidence
base, our knowledge of these largely forgotten and silenced historical
actors is likely to remain quite restricted, not to mention highly filtered
through the bureaucratic and administrative scripts of institutional docu-
ments. Even with these limitations, we can glean some semblance of the
trials and tribulations of those sterilized in California and Indiana, and
situate their experiences along the wide-ranging continuum of the eu-
genic practices and policies that held forth in the United States for much
of the twentieth century.
No t es
1.â•‡ “Indiana Sterilization Hearing, 1950, in the Case of â•‡â•‡â•‡â•‡ â•›, Medical Depart-
ment, Fort Wayne State School, Fort Wayne, Indiana,” Fort Wayne State School, Patient
Files, Indiana State Archives (ISA). Names have been changed to protect the privacy of
patients.
2.â•‡ “Recommendation and Approval for Vasectomy or Salpingectomy for the Pur-
pose of Sterilization,” Pacific Colony, 1950. This is one of approximately 15,000 steriliza-
tion orders contained in microfilm reels housed at the California Department of Mental
Health, accessed per IRB approval for Project #07-06-51, from the Committee for the
Protection of Human Subjects, California Health and Human Services Agency. Names
have been changed to protect the privacy of patients.
3.â•‡ See sterilization numbers and statistics in Lisa M. Matocq, ed., California’s
Compulsory Sterilization Policies, 1909–1979, July 16, 2003, Informational Hearing, Califor-
nia legislative report of the Senate Select Committee on Genetics, Genetic Technolo-
gies, and Public Policy (December 2003).
4.â•‡ See, for example, James W. Trent Jr., Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of
Mental Retardation in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994);
Steven Noll and James W. Trent Jr., eds., Mental Retardation in America: A Historical
Anthology (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 281–99; Joel Braslow, Mental
Ills and Bodily Cures: Psychiatric Treatment in the First Half of the Twentieth Century
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race:
Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001).
5.â•‡ See Harry H. Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization in the United States (Chicago: PsyÂ�
chopathic Laboratory of the Municipal Court of Chicago, 1922); Philip R. Reilly, The Sur-
gical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1991).
6.â•‡ On Sharp’s initial rationale for vasectomy, see Elof Axel Carlson, The Unfit: A
History of a Bad Idea (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press,
2001), and Angela Gugliotta, “‘Dr. Sharp with His Little Knife’: Therapeutic and Puni-
tive Origins of Eugenic Vasectomy—Indiana, 1892–1911,” Journal of the History of Medi-
cine 53:4 (1998): 371–406.
7.â•‡ Harry C. Sharp, Vasectomy: A Means of Preventing Defective Procreation (Jeffer-
sonville: Indiana Reformatory Print, 1909), 6.
8.â•‡ “An Act Entitled to Prevent Procreation of Confirmed Criminals, Idiots, Im-
beciles, and Rapists,” Laws of the State of Indiana (Indianapolis: Wm. B. Buford, 1907),
377–78. For a political and legislative analysis of Indiana’s sterilization laws, see Jason
Lanzter, this volume.
9.â•‡ “Surgeons to Deal with Criminals,” Indianapolis Morning Star, March 7, 1907, 10.
10.â•‡ Sharp, Vasectomy, 2–3.
11.â•‡ See Gugliotta, “‘Dr. Sharp with His Little Knife.’” Figures for 1908 were calcu-
lated by archivist Vicki Casteel, Sterilization File, ISA.
12.â•‡ See Correspondence Folder, Thomas R. Marshall Papers, ISA; Gugliotta, “‘Dr.
Sharp with His Little Knife’”; Carlson, The Unfit, 207–22.
13.â•‡ See Reilly, The Surgical Solution; Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization.
14.â•‡ George A. H. Shideler to Governor J. P. Goodrich, September 9, 1909, folder 2,
box 159, Indiana Reformatory Correspondence, Documents and Reports, Papers of Gov-
ernor James Goodrich, ISA.
15.â•‡ Williams v. Smith, No. 23,709, State of Indiana in the Supreme Court, Brief of
Appellee, 4–5; Smith v. Williams, No. 12,106, Appeal from the Clark Circuit Court to the
Supreme Court of Indiana, Sterilization File, ISA; “Eugenic Sterilization in Indiana,”
Indiana Law Journal 38:2 (1963): 275–89.
16.â•‡ See Sixty-first Annual Report of the Fort Wayne State School, Fort Wayne, Indiana,
for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1939 (Indianapolis: Wm. B. Burford Printing Co., 1939),
5. Nearly every annual report included a brief historical profile of the institution.
17.â•‡ See Fifty-third Annual Report of the Fort Wayne State School (also Twelfth Annual
Report of the Muscatatuck Colony) for the Fiscal Year Ending September 30, 1931 (India-
napolis: Wm. B. Burford Printing Co., 1932).
18.â•‡ Ibid., 12; Fifty-fourth Annual Report of the Fort Wayne State School (also Thir-
teenth Annual Report of the Muscatatuck Colony) for the Fiscal Year Ending September 30,
1931 (Indianapolis: Wm. B. Burford Printing Co., 1933), 35.
19.â•‡ Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization, 17; on Hatch, see Braslow, Mental Ills and
Bodily Cures, 56.
20.â•‡ Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization, 18, 19.
21.â•‡ Third Biennial Report of the Department of Institutions of the State of California,
Two Years Ending June 30, 1926 (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1926),
92.
22.â•‡ Braslow, Mental Ills and Bodily Cures, 56.
23.â•‡ See Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern
America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
24.â•‡ See Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme
Court, and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
25.â•‡Reilly, The Surgical Solution, 97–101.
26.â•‡ See Statistical Report of the Department of Institutions of the State of California,
Year Ending June 30, 1935 (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1936); Statistical
Report of the Department of Institutions of the State of California, Year Ending June 30, 1942
(Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1943), 98; Matocq, ed., California’s Com-
pulsory Sterilization Policies.
27.â•‡ See, for example, Seventh Biennial Report of the State Commission in Lunacy for
the Two Years Ending June 30, 1910 (Sacramento: Superintendent State Printing, 1910),
19–23; Third Biennial Report, 93–94; Fred O. Butler, “A Quarter of a Century’s Experi-
ence in Sterilization of Mental Defectives in California,” reprint from the American
Journal of Mental Deficiency (1945), contained in Matocq, ed., California’s Compulsory
Sterilization Policies.
28.â•‡ Although cases involving allegations of medical malpractice, demands for dam-
ages, and petitions for the state to provide nontherapeutic surgical sterilizations for the
indigent were heard in California’s supreme and appellate courts between 1930 and 1979,
only Sara Rosas Garcia v. State Department of Institutions challenged the constitutional-
ity of the sterilization law. See Jessin v. County of Shasta, Civ. No. 12,027, Court of Appeal
of California, Third Appellate District, 274 Cal. App. 2d 737; 79 Cal. Rptr. 359; 1969 Cal.
App. LEXIS 2107; 35 A.L.R.3d 1433, July 11, 1969; Kline, Building a Better Race, chap. 4.
29.â•‡ Petition for Writ of Prohibition of Mandate, Civ. 12533, in the District Court of
Appeal of the State of California, Second Appellate District, Sara Rosas Garcia vs. State
Department of Institutions of the State of California et al., December 13, 1939, on file at the
California State Archives. An abridged version is available through Lexis-Nexis: see
Sara Rosas Garcia v. State Department of Institutions, Civ. No. 12,533, Court of Appeal of
California, Second Appellate District, Division One, 36 Cal. App. 2nd 152; 97 P.2d 264;
1939 Cal. App. LEXIS.â†œ
30.â•‡ See Legislative History, Senate Bill 750, microfilm 3:2 (4); “Legislative Memo-
randum,” April 4, 1953, Legislative History, Assembly Bill 2683, microfilm reel 3:2 (10);
Frank F. Tallman to Honorable Earl Warren, March 31, 1953, Legislative History, Assem-
bly Bill 2683, microfilm reel 3:2 (10), CSA.
31.â•‡ For a discussion of Catholic opposition to sterilization, which solidified in the
1920s, see Christine Rosen, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eu-
genics Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
32.â•‡ On Earl Warren’s gubernatorial administration in California and his rise to
Supreme Court justice, see Jim Newton, Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He
Made (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006).
33.â•‡ See “Background Paper,” in Matocq, ed., California’s Compulsory Sterilization
Policies.
34.â•‡ “Background Paper,” and “Sterilization Operations in California State Hos-
pitals, April 26, 1909, through June 30, 1960,” in Matocq, ed., California’s Compulsory
Sterilization Policies. Also see “History, Description, and Evaluation of the Department
of Mental Hygiene,” (1962), Papers of Nathan Sloate, Department of Mental Hygiene
Records (DMH), CSA.
35.â•‡ “Sonoma State Hospital,” Biennial Report, 1952–54, Sonoma State Hospital,
Administrative Files, DMH, F3501, Loc D0419, box 154, CSA.
36.â•‡Not until the 1940s, when California claimed about 60 percent of all operations
nationwide, did a few places, such as Delaware, North Carolina, and Virginia, begin to
consistently overtake California in per capita or annual terms. Figures derived from
“U.S. Maps Showing the States Having Sterilization Laws in 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940,” Pub-
lication No. 5 (Princeton: Birthright, n.d.), in Matocq, California’s Compulsory Steriliza-
tion Policies; Clarence J. Gamble, “Preventive Sterilization in 1948,” JAMA 141:11 (1949):
773; Gamble, “Sterilization of the Mentally Deficient under State Laws,” American Jour-
nal of Mental Deficiency 51:2 (1946): 164–69. Delaware was the only state that outpaced
California in per capita terms in the 1930s, with a rate ranging between about 80 and 100
sterilizations per 100,000 individuals.
37.â•‡ “Eugenic Sterilization in Indiana” notes inconsistent interpretations of criminal
immunity; “An Act to Provide for the Sexual Sterilization of Inmates” (1927), Steriliza-
tion File, ISA.
38.â•‡ See Fort Wayne Minutes, 1931–47, ISA.
39.â•‡ L. Potter Harshman, “Medical and Legal Aspects of Sterilization in Indiana,”
Journal of Psycho-Asthenics 39 (June 1933–June 1934): 189.
40.â•‡ See “Eugenical Sterilization in Indiana.”
41.â•‡ Sonoma State Hospital, interoffice memorandum, November 29, 1956, re: W & I
Code Changes, Sonoma State Hospital, Administrative Files, DMH, F3501, Loc D0419,
box 153, CSA.
42.â•‡ See Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, and Noll and Trent, Mental Retardation in
America; for an elaboration of this attitudinal change in California, see “Statement of
Progress, Department of Mental Hygiene for the Period 1943–1950,” November 1, 1950,
DMH, Papers of Nathan Sloate, CSA.
43.â•‡ “Sterilization Operations Performed, Patton State Hospital, during Month of
March 1939.” Her operation occurred on March 23, 1939.
pose of Sterilization,” Patton State Hospital, 1939.
45.â•‡ Statistical Report of the Department of Institutions of the State of California, Year
Ending June 30, 1939 (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1939), 26.
46.â•‡ John A. Reily to John Randolph Haynes, February 19, 1916, box 193, Haynes Pa-
pers, 1241, Special Collections, UCLA.
47.â•‡ Third Biennial Report of the State Department of Institutions (1926), 83.
48.â•‡To be true to the historical era of eugenic sterilization, I use the terms employed
at the time. Today these kinds of facilities generally are referred to as developmental
centers (feebleminded homes) and state hospitals (mental hospitals).
49.â•‡ Statistical Report of the Department of Institutions of the State of California, Year
Ending June 30, 1940 (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1940), 12.
50.â•‡ Braslow, Mental Ills and Bodily Cures, 21, 80.
51.â•‡ Biennial Report (1939), 26.
52.â•‡ On Smyth’s ardent support of sterilization, see Margaret L. Smyth to John
Randolph Haynes, June 3, 1916, box 17, Haynes Papers, 1241, Special Collections, UCLA;
Smyth, “Psychiatric History and Development in California,” American Journal of Psy-
chiatry 94 (1938): 1223–36.
53.â•‡ See Stern, Eugenic Nation, chap. 3.
54.â•‡ Sterilization order in the form of a letter, Butler to Earl E. Jensen, March 22, 1928.
55.â•‡ Sterilization order in the form of a letter, Butler to Dr. J. M. Toner, January 9,
1932.
56.â•‡ “Indiana Sterilization Hearing, 1950, in the Case of â•‡â•‡â•‡â•‡ â•›, Muscatatuck State
School, Butlerville, Indiana,” April 16, 1942, Muscatatuck State School, Patient Files, ISA.
57.â•‡ See entries for 1942 in Fort Wayne State School Minutes, vol. 1, 1931–47, ISA.
58.â•‡ See entries for 1953 in Fort Wayne State School Minutes, vol. 2, 1948–55, ISA.
59.â•‡ For insight into California’s youth of color in state institutions, see Miroslava
Chávez-García, “Intelligence Testing at Whittier School, 1890-1920,” Pacific Historical
Review 76:2 (2007): 193–228.
60.â•‡ Butler to â•‡â•‡â•‡â•‡ â•›, November 21, 1931, Inmate #13694, F3738:20, Inmate Records,
Inmates Histories, Papers of the Preston School of Industry, California Youth Author-
ity, CSA, consulted per confidentiality agreement signed at the CSA.
61.â•‡ J. C. Geiger to Butler, November 24, 1931, Inmate #13694, ibid.
pose of Sterilization,” Pacific Colony, â•‡â•‡â•‡â•‡ â•›, 1950.
63.â•‡ Fred O. Butler, “Report of Medical Superintendent of the Sonoma State Home,”
First Biennial Report of the Department of Institutions, 1920, 80.
64.â•‡ Paul Popenoe to Ezra S. Gosney, March 25, 1926, box 7, folder 2, Papers of Ezra
S. Gosney and the Human Betterment Foundation, Institute Archives, California Insti-
tute of Technology.
65.â•‡ See interview of Fred O. Butler; Butler, “A Quarter of a Century’s Experience.”
66.â•‡ Leonard Stocking to John Randolph Haynes, March 11, 1916, box 193, Haynes
Papers, 1241, Special Collections, UCLA.
67.â•‡ See “California’s Compulsory Sterilization Policies”; Braslow, Mental Ills and
Bodily Cures.
six
Eugenics and Social Welfare

in New Deal Minnesota
Mol ly L a dd - Tay l or
Tena and Stewart had “many good traits and were fond of their children,”
but social workers found their living conditions “impossible.” It was 1937,
and the couple “could not cope” with the “existing conditions” of depres-
sion and unemployment. He drank, and she was “stepping out”—despite
being pregnant with her fourth child. Their children appeared neglected
and abused. After IQ tests found both parents to be feebleminded,1 they
were committed to state guardianship, sent to the state institution, and
sterilized. Stewart’s parents quickly consented to his operation, and he
returned home after two months, but Tena’s parents “caused” her opera-
tion to be delayed. She was reunited with her family eight months later,
but the couple remained wards of the state. A social worker helped Stew-
art get New Deal work relief and kept in “close touch” with Tena as she
reestablished her home.2
Tena and Stewart were among the approximately 1,200 Minnesotans
sterilized during the Great Depression. 3 Their welfare dependency and
problematic parenting brought them to the attention of the county child
welfare board, and their low IQ scores provided proof of their mental
deficiency. Their case, which was unusual only because both husband
and wife were sterilized, was presented to the American Association for
Mental Deficiency as an example of successful casework. The write-up
made no reference to heredity or eugenics, however; the point was that
the couple’s economic circumstances and parenting skills could be im-
proved with positive social work intervention and surgery. Eugenic ster-
ilization, in this case, was a routine decision aimed at ensuring that a
welfare-dependent family did not have any more mouths to feed and that
117
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their children did not get into trouble. Their surgery was propelled less by
a eugenics-based “quest for racial purity” than by specific local concerns
about welfare dependency and social disorder.4
This essay examines the routine operation of eugenic sterilization
as a social welfare policy during the New Deal, the period of its great-
est activity. Although Minnesota’s sterilization law was enacted in 1925
and stayed on the books for 50 years, nearly 45 percent of the state’s re-
corded sterilizations were performed between 1933 and 1940, mostly on
white working-class women considered to be feebleminded. Sterilizations
dropped off during World War II because of a shortage of medical and
nursing personnel, and the program never returned to its earlier scale. By
1963, the last year for which statistics are available, at least 2,350 Minneso-
tans—78 percent of them women—had been sterilized, but Minnesota
accounted for just 4 percent of all sterilizations in the nation. 5
Many historians have commented on the relationship between eu-
genics and European welfare states, but little work has been done on the
relationship between eugenics, liberal social welfare policy, and day-to-
day sterilization routines in the United States.6 Minnesota is a good site
for investigation into this topic because its eugenic sterilization law was
considered voluntary (consent of kin was required), and it was adminis-
tered within a child welfare system that won national praise. Like public
welfare in general, eugenic sterilization was shaped by the social-control
goals of reducing dependency and disorder, and characterized by local
variation, political manipulation, and a gap between rhetoric and routini-
zation. Eugenics-inspired fears of the menace of the feebleminded were
clearly central to the passage of the 1925 sterilization law, but the bill’s ac-
tual administration over the years had as much to do with fiscal and wel-
fare politics as with an attempt to improve the human race. The eugenic
and welfare functions of Minnesota’s sterilization program overlapped
when the object of eliminating the unfit converged with keeping taxes and
relief costs low, yet at times the welfare goal of providing assistance to the
poor and the eugenics goal of reducing their numbers collided.7
The legal foundation for Minnesota’s eugenic sterilization law was
laid in its Children’s Code, a package of 35 laws passed in 1917 to modern-
ize the state’s child welfare system. According to one social work his-
torian, the code launched a “new era of child welfare work” and made
Minnesota “one of the leading states measured by its children’s laws.”
E u g e n i c s a n d S o c i a l W e l fa r e i n N e w D e a l M i n n e s o t a â•… · â•… 119
It modernized adoption procedures, extended the rights of illegitimate

children, revised the state’s mothers’ pensions and juvenile court laws,
and created an administrative apparatus, consisting of a state children’s
bureau and county child welfare boards, to take children’s services into
every corner of the state. Most important for the history of sterilization,
the Children’s Code included a civil commitment law that empowered
county probate judges to commit neglected, dependent, and delinquent
children—and any person “alleged to be Feeble Minded, Inebriate, or
Insane,” regardless of age—to state guardianship without the approval of
parent or kin. The guardianship was for life, unless the person was specifi-
cally discharged. Once committed as feebleminded, a ward took on the
status of a permanent child: he or she was unable to vote, own property,
manage his or her financial affairs, or marry without the state’s approval.
The Board of Control, as legal guardian, decided whether the ward should
be placed in an institution or stay in the county under the supervision of
the child welfare board.8
The fact that a compulsory commitment law for so-called defectives
was part of the Children’s Code reveals the deep intellectual and ad-
ministrative connections between eugenics and child welfare in Pro-
gressive Era Minnesota. It also demonstrates the enormous influence
of Dr. Arthur C. Rogers, the esteemed superintendent of the Minnesota
School for the Feebleminded from 1885 to 1917. Although Rogers died
before either compulsory commitment or eugenic sterilization became
law, his three-pronged strategy for the identification and control of the
feebleminded—eugenic family studies, mass IQ testing, and compulsory
civil commitment—shaped Minnesota’s eugenics policy into the 1930s.
In 1910, the year the Eugenic Record Office (ERO) was founded and just
two years after Alfred Binet developed the first modern intelligence test,
Rogers arranged for two ERO field workers to study the family histories
of students at the Faribault School. He also hired psychologist Frederick
Kuhlmann, a former classmate of Lewis Terman at Clark University,
to conduct IQ tests at the institution (and throughout the state). Rog-
ers’s advocacy of civil commitment as a eugenics strategy was especially
innovative, for it permitted authorities to institutionalize supposedly
defective women and girls without their families’ consent. It is a testa-
ment to Rogers’s stature—and to the general influence of his eugenics
philosophy on Minnesota reformers—that the Minnesota Child Welfare
Commission wrote a compulsory commitment law for defectives into the

Children’s Code.9
Rogers’s welfarist approach to eugenics also influenced Minnesota
sterilization policy. Although the Faribault superintendent opposed a
1913 bill that would have sterilized criminals as well as the feebleminded,
he registered general approval of the sterilization idea, and the 1925 steril-
ization law was consistent with his careful approach.10 Unlike the better-
known laws of Virginia, Indiana, and California, Minnesota’s steriliza-
tion program applied only to persons who had been committed to state
guardianship as feebleminded or insane. The sterilization of a feeble-
minded ward could be authorized after “careful investigation of all the
circumstances of the case,” consultation with three experts (the superin-
tendent of the School for the Feebleminded, a “reputable” physician, and
a psychologist), and the written consent of the spouse or nearest kin. If
no relative could be located, the State Board of Control as legal guardian
could give consent. A mentally ill person committed to the custody of
the superintendent of the state hospital for the insane could be sterilized
only if he or she had been a patient in the institution for six consecutive
months. Both the patient and the next of kin had to give their written
consent. It is not surprising, given the statutory requirements pertaining
to institutionalization and personal consent, that fewer than 20 percent
of sterilizations in Minnesota were performed on the insane.11
The administrative structure of Minnesota’s sterilization program
was also singularly welfare oriented. While most states placed the author-
ity to order sterilizations in a state eugenics board or the board of trust-
ees or superintendent of a state institution, Minnesota made the State
Board of Control its chief sterilization agency. A three-member panel
appointed by the governor to “secure the economical management” of
state institutions, the Board of Control oversaw the operation of mental
hospitals, prisons, poorhouses, the state orphanage, and the school for
the feebleminded; it also assisted county child welfare boards with the
care of dependent or neglected children and distributed emergency relief
during the New Deal.12
If the administrative structure of the sterilization program reflected
its overlapping welfare and eugenic functions, the inherent tensions be-
tween these two aims was evident in the simmering dispute between
state welfare officials and the Minnesota Eugenics Society. The found-
ing meeting of the eugenics society was attended by several prominent

welfare reformers, including Minneapolis settlement worker Catheryne
Cooke Gilman, the executive secretary of the Women’s Cooperative Al-
liance and a member of the Child Welfare Commission that drafted the
Children’s Code. Yet there is little evidence of sustained interaction. No
member of the Child Welfare Commission sat on the council of the Min-
nesota Eugenics Society when it was founded in 1923. A few high-profile
men, including Frederick Kuhlmann, George G. Eitel (who would even-
tually perform many of the surgeries at Faribault), and Minneapolis Gen-
eral Hospital superintendent Walter List joined the Minnesota Eugenics
Society, but it was Charles Dight, the organization’s eccentric president,
who became the public face of eugenics in Minnesota.
Dight, a socialist physician and former Minneapolis alderman who
lived for a while in a tree house, was a tireless eugenics campaigner. He
believed fervently that the “socially unfit”—the insane, the diseased, the
feebleminded and epileptic, the criminally inclined, and the avaricious—
were a “peril to the nation,” and he was dogged in his pursuit of a eugenics
law. Dight’s efforts on behalf of a sterilization bill were publicly acknowl-
edged with an invitation to attend the first six operations on January 8,
1926.13
At first glance, Dight’s high-profile career supports the popular view
of eugenic sterilization as the product of a racist campaign by scientific
and medical elites to “create a superior Nordic race.”14 Dight worried
about the influx and “rapid reproduction” of the “mentally inferior of Eu-
rope,” complained that Minnesota’s “restricted” sterilization law did not
cover Mexican migrant workers, and wrote an admiring letter to Hitler
in 1933. Determined to extend “eugenic” sterilization to rapists, three-
time felons, undesirable immigrants, and others who were eugenically
unfit but not committed to state guardianship, Dight waged a loud but
ultimately unsuccessful campaign to make Minnesota’s sterilization law
more like California’s. He was vociferous in his criticism of the casework
orientation of the Board of Control (especially its sole female member,
Blanche La Du) and lobbied stubbornly for an office of state eugenist or
county sterilization boards to replace it as the state’s chief sterilization
authority.15
Yet the Board of Control consistently rejected Dight’s sweeping eu-
genics vision in favor of a social welfare policy of “selective sterilization”
in individual cases. La Du reportedly called Dight’s far-reaching propos-

als dangerous and hung up the telephone or walked away when he tried to
argue with her. Another Board of Control employee recalled ducking out
a side door so she would be “not in” whenever he visited her office.16 Both
sides agreed that mental defect was largely inherited and posed a burden
on the welfare system, yet while Dight accentuated the eugenic benefits
of sterilization, the Board of Control emphasized the need for individual
casework and public welfare. To state welfare officials, the most compel-
ling justification for sterilization was not eugenic, but “socio-economic . . .
that the feeble-minded parent cannot provide a stable and secure family
life for his children.”17
Scientific and medical elites played an important role in lobbying for
a sterilization law and performing the actual surgeries, but they played a
surprisingly small role in the day-to-day decisions about who would be
sterilized in Minnesota. Under the 1917 commitment law, any family mem-
ber or “reputable” citizen living in the same county as an alleged defective
could initiate a commitment proceeding, and a local probate judge had
the sole authority to decide if the petition had merit and should continue.
The State Board of Control was permitted to send a “person skilled in
mental diagnosis” to examine the alleged defective and attend a hearing,
but the expert played only a consultative role. The actual finding of feeble-
mindedness was made by a board of examiners comprised of the probate
judge and two licensed physicians appointed by the judge—although if a
person were “obviously feebleminded,” the judge could dispense with the
board of examiners and make the decision on his own. Thus the first and
most significant step in the sterilization process—the power to diagnose
and commit a feebleminded individual to state guardianship—rested
in the hands of a probate judge, an elected official not required to have
any legal or medical training. (If a feebleminded ward petitioned to be
“restored to capacity,” the case would be heard by a district court judge,
presiding without a jury.)18
Unquestionably, the decision to commit was the crucial moment in
the administration of the sterilization law. Probate judges had a great deal
of latitude in making this decision because the statutory definition of a
“feebleminded person”—as someone “who is so mentally defective as to
be incapable of managing himself and his affairs, and to require supervi-
sion, control and care for his own or the public welfare”—was so impre-
cise.19 Most judges relied on the standard markers of feeblemindedness—

visual signifiers, such as an evident physical disability or a “large tongue”
or “protruding lip”; social characteristics, such as poor English language
skills, a weak school or employment record, or a disorderly home; or be-
havioral indicators such as alcoholism or “sex delinquency.”20 Many judges
also considered the results of intelligence tests, although these were often
given under “conditions that were far from ideal—in a crowded room,
in a home with a child often pounding on the door, in the yard or in the
car”—a fact that surely added to the numbers of working-class Minneso-
tans determined to be feebleminded. Many of the personal traits taken as
evidence of hereditary feeblemindedness in the 1930s were seen by later
generations as the effects of a culture of poverty—fatalism, inability to
delay gratification, and a low level of aspiration. The feebleminded “lack
common sense, foresight, are unable to resist ordinary temptations, act on
impulse, and have little or no initiative,” the control board explained in a
widely distributed memo. “They have about the same desires as normals,
including sexual, but lack ability to control them. They usually have poor
homes.”21
The connection officials saw between feeblemindedness, poverty,
and sexual misbehavior was not simply due to their frame of mind; it was
rooted in the fiscal and administrative structures of Minnesota’s wel-
fare system. Probate courts doubled as juvenile courts in Minnesota’s
84 non-urban counties, and rural judges routinely encountered cases of
incorrigibility, truancy, sex delinquency, and child neglect—all highly
subjective offenses that were associated with feeblemindedness. In addi-
tion, unpaid child welfare board members, who conducted mothers’ aid
investigations and arranged for foster-care or adoption placements for
needy children, were inclined to stress “the relationship of low mentality
to social problems.” Poor relief was funded through local property taxes,
and cash-strapped child welfare boards worried about the pauperizing
effects—and rising costs—of public relief. They often treated destitute
families as a burden on taxpayers and saw hereditary feeblemindedness
as the cause of poverty, sexual misconduct, and crime. Many welfare
workers embraced Minnesota’s three-step program of committing, insti-
tutionalizing, and sterilizing the feebleminded because it shifted part of
the economic and social responsibility for their most troublesome charges
from the county to the state. 22
While feebleminded commitments were made (and occasionally

unmade) at the local level by hundreds of different judges, the decision
to sterilize was centralized in St. Paul. The Board of Control gave final
approval, but the central figure in Minnesota’s sterilization program was
Mildred Thomson, who ran the control board’s bureau for the feeble-
minded and epileptic from 1924 to 1959 and was de facto guardian of the
state’s feebleminded wards. An Atlanta native, Thomson had a master’s
degree in education from Stanford University, where she wrote a thesis
on the IQ testing of schoolchildren with the famous psychologist Lewis
Terman. Yet she saw herself primarily as a social worker. In her memoirs,
she made a point of distinguishing the attitudes of social workers “actually
working with individuals” from the men, such as Frederick Kuhlmann
and Charles Dight, whose interest in eugenics she saw as more abstract
and indiscriminate. Throughout her long career, Thomson stressed the
state’s “obligation” to the feebleminded, who “even though grown . . . are
really children” in need of protection. Like her superiors at the Board of
Control, she opposed the “overzealous conclusion that sterilization of the
feebleminded is wholly justified by the eugenic factors,” but supported
“selective sterilization, with consideration of the individual tempering
each selection” when it was in the “best interests” of the ward. “We are
primarily the friends of the feeble-minded,” Thomson reminded
county child welfare board members in a widely distributed memo, “made
so by law and also by our natural sympathies, I believe.”23 After
the war, Thomson’s “natural sympathies” for the feebleminded and their
families led her to play a major role in the 1950 founding of the national
Association for Retarded Children, a parent advocacy group for people
with intellectual disabilities; her contribution to ARC is still noted on the
organization’s website. The relative ease with which Thomson made the
transition from eugenics administrator to reform facilitator reveals both
the constancy of her welfare-casework orientation and the mutability of
her social work role.24
Thomson’s view of surgical sterilization as just one part of a broad
social work program to assist the feebleminded also helps to explain an-
other apparent paradox: why sterilizations increased in the 1930s, just as
scientific and popular critiques of eugenics were beginning to command
attention. As the decade opened, two events shifted Minnesota’s politi-
cal and cultural landscape away from a general support for “eugenics”:
Pope Pius XI issued his 1930 encyclical on marriage, which strengthened

Catholic opposition to eugenic sterilization, and the charismatic Swed-
ish-American attorney Floyd Olson, a forceful advocate for emergency
relief and social security, was elected the state’s first Farmer-Labor gov-
ernor. Amidst the turmoil of the Depression, impassioned battles over
Farmer-Labor politics, unionization, and the New Deal swept away the
erstwhile fixation on the unfit. The Minnesota Eugenics Society “faded
out of existence,” but routine sterilizations continued on. 25
Most historians have attributed the nationwide increase in steriliza-
tions during the Depression to a general acceptance of eugenics beliefs
and budgetary pressures on the public purse: sterilizing and releasing the
“high-grade” feebleminded freed up space in overcrowded state institu-
tions.26 Yet the increase in sterilizations in 1930s Minnesota coincided
not with the “harsh economic realities” of the Depression but with the
influx of federal funds during the New Deal. About 67 Minnesotans were
sterilized annually between 1926 and 1929. The number of recorded ster-
ilizations increased slightly in the early years of the Depression, but more
than doubled—from 79 to 144—between 1932 and 1934. Nearly 140 Min-
nesotans were sterilized each year for the rest of the decade.27
The increase in sterilizations came partly because the New Deal fun-
neled emergency relief through existing state agencies, vastly increasing
the power of amateurish child welfare workers in the counties and the
old-school social workers at the State Board of Control. In 1933, Governor
Olson designated the Board of Control the State Emergency Relief Ad-
ministration responsible for allocating emergency aid, distributing food
and surplus commodities to drought-scarred counties, and administer-
ing the major New Deal work relief programs, the Civilian Conservation
Corps and (after 1935) the Works Progress Administration (WPA). In 1937,
when the state reorganized its welfare system to meet the administrative
standards of the Social Security Act, the mostly volunteer child welfare
boards established under the 1917 Children’s Code were transformed into
“county welfare boards” with higher budgets and greater investigative and
economic powers. They retained their old responsibilities for child wel-
fare and the state’s feebleminded wards, but took on a colossal new job:
the administration of “all forms of public assistance.” The massive relief
and social security programs dwarfed the control board’s other programs.
The program for the feebleminded “seemed especially overshadowed,”
Thomson recalled. “With few exceptions the welfare boards gave first
consideration to other programs; supervision of the feebleminded was
done almost solely on an emergency basis.”28
The spectacular increase in federal welfare funding (and government
jobs ripe for patronage) raised the stakes in the bitter partisan battles over
taxation and relief. Traveling around the country for federal relief admin-
istrator Harry Hopkins, journalist Lorena Hickok reported that she had
a “pretty poor impression” of relief work in Minnesota. “The whole set-up
in this state was—pardon the vulgarity—lousy with politics.” Although
Olson was “about the smartest ‘Red’ in this country,” the Democrats were
weak, and “most of the money and the press are Republican and hostile.”
Charges of Communist influence in state government, and the internal
struggles that divided Farmer-Laborites after Olson’s sudden death from
cancer in 1936, added to the turmoil. The years from 1936 to 1939 were a
time of “change and also of considerable stress,” Thomson recalled with
characteristic understatement. There were deep divisions between “ex-
tremely conservative” social workers and “extremely radical” ones and a
“sense of uneasiness” in the state agencies. The Republicans regained the
governorship in 1938, and the new governor, Harold Stassen, embarked on
a major reorganization of state government that brought the 1939 elimina-
tion of the Board of Control. Suspected Communists were purged from
state government, and the control board was replaced by a Social Security
Board with two new departments, Social Welfare and Public Institutions.
Yet sterilizations did not stop.29
Despite the turmoil in the state bureaucracy, Minnesota’s program
for the feebleminded remained outside the political fray for much of this
period. Thomson’s bureaucratic disposition and detachment from party
politics—and the fact that her bureau had no direct money grants—likely
kept the program for the feebleminded from getting politicized. Yet the
inattention to her program also signals ideas about disability, dependency,
and gender that all three parties at every level of government shared. His-
torian Alice Kessler-Harris has remarked on what she calls a “gendered
imagination” which positioned men as independent workers and women
as dependent family members and constituted a crucial measure of “what
was fair” at a time when the social welfare functions of the federal govern-
ment were expanding. Despite being deeply divided over unions, taxa-
tion, and the New Deal, most Minnesotans held the same gendered ideas
about male breadwinning and the dignity of work—ideas shaped by dis-

ability as well as by gender. Thus, while policy makers in Washington and
St. Paul designed work relief, union rights, and unemployment insurance
that preserved the dignity of “employable” but temporarily jobless (white)
men, public assistance for “unemployables” remained on an inferior track.
Social assistance for single mothers, dependent children, and “defectives”
(who, according to Thomson, were rarely “employable” under the “present
industrial set-up”) remained largely means- and morals-tested and locally
funded and controlled. Perhaps this is why Olson, despite expressing
little interest in the state’s program for the feebleminded, signed a bill
long advocated by Kuhlmann that authorized a statewide census of the
feebleminded in 1935. The bill was more symbolic than practical, however,
for no appropriation was ever made. 30
For reasons both cultural and structural, Minnesota’s guardianship
program for the feebleminded received bipartisan support in the 1930s,
and Mildred Thomson could proudly claim that hers was the most “feeble-
minded conscious” state. Even during the Depression, many social work-
ers saw a “definite relationship between the persons receiving direct relief
and work relief from the state and federal governments, and feeble-mind-
edness.” Some welfare boards ordered IQ tests for parents and children
living “under deplorable conditions” and had entire families committed
to state guardianship as feebleminded. “Apparently the boards were satis-
fied that they had taken some kind of action,” Thomson later observed, for
although counties still had to pay for relief or help wards find WPA jobs,
the state assumed a portion of the economic responsibility. “Later some
of these families were difficult to work with,” she conceded; “not all those
tested and committed to guardianship under the circumstances proved
to be really feebleminded and their frustrating experiences made them
resentful. Tests and decisions had been made too hurriedly.” Commit-
ments were made by the probate courts, however, and state officials were
“powerless” to undo court decisions once they were made. 31
Note that Thomson’s observations concerned feebleminded com-
mitments, which could be ordered without the consent of kin, but not
sterilization, which required relatives to consent. Minnesota officials took
sterilization consent seriously, and it was recorded, along with basic de-
mographic information like birth date, IQ , and county of residence, in a
medical record book of the first 1,000 sterilization operations performed
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at the Faribault School for the Feebleminded. It is interesting that both

consent of kin, which was required by law, and personal consent, which
was legally unnecessary, were recorded. Members of the immediate
family—parents, spouse, or siblings—consented to 82 percent of ster-
ilizations, and personal consent was obtained for more than 97 percent
of surgeries. 32 Of course, consent could be coerced, as when parents put
pressure on a daughter who was sexually active or had a baby out of wed-
lock, or when officials withheld release from the institution until consent
to sterilization was secured. Thomson insisted that the state would never
“make a bargain” in exchange for sterilization and that people who op-
posed sterilization because of “religious and moral convictions” would
face “no pressure” to give consent, but she regularly advised child welfare
workers to tell families that release from the state institution would pro-
ceed “more easily and satisfactorily” after sterilization. Surgery should
not be considered a condition of discharge, she said, but an “aid to the
reconstruction of their lives outside the institution.”33
Despite its obvious limitations, Minnesota’s statutory consent re-
quirement provided crucial leverage for disadvantaged families. A sig-
nificant number of families, especially Catholics, refused to consent to
a sterilization operation, and given popular beliefs about the impact of
vasectomy on male sexual performance, the consent provision might
have been a factor in the relatively small percentage of sterilizations per-
formed on men. Yet even when operations were eventually performed, the
consent provision helped poor families negotiate with welfare officials.
The case of Sam and Lena B provides a good illustration. The couple
had two children when they were committed to state guardianship in
1934. Although the welfare board wanted the pair sterilized immediately,
relatives objected, and three years passed before the couple was taken to
Faribault for surgery. A daughter was born in the intervening period, and
the couple’s fourth child, a son, was born in the institution. The family
was reunited a few months after the parents were sterilized, and the social
worker reported that they were happy: “Sam said he thought he had the
right size family and was glad that they did not have any more children,”
she explained. The couple resisted the state’s sterilization plan when they
had only two children, but they were content to stop at four. 34
As the case of Sam and Lena suggests, some welfare-dependent fami-
lies tolerated—and occasionally even sought—surgical sterilization as a
form of birth control paid for by the state. A Twin Cities social worker,
who considered sterilization “questionable” when it came to eugenics,
admitted that it “has worked out well in families where there were already
enough children and the mother and father were convinced that there
should not be any more.” The state archives contain many examples of
women like Annie, the mother of ten children, who entered the insti-
tution “for sterilization” and returned home as soon as they recovered
from surgery. In their cases, the eugenics aim of preventing the births
of potentially feebleminded children, the welfare objective of provid-
ing (minimal) assistance to relief-dependent families, and poor women’s
desire for reproductive control converged. Yet state-funded sterilizations
could only be performed on feebleminded or insane persons under state
guardianship, so poor women seeking state-funded sterilization were
left exceedingly vulnerable. Countless women got stuck in the institu-
tion when outbreaks of influenza or the measles caused surgical delays
or when a family member would not sign the consent form. (The patient,
of course, could not legally sign for herself.) By the end of the decade,
Minnesota’s commitment-institutionalization-sterilization program was
winning few praises outside the Board of Control. But the operations
continued. 35
By the end of the 1930s, political turmoil, partisan charges of patron-
age and corruption, and constant criticisms of state government created
a space for a more open rebellion. In the early years of the sterilization
program, resistance was largely invisible; most people rebelled by refus-
ing to sign sterilization consent forms or simply by running away. Few
Minnesotans pursued the initial right to a hearing, and fewer still sued for
“restoration to capacity.” As the program expanded, however, the opposi-
tion grew increasingly vocal. Socialist feminist author Meridel Le Sueur
wrote about single pregnant working-class women struggling to escape
police matrons and social workers wanting to sterilize them. Except for
Le Sueur and a handful of Farmer-Labor radicals, however, there was little
evidence of concern about women’s reproductive or human rights. 36
Indeed, most public criticism of Minnesota’s program for the fee-
bleminded was motivated by political opposition to the leftist Farmer-
Labor regime. A particularly damning report, which focused partly on
misspending and administrative problems at the School for the Feeble-
minded, was released shortly after the Republicans regained control of
state government in 1939. A joint committee investigating the “acts and

