Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the opinion for the Court. Holmes had already served on the Supreme Court for a quarter century; for twenty years before that, he had been a justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the last three years as chief justice. He had been educated in private schools, at Harvard College, and at Harvard Law School. He was, by common consensus, a very smart man.
He was able to dispose of Carrie Buck’s claim in a few pithy sentences.
We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
Carrie Buck was sterilized on October 19, 1927. Not long after, she was “paroled” from the Colony into the care of a family in Bland, Virginia, for whom she worked as a domestic servant. She married; she and her husband had, of course, no children. Her husband died after twenty-four years of marriage. Carrie eventually remarried and in 1970 moved back to her hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia. For ten years, she and her husband lived there in a one-room, cinder block shed. In 1980 Carrie was hospitalized for exposure and malnutrition; later, she and her husband were taken to a nursing home where, on January 28, 1983, Carrie Buck died at the age of seventy-six.
Not long before her death, Carrie Buck was interviewed by Professor Paul Lombardo of the University of Virginia. He writes:
Throughout Carrie’s adult life she regularly displayed intelligence and kindness that belied the “feeblemindedness” and “immorality” that were used as an excuse to sterilize her. She was an avid reader, and even in her last weeks was able to converse lucidly, recalling events from her childhood. Branded by Holmes as a second generation imbecile, Carrie provided no support for his glib epithet throughout her life.
Carrie Buck, it appears, was no “imbecile” at all. She was poor, she was uneducated, and these no doubt contributed to her “diagnosis.” But even under the crude categories of the day, under which “imbeciles” ranked below the various grades of “morons” in the grand hierarchy of “feeblemindedness,” Carrie was no “imbecile” and probably was not “feebleminded” at all.
Carrie Buck’s attorney might have known better, might have known that Carrie was no imbecile, was no moron, and was perhaps not feebleminded at all. He might have explained all this to the reviewing courts. But Carrie Buck’s attorney apparently had other plans. Irving Whitehead, it evolves, was a former member of the Board of Directors of the Virginia Colony for the Feeble-minded and a long time associate of Strode and Priddy’s. Indeed, a building at the Colony named in Irving Whitehead’s honor was opened just two months before the arrival of a young mother named Carrie Buck.
Irving Whitehead might also have known the truth behind Carrie’s moral failings. Carrie’s illegitimate daughter was conceived in neither a moral lapse nor an imbecile’s folly; she was conceived when Carrie was raped by the nephew of her foster parents. Carrie Buck was institutionalized not to protect her welfare, but to preserve her foster family’s good name.
In the end, Carrie Buck was a victim not of nature, but of the people around her. The eventual debunking of the sham that was eugenics merely confirmed what should have been obvious all along: the “science” that dictated Carrie’s unwelcome trip to the Colony infirmary was in reality only politics, the cruel politics of inequality.
There is, finally, the matter of Carrie’s daughter, the third of the three generations of imbeciles. Relatively little is known of her life, save this: Vivian Buck attended regular public schools for all of her life, before dying of an infectious disease at the age of eight. And in the next to last year of her short life, Carrie Buck’s daughter earned a spot on the Honor Roll.1
There are no more imbeciles in America, no more morons, no more feebleminded of any type or degree. We eliminated them all, installing in their place people with varying degrees of mental retardation: at first, some were educable or trainable; now their retardation is mild or moderate or severe or profound. And when we determined that we had too many people with mental retardation, we tightened the general definition of the class, eliminating half the mentally retarded population in a single bold stroke that would have made the eugenicists proud.
But some things have not changed. In contemporary America, we still sterilize people with low IQs. When they escape sterilization, we routinely deny them the right to raise their own children. Systematically, too, we deny them the right to marry, to vote, to choose their residence, to live on their own. We have made a history for people with mental retardation that is replete with the normal horrors of discrimination—stigmatization, segregation, disenfranchisement—but we have added to their lot the unique horrors of involuntary sterilizations and psychosurgery. In our words and in our deeds we have been relentless in our efforts to diminish them, to make them lesser people. All of this, because they are not sufficiently smart.2
The remarkable furor that followed the publication of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s book The Bell Curve tended to obscure the altogether unremarkable thesis of that text. Simply put, its thesis was this: in American society today, smart folks get ahead, and not-so-smart folks don’t. As their critics pointed out, Herrnstein and Murray relied on a whole lot of questionable material to make this point, and stretched the bounds of science to posit a slew of weak correlations among various “biological” traits, “intelligence,” and assorted indicia of “success.” Still, the basic empirical proposition of the text has survived most critical scrutiny: if you are smart, then indeed, you get ahead; if you are not, chances are, you won’t.
This, of course, came as good news to smart people throughout the country, and they were not reluctant to express their satisfaction. For them, it was not merely that the inevitable equation of smartness and success ensured their fortunes; what was more important, rather, was that they could feel downright good about their prospects.
There was, after all, a subtext to The Bell Curve’s simple story that is almost of moral dimensions. The people who have made it have done so because they are smart; they, in a very clear sense, deserve their success. Conversely, the people who have not made it have failed because they are not-so-smart; they, in an equally clear sense, deserve their failure.
Understandably, then, The Bell Curve was not perceived as bringing very good news for the not-so-smart people, who to the extent that they could understand the text’s rather simple message, had to be forgiven for finding it just a bit depressing. For these people, after all, there were to be no smiling fortunes; destiny promised them less wealth, less status, less comfort. The Bell Curve offered to the not-so-smart people little more than a single lesson in civics: hereafter, they should no longer labor under the illusion that smart people were to blame for their misfortunes.
Indeed, the worst news for the not-so-smart people came in the political subtext of the book, and it was this reading that generated some of the most heated debate. For Herrnstein and Murray, there were clear policy implications to their findings. If smart people get ahead, almost no matter what, and if not-so-smart people fall behind, almost no matter what, then it does not seem to make a great deal of sense to devote massive amounts of energy and resources to the pursuit of social and economic equality. From a pragmatic viewpoint, those efforts were simply futile; moreover, if the moral lesson of their work was correct, then such rampant egalitarianism was simply unjust. New Deals, Great Societies, New Covenants and the like would never alter the basic social hierarchy; they would