activities of the various governmental departments,” chaired by conserva-
tive legislator A. O. Sletvold, accused Superintendent Edward Engberg
of using tax dollars to renovate his home and condemned the scandal-
ous treatment of patients. Inmates did not have enough milk or butter,
there were not enough guards for violent male inmates, trench mouth was
epidemic, and broken bones were left untreated for days. The committee
recounted the sad story of Blanche Harkner as an “outstanding example”
of medical neglect, although we know from other sources that Harkner’s
injuries resulted from a desperate attempt to escape a scheduled steril-
ization operation in February 1939. Harkner climbed out a window at
the hospital where sterilizations were performed and fell two and a half
stories to the ground, shattering both legs and injuring her spine. More
than six days passed before she was transferred to a Minneapolis hospital
where she could receive proper medical care. Yet while the Sletvold com-
mittee expressed outrage over the delay in treating Harkner’s fractured
bones, it was silent on the question of her sterilization. Faribault offi-
cials reported 136 sterilizations in 1939, Republican Harold Stassen’s first
year as governor, but Sletvold maintained that the “evils” wrought by the
Farmer-Laborites were already being remedied by the new administra-
tion. Clearly, sterilization was a bipartisan affair. 37
While the Sletvold committee and other legislative investigations
of the 1930s got a lot of press, they had little real impact; more serious al-
legations of incompetence and mismanagement were leveled by national
authorities. Between 1939 and 1941 two major studies—a U.S. Public
Health Service survey of mental hospitals and a review of Minnesota’s
mental health program by the American Public Welfare Association—
raised “very serious questions” about the program for the feebleminded
and especially Mildred Thomson. Both reports called attention to the
inordinate power of untrained county welfare boards and questioned
the wisdom of placing the administration of Minnesota’s mental health
program under the agency responsible for prisons and welfare. 38
Thomson’s beloved program of legal guardianship for the feeble-
minded came in for particularly harsh criticism. “Certain people in Min-
nesota have been very proud of the attempts that they have made to ad-
dress the problem of feeblemindedness,” Milton Kirkpatrick of the Public
Welfare Association wrote derisively, but the entire program was flawed.
The state placed too much emphasis on the social problems caused by
the feebleminded and failed to recognize that “higher-grade” mentally
deficient individuals could be rehabilitated and made self-supporting.
About 500 new commitments were made each year, but guardianship
meant little beyond facilitating admission or discharge from the state
institutions; it did nothing for feebleminded wards living in the com-
munity. There was “little justification for the state assuming ‘en masse’
responsibility for so many people . . . when [the state] has so little to offer,”
he concluded. 39
Kirkpatrick also condemned the “startling procedures” at the state
institutions. Crucial decisions about admission and discharge were not
made by physicians or the institutions’ medical superintendents, but by
the supervisor of the feebleminded (Thomson) and shaped largely by lo-
cal welfare needs. Discharge depended on the willingness of the county
of residence to provide economic and social support for the ward, yet
because counties paid only $40 per year to support wards who were in-
stitutionalized, Kirkpatrick surmised that there was “little likelihood that
they will stir themselves very violently” to help feebleminded persons
return to the community, where the cost of supervision was much greater.
Curiously, he did not mention sterilization.40
The Public Health Service, however, wrote disapprovingly that the
“sterilization of defectives is a vigorously advocated procedure.” It noted
that some Minnesota officials hung on to the “crudely unscientific notion”
that surgery could eliminate hereditary defect, but the more common ar-
gument was economic: “Sterilization for even one feeble-minded person
may save the community the cost of supporting another one . . . [and] su-
pervision is much cheaper if the morals of the person supervised are not a
matter of concern.” Like Kirkpatrick, the Public Health Service expressed
concern that state wards who returned to the community were not super-
vised by professionals trained to work with the mentally retarded, but by
county welfare boards “utterly inadequate” to the task.41
Thomson was stunned by the criticism. The release of the Kirkpatrick
report in January 1941 “gave me a shock!” she recalled in her memoirs;
“It was more than critical—it was devastating—in its estimate of the
program for the mentally deficient and epileptic.” But she dismissed the
criticism as a professional dispute between psychiatrists and psychiat-
ric social workers who wanted to “re-create the feebleminded in the im-
age of the mentally ill” and those (like herself) who were more realistic.
Kirkpatrick had little understanding of the extent and permanence of the
feebleminded problem, Thomson complained; “he was assuming that if
you refused to recognize a problem, it did not exist.”â†œ42
In the end, the most important challenge to Minnesota’s eugenics
program came not from the politicians or professionals but from the
so-called feebleminded who had the most at stake. Lawsuits seeking
restoration to capacity appear to have increased in the late 1930s and
early 1940s, but one dramatic case sent shock waves through the state
bureaucracy. Rose Masters, a Catholic farm wife and mother of ten, took
her case all the way to the Minnesota Supreme Court—and won. Mrs.
Masters and her husband were poor but respectable tenant farmers who
married in 1923 and had a large family of “apparently normal children,”
but as the Depression continued and their family grew, they wound up on
county relief. Beginning in 1937, they received regular visits from agents
of the county welfare board, who grew increasingly frustrated with Mrs.
Masters’s poor housekeeping and the fact that she kept having babies
despite being on the dole. Several months after the birth of her ninth
child, the welfare board made its move. Mrs. Masters was committed
for the purpose of sterilization in 1940 and sent to the state institution
at Faribault two years later, when her tenth baby was seven months old.
Three months after that, her neighbors petitioned for her release. The
district court rejected their appeal, but its decision was reversed by the
Minnesota Supreme Court.43
The Masters case focused on the involuntary institutionalization and
mental capacity of the Catholic farm wife. Sterilization was not mentioned
in the court records, no doubt because the state could not act without the
family’s consent, and neighbors took action against commitment only
after Mrs. Masters was institutionalized. Still, the case is a powerful ex-
ample of the punitive welfare function of Minnesota’s eugenics program
and a useful illustration of three very different perspectives on welfare,
feeblemindedness, and mothering at a time when the relationships be-
tween families and governments were changing. On one side, testifying
for the state, was the control board psychologist who tested Mrs. Masters.
He saw her IQ score of 64 as incontrovertible proof that she was a moron
and could never be cured. In testimony that the Supreme Court found de-
cidedly unconvincing, the psychologist dismissed all social or behavioral
indicators of intelligence; in his view, IQ was all that mattered. On a sec-

ond side, also supporting the state, was the social worker from the county
welfare board. She emphasized social considerations—Mrs. Masters’s re-
peated pregnancies, welfare dependency, disorderly home, and unlovely
children—as the starkest evidence of the woman’s mental deficiency. The
large family squeezed into a dilapidated five-room house, tattered clothes
were piled in the corners, chickens roamed through the house, and the
children were often absent from school. To the social worker, Mrs. Mas-
ters’s welfare dependency, disorderly household, and unkempt children
proved she was a moron; nothing else mattered. On the third side of the
triangle were the neighbors who opposed the action of the state. They
insisted that Mrs. Masters was a “perfectly capable” mother, despite her
messy house, and the whole family was normal. To the neighbors, it was
a “shame for a mother with small children to be taken from them like
that”; Mrs. Masters must have been institutionalized simply as “punish-
ment for having ten children.” The Supreme Court found their viewpoint
understandable but incorrect. “Even in this modern age of birth control
and social welfare agencies, the circumstance of being the mother of an
unusually large family . . . should not label a woman as a moron,” the court
decreed, but it was not the number of children but their mother’s inability
to care for them that was at issue. Even if Mrs. Masters were restored to
capacity, she was not necessarily fit to care for her children. They could
remain wards of the state.44
In reversing the commitment order of the lower court, the Minne-
sota Supreme Court issued an unequivocal repudiation of eugenics and
of the broad designation of mental deficiency that led to large numbers
of commitments and sterilizations in the 1930s. The court rejected the
psychologist’s assertion that Mrs. Masters had a permanent, inherited
birth defect that could be diagnosed with certainty from an IQ test alone.
“The statement frequently made that all persons with IQ’s below 70 are
feeble-minded is not justified. . . . Intelligence is made up of too many fac-
tors to permit of such a dogmatic statement,” the higher court declared.
“Feeble-mindedness, viewed from a sociolegal rather than a purely medi-
cal standpoint, is not necessarily a ‘permanent’ and ‘incurable’ condition.”
Mrs. Masters’s strong performance and “intelligent responses” on the
stand constituted “persuasive proof” that, “having been given the chance
of complete physical and emotional convalescence at the state institu-
tion for more than a year, her condition has definitely improved.” While
the Masters case was a significant victory for welfare-dependent families
forcibly committed to state guardianship in the 1930s, it is clear that she
was restored to capacity only because she was a long-standing member of
the community, had respectable neighbors and a local doctor willing to
support her, and demonstrated her intelligence in court. Like thousands
of other Minnesotans during the Depression, Mrs. Masters was welfare-
dependent, but she was not mentally retarded. The court’s repudiation of
her feebleminded classification tells us as much about changing attitudes
toward welfare as it does about feeblemindedness and eugenics.45
As the Masters case was moving through the courts, Minnesota’s
sterilization program was winding down. A wartime staff shortage at the
Faribault Hospital made routine tubal ligations impossible, and a robust
economy created new employment opportunities for “retarded” citizens
outside the state institutions while weakening public fears of the feeble-
minded menace. Faribault officials reported only 33 sterilizations in 1944,
fewer than one-fifth of operations at the program’s peak. Yet sterilization
continued to be a political issue. In 1946, charges of mass sterilization at
the state institution became front-page news in a bitter primary election
campaign. Ironically, this time it was former Farmer-Labor governor
Hjalmar Petersen, now running as a Republican, who accused the Re-
publicans in government of mistreating inmates and sterilizing them
against their will. A grand jury was called to investigate the charges, but
found the complaints of “wholesale and unauthorized sterilization . . .
unwarranted and not substantiated.” Sterilizations were performed at
Faribault under the Republican administration, as they had been under
the Farmer-Laborites, but they were sanctioned by law.46
Thomson testified before the grand jury, but her attention was increas-
ingly focused on parent advocacy. By encouraging parent activists to start
their own organization, the National Association for Retarded Children,
instead of joining the professionally oriented American Association for
Mental Deficiency, she acted as midwife to the parent reform movement.
Years later, mental health reformer Gunnar Dybwad praised Thomson’s
“enlightened concern for the retarded that was far ahead of her time.” In
1959, the year she retired, a young reform-minded psychiatrist, David J.
Vail, became director of medical services at the Minnesota Department of
Welfare and launched a frontal assault on routine sterilization and other
dehumanizing practices in the state institutions. Minnesota’s eugenics

era had come to a close.47
Or had it? The Kennedy-Johnson era brought “hope for the mentally
retarded” and an antipoverty campaign that greatly expanded welfare
rights, but old eugenics habits persisted when it came to poor people
thought to have a mental disability. In 1965, two very different works
about mentally retarded Minnesotans, both written by professors at the
University of Minnesota, highlighted the coexistence of old and new
ideas about eugenics, mental deficiency, and welfare. Mental Retardation:
A Family Study (1965), a 700-page tome by geneticists Sheldon and Eliza-
beth Reed, followed up on the eugenics field research started in the 1910s
by A. C. Rogers and the Eugenic Record Office. The Reeds, who were af-
filiated with the university’s Dight Institute for Human Genetics (where
Sheldon was director), studied the descendants of 549 patients from the
Faribault School, eventually compiling data on more than 82,000 individ-
uals and concluding—not unlike their eugenicist forebears—that mental
retardation ran in families. Whether the cause of mental retardation was
primarily genetic or environmental, they observed, the most significant
predisposing factor was a mentally retarded relative. The solution: reduce
the fertility of the unfit. “When voluntary sterilization becomes a part of
the culture of the United States, we should expect a decrease of about 50
per cent per generation in the number of retarded persons.”â†œ48
University of Minnesota law professor Robert J. Levy took a very
different perspective. In a Minnesota Law Review article acerbically titled
“Protecting the Mentally Retarded,” Levy delivered a blistering attack
on Minnesota’s much-praised guardianship program. Condemning the
gap between the rhetoric of protection and routine abuse of power, he
reported that procedural safeguards were “almost entirely ignored,” and
he accused county welfare departments and probate judges of manipu-
lating the guardianship program: they made commitments to reduce
county costs, institutionalized delinquents who were not retarded, and
pressured state wards to consent to sterilization. “Welfare departments
have misused the guardianship program,” Levy charged, but “many pro-
bate judges have completely abdicated their judicial responsibilities.”
Faced with growing pressure from reform-minded insiders like Vail, as
well as from parents, former patients, and outside advocates like Levy,
the state enacted significant legal changes. The 1975 Mental Retarda-
tion Protection Act gave Minnesotans with developmental disabilities

greater protection from unwanted sterilization, and in 1998 the Faribault
Regional Center was closed.49 Yet the basic concerns that drove Minne-
sota’s eugenic sterilization program in the 1930s—poverty, fiscal politics,
and fear of dependency and disorder—continue to shape social welfare
policy. Welfare programs, like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families
(TANF), are still characterized by local variation, political manipulation,
and dubious questions about maternal fitness, and local trial courts still
issue sentencing decisions that curtail the parenting rights of women who
would have been labeled feebleminded in another era. Looking back at
the welfare function of eugenic sterilization in the 1930s, perhaps we can
better see the eugenic function of welfare programs today. 50
Notes
1.â•‡ In this essay, I use problematic terms such as feebleminded, defective, and men-
tally retarded freely, usually without quotation marks. These words are recognized as
highly offensive today, but that is precisely the point: they capture the perceptions of
their time. They are also more inclusive than current terminology, like developmental
disability, because they refer to people and attributes now seen through a cultural or
psychological lens.
2.â•‡ Mildred Thomson, “Supervision of the Feeble-Minded by County Welfare
Boards,” paper given to the American Association of Mental Deficiency, May 1940, Re-
cords of the Minnesota Department of Public Welfare, Psychological Services Bureau
(DPW-PSB), Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul (MHS).
3.â•‡ E. J. Engberg to Carl Swanson, June 22, 1946, Superintendent’s Correspondence,
Records of the Faribault State School and Hospital (FSSH), MHS.
4.â•‡ Harry Bruinius, Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization
and America’s Quest for Racial Purity (New York: Vintage Books, 2007).
5.â•‡ Some 1,930 sterilizations, or 82 percent of the total, were performed on persons
classed as mentally deficient. “Sterilizations Performed under U.S. State Sterilization
Statutes through December 31, 1963,” February 1964, Association for Voluntary Steril-
ization, Supplement, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota; Philip
R. Reilly, The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 140–43.
6.â•‡ Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen, Eugenics and the Welfare State: Steril-
ization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland (East Lansing: Michigan State
University Press, 1996). See, however, Johanna Schoen, Choice & Coercion: Birth Con-
trol, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2005).
7.â•‡ Cheuh-Fang Ma, One Hundred Years of Public Services for Children in Minnesota
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 111. See also Molly Ladd-Taylor, “The ‘So-
ciological Advantages’ of Sterilization: Fiscal Politics and Feeble-Minded Women in
Interwar Minnesota,” in Mental Retardation in America: A Historical Anthology, ed.

Steven Noll and James W. Trent (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 281–99;
Gary Phelps, “The Eugenics Crusade of Charles Dight,” Minnesota History 49 (Fall
1984): 99–108. On public welfare generally, see Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the
Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1986).
8.â•‡ Ma, One Hundred Years, 90; Edward MacGaffey, “A Pattern for Progress: The
Minnesota Children’s Code,” Minnesota History 41 (Spring 1969): 229–36. See also Mol-
ly Ladd-Taylor, “Coping with a ‘Public Menace’: Eugenic Sterilization in Minnesota,”
Minnesota History 59 (Summer 2005): 237–48.
9.â•‡ Mildred Thomson, Dr. Arthur C. Rogers: Pioneer Leader in Minnesota’s Program
for the Mentally Retarded (Minneapolis: Minnesota Association for Retarded Children,
n.d.), MHS.
10.â•‡ Mildred Thomson, Prologue: A Minnesota Story of Mental Retardation Showing
Changing Attitudes and Philosophies (Minneapolis: Gilbert, 1963), 57.
11.â•‡ Minnesota Statutes, Laws 1925, Chap. 154; “Sterilizations through 1963.”
12.â•‡ Esther Benson, “Organization of Public Welfare Activities in Minnesota” (M.A.
thesis, University of Minnesota, 1941), 62.
13.â•‡ Charles F. Dight, History of the Early Stages of the Organized Eugenics Movement
(Minneapolis: Minnesota Eugenics Society, 1935), 9–10; “Human Thoroughbreds—
Why Not?” pamphlet, 1922, Charles F. Dight Papers, MHS; Neal Ross Holtan, “The Eit-
els and Their Hospital,” Minnesota Medicine 86 (September 2003): 52–54.
14.â•‡ Edwin Black, War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a
Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003), xv, 7.
15.â•‡ “Human Thoroughbreds,” 32; Charles. F. Dight, “The American Beet Sugar
Company,” typescript (c. 1925) and “Relating to Minnesota Eugenics Society,” pam-
phlet, n.d., Dight Papers. See also Neal Ross Holtan, “Breeding to Brains: Eugenics,
Physicians, and Politics in Minnesota in the 1920s” (M.A. thesis, University of Minne-
sota, 2000); Mark Soderstrom, “Weeds in Linnaeus’s Garden: Science and Segregation,
Eugenics, and the Rhetoric of Racism and the University of Minnesota and the Big Ten,
1900–1945” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Minnesota, 2004).
16.â•‡ Charles F. Dight, “Facts Relating to My Efforts to Secure Enactment of an
Eugenics Sterilization Law in Minnesota in 1931,” typescript, Dight Papers; Thomson,
Prologue, 55.
17.â•‡ “History of the Sterilization of the Feeble-Minded,” typescript, n.d. [1939], Su-
perintendent’s Correspondence, FSSH.
18.â•‡ Minnesota Statutes, Laws 1917, chap. 344; Agnes Crowley, “New Laws Relating
to the Feeble-Minded and Some Statistics,” Proceedings of the Minnesota State Conference
of Social Work (September 22–25, 1923), 268–72.
19.â•‡ Minnesota Statutes, Laws 1917, chap. 344.
20.â•‡ See A. F. Tredgold, A Textbook of Mental Deficiency (New York: William Wood,
1908); “Examination of Dr. A. W. Nuetzman,” transcript in “Petition for Restoration to
Capacity of Rose Masters,” O. M. Teubner and Lee Adams, Appellants vs. State of Min-
nesota, Martin County (17th Judicial District), Case Files #33719, Minnesota Supreme
Court, MHS.
21.â•‡ Mildred Thomson, “My Thirty-five Years of Work with the Mentally Retarded
in Minnesota,” typescript, 1961–62, 133, MHS; “Report on Census of the Feeble-Mind-
ed,” typescript, n.d. [1936], Dept. of Public Welfare Library, MHS. On feebleminded-
138â•… ·â•… M o l ly L a d d - T a y l o r
ness, see James W. Trent Jr., Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation
in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). On the culture of
poverty, see Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the
Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press),
99–123.
22.â•‡ Mildred Thomson, “Social Aspects of Minnesota’s Program for the Feeble-
minded,” Proceedings from the American Association on Mental Deficiency 44 (1939–40):
238–43; Raymond Koch, “The Development of Public Relief Programs in Minnesota,
1929–1941” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1967).
23.â•‡ Thomson, Prologue, 6–13, 55–59, 95; “History of the Sterilization”; Mildred
Thomson, Memo to Members of the Child Welfare Boards of Minnesota, n.d., Gilman
(Robbins and Family) Papers, MHS.
24.â•‡ Thomson, Prologue, 170–71; “A History of the National Association for Retarded
Children, Inc.,” http://www.thearc.org/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=272.
25.â•‡ Reilly, Surgical Solution, 118–22; Phelps, “Eugenics Crusade,” 108. See Sharon M.
Leon, “‘A Human Being, and Not a Mere Social Factor’: Catholic Strategies for Dealing
with Sterilization Statutes in the 1920s,” Church History 73 (June 2004): 383–411; D. Je-
rome Tweton, Depression: Minnesota in the Thirties (Fargo: North Dakota State Univer-
sity, Institute for Regional Studies, 1981).
26.â•‡ Reilly, Surgical Solution, 77–78; Diane B. Paul, Controlling Human Heredity:
1865 to the Present (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1995), 84–85; Daniel J.
Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity, rev. ed. (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 114–15.
27.â•‡ Engberg to Swanson. June 22, 1946.
28.â•‡ Koch, “Public Relief Programs”; Ma, One Hundred Years, 225–35; Thomson,
Prologue, 101.
29.â•‡ Richard Lowitt and Maurine Beasley, eds., One Third of a Nation: Lorena Hick-
ock Reports on the Great Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 134–35;
Thomson, Prologue, 101, 109.
30.â•‡ Thomson, Prologue, 109, 91–98; Mildred Thomson, “One of the most serious
welfare problems . . .” untitled typescript (c. 1937), DPW; Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pur-
suit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3–18; Elizabeth Faue, Community
of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915–1945
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). See also Deborah A. Stone, The
Disabled State (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984).
31.â•‡ Thomson, “Social Aspects”; Thomson, Prologue, 79–80.
32.â•‡ Record of Sterilization Cases, 1916–37, FSSH; Elizabeth Piper, “Analysis of
Faribault Sterilization Records” (2003), unpublished report in author’s possession.
33.â•‡ Mildred Thomson, “To Child Welfare Board Members and Others Concerned
with Carrying Out the Sterilization Law,” December 12, 1934, DPW.
34.â•‡ Stella Hanson, “Outside Supervision of the Feebleminded,” c. 1940, DPW-PSB.
35.â•‡ Charles E. Dow, “The Problem of the Feeble-Minded III,” typescript, August 9,
1934, DPW Library; E. J. Engberg, “The Treatment of Mental Defectives in Minnesota,”
Minnesota Medicine 23 (May 1940), reprint, FSSH.
36.â•‡ Meridel Le Sueur, “Sequel to Love,” Anvil 9 (January/February 1935): 3–4.
37.â•‡ Minnesota Legislature, Joint Committee on Acts and Activities of the Various
Governmental Departments of the State of Minnesota, Report from the Joint Senate and
House Investigating Committee Covering the Acts and Activities of the Various Governmen-
tal Departments and Agencies of the State of Minnesota, A. O. Sletvold, chairman, 1939–40
interim, MHS; A. L. Haynes, memorandum re: Miss Blanche Harkner, June 19, 1939,
FSSH; Engberg to Swanson, June 22, 1946.
38.â•‡ Carl Swanson to E. J. Engberg, April 12, 1940, FSSH; United States Public
Health Service, Section X of a Survey of the State Hospitals of Minnesota, Section I,
Washington, D.C., 1939, typescript, DPW-PSB; “From Supplementary Report on the
Mental Health Program in Minnesota by the American Public Welfare Association,”
typescript, n.d., DPW-PSB; Thomson, Prologue, 125–30. See Gerald Grob, Mental Illness
and American Society, 1875–1940 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983).
39.â•‡ “Supplementary Report,” 4.
40.â•‡ “Supplementary Report,” 2.
41.â•‡ “Survey of the State Hospitals of Minnesota.”
42.â•‡ Thomson, Prologue, 127–29; Mildred Thomson to Walter W. Finke, “Report of
the American Public Welfare Association,” memorandum, January 7, 1941, DPW-PSB.
43.â•‡ In re Masters, Teubner et al. v. State, Supreme Court of Minnesota, March 3,
1944, 13 NW 2d, 487–94; “Petition for Restoration to Capacity of Rose Masters,” O.
M. Teubner and Lee Adams, Appellants vs. State of Minnesota, Martin County (17th
Judicial District), Case Files #33719, Minnesota Supreme Court, MHS; Martin County
Welfare Board, Minutes, December 8, 1938, MHS.
44.â•‡ Testimony from “Petition for Restoration to Capacity of Rose Masters”; In re
Masters, 487–89.
45.â•‡ In re Masters, 490–93.
46.â•‡ Thomson, Prologue, 147–48; Engberg to Swanson, June 22, 1946; “Cruelty in
State School Charged,” Veterans’ News (June 19, 1946), MHS.
47.â•‡ Gunnar Dybwad, “From Feeblemindedness to Self-Advocacy: A Half Century
of Growth and Self-Fulfillment,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Ameri-
can Association of Mental Retardation, June 2, 1994, www.mncdd.org/parallels2/
pdf/98-FFA-HSU.pdf. See the excellent website of the Minnesota Governor’s Council
on Developmental Disabilities, “Parallels in Time: A History of Developmental Disabili-
ties,” http://www.mncdd.org/parallels/index.html.
48.â•‡ Elizabeth W. Reed and Sheldon C. Reed, Mental Retardation: A Family Study
(Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1965), 77–78. Many academic reviewers expressed con-
cern about the Reeds’ subjective definition of mental retardation and the validity of
their data, and in 1985 the university distanced itself from eugenics by dropping “Dight”
from the institute’s name. See the review by Edgar A. Doll in the American Journal of
Psychology 79 (June 1966): 346–47, and “Institute May Be Renamed Due to Benefac-
tor’s Beliefs,” Minnesota Daily (May 2, 1985). See also Molly Ladd-Taylor, “‘A Kind of
Genetic Social Work’: Sheldon Reed and the Origins of Genetic Counseling,” in Women,
Health, and Nation: Canada and the United States since 1945, ed. Gina Feldberg, Molly
Ladd-Taylor, Alison Li, and Kathryn McPherson (Montreal: McGill-Queens University
Press, 2003), 67–83.
49.â•‡ Robert J. Levy, “Protecting the Mentally Retarded: An Empirical Survey and
Evaluation of the Establishment of Guardianship in Minnesota,” Minnesota Law Review
49 (1965): 821–87, quotation on 877; Minnesota Statutes, Laws 1975, chapter 252A. Condi-
tions within the institutions were challenged by a 1972 lawsuit, Welsch v. Likins, which
led to a systemwide consent decree and contributed to the closure of the state institu-
tions. See “Parallels in Time” and Joseph P. Shapiro, No Pity: People with Disabilities
Forging a New Civil Rights Movement (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1994).
50.â•‡ See Dorothy Roberts, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (New York:
Basic Books, 2001) and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of
Liberty (New York: Pantheon, 1997); Rachel Roth, “‘No New Babies?’ Gender Inequality
and Reproductive Control in the Criminal Justice and Prison Systems,” Journal of Gen-
der, Social Policy, and the Law 12 (2005): 391–425.
seven
Reassessing Eugenic Sterilization:

The Case of North Carolina
Joh a n n a S c hoe n
On March 5, 1968, Elaine Riddick, a 14-year-old African American girl

from Winfall, North Carolina, was sterilized under authority of the
North Carolina Eugenics Board. Elaine had just given birth to a baby
boy—after being repeatedly raped by a 20-year-old man with a history
of assault and incarceration. Taught not to talk about sex and fearing for
her life as her rapist had threatened to kill her if she reported him, Elaine
did not tell anybody about those rapes. Both of Elaine’s parents were al-
coholics who were intermittently in prison. When her father lost custody
of his children, Elaine’s six younger siblings were placed in an orphanage
while Elaine and her older sister went to live with their grandmother,
Miss Peaches. After Elaine’s pregnancy became apparent, a Perquimans
County social worker concluded that Elaine must be both promiscu-
ous and feebleminded and drew up a petition for eugenic sterilization.
Although he no longer had custody of Elaine, her father was allowed to
sign the consent form and, after authorization by the Eugenics Board,
Elaine was sterilized.1
Elaine was one of more than 7,000 people sterilized between 1929
and 1975 under the authority of the North Carolina Eugenics Board. Eu-
genic science gained the ear of policy makers in the last quarter of the
nineteenth century when many feared that immigration and the devel-
opment of birth control threatened a strong United States dominated by
a native-born white population. During the 1910s and 1920s, eugenicists
helped to shape legislation that aimed to stem this perceived threat by
restricting marriage, controlling immigration, and sterilizing members
of the community whose offspring they considered undesirable. A U.S.
141
142â•… · â•… J o h a n n a S c h o e n
Supreme Court decision in 1927, Buck v. Bell, upholding a Virginia court

order to sterilize 17-year-old Carrie Buck for her supposed feeblemind-
edness, encouraged promoters of sterilization programs throughout the
United States. The court was persuaded not only that Carrie Buck and
her mother were “feebleminded” but also that Carrie Buck’s 7-month-
old daughter had inherited the family’s feeblemindedness. Henceforth
it was within the power of any state, unless specifically forbidden by its
own constitution, to enact sterilization legislation. The Supreme Court
decision was followed by a wave of new sterilization laws, and by 1929,
30 states—including North Carolina—had passed sterilization laws
inspired by eugenic science.2 From the passage of the first sterilization
law until the mid-1970s, when the last states ceased operation of their
sterilization programs, over 63,000 people nationwide received eugenic
sterilizations. With almost 20,000 sterilizations between 1909 and 1953,
California led the way, followed by North Carolina and Virginia with over
7,000 sterilizations between the late 1920s and the mid-1970s. 3
The wave of sterilization legislation of the 1910s and 1920s mainly ad-
dressed what eugenicists termed “inheritable feeblemindedness.” During
the first decades of the twentieth century, eugenic theorists thought that
feeblemindedness was the result of defective “germ plasm.” This germ
plasm, eugenicists believed, was carried from generation to generation.
As the existence of bad germ plasm could not be diagnosed medically, one
could recognize feeblemindedness only by such social symptoms as pov-
erty, promiscuity, criminality, alcoholism, and illegitimacy—phenomena
that were considered to lie at the root of many societal ills. Since eugenic
scientists considered feeblemindedness, and thus undesirable social be-
haviors, to be hereditary, sterilization seemed to offer an easy medical
solution to complex social problems.4
Thanks to the development of intelligence testing in the 1910s, scien-
tists felt confident that they could measure mental capacity and confirm
the diagnosis of feeblemindedness to which certain social problems had
pointed. To eugenicists, tests of the Intelligence Quotient (IQ ) were an
unfailing tool for the diagnosis of feeblemindedness, lending scientific
legitimacy and authority. 5 Testing allowed for the implementation of ster-
ilization programs that depended on the ability of authorities to verify
a diagnosis of feeblemindedness. An IQ rating of 70 and below quickly
R e a s s e s s i n g E u g e n i c S t e r i l i z a t i o nâ•… · â•… 143
identified the feebleminded and permitted health and welfare profession-

als to move from diagnosis to treatment.
North Carolina’s eugenic sterilization law fit squarely with state
public welfare policies. Introduced by a former member of the Burke
County Board of Public Welfare, the law permitted the sterilization of
individuals who were “mentally diseased, feeble minded, or epileptic”
and whose sterilization was considered “in the interest of the mental,
moral, or physical improvement of the patient or inmate or for the public
good.”6 Between 1929 and 1932, state officials made somewhat halfhearted
use of the law, sterilizing only 49 people. But in 1932, a lawsuit resulted
in the redrafting of the state sterilization statute and the formalization
of sterilization procedures. The new law, introduced by a member of the
board of directors of Caswell Training School, established a state eugen-
ics board composed of the commissioner of public welfare, the secretary
of health, the chief medical officers of the state hospital at Raleigh and of
an institution of the feebleminded or insane, and the state attorney gen-
eral. Housed under the Department of Public Welfare, the board received
petitions for sterilization from the state’s penal and charitable institutions
or county superintendents of public welfare and voted on the authoriza-
tion of these petitions.7 North Carolina was the only state in the nation
to extend the power of filing sterilization petitions to social workers; its
eugenic sterilization program represented more clearly than any other the
state’s interest in sterilization.
I mpl ementing E ug enic S teri l i z ation:

Constructing the F eebl eminded
With the passage of the state’s eugenic sterilization law, health and wel-
fare officials implementing the program brought their own policy goals
to the table. These goals could range from controlling welfare spending
to improving the health of sterilization candidates to easing institutional
overcrowding by sterilizing and then releasing inmates from the state’s
training schools. Having identified an individual as in need of eugenic
sterilization, petitioners put together a sterilization petition containing
information on the client’s social, medical, and eugenic history and sub-
mitted the application to the North Carolina Eugenics Board. At their
monthly board meetings, Eugenics Board members reviewed these peti-

tions and voted on the sterilization decision. In 95 percent of the cases,
the board authorized the sterilization. Once it did, the case was assigned
to the closest hospital where staff surgeons performed the surgery.
Health and welfare authorities hoped that eugenic sterilization could
aid in the fight against social ills. Social and economic factors took center
stage in the implementation of eugenic sterilization. Class background
played an important role in identifying the mentally defective. Eugenic
scientists emphasized the inability of the feebleminded to compete eco-
nomically with others around them. Feebleminded persons, one official
definition read, might be “capable of earning a living under favorable cir-
cumstances, but are incapable . . . of competing on equal terms with their
normal fellows.”8 Poor, rural families were particularly likely to be per-
ceived as feebleminded. By the 1930s, as the United States was struggling
through the Great Depression, health and welfare officials across the coun-
try conflated welfare dependency with feeblemindedness and suggested
that sterilization might provide a solution. A host of local studies seemed
to confirm a close link between poverty, rural isolation, and feebleminded-
ness. As a 1937 Study of Mental Health in North Carolina reported:
Scattered rural communities in poor “marginal” lands with low standards
of living and low levels of cultural-intellectual development show high
frequencies of apparent mental deficiency.9
If poverty pointed to the existence of feeblemindedness, receiving

financial aid from the state provided the state with a financial interest
in eugenic sterilization and further helped officials to identify potential
sterilization candidates. A study of mental illness, mental deficiency, and
epilepsy conducted in the late 1940s found that most of those classified
as mentally deficient had received some type of financial assistance from
the state.
This has been in the form of general assistance, old-age assistance, ADC
[Aid to Dependent Children], boarding home placement, institutional
care in homes for children, free medical care and hospitalization, and
employment on the projects of the WPA [Works Progress Administra-
tion] and in Civilian Conservation Corps camps. In addition to this, there
is the cost of court hearings, sentences served in the county jail, training
schools, State prison, and the road camps.10
The inability to hold a job and a history of welfare dependency both

indicated feeblemindedness and constituted a reason for sterilization.
Across the country, health and welfare professionals advocated the ster-
ilization of “charity cases.”11 The case of Mary Brewer demonstrates both
welfare officials’ concern with clients’ economic competitiveness and
their unwillingness to consider present circumstances and past employ-
ment histories in their clients’ favor. Until she married, Mary Brewer had
supported herself, her parents, and her 11 siblings from the age of 10 by
working in a hosiery mill, a cigarette factory, and a knitting mill. She had
quit work only after marriage and the birth of five children forced her to
stay home. In 1932, the worst year of the Great Depression, when 28 per-
cent of the nation’s households lacked a single breadwinner, Mary Brewer
was also out of work. Despite her employment history, the superintendent
of public welfare in Forsyth County saw in her present inability to find
paid employment a symptom of feeblemindedness. “When they reach
that state [of feeblemindedness] they are rarely ever self-supporting,” he
argued. “They usually make their living by begging.”12
To convince family members of the desirability of surgery, board
members frequently stated that they wanted to prevent the birth of chil-
dren who might be financially dependent on the family or the welfare
department.13 They inquired about families’ financial resources, the kind
of work they did, how much they earned, whether they had ever received
relief payments or help through the WPA, and how high such relief pay-
ments had been. The state, board members emphasized, had a financial
interest in the sterilization. As one board member argued, “[Patient] is a
state charge and to protect herself and the state we feel that this opera-
tion would be for the best.”14 Indeed, board members claimed that the
real or potential financial dependence of patients gave the state a right
to consider sterilization and asked family members to prove that a pa-
tient “is perfectly capable of taking care of herself or of any children she
might have or that any children she might have would be able to take
care of themselves.”15 Such proof, of course, was impossible for anyone
to render.
Patients’ sexual behavior provided another indication of mental dis-
ease or deficiency. Here, too, public health and welfare professionals fol-
lowed the lead of eugenic scientists who identified sexual behavior as a
root cause of deviancy. One researcher who was deeply concerned about
146â•… ·â•… J o h a n n a S c h o e n
the relationship between feeblemindedness, sexuality, and deviant be-

havior was zoologist Charles B. Davenport, who argued that sexually im-
moral people were also afflicted with criminality and feeblemindedness.
Prostitutes, criminals, and tramps, he said, lacked the genes that allowed
modern human beings to control their primitive and antisocial instincts
and thus to develop civilization.
Eugenicists worried in particular about sexually attractive yet feeble-
minded women. “Attractive morons abound in the community,” one pub-
lication warned, illustrating the danger with photographs of two young
women who were inmates of a state training school. It explained, “Girls
like these, who come from defective stock yet who are trained sufficiently
to pass for normal by those with superficial judgment, are the greatest
menace to the race when returned to the community without the protec-
tion of sterilization.”16 A 1926 Report of the Committee on Caswell Training
School warned that 99 percent of the “high-grade” feebleminded lived out-
side mental institutions and were “mixing and mingling with the general
population.” These feebleminded people were said to be “uncontrolled,
and to a considerable extent uncontrollable.”17
But if eugenic scientists understood sexual activity outside marriage
to point to larger problems of feeblemindedness, health and welfare pro-
fessionals elevated the symptom to merit treatment itself. One eugenic
board member explained that the operation could be performed when
“people are mentally disordered, mentally defective, or promiscuous sex-
ually.”18 Echoing eugenicists’ descriptions of the feebleminded’s inability
to control their primitive instincts, health and social work professionals
maintained that individuals who engaged in sex outside marriage lacked
the self-discipline to control their sexual urges. A 1948 study of 40 per-
sons sterilized under North Carolina’s eugenic sterilization program con-
cluded that 22 of the 40 persons were known to be sex offenders; 19 had
been diagnosed as sexually promiscuous. Other sexual delinquencies in
this group included incest, “trespassing including being a peeping tom,”
“abduction, adultery . . . bastardy, crime against nature, indecent exposure,
prostitution, seduction, using a hotel room for immoral purposes,” and
“uncontrolled sexual desire.”19 Of the case histories with information on
patients’ sexual history, 80 percent were considered promiscuous. 20 Since
sexual activity outside marriage was particularly disturbing in women,
they became the main target of sterilization programs. Sixty-one percent
of eugenic sterilizations nationwide and 84 percent of sterilizations in

North Carolina were performed on women.21
Social background and sexual behavior determined who came in
touch with the eugenic sterilization program. Most clients of eugenic
sterilization programs were poor or of marginal economic status. 22 Of
those suggested for sterilization in North Carolina, the majority made
their living by farming, selling tobacco and other crops, and sawing wood.
One-fourth were considered unable to work and 63 percent received some
form of welfare benefits.23 Often it was the illness or desertion of the male
breadwinner that plunged families into poverty. Housing conditions were
poor. Residences were overcrowded, in ill repair, barely furnished, and
lacking conveniences.24 Case files from the 1960s included a couple with
eight children living in a three-room shack; a four-person family living
in a shack without a bed—they slept on corn shucks and cotton piled in
the corner; and a family of 14 living in a dilapidated three-room house
heated with a woodstove, lacking indoor plumbing, and furnished only
with three beds, a couch, and a baby bed.25
Many patients and family members also lacked formal education. Es-
pecially among the parental generation, illiteracy was still quite common
during the 1930s and 1940s. 26 Confronted with the need to make a living,
many felt both intimidated by the educational system and unconvinced
of the value of formal education. Parents frequently kept their children
at home to help on the farm or in the household. Many children missed
school because their parents lacked funds to pay for books or shoes. 27
F rom Genes to Socia l i z ation: E ug enic

S teri l i z ation in the P ostwar E ra
While health and welfare professionals had high hopes for eugenic ster-
ilization, the eugenic science that underlay it did not go unchallenged.
Starting in the 1920s, geneticists, anthropologists, physicians, and psy-
chologists began to engage in research that eventually undermined eu-
genic science’s basic assumptions. With the onset of World War II, interest
in eugenic sterilization began to decline. The country finally pulled out
of the Great Depression, and wartime production led to full employment
and a drastic reduction of the welfare rolls. The shortage of surgeons
during the war caused a sharp decline in the number of sterilization op-
148â•… ·â•… J o h a n n a S c h o e n
erations performed, and news of sterilization abuses in Nazi Germany

helped to discredit the practice. In 1942, the U.S. Supreme Court struck
down an Oklahoma law that had provided for the sterilization of thrice-
convicted felons. Although this decision did not overturn Buck v. Bell,
the 1927 Supreme Court decision which had upheld Virginia’s steriliza-
tion law, it did set a new precedent for judicial decisions. In most states,
state-ordered sterilizations had ceased completely by the late 1940s. But
this decline was countered by an expansion of sterilization programs
in Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia. In 1944, these states were re-
sponsible for sterilizing 285 patients (24 percent of the nation’s total for
the year). In 1958, by contrast, they sterilized 574 patients (76 percent of
the nation’s total).
As challenges to eugenic sterilization programs were mounting
across the country, supporters embarked on a massive publicity cam-
paign to argue for the programs’ continuation and expansion. They were
supported by Birthright, an organization devoted to the promotion of
eugenic sterilization and the distribution of sterilization statistics, and
financed by Clarence J. Gamble, heir of Procter & Gamble, who had also
been instrumental in financing local birth control and sterilization clinics
across the country. 28 Undisturbed by the wave of criticism from within
and outside the field, a small but vocal group of health and welfare profes-
sionals across the country formed coalitions with local philanthropists,
ministers, women’s clubs, and professors from the local universities to
lobby for the continuation of state sterilization programs. Starting in
1945, sterilization supporters initiated newspaper campaigns to explain
the continuing need for sterilization to the general public. 29 “Alarming
Mental Deficiency Rate Confronts State” warned the headline of the
first article in a newspaper series promoting sterilization in North Caro-
lina. The article spelled out the consequences of a high rate of mental
deficiency for national defense: “14.2 out [ofâ†œ] 100 Men Are Rejected [for
military service].”30 With defense projects forming a major state priority,
the series’ author asserted the following day, the state lacked money to
invest in the feebleminded and the mentally ill. Sterilization, the article
suggested, was the “key in solving [the] problem of feeblemindedness in
the state.”31
Although eugenic science was discredited by the 1940s, the policy
goals behind the programs remained. Eugenic sterilization programs con-
tinued both to offer a solution to social problems and to cut welfare rolls
by reducing the number of children born to welfare recipients. Thus as
welfare rolls grew in the 1950s and 1960s, eugenic sterilization programs
in a few states expanded. Continuing such programs became particularly
appealing in the postwar period, when sex outside marriage and rising il-
legitimacy rates seemed to threaten the stability of the American family.
The “rediscovery” of poverty in the early 1960s further fueled concerns
about the reproductive capacity of poor families and solidified the link
between illegitimacy and innate immorality. The focus on the “culture
of poverty” replaced hereditary theories as a justification for eugenic
sterilization and other measures while demanding similar interven-
tions. Almost formulaically, social workers emphasized the inadequate
supervision that daughters received from their mothers and warned of
the continuation of poverty and neglect from generation to generation.
“Sterilization,” they argued, “will prevent additional children who will
never be able to realize any potential they may have because adequate
care will be denied them and will restrict the third generation who are
caught in this cycle of poverty and neglect.”32 By the 1950s, social policy
had refashioned the theoretical foundations of eugenic sterilization to
meet its purposes.
Fears about the rising cost of the Aid to Dependent Children (ADC)
program led to a significant shift in the racial composition of those tar-
geted for eugenic sterilization. While the discriminatory welfare prac-
tices of the 1930s and 1940s had excluded African Americans from ADC
programs and left them largely outside social workers’ sphere of influ-
ence, federal pressure and a series of new requirements relating to the
implementation of ADC resulted in black women’s inclusion in social
service programs, bringing them into closer contact with social workers
and thus with state-supported sterilization. Nationwide, the percentage
of welfare recipients who were African American rose from 31 percent in
1950 to 48 percent in 1961. By the 1960s, the addition of Hispanics to the
rolls produced a nonwhite majority among welfare recipients. It seemed
especially pressing to save funds considering the “prevalence of illegiti-
macy among the lower-class Negro population” and the perception that
most nonwhite unwed mothers had “no means of support except through
public assistance.”33 As a result, the proportion of African Americans
sterilized under the auspices of the North Carolina Eugenics Board rose
from 23 percent in the 1930s and 1940s to 59 percent between 1958 and
1960 and finally to 64 percent between 1964 and 1966. 34 Overall, about
60 percent of sterilization candidates were white, and 40 percent were
African American.
To intensify the fight against poverty, Ellen Winston, North Caro-
lina’s commissioner of public welfare, recommended in 1951 that the state
expand its use of the eugenic sterilization program by following up on
ADC families in which one family member had been sterilized to deter-
mine if other members might benefit from the surgery. 35 This new policy
led not only to an increase in the number of noninstitutional steriliza-
tions but also to a sharp rise in the number of women sterilized who had
given birth to children prior to having the operation. Sixty-six percent of
patients sterilized in the 1950s and 1960s had had children prior to their
sterilization, and 52 percent of them had given birth outside marriage.
The new emphasis on socialization drew particular attention to the
behavior of teenage girls. Social workers considered girls reared in impov-
erished and immoral environments to be likely to perpetuate the pattern
set by their parents. As social workers began to draw up the eugenic ster-
ilization petitions of the 1950s and 1960s, this attention to young single
mothers led straight into the homes of girls such as Elaine Riddick.
W ho Got S teri l i z ed?
While inmates in the state mental institutions comprised a significant

portion of sterilization candidates in the early decades, with the expan-
sion of the welfare state in the postwar period the eugenics board turned
its attention to the noninstitutional poor. During the 1930s and 1940s, 60
percent of those sterilized were inmates of state mental institutions. The
remaining 40 percent were noninstitutional poor. By the 1950s, psychia-
trists began to express open doubt about the efficacy of eugenic steriliza-
tion, and the number of institutional petitions plummeted drastically.
In its stead, the percentage of those sterilized outside institutions rose
to over 70 percent in the 1950s and 1960s. Overall, 40 percent of those
sterilized were inmates of state mental institutions; 60 percent were non-
institutional poor.
To be sure, eugenic board members encountered sterilization candi-
dates who suffered from serious mental illness or retardation; 23 percent
of sterilization candidates had been diagnosed with some form of mental

illness. Many of them suffered from auditory and visual hallucinations,
delusions, or depression. Martha B., a 29-year-old mother of four, had been
diagnosed with schizophrenia. Martha claimed her children were dead,
showed no interest in her newborn child, and confused her husband with
her sister-in-law. She laughed and talked to herself, repeatedly tried to run
away, threatened to kill family members, and attempted suicide. Social
workers felt that all of these problems made her unable to give proper care
to her four children. They suggested that Martha be sterilized. 36 Carla
M., 32, was also diagnosed with schizophrenia. Carla was unable to do
housework because she had difficulty breathing and coughed up blood.
In addition, she had somatic delusions, including the belief that her body
was rotting away while her brain was still alive. The superintendent of the
state hospital at Morganton recommended her sterilization. 37
Health and welfare professionals not only worried about the suffer-
ing that mental conditions might cause their patients; they also feared
that patients’ illnesses or retardation might lead them to physically harm
their children. In fact, a number of patients did threaten their children’s
safety or severely neglected or abused them, sometimes causing the death
of a child. Ethel W., a 40-year-old mother of seven who suffered from
depression, killed her two youngest children. 38 And 21-year-old Bertha
M., diagnosed with mental retardation, was the mother of a 4-month-old
and a 4-year-old. After her younger child died as a result of neglect, the
Department of Public Welfare explained that Bertha herself was a half-
grown child who needed “someone . . . responsible to care for and guide
her,” and the department petitioned for her sterilization. 39
I am not suggesting that eugenic sterilization was appropriate in these
cases while it might not have been in others. The above cases illustrate,
however, that as far as the law was concerned, some of those sterilized
did indeed suffer from severe mental illness and retardation. But cases
such as the above constituted the exception in a program where most
sterilization candidates were neither inmates in state mental institutions
nor had threatened the lives and physical safety of their children. Most
sterilization candidates came to the attention of county health or welfare
officials because they or their relatives received some form of welfare
benefits and officials feared that pregnancy would add yet another child
to the welfare rolls.
In case files, descriptions of poverty were accompanied by observa-

tions about the sexual behavior of those suggested for sterilization. Ella
Mae’s social worker sought sterilization for the 29-year-old mother of
four because Ella Mae “seems determined to be promiscuous.”â†œ4 0 Pearl’s
social worker argued for the sterilization of Pearl, a 21-year-old mother
of six, because Pearl made “no effort to curb her sexual desires and is
very promiscuous with numerous suitors.”â†œ41 Ruby, a 32-year-old single
woman without children, was simply deemed “oversexed,” and Rosie Lee,
a 26-year-old single woman without children, was considered a “sex prob-
lem” at Caswell Training School.42
Most troubling, as the case of Elaine Riddick suggests, was the ster-
ilization of rape and incest victims—the majority of whom were teenage
girls.43 The petition for Beulah, a 16-year-old white girl, noted that Beulah
was pregnant. When Beulah was 12, the petition observed, her father
began to rape her. The man responsible for Beulah’s pregnancy was a
friend of Beulah’s mother who had gotten the mother’s permission to have
sexual relations with Beulah.44 The social worker suggested sterilization;
Beulah’s father concurred and signed the petition. Leora, an 18-year-old
black single girl, was also pregnant. Her petition noted that Leora “had
[an] incestuous relationship with her father at age 14, but because she and
her mother would not testify in court against him he was found not guilty.
She is now far advanced in pregnancy and her parents refuse to attempt
to establish paternity as they ‘don’t want to get messed up in that.’”â†œ45 Her
father had signed the consent form. And Goldie, a 13-year-old white girl,
was pregnant by her brother. The social worker suggesting her steriliza-
tion wrote: “Her brother is the alleged father of her child and has been
committed to training school. There is also a feeling in the community
that the father has had relations with her but no proof of this has been se-
cured. According to the brother, Goldie would make an attempt to resist
him but would give in each time.”â†œ4 6 The parents sought sterilization and
signed the consent form.
Lest anybody think that cases like these were rare, the youngest per-
son sterilized under the eugenic sterilization program was 9 years old.
There were three 10-year-olds, 31 11-year-olds, 67 12-year-olds, 116 13-year-
olds, 226 14-year-olds, 335 15-year-olds, 406 16-year-olds, and so on. More
than one-third of those sterilized were not even of legal age to buy a drink
or vote, let alone give consent to their sterilization.
It is unclear what social workers and eugenic board members thought

when they looked to eugenic sterilization as a solution to these problems.
Careful attention to the words of former eugenic board members and so-
cial work professionals indicates that they were genuinely concerned with
their clients and desired to help improve their lives. Several health and
social work professionals expressed deep ambivalence about the program
when I contacted them in the 1990s. One former eugenics board member
claimed to be so haunted by his role that he refused to talk to me. Oth-
ers conceded that the program sometimes carried negative associations.
“It isn’t something we would have volunteered to do,” Jakob Koomen, a
former board member, explained. “We did it because the law obligated
us to.” Board members questioned whether authorizing sterilizations
was a function of the state. “Was this a right thing to do? Did we really
have all the data at hand?” Despite such doubts, however, eugenic board
members were firmly convinced that eugenic sterilization constituted an
important social policy intervention. The eugenic sterilization program
seemed to offer an opportunity to “make things better for . . . the flow of
illegitimate children and the circumstances in which they were brought
up,” Koomen explained. “I think our major concern was that here was a
mother who has already demonstrated to be incompetent for the raising
of children . . . who was having yet another child, and who, because of
her community behavior was likely to have several more. That it was an
illegitimate birth was of much less concern than the fact that it was an in-
competent [mother].”â†œ47 In vivid detail, social workers recalled the grind-
ing poverty of clients. If combined with mental illness or retardation,
they explained, the situation could spell disaster.48 Koomen concluded:
“I never for a moment felt that anyone on this board was doing this as a
matter of punitiveness or vindictiveness or ‘this is what these people de-
serve.’ Never, never! Or a matter of discrimination of any kind. . . . Most
of us felt it was a very sad situation, felt, knew that there were hundreds
and hundreds and hundreds of others just like this that never came to our
attention. We were sometimes thanked for having done this—parents
were glad.”â†œ49
The impersonal nature of the process masked the fact that eugenic
board members were making decisions about the most intimate aspects
of sterilization candidates’ lives. Since board members rarely faced steril-
ization candidates in person, they were assessing abilities at a distance, in
the abstract. Instead, clients’ abilities were expressed only in an IQ rating

and brief descriptions of a client’s social and economic background. The
presence of some severely retarded or mentally ill individuals among ster-
ilization candidates most likely camouflaged the fact that the majority
were primarily poor and lacking education. Indeed, the social distance
between sterilization candidates and eugenic board members further
eased the decision making process. Board members were all heads of
state agencies and of similar age and academic background. They shared
a sense of purpose and competency central to the decision making pro-
cess. “We would usually have a brisk discussion, think about our own
background,” Jakob Koomen explained about the preparation for voting
on a case. Even with the best of intentions, however, social workers and
eugenic board members acknowledged that the eugenic sterilization pro-
gram was far from flawless. “We may well have sterilized some folk who
weren’t that much retarded,” Koomen admitted. 50
Systemic problems further contributed to abuse. A lack of oversight
on the county level meant that some social workers overstepped their
boundaries with impunity. One retired social worker recalled a colleague
who sterilized his entire caseload. 51 Others misrepresented the nature of
the procedure when securing consent. They claimed that sterilization was
reversible or coerced clients into signing consent forms by threatening
the withdrawal of welfare payments. Sometimes social workers asked
relatives to sign the consent form even if those relatives lacked the legal
authority to do so. Board members, too, were not above reproach. They
disregarded evidence that clients had, indeed, been coerced and ignored
details suggesting that sterilization candidates were merely victims of
unwanted sexual attention. And they gave little thought to the fact that
sterilization might further harm rape and incest victims. Moreover, those
board members who were directors of state mental institutions frequently
voted on petitions they themselves had submitted for their institution.
They did so with the acquiescence of the state attorney general’s office,
which also had a member on the board. Finally, while some board mem-
bers in the 1950s began to have doubts about the program, they preferred
to stay away from board meetings rather than challenge the program itself.
This is true both for several of the psychiatrists who sat on the board as
well as for several representatives from the state attorney general’s office.
Indeed, in its heyday, the program was run by three individuals: typically
the director of the state Board of Public Welfare, Ellen Winston, or her
representative, R. Eugene Brown; R. D. Higgins from the State Board of
Health; and W. R. Pierce from the State Attorney General’s Office.
It took until the late 1960s for North Carolina sterilization rates to de-
cline. Changes during that decade laid the groundwork for the disman-
tling of state-supported sterilization. The development of more reliable
contraceptives, the onset of the civil rights and women’s rights move-
ments, and a better understanding of mental disease and deficiency all
contributed to a significant shift in board members’ perceptions of eu-
genic sterilization. In 1974, North Carolina and Virginia finally repealed
their eugenic sterilization laws. That same year, the Office of Economic
Opportunity formulated and distributed sterilization guidelines to en-
sure that patients would receive adequate counseling and be given in-
formed consent to further safeguard the poor against the possibility of
sterilization abuse.
Clearly, the history of eugenic sterilization is a history of misguided
governmental policy that we do not want to see repeated. By thwarting
the most intimate interests of sterilization victims in their own physical
and mental health, the state did wrong as well as harm. State steriliza-
tion disappointed the most natural and realistic hopes and expectations
an individual might hold: the ability to determine the size of one’s fam-
ily. Moreover, as victims testify to a lifetime of depression, distrust, and
feelings of worthlessness as a result of sterilization, the surgery left them
worse off than they had been prior to the surgery. By infringing on the
victims’ interest in their own health and the normal functioning of their
bodies, the state violated the most important interests a person has. 52
North Carolina has come a long way in facilitating research of its his-
tory and acknowledging responsibility for its past. Following Governor
Easley’s 2002 apology for the program and his appointment of a eugenics
study commission, the state—through its Office of Minority Health and
Health Disparities—commissioned an exhibit to remember this history.
In 2009, the state erected a historical marker to call attention to the work
of the Eugenics Board. 53 Last but not least, North Carolina—like Sweden
and the Canadian province of Alberta before it—is considering restitu-
tion payments to its sterilization victims. These are steps of great signifi-
cance, and the state should be congratulated for having come so far. But
an acknowledgment of past wrongs means little unless it is accompanied
by serious attempts to avoid similar mistakes in the future. We need to
show both our humanity toward the sterilization victims and humility
toward the policy making process. This includes the study of and educa-
tion about past policy and thoughtful discussion about the principles that
should guide our social policy in the future.
The ability of poor women to exercise their reproductive rights
remains under constant attack. Many people continue to believe that
women should not have children while they receive public assistance.
As we think about these problems, we need to remember the legacy of
state sterilization programs. We have to prevent family planning policies
that force women to use any form of birth control against their will. And
we have to ensure that all have access to education about birth control,
sterilization, and abortion regardless of their race, class, age, and marital
status. Finally, we have to understand that women and men have the right
to decide to use or not to use such services, even if we disagree with their
decision. Rights are only as strong as our willingness to tolerate the deci-
sions of others. A full acknowledgment of the suffering of the women and
men sterilized under the auspices of the North Carolina Eugenics Board
must include a spirited defense of their reproductive rights.
Notes
1.â•‡ John Railey, interview with Elaine Riddick Jessie, Aug. 26, 2002. In author’s
possession.
2.â•‡ See R. Eugene Brown, Eugenical Sterilization in North Carolina (Raleigh, N.C.:
Eugenics Board of North Carolina, 1935); see also General Statute, chapter 35, article 7;
Biennial Reports of the Eugenics Board of North Carolina (Raleigh, N.C.: Eugenics Board
of North Carolina, June 30, 1934, to July 1, 1968). For general information on Buck v.
Bell, see J. David Smith and K. Ray Nelson, The Sterilization of Carrie Buck (Far Hills,
N.J.: Horizon Press, 1989); Allison C. Carey, “Gender and Compulsory Sterilization
Programs in America, 1907–1950,” Journal of Historical Sociology 11, no. 1 (March 1998):
74–105; Paul Lombardo, “Eugenic Sterilization in Virginia: Aubrey Strode and the Case
of Buck v. Bell” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1982); Philip R. Reilly, The Surgical
Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1991), 88, 129, 137; Moya Woodside, Sterilization in North
Carolina: A Sociological and Psychological Study (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro-
lina Press, 1950), 194.
3.â•‡ Carey, “Gender and Compulsory Sterilization Programs”; Reilly, The Surgical
Solution, 129, 137, 158; Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugen-
ics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2001).
4.â•‡ See Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson, Applied Eugenics (New York:
Macmillan, 1922), 74; Henry H. Goddard, The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of
Feeblemindedness (New York: Macmillan, 1921); Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugen-
ics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 46–49.
5.â•‡ JoAnne Brown, The Definition of a Profession: The Authority of Metaphor in the
History of Intelligence Testing, 1890–1930 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1992); Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981),
146–233.
6.â•‡ Brown, Eugenical Sterilization, 21. My ability to analyze the policy making
process in North Carolina is limited by the fact that the state legislature does not keep
written records of its legislative sessions. Trying to understand the motivations of state
legislators who debated, formulated, and funded reproductive policy is difficult, and in
the case of the passage of and amendments to the state sterilization laws, it is impossible.
In fact, during most of the period under discussion, such issues were considered to be
private and were not debated publicly.
7.â•‡ See Brown, Eugenical Sterilization; General Statute, chapter 35, article 7.
8.â•‡ “Definitions of Feeblemindedness,” General File, box 7, file: Policies and Prac-
tices of the Eugenics Board, Social Services Record Group (SS), North Carolina State
Archives (NCSA). This 1908 definition is an excerpt of the British Royal Commission on
the Feebleminded and was provided for North Carolina officials concerned with identi-
fying the feebleminded for sterilization.
9.â•‡Lloyd J. Thompson, A Study of Mental Health in North Carolina (Raleigh, N.C.,
1937), 252–53. Also Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival
of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991),
40. For similar calls, see Lydia Allen DeVilbiss to Margaret Sanger, September 10, 1935,
Margaret Sanger Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, reel S 10, Smith College, Northamp-
ton, N.H.
10.â•‡George H. Lawrence, “A Study Relating to Mental Illness, Mental Deficiency,
and Epilepsy in a Selected Rural County” (May 1948), 14, General File, box 7, file:
Woodside Study, SS-NCSA.
11.â•‡ DeVilbiss to Sanger, September 10, 1935. See also Eugenics Board meetings, Oc-
tober 24, 1961, October 23, 1962, and October 27, 1962, Eugenics Board (EB), NCSA.
12.â•‡ Brewer v. Valk, 204 N.C. 378 (1932), 13.
13.â•‡ Hearing Case 1, Eugenics Board meeting, August 17, 1938; Hearing Case 1, Eu-
genics Board meeting, December 2, 1936; Hearing Cases 2 and 3, Eugenics Board meet-
ing, April 20, 1938, EB-NCSA.
14.â•‡ Hearing Case 2, Eugenics Board meeting, December 2, 1936, EB-NCSA.
15.â•‡ Hearing Case 2, Eugenics Board meeting, June 15, 1938; Hearing Case 1, Eugen-
ics Board meeting, August 19, 1936; Hearing Case 1, Eugenics Board meeting, July 21,
1937; Hearing Case 2, Eugenics Board meeting, March 16, 1938, EB-NCSA.
16.â•‡ Marian S. Olden, The ABC of Human Conservation, publication no. 31 (PrinceÂ�
ton, N.J.: Birthright, [1946]), 6–7, copy consulted in series 1, box 2, folder 77,
Human Betterment League Papers, Southern Historical Collection (HBL-SHC).
17.â•‡ Report of the Committee on Caswell Training School in Its Relation to the Problem
of the Feebleminded of the State of North Carolina (Raleigh: Capitol Printing, 1926), 15.
18.â•‡ Hearing Case, Eugenics Board meeting, January 25, 1955, EB-NCSA. It was not
unusual for health and welfare professionals across the country to refer promiscuous
daughters to welfare departments for sterilization. See, for instance, the recommenda-
tion by an agent of the Farm Security Administration to leave such regulation of sexual-
ity to welfare departments. W. C. Morehead, “Outline of Talk Given to FSA Personnel in
Special Rural Projects Program,” September 19, 1940, Planned Parenthood Federation
of America I, series 3, box 45, folder: Birth Control, California, FSA Project, 1939–1941,
Margaret Sanger Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.
19.â•‡Lawrence, “A Study Relating to Mental Illness,” 7, 10. Other states mirrored
these findings. Seventy-five percent of those sterilized in California, for instance, were
considered “sex delinquents.” E. S. Gosney and Paul Popenoe, Sterilization for Human
Betterment (New York: Macmillan, 1930), 40.
20.â•‡ In the case histories, 178 histories [22 percent] gave information on sexual be-
havior, and 142 of those clients were described as sexually promiscuous. In 44 petitions,
patients were described as victims of rape or incest or likely to be taken advantage of.
Several cases contain more than one observation.
21.â•‡ Reilly, The Surgical Solution, 94–95, 99; Carey, “Gender and Compulsory Ster-
ilization Programs,” 84–85, 101n11; Kline, Building a Better Race, 53. Other states also
had such a high percentage of female sterilizations. Seventy-nine percent of individuals
sterilized in Minnesota between 1926 and 1946, for instance, were female. Most steril-
ized women in that state fell into two general categories: sexual “delinquents” or older
women with a number of children on welfare. Molly Ladd-Taylor, “Saving Babies, Steril-
izing Mothers,” Social Politics 4, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 136–53, at 145, 149; Mary Bishop,
“Sterilization Survivors Speak Out,” Southern Exposure 23, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 12–17,
at 14.
22.â•‡ A study by eugenicist Paul Popenoe on sterilizations performed in California
between 1909 and 1929 shows that “economically dependent” men and women were
three times as likely to be sterilized as those who were more prosperous. Paul Popenoe,
“Economic and Social Status of the Sterilized Insane,” in Collected Papers on Eugenic
Sterilization in California, ed. E. S. Gosney (Pasadena, Calif.: Human Betterment
Foundation, 1930), 24. See also Ladd-Taylor, “Saving Babies, Sterilizing Mothers,” 144;
Bishop, “Sterilization Survivors Speak Out,” 15.
23.â•‡ Of 800 sterilization candidates—a sample of 10 percent of the total number of
sterilization petitions—147 (18.4 percent of the sample) gave information on clients’
work history; 41 (28 percent) of those households received ADC payments; 63 (43 per-
cent) received other benefits; 39 patients (26 percent) were described as unable to
work.
24.â•‡ Information on the physical condition of clients’ housing was available in 67
cases (8.4 percent of the overall sample). Of these, 57 (85 percent) lived in inadequate
housing and 37 (55 percent) in overcrowded housing. In 14 cases (21 percent), houses
were in poor repair; in 11 (16 percent), houses were poorly furnished. Six families (9 per-
cent) lacked some or all conveniences.
25.â•‡ Case 19, February 28, 1961; special meeting: Case 2, February 18, 1960; Hearing
Case 1, March 22, 1966.
26.â•‡ While overall rates of illiteracy had dropped to 13 percent in 1930, 27.7 percent
of African Americans over the age of 21 were illiterate. For the rural farm population,
white illiteracy rates stood at 10.4 percent and rates for African Americans stood at 32.6
percent. See 15th Census of the United States, 1930.
27.â•‡ See Hearing Case 2, Eugenics Board meeting, April 20, 1938, for a father’s inabil-
ity to pay book rent; Hearing Case 1, Eugenics Board meeting, September 21, 1938, for
children who couldn’t attend school because they were needed to help with the harvest;
also Hearing Case 2, Eugenics Board meeting, March 16, 1938, EB-NCSA.
28.â•‡ For more information on Gamble, see James Reed, From Private Vice to Public
Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society, rev. ed. (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1983), and Doone Williams and Greer Williams, Every Child
a Wanted Child: Clarence James Gamble, M.D., and His Work in the Birth Control Move-
ment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). Also Johanna Schoen, Choice &
Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
29.â•‡ During the late 1940s, Clarence Gamble himself published at least 20 articles
in professional journals arguing for eugenic sterilization. Larson argues that Gamble
did as much as any one philanthropist could have done to implement eugenic steril-
ization programs. Edward Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 149–51, 155–57. See also Human Bet-
terment League of North Carolina, “25th Anniversary, 1947—25 Years of Human Better-
ment—1972,” series 3, box 4, folder 133 (1968–74), HBL-SHC.
30.â•‡ Evangeline Davis, “Alarming Mental Deficiency Rate Confronts State,” Char-
lotte News, March 27, 1945.
31.â•‡ Evangeline Davis, “Crowded Caswell Simply Can’t Handle Patients,” Charlotte
News, March 28, 1945.
32.â•‡ Case 3, EBM, June 11, 1964, EB-NCSA. See also Case 12, EBM, June 23, 1964,
and Case 1, EBM, August 25, 1964, both in EB-NCSA.
33.â•‡ Pax Davis, “Sterilization Funds Urged,” Raleigh News and Observer, August 27,
1950.
34.â•‡ See minutes of the Eugenic Board meetings, EB-NCSA. No comparable data for
other states is available.
35.â•‡ Winston to the Superintendent of Public Welfare, December 12, 1951, box 30A,
file: ADC-Eugenics Program, DSS-NCSA.
36.â•‡ Case 39, EBM, May 24, 1955, EB-NCSA.
37.â•‡ Case 16, EBM, November 26, 1954, EB-NCSA.
38.â•‡ Case 28, EBM, September 27, 1950, EB-NCSA.
39.â•‡ Case 13, EBM, March 22, 1955, EB-NCSA.
40.â•‡ Case 5, June 1952.
41.â•‡ Case 7, May 1964.
42.â•‡ Case 6, February 1952; Case 4, April 1952.
43.â•‡ A quarter of the cases providing observations about sex mentioned instances of
rape or incest.
44.â•‡ Case 10, November 22, 1960.
45.â•‡ Case 31, June 26, 1962.
46.â•‡ Case 7, July 24, 1962.
47.â•‡ Jakob Koomen, interview with Johanna Schoen, May 2, 1990, Chapel Hill, N.C.
48.â•‡ Murlene Wall, interview with Johanna Schoen, June 19, 1997, Charlotte, N.C.
49.â•‡ Koomen interview, 1990.
50.â•‡ Ibid.
51.â•‡ Ed Chapin, interview with Johanna Schoen, June 19, 1997, Charlotte, N.C.
52.â•‡ Joel Feinberg, Harm to Others, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984),
3–64.
53.â•‡ See North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources (http://news.ncdcr.gov/
2009/06/18/historical-highway-marker-remembers-eugenics).
e ig h t
Protection or Control?
Women’s Health, Sterilization
Abuse, and Relf v. Weinberger
G r e g or y M ic h a e l D or r
On June 13, 1973, Mrs. Minnie Relf welcomed two representatives from the
Montgomery, Alabama, Community Action Council (MCAC) into her
home.1 According to Mrs. Relf, these social workers told her that they had
noticed boys “hanging around” her daughters, 14-year-old Minnie Lee
and 12-year-old Mary Alice. Worried that this social interaction would
lead to sexual intercourse, the welfare officials escorted Mrs. Relf and
the girls to a local hospital and presented Mrs. Relf with a bureaucratic
solution: they placed consent forms in front of her. Mrs. Relf’s illiteracy
rendered her unable to read the forms; her lack of education further con-
fused the officials’ explanations. Mrs. Relf believed that signing the forms
would authorize the MCAC’s family planning clinic to give her daughters
“some shots.” Her oldest daughter, 17-year-old Katie, had been receiving
injections of the then-experimental, long-term birth control drug Depo-
Provera from the clinic. Assuming that she was enrolling her youngest
daughters in the same program, Mrs. Relf made her mark, an uncertain
X, on the signature line of each consent form. A nurse then escorted Mrs.
Relf home. The next morning, Mary Alice and Minnie did indeed receive
shots—of sedatives—after which they were wheeled into an operating
room and surgically sterilized. Unbeknownst to Mrs. Relf, she had made
her mark on surgical consent forms authorizing the sterilizations. Two
weeks later, on June 27, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) filed a
$1 million lawsuit on the Relfs’ behalf, sparking furious protest. 2 Before
the year ended, Americans learned that doctors and overzealous social
workers had been targeting poor women, and especially poor women of
color, in a nationwide epidemic of sterilization.
161
162â•… · â•… G r e g o r y M i c h a e l D o r r
This essay examines the controversy touched off by the Relf sisters’
sterilization, an event that gained national notoriety through the federal
court case Relf v. Weinberger.3 Often only a footnote in histories about
reproductive rights, significant solely as the spark that ignited a politi-
cal tinderbox, Relf deserves closer attention for at least three reasons.4
First, locating Relf in its historical context reveals the social tensions that
merged quasi-Malthusian thinking with rising political animosity toward
federal welfare programs. Support for implicitly and explicitly eugenic
population controls emerged from the concern that the nation faced
a demographic explosion among the underclass, a “population bomb”
that threatened to destroy civilization in either a hail of welfare claims
or violent social revolution. Politically, the Nixon administration used
population anxiety to harmonize the demands of welfare activists and the
New Right on one hand, demographic alarmists and the emerging anti-
abortion lobby on the other—all in the name of reelecting the president.
This political opportunism had far-reaching consequences. 5
Second, Relf illustrates the persistence of eugenic ideology in Amer-
ican social policy. State and federal efforts to curb procreation in the
1960s and 1970s devolved from earlier attempts to improve the “human
stock” into operations purportedly “performed for the public benefit . . .
to maintain control within state institutions and to limit welfare costs.”â†œ6
Such operations, while not meant to purify the gene pool by filtering
out “undesirable” genetic traits, still amounted to eugenic interventions.
Some legislators, activists, and segments of the public argued that poverty
bred more poverty; preventing the poor from breeding seemed a solution.
Controlling procreation both defused the population bomb and offered a
panacea for a hot topic social problem: the birth of “illegitimate” children
to unwed mothers receiving welfare.
Finally, the revelation of the Relfs’ experience came hard on the heels
of another medical fiasco involving Alabama, African Americans, and the
federal government. Just a year earlier, in July 1972, journalists stunned the
nation with reports of the so-called Tuskegee syphilis experiment. Ameri-
cans had been horrified to learn that U.S. Public Health Service physi-
cians had watched 399 poor African American men in Macon County,
Alabama, sicken (and some die) from syphilitic infections, all the while
denying them antisyphilitic therapy. Investigators and the public quickly
associated the lack of informed consent in both the Tuskegee and Relf
P r o t e c t i o n o r C o n t r o l ? â•… · â•… 163
incidents with the specter of Nazi medical experimentation and eugen-

ics. The fact that both events occurred in Alabama, involved poor blacks,
and revolved around sexual function was not lost on civil rights, women’s
rights, and women’s health activists. Reproductive rights activists argued
that poor women should be free to elect or reject sterilization, regard-
less of politicians’, doctors’, or the public’s preferences. Ultimately, this
essay explores the competing claims of individuals interested in welfare
reform, civil rights, women’s health, and medical ethics. The resolution
of this contest resulted in policies that controlled poor women’s access to
sterilization, then and today the favored form of long-term birth control,
in the name of protecting women’s rights.
W e lfar e R e form and th e R is e

of P opulation P olitics
It is a truism to note that the early 1970s were marked by generational

tensions, changing notions of racial and gender conventions, shifting
sexual mores, and expanding reproductive rights. As the fragile civil
rights coalition shattered into identity politics, women’s rights, black
power, and the antiwar movement squared off against the rising New
Right of Richard Nixon’s law-and-order conservatism. The rise of “lib-
eral” ecological and antipoverty activism, however, marched in lock step
with concern about overpopulation and a movement for Zero Population
Growth that allied political liberals and conservatives. While Rachel
Carson’s Silent Spring and Michael Harrington’s The Other America are
cited as influential books that shaped a generation, commentators ne-
glect Stanford biologist Paul R. Ehrlich’s 1968 best seller, The Population
Bomb.7 Ehrlich’s crusade to alert Americans to an impending Malthu-
sian catastrophe—overpopulation exacerbated by pollution resulting
in mass starvation and chaos—inspired a cultural mania. Popular fears
found embodiment in such disparate responses as the Nixon adminis-
tration’s “Birth Curb Bill” (the Family Planning Services and Popula-
tion Research Act of 1970, a $382 million federal program “to control
population growth”) and the 1973 Charlton Heston film Soylent Green
(a nightmarish vision of an overpopulated America being fed on green
wafers rendered from the corpses of euthanized people).8 The postwar
baby and economic booms had crested in the early 1960s. By the late
1960s and early 1970s, people drew parallels between starvation and war
in Indo-China and America’s crowded, dirty, and decrepit inner cities
that erupted in the violent “long hot summers” of the late 1960s. With
the Vietnam War and the Great Society sapping the treasury, the econ-
omy sagged. Soon Americans reeled under the new economic malaise,
“stagflation.” Ehrlich’s prognostications seemed to be coming true—
overpopulation was placing unsustainable demands on scarce resources,
threatening collapse.
Both the state and federal governmental response to the exploding
underclass often redounded to eugenics. A number of states considered
passing “punitive sterilization laws,” attempting to compel poor mothers
of “illegitimate” children to undergo sterilization.9 These legislative initia-
tives reflected ambient attitudes in America, enunciating a view of eugenic
sterilization that had been implicit since the 1910s—that the so-called
feebleminded, the original targets of sterilization, actually comprised a
catch-all category linked more closely to poverty and perceived antisocial
behavior than to organic mental deficiency.10 After Relfâ•ƒ broke, Americans
realized that coercive sterilization was not restricted to states with long-
standing eugenics programs or to state bureaucrats. Instead, support for
the sterilization of welfare mothers reached into private medical practices,
federally funded birth control clinics, and perhaps even into the Oval
Office itself.
While secondary to the Vietnam War, social unrest—and the failure
of President Johnson’s Great Society programs to engender tranquility—
emerged as a principal issue in the 1968 elections. Urban violence had
rocked the nation each summer since the Watts section of Los Angeles
burned in 1965. Blamed in part on crushing inner-city poverty, the vio-
lence spurred welfare activists to demand action; they swamped welfare
offices with applications for increased benefits and direct participation
by recipients in policy administration.11 As the Left argued for social
meliorism and the Right advocated “law and order,” population control
enthusiasts claimed that unfettered reproduction among the poor, en-
couraged by the promise of “government handouts,” fueled the social
crisis. Nixon determined to quell unrest, dismantle the Great Society,
and cure poverty in one stroke by linking welfare reform and population
control. Combined, these measures would lead to increased opportunity
and equity for all Americans.
President Nixon’s version of civil rights—whether the rights and

well-being of women, the poor, or racial minorities (categories that often
overlapped)—revolved around economic enfranchisement. Although
people were obviously unequal in their social station and abilities, Nixon’s
personal experience as a “self-made man” established him as an inveterate
meritocrat. He told aides that “we must ensure that anyone might go to
the top,” if they had sufficient talent and pluck.12 Nevertheless, holding a
dismal view of women’s abilities (once characterizing his wife as “excess
baggage”), the president announced that he only respected women “who
hold the hands of the husbands who do hold office.”13 Similarly, Nixon
recorded his dim view of racial minorities: “There has never in history
been an adequate black nation, and they are the only race of which this
is true.”14 Unsurprisingly, the president’s welfare reform and population
control nostrums extended gender and racial stereotypes that penalized
poor minority women the most.
For Nixon, both social prejudice and misguided welfare programs
retarded individual progress—the former by erecting barriers, the latter
by gutting initiative. In August 1969, Nixon announced “Welfare Reform:
Shared Responsibility,” aimed at alleviating destitution and providing
incentives to get off the dole. The president called for replacement of the
existing welfare system, job-training and placement programs, revamp-
ing the Office of Economic Opportunity, and sharing federal tax revenues
with the states. Nixon hoped to replace Johnson’s “War on Poverty” with
this “New Federalism,” supplanting government largesse with individual
initiative.15 The program’s Family Assistance Plan (FAP) guaranteed an
annual income and encouraged work by allowing the head of household
to earn up to $720 annually without sacrificing benefits (additional earn-
ings would result in scaled reductions until income supported the fam-
ily).16 The president “reached out to both poles of popular sentiment about
welfare” to sell the FAP. Passed by the House of Representatives, pro-
test from southern politicos, welfare rights organizations, urban welfare
mothers, and the national Chamber of Commerce ultimately derailed the
FAP, a revised version of which died in the Senate two years later.17 As
progressive as the FAP may look to many historians, it expired without
restructuring America’s welfare system.18 President Nixon lobbied for
FAP only so long as it seemed politically expedient; when it failed, he
turned to population policy to reform society.
On election eve 1968, when he realized he had won, Nixon announced

to his staff that it was time “to get down to the nut cutting.”19 Nixon’s
staffers understood his reference to imply the metaphorical castration
of their political opponents and a drastic trimming of the Great Society.
Before the first term was half over, however—and well before the FAP
foundered—the Nixon administration was facilitating the near-literal
application of this measure to the poor. Without explicitly invoking the
term eugenics, the administration employed quasi-eugenic birth control
policy in the name of population control.
Poverty and reproductive policy converged in the lives of America’s
minority populations, a situation magnified by Daniel Patrick Moyni-
han’s advice to the president. Moynihan argued that only welfare policies
that reinforced the “traditional” patriarchal family could restore stability
and independence to black families and America’s inner cities. Lacking
the requisite federal money and political capital to initiate a comprehen-
sive domestic policy, Moynihan advised that it was “better just to get rid
of the things that don’t work, and try to build up the few that do.”20 If the
FAP failed to achieve peace, Moynihan and Nixon hoped population
control programs might.
Moynihan was the conduit through which population control ideas
reached Nixon. Following towering Republican population activist Nel-
son Rockefeller, Moynihan championed improving poor women’s re-
productive control to alleviate both the welfare crisis and social unrest.
Birth control would be welcomed by both welfare rights activists and
welfare critics. Activists sought contraceptives to liberate poor women
from undesired pregnancies that strained family economies. Yet they
also championed poor women’s right to oppose coercive sterilization.
This position presented “a double-edged sword”: if women were granted
complete reproductive control, society could demand that they bear only
the children they could support.21 “Illegitimate children” born to impov-
erished single mothers became the new social/eugenic menace. Welfare
opponents promoted punitive sterilization laws targeting “irresponsible”
mothers to decrease welfare expenditures. In the absence of coercive laws
that would guarantee sterility, the widespread provision of birth control
seemed an excellent fallback. Guaranteed to reduce births among the
poor, the need for welfare, and the taxes underpinning welfare, birth con-
trol mollified the white taxpayers who formed Nixon’s “Silent Majority.”
Thus population policy could reconcile the Left and the Right, solidifying
the GOP’s hold on government.
President Nixon turned to the Office of Economic Opportunity
(OEO) to administer programs aimed at poor women. Ironically, despite
its nominal congruence with the president’s economic enfranchisement
ideology, the OEO was the Great Society program Nixon hated most and
targeted for a “revamping” with the FAP. Although that overhaul failed,
Nixon was able to use Great Society programs like the OEO and the
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (DHEW) to disseminate
family planning services—even as he sought their dissolution as govern-
mental agencies.
Nixon’s population initiatives recurred throughout his presidency.
In July 1969, the president unveiled his “birth curb” program that cre-
ated a federal population office to disburse $382 million to population
control groups. These funds subsidized contraceptive research, birth con-
trol counseling, and the distribution of contraceptives to the poor, first
through OEO-sponsored family planning services (including the MCAC
family planning clinic) and later through DHEW. In the fall of 1969, the
president had DHEW create a National Center for Family Planning Ser-
vices. Early in 1970, the administration almost doubled the budget for
contraceptive research. On Christmas Eve 1970, the president signed the
Family Planning Services and Population Research Act—the “birth curb
bill”—the first such law ever passed by Congress.22 On May 18, 1971, the
OEO began funding sterilizations (but never abortions, which were illegal
in most instances). Concerned that “patients be protected and provided
with high quality medical care,” the OEO sought “guidelines and clinical
standards” to “incorporate the necessary safeguards” in promulgating
sterilization. These guidelines were scheduled for release by September 1,
1971. Until that time, no OEO-funded program was supposed to provide
sterilizations.23
The administration’s increased funding and its rhetoric about pa-
tient safety were creatures of political calculus, not social conscience.
Although such spending might prime the flagging economy and reduce
welfare demand, it also “might help us politically, a thought that just oc-
curred to me,” the president wrote. Nixon once again used cross-cutting
political pressures to nullify each other. The program’s increased benefits
(in the form of federally sponsored birth control) looked good to welfare
activists, as did Nixon’s demand that every executive department (includ-

ing OEO and HEW) expend their budgets through June 1972—expen-
ditures that temporarily increased benefits. The apparent concern for
patient safeguards and the provision of only sterilization (not abortion)
reassured both welfare and antiabortion activists. As the abortion debate
threatened to boil, the president championed proactive family planning
rather than using abortion as birth control.
Under this cover, the administration dismantled the federal anti-
poverty infrastructure and simultaneously curbed the reproduction of
the poor, further reducing the clientele for Great Society programs.24
Reelection secured, Nixon abandoned his support of OEO. In January
1973, the president instructed two successive OEO directors to request no
congressional funding appropriation. 25 Nixon also sought to pare down
DHEW, the agency that assumed responsibility for federal family plan-
ning.26 Bemoaning both the Great Society and the failure of the FAP,
the administration misdirected attention from its sterilization initiatives
while eviscerating welfare programs.
Nixon’s legerdemain came to light when journalists discovered
that the administration had suppressed the distribution of sterilization
guidelines—safeguards that would have prevented the Relfs’ steriliza-
tion. In 1971, Dr. Warren Hern, chief program director for the OEO’s
family planning division, drafted standards that barred sterilizations on
anyone lacking the legal capacity to consent and “unless the individual
patient has given his [sic] informed written consent to the procedure.”
These stipulations would have debarred the minor Relfs. Despite “doz-
ens of requests from Community Action Agencies all over the country
for the guidelines,” Hern was told that the rules “would not be issued
until after the 1972 elections.” He suspected political procrastination. 27
Alarmed, Hern contacted John Dean, White House legal counsel. In-
stead of prompting the guidelines’ release, Hern’s actions earned him a
reprimand. He resigned in protest over the “political interference and the
completely irresponsible action of the OEO in blocking the dissemina-
tion of those guidelines.”28
After the Relfs’ story broke, OEO officials attempted to distance the
administration from the situation by releasing portions of Dr. Hern’s
guidelines and claiming they had been mailed on January 11, 1973. This
move refocused attention from an apparently malfeasant executive to a
federal bureaucracy and an allegedly renegade state program. Both the

timing of events and the subsequent unavailability of OEO officials, how-
ever, suggest that the partial disclosure was a rear-guard attempt to cover
up the guidelines’ suppression. Dr. Louis Hellman, deputy assistant sec-
retary for population affairs, then claimed that Hern’s recommendations
were abandoned as “discriminatory” because they “included an outright
prohibition of sterilization for those covered by the department’s guide-
lines,” meaning the indigent mentally incompetent and poor children.29
Under pressure from reporters to verify this account, however, the OEO
spokesperson discovered “that all 25,000 copies of the directive were still
in the Government warehouse.” This revelation prompted the Relfs’ law-
yers to add Dean and White House aide John Ehrlichman to the list of
defendants, claiming that they suppressed the guidelines. Coming the
night before Senator Edward Kennedy was to begin hearings on the Relfs’
experience, and amidst the revelations of Dean and Ehrlichman’s role in
the Watergate affair, the administration’s actions took on a sinister cast.
The federal foot-dragging stemmed from the complex confluence of
issues on the eve of the 1972 election. Hostility toward welfare—and par-
ticularly toward the mythic figure of the “welfare queen”—would seem
to have made sterilization palatable to many Nixon supporters. This line
of thinking made sterilization attractive to many SPLC supporters; let-
ters criticizing the SPLC’s involvement in Relf came from both political
liberals and conservatives who believed poor women should have no more
children than they could financially support.
Unfortunately for the administration, Roe v. Wade had been before
the Supreme Court since December 1971, inflaming anti-abortion activ-
ism, and providing a fault line among those who favored birth control
for the impoverished. 30 Ostensibly, the president had rejected abortion,
although tape recordings show the impact of Moynihan’s influence, as
well as Nixon’s racism. He argued that abortion would lead to sexual
“permissiveness” and would “break the family.” He then acknowledged,
“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you
have a black and a white. Or a rape.”31 Ultimately, he did not want his
support of sterilization linked to Roe, thereby becoming a political li-
ability. The best way to keep the “birth curb” initiative sotto voce was to
squelch the guidelines, which would have required announcement and
public comment before adoption. Public hearings would provide anti-
abortion and Catholic voters an opportunity to attack the administra-

tion’s sterilization policy, further alienating constituencies that Nixon
hoped to win.
Nonetheless, the Relf revelations embroiled Nixon’s sterilization pro-
gram in the abortion battle, welfare debates, and the Watergate debacle.
Attempting to insulate the administration from Relf, Howard K. Phil-
lips, Nixon acolyte and former acting director of OEO, claimed that the
Montgomery Community Action Committee’s action was illegal and
cut off all funding to the clinic on June 28. 32 Phillips declared that poli-
tics played no part in the suppression of the sterilization guidelines. “My
impression of the White House position,” Phillips testified before the
Senate, “was that [the guidelines] merely reflected the view of the Presi-
dent that federal funds should not be used for abortion or sterilization.
. . . My impression was that what discomfort did exist was not with the
guidelines themselves.”33 Phillips’s hair-splitting effort to distinguish the
method from the rules fell on deaf ears in many circles. The Washington
Post, responsible for breaking the Watergate scandal, opined that while
the administration was
advocating less government, draconian law enforcement, more decentral-
ization and indifference to problems of race and poverty, some of them
were hiring goon squads and others were using the power of their public
office for blackmail and extortion. Phillips, the ex-head of OEO, hasn’t
been connected with that stuff. No, he was handing out money from his
agency to pay for the sterilization of black children. By comparison to
Phillips, the Deans, the Colsons and the Magruders look almost good. . . .
[T]his revelation may explain Richard Nixon’s opposition to abortion.
There was a better plan . . . the new Federalism’s final solution to race and
poverty in America. 34
The Nixon administration’s political machinations reflected trends

established in the 1930s. Then eugenicists “became less concerned with
preventing the birth of children with genetic defects and more concerned
with preventing parenthood in those individuals who were thought to be
unable to care for children.” The goal in the 1930s, as in the early 1970s,
“was to reduce new burdens on the public purse.”35 Eugenicists wanted
to extend sterilization’s reach beyond the institutionalized to achieve
this end. The unfit, too poor or benighted to use contraceptives, might
be persuaded to undergo sterilization. 36 Activists would “sell” steriliza-
tion to the unfit, offsetting the dysgenic effect of fit couples’ use of con-
traceptives. Yet voluntary sterilization—long trammeled by so-called
age/parity requirements debarring young women, mothers with fewer
than three children, and women whose husbands would not also sign
the consent form—remained largely unavailable until the 1970s. 37 By
then, the heirs to the eugenics movement and their foes understood that
education about and access to contraception represented both a boon
to poor women (they could exercise greater reproductive freedom) and
a doorway to potential abuse (officials could force birth control or ster-
ilization on unwilling women). 38 Voluntarism would allow sterilization
to escape the stigma of eugenics; the definition of “voluntary,” however,
remained fluid—conditioned by emerging concepts of informed con-
sent. What constituted informed consent now became the fulcrum over
which women’s desires and societal imperatives teetered.
Eug e nics , A labama , and

th e Road to R e l f
Talk of a “final solution” raised the specter of Nazi eugenics. As Relf

broke, civil rights activist Julian Bond, then president of the SPLC, said,
“Sterilization of the retarded had its precedent in Nazi Germany. This
whole thing is a horrendous attack on privacy, innocence, and the right
of motherhood.”39 Bond’s comments amplified historical resonances
that influenced consideration of Relf at the time and since. Bond incor-
rectly located the origins of eugenic sterilization in Nazi law and practice.
Constitutional precedent for the eugenic sterilization of the mentally
retarded, however, originated with Justice Holmes’s 1927 ruling in Buck v.
Bell. By June 1933, when the Nazis passed their eugenics laws, thousands
of Americans had already undergone eugenic sterilization. Moreover,
Bond’s assertion that the Relfs’ sterilizations violated notions of “pri-
vacy, innocence, and the right of motherhood” was itself a product of
historical context. While the Supreme Court had already established that
procreation represented “one of the basic civil rights of man” in Skinner
v. Oklahoma, and had declared contraception legal and protected by the
“right to privacy” in Griswold v. Connecticut, the then-recent decision in
Roe v. Wade enlarged the notion of privacy to encompass bodily integrity.
Neither Skinner nor Roe directly challenged eugenics or the precedent
172â•… ·â•… G r e g o r y M i c h a e l D o r r
set in Buck. 40 Bond’s remarks demonstrated that by 1973, the footprints

of America’s and Alabama’s eugenic past had been erased by the passage
of time and the redirection of attention from compulsory sterilization to
voluntary birth control.
Until recently, most historians have claimed that eugenics died after
the revelations of the Nazi Holocaust.41 The Relf case demonstrates the
durability of eugenic ideas in America generally and Alabama specifi-
cally.42 The state of Alabama has a long history of involvement with eu-
genic theory and practice.43 Although it took 19 years, Alabama’s eugenics
lobbyists persuaded the legislature to pass a sterilization law in 1919.44
This statute empowered the superintendent of the Alabama Home for
the Feebleminded “to sterilize any inmate” provided he had the concur-
rence of the superintendent of the Alabama Insane Hospitals. Since these
men both worked in Tuscaloosa and were close friends, this provision
amounted to a rubber stamp that gave the superintendents carte blanche,
without any of Buck’s procedural safeguards. After 1923, the superinten-
dencies were merged, and William D. Partlow, an avid eugenicist, as-
sumed sole discretion over sterilization.45
Statistically speaking, Alabama’s eugenics program was tiny com-
pared with eugenics powerhouse California. Although Partlow sterilized
every patient he discharged between 1919 and 1935, this only amounted to
224 people.46 California, in contrast, sterilized 3,763 people in the same
period.47 Yet when Alabama eugenicists sought to extend the coverage of
their eugenics laws, they looked not to California for a model but to Nazi
Germany. Alabama’s State Public Health Officer, Dr. James Norment
Baker, noted in 1934 that “the whole civilised world will watch, with keen
interest, the bold experiment just launched by Germany in mass steriliza-
tion,” predicting that the Reich would realize massive savings. Lament-
ing the short reach of Alabama’s sterilization law, Baker averred, “Both
the humanitarian and economic aspects of this question are indeed so
gigantic as to attract the interests of all; and especially should this whole
question of human betterment via the eugenic and sterilisation route
make a peculiar and lasting appeal to every physician.”â†œ48
Testimony by Baker and others persuaded the legislature to pass a
bill calling for an expansive sterilization program, larger than any other in
the country. Under the proposed law, people subject to compulsory ster-
ilization included anyone committed to state homes for the insane and
feebleminded, reformatories, industrial schools, or training schools (a

cipher for juvenile delinquents, the blind and deaf), as well as any “sexual
pervert, Sadist, homosexualist, Masochist, Sodomist, or [people suffering
from] any other grave form of sexual perversion.” The bill also mandated
the sterilization of “any prisoner who has twice been convicted of rape”
or imprisoned three or more times. The statute would also have applied
to individuals “habitually and constantly dependent upon public relief
or support by charity.”â†œ49 Clearly Alabamians in the midst of the Great
Depression were as concerned about lightening the economic load as they
were about reducing the genetic load.
Governor Bibb Graves asked the Alabama Supreme Court for an
advisory opinion on the legislation. The court found the bill unconstitu-
tional for lack of due process provisions; Graves vetoed it. Though the 1919
sterilization law remained on the books, the advisory opinion exposed it
to constitutional challenge, too. A bitter William Partlow wrote that, as a
result of liability concerns, he had “positively discontinued the practice of
sterilization, which will of necessity effect [sic] our previous liberal policy
of granting paroles.”50 Compulsory eugenic sterilization in Alabama was
not dead, however.
Despite the revelations of the Holocaust, many Alabamians remained
committed to eugenics. Alabama’s medical school, the principal source
of the state’s physicians, had trained generations of doctors in eugenics.
Medical students began rotating through Partlow’s facilities in Tusca-
loosa when they opened in 1924, learning eugenics at the master’s knee. 51
These men took eugenic ideas into their private practices. Budding social
workers learned eugenics in college and came to understand the notion
of the “unfit.” This eugenic instruction bred convictions that led to abor-
tive attempts to pass sterilization bills in 1945 and 1951. 52 The notion that
feebleminded people deserved sterilization survived into the 1960s in the
public mind, even though most scientists, psychiatrists, and physicians
had abandoned simplistic genetic explanations for mental retardation.
Nevertheless, states performed sterilizations under the aegis of their eu-
genics laws until 1979. 53 Federal funding provided by OEO, DHEW, and
Medicaid made it easier to put thought into action. Eugenically inclined
doctors were guaranteed payment for practicing their beliefs. The persis-
tence of these ideas, and their impact on people’s lives, came to light in
the aftermath of Relf.
A bus e U nfolds
Relf ’s filing prompted other abused women to speak out, even as official
investigations revealed an ever-widening pattern of sterilization abuse. By
July 2, 1973, OEO investigators had determined that 11 women, all but 1
of whom were black, had been sterilized by the MCAC. 54 On July 13, Nial
Ruth Cox, a 26-year-old African American hospital worker, reported that
North Carolina officials had sterilized her when she became an unwed
mother at 18. Her case prompted scrutiny of the North Carolina State Eu-
genics Board, which routinely classified poor women as “feebleminded”
and ordered them sterilized. 55 On July 21, officials from the South Carolina
Department of Social Services and the Atlanta offices of DHEW began
investigating physicians in Aiken, South Carolina, especially Dr. Clovis
Pierce. Inspectors discovered that Pierce refused to provide obstetrical
services to poor women on welfare—unless the women consented to
sterilization during delivery. Rather than forgo obstetrical services, half
of the welfare mothers who delivered babies in Aiken County during 1973
received sterilizations. One woman sterilized by Pierce testified that he
told her “he worked hard to pay his taxes and was tired of having people
come to him to have babies he would have to support with his tax dollars,”
despite the fact that Medicaid had paid him over $60,000 in 1972 and the
first half of 1973 for serving poor women. 56 Pierce was not an ideological
wildcat. A 1972 survey showed that 94 percent of obstetrician-gynecolo-
gists supported “compulsory sterilization or the withholding of welfare
support for unwed mothers who already had three children.”57 The SPLC
brought two of Dr. Pierce’s patients into the Relf suit and represented
them in a federal tort case, Walker v. Pierce. 58
The federal government, responsible for subsidizing this cottage in-
dustry in sterilization, admitted that 16,000 women and 9,000 men had
been sterilized at public expense between 1972 and 1973. Government
officials, however, could not vouch for the degree of informed consent
in every case. Black women had special reason for concern. Beyond the
conventional wisdom about “Mississippi appendectomies” in the black
community (sterilizations performed under the guise of other abdominal
surgeries), independent studies demonstrated in 1970 that black women
were sterilized at more than twice the rate of white women (9 per 1,000
black patients compared with 4.1 per 1,000 white patients). 59 In the wake
of Relf, Latinas and Native American women came forward with their
own stories of widespread sterilization abuse, too. 60 These revelations
proved to be only the tip of America’s deeply submerged sterilization
iceberg.
Between 1968 and 1973, America witnessed a sterilization explosion:
approximately two million Americans (one million men, one million
women) underwent sterilization in 1973, up from roughly 400,000 in
1968. This increase led to additional questions. Prompted by the work of
Dr. Bernard Rosenfeld, the Health Research Group (a watchdog agency
funded by Ralph Nader’s activist organization Public Citizen) discov-
ered a nationwide epidemic of abuse. As an intern at Oakland’s Highland
General Hospital, Rosenfeld witnessed doctors “selling” sterilization to
patients, particularly women of color. While helping a senior resident
deliver a woman who “in his opinion, had enough children,” Rosenfeld
heard the doctor ask the woman “‘What do you think about getting your
tubes tied now?’” The physician then advised the patient’s husband that
he “better tell his wife to get her tubes tied,” because, “‘With the pill she’ll
get a blood clot to her brain; with the I.U.D. a pregnancy in her tubes.’”
Sterilization was safer. When Rosenfeld objected to this advice, the resi-
dent responded, “‘Hell, man, don’t you realize we’re paying for her kids?’”
despite the fact that the woman was not on welfare. She just happened
to be African American and delivering in the publicly supported county
hospital.61
The Health Research Group found similar maltreatment occurring
at America’s best teaching hospitals. Often, when sterilization was on the
line, there existed “little evidence of informed consent by the patient,” and
it was clear that “these operations have been ‘sold’ to the public by sur-
geons in a manner not unlike many other deceptive marketing practices.”
Surgeons promoted sterilization for eugenic and professional reasons.
The eugenic reasons were reflected in the cases from Alabama and the
Carolinas. The professional impulse stemmed from interns’ and residents’
need to perform a certain number of surgical procedures as a prerequi-
site to taking their board examinations. As a resident told interns at the
University of Southern California Hospital, “I want you to ask every one
of the girls if they want their tubes tied, regardless of how old they are.
Remember everyone you get to get her tubes tied means two tubes for
some resident or intern,” moving them that much closer to certification.
The report concluded, “It is probable that of the 2 million people who
undergo surgical sterilization each year, at least several hundred thousand
are considerably less than well informed about the irreversibility, risks
and alternative methods of family planning when the[y] ‘decide’ to have
these operations.”â†œ62 The arena for sterilization abuse was broad, indeed.
Prot e ction or Control :

T h e B attl e ov e r R e l f
The Relf case broke at a critical juncture in the history of medical care
and human rights. Congress had just concluded its investigation into
the ethics of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and a federal court in
Alabama was reconsidering the constitutionality of the state’s moribund
1919 sterilization law in the case Wyatt v. Aderholt. 63 All of this occurred
amidst the civil rights and women’s rights turmoil of the early 1970s. Al-
though neither media pundits nor legal officials ever linked Tuskegee,
Relf, and Wyatt, exploring their commonalities is instructive. Two themes
emerge from the comparison. First, in all three cases, the central issue
was whether the victims—the Relf girls, the syphilitic men, and institu-
tionalized mental patients—had given their informed consent. In Relf
and Tuskegee, observers identified an abusive white power structure
subverting informed consent by exploiting female African American
healthcare workers. Digging deeper into this dynamic, however, reveals
that a class-based impulse, mirroring the effects of racism, might have
motivated members of an oppressed group to oppress others. The sec-
ond major theme arises from the fact that Relf and Wyatt connect earlier
eugenic policies to the sterilization abuses of 1973. While neither Relf nor
Wyatt overturned the precedent set in Buck v. Bell, they both implicitly
undermined the durable Progressive Era notion that, in the public inter-
est, the state can reliably substitute its judgment for individual decision
making. Analyzing these issues underscores the intended and unintended
consequences of Relf: a ruling that protected poor women from abuse at
the expense of controlling their access to birth control and hence curbing
their reproductive freedom.
Immediately after the Relfs’ story broke, officials started justifying
their actions. Joseph Conklin, director of the MCAC, claimed that a no-
tary public had “quizzed” Mrs. Relf, verifying that she understood the ef-
fects of sterilization, before notarizing the “signed” consent form. Conk-

lin also asserted that the girls lacked the “mental talents” to take birth
control pills and that Depo-Provera was not an option because the drug
had been prohibited since May, when his program shifted birth control
funding from an OEO grant to money from the DHEW.64 Federal review
called Conklin’s timeline into question: DHEW investigators concluded
that financial support had been transferred from OEO as of March 1,
not May. Moreover, including the Relf girls, DHEW determined that
the MCAC had sterilized 11 women, all but 1 of whom were black, 7 of
whom were mentally retarded, and 5 of whom were minors. Although the
investigators concluded that “this project is basically regarded as a good
project,” serving “about 2,200 of the 3,000 active family planning patients
in Montgomery,” the discrepancies between state and federal officials fu-
eled public skepticism about MCAC motives and conduct.65
MCAC officials scrambled to deflect the insistent allegations of sex-
ism and racism. Two days after the Relfs filed suit, Alabama State Health
Department officials tried to defuse racial tensions by disclosing that
82 people, 40 of whom were white, had obtained sterilizations through
health department programs—implying that, if half the people sterilized
were white, the procedures must have been voluntary and nonracist. 66
Meanwhile, Mrs. Orelia Dixon, the white director of the MCAC family
planning clinic, noted that she, like Mrs. Relf, was a mother of six. Mrs.
Dixon implied that, as a woman and mother, she could only have had be-
nign intentions, perhaps including a desire to spare “obviously incapable”
young women from being burdened with children. Mrs. Dixon claimed
that there was “no way” anyone could be sterilized without consent. “We
ask them [the patients] if they understand it,” Mrs. Dixon claimed. “If they
say they understand it, that’s it. That’s about as far as you can go.”â†œ67 Mrs.
Dixon argued that, since the clinic nurse/social workers who took the
girls to the hospital were black (as were 11 of the clinic’s 14 staff members),
race could not possibly have influenced the Relfs’ treatment. After all, she
reasoned, African Americans would never willingly have discriminated
against other African Americans. Indeed, unidentified black nurses from
the clinic claimed that the Relfs “exploited the situation,” and argued that
other poor blacks that had been sterilized “thank God” for the clinic’s
services. “You can’t take one isolated example like this and get a balanced
picture of what the clinic does,” according to Mrs. Dixon.68
Mrs. Dixon’s assertion carried a great deal of truth, but it also illu-
minates the double bind created by Relf. According to the Relfs’ lawyer,
Joseph Levin, there was no question that the MCAC clinic and the op-
erating physician believed they were acting in the best interests of their
patients.69 That said, it was the SPLC’s position that “mental retardation
and mental illness have been used as excuses for sterilization of poverty
level people where no such necessity existed; and the practice has been
widespread.” 70 Although the president of the National Council of Negro
Women (NCNW)—who decried the sterilization of the Relfs—urged
the SPLC to support renewal of the Family Planning Services and Popu-
lation Research Act as a “vitally needed health service,” Levin noted that
the SPLC felt the need to pursue increased protections. Intervention,
even at the risk of compromising women’s reproductive autonomy, was
needed “to insure that children and other persons who are unable to com-
prehend the consequences of sterilization and experimental drugs would
be protected.” 71 Poor women of color deserved access to all reproductive
technologies, but to ensure their freedom from abuse—and to protect mi-
nors and the mentally incompetent—they would have to clear additional
hurdles before they could obtain sterilizations.
Moreover, Mrs. Dixon and other commentators ignored how, even
within the community of black women, intragender and intraracial class
tensions could exactly mirror the effects of sexism and racism.72 Many
African Americans adhered to a cultural eugenics that projected white
eugenic judgments onto the black community. Just as whites viewed their
feebleminded and immoral as eugenically “unfit,” so too might black
middle-class officials have considered the Relfs unfit. Just as Carrie Buck
represented the “shiftless, ignorant, worthless class of anti-social whites
of the South,” so too the Relfs—obviously uneducated, on welfare, with
young Mary Alice both physically deformed (she was born without a right
hand) and apparently mentally retarded—represented the analogous seg-
ment of the black community.73
Comments from African American nurses in Montgomery suggest
that intraracial and intragender class dynamics that operated like racism
may well have been present in the Relf situation. One unnamed black
nurse from the MCAC told a reporter that the lack of birth control had
historically “kept back black people.” How could impoverished women
“provide for the education of two, much less a dozen children?” she asked
rhetorically.74 This nurse’s logic elided the issue of consent in favor of pat-
ent economic considerations. Another black Montgomery County Heath
Department nurse remarked, “We’ve had the Relfs as clients for more
than five years, and for the longest time I was trying to explain that the
two elder girls should have their (fallopian) tubes tied. . . . The family al-
ways refused.” A Jet reporter submitted this comment as evidence that the
Relfs could not have given informed consent—they had always refused in
the past. Therefore, Mrs. Relf signed the consent form because her igno-
rance and her culturally ingrained deference to middle-class blacks and
whites created a coercive situation. While this dynamic may have been
operating, the Jet reporter neglected the undertones in the nurse’s state-
ment. The black public health nurse was in favor of sterilizing the elder
Relf girls, Katie and Minnie Lee; she merely had more scruples than the
MCAC officials (including the black nurses who visited the Relfs) and
refused to hoodwink Mrs. Relf into consent.75 That these intraracial and
intragender beliefs existed may explain why, almost four months after
the Relfs’ story broke, no “united effort on the part of blacks . . . to stop
the threat has been initiated. Apparently only one white woman, Gloria
Steinem, has publicly sounded the battlecry by urging that forced steril-
ization ‘be fought and fought as a coalition issue.’” 76 The race and gender
of the nurses directly involved in the Relfs’ sterilization immunized their
class-biased actions. Nurses in the MCAC may well have believed that
the Relfs were lucky to receive sterilization and should “thank God.”
The Montgomery County Health Department nurse’s response reflected
precisely this evaluation. The appalling lack of medical care facing gen-
erations of black southerners undoubtedly made even crumbs seem like
much more than half a loaf.77
Traditional racial mores, too, influenced these black nurses. MCAC
nurses remained subordinate to white officials, including Mrs. Dixon.
Even if they did not share class or racial biases against poor mothers,
these women might be “on Mrs. Dixon’s side” to protect their jobs. It
was not exactly a case of “White folks say do, come, go, don’t, and Blacks
do, come, go and don’t,” as Jet magazine reported. Instead, the suppos-
edly benign nature of these interventions may have obscured their ra-
cial overtones.78 In the end, the “moral astigmatism” created by class
bias made sterilization seem benignly eugenic, rather than eugenically
genocidal.79
The eugenic nature of the Relf sterilizations came to light as Alabama

was reconsidering, definitively, the status of the 1919 sterilization law.
While that law had been in abeyance, cast into limbo by the 1935 Alabama
Supreme Court advisory opinion, it remained on the books. And, despite
Dr. Partlow’s claims to the contrary, it appears that officials continued to
sterilize residents under the aegis of the obsolete law. In Wyatt v. Aderholt,
a federal court finally declared Alabama’s 1919 sterilization statute uncon-
stitutional. Citing the controlling authority of Buck v. Bell, the court noted
the obvious procedural defects of the 1919 law, which left sterilization to
the discretion of state officials with no provision for due process. U.S. Dis-
trict Judge Frank Johnson ruled that sterilizations on state wards could
be performed only with their voluntary informed consent (in the case of
legally competent patients), or with a medical determination that steril-
ization was in the best interests of the legally incompetent. Johnson man-
dated a due process procedure including legal representation, a judicial
hearing, and direct consultation with the patient. Johnson also forbade
making sterilization a condition for release, Dr. Partlow’s favored tactic.
With this ruling, Alabama’s “official” eugenic sterilization law exceeded
the standard in Buck v. Bell by requiring voluntary informed consent and
a finding that the sterilization was “in the best interest of the resident,”
not just in the best interest of society or “on the basis of institutional con-
venience or [for] purely administrative considerations.”80 Economically
motivated sterilization was now beyond the reach of the state.
That the Relf sterilizations—and the hundreds of thousands of simi-
lar federally funded procedures that were discovered by investigators—
bore a eugenic cast gained notice in U.S. Federal Judge Gerhard Gesell’s
initial opinion in Relf v. Weinberger. In his decision, Gesell concluded
that federally funded family planning clinics sterilized between 100,000
and 150,000 poor people per year. Although Gesell did not note it, these
sterilization rates indeed matched those of the Nazi regime in the 1930s.
The only difference was that informed consent accompanied some of the
American operations.81 Gesell then affirmed the “uncontroverted evi-
dence” that minors, the mentally retarded, and “an indefinite number of
poor people have been improperly coerced into accepting a sterilization
operation.”82 Conceding that the case appeared “during a period of rapid
change in the field of birth control,” and that contraception and family
planning had become “widely accepted,” the judge cautioned that “over
this entire area lies the specter of overpopulation, with its possible impact
upon the food supply, interpersonal relations, privacy, and the enjoyment
of our ‘inalienable rights.’”83
Despite, or perhaps because of, the perilous nature of the situation,
Judge Gesell wrote, “Surely the Federal Government must move cau-
tiously in this area, under well-defined policies determined by Congress
after full consideration of constitutional and far-reaching social implica-
tions. The line between family planning and eugenics is murky.” Gesell
admonished, “Whatever might be the merits of limiting irresponsible
reproduction, which each year places increasing numbers of unwanted
or mentally defective children into tax supported institutions, it is for
Congress and not individual social workers and physicians to determine
the manner in which federal funds should be used to support such a
program.” Gesell decried the “drift into a policy which has unfathomed
implications and which permanently deprives unwilling or immature
citizens of their ability to procreate without adequate legal safeguards
and a legislative determination of the appropriate standards in light of
the general welfare and of individual rights.”84
Acting in the name of the inalienable individual rights that under-
pinned the civil rights and women’s health movements, Judge Gesell
struck down interim sterilization guidelines drafted by HEW and or-
dered the creation of new rules restricting the use of federal funds for
“voluntary” sterilization. Meanwhile, he enjoined the federal government
from providing funds for the sterilization of mentally or legally incom-
petent individuals.85 Activists at the time worried that these restrictions
might not lessen the incidence of abuse and that they might increase the
obstacles poor women faced in accessing reliable birth control. It would
take another four years and two more court rulings before the federal
sterilization guidelines fulfilled the need for informed consent, yet still
allowed maximal access to birth control services.
In November 1978, HEW issued regulations requiring a mandatory
30-day waiting period for federally funded sterilizations and the provision
of translators when necessary, and banned the signing of consent forms
while a patient was undergoing labor, childbirth, or abortion. 86 Informed
consent protected women from abuse, but the procedures to ensure the
uncoerced nature of that consent controlled women’s access to steriliza-
tion. Women, it seemed to many, faced yet another double bind. 87
U nint e nde d Cons e qu e nc e s
As Judge Gesell and federal officials worked to devise appropriate rules

governing federally subsidized sterilizations, the Relf family awaited the
outcome of their damage suit. Handled by the firm of flamboyant per-
sonal injury lawyer Melvin “the King of Torts” Belli, the suit ultimately
failed because an appropriate defendant could not be identified under
the Federal Tort Claims Act. 88 Joseph Levin recalled that, although the
Relfs did not receive any monetary compensation, the SPLC had young
Mary Alice evaluated and placed in an appropriate educational program.
Her “mental retardation” was spurious—the effect not of organic mental
defect but of a severe, untreated cleft palate that had made it nearly impos-
sible for her to speak intelligibly. After arranging Mary Alice’s cleft repair
surgery, the SPLC lost contact with the Relf girls. 89
Ultimately, it appears that the Relf decision had a limited impact in
preventing sterilization abuse. In January 1975, almost nine months after
Judge Gesell ordered new regulations, a survey including 42 of the na-
tion’s 50 largest teaching hospitals found 76 percent continued to violate
the new federal sterilization standards.90 A subsequent 1979 study revealed
that 70 percent of hospitals remained noncompliant with the guidelines.91
Even with the Relf decision in place, tort claims stemming from other
coercive sterilizations also failed. Although Joseph Levin managed to
win the damages suit in Walker v. Pierce, the jury awarded Mrs. Shirley
Brown five dollars for the indignities she suffered at the hands of Dr.
Pierce—a far cry from the million dollars sought by the Relfs. And Dr.
Pierce won on appeal, having the initial damages decision reversed. In the
final order in Walker v. Pierce, the federal appeals court found “no reason
why Dr. Pierce could not establish and pursue the policy he has publicly
and freely announced [that he would not deliver additional children to
mothers on welfare unless they underwent sterilization]” as long as all
patients were “made fully aware of his professional attitude.” Since, in the
court’s opinion, Dr. Pierce’s acceptance of Medicaid funds did not make
him a “state agent,” and there was no explicit law against his policies, he
was free to continue coercive sterilization, just as his patients were “free”
to find another attending obstetrician.92
The restriction of federal funding and a series of women’s health care
scandals in the 1970s and 1980s were probably more effective in curb-
ing abusive sterilization. Lower reimbursement rates (and the prohibi-

tion against using federal funds for the sterilization of minors, mental
incompetents, and the institutionalized) made the sterilization of welfare
women less economically attractive to physicians who had previously
profited from such procedures. Prohibiting federal funding for hyster-
ectomies performed for birth control likely reduced both economic and
training incentives for doctors engaging in gratuitous procedures. The
thalidomide and D.E.S. scandals, combined with massive damage claims
resulting from the Dalkon Shield IUD fiasco and the debates over the
safety of silicone breast implants, brought women’s health issues to the
fore and placed physicians (especially obstetricians, gynecologists, and
surgeons) under intense scrutiny. The concomitant trend toward massive
malpractice awards against individual practitioners, and the mushroom-
ing incidence of malpractice litigation in the 1980s, redoubled the pressure
on doctors to avoid liability. Thus the antisterilization abuse enforcement
regime shifted from federal regulation to private litigation. Meanwhile,
poor women continued to find it difficult to exercise reproductive au-
tonomy. As the Washington Post announced in 1998, “Some Poor Mothers
Find Bureaucracy a Barrier to Sterilization,” a situation that persists to-
day. In the name of protecting minors, the mentally incompetent, and the
poor from abuse, federal regulation of sterilization continues to control
poor women’s reproductive rights.93
Not e s
Previous iterations of this chapter were delivered at the Social Science History As-
sociation (2002), Southern Association for the History of Medicine and Science (2004),
the University of Alabama–Birmingham (2005), the Suffolk Section of the Massachu-
setts Medical Society and Grand Rounds of the Vincent Obstetrics and Gynecology
Department, Massachusetts General Hospital (2006). The author thanks participants at
these meetings for helpful critiques. This narrative is distilled from newspaper reports,
court documents, and the Relf files of the Southern Poverty Law Center. The author
thanks Joseph J. Levin Jr., Center co-founder and president emeritus for granting unfet-
tered access to the extant files.
1.â•‡ “Suit Says Girls Were Sterilized,” New York Times, June 27, 1973, 44; “Clinic
Defends Sterilization of 2 Girls, 12 and 14,” New York Times, June 28, 1973, 14; “Racism,
Ethics, and Rights at Issue in Sterilization Case,” New York Times, July 2, 1973, 10; “Relfs
File Suit against U.S.,” Montgomery Advertiser, July 19, 1973, 1; Bruce Nichols, “Suit Seeks
Million,” Montgomery Advertiser, 1; Nichols, “Sterilization Case ‘Patient’s Choice,’”
Montgomery Advertiser, June 28, 1973, 1; Nichols, “Staff of Clinic Stunned by Suit,”
Montgomery Advertiser, June 29, 1973, 1; Louis Berney, “Relfs Have Scant Understanding
of Happenings,” Montgomery Advertiser, July 1, 1973, 1; Nichols, “Relfs Leave by Plane
to Testify to Subcommittee,” Montgomery Advertiser, July 10, 1973, 1; “Authorization
for Sterilization” documents, Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf, box 2, Relf Case Files,
Southern Poverty Law Center, Montgomery, Ala. (hereinafter referred to as Relf Files);
“Complaint, Class Action,” Civil Action 1557-73, Relf Files, 8–10; “Class Defendant
Action, Class Plaintiff Action, Temporary Restraining Order Requested, Preliminary
Injunction Requested,” Civil Action 4099-N, Relf Files, 1–6.
2.â•‡ When MCAC workers returned for Katie, she locked herself in her room. “Com-
plaint, Class Action,” Relf Files, 9–10. Social workers from the St. Jude Social Service
Center, who had been assisting the Relfs, investigated the sterilizations and alerted the
Southern Poverty Law Center. These actions “didn’t have anything to do with Catholic
beliefs,” one social worker said. “It was just a personal reaction.” See “The Relfs: A Fam-
ily Caught Up in a National Controversy,” Washington Post, July 8, 1973, A4; “Statement
of Jessie Bly” (St. Jude’s social worker) and “Chronology of Case Contacts,” Relf Files.
3.â•‡ Relf v. Weinberger, 372 F. Supp. 1196 (1974); Relf v. Mathews, 403 F. Supp. 1235
(1975); Relf v. Weinberger, 565 F. 2d 722 (1977).
4.â•‡ The Relfs do not appear in landmark studies like David J. Garrow, Liberty and
Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade (New York: Macmillan,
1994) or Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right (New York: Penguin Books, 1990)
(although she does cover sterilization abuse, 433–36). Charlotte Rutherford, “Repro-
ductive Freedoms and African American Women,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 4
(1992): 273–75, omits the Relfs. A thumbnail sketch appears in Angela Y. Davis, Women,
Race, and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 215–16. A more complete treatment
appears in Donald T. Critchlow, Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and
the Federal Government in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 144–47.
Jennifer Nelson provides a partial (and error-riven) account in Women of Color and the
Reproductive Rights Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 65–67. Re-
becca Kluchin’s excellent Fit to Be Tied: Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in America,
1950–1980 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009) provides the most
complete account and advances complementary arguments to this essay.
5.â•‡ Dean J. Kotlowski, “Deeds versus Words: Richard Nixon and Civil Rights
Policy,” New England Journal of History 56 (Winter 1999–Spring 2000): 122–44; Alan J.
Matusow, “Economics, Politics, and the Limits of Presidential Power: The Case of Rich-
ard Nixon,” ibid., 90–100.
6.â•‡Edward J. Larson and Leonard J. Nelson III, “Involuntary Sexual Sterilization
of Incompetents in Alabama: Past, Present, and Future,” Alabama Law Review 43 (1992):
399–444, at 403.
7.â•‡ Allan Chase, The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), 382–87; Critchlow, Intended Consequences, 150–66.
8.â•‡ “President Signs Birth Curb Bill,” New York Times, December 27, 1970.
9.â•‡ See “A bill to provide for the sterilization of females who give birth to certain il-
legitimate children. . . . ,” House Bill 494, February 12, 1960, Virginia Bills, House (1960);
Gregory Michael Dorr, Segregation’s Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia (CharlottesÂ�
ville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 211–13; and Julius Paul, “The Return of Puni-
tive Sterilization Proposals: Current Attacks on Illegitimacy and the AFDC Program,”
Law and Society Review 3 (August 1968): 77–106.
10.â•‡ Steven Noll, Feeble-Minded in Our Midst: Institutions for the Mentally Retarded
in the South, 1900–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 19, 75;
James W. Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United
States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), chapter 5. Noll downplays the
salience of race in southern eugenics. I believe Noll overstates his case for the early
period; undoubtedly, by the 1960s and 1970s many whites used specious claims of black
feeblemindedness to justify the extension of sterilization. See Gregory Michael Dorr,
“Defective or Disabled? Race, Medicine, and Eugenics in Progressive Era Virginia and
Alabama,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5 (October 2006): 377. See also
Johanna Schoen, Choice & Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public
Health and Welfare (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
11.â•‡ See generally Premilla Nadasen, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement
in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2005).
12.â•‡ Nixon quoted in Kotlowski, “Deeds versus Words,” 122–23.
13.â•‡ John Ehrlichman and Nixon, quoted in Simone Caron, “Richard M. Nixon: The
‘Problem of Population’ versus ‘The Sanctity of Human Life,’” New England Journal of
History 56 (Winter 1999–Spring 2000): 102–104.
14.â•‡ Nixon quoted in H. R. Haldeman’s diary entry for Monday, April 28, 1969 in
Kevin L. Yuill, Richard Nixon and the Rise of Affirmative Action: The Pursuit of Racial
Equality in an Era of Limits (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 124.
15.â•‡ Richard M. Nixon, “Welfare Reform: Shared Responsibility,” in Welfare: A Doc-
umentary History of U.S. Policy and Politics, ed. Gwendolyn Mink and Rickie Solinger
(New York: New York University Press, 2003), 314–17.
16.â•‡ “Nixon: The First Year of His Presidency,” Congressional Quarterly (1970): 75-A;
Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 118; Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse:
A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 277; Nadasen, Wel-
fare Warriors, 171–72, 176; Felicia Kornbluh, The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Pov-
erty in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 146–47.
17.â•‡ Nadasen, Welfare Warriors, 178–82.
18.â•‡ David Greenberg, Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image (New York: W. W.
Norton, 2003), 304–37.
19.â•‡ Nixon quoted in Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American
Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Free Press, 2001), 23. My discussion of Nixon’s
presidency derives from Schulman, Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion (New York:
Basic Books, 1995), chapters 9 and 10, and Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall,
Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1992).
20.â•‡ H. R. Haldeman paraphrasing Moynihan, quoted in Kotlowski, “Deeds versus
Words,” 125.
21.â•‡ Critchlow, Intended Consequences, 89–90; Nadasen, Welfare Warriors, 217–18.
22.â•‡ Critchlow, Intended Consequences, 92.
23.â•‡ Wesley J. Hjornevik, “OEO Instruction—Family Planning Activities,” May 18,
1971, Exhibit A; George Contis, M.D., to All OEO Community Action Agency Direc-
tors, June 28, 1971, Exhibit B in Relf Files.
24.â•‡ Simone Caron makes a similar point. Caron, “Richard M. Nixon: The ‘Problem
of Population,’” 105.
25.â•‡ “Nominee to O.E.O. Backs Aid to Poor,” New York Times, July 21, 1973, 25;
“Health Official Quits in Protest,” New York Times, June 29, 1973, 28.
26.â•‡ “‘Cap the Knife’ Goes to Work,” New York Times, July 8, 1973, 4.
27.â•‡ United States Senate, Transcript of Proceedings before the Subcommittee on Health
of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare (Washington, July 10, 1973), Relf Files,
92–107 (quotations 97, 98, 101); “Testimony Conflicts in Sterilization Case,” Washington
Post, July 11, 1973, A2; Leon Cooper, M.D., to Warren Hern, M.D. M.P.H., “Unauthor-
ized External Communications,” undated, Exhibit G; and Hern to Cooper, May 8, 1972,
Exhibit H, in Relf v. Weinberger, Civil Action 1557-73, “Class Action” pleading, Relf Files.
28.â•‡ “Guidelines Found on Sterilization,” New York Times, July 7, 1973, 5. For more
on Hern, see “The Last Abortion Doctor,” Esquire (online edition): http://www.esquire
.com/features/abortion-doctor-warren-hern-0909.
29.â•‡ “H.E.W. Chief Issues Guidelines to Protect Rights of Minors and Others in
SteriÂ�l ization Cases,” New York Times, July 20, 1973, 32; Critchlow, Intended Consequences,
145–46.
30.â•‡ Roe v. Wade 410 U.S. 113 (1973), argued December 13, 1971; reargued October 11,
1972; decided January 22, 1973.
31.â•‡ Charlie Savage, “On Nixon Tapes, Ambivalence over Abortion, Not Watergate,”
New York Times, June 24, 2009.
32.â•‡ “O.E.O Cuts Off Funds in Sterilization of Girls,” New York Times, June 29, 1973,
28; Bill Kovach, “H.E.W. Head Curbs Sterilization Aid,” New York Times, July 6, 1973, 54.
33.â•‡ Phillips quoted in “Testimony Conflicts in Sterilization Case,” Washington Post,
July 11, 1973, A2.
34.â•‡ Nicholas von Hoffman, “Life and Liberty in Alabama,” Washington Post, July 4,
1973, D1 and D4.
35.â•‡ Philip R. Reilly, The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the
United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 94.
36.â•‡ Schoen, Choice & Coercion, 28–29, 32.
37.â•‡ Virginia passed the first law making informed, voluntary sterilization explicitly
legal in 1962. See Dorr, Segregation’s Science. See also “Cost of Abortions, Vasectomies
and Pills Ruled Tax Deductible,” New York Times, April 11, 1973, 52. In the next decade,
sterilization quietly became the birth control method of choice for one in six American
families. See Harold M. Schmeck Jr., “More in U.S. Rely on Sterilization,” New York
Times, March 25, 1974, 17; Relf v. Weinberger 372 F. Supp 1196 (1974) at 1199; Jane E. Brody,
“Study Finds Sterilization Gains Fastest of Birth-Curb Methods,” New York Times, May
5, 1976, 22; and Gordon, Woman’s Body, 432. On Nixon’s political backpedaling, see
Critchlow, Intended Consequences, 166–73.
38.â•‡ Increased access to reliable contraception often resulted from being labeled
irresponsible or unfit. Andrea Tone, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in
America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 85–87, 144–45, 268–69; Schoen, Choice &
Coercion, 32, 41–47.
39.â•‡ Bond quoted in “Racism, Ethics, and Rights at Issue in Sterilization Case,” New
York Times, July 2, 1973, 10.
40.â•‡ Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535 (1941), 536, quotation 541. Skinner invali-
dated Oklahoma’s eugenic law mandating sterilization for certain classes of criminals
without overturning Buck. A constitutional right to privacy was first articulated in
Griswold v. Connecticut, 379 U.S. 479 (1965), which affirmed married couples’ right to
practice contraception, a right extended to the unmarried in Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405

U.S. 438 (1972).
41.â•‡ Mark Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Bruns-
wick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963); Kenneth Ludmerer, Genetics and American
Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972). Daniel J. Kevles posited a
subtle transformation of eugenics, from unscientific, racially bigoted “mainline” eugen-
ics to a nonracist “reform” eugenics that focused on population policy in In the Name
of Eugenics (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1985). Allan Chase first challenged the traditional
interpretation in his polemical Legacy of Malthus.
42.â•‡ Schoen, Choice & Coercion, 103–11; Diane B. Paul, “The Eugenic Origins of Med-
ical Genetics,” in The Politics of Heredity: Essays on Eugenics, Biomedicine, and the Nature-
Nurture Debate (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 133–56.
43.â•‡Edward J. Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 60–67, 105–107, 139–52.
44.â•‡ The sterilization clause was buried in a statute establishing a home for the
feebleminded. See Julius Paul, “. . . Three Generations of Imbeciles Are Enough . . .: State
Eugenic Sterilization Laws in American Thought and Practice,” manuscript (Washing-
ton, D.C., 1965), 240, available at http://BuckvBell.com.
45.â•‡ Larson and Nelson, “Involuntary Sexual Sterilization,” 414–15.
46.â•‡ Although most scholars emphasize the disproportionate sterilization of wom-
en, Alabama sterilized 129 men and 95 women. Paul, “. . . Three Generations of Imbeciles
Are Enough . . . ,” 246. On targeting women, see Reilly, Surgical Solution, 94–95; Wendy
Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century
to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 53–56.
47.â•‡ “Report of the Committee on Mental Hygiene,” Transactions of the Medical As-
sociation of the State of Alabama, 1935; Reilly, Surgical Solution, 97.
48.â•‡ James N. Baker, “Eugenics and Human Sterilization,” Journal of the Medical
Association of the State of Alabama (July 1934): 17–18; Larson and Nelson, “Involuntary
Sexual Sterilization,” 417–18. Baker exemplified many American eugenicists who ap-
plauded the Nazis. Stefan Kühl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and
German National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
49.â•‡ Alabama House Bill 87, 1935 reg. sess. (introduced June 18, 1935), 92 Journal of the
House of Representatives of Alabama 143 (1935): 633–36.
50.â•‡ Partlow quoted in Larson and Baker, “Involuntary Sexual Sterilization,” 424.
Partlow sterilized all parolees in this period—224 people in 16 years, an average of about
1 per month, hardly “liberal” practices in an institution with hundreds of inmates.
51.â•‡ The University of Alabama catalog shows eugenics entering Alabama’s medical
curriculum as early as 1902’s Genetic Psychology. By 1915, the biology department’s Evo-
lution, Heredity, Genetics offered eugenics. University biologists supported efforts to
expand the state’s sterilization program in 1935. “Biologist Sees Control of Human De-
fectives Only Solution of Race,” Montgomery Advertiser, June 30, 1935, 5. Academic sup-
port was not surprising. See Dorr, Segregation’s Science, chapters 1–3, 6; Steven Selden,
Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in America (New York: Teacher’s
College Press, 1999).
52.â•‡ Larson and Nelson, “Involuntary Sexual Sterilization,” 425–26.
53.â•‡ This late date refers to Virginia. In the 1979 case Hudson v. Hudson, the Alabama
Supreme Court held that courts did not have “‘the power to order a surgical sterilization’
even where the operation was in the incompetent’s best interest.” It reserved the right of
courts to order sterilization in the case of medical necessity. Larson and Nelson, “Invol-
untary Sexual Sterilization,” 431–32.
54.â•‡ See “Aide Says 11 May Have Been Sterilized,” New York Times, July 3, 1973, 6; Bill
Kovach, “H.E.W. Head Curbs Sterilization Aid,” New York Times, July 6, 1973, 54.
55.â•‡ Schoen, Choice & Coercion, 75–76.
56.â•‡ See “Inquiry in South Carolina,” appended at end of “H.E.W. Chief Issues
Guidelines to Protect the Rights of Minors and Others in Sterilization Cases,” New York
Times, July 20, 1973, 32; and “3 Carolina Doctors Are under Inquiry in Sterilization of
Welfare Mothers,” New York Times, July 22, 1973, 30; “Sterilization of Black Mother of 3
Stirs Aiken, S.C.,” New York Times, August 1, 1973, 27.
57.â•‡Elena R. Gutierrez, “Policing ‘Pregnant Pilgrims’: Welfare, Health Care, and the
Control of Mexican-Origin Women’s Fertility,” in Women, Health, and Nation: The U.S.
and Canada since 1945, ed. Georgina Feldberg, Molly Ladd-Taylor, Alison Li, and Kath-
ryn McPherson (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), 384.
58.â•‡ “Amended Complaint No. 1,” Civil Action No. 1557-73 (August 10, 1973), Relf
Files; Walker v. Pierce 560 F. 2d 609 (1977).
59.â•‡ Stephen Trombley, The Right to Reproduce (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1988), 177.
60.â•‡ Rickie Solinger, Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics
in America (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 194–200; Gutierrez, “Polic-
ing ‘Pregnant Pilgrims,’” 379–403; and Jane Lawrence, “The Indian Health Service and
the Sterilization of Native American Women,” American Indian Quarterly 24 (Summer
2000): 400–419.
61.â•‡ “Statement of Bernard Lloyd Rosenfeld, M.D., Ph.D.,” January 23, 1974, Relf
Files.
62.â•‡ Health Research Group, “A Health Research Group Study on Surgical Steriliza-
tion: Present Abuses and Proposed Regulations” (Washington, D.C.: Health Research
Group, October 1973), 2, 7, and 9.
63.â•‡ Wyatt v. Aderholt 368 F. Supp. 1382 (M.D. Ala. 1973) and Wyatt v. Aderholt 368 F.
Supp. 1383 (M.D. Ala. 1974). Inmates had filed suit over inhumane treatment, including
allegedly continued nonconsensual sterilization.
64.â•‡ “Clinic Defends Sterilization of 2 Girls, 12 and 14,” New York Times, June 28,
1973, 14. These assertions are contradicted by the girls’ medical records, which contain
both “signed” consent forms from Mrs. Relf authorizing the clinic to provide the girls
with the birth control pill and indications that Depo-Provera injections had been ad-
ministered to each girl at least twice. See “Medical Records,” Relf Files.
65.â•‡ Assistant Secretary of Health Charles C. Edwards, M.D., to The Secretary,
DHEW, memorandum, July 3, 1973, Relf Files; “Aide Says 11 May Have Been Sterilized,”
New York Times, July 3, 1973, 6; “H.E.W. Head Curbs Sterilization Aid,” New York Times,
July 6, 1973, 54.
66.â•‡ Bruce Nichols, “Whites in State Obtained Half of 82 Sterilizations,” Montgom-
ery Advertiser, June 29, 1973, 9. Later, health department officials acknowledged that
this number did not include eight other Alabama agencies, similar to the MCAC, that
provided sterilization services. J. Paul Till, “Abortion, Sterilizing Utilized in Alabama,”
Montgomery Advertiser, July 2, 1973, 1. Twenty-six men were sterilized through this
program.
67.â•‡ Bruce Nichols, “Sterilization Case ‘Patient’s Choice,’” Montgomery Advertiser,

June 28, 1973, 1, 2.
68.â•‡ Bruce Nichols, “Staff of Clinic Stunned by Suit,” Montgomery Advertiser, June
29, 1973.
69.â•‡ Gregory Michael Dorr, interview with Joseph Levin, August 22, 2007, Southern
Poverty Law Center. [Tape in author’s possession.] The doctor who sterilized the Relfs
had, years earlier, delivered Joseph Levin.
70.â•‡ Joseph J. Levin Jr. to Steven A. Becker, January 6, 1975, Relf Files.
71.â•‡ Dorothy I. Height to Julian Bond, July 9, 1973; and Joseph J. Levin Jr. to Dorothy
Height, August 3, 1973, Relf Files.
72.â•‡ See “Racism, Ethics, and Rights at Issue in Sterilization Case,” 10. For an exten-
sive discussion of “assimilationist eugenics” among blacks, see Dorr and Logan, chapter
4 of this volume.
73.â•‡ Paul A. Lombardo, “Three Generations, No Imbeciles: New Light on Buck v.
Bell,” New York University Law Review 60 (April 1985): 51; Michele Mitchell, Righteous
Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 230–36; and Gregory Michael Dorr,
“Beyond Racial Purity: African Americans and Integrationist Eugenics” (paper present-
ed at 2003 Organization of American Historians conference, April 2003).
74.â•‡ Nichols, “Staff of Clinic Stunned,” 2.
75.â•‡ M. Cordell Thompson, “Genocide: Black Youngsters Are Sterilized by Alabama
Agency,” Jet (July 19, 1973): 13.
76.â•‡ Jack Slater, “Sterilization: Newest Threat to the Poor,” Ebony 28 (October 1973):
156.
77.â•‡ Susan L. Smith, “Neither Victim nor Villain: Eunice Rivers and Public Health
Work,” in Tuskegee’s Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, ed. Susan M. Reverby
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 348–64; Edward H. Beardsley,
A History of Neglect: Health Care for Blacks and Mill Workers in the Twentieth-Century
South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987); Susan L. Smith, Sick and Tired of
Being Sick and Tired: Black Women’s Health Activism in America, 1890–1950 (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).
78.â•‡ Thompson, “Genocide,” 12.
79.â•‡ Mrs. Emily Young, the African American founder of the MCAC’s family plan-
ning clinic (1967), noted that she had hired Mrs. Dixon as her successor because “the
two shared the same philosophy, which emphasizes positive family planning rather
than negative birth control.” This formulation mirrors the distinction between positive
eugenics and negative eugenics, reflecting the discursive shift between older racist and
classist eugenics to modern “reform” eugenics. Nichols, “Staff of Clinic Stunned,” 2;
Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 88, 173–76.
80.â•‡ Wyatt v. Aderholt 368 F. Supp. 1382 (1973), 1383; Wyatt v. Aderholt 368 F. Supp.
1383 (1973), 1384. See Larson and Nelson, “Involuntary Sexual Sterilization,” 438–39.
81.â•‡ Chase, Legacy of Malthus, 16.
82.â•‡ Relf v. Weinberger 372 F. Supp. 1196 (1974), 1199.
83.â•‡ Ibid., 1203.
84.â•‡ Ibid., 1204.
85.â•‡ Ibid.
86.â•‡ Gordon, Woman’s Body, 435.
87.â•‡ The 1978 National Organization for Women convention condemned the waiting
period as an intolerable infringement on reproductive freedom. Ibid., 434.
88.â•‡ Melvin Belli to Morris Dees, June 21, 1977, Relf Files.
89.â•‡ Gregory Michael Dorr, interview with Joseph Levin.
90.â•‡ Robert E. McGarrah Jr. to Caspar Weinberger, January 20, 1975; Robert E.
McGarrah Jr., “Sterilization without Consent: Teaching Hospital Violations of HEW
Regulations” (unpublished report, Public Citizen, January 21, 1975), 1.
91.â•‡ Bogue and Sigelman, “Sterilization Report,” Family Planning Perspectives 11
(November–December 1979): 366–67.
92.â•‡ Walker v. Pierce 560 F. 2d (1977), 613.
93.â•‡ “Too Many Babies, Too Many Barriers,” Washington Post, February 19, 1998, 1, 11.
Pa r t fou r
Eugenics in the Human Genome Era

nine
Are We Entering a “Perfect Storm”

for a Resurgence of Eugenics? Science,
Medicine, and Their Social Context
L i n da L . Mc C a b e a n d E dwa r d R . B . Mc C a b e
The purpose of this volume is to consider the history and legacy of eu-
genics. No extant scientific or medical community is more conscious of
the burden of the eugenic bequest than human and medical geneticists,
since our discipline is historically rooted in eugenics and the eugenic
movement.1 Perhaps in response to this disciplinary origin, geneticists
often avoid discussions of eugenics, but such avoidance ignores the risk
of eugenic resurgence and may in fact foster its reemergence by avoiding
notice of the scientific, medical, and social factors that are realigning for
the “perfect storm.”
Fac tor s Con t r i bu t i ng to a P o s s i bl e

R e s u rg e nc e of E ug e n ic s
The following proposals appeal to significant portions of the U.S. popu-

lation in the early twenty-first century. Taxpayers are distressed about
spending for the poor, the mentally ill, and the incarcerated. An increased
police presence is required to promote the rule of law. The citizenry are
concerned about being overwhelmed by recent immigrants and their
offspring, and many would support immigration reform that is more se-
lective. But these were early twentieth-century positions espoused by
Charles Davenport, who was the founding director of the Cold Spring
Harbor Laboratory in 1904 and its Eugenics Record Office in 1910.
Garland Allen argues that many of the economic and social influ-
ences that led to the American Eugenics Movement are present today,
and these influences exist in a similar scientific context that is filled
with genetic determinism. The early decades of the twentieth century,
193
194â•… · â•… L i n d a L . M c C a b e a n d E d wa r d R . B . M c C a b e
during which eugenics prospered in the United States, were turbulent

socially, economically and politically. One response to this turbulence
was Progressivism, which utilized a scientific approach to planning and
management, engaging experts and managers to address rapid change
and improve efficiency, initially in the industrial sector and eventually in
government. These features had strong appeal to proponents of eugenics,
who argued that science could be harnessed to improve genetic outcomes,
and careful management of human breeding would be more efficient for
society economically.2
The parallels are obvious between Davenport’s social and economic
positions described above and similar proposals heard today. Allen shows
additional resemblances between the early twenty-first and early twenti-
eth centuries and raises serious concerns:
I would like to suggest that in the United States, immersed as we are in
the present economic era of cutbacks and “bottom-line” mentality, we are
on the brink of revisiting a mistake of the past, that is, regarding certain
people as too expensive to maintain, and using genetic arguments to jus-
tify inhumane solutions in the name of efficiency. 3
Allen adds:
We seem to be increasingly unwilling to accept what we view as imper-
fection in ourselves and others. As health care costs skyrocket, we are
coming to accept a bottom-line, cost-benefit analysis of human life. This
mindset has serious implications for reproductive decisions. If a health
maintenance organization (HMO) requires in utero screening, and re-
fuses to cover the birth or care of a purportedly “defective” child, how
close is this to eugenics? . . . If eugenics means making reproductive deci-
sions primarily on the basis of social cost, then we are well on the road.4
The rhetoric of genetic determinism and the perceived power of genomics

could fuel the resurgence of eugenics, though undoubtedly with a dif-
ferent name, and therefore it is essential to challenge such deterministic
thinking whenever and wherever it arises.
In this era of political and social polarization, reinvention of market
economies, and a desire to maximize efficiency in all areas of our lives,
will we be seduced into believing that science will be our salvation? Are
we entering an era of neo-progressivism that could set the stage for the
resurgence of eugenics?
A r e W e E n t e r i n g a “ P e r f e c t S t o r m ”? â•… · â•… 195
S c i e n t i f ic C l a i m s a nd E x pe c tat ion s
The media, public, and patients have exhibited a remarkable interest in

the results of the Human Genome Project.5 A physician, Sandra Sabatini,
asked her patients, “What are your expectations of the Human Genome
Project?” and summarized the responses: “Cure diabetes and cancer”;
“Prevent renal [kidney] failure, heart disease, and birth defects”; “Avoid
hypertension, obesity, and osteoporosis”; and “Prolong life.” She added,
“Most [of her patient-respondents] believe that these problems are either
now solved or near to being solved.” How have these expectations been
shaped?6
Horace Freeland Judson argues that the public’s understanding of the
Human Genome Project is distorted by the language used to describe it.
Look at the phrase—or marketing slogan—“the human genome project.”
In reality, of course we have not just one human genome but billions. At
the level of genes, the project promises a useful consensus, but at the level
of sequences of nucleotides, variability is great and important. . . . Then,
too, the entire phrase—the human-genome project: singular, definite,
with a fixed end-point, completed by 2000, packaged so it could be sold to
legislative bodies, to the people, to venture capitalists. But we knew from
the start the genome project would never be complete.7
He concludes that “genes act in concert with one another—collec-

tively with the environment” and “for ourselves, for the general public,
what we require is to get more fully and precisely into the proper language
of genetics.”8 A sloppiness of language and miscommunication by the
scientists results in an excessively reductionist and determinist percep-
tion of the products of genetic and genomic research on the part of the
public. The complexity of biology denies simple reductionist explanations
for disease based on a specific mutation in a single gene and demands a
synthetic view of gene products embedded within biological networks.9
Th e H u m a n G e nom e Proj e c t
Be com e s a n Icon
The Human Genome Project would become an icon of the last decade
of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first century,
and who better to champion this iconic status than James Watson, for he
had already accomplished this for the double helical structure of DNA,
as chronicled by Soraya de Chadarevian.10 De Chadarevian noted that
the photographs of Watson and Crick with their model of DNA are now
inseparable from their 1953 publication in which they deduced the struc-
ture of DNA.11 Those photographs, however, remained in deep obscurity
until the publication of Watson’s best seller, The Double Helix, in 1968.12 In
September 1988, the National Institutes of Health established the Office
of Human Genome Research with Watson as its leader. Watson would
sell the Human Genome Project to the American people and gain fund-
ing from Congress with statements like his 1989 quote in Time magazine:
“We used to believe our destiny was in the stars; now we know in large
measure our fate is in our genes.”13
Such hyperbole as Watson’s would become the public language of
the Human Genome Project, sprinkled generously with metaphors and
other comparisons.14 At times these metaphors can take on a life of their
own. For example, following the announcement of the “working draft” of
the human genome sequence on June 26, 2000, in a joint press conference
linking President Bill Clinton in the White House with Prime Minister
Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street, the “book of life” metaphor, though
not used in Clinton’s speech, was found in seven of nine major British
newspapers.15 Symbolic communication in this manner may insert ad-
ditional meaning with historical references, for example, bringing back
“old metaphors of the eugenics movement.”16
G e n et ic Det e r m i n i s m I s On e M e s s ag e
of t h e H u m a n G e nom e Proj e c t
The hyperbolic and metaphoric communications of the Human Genome

Project often contain genetic deterministic meanings, implying a reduc-
tion of an individual’s identity, future, and fate to that person’s genes.
Consider for a moment the implications of the rhetoric stating that an
individual’s fate is determined by his/her genomic sequence: since the
individual’s genome is determined at the time of fertilization and the
sequence is set at that moment, then the person’s fate would be immu-
table following that instant. But we know that is not the case, for it is not
so much how the sequence is written as how it is read. Environmental
influences effect chemical changes in the DNA to silence specific genes
so that these genes are not read, and these chemical modifications may
be maintained permanently for the life of the individual and perhaps
even beyond into the next generation(s). Therefore, an individual’s experi-
ences, or perhaps even the experiences of their progenitors, can influence
the way in which his/her genome is read throughout his/her life span.
Eugenics utilized genetic determinism to simplify the biological basis
of behavior and other exceedingly complex characteristics and general-
ized to entire ethnocultural groups these “biologically” constructed, per-
ceived deviations from acceptable norms. If one recognizes the complex-
ity of biology and the plasticity of genomic expression, then the simplistic
foundations of eugenics must crumble. Lionel Penrose, Galton Professor
of Human Genetics at the University College London, described the lack
of scientific support for eugenics in his Presidential Address to the Third
International Congress of Human Genetics in 1966. He stated, “Eugen-
ics was based upon arbitrary valuations of individuals and social groups,
supported by unjustified and premature assumptions about the nature of
hereditary influences,” and “At the moment . . . our knowledge of human
genes and their action is still so slight that it is presumptuous and fool-
ish to lay down the positive principles for human breeding.”17 Penrose
made these statements in 1966, but more than 30 years later the Dutch
philosopher of the mind, Huib Looren de Jong, said the position “that
genes determine development, inevitably leading towards certain types
of behavior or personality” is a consequence of “the Gene Myth: the view
that our nature (or even our fate) is in the genes, that genes determine
behavior like a puppeteer his puppets.”18 Thus the reductionism required
for the simplistic interpretation demanded by eugenics is fundamentally
flawed because of the complexity of biology and its mutability by its in-
timate and ongoing interactions with the environment. Genetic deter-
minism drives this simplification, because genetic determinism cannot
survive the nuanced reality of biology.
G e n et ic Di s c r i m i n at ion
Eugenics, with its arbitrary and fallacious use of an individual’s or group’s

perceived genetic information in decisions regarding social roles (e.g., em-
ployment) and biological roles (e.g., reproduction) is one form of genetic
discrimination, and both eugenics and genetic discrimination are driven
by genetic determinism. This arbitrariness is due in part to the incom-

pleteness of genetic information, the selective use of that information,
and the privileging of certain traits with undeserved genetic power. For
example, racial and genetic discrimination are often intertwined within
eugenics; but endowing racial groups with profound genetic differences
denies the fact that race is a social rather than a biological construct,
and there is more genetic variation within than between ethnocultural
groups.19
Just as economic factors were critical to the development of eugenics,
so too are economic considerations key influences in genetic discrimina-
tion as currently practiced in the United States for insurance and employ-
ment. The concerns expressed by employers and insurers in denying ben-
efits relate to the costs of the individual’s or group’s genetic disorder(s).
But as we will see in the next section, some of these decisions, made on the
basis of cost containment, productivity, and efficiency, will be considered
to meet the criteria to be classified as eugenics.
Do mechanisms exist to prevent and/or redress genetic discrimina-
tion? Some individual states have passed laws intended to block or severely
limit this form of discrimination, despite “strong opposition and lobbying
by the insurance industry and chambers of commerce.” 20 At the federal
level, several different strategies currently exist to address the problems
caused by genetic discrimination. The Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission (EEOC), particularly during the term of Commissioner
Paul Miller, interpreted the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 to
prohibit employment discrimination. 21 On February 8, 2000, President
Clinton issued Executive Order 13145, “To Prohibit Discrimination in
Federal Employment Based on Genetic Information.” The Congress took
13 years to pass genetic nondiscrimination legislation for health insur-
ance and employment. However, this legislation only covers those with
a positive genetic test who have not yet developed symptoms; those with
symptoms, members of the military, and those applying for life, disability,
and/or long-term care insurance are not covered.22
Thus the federal government and certain state governments rec-
ognize the existence of genetic discrimination and have used various
strategies to combat it. More sweeping federal nondiscrimination legisla-
tion targeting employment and insurance, such as the recently enacted
Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, will not protect explicitly
against eugenics. Such legislation, however, by creating a stronger legal

barrier against genetic discrimination, would create an additional defense
against eugenic practices in the United States.
G e nom ic M e dic i n e a nd E ug e n ic s
The basis for genomic medicine is care that will be predictive, preventive,
and personalized.23 One might expect such an individualized and antici-
patory approach for health care to celebrate all persons and to prevent
any discriminatory and eugenic misadventures. Consider, however, that
genetic testing of individuals and screening of populations is essential to
implement genomic medicine. If the results of these analytical methods
are used inappropriately, then the testing could lead to genetic discrimi-
nation and even to eugenic practices. It is not the power of the genetic
and genomic technologies that is the risk but how the output of these
technologies—an individual’s test result—is used.
A De f e n s e ag a i n s t E ug e n ic s:
R e s pe c t for Pe r son a l Au tonom y
a nd R e produc t i v e F r e e d om
Principles of personal autonomy and reproductive freedom are at the
center of geneticists’ discussions of whether or not genetics and genetic
testing can be considered eugenic. If eugenics involves “a social action
program,”24 then individual choice in the use of clinical genetics services
would be considered by some to block the claims that medical genetics is
eugenic as long as that choice is freely made and not coerced.25 Holtzman
would consider the following scenario to be an example of eugenics: a
U.S. health insurance carrier, as a requirement for insuring the baby, de-
manded that the mother have prenatal diagnosis and that if the fetus was
affected, she would terminate the pregnancy. The company would only
insure a “well-born” offspring and would force the mother’s compliance,
or else have her and not their shareholders accept the economic conse-
quences if she did not comply. As predicted by Allen, this example of a
resurgence of eugenics was driven by economic decisions and a “‘bottom-
line’ mentality.”26
Governments may also be perceived to exert coercive influences on
genetic decision making when these entities pay for the services and are
expressly interested in balancing costs and benefits toward the benefit

side of the ledger.27 One example, cited by Charles Epstein, is the report of
the state-funded prenatal screening program in California, which he said
“troubled me quite a bit.”28 The report states: “It is useful to reflect on the
missed opportunities for the avoidance ofâ†œ birth defects.”29 In this study,
49 percent of women with a fetus with a chromosomal abnormality [e.g.,
trisomy 21 or Down syndrome] and 29.3 percent of women with a fetus
with a neural tube defect [e.g., spina bifida] did not elect to terminate this
pregnancy. While not overtly threatening reproductive freedom, repre-
sentatives of California’s prenatal genetic testing program expounded a
perspective, if not a policy, of what would be the “ideal” approach to uti-
lization by individual women. A less value-based evaluation of the results
and statement of the conclusions would have been less threatening to the
principles of personal autonomy and reproductive freedom and therefore
less facilitative for eugenics. Governmental representatives must be more
sensitive to the language they use to evaluate policies and processes in
genetics. 30
I s “ Pro c r e at i v e Be n e f ic e nc e ”
a F u nda m e n ta l Obl ig at ion ?
Julian Savulescu argued in favor of the principle that he called “procre-

ative beneficence” and defined as follows: “Couples (or single reproduc-
ers) should select the child, of the possible children they could have, who
is expected to have the best life, or at least as good a life as others, based
on the relevant, available information.”31 He maintained that assisted
reproductive technologies (ARTs), including in vitro fertilization (IVF)
and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), permit parents to select
not only against disease genes but also for favorable genetic traits in their
offspring. IVF involves fertilization of eggs retrieved from the biological
mother in a culture dish in the laboratory by the addition of sperm from
the biological father, after which the embryos are cultured approximately
two days and examined through a microscope, and the healthiest appear-
ing are transferred to the uterus of the biological mother or a surrogate.
IVF is the first stage of PGD with examination not limited to microscopic
observation, but after the embryo grows to approximately the eight-cell
stage, the nucleus of one cell is removed and undergoes genetic testing.
At that stage of embryonic development the loss of a single cell does not
compromise subsequent development since any cell can give rise to a
complete fetus. PGD was developed to permit parents to identify em-
bryos with mutations or chromosomal abnormalities prior to implanta-
tion, rather than having to await prenatal diagnosis later in the pregnancy
with the option to abort affected fetuses.
Savulescu stated that the principle of procreative beneficence implied
that “couples should employ genetic tests for non-disease traits in select-
ing which child to bring into existence and that we should allow selection
of non-disease genes in some cases even if this maintains or increases
social inequality,” and added, “In the absence of some other reason for
action, a person who has good reason to have the best child is morally
required to have the best child.” Savulescu opened his article with the
statement, “Eugenic selection of embryos is now possible,” but presum-
ably this relates to the literal meaning of the term as well born or in his
terminology best life. This presumption is based on subsequent statements
that procreative beneficence would not be eugenic, since it would involve
decision making at the individual or couple level, whereas eugenics en-
gages populations and interferes with reproduction, for example, by eu-
genic sterilization, “to promote social goods.”32 Subsequently, Savulescu
argued emphatically for individual choice in reproductive decision mak-
ing and respect for the individual’s decision even when there might be
strong disagreement with doctors or others. 33
I s Pr e n ata l G e n et ic Di ag no s i s
L e a di ng to De s ig n e r B a bi e s?
Let us now look at experience in the United States and United Kingdom
with PGD that was carried out, not only for the benefit of the child being
born without a genetic disease, but also for advantage to a sibling. We will
consider the cases and also the differences in decision-making processes
between the two countries.
The first case of this type involved the Nash family in Englewood,
Colorado. 34 Molly Nash, daughter of Lisa and Jack, had a genetic dis-
order, Fanconi anemia, which is associated with birth defects, includ-
ing an absence of thumbs, and an anemia affecting red cells, white cells,
and platelets (the clotting elements), which eventually leads to leukemia.
202â•… ·â•… L i n d a L . M c C a b e a n d E d wa r d R . B . M c C a b e
The parents sought a geneticist to assist them in having a second child

with PGD, one who would not have Fanconi anemia and would have a
tissue type that would allow the new baby to be a matching donor for a
hematopoietic stem cell transplant to Molly. If the Nashes used PGD
and selected only for embryos unaffected by Fanconi anemia, then, by
chance, the baby might not be a compatible donor, and even with multiple
pregnancies, they might not have a donor to save Molly’s life before she
succumbed to leukemia. Eventually Lisa and Jack found Yury Verlinsky
in Chicago, who agreed to work with them, and Verlinsky recovered 30
embryos, 24 of which were unaffected with Fanconi anemia, and five
of these were also HLA compatible. In the fourth IVF cycle, the last of
the five unaffected, compatible embryos was implanted in Lisa’s uterus,
resulting in a pregnancy, and Adam was born in 2000. 35 His cord blood,
rich in hematopoietic stem cells, was transfused into Molly and resulted
in a successful transplant.
For Adam Nash, PGD assured that he would not have the same ge-
netic disease as his older sister; however, this technology also assured that
he would have a characteristic that had no benefit to him and would only
be beneficial to another individual, Molly. In the U.S. health care system,
driven in general by personal autonomy and individual decision making,
and where there is a resistance to regulate “the practice of medicine,”
the entrepreneurial approach of Lisa and Jack Nash could be rewarded if
they could find a geneticist who understood their motivation and would
be willing to pursue their wishes. Such is not the case in the more highly
regulated medical environment in the United Kingdom (UK).
The UK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA)
requires individual assessment of each PGD application before it can be
performed. 36 Shahana and Raj Hashmi, in Leeds, had a son, Zain, with
beta-thalassemia, a severe red blood cell anemia, caused by mutations in
the beta-globin gene. 37 The Hashmis planned to work with Simon Fishel,
in Nottingham, who agreed to collaborate with Verlinsky to provide their
PGD, which would be the first of this type planned in the UK: selecting
embryos without the genetic disorder that would also be a compatible
match for Zain. The HFEA dedicated a working group to the Hashmi
case, which was also reviewed by the HFEA’s Ethics and Law Commit-
tee; the deliberations of these subgroups would then be presented to the
full HFEA for deliberation. Debbie Jaggers, who was the HFEA licensing
manager, commented during these deliberations, “There’s pressure for us

not to move to eugenics and a slippery slope and that side of things, and
yet there’s also the contrary pressure that there’s a right to have [treat-
ment], you know, if it’s scientifically feasible, we should therefore have
the right to have it.”38 The HFEA issued a license to Nottingham to allow
PGD as requested by the Hashmis.
Another family received a very different decision from the HFEA.
The Whitakers had a child with Diamond-Blackfan anemia (DBA), which
in the majority of patients is not an inherited genetic disorder but is a
consequence of a spontaneous or sporadic mutation. 39 Therefore, PGD
was considered by the HFEA not to have any value in preventing disease
in the child who would result from the pregnancy, and its only purpose
would be to create a child with the correct HLA type to serve as a cord
blood donor, which “was deemed unacceptable and in violation of the
strict terms of the HFE Act.”â†œ4 0 The HFEA’s denial of a license for PGD to
benefit the Whitaker child was controversial, particularly in light of the
opposite decision for the Hashmis.
It is valuable to examine these three cases of PGD that were under-
taken to create “designer babies” or “savior siblings” and to compare the
processes in the United States and the United Kingdom. Sarah Franklin
and Celia Roberts considered the practices of the HFEA to have “created
a climate of greater openness and exchange among the IVF community,
which in turn is seen to exercise a much more effective means of self-reg-
ulation than in the more secretive and competitive context of the United
States.” They concluded, regarding the actions of the HFEA, “In response
to some of these cases, such as that of the Hashmis, the existing limits to
treatment have been extended, whereas in response to others, such as that
of the Whitakers, the limits have been clarified and reinforced.”â†œ41
Ginny Squires of the HFEA stated, “People [in the UK] want this
area of medicine regulated, and they see what goes on in America . . .
and they want some kind of boundary put on it.”â†œ42 Whereas the addi-
tion of new technological approaches at the interface of reproduction
and genetics in the United States are more likely to be individual deci-
sions that are judged in the media, the UK has established a centralized
regulatory approach to assess the comfort level of the public with such
innovations. Since the HFEA is a governmental authority, it is setting
state-sanctioned policies for the population and, therefore, depending on
the policies it establishes, could be judged as exerting eugenic authority.

On the other hand, the more individualized initiative and decision mak-
ing in the United States might seem to have less risk for interpretation as
developing population eugenic policies. Let us now consider whether the
U.S. system embodies any less risk for support of eugenic policies.
Th e “ Pr ac t ic e of M e dic i n e ”
The “practice of medicine” is a fundamental concept in the U.S. medical

system, and the tensions surrounding the regulation or lack of regula-
tion of this practice and where that regulatory line is drawn are well rec-
ognized.43 The unwillingness to restrict medical practice by individual
physicians, for example, in the off-label prescribing of medications and
devices, is a position promoted by both the American Medical Associa-
tion and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).44 An example
of an off-label use involves an FDA-approved drug prescribed for a dif-
ferent purpose. The Federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act (FDCA),
originally passed in 1938 by the Congress, indicated it had no intention
of broadly regulating the practice of medicine. Subsequent court deci-
sions determined that there were no constitutionally based limits on
the ability of the FDA to regulate physicians’ practices; however, the
FDA, “as a matter of policy, has sought to avoid direct regulation of their
activities.”â†œ45
One might conclude that the U.S. model of the individualized prac-
tice of medicine, which has been referred to as “authoritarian medicine,”
has the following implications:
The term authoritarian medicine promotes the power of medical autonÂ�
omy, the belief that physicians possess such special knowledge that non-
professionals cannot properly evaluate them, the belief that physicians are
conscientious and do not require supervision, the belief that the profes-
sion can be trusted to supervise and discipline itself, and the belief that
peer review is the highest authority in the profession.46
This authoritarian model of medicine, however, is not as indepen-

dent and unrestricted as it might seem. The regulation of the practice
of medicine occurs primarily at the level of the states.47 States exert
this authority through their medical boards, which, in turn, exert their
authority through disciplinary actions. State courts also hear medical
malpractice lawsuits by citizens. Disciplinary actions include “loss of

insurance coverage, negligence or incompetence, malpractice . . . , im-
pairment by substance abuse or mental illness, sexual misconduct with
patients, misrepresentation of credentials, and inappropriate prescribing
practices.”â†œ48 While these offenses all may appear to be serious, constitut-
ing professional misconduct, it must also be recognized that the power of
such disciplinary authority could begin to circumscribe the boundaries
of medical practice.
Therefore, while at the superficial level U.S. medical practice appears
to be more independent than, for example, practice in the UK, there are
state-based regulatory authorities that establish the rules of medical prac-
tice conduct and misconduct. If the norms of medical conduct should be
interpreted to shift toward neo-eugenic practices, or at least do not rec-
ognize such practices as misconduct, then such authorities could overtly
condone or covertly permit a new form of eugenics.
In addition to state-based regulation of medical practice in the
United States, there is also the increasing influence of corporate incen-
tives. We have discussed, above, the impact of health insurers’ decisions
on patients’ choices. The rise of the corporate practice of medicine, and
its enabling physician-employees, establishes a new dynamic that may
influence the practice of medicine and practice policy. With the rise of
the employee-physician in the United States, the view of the physician is
changing: “The traditional image of the physician in this country seems
to center on engagement between an independent medical professional
and his or her patient, applying professional judgment in the application
of medical science to the particular circumstances presented, with only
the patient’s interests at play.” However, “As employment becomes a more
dominant setting for physicians, the dissonance between the image and
reality becomes irreparable.”â†œ49
Alan Berkenwald has stated that the “health care revolution” cur-
rently underway “is, arguably, less about health and more about money.”50
Christopher Guadagnino, citing the opinions of William Kissick, has
elaborated on the financial reasons for the reasons why clinics and hos-
pitals require closer relationships with and employment of physicians:
“technology, the need for cost-effectiveness and for hospital formularies,”
the latter presumably limiting the choice of the individual physician and
reducing the costs of therapy. 51 The changes in the organization of medi-
cal practice, therefore, are being influenced significantly by what Garland

Allen sees as one of the precursors for the resurgence of eugenics, the
bottom-line mentality. 52
The reorganization of medical practice from the independence of the
practitioner to the institutional employment of the physician is having
other influences and is most definitely constricting the previously more
widely distributive decision making and could change the normative
standards for the practice of medicine. For example, Guadagnino, citing
the opinions of Alan L. Hillman, has indicated “that greater exposure to
peer review among employed physicians may lead to increased quality as-
surance,” and interrelationships “between physicians and medical societ-
ies could become even more important in the face of increasing physician
employment,” for example, by assisting physicians to determine “which
employee practices should become norms.”53
Through these analyses of the current state of the practice of medi-
cine, we see the established authority of institutions such as medical so-
cieties and state medical boards and the possibly increasing influence of
these institutions driven by the need for adjudication of normative prac-
tices. Should the reader think that such institutions would never resort to
the support of eugenic policies, it is particularly relevant to this volume
that Dr. John N. Hurty, an avid supporter of eugenic sterilization, also
served as the secretary of the Indiana State Board of Health and firmly be-
lieved that every social problem was biologically determined. Hurty was
one of the champions of the first eugenic sterilization law.54 Therefore, we
risk a new eugenics through the confluence of the concept that science
contains solutions for social problems, the belief in the soundness of ge-
netic determinism, the desire to seek improved efficiencies and decreased
costs in the practice of medicine, and the centralization of authority in
the determination of practice norms.
Comm e rc i a l i z at ion of G e n et ic T e s t i ng
a nd R e produc t i v e T e c hnol o g i e s
Summarizing the arguments of Novas and Nikolas Rose, Franklin and

Roberts state, “The gene has become a major component of our ideas
of selfhood, identity, responsibility, and even citizenship in the twenty-
first century.”55 Rose maintains, based on his own work and that of Fou-
cault and Franklin, that the “vital politics” of the twenty-first century
“is concerned with our growing capacities to control, manage, engineer,
reshape, and modulate the very vital capacities of human beings as living
creatures . . . , a politics of ‘life itself.’”56 If genes are so critical to our self-
understanding and our desire to control our future, then genetic testing
and reproductive technologies are the critical mediators to achieve this
understanding and control. And these mediators have become major
business influences. Let us examine the context of the markets in genes,
genetic testing, and ARTs, recognizing that human DNA and genes are
body parts.
M a r k ets for Org a n s a nd T i s s u e s
All human parts have a price. Sales of body parts from cadavers have
received a tremendous amount of media attention. 57 According to John
M. Broder of the New York Times,
“It is illegal to sell cadavers or body parts. But it is legal to charge
‘reasonable’ fees for collecting, shipping, processing, marketing and im-
planting tissues from corpses. Tissue from one cadaver can be used in
50 to 100 different experiments or procedures, and a typical body can be
worth more than $220,000, medical researchers say.”58
Solid organ transplantation is coordinated in the United States by
the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), and therefore data for
these types of transplants are readily available. For solid organ trans-
plants, the UNOS homepage lists 96,935 individuals as candidates on
their waiting list, and between January and May 2007, 11,746 transplants
were performed from 5,869 living and cadaveric donors.59 The cost of
organ or tissue procurement for transplantation is lowest for hematopoi-
etic stem cells at $18,900. For solid organ transplants, the procurement
costs range from a low of $41,700–48,500 for a single lung to a high of
$199,200–222,300 for a combination of liver, pancreas, and intestine. 60 A
significant number of candidates die each year awaiting their transplants,
estimated for kidneys as 3,000–5,000 individuals on the candidate list. 61
Therefore, serious consideration is being given to paying donors for or-
gans, particularly kidneys.62 Because of the lack of availability of an ad-
equate number of donor kidneys, it is estimated that “the voluntary sale
of purchased donor kidneys now accounts for thousands of black market
transplants,”â†œ63 not only in the United States but also in other countries,
including India.64
Tissue and cell samples are essential for biomedical research, and the
ownership of these samples remains a controversial topic. The Office of
Human Research Protection (OHRP) and the Food and Drug Admin-
istration (FDA) are two agencies within the U.S. Department of Health
and Human Services (DHHS) that provide guidance to Institutional
Review Boards (IRBs) at each university or other institution carrying out
research on human subjects. Both the OHRP and FDA assert that the in-
formed consent documents, which must be read, understood, and signed
by each research subject, should not indicate that the subjects are giving
up any property rights to their tissue samples. However, in the three cases
(Moore v. Regents of The University of California, Greenberg et al. v. Miami:
Children’s Hospital, and Washington University v. Catalona) that have been
taken to court by research subjects to attempt to affirm ownership rights
over their research specimens, the decisions have all determined that the
samples are so valuable to biomedical research that ownership, including
the right to sell the samples and access to as well as products from the
specimens, belongs to the research institution. Therefore, these court
decisions indicate that tissue samples provided for research are commodi-
ties that are owned by the research institutions, with the research subjects
giving up property rights once they have provided the specimens. 65
Commodi f ic at ion of G e n e s
a nd G e n et ic T e s t i ng
Since cadaveric body parts for studies and organs and tissues for trans-
plantation and research all have been commodified, is this also true for
genes and genetic testing? The answer is a resounding yes. The U.S. Patent
and Trademark Office (PTO), which derives its authority from the Con-
stitution, has issued approximately 6,000 gene patents, many of which
were based solely on sequence information from the Human Genome
Project. This means that to use the sequence of a patented gene, the pat-
ent holder could demand payment of a licensing fee to anyone desiring to
profit from that gene’s sequence information. Patent holders may decide
that the best way to increase the value of the intellectual property they
own is to be extremely restrictive in licensing, perhaps even preventing
the use of the sequence information by anyone, hoping that this will add
to the perceived value of the patented gene sequence information. The
consequence of such a decision to block access to a patented gene would
be that individuals desiring testing for mutations in that gene would not
be able to have the testing performed and that, even if testing was per-
mitted, the individuals being tested would pay for the right to have their
own DNA analyzed for a mutation in his/her gene. It is estimated that
each individual’s genome contains approximately 20,000–25,000 genes,
and therefore if approximately 6,000 patented genes are owned by some
other entity, then roughly 25 percent of each person’s gene complement
is the property not of that person but of someone else.66
Let us consider one measure of the value of this gene-based intellec-
tual property, to determine if it supports the view that genes have been
commodified. For if there is insufficient value in this commodity, then it
would be hard to argue for commodification of human genes. A website
that describes itself as “a publicly funded medical genetics information
resource developed for physicians, other healthcare providers, and re-
searchers” lists 618 laboratories testing for 1,430 genetic diseases, of which
1,143 are clinical tests and 287 are research-only tests.67 These are modest
numbers and do not give insight into volume or value of genetic testing.
Genzyme Corporation, a major supplier of genetic testing, in its 2007
second quarter earnings report stated that its Genetics segment, fueled in
part by clinical trials and diagnostic testing, showed a 21 percent increase
in revenue to $73.7 million, which compared with $61.0 million during the
same period of 2006; this represented 7.9 percent of their $933.4 million
in total revenue for the second quarter of 2007, similar to the 7.7 percent
of their $793.4 million in total revenue for that period in 2006, 68 and, in
2007 the Genetics sector of their business had revenues three percentage
points better than the overall revenue growth of 18 percent.69 If there were
no quarterly financial aberrations, and for the first two quarters of 2006
and 2007 there did not appear to be any significant differences in revenue,
then this would amount to an annual revenue in their Genetic business
of at least $280 million.
Another company, Myriad Genetics, has attempted to maintain ag-
gressive control of its breast cancer gene patents and has used these pat-
ents to develop its predictive medicine product line to utilize genetic
testing to identify cancer before it manifests clinically and to personalize
medical care.70 In 2006, Myriad reported testing the 100,000th individual

with its breast cancer gene diagnostic analysis and over $100 million in
revenue for its predictive medicine line, an increase of 41 percent over the
2005 revenue. These are only two companies with significant revenues
deriving from gene patents and diagnostics, and their fiscal performances
indicate significant financial value deriving from the commodification of
genes and genetic testing.
Comm e rc e i n R e produc t i v e
T e c hnol o g i e s
Artificial Reproductive Technology (ART) represents a variety of ap-

proaches to aid women who might not be able to become pregnant with-
out assistance. The classic and most common form of ART is in vitro
fertilization (IVF), first performed successfully with the birth in 1978
of Louise Brown in the UK, and involving hormonal hyperstimulation
of the biological mother’s ovaries to release multiple eggs, recovery of
those eggs, mixture of the eggs and biological father’s sperm in a culture
dish to achieve fertilization, culture of embryos in the laboratory for ap-
proximately two days, and placement of one or more embryos into the
uterus of a woman with appropriate hormonal preparation to proceed
with pregnancy. There are many different scenarios in IVF, for example:
the biological mother could carry the pregnancy, or a “surrogate mother”
could be used; the eggs could be donated or purchased; the sperm could
be provided by a male partner, a donation from a male participant, a pur-
chase from a sperm bank, or even a male who has been declared dead
and his next of kin requests collection, referred to as posthumous sperm
procurement (PHSP); or the pregnancy could be achieved with frozen
embryos created previously by any of the above methods, and thereby be-
longing to the individual or couple, donated by another, or procured from
a third party. The sperm can be injected directly into the cytoplasm of the
egg, a process referred to as intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), if
fertilization cannot be otherwise achieved.71
Congress passed the Fertility Clinic Success Rate and Certification
Act (FCSRCA) in 1992, which required the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta to gather annual data on ARTs in the
United States. The 2004 CDC report indicated that there were 461 clin-
ics performing ART in the United States during that year, representing
a steady increase in clinics since the CDC began collecting these data
in 1995. Of these clinics, 411 submitted information for 2004, which in-
cluded 127,977 ART cycles, 99 percent of which were IVF, and 49,458
infants born resulting from ART cycles performed in that year, which
the CDC estimated to represent “slightly more than 1 percent of total
U.S. births.” 72
Thus the volume of ARTs is impressive, but what about the commer-
cial value? Using April 2004 pharmaceutical costs, the average national
cost per cycle of ART was estimated to be $12,400.73 Correcting for the
number of clinics not reporting results (50 of 461 total, or 10.8 percent),
the estimated total number of ART cycles in 2004 would be 143,546.74
Therefore, the total cost for ART cycles in 2004 would be estimated to
be $1.78 billion.75 While this is a large dollar value, one could argue that
it is the service cost of preparing the women for ART. Alternatively, this
could be judged to be the investment of $1.78 billion in the ART com-
modity market that will lead to somewhat more than 1 percent of U.S.
births. This tension between services and objects as commodities is one
that permeates studies of these types of markets.76
The objects in the ART commodity market could be considered to be
the gametes, i.e., the eggs and sperm. Among the 143,546 estimated total
ART cycles in 2004, in 11.8 percent of the cycles, the “eggs or embryos
were donated by another woman,” 77 representing an estimated 16,938
cycles with donor eggs or embryos. Rene Almeling reported that in 2002
two “egg agencies,” one of which was among the largest in the United
States, charged the “recipient clients an agency fee of $3,500 in addition
to the donor’s fee and her medical and legal expenses,” with the donors’
fees ranging from $4,000 to 6,000,78 and medical fees averaging $12,400.79
Legal fees are not disclosed, but would be in addition to these other fees.
If we use a donor’s fee in the middle of the range for these two agencies
(e.g., $5,000), and assume one donor per ART cycle, then the sum of the
agency, donor, and medical fees would be $20,900. With an estimated
16,938 donor cycles per year and a minimum estimated cost of $20,900/
cycle, the estimated annual total cost of “donated” eggs and embryos to
recipient clients for ART cycles would be a minimum of $354 million.
The 2004 ART Success Rate report does not include data regarding
whether the sperm were provided by a partner or friend or purchased
from a sperm bank. Almeling, however, described two sperm banks: the
larger of the two charged $215/vial and distributed approximately 30,000
vials/year, for a total of $6.45 million/year; and the smaller, a nonprofit
agency, charged $175/vial and distributed approximately 400 vials/year,
for a total of $70,000/year. 80 Therefore, while we do not know the total
annual volume and cost of sperm, nevertheless there are costs to some
clients for the procurement of male gametes.
Almeling argues, particularly for eggs in the case of postcycle gifts,
“the line between gift and sale [is] indistinguishable.” She describes the
gendered differences in the markets for eggs and sperm and concludes,
“The commodification of the human body can be expected to vary based
on the sex and gender of that body, as economic valuations intertwine
with the cultural norms in specific structural contexts.” Almeling in-
cludes the following cautionary note:
In this market [for eggs and sperm], race and ethnicity are biologized,
as in references to Asian eggs or Jewish sperm, and it is one of the primary
sorting mechanisms in donor catalogs, along with hair and eye color. This
routinized reinscription of race at the genetic and cellular level in dona-
tion programs, which as medicalized organizations offer a veneer of scien-
tific credibility to such claims, is worrisome given our eugenic history. 81
Therefore, we would argue that there is commerce in reproductive

technologies, including the gametes themselves, which can reach sig-
nificant volumes and dollars. Furthermore, this commodification of the
foundation of pregnancy and eventual personhood could be argued to
fit into the bottom-line mentality that Allen feels is leading us toward
a resurgence of eugenics, particularly as individuals seek, for example,
the best egg donor to provide the characteristics they desire for their
“best born” child or the fertility clinic with the best success rate per
ART cycle.
With the intimate relationship between our genes and our identities, we
would argue that the commodification of genes, genetic testing, and re-
productive technologies influence our concepts of individual identity.
Placing a value on these objects and services could be perceived as plac-
ing a value on selfhood and identity. Given the deterministic nature of

the ART industry, for example, “If you obtain an egg from a woman with
an advanced degree, then you will have a brighter child,”82 and the fact
that the ova from the individual with these desired characteristics will
be priced higher than others, the marketplace is differentially valuing
individuals within society. Moving from the market value of individuals
to their social value would seem to be even easier than the reverse: if a
person has a defined monetary worth that is less than another, then some
would argue (all too easily) that the person belongs to a different and
lower social stratum and he/she would be valued less. These factors as
well as the racialization of the ART market83 and the close relationships
of economic/social class and racial categorizations with eugenics in the
United States are setting the social stage for a return to eugenics.
Additional forces are present that risk placing us even more directly
in the path of this perfect storm that could result in a resurgence of eu-
genics. Genetic determinism, fueled by the Human Genome Project and
fundamental to genetic discrimination and eugenics, reduces the indi-
vidual to his/her genes and oversimplifies the science, ignoring the need
for a more synthetic, nuanced, and realistic view of our biological selves.
Overselling the power of science to rationalize and to solve social prob-
lems was one of the fundamental tenets of Progressivism, and we would
argue that the flawed genetic determinism of the “Genomic Era” could
lead us toward a neo-progressivism.
If anyone should think that this return to the Progressive Era is pure
academic speculation, please consider the following quote from Hillary
Rodham Clinton during the July 23, 2007, CNN/YouTube Democratic
presidential debate in response to a question about how she would de-
scribe her political philosophy:
I prefer the word “progressive,” which has a real American meaning, going
back to the progressive era at the beginning of the twentieth century. I
consider myself a modern progressive, someone who believes strongly in
individual rights and freedoms, who believes that we are better as a soci-
ety when we’re working together and when we find ways to help those who
may not have all the advantages in life get the tools they need to lead a
more productive life for themselves and their family. So I consider myself
a proud modern American progressive, and I think that’s the kind of phi-
losophy and practice that we need to bring back to American politics. 84
It is concerning that Clinton does not know or consider the eugenic bag-
gage carried by the Progressive movement in the early twentieth cen-
tury, and that the freedoms and rights of individuals she attributes to this
movement were limited only to selected “well-born” persons.
How can we prevent being engulfed by this “perfect storm” for the re-
surgence of eugenics? We would propose that the following efforts could
bring relief and move us out of the path of this storm. We must recognize
the illegitimacy of genetic discrimination and support genetic nondis-
crimination legislation; respect personal autonomy and reproductive
freedom; recognize and resist the corrosive nature of commodification
of body parts, including genes and gametes, on social structure; guard
against policies from organized medicine, governments, and corporations
that could enshrine eugenic practices; and educate opinion leaders and
the populace regarding the risks of overpromising genetics/genomics and
the consequences of determinism and eugenics.
No t e s
1.â•‡See generally Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of
Human Heredity (New York: Harvard University Press, 1985); Kenneth L. Garver and
Bettylee Garver, “Eugenics: Past, Present, and Future,” American Journal of Human Ge-
netics 49 (1991): 1109–18; Allen Buchanan, Dan W. Brock, Norman Daniels, and Daniel
Wikler, From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000); Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: BioMedicine, Power, and Subjectivity
in the Twenty-first Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007). Many
of the issues we analyze in this essay were raised in our earlier book: Linda L. McCabe
and Edward R. B. McCabe, DNA: Promise and Peril (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2008).
2.â•‡Garland E. Allen, “The Social and Economic Origins of Genetic Determin-
ism: A Case History of the American Eugenics Movement, 1900–1940, and Its Lessons
for Today,” Genetica 99 (1997): 77–88, at 78–80; Garland E. Allen, “Is a New Eugenics
Afoot?” Science 294 (2001): 59–61.
3.â•‡Allen, “ Social and Economic Origins,” 85.
4.â•‡Allen, “Is a New Eugenics Afoot?” 61.
5.â•‡ Dorothy Nelkin, “Molecular Metaphors: The Gene in Popular Discourse,”
Nature Review Genetics 2 (2001): 555–59, at 557; Horace F. Judson, “Talking about the Ge-
nome: Biologists Must Take Responsibility for the Correct Use of Language in Genet-
ics,” Nature 409 (2001): 769; and Tania Bubela, “Science Communication in Transition:
Genomics Hype, Public Engagement, Education, and Commercialization Pressures,”
Clinical Genetics 70 (2006): 445–50, at 446.
6.â•‡Sandra Sabatini, “Mapping of the Human Genome: What Does It Mean for Our
Patients?” American Journal of the Medical Sciences 322 (2001): 175–78, at 175.
7.â•‡ Judson, “Talking about the Genome,” 769.

8.â•‡Ibid.
9.â•‡Charles R. Scriver and Paula J. Waters, “Monogenic Traits Are Not Simple:
Lessons from Phenylketonuria,” Trends in Genetics 15 (1999): 267–72, at 267; Katrina
M. Dipple and Edward R. B. McCabe, “Phenotypes of Patients with ‘Simple’ Mende-
lian Disorders Are Complex Traits: Thresholds, Modifiers, and Systems Dynamics,”
American Journal of Human Genetics 66 (2000): 1729–35, at 1729; Katrina M. Dipple
and Edward R. B. McCabe, “Modifier Genes Convert ‘Simple’ Mendelian Disorders to
Complex Traits,” Molecular Genetics and Metabolism 71 (2000): 43–50, at 47; Katrina
M. Dipple and Edward R. B. McCabe, “Consequences of Complexity within Biological
Networks: Robustness and Health, or Vulnerability and Disease,” Molecular Genetics
and Metabolism 74 (2001): 45–50, at 49–50.
10.â•‡Soraya de Chadarevian, “The Making of an Icon,” Science 300 (2003): 255–57.
11.â•‡ James D. Watson and Francis H. C. Crick, “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Ac-
ids,” Nature 171 (1953): 737–38.
12.â•‡ James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of Struc-
ture of DNA (New York: Readers Union, 1968).
13.â•‡ Patricia Wald, “Future Perfect: Grammar, Genes, and Geography,” New Literary
History 31 (2000): 681–708, attributed to Leon Jaroff, “The Gene Hunt,” Time, March 10,
1989, 67.
14.â•‡ Nelkin, “Molecular Metaphors,” 558–59.
15.â•‡Brigitte Nerlich, Robert Dingwall, and David D. Clarke, “The Book of Life:
How the Completion of the Human Genome Project Was Revealed to the Public,”
Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness, and Medicine 6
(2002): 445–69, at 450.
16.â•‡ Nelkin, “Molecular Metaphors,” 557.
17.â•‡Lionel S. Penrose, “The Influence of the English Tradition in Human Genetics,”
in Proceedings of the Third International Congress of Human Genetics, ed. James F. Crow
and James V. Neel (Baltimore, 1967): 13–25, at 22–23.
18.â•‡ Huib Looren de Jong, “Genetic Determinism: How Not to Interpret Behavioral
Genetics,” Theory and Psychology 10 (2000): 615–37, at 621.
19.â•‡See generally Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge,
1995); Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites: Texas Cotton Cul-
ture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black
Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage Books, 1997).
20.â•‡ Paul R. Billings, “Genetic Nondiscrimination,” Nature Genetics 37 (2005): 559–60.
21.â•‡ McCabe and McCabe, DNA: Promise and Peril, 185–88.
22.â•‡ Kathy L. Hudson, M. K. Holohan, and Francis S. Collins, “Keeping Pace with
the Times: The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008,” New England
Journal of Medicine 358 (2008): 2661–63; Russell Korobkin and Rahul Rajkumar, “The
Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act: A Half-Step toward Risk Sharing,” New
England Journal of Medicine 359 (2008): 335–37; Mark A. Rothstein, “Putting the Genetic
Discrimination Act in Context,” Genetics in Medicine 10 (2008): 655–56.
23.â•‡Linda L. McCabe and Edward R. B. McCabe, “Genetic Screening: Carriers and
Affected Individuals,” Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics 5 (2004): 57–69,
at 57–58, 65.
24.â•‡Allen, “Social and Economic Origins,” 79.
25.â•‡ Neil Holtzman, “Eugenics and Genetic Testing,” Science in Context 11 (1998):
397–417, at 408–409; Charles J. Epstein, “Is Modern Genetics the New Eugenics?” Ge-
netics in Medicine 5 (2003): 469–75, at 474.
27.â•‡Allen, “Is a New Eugenics Afoot?” 59–61.
28.â•‡Epstein, “Is Modern Genetics the New Eugenics?” 473.
29.â•‡George C. Cunningham and D. Gwynne Tompkinson, “Cost and Effectiveness
of the California Triple Marker Prenatal Screening Program,” Genetics in Medicine 1
(1999): 199–206, at 199.
30.â•‡ Judson, “Talking about the Genome,” 769.
31.â•‡ Julian Savulescu, “Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best
Children,” Bioethics 15 (2001): 413–26, at 415.
32.â•‡Ibid., 424.
33.â•‡ Julian Savulescu, “Deaf Lesbians, ‘Designer Disability,’ and the Future of Medi-
cine,” British Medical Journal 325 (2002): 771–73.
34.â•‡ Details of the Nash case may be found in Sarah Franklin and Celia Roberts,
Born and Made: An Ethnography of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2006), 35, 62.
35.â•‡T. Scheck, “A Question of Life,” Minneapolis Public Radio, October 18, 2000
(http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/200010/18_scheckt_babies/).
36.â•‡Accounts of the Hashmi and Whitaker family cases are drawn from Franklin
and Roberts, Born and Made, 62, 65–66.
37.â•‡Technologies used to screen for neonatal blood conditions such as beta-thalas-
semia are described in Urvashi Bhardwaj, Yao-Hua Zhang, and Edward R. B. McCabe,
“Neonatal Hemoglobinopathy Screening: Molecular Genetic Technologies,” Molecular
Genetics and Metabolism 80 (2003): 129–37.
38.â•‡ Franklin and Roberts, Born and Made, 62–63.
39.â•‡ Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM), “#105650, Diamond-Blackfan
Anemia; DBA.”
40.â•‡ Franklin and Roberts, Born and Made, 65–66.
41.â•‡Ibid., 65–67.
42.â•‡Ibid., 72–73.
43.â•‡Barbara J. Evans, “Distinguishing Product and Practice Regulation in Personal-
ized Medicine,” Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics 81 (2007) 288–93, at 288.
44.â•‡ Nicole Ansani, Carl Sirio, Thomas Smitherman, Bethany Fedutes-Henderson,
Susan Skledar, Robert J. Weber, Nathalie Zgheib, and Robert Branch, “Designing a
Strategy to Promote Safe, Innovative Off-Label Use of Medications,” American Journal
of Medical Quality 21 (2006): 255–61, at 255.
45.â•‡Barbara J. Evans and David A. Flockhart, “The Unfinished Business of U.S.
Drug Safety Regulation,” Food and Drug Law Journal 61 (2006): 753–94, at 775.
46.â•‡Alan D. Berkenwald, “In the Name of Medicine,” Annals of Internal Medicine 128
(1998): 246–50, at 248–49.
47.â•‡L. E. Smith, “The Practice of Medicine and Its Interface with Medical Regula-
tion,” Archives of Facial and Plastic Surgery 1 (1999): 58–59; James N. Thompson, “The Fu-
ture of Medical Licensure in the United States,” Academic Medicine 81 (2006): S36–S39,
at S38; J. T. Rannazzisi, “The DEA’s Balancing Act to Ensure Public Health and Safety,”
Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics 81 (2007): 805–806.
48.â•‡ James Morrison and Peter Wickersham, “Physicians Disciplined by a State

Medical Board,” JAMA 279 (1998): 1889–93, at 1889.
49.â•‡Christopher Guadagnino, “The Rise of the Physician Employee,” Physician’s
News Digest (1997): 1–7, at 1.
50.â•‡Berkenwald, “In the Name of Medicine,” 246.
51.â•‡Guadagnino, “The Rise of the Physician Employee,” 5.
53.â•‡Guadagnino, “The Rise of the Physician Employee,” 7.
54.â•‡ Kevin B. O’Reilly, “Confronting Eugenics: Does the Now Discredited Practice
Have Relevance to Today’s Technology?” AMNews, July 9, 2007, (http://www.ama.assn
.org/amednews/2007/07/09/prsa0709.htm).
55.â•‡ Franklin and Roberts, Born and Made, 15.
56.â•‡ Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, 3.
57.â•‡Andrew Murr, “The Body Parts Bandit?” Newsweek National News Web Exclu-
sive, May 9, 2007 (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17542038/site/newsweek/).
58.â•‡ John M. Broder, “UCLA Halts Donations of Cadavers for Research,” New York
Times, March 10, 2004.
59.â•‡UNOS (http://www.unos.org/).
60.â•‡ N. J. Ortner, “U.S. Organ and Tissue Transplant Cost Estimates and Dis-
cussion,” Milliman Research Reports 6 (2005) (www.transplantliving.org/Content
Documents/2005Milliman_Report.pdf).
61.â•‡Eli A. Friedman and Alan H. Friedman, “Payment for Donor Kidneys: Pros and
Cons,” Kidney International 69 (2006): 960–62.
62.â•‡Troyan Brennan, “Markets in Health Care: The Case of Renal Transplantation,”
Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics 35 (2007): 249–55, at 249.
63.â•‡Eli A. Friedman and Alan H. Friedman, “Payment for Donor Kidneys, 960–62.
64.â•‡Sanjay Kumar, “Police Uncover Large Scale Organ Trafficking in Punjab,” Brit-
ish Medical Journal 326 (2003): 180.
66.â•‡Ibid., 163–67.
67.â•‡GeneTests data as of August 23, 2007 (http://www.genetests.org/).
68.â•‡See http://www.genzyme.com/corp/investors/GENZ%20PR-072507.asp.
69.â•‡See http://www.genzyme.com/components/highlights/genz_p1_q2_2007
.pdf.
70.â•‡See http://www.myriad.com/about/.
72.â•‡Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, American Society for Reproductive
Medicine, and Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, “2004 Assisted Repro-
duction Technology Success Rates: National Summary and Fertility Clinic Reports”
(Atlanta, 2006): http://www.cdc.gov/art/art2004/508PDF/2004ART_Intro-National-
Sum_t508.pdf.
73.â•‡Robert L. Gustofson, James H. Segars, and Frederick W. Larsen, “Cost Analysis
of Ganirelix versus Luteal-Phase Lupron Downregulation per Assisted Reproductive
Technology (ART) Cycle and Pregnancy Achieved,” Fertility and Sterility 82 (2004):
S118–S119, at S118.
74.â•‡CDC et al., “2004 Assisted Reproduction Technology Success Rates.”
75.â•‡Ibid.
76.â•‡Rene Almeling, “Selling Genes, Selling Genders: Egg Donors, Sperm Banks,
and Medical Marketing Genetic Material,” American Sociological Review 72 (2007):
319–40, at 321–22.
77.â•‡CDC et al., “2004 Assisted Reproduction Technology Success Rates.”
78.â•‡Almeling, “Selling Genes, Selling Genders,” 332;
79.â•‡Gustofson et al., “Cost Analysis of Ganirelix,” S118.
80.â•‡Almeling, “Selling Genes, Selling Genders,” 325–34.
81.â•‡Ibid., 337.
82.â•‡ McCabe and McCabe, DNA: Promise and Peril, 206.
83.â•‡Almeling, “Selling Genes, Selling Genders,” 327.
84.â•‡CNN 2007 (http://www.cnn.com/2007/politics/07/23/debate.transcript/
index.html).
ten
Modern Eugenics
and the Law
M a x w e l l J. M e h l m a n
One hundred years after the enactment of chapter 215 of the Indiana Acts
of 1907, the world’s first eugenic sterilization law, eugenics might be ex-
pected to be a thing of the past.1 Yet practices that might be considered
eugenic persist, and there is good reason to expect them to flourish in the
near future. This essay begins by discussing what is meant by “eugenic.”
It then describes modern practices that might be considered eugenic.
It concludes by foreshadowing future developments in technology and
public policy that might achieve eugenic objectives.
W h at Cou n ts a s a E ug e n ic Pr ac t ice?
Francis Galton, who originated the term eugenics in 1883, defined it as
“the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to ques-
tions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes
cognisance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give
to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevail-
ing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had.” 2
In 1904, he restated his understanding of eugenics as “the science which
deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also
with those that develop them to the utmost advantage.”3
There is widespread agreement now among geneticists that there is
no genetic basis for the concept of “race.” Members of the same “race”
can differ markedly, and people of different races can share more genes
in common than people of the same race.4 Hence we might be tempted
to think that, since eugenics is an effort to improve “races” or “strains of
blood,” there can be no true modern eugenic practices.
219
220â•… · â•… M a x w e l l J . M e h l m a n
Moreover, one of the hallmarks of the eugenics movement in the early

twentieth century was its belief that many social ills could be attributed
to bad genes. As Elof Carlson noted in the first chapter of this volume, the
view that inherited physiological imperfections led to social degeneracy
was a prerequisite to the enactment of initial eugenic sterilization laws.
Toward the end of the twentieth century, however, our understanding
of genetic science has become more sophisticated, and there may be less
inclination to believe in genetic determinism.
But the conception of eugenics reflected in these positions is too nar-
row. It does not matter whether genes or social conditions make a person
a thief or a prostitute rather than an upstanding citizen. The point is that
thieves and prostitutes are thought to be likely to have children who be-
come thieves and prostitutes, while the children of upstanding citizens
are more likely to become upstanding citizens. To improve society, the
objective then is to limit the former’s ability to reproduce relative to the
latter. As Dorothy Roberts states in connection with efforts to criminalize
drug-addicted women who bear children, “These reproductive punish-
ments are not strictly eugenic because they are not technically based on
the belief that crime is inherited; that is, their goal is not to prevent the
passing down of crime-marked genes. They are based, however, on the
same premise underlying the eugenic sterilization laws—that certain
groups in our society do not deserve to procreate.”5
Furthermore, efforts at genetic improvement need not be aimed at
“races” in order to raise many of the same concerns as classic eugenics. As
Roberts implies, the point is whether one believes that only certain types
of persons should procreate.
Understood in this way, many modern practices can be considered eu-
genic, or to use Sonia Suter’s term, “neoeugenic.” As she explains, “although
neoeugenics is not identical to the eugenics of yesteryear, many of the same
impulses and drives exist today; most notably, the desire to improve the
human species and our children through reproductive choices.”â†œ6
Eugenic practices can be either “positive” or “negative.” Daniel Kevles
states that positive eugenics aims “to foster greater representation in a so-
ciety of people whom eugenicists [consider] socially valuable.” Negative
eugenics, on the other hand, seeks “to encourage the socially unworthy
to breed less or, better yet, not at all.” 7 As Carlson observes, it aims at
“reproductive isolation of those considered unfit to reproduce.”
M o d e r n E u g e n i c s a n d t h e L aw â•… · â•… 221
Commentators often distinguish between “state-sponsored” and

“private” reproductive decisions, suggesting that only the former can be
considered to be eugenics. Duster states, for example: “It is imperative
to distinguish between state-sanctioned eugenics programs on the one
hand, and private, individualized, personal decisions that are socially pat-
terned on the other.”8 But the exercise of state power and the dividing line
between state-sponsored and private decision making are less clear-cut
than Duster implies. At one extreme, the state can prohibit a eugenic prac-
tice. In Skinner v. Oklahoma, for example, the Supreme Court held that it
was unconstitutional for a state to require certain habitual criminals to
be sterilized but not others.9 Another case attacking sterilization was Relf
v. Weinberger,10 discussed earlier in this volume by Gregory Dorr. At issue
were regulations proposed in 1974 by the Department of Health, Educa-
tion, and Welfare (now the Department of Health and Human Services)
that would have authorized federal family planning funds to pay for the
involuntary sterilization of minors and persons with mental deficien-
cies, and the supposedly voluntary sterilization of consenting adults. The
decision was written by Judge Gerhard Gesell of Watergate fame, who
ruled that Congress had not authorized the sterilization of incompetent
persons and that the regulations did not incorporate safeguards necessary
to fulfill a congressional prohibition against the use of family planning
funds to coerce indigent patients into agreeing to be sterilized.
At the other extreme, the state may compel a eugenic practice, such
as Indiana did when it enacted its 1907 involuntary sterilization law. Be-
tween these two extremes, however, there are a number of gradations. For
example, the government can provide financial inducements for eugenic
practices, such as tax breaks and welfare penalties for having desirable or
undesirable children, or damages awarded by the judicial system to fami-
lies whose physicians failed to prevent the birth of children with disabili-
ties. Even when the government merely refrains from limiting or prohibit-
ing eugenic practices, it might be said to be sanctioning them implicitly.
Duster might regard reproductive decisions by parents as “personal,” but
the government arguably collaborates when it turns a blind eye.
In short, when the law influences reproductive decision making in
such a way as to encourage or discourage the birth of specific types of in-
dividuals, this is at least suggestive of a eugenic objective. The more overt
this objective, or the greater the impact of the law on individual reproduc-
tive decisions, the more frankly eugenic the law can be considered. This
is not meant to imply that forced sterilization is on par with government
inaction in the face of private behavior. Yet as the other chapters in this
book demonstrate, society has employed indirect as well as direct means
to control reproductive behavior in order to achieve eugenic goals. The
memory of the victims of the Indiana law and its successors would be
dishonored if we examined the current state of affairs using too narrow
a view of this history.
L e g ally Tole r at ed Pr ac t ice s
A number of practices typically are thought of as private because they

result from private rather than public decision making. But the fact that
the law permits them to take place indicates a measure of public acquies-
cence, if not approval.
This category includes attempts to achieve what might be considered
positive neoeugenic objectives. One example is selective breeding to pro-
duce a “better” genetic lineage. This has long taken place with animals,
but it also takes place in humans. The most notorious recent case is the
Chinese basketball player Yao Ming, whose parents were mated by the
Chinese government because of their height and athletic prowess and
who was forced to play basketball at an early age.11 Private forms of selec-
tive breeding are rampant in the United States, including mating within
certain social circles, such as “coming out” at debutante balls, arranged
marriages and semi-arranged marriages in which the couple is brought
together by the parents, and most recently, computerized dating services
in which participants select one another according to desirable traits.
One such service, eHarmony.com, provides information about 29 per-
sonal characteristics, including appearance, intellect, industriousness,
ambition, family background, education, and character. Those who avail
themselves of these dating services can compress investigations that used
to take a number of “dates” into the click of a button.
Some of the most glaring selective breeding practices are associated
with gamete donation. The Genetics & IVF Institute, for example, pro-
vides the following information about egg donors: adult photos, child-
hood photos, audio interviews, blood type, ethnic background of do-
nor’s mother and father, height, weight, whether pregnancies have been
achieved, body build, eye color, hair color and texture, years of education
and major areas of study, occupation, Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT)
scores and grade point averages, special interests, family medical history,
essays by donors, and personality typing based on the Keirsey test, which
uses a Jungian approach to classify temperaments into 12 categories, such
as “rational and reserved” or “artisan and introspective.” The California
Cryobank, Inc., provides purchasers of donor sperm with a 26-page donor
profile. A company called Fertility Alternatives pays a premium to “ex-
ceptional” egg donors. To qualify, the donor must have graduated from
a major university, or be currently attending one, preferably Ivy League;
have a GPA of 3.0 +; SAT scores of 1350+ or ACT scores of 30+; and have
a documented high IQ.
The degree to which the law accommodates these assisted reproduc-
tive practices is striking.12 Although health care is one of the most heav-
ily regulated industries in the country, the only federal law specifically
governing in vitro fertilization (IVF) services is the Fertility Clinic Suc-
cess Rate and Certification Act of 1992, which merely requires infertility
clinics to report success rates in a standardized fashion.13 State regulation
is minimal.14 The criticisms leveled at the recent IVF-assisted birth of
octuplets to an unmarried, unemployed woman illustrate this regulatory
lacuna.
Conceivably, state law might encourage selective breeding by permit-
ting parents to sue infertility clinics for negligence in failing properly to
screen gamete donors. The leading case is Harnicher v. University of Utah
Medical Center.15 The Harnichers purchased sperm from a fertility clinic
after closely matching the donor to the husband’s physical characteristics
and blood type and mixing the donor sperm with the husband’s, so that
the couple could more easily represent any child genetically as their own.
The parents sued after learning that the clinic had accidentally substituted
sperm from a different donor, resulting in triplets whose eye color, hair
color, and blood type did not match the husband’s. The court refused to
allow the parents to recover damages from the clinic on the grounds that
they had not suffered any physical injury and that they could not recover
for the emotional distress from “exposure to the truth” about their chil-
dren’s father.16 The court also rejected the parents’ claim that they had
been damaged by the fact that children from the donor they actually had
selected would have been better looking.17 So far it would appear that the
224â•… ·â•… M a x w e l l J . M e h l m a n
law was not lending itself to supporting the practice of selective breeding
through gamete donation. But the Supreme Court of Utah concluded its
opinion with a startling caveat: “The Harnichers do not allege that the
triplets are unhealthy, deformed, or deficient in any way. Nor do they
claim any racial or ethnic mismatch between the triplets and their par-
ents.”18 If any of these had been the case, presumably the law would have
afforded the parents the relief that they were seeking.
While the parents in the Harnicher case used selective breeding in the
hopes of achieving a positive neoeugenic goal, the law also countenances
a number of practices that might be deemed negative neoeugenics. One
obvious example is fetal testing followed by aborting the fetus for reasons
that do not relate to the mother’s health. Another is preimplantation ge-
netic diagnosis (PGD) of fertilized embryos in the course of IVF, where
only those embryos with the best genetic endowment are implanted in
the uterus and allowed to gestate. The law leaves IVF services essentially
unregulated. A third technique is community-based genetic testing for
matchmaking purposes, such as screening programs for Tay-Sachs and
other recessive genetic diseases prevalent in Jews of Ashkenazi descent.19
The pioneer program is Chevra Dor Yeshurim (Association of the Upright
Generation), which screens Orthodox Jewish adolescents in New York
and does not allow a matchmaker to arrange a marriage between two
individuals who both carry a recessive mutation. 20
Finally, there are private family planning initiatives. One is Project
Prevention (formerly CRACK). This was started in California in 1997 by
a woman who had adopted four children and who wanted to punish their
drug-addicted mother. When she failed to persuade the state legislature
to criminalize drug-addicted mothers, she created CRACK, which gives
drug addicts $200 if they undergo sterilization or use long-term birth
control. In 2003, the organization claimed to have 23 chapters nationwide
and had paid 907 women, including 361 who had tubal ligations. African
Americans and Hispanics accounted for 401 of the participants.21 At pres-
ent, there is no state or federal law that would interfere with this project.
L e g ally Facili tat ed Pr ac t ice s
In some instances, the law goes farther than turning a blind eye; it actu-
ally aids the practice of neoeugenics. One example is the ability of par-
ents to bring so-called wrongful birth actions. In most jurisdictions, the

common law permits parents to bring an action when a child who is born
with a defect or disability would not have been born at all but for the neg-
ligence of a health care provider. One example is Molloy v. Meier, a 2004
case in which the Minnesota Supreme Court held that physicians who
negligently failed to diagnose a genetic disorder known as Fragile X in
one child could be liable to the parents who conceived another child with
the same disorder.22 The physicians argued that their duty only extended
to the first child, whom they had misdiagnosed. The court disagreed,
stating:
In this case, the patient suffered from a serious disorder that had a high
probability of being genetically transmitted and for which a reliable and
accepted test was widely available. The appellants should have foreseen
that parents of childbearing years might conceive another child in the
absence of knowledge of the genetic disorder. The appellants owed a duty
of care regarding genetic testing and diagnosis, and the resulting medical
advice, not only to S.F. [the first child] but also to her parents.23
The significance of this type of lawsuit for neoeugenics is obvious.

Indeed, the judge in one Michigan case, Taylor v. Kurapati, refused to
allow the parents to recover damages in a similar case because of the
eugenic implications.24 In Kurapati, a child was born with femur-fibula-
ulna syndrome, a condition which left her with a missing right shoulder,
fusion of the left elbow, missing digits on the left hand, missing femur on
the left leg, and short femur on the right.25 The parents had obtained two
ultrasounds during the pregnancy, but neither radiologist had discovered
the abnormalities. The parents contended that this was malpractice and
that it deprived them of the opportunity to abort the fetus.
In dismissing the complaint, Judge Whitbeck began by explaining
that, in order to recover, the parents would have to prove that the costs
of raising the child outweighed the benefits. This required the jury to
predict, and discount, the child’s future potential. As the judge observed,
“How, for example, would a hypothetical Grecian jury, operating under
Michigan jurisprudence, measure the benefits to the parents of the whole
life of Homer, the blind singer of songs who created the Iliad and the
Odyssey?”26
In addition, the judge felt that permitting recovery in these cases “can
slide ever so quickly into applied eugenics.”27 As he explained:
The very phrase “wrongful birth” suggests that the birth of the disabled
child was wrong and should have been prevented. If one accepts the prem-
ise that the birth of one “defective” child should have been prevented,
then it is but a short step to accepting the premise that the births of classes
of “defective” children should be similarly prevented, not just for the
benefit of the parents but also for the benefit of society as a whole through
the protection of the “public welfare.” This is the operating principle of
eugenics. 28
After describing the history of eugenics and its culmination in the

Holocaust, Judge Whitbeck concluded:
To our ears, at the close of the twentieth century, this talk of the “unfit”
and of “defectives” has a decidedly jarring ring; we are, after all, above such
lethal nonsense. But are we? We know now that we all have at least five
recessive genes but, according to Bowman [James E. Bowman, “The Road
to Eugenics,” 3 U. Chic. L. Sch. Roundtable 491 (1996)], when scientists map
the human genome, they will unveil many more potentially harmful genes
in each of us. Bowman states that “psychoses, hypertension, diabetes,
early- and late-appearing cancers, degenerative disorders, susceptibility
genes for communicable diseases, genes for various mental deficiencies,
aging genes, and other variations and disorders will be ascertained.” Will
we then see the tort of wrongful birth extended to physicians who neglect
or misinterpret genetic evidence and thereby fail to extend the option of a
eugenic abortion to the unsuspecting parents of a genetically “unfit” and
“defective” child? Our current acceptance of the wrongful birth tort would
require the answer to this question in Michigan to be: yes.29
In 2003, the Kentucky Supreme Court reached a similar result in

Grubbs v. Barbourville Family Health Ctr., P.S.C. 30 The decision involved
two cases. In both, parents were told that the results of ultrasounds were
normal. In one case, the child was born with spina bifida and hydro-
cephalus. The child in the other case had a cyst that occupied most of
his cranium. As a consequence, stated the court, “he has no eyes and
no brain, although he has an underdeveloped brain stem that supports
minimal autonomic functioning. He has a cleft palate and cannot speak.
He must be strapped into a wheelchair to sit, and he has no control of his
bowels.”31 As in Kurapati, the court refused to allow the parents to sue for
wrongful birth. (The court also disallowed the children from bringing
claims for “wrongful life.”) Of note is the concurring opinion by Judge
Wintersheimer:
Any quality of life ethic favors the life of the healthy over the infirm, the
able-bodied over the disabled and the intelligent over the mentally chal-
lenged. If logically extended, it could produce a culture that condones
the extermination of the weak by the strong or the more powerful. The
Nazi regime under Adolph [sic] Hitler is a not too distant reminder of this
kind of eugenic approach. Unfortunately, such thoughts are not limited
to foreign nations but can also be found in the writings of Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes in Buck v. Bell . . . , which approved of sterilization of the
mentally incompetent. Taylor, supra, calls to our attention the influence
that Hitler’s experiments with sterilization had on the American eugenics
movement. Eugenics espouses the reproduction of the fit over the unfit
and discourages the birth of the unfit. 32
In short, the judges in Kurapati and Grubbs did not want the ma-
chinery of the courts to contribute to what they felt was a eugenic goal,
the desire of some parents to avoid giving birth to a child with severe dis-
abilities. (Ironically, given their goal, they reached the wrong outcome.
Arguably, parents are less likely to abort fetuses with disabilities if they
can recover the costs of caring for the children through wrongful birth
actions. On the other hand, physicians who had to compensate parents
in wrongful birth cases might be more likely to encourage the parents to
abort the fetuses in marginal cases.)
Another method by which the government involves itself in what
might be considered neoeugenics is providing public funding for family-
planning programs aimed at preventing the birth of children to poor
mothers. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the government
in 2001 spent $1.26 billion on reversible contraceptive services and $95
million on sterilization services. 33 These funds are distributed through
several programs: Medicaid, Title X, Title V (Maternal Child Block
Grants), Social Services Block Grants, and TANF (Temporary Assistance
for Needy Families). 34 These programs would not be particularly neoeu-
genic if they provided family-planning assistance to all socioeconomic
groups, but virtually all of these funds are earmarked for the poor. As Jane
Gilbert Mauldon writes, government-supported “family planning” efforts
have been linked to eugenics in the past, and they arguably continue to
pursue eugenic goals:
Eugenics seeks to improve social welfare by discouraging births of certain
types, or births among certain social groups, and by encouraging other
types of births. This line of thinking has a long history in the United
States. Early in the twentieth century, explicitly eugenicist ideas, mani-
fested as exhortations to educated women to have large families so as not
to be out-bred by poor, immigrant or African American women, were
commonly accepted among elites in the United States. More than thirty
states had sterilization laws that provided for the involuntary sterilization
of so-called socially unfit individuals, which could mean simply women
who were poor and ill-educated. In 1958, Mississippi State Representa-
tive David H. Glass sponsored an unsuccessful bill to “. . . Discourage the
Immorality of Unmarried Females by Providing for Sterilization of the
Unwed Mother under Conditions of the Act; and for Related Purposes.”
Glass made clear the intended purpose of the act: “During the calendar
year 1957, there were born out of wedlock in Mississippi, more than seven
thousand Negro children . . . the Negro woman because of child welfare
assistance [is] making it a business, in some cases, of giving birth to ille-
gitimate children. . . . The purpose of my bill was to try to stop, slow down,
such traffic at its source.”
In some respects, contemporary policies still seem to reflect these elitist
assumptions and concerns about “excess” childbearing among disadvan-
taged women. If programs were exclusively intended to assure recipients
reproductive freedom, they might also include subsidized fertility ser-
vices, not just contraception and sexually transmitted disease preven-
tion. If they were entirely philanthropic programs intended to reduce
unplanned childbearing across the board, they might have been designed
to serve a larger group of people. 35
Organizations that provide these federally funded family planning

services are typically nonprofits, and therefore another way that the gov-
ernment facilitates their activities is by giving them a subsidy in the form
of exempting them from federal and state taxes. (At the same time that
it provides financial incentives for family planning, however, Congress
prohibits the federal government from paying for abortions under Med-
icaid except in cases of rape or incest, or when a pregnant woman’s life is
endangered by a physical disorder, illness, or injury. Moreover, the United
States will not provide aid to any foreign family planning organization
that performs or promotes abortion. Clearly, many people do not regard
abortion as an acceptable means of achieving eugenic goals.)
Another government tax policy that might be considered neoeugenic
is federal child tax credits. Until statutory limits are reached, the more
children the taxpaying family has, the larger the number of credits that
it can claim. The policy might be regarded as eugenic in that, since only
families with enough income to pay taxes benefit from the credit, the
policy creates an incentive for better-off families to have more children.
Contrast child tax credits with so-called family caps under state wel-
fare programs. Unlike child tax credits that encourage taxpaying fami-
lies to produce more offspring, family caps apply to families on welfare,
discouraging them from becoming larger by halting increases in welfare
benefits once there are more than a certain number of children. Currently
24 states have some version of this policy. 36 Dorothy Roberts observes
that “like birth control programs and reproductive punishments, contem-
porary welfare policies share features of eugenic thinking. . . . Of course,
the current welfare family caps are not premised on notions of recipients’
genetic inferiority. But, like eugenic programs of the past, they are seen as
a way of ridding America of the burden poor people pose.”37
In Dandridge v. Williams, the Supreme Court upheld family caps in
the face of constitutional challenge. 38 The Court ruled that the state of
Maryland did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment because it had a reasonable basis for the policy, namely, “the
state’s legitimate interest in encouraging employment and in avoiding
discrimination between welfare families and the families of the working
poor.”39 Interestingly, the state itself had articulated an additional goal,
“providing incentives for family planning,”â†œ40 on which, without com-
ment, the Court apparently declined to rely.
L e g ally M a n dat ed Pr ac t ice s
So far we have considered government toleration or subsidization of prac-

tices that can be considered neoeugenic. Additionally, there are some
practices that the government currently mandates by law. All of them are
in aid of negative eugenics objectives in that they discourage reproduc-
tion by undesirable segments of the population. One example is steriliza-
tion and other restrictions on reproduction employed ostensibly to deter
the commission of future crimes. For example, California in 1996 enacted
a law authorizing voluntary chemical or surgical castration for the first
offense of child molesting and mandating castration as a condition of pa-
role for repeat offenders.41 Georgia, Florida, and Montana have adopted
similar statutes. Chemical castration involves the use of Depo-Provera,
a synthetic progesterone that decreases testosterone, causing a reduction

in sex drive and an improved ability to control sexual fantasizing.42 In an-
other illustration, a judge conditioned parole for a convicted child abuser
on surgical implantation of the contraceptive Norplant. The defendant
challenged the requirement, but the case was dismissed as moot after
other parole violations occurred.43 Although the intent of these laws argu-
ably is to prevent child molestation, they are eugenic in that they decrease
the likelihood that child molesters will reproduce.
How can these statutes be constitutional when, as noted earlier, the
Supreme Court invalidated the sterilization requirement in Skinner? The
answer lies in the fact that the Court has never overturned its decision in
Buck v. Bell, which upheld Virginia’s sterilization program for inmates at
its State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded.44 As Justice Douglas
explained in Skinner, inmates were sterilized at the Virginia institution so
that they might be allowed to leave it. As the Court stated in Buck, “So far
as the operations enable those who otherwise must be kept confined to be
returned to the world, and thus open the asylum to others, the equality
aimed at will be more nearly reached.”â†œ45 In Skinner, Douglas pointed out,
“there is no such saving feature.”â†œ46 The California, Georgia, Florida, and
Montana laws likewise offer sterilization as an alternative to continued
incarceration.
The criminal justice system deters reproduction not only by sex of-
fenders but by all incarcerated criminals. In a broader sense, then, the
entire criminal system is a negative neoeugenic program. Only five states
(California, Mississippi, New Mexico, New York, and Washington) per-
mit prisoners to have conjugal visits with their spouses, despite some
evidence that such visits reduce the incidence of prison rape.47
In the early twentieth century, eugenic goals fueled restrictive im-
migration laws. Similar objectives arguably are associated with current
efforts to limit immigration, including the plan to construct a fence along
the border with Mexico. Although anti-immigration forces avoid directly
linking immigration with eugenics, the connection between eugenics
organizations like the Pioneer Fund and anti-immigration lobbying is
too plain to dismiss.48
Another governmental action that could be considered neoeugenic
was Congress’s 2006 reversal of the federal executive order that had man-
dated coverage of Viagra under Medicaid.49 The action was prompted by
reports that some Medicaid programs had prescribed the drug for sex
offenders. But it also could have the effect of discouraging the poor from
reproducing.
After the FDA approved Norplant, a surgically implanted, long-
lasting contraceptive, legislators in a number of states proposed linking
Norplant use to eligibility for welfare benefits. In other words, women
on welfare could not receive benefits if they continued to have children.
Although no such requirement has been adopted, Norplant has been
covered under all state Medicaid programs.
The state-mandated initiative that most overtly raises eugenics con-
cerns, however, is newborn screening for nontreatable disorders. New-
born screening began in the 1960s after physician Robert Guthrie devel-
oped a screening test for PKU, an autosomal recessive metabolic disorder
that can be treated effectively if detected soon after birth. Guthrie also
pioneered a method for collecting and transporting on special filter paper
the blood samples used for screening, known as “Guthrie cards,” and he
insisted that the collection and analysis of the samples be performed
by state public health officials. Massachusetts adopted newborn screen-
ing on a voluntary basis in 1962, but after President Kennedy’s Advisory
Committee on Mental Retardation recommended mandatory screening,
states began to enact newborn screening as a legal requirement. By 1973,
newborn screening was compulsory in 43 states. Now it is universal.
The development of faster and cheaper technologies such as tandem
mass spectrometry and microchip arrays enable programs to screen for far
greater numbers of disorders, including many for which no readily effec-
tive treatments presently exist. Screening for these nontreatable disorders
can be beneficial, in that it could spare families years of uncertainty once
symptoms emerged; alert them to be on the watch for new discoveries
that could provide their children with treatment; provide children with
adjunctive if not curative interventions; and facilitate participation of the
children in research on their disorders. Yet some public health advocates
offer an additional rationale for screening for nontreatable disorders: that
it can serve as a valuable tool in family planning. One recent article ex-
plains, for example: “Arguments for considering broader benefits from
the early diagnosis that only newborn screening can provide include . . .
knowledge on which to base reproductive decision-making years before
a disease would be diagnosed for the affected child.”50
Moreover, as noted above, newborn screening is mandatory. Only

Maryland, Wyoming, and the District of Columbia currently seek pa-
rental consent for newborn screening. (Massachusetts recently has be-
gun doing so in a pilot program.) In Maryland, the consent is for the
total screening package; parents are not asked to consent to specific tests.
Thirty-three states provide an exemption from screening if contrary to
parents’ religious beliefs, but it is up to the parents to assert the objection
without being asked.
In addition, in a case called Douglas County v. Anaya, the Nebraska
Supreme Court in 2005 rejected a constitutional challenge to newborn
screening based on religious grounds. After a home birth, the Anayas
refused to allow a blood sample to be taken and sued the public health
department to block enforcement of the law, which contained no excep-
tions. The court refused to recognize a religious exemption, noting that
“[t]he health and safety of the child are of particular concern.”51
By focusing on the health and safety of the child, the decision makes
the case seem no different than the numerous instances in which the
courts have refused to allow parents such as Jehovah’s Witnesses to with-
hold treatment from children for religious reasons. But courts override
parental treatment decisions for religious reasons only when the denial of
treatment would be fatal or would seriously impair the child’s health. At
least some newborn screening tests may not have such a direct connec-
tion to the child’s welfare. Indeed, according to pediatric geneticist Jeffrey
Botkin, of the 29 disorders for which the American College of Medical
Genetics recommends screening, 12 are quite rare, occurring in less than
1 in 100,000 births. 52 In any event, the Supreme Court of Nebraska did not
rest its decision in the Anaya case on the need for screening to protect the
newborn’s health alone. In addition, the court observed that mandatory
screening was necessary in order to address “the potential social burdens
created by children who are not identified and treated.”
Newborn screening for treatable disorders is laudable. Screening
for nontreatable disorders, however, is another matter. The screening is
mandated by the state and is imposed on parents over their objection.
Nontreatable disorders would be included in part in order to discourage
parents from giving birth to additional children with those disorders.
This will prevent these children from inheriting genes that will make
them a burden on society. Viewed in this manner, the resemblance be-
tween this program and classic eugenic practices is, at the very least,
disconcerting.
In her 2008 book Heredity and Hope, historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan
defends medical genetics in general, and newborn screening in particular,
from being attacked as eugenic. Their intention is not, she explains, the
eugenic goal of preventing the genetically unfit from reproducing, but the
exact opposite: to help people reproduce who suspect that they are at risk
for having a genetically unfit child. According to Cowan, medical genetics
facilitates this by allowing these people to confirm through genetic test-
ing that they are not in fact at risk or, if testing shows that they are in fact at
risk, by enabling them to use prenatal diagnosis to bring only genetically
healthy fetuses to term. 53 Cowan is correct in that mandatory newborn
screening does not necessarily aim at preventing reproduction by persons
who may have undesirable genetic loads. But it does discourage the birth
of children with undesirable mutations, with the result that our genetic
stock will be improved. When this objective is extended to nontreatable
disorders and accomplished through compulsory government programs,
its neoeugenic pedigree is unmistakable, even if it is not intended.
T h e L aw of Mode r n Neoe ug e n ic s
Clearly, laws and regulations that mandate or actively encourage neoeu-

genic practices, such as newborn screening for nontreatable disorders or
family welfare caps, could be revised or repealed. But what about passive
government policies? Given our current constitutional framework, could
the law be changed to outlaw neoeugenic practices?
Many neoeugenic practices, including selective breeding, contra-
ception, nontherapeutic abortion, and possibly also the right to employ
assisted reproductive technologies, such as IVF and PGD, would be
protected under the constitutional right to reproductive freedom. This
right, incidentally, was first recognized by the Supreme Court in Skinner v.
Oklahoma, the case striking down the Oklahoma law that authorized the
sterilization of certain criminals, where the Court observed that “mar-
riage and procreation are fundamental to the very existence and survival
of the race.”54 As John Robertson and others have argued, the right of
reproductive freedom arguably extends far enough to bar the law from
interfering with a parental decision to prevent the birth of a child with
disabilities and to promote the birth of a child with a favorable ratio of

desirable traits. 55 A more difficult question is whether this right embraces
the freedom to conceive a child intentionally with a disability, such as
certain deaf couples are reported to desire.
Other neoeugenic practices are protected by the First Amendment.
These include exhortative and religious activities such as private family
planning educational initiatives and community-based genetic match-
making programs. A scheme such as Project Prevention would not fall
completely within the ambit of the First Amendment, however, since it
involves action (paying women to be sterilized) as well as speech.
One approach for restricting neoeugenic practices might be to reg-
ulate health care professionals and provider organizations. There is no
question, for example, that the state can regulate the activity of fertility
doctors and clinics; as noted earlier, for instance, a federal law requires
fertility clinics to disclose their success rates. At the same time, however,
these laws must be constitutional. For example, the Supreme Court has
invalidated laws prohibiting physicians from prescribing contraceptives56
or performing abortions. 57 Therefore, the Court might strike down laws
constraining IVF practitioners from assisting parents in making repro-
ductive choices that may have neoeugenic consequences.
The government exercises broad regulatory authority over medical
products as well as services. Thus it could restrict the marketing of genetic
tests used in selective breeding, PGD, and newborn screening if it deemed
them unsafe or ineffective. A recent case in the U.S. Court of Appeals for
the District of Columbia, Abigail Alliance v. von Eschenbach, reaffirmed
the government’s power in the face of a challenge mounted by terminally
ill cancer patients. The patients argued that they had a constitutionally
protected right to obtain Phase I cancer drugs—that is, drugs that had
completed only the first of the three stages of the testing required by the
FDA for marketing approval. A previous opinion by a three-judge panel
of the court had sided with the patients, but the full court reheard the case
and reversed the decision on the ground that the right to self-preservation
does not override the government’s interest in protecting people from
unsafe drugs. 58
It remains to be seen, however, whether the government could exert
its power to regulate the safety and efficacy of medical products to pre-
vent them from being used to achieve neoeugenic goals. Once the FDA
approves a drug or medical device, physicians are free to use them in any
way they choose, subject only to liability for malpractice if their behav-
ior is deemed unreasonable. 59 So even if the agency refused to approve
a eugenic indication for a product—say, a label claim that a genetic test
was useful in making reproductive decisions—FDA rules would allow a
physician to perform the test for that purpose so long as the product had
been approved for any use. If Congress or the FDA were to change this
policy, however, the recent Abigail decision suggests that the new policy
would be upheld as constitutional.
Aside from concerns about constitutionality, from a practical stand-
point certain attempts to restrict neoeugenic practices would be unlikely
to succeed. The private nature of reproductive decision making which
lends it its cloak of constitutionality means that some enforcement ac-
tivities would have to intrude into the patient-physician relationship,
the internet, and the bedroom. Even if we were willing to permit such
invasions, the sheer difficulty of monitoring these spaces would require
enormous resources. Black markets offering banned genetic testing and
assisted reproductive services are bound to spring up as they did when
abortion was illegal. In 1962 alone, more than a million abortions were
believed to have been performed, half by physicians. 60 Reproductive
products and services that were illegal in the United States could be
obtained abroad.61
F u t u r e Developme n ts
As the understanding of genetic science expands, the ability to pursue

neoeugenic objectives is bound to increase. Of greatest importance is the
development of new tests to detect undesirable conditions and traits. As
noted earlier, it is becoming possible to screen newborns for far greater
numbers of genetic conditions and risk factors for disease. In June 2006,
researchers in London announced that a new technique called preimplan-
tation genetic haplotyping would increase the number of diseases or risk
factors that can be detected by PGD testing from 200 to 6,000. 62 Similar
testing could be performed on donor gametes and on fetuses in utero, and
could be used by couples considering whether or not to reproduce.
In response to the threat of bioterrorism, some public health advo-
cates believe that the nation’s public health laws need to be revamped to
give public health officials additional powers and discretion. With fund-
ing from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the W. K. Kellogg
Foundation, they have drafted a Model State Public Health Act.63
An indication of the scope of the powers that would be conferred
on public health officials under this law can be obtained by considering
its provisions for mandatory public health screening and testing. Under
the act, a state or local public health agency may establish a compulsory
screening program for any “conditions of public health importance that
pose a significant risk or seriously threaten the public’s health” [section
5-106(d)(1)]. The terms significant risk and seriously threaten are not defined
in the act, but the term condition of public health importance is defined to
mean “a disease, syndrome, symptom, injury, or other threat to health
that is identifiable on an individual or community level and can reason-
ably be expected to lead to adverse health effects in the community” [sec-
tion 1-102(6)]. Under the model act, then, a public health agency could
make prenatal screening for genetic diseases and conditions mandatory
for all pregnant women, so long as the agency determined that the dis-
eases and conditions, if not detected in utero, posed a significant threat to
health that can reasonably be expected to lead to adverse health effects in
the community. Such a belief is not far-fetched. The American College of
Obstetrics and Gynecology recently called for “routine” prenatal screen-
ing for Down syndrome.64 Another provision of the model act states that a
public health agency may make participation in such a screening program
a condition “of participating in or receiving a service or privilege” [section
5-106(d)(2)]. Accordingly, women who refused to be screened could be
denied health and welfare benefits.
Renewed interest in universal health insurance also could act as a
spur to neoeugenic practices. Universal insurance provided by federal
or state governments would give them greater control over the alloca-
tion of health care resources, which could lead to greater efforts to save
money through eugenic measures. Even if the actual health insurers re-
mained private companies, they would have greater incentives to try to
reduce spending by refusing to cover genetic conditions that could have
been, but were not, prevented. Legislation prohibiting genetic discrimi-
nation might not prohibit such practices; it is not yet clear that laws like
the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), for example,
would necessarily do so. On the other hand, universal health insurance
could help reverse health disparities that cause higher rates of morbidity,
mortality, and infant mortality in poor and minority populations. By
improving their chances of reproducing, this could militate against the
achievement of neoeugenic objectives.
Although the development of human gene transfer technology—the
ability to install new genetic instructions into existing cells—has been
disappointing to date, a significant breakthrough could accelerate prog-
ress dramatically. This might lead to the development of genetic interven-
tions that could prevent diseases or disorders if applied in utero or during
IVF. In the same way that they mandate immunization, public health of-
ficials might require parents to employ these interventions, or they might
provide incentives for doing so, such as public funding or tax breaks.
If genetic interventions took place early enough in the life cycle, the
resulting changes in DNA would be incorporated into an individual’s
eggs or sperm and passed on to future generations. Societal pressure to
use this technology to improve the germ line could become overwhelm-
ing. Future developments in genetics also hold out the possibility of ma-
nipulating DNA to enhance non-disease traits. Researchers have already
created mice with genetically engineered improvements in strength 65
and cognitive ability.66 The question for public policy would be whether
to subsidize access to these technologies for those who cannot afford to
pay for them. Failure to do so would be an implicit form of neoeugen-
ics, since enhanced individuals would claim a greater share of societal
resources, increasing their chances of reproductive success over genetic
have-nots.
As we move forward 100 years after chapter 215 of the Indiana Acts of
1907, the question of how far the state may go in controlling reproduc-
tive decision making is bound to become more compelling. Some believe
that the future of the genetic revolution holds the possibility of enabling
people virtually to dictate the precise genetic endowment of their off-
spring. This would be nothing less than the ability to manage human
evolution, the holy grail of eugenics. If this capability actually emerged,
it would remain to be seen how the historical lessons of eugenics would
inform its use.
No t e s
1.â•‡ In 1921, the Supreme Court of Indiana held that law to be unconstitutional in
Williams v. Smith, 131 N.E.2 (Ind. 1921). The Indiana legislature enacted a replacement
sterilization law, Ind. Acts 1927, ch 241, which responded to the lack of due process in the
first scheme.
2.â•‡ Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (London:
Macmillan, 1883), 17n1.
3.â•‡ Francis Galton, “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope, and Aims,” American Journal
of Sociology 1 (1904).
4.â•‡ Michael J. Bamshad and Steve E. Olson, “Does Race Exist? An Overview/Ge-
netics of Race,” 289 Scientific American 78–85 (2003).
5.â•‡ Dorothy E. Roberts, “Crime, Race, and Reproduction,” 67 Tulane Law Review
1945, 1969 (1993).
6.â•‡Sonia Suter, “A Brave New World of Designer Babies?” 22 Berkeley Tech. L. J. 897,
968–69 (2007).
7.â•‡ Daniel J. Kevles, “Eugenics,” in 2 Encyclopedia of Bioethics 848 (3rd ed. 2004).
8.â•‡Troy Duster, “Eugenics: Ethical Issues,” in 2 Encyclopedia of Bioethics 854 (3rd ed.
2004) (emphasis in original).
9.â•‡ Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535 (1942).
10.â•‡ Relf v. Weinberger, 372 F. Supp. 1196 (D.D.C. 1974), vacated as moot, 565 F.2d 722
(D.C. Cir. 1977).
11.â•‡Steve Weinberg, “Yao: China’s Gift to Basketball,” Christian Science Monitor,
Jan. 3, 2006, at 13.
12.â•‡See, e.g., Alicia Ouellette et al., “Lessons across the Pond: Assisted Reproduc-
tive Technology in the United Kingdom and the United States,” 31 Am. J. L. and Med 419
(2005).
13.â•‡ Fertility Clinic Success Rate and Certification Act of 1992, Pub. L. No. 102-493,
106 Stat. 3146 (codified at 42 U.S.C. §§ 263a-1 to a-7 (2000)).
14.â•‡ Ouellette, supra note 44, at 423.
15.â•‡ 962 P.2d 67 (Utah 1998),
16.â•‡ Id. at 72.
17.â•‡ Id.
18.â•‡ Id.
19.â•‡ Lori B. Andrews, “A Conceptual Framework for Genetic Policy: Comparing the
Medical, Public Health, and Fundamental Rights Models,” 79 Wash. U. L. Q. 221, 245
(2001).
20.â•‡ Beverly Merz, “Matchmaking Scheme Involves Tay-Sachs Problem,” 258 JAMA
2636 (1987).
21.â•‡See Renee Chelian, “Remarks on the “CRACK” Program: Coercing Women’s
Reproductive Choices,” 5 J. L. Soc’y 187 (2003).
22.â•‡ Molloy v. Meier, 679 N.W.2d 711 (Minn. 2004).
23.â•‡ Id. at 720.
24.â•‡ Taylor v. Kurapati, 600 N.W.2d 670 (Mich. App. 1999).
25.â•‡ Id. at 674.
26.â•‡ Id. at 688.
27.â•‡ Id.
28.â•‡ Id.
29.â•‡ Id. at 690.
30.â•‡ Grubbs v. Barbourville Family Health Ctr., P.S.C., 120 S.W.3d 682 (Ky. 2003).
31.â•‡ Id. at 686.
32.â•‡ Id. at 692.
33.â•‡ Alan Guttmacher Institute, Public Funding for Contraceptive, Sterilization, and
Abortion Services (2005) (http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fpfunding/tables.pdf).
34.â•‡ Id., Table 1.
35.â•‡ Jane Gilbert Mauldon, “Providing Subsidies and Incentives for Norplant, Steril-
ization, and Other Contraception: Allowing Economic Theory to Inform Ethical Analy-
sis,” 31 J. L. Med. & Ethics 351, 353–54 (2003).
36.â•‡See Janet Simmons, “Coercion in California: Eugenics Reconstituted in Wel-
fare Reform, the Contracting of Reproductive Capacity, and Terms of Probation,” 17
Hastings Women’s L. J. 269, 277 (2006).
37.â•‡ Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of
Liberty (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), 215–16.
38.â•‡ 397 U.S. 471 (1970).
39.â•‡ Id. at 486.
40.â•‡ Id. at 484.
41.â•‡ Cal. Penal Code sec. 645.
42.â•‡ For more on chemical castration, see Avital Stadler, Comment, “California In-
jects New Life into an Old Idea: Taking a Shot at Recidivism, Chemical Castration, and
the Constitution, “ 46 Emory L. J. 1285 (1997).
43.â•‡ Andrews, supra note 11, at 77, n.8.
44.â•‡ Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927).
45.â•‡ Id. at 208 (quoted in Skinner, 316 U.S. at 542).
46.â•‡ Skinner, 316 U.S. at 542
47.â•‡Rachel Wyatt, Note: “Male Rape in U.S. Prisons: Are Conjugal Visits the An-
swer?” 37 Cas. W. Res. J. Int’l Law 579 (2006).
48.â•‡See, e.g., Paul A. Lombardo, Commentary: “‘The American Breed’: Nazi Eugen-
ics and the Origins of the Pioneer Fund,” 65 Alb. L. Rev. 743, 750 (2002).
49.â•‡ Cheryl G. Stolberg, “House Rejects Coverage of Impotence Pills,” New York
Times, June 25, 2005.
50.â•‡ Duane Alexander (NIH) and Peter C. van Dyck (HRSA) 2006: “A Vision of the
Future of Newborn Screening” 117 Pediatrics S350, 352.
51.â•‡ Douglas County v. Anaya, 694 N.W.2d 601 (Neb. 2005).
52.â•‡ Jeffrey Botkin, Testimony before the President’s Council in Bioethics, Feb. 3,
2006 (http://www.bioethics.gov/transcripts/feb06/feb3full.html).
53.â•‡Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Heredity and Hope: The Case for Genetic Screening (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 236–37.
54.â•‡ Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535, 541 (1942).
55.â•‡See, e.g., John A. Robertson, Children of Choice: Freedom and the New Reproduc-
tive Technologies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
56.â•‡ Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1966).
57.â•‡ Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).
58.â•‡ Abigail Alliance v. von Eschenbach, 2007 U.S. App. LEXIS 18688 (Aug. 7,
2007).
240â•… ·â•… M a x w e l l J . M e h l m a n
59.â•‡ David A. Kessler, “Regulating the Prescribing of Human Drugs for Nonap-
proved Uses under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act,” 15 Harv. J. Legis. 693 (1978).
60.â•‡See Zad Leavy and Jerome M. Kummer, “Criminal Abortion: Human Hardship
and Unyielding Laws,” 35 S. Cal. L. Rev. 123 (1962).
61.â•‡See Maxwell J. Mehlman and Kirsten M. Rabe, “Any DNA to Declare? Regulat-
ing Offshore Access to Genetic Enhancement,” 28 Am. J. L. and Med. 179 (2002).
62.â•‡ Ian Sample, “Embryo Test to Screen for 6,000 Inherited Diseases: Procedure
Hailed as Major Advance for IVF Couples: Doctors Will Be Able to Test for Genetic
Mutations,” Guardian, June 19, 2006, 7.
63.â•‡Turning Point Model State Public Health Act (http://www.turningpoint
program.org/Pages/pdfs/statute_mod/MSPHAfinal.pdf).
64.â•‡ American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology News Release (http://www
.acog.org/from_home/publications/press_releases/nr01-02-07-1.cfm).
65.â•‡ BBC News, Aug. 24, 2004 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/
3592976.stm).
66.â•‡ Y. Tang, E. Shimizu, G. Dube., C. Rampon, G. Kerchner, M. Zhuo, G. Liu, and
J. Tsien, “Genetic Enhancement of Learning and Memory in Mice,” Nature 1999, 401:
63–69.
C on t r i bu t or s
Elof A xel Car lson, Ph.D., is Distinguished Teaching Professor

Emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Stony
Brook University in New York. His most recent book is Neither Gods
nor Beasts: How Science Is Changing Who We Think We Are.
Gr egory Michael Dor r, Ph.D., was most recently Visiting Pro-

fessor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College.
He is author of Segregation’s Science: Eugenics and Virginia.
Molly Ladd-Taylor, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of History at

York University in Toronto. She is author of Mother-Work: Women,
Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930.
Jason S. Lantzer, Ph.D., is Adjunct Professor of History at Indiana

University–Purdue University Indianapolis and Butler University and
author of Prohibition Is Here to Stay: The Reverend Edward S. Shumaker
and the Dry Crusade in America.
A ngela Logan is a doctoral candidate in Philanthropic Studies at

Indiana University. She currently serves as the Program Officer for
Education at a private foundation in the southeastern United States.
Paul A. Lombar do, Ph.D., J.D., is Professor of Law at Georgia State

University in Atlanta. His most recent book is Three Generations, No Im-
beciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell.
241
242â•… · â•… c o n t r i b u t o r s
Edwar d R . B. McCabe, M.D., Ph.D., is Professor, Departments of

Pediatrics and Human Genetics, David Geffen School of Medicine, and
Department of Bioengineering, Henry Samuel School of Engineering
and Applied Science; Mattel Executive Endowed Chair of Pediatrics
Physician-in-Chief, Mattel Children’s Hospital, and Co-Director, Cen-
ter for Society and Genetics, all at the University of California at Los
Angeles. He is author (with Linda L. McCabe) of DNA: Promise and
Peril.
Linda L. McCabe, Ph.D., is Adjunct Professor, Departments of Hu-

man Genetics and Pediatrics, David Geffen School of Medicine, and
Center for Society and Genetics, University of California at Los Angeles.
She is author (with Edward R. B. McCabe) of DNA: Promise and Peril.
M a xwell J. Mehlman, J.D., is the Arthur E. Petersilge Professor of

Law and Director of the Law-Medicine Center, Case Western Reserve
University School of Law, and Professor of Bioethics, Case Western Re-
serve University School of Medicine. His latest book is The Price of Per-
fection: Individualism and Society in the Era of Biomedical Enhancement.
Johanna Schoen, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of History at the

University of Iowa. She wrote Choice & Coercion: Birth Control, Steril-
ization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare.
A lex andr a Minna Ster n, Ph.D., is the Zina Pitcher Collegiate

Professor in the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan and
author of Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Mod-
ern America.
I n de x
Abigail Alliance v. von Eschenbach, 234 American Breeders Association, 17,

abortion, 168–70 24n12
African Americans: Aid to Dependent American Eugenics Society, 64n9
Children (ADC) programs, 144, 149; American Public Welfare Association,
biological equality of, 73–74, 77, 78, 130, 139n38
85; eugenical uplift, 70, 71, 73–78, Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990,
81, 84, 87, 90n14; eugenics move- 198
ment among, 68–69; illiteracy of, 147, Andrews, Walter, 47, 64n14
159n26; lynching of, 4, 52, 70, 82–85; Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America, 49
in North Carolina, sterilization of, anti-lynching campaign, 84–85
149–50; sterilization abuse, 174–76; ARC, 124, 134
Tuskegee syphilis experiment, 162– artificial reproductive technologies
63, 176; welfare recipients, 149. See (ART), 200–201, 206–207, 210–12,
also assimilationist eugenics; NAACP 223, 234
baby contests assimilationist eugenics: biological equal-
Agnews insane hospital, 110 ity, 73–74, 77, 78, 85; birth control in,
Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), 149 75–77; cultural superiority, 79; educa-
Alabama sterilization laws: abuse of, tion in, 75, 76, 88; eugenical uplift, 71,
174–76; authority governing, 172; can- 73–78, 81, 84, 87, 90n14; intelligence
didates for, 172–73, 185n10, 187n44; testing, 76; nature/nurture dialectic
challenges to, 173, 176, 180; history (environmental influences), 73–75;
of, 171–73, 187n44; informed consent “New Negro” promotion, 75–76;
in, 161, 168, 176–77, 179, 180, 188n64; origins, 70–71; overview, 69, 87–89;
legal protections, 178, 180, 181; moti- social reform, public policy basis, 79;
vations, 173–81, 185n10; overview, 5; “Talented Tenth” (eugenical uplift),
sexual promiscuity, 172–73; statistics, 70, 72–78, 80, 84, 87, 88, 90n14 (See
172, 177, 182, 187n46; Tuskegee syphi- also NAACP baby contests); teaching
lis experiment, 162–63, 176; veto of, 60 of, 77–80; Tenth Crusade, 81, 83–88;
Allen, Garland, 193–94, 206 theory of, 71–77. See also Racial
Almeling, Rene, 211, 212 eugenics
American Association for Mental Defi- Association for Retarded Children, 124
ciency, 117, 134 Atlanta Constitution, 60
243
244â•… · â•… I n d e x
Augusta Chronicle, 58–60 programs, 200; repeal of, 111; revision

Augusta Merchants Association, 62 of, 102; Roman Catholic Bishops of
California, 102; Sara Rosas Garcia v.
Baker, James Norment, 172 State Department of Institutions, 101–
Barber, W. E., 56 102, 114n28; sexual promiscuity, 99,
Bean, Robert Bennett, 54 102, 106–112; Sonoma State Home,
Beckham, Albert Sidney, 75–76 102, 105, 107–110; statistics, 95–96,
Bell, John, 52 100, 102, 104–106, 109, 110, 114n36,
Belli, Melvin, 182 142, 172; Stockton State Hospital,
Berkenwald, Alan, 205 105–106; welfare dependency basis of,
bionomics, 17 158n22
Birth Control Review, 76 Camp, Lindley W., 60
“Birth Curb Bill” (Family Planning Ser- Carlson, E., 3, 220
vices and Population Research Act of castration: chemical, 161, 177, 188n64,
1970), 163, 167, 178 229–30; surgical, 35, 50
birthright, 148 Champion, W. L., 50
Blair, Tony, 196 chemical castration, 161, 177, 188n64,
Bond, Julian, 171, 172 229–30
“Bootleg Slavery,” 58 Chevra Dor Yeshurim (Association of the
Bourke-White, Margaret, 61 Upright Generation), 224
Bowen, Otis, 36, 37 Child Welfare Exhibit, 46
Boyd, Jackson, 29 “Children’s Number,” 76, 84, 85
Brewer, Mary, 145 Clinton, Bill, 196, 198
Buck v. Bell, 21, 33, 34, 52, 100, 142, 148, Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 213–14
171–72, 176, 180, 230 Committee on Mental Defectives (CMD),
Bunglers experiment, 52–55, 61–62 32–33
Butler, Fred O., 108–109 Conklin, Joseph, 176–77
Cowan, Ruth Schwartz, 233
Caldwell, Erskine, 4, 45–46, 52, 54–55, Crisis, 75–76, 84, 85–87
57–63
Caldwell, Ira, 52–55, 58, 59, 61–62 Damaged Goods, 47
California Cryobank, Inc., 223 Dandridge v. Williams, 229
California sterilization laws: Agnews in- Davenport, Charles, 20, 77, 146, 193, 194
sane hospital, 110; authorities govern- Davis, James C., 49–50
ing, 102, 103, 108–109; challenges to, Davis Racial Integrity Bill, 50
101–102, 108–109, 114n28; chemical Dean, John, 168, 169
castration, 229–30; Department of degeneracy theory: origins, 11, 13–17,
Mental Hygiene (Department of Insti- 23nn3–4
tutions), 101, 102; insane persons, 99, Delaware, 114n36
104–106, 110; on Latinos, 108–109; Department of Health, Education, and
legal protections in, 101–103, 107; Welfare (DHEW), 167, 168, 174, 177,
Moore v. Regents of The University of 181, 221, 713
California, 208; motivations, 100, 105; Department of Mental Hygiene (Depart-
overview, 99–100, 110–12; Pacific ment of Institutions), 101, 102
Colony, 95–96, 100–102, 105, 109; Depo-Provera, 161, 177, 188n64, 229–30
paradigm shift in, 96; Patton State Diener, George S., 36
Hospital, 104–106; prenatal screening Dight, Charles, 121–22, 124
I n d e x â•… · â•… 245
Dight Institute for Human Genetics, 135, 231–33; procreative beneficence,

139n48 200–201; reproductive technologies,
Dixon, Orelia, 177–79, 189n79 200–201, 206–207, 210–12, 223, 234;
Dorr, G., 4, 5, 221 resurgence, factors affecting, 193–95,
Douglas County v. Anaya, 232 199, 212–14
Drews, James, 36 excessive masturbation, 19–20, 29, 97
Du Bois, W.E.B., 4, 69, 71–77, 81–89,
90n14 Family Assistance Plan (FAP), 165–68
Dugdale, Richard, 23n4 family caps, 229
family planning initiatives: National
eHarmony.com, 222 Center for Family Planning Services,
Ehrlich, Paul, 163, 164 167; private, 224; public funding,
Ehrlichman, John, 169 227–28
Eitel, George G., 121 Family Planning Services and Population
Elizabeth I (Queen of England), 13 Research Act of 1970 (“Birth Curb
employment discrimination, 198 Bill”), 163, 167, 178
Engberg, Edward, 130 Faribault School for the Feebleminded,
English, William H., 28 119–20, 129–30, 132, 134, 136
environmental influences: assimilationist federal child tax credits, 228–29
eugenics, 73–75; Bunglers experiment, Federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act
52–55, 61–62; as cause of degeneracy, (FDCA), 204
220 Federal Tort Claims Act, 182
epileptics, sterilization of: in Indiana, feebleminded. See mental disability
32–33, 35, 103; in Minnesota, 124; in sterilizations
Virginia, 21, 33, 34, 52, 100, 142, 148, Fertility Clinic Success Rate and Cer-
171–72, 176, 180, 230 tification Act (FCSRCA) of 1992,
Epstein, Charles, 200 210–11, 223
“equal protection” grounds, 35, 98, 101, First Amendment, 234
229 Fitter Families contests, 64n9, 71, 81–82.
eugenical uplift, 71, 73–78, 81, 84, 87, See also NAACP baby contests
90n14 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 63n3
Eugenics and Racial Integrity in Relation to Florida, 229–30
the New Family (Plecker), 49 Food and Drug Administration (FDA),
eugenics generally: commercialization of 204, 208, 231, 234–35
generally, 212–13; definitions, con- Fort Wayne State School, 95, 99, 106, 107
cepts of, 6–7, 45, 70, 219–22; designer Fourteenth Amendment, 98, 229
babies, 201–204; gene commodifica-
tion, 208–210; genetic determinism, 6, Galton, Francis, 70, 219
196–97, 212; genetic discrimination, Gamble, Clarence J., 148, 159n29
197–99, 212; genomic medicine, 199; gamete donation, 222–24
legal issues (see Legal issues gener- Garvey, Marcus, 69
ally); motivations, 97, 220; organ, gene commodification, 208–210
tissue markets, 207–208; personal au- genetic determinism, 6, 71, 72, 193–98,
tonomy, reproductive freedom, 199– 212, 213
200, 233–34; “practice of medicine” genetic discrimination, 197–99, 212
concept, 204–206; prenatal screening Genetic Information Nondiscrimination
(genetic testing), 199, 200–204, 224, Act, 198–99, 236
246â•… · â•… I n d e x
genetic testing, 199, 200–204, 224, 231–33 Harrison, Benjamin, 28

genomic medicine, 199 Harshman, L. Potter, 103–104
Genzyme Corporation, 209 Hatch, F. W., 99
“Georgia Cracker” (Caldwell), 55 health care revolution, 204–6
Georgia Humane Society, 56 Health Research Group, 175
Georgia Medical Society, 47, 52 Hellman, Louis, 169
Georgia State Asylum, 51 Hendricks, Thomas, 28
Georgia sterilization laws: Bunglers ex- hereditary determinism, 71, 72, 87–89.
periment (environmental influences), See also assimilationist eugenics
52–55, 61–62; Caldwell controversy, heredity, influences on, 12
57–59; challenges to, 60, 61; chemi- Heredity and Hope (Cowan), 233
cal castration, 229–30; Davis Racial Hern, Warren, 168, 169
Integrity Bill, 50; Fitter Families con- Hickok, Lorena, 126
tests, 64n9, 71, 81–82; insane persons, Hispanics. See Latinos
50, 56, 60–61; legislative passage of, Holmes, C. Oliver, 33
59–63; marriage medical certificates, Holmes, Oliver Wendell Jr., 33, 60, 171
47–48; medical boards, 56; motiva- “How to Conduct a Baby Contest” (Pick-
tions for, 51, 56–59; one drop rule, ens), 84
48–50; overview, 4, 45–46; political Hudson v. Hudson, 187n53
history, 46–47; “profound regret” Human Fertilisation and Embryology Au-
resolution, 63, 67n103; repeal of, 63, thority (HFEA), 202–204
67n100; state-sponsored, 50–52; sta- Human Genome Project, 195–97, 208,
tistics, 62, 148; veto of, 60; voluntary, 212
63, 67nn100,102; Voluntary Steriliza- Hurty, John N., 206
tion Act, 67n102
Gesell, Gerhard, 180–81, 221 in vitro fertilization (IVF), 200–201, 210,
God’s Little Acre (Caldwell), 57 223
Goodrich, James, 32, 98 Indiana sterilization laws: authorities gov-
Gracewood Training School for Mental erning, 36, 103, 107–108; challenges
Defectives, 51 to, 21, 31–34, 98, 107–108; charity
Grant, Madison, 49 movement, 15–16; Fort Wayne State
Graves, Bibb, 60, 173 School, 95, 99, 106, 107; history of,
Great Depression, 22, 34, 52, 100, 117, 11–13, 21–22, 97–99; House Bill 265,
125, 144, 173 35; House Bill 275, 36; House Bill
Great Migration, 71 1238, 37; hygiene movement, 18–19;
Great Society, 164, 166–68 ideological basis of, 27–28; insane
Greenberg et al. v. Miami: Children’s Hos- persons, 32, 34, 99, 103; Ishmaelites
pital, 208 (Tribe of Ishmael), 3, 15–17, 24n9;
Griswold v. Connecticut, 171 Jeffersonville Reformatory, 11, 18, 20,
Grubbs v. Barbourville Family Health Ctr., 29–31, 97–98; legal protections in,
P.S.C, 226–27 102–104, 107; legislative passage of,
Guthrie, Robert, 231 28–30; marriage certificates, 29; men-
tal hospitals, 106; Model Sterilization
Hanly, J. Frank, 20, 30, 31, 38n10 Act, 21, 34; motivations, 19–20, 29,
Harkner, Blanche, 130 97–98; Muscatatuck State School, 99,
Harnicher v. University of Utah Medical 106, 107; overview, 3, 22–23, 26–27,
Center, 223 110–12; paradigm shift in, 34–37, 96;
I n d e x â•… · â•… 247
repeal of, 36–37, 111; revisions of, 34– Larson, Edward, 46

36, 99, 103; Senate Bill 86, 33; Senate Latinos: immigration limits on, 230;
Bill 304, 35; statistics, 95, 98, 99, 104 sterilization abuse, 174–75; welfare
informed consent: in Alabama, 161, 168, recipients, 149
176–77, 179, 180, 188n64; Minnesota Laughlin, Harry, 20, 21, 34, 49
provisions, 118–20, 127–29; new- Le Sueur, Meridel, 129
born screening, 231, 232; in North legal issues generally: chemical castra-
Carolina, 141, 152, 154; organ, tissue tion, 161, 177, 188n64, 229–30; con-
markets, 208; in poverty eugenics, 161, jugal visits, 230; “equal protection”
168, 175; Relf v. Weinberger, 161, 168, grounds, 35, 98, 101, 229; facilitated
176–77, 179, 184n2, 188n64; in sexual practices, 224–29; family caps, 229;
promiscuity sterilization, 161, 168, 171 family planning initiatives, publicly
insane persons sterilization: in California, funded, 227–28; federal child tax cred-
99, 104–106, 110; excessive masturba- its, 228–29; future directions, 235–37;
tion, 19–20, 29, 97; in Georgia, 50, gamete donation, 222–24; immigra-
56, 60–61; in Indiana, 32, 34, 99, 103; tion law, 230; mandated practices,
in Minnesota, 119–20, 129; in North 229–33; newborn screening, 231–33;
Carolina, 151; schizophrenia, 104, 151 personal autonomy, reproductive free-
insurance company discrimination, 199, dom, 199–200, 233–34; restrictions,
205 revisions, 233–35; selective breeding,
intelligence testing: in assimilationist eu- 222–24; tolerated practices, 222–24;
genics, 76; as diagnostic tool, 142–43; Viagra coverage, 230–31; wrongful
in Minnesota, 117, 119, 123, 127, birth actions, 225–27. See also specific
132–33; in North Carolina, 154; in case law
selective breeding, 223 Levin, Joseph, 178, 182
Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), Levy, Robert J., 135
210 Lindsey, E. E., 56–57
Ishmaelites (Tribe of Ishmael), 3, 15–17, List, Walter, 121
24n9 Logan, A., 4
Looren de Jong, Huib, 197
Jeffersonville Reformatory, 11, 18, 20, Lynching, 4, 52, 70, 82–85
29–31, 97–98
Johnson, Frank, 180 Malinka, Betty, 36
Jordan, David Starr, 11, 13, 16–17, 22, 23, marriage laws: intermarriage, 49–50, 74,
24n13, 28 169; medical certificates, 29, 47–48
Judson, Horace Freeland, 195 Marshall, Thomas, 21, 31, 98
Masters case, 132–34
Kennedy, Edward, 169 McCabe, E., 6
Kevles, Daniel, 187n41, 220 McCabe, L., 6
Kirkpatrick, Milton, 130–32 McCulloch, O., 3, 11, 13, 15–16, 22,
Koomen, Jakob, 153, 154 28–29
Kuhlmann, Frederick, 121, 124, 127 McNutt, Paul V., 34
Medical Association of Georgia, 56,
La Du, Blanche, 121–22 67n100
Ladd-Taylor, M., 4–5 Mehlman, M., 6
Lamarck, Jean Baptiste, 12 mental disability sterilizations: in Cali-
Lantzer, J., 3 fornia, 99–110; genetic foundation
248â•… ·â•… I n d e x
of, 135, 142; in Georgia, 51; hygiene in, 124–26; welfare dependency basis
movement, 19; inability to compete of, 117–23, 127, 132–34
grounds for, 78, 144; in Indiana, miscegenation, 48–50, 64n24, 70, 74, 88,
32–35, 95–99, 101–103, 106; job train- 111, 169
ing of, 99; in Minnesota, civil commit- Model Sterilization Act, 21, 34
ment of, 119–20, 122–23, 127; over- Molloy v. Meier, 225
view, 95–97, 106–107, 171; paradigm Montana, 229–30
shift regarding, 104; protection vs. Moore v. Regents of The University of Cali-
control issue, 176–81; public percep- fornia, 208
tions of, 173, 174; restoration to capac- Moynihan, Daniel, 166
ity, 122, 129, 132–34; social costs of, Muhammad, Elijah, 69
51, 56–57; statistics, 95–96, 99 Muscatatuck State School, 99, 106, 107
Mental Retardation: A Family Study Myriad Genetics, 209–210
(Reed), 135, 139n48
Mental Retardation Protection Act of NAACP baby contests: funds distri-
1975, 135–36 bution, 84–85; history of, 82–83;
Michigan sterilization statutes, 30 overview, 70, 80–82, 87–89; results,
Minnesota Eugenics Society, 120–21, controversies, legacy, 85–87; Tenth
125 Crusade, 81, 83–85
Minnesota sterilization laws: authority Nation of Islam (NOI), 69, 71
governing, 119–22, 124, 131; challeng- National Association for Retarded Chil-
es to, 129–35; Child Welfare Commis- dren, 124, 134
sion, 121; Children’s Code, 118–19, National Association of Colored Women,
121; civil commitment, 119–20, 78
122–23, 127; Dight Institute for Hu- National Center for Family Planning Ser-
man Genetics, 135, 139n48; disputes vices, 167
regarding, 120–21, 126, 136; enact- National Council of Negro Women
ment of, 118; Faribault School for the (NCNW), 178
Feebleminded, 119–20, 129–30, 132, Nazi eugenics program, 35, 56, 148, 163,
134, 136; gendered ideas in, 126–27; 171, 172
informed consent provisions, 118–20, neurasthenia, 19, 23n3
127–29; insane persons, 119–20, 129; New Deal, 4, 117, 120, 125, 126. See also
intelligence testing, 117, 119, 123, 127, Minnesota sterilization laws
132–33; legal foundation, 118–19; New Republic, 60
legal protections, 118–20, 127–29, New York Post, 58
135–36; Masters case, 132–34; Mental Nixon, Richard, 5, 162–70
Retardation Protection Act of 1975, Noll, Steven, 185n10
135–36; motivations, 118, 121–25; Nordau, Max, 23n3
overview, 4–5; paradigm shifts in, Norplant, 230, 231
124–25, 134–36; Public Health Ser- North Carolina: sexual promiscuity steril-
vice, 130–31; restoration to capacity, ization, 141, 145–47, 152, 158nn18,20
122, 129, 132–34; sexual promiscuity, North Carolina Eugenics Board, 141,
123, 158n21; State Board of Control, 143–44, 174
120, 122, 124–26; as state-funded North Carolina sterilization laws: abuse
birth control, 128–29; statistics, 118, of, 174–76; African Americans in,
120, 125, 134, 136n5, 158n21; termi- 149–50, 159n26; authority govern-
nology, 136n1; welfare administration ing, 143–44; candidate assessment,
I n d e x â•… · â•… 249
150–55; Caswell Training School, 168, 175; overview, 4, 5; voluntary

143, 152; challenges to, 147–50; ex- sterilization, 171, 181, 186n37; welfare
pansion of, 150; illiteracy and, 147, reform movement, 163–71. See also
159n26; implementation, 143–47; Georgia sterilization laws; Minnesota
informed consent provision, 141, 152, sterilization laws; North Carolina ster-
154; insane persons, 151; intelligence ilization laws; Relf v. Weinberger
testing, 154; motivations, 5, 142, 144, Powell, John, 49
147–52; overview, 5, 141–43, 155–56, “practice of medicine” concept, 204–6
157n6; repeal of, 155; sexual promis- preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD),
cuity, 141, 145–47, 152, 158nn18,20; 200–204, 224
socialization basis of, 150, 153; sta- prenatal screening, 199, 200–204, 224,
tistics, 114n36, 141, 142, 146–50; 231–33
welfare dependency basis of, 144–53, Price, W. F., 99
158nn23,24 prison inmate sterilization: in Alabama,
172–73, 187n50, 188n63; castration
Ochsner, Albert, 19, 22 of, 35, 50; chemical castration, 229–
Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), 30; conjugal visits, 230; as degeneracy
165, 167–69, 174, 177 cure, 19–21, 65n32, 97–98; hygiene
Office of Human Research Protection movement, 18; as mandatory, 34, 173;
(OHRP), 208 marriage laws, 29; as voluntary, 30, 31
Oklahoma, 35 private family planning initiatives, 224
Olson, Floyd, 125–27 procreative beneficence, 200–201
one drop rule, 48–50 Progressives, 27
organ, tissue markets, 207–208 Project Prevention (CRACK), 224, 234
“Protecting the Mentally Retarded”
Pacific Colony, 95–96, 100–102, 105, 109 (Levy), 135
Partlow, William D., 172, 173, 180,
187n50 racial eugenics: antimiscegenation
Pennsylvania sterilization statutes, 30 statutes, Georgia, 48–50, 65n32;
Penrose, Lionel, 197 biological equality, 73–74, 77, 78, 85;
Petersen, Hjalmar, 134 deference to ruling class in, 179; inter-
Phillips, Howard K., 170 marriage, 49–50, 74, 169; on Latinos,
Pickens, William, 80, 84–86 108–109; overview, 4, 5; protection
Pierce, Clovis, 174, 182 vs. control issue, 176–81. See also Ala-
Pius XI, 125 bama sterilization laws; assimilationist
Plecker, Walter, 49 eugenics; Georgia sterilization laws
Poor Laws, 13 Racial Integrity Act, 49
Popenoe, Paul, 110, 158n22 Ralston, Samuel, 32
The Population Bomb (Ehrlich), 163 Read, Horace G., 30
posthumous sperm procurement (PHSP), Reed, Elizabeth, 135, 139n48
210 Reed, Sheldon, 135, 139n48
poverty eugenics: Caldwell controversy, Reily, John A., 105
57–59; coercive sterilization, 164, Relf v. Weinberger: abuse issue, 174–76;
166–68, 182–83; contraceptives Alabama history in, 171–73; Congres-
(birth control), 166, 168, 171, 186n38; sional hearings on, 169; informed
degeneracy theory origins, 11, 13–17, consent issue, 161, 168, 176–77, 179,
23nn3–4; informed consent in, 161, 184n2, 188n64; legacy of, 182–83;
250â•… · â•… I n d e x
Nixon administration reaction to, 170; sharecroppers, 61

overview, 5, 161, 221; protection vs. Sharp, Harry Clay, 2, 11, 13, 18–23,
control issue, 176–81 24n14, 29–31, 97–98
reproduction eugenics: abortion, 168–70; Skinner v. Oklahoma, 35, 171, 186n40,
history of, 11–19; National Center for 221, 230, 233
Family Planning Services, 167; over- Sletvold, A. O., 130
view, 5, 6; welfare reform movement, Smith, Warren Wallace, 98
163–71 Smyth, Margaret, 105–6
reproductive technologies, 200–201, Some American People (Caldwell), 61
206–207, 210–12, 223, 234 Sonoma State Home, 102, 105, 107–10
Rhodes, Robert C., 56 Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois), 74–75
Richardson, Charles H., 56 South Carolina sterilization laws, 60,
Riddick, Elaine, 141, 152 174–76
Rivers, E. D., 61 Spencer, Herbert, 19
Roberts, Dorothy, 220, 229 Stassen, Harold, 126, 130
Rockefeller, Nelson, 166 Stern, A., 4
Roe v. Wade, 169, 171 Stocking, Leonard, 110
Rogers, Arthur C., 119, 120 Stockton State Hospital, 105–106
Roman Catholic Bishops of California, Stoddard, Lothrop, 49
102 Sunday, Billy, 47
Rosenfeld, Bernard, 175 Suter, Sonia, 220
Sabatini, Sandra, 195 “Talented Tenth” (eugenical uplift), 70,

Sanger, Margaret, 76 72–78, 84, 87, 88, 90n14
Sara Rosas Garcia v. State Department of Talmadge, Eugene, 57, 60
Institutions, 101–102, 114n28 Taylor v. Kurapati, 225–27
Savulescu, Julian, 200–201 Tenth Crusade, 81, 83–85, 83–88
schizophrenia, 104, 151 Terman, Lewis, 119, 124
Schoen, J., 5 Thomas, William Hannibal, 69, 71
Schricker, Henry F., 36 Thomson, Mildred, 124–28, 130–32,
Scripps-Howard news chain, 58 134
selective breeding, 222–24 Thurmond, Strom, 60
Sex, Race, and Science (Larson), 46 Time, 58, 59
sexual promiscuity sterilization: abuse Tobacco Road (Caldwell), 55, 57–58, 61,
issue, 174–76; in Alabama, 172–73; 62
Buck v. Bell, 21, 33, 34, 52, 100, 142, Townsend, Howard, 32
148, 171–72, 176, 180, 230; in Califor- Tribe of Ishmael (Ishmaelites), 3, 15–17,
nia, 99, 102, 106–112; excessive mas- 24n9
turbation, 19–20, 29, 97; federal guide- Turner, Thomas Wyatt, 69, 77–82
lines suppression, 168–70; informed Tuskegee syphilis experiment, 162–63,
consent in, 161, 168, 171; medical 176
certificates in, 47; in Minnesota, 123,
158n21; North Carolina, 141, 145–47, United Kingdom, 202–204
152, 158nn18,20; order, process of United Network for Organ Sharing
obtaining, 34, 96, 99; overview, 5, 6; (UNOS), 207
rape, incest cases, 141, 152, 158n20. Universal Negro Improvement Associa-
See also Relf v. Weinberger tion (UNIA), 69, 71
I n d e x â•… · â•… 251
Vail, David J., 134–35 Weismann, August, 12

vasectomy: challenges to, 21, 31–34, 60, welfare dependency perspective: in Cali-
61, 98, 107–108; historical use of, 3, fornia, 158n22; in Minnesota, 117–23,
12, 19–21, 24n5, 29–30, 97. See also 127, 132–34; Nixon administration
specific states reforms, 163–71; in North Carolina,
Virchow, R., 18 144–53, 158nn23–24
Virginia sterilization laws: Buck v. Bell, 21, “Welfare Reform: Shared Responsibility,”
33, 34, 52, 100, 142, 148, 171–72, 176, 165
180, 230; constitutionality of, 21, 100; White, J., 101–102
language of, 34; Racial Integrity Act, Whittaker, William H., 29–31, 98
49; repeal of, 155; statistics, 114n36, Willan, Horace R., 34
142, 148; voluntary, 186n37 Williams, Charles F., 98
Voluntary Sterilization Act, 67n102 Winston, Ellen, 150
Women’s Christian Temperance Union,
Walker v. Pierce, 174, 182 46
Warren, Earl, 102 wrongful birth actions, 225–27
Washington Post, 170, 183 Wyatt v. Aderholt, 176, 180, 188n63
Washington University v. Catalona, 208
Watson, James, 195–96 Yao Ming, 222
Watts, Mary T., 81–82 You Have Seen Their Faces (Caldwell), 61
Webster, G. M., 105 Young, Emily, 189n79
Bioethics and the H umanities
E r ic M . M e s l i n a n d R ic h a r d B . M i l l e r , e di t or s
The Ethics of Autism: Among Them, but Not of Them

Deborah R. Barnbaum
Dark Medicine: Rationalizing Unethical Medical Research

Edited by William R. LaFleur, Gernot Böhme,
and Susumu Shimazono
Bioethics and Organ Transplantation in a Muslim Society:

A Study in Culture, Ethnography, and Religion
Farhat Moazam
The Dream of the Perfect Child

Joan Rothschild
Profits before People? Ethical Standards and the Marketing

of Prescription Drugs
Leonard J. Weber
Paul A. Lombar do is best known for his work on the history of
the American eugenics movement, particularly the 1927 United States
Supreme Court case of Buck v. Bell, which upheld state laws mandating
eugenic sterilization of the so-called feebleminded and socially inad-
equate. He earned both his Ph.D. and J.D. at the University of Virginia,
where he served on the faculty from 1990 until 2006. Since 2006 he has
been Professor of Law at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

A Century of Eugenics in America From The Indiana Experiment To The Human Genome Era Bioethics and The Humanities

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A century of Eugenics in America

From the Indiana Experiment

Indiana University Pr ess

iupress.indiana.edu A century of eugenics in America : from the

· Preface & Acknowledgmentsâ•… ix

· Introduction: Looking Back at Eugenicsâ•… Paul A. Lombardoâ•… 1

· Part 1. The Indiana Origins of Eugenic Sterilization

· Part 2. Eugenics and Popular Culture

· Part 3. State Studies of Eugenic Sterilization

· Part 4. Eugenics in the Human Genome Era

· List of Contributorsâ•… 241

The Indiana secretary of health appeared on behalf of the governor

This group produced new scholarship that probed practices in Indiana,

Looking Back at Eugenics

Eugenics. A quick internet search identifies that word as the invective du

Par t 1. The I n diana Origins

Elof Carlson reminds us that the roots of twentieth-century eugenics

Par t 2 . E ugenics an d P opu l ar C u lt ure

A common theme among most of these essays is the role of economic

genic.” The work of novelist Erskine Caldwell confronted Georgians with

Par t 3. S tat e S t u dies of

public guardianship were closely linked to decisions about which people

of more children of poverty. To others, it meant encouraging the most

The Indiana Origins of

The Hoosier Connection: Compulsory

Two important Indiana intellectuals, Oscar McCulloch (1843–91) and

McCulloch’s role was to popularize the shift from an enabling char-

T he R ise of Dege n erac y T heor y

Degeneracy theory arose about 1600 in response to a problem that had

in need of reform clustered together in problem families or clans. Oscar

O scar McC ulloch a n d the C harit y

Oscar McCulloch’s father wanted him to pursue a business career, but

David S tarr Jorda n a n d the

Jordan received his bachelor’s degree at Cornell University and a master’s

sity’s presidency in 1885. While in Indianapolis, he regularly encountered

H arr y C la y S harp a n d the

In addition to practical reform in the prison, Sharp remained inter-

S etti ng the S tage for

tion. Less an innovator than an opportunist, Sharp was simply melding

Governor Thomas Marshall, the Democrat who replaced Hanly,

S terili z ation after the

Sharp was successful in initiating a movement that eventually led to more

L ooki ng B ack at the Compulsor y

It is remarkable that something as malevolent in its outcome as compul-

The Indiana Way of Eugenics:

sidered the issue “settled.” A new round of potentially fractious legislative

Eugenics, the “science of the well born,” embodied a fundamental clash

Eugenicists referred to McCulloch’s study to argue for tighten-

economic, and public health arguments together in the 1920s. Eugenics

The repeal legislation was signed on February 13, 1974, by Gover-

5.â•‡ J. H. Landman, “The Human Sterilization Movement,” Journal of Criminal Law

Eugenics and Popular Culture

From Better Babies to the Bunglers:

ideas we now associate with America’s eugenics movement. His work

As support for instruction in eugenics gained momentum, the state

riage laws prohibiting unions between potentially “defective” parents,

The On e Drop Ru l e : The E ug e n ic s

different races separate.22 In 1914, the leaders of Georgia’s women’s clubs

S t e r i l i z at ion L aw i n Ge org i a : F rom

solution. Caldwell conceded that it was impossible to separate environ-

dragged society down. They contributed to the “sociological morass in

der at the patrician university, he was forced to work as a janitor in a pool

The Tob acco Roa d to