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Author: Paul A. Lombardo
ISBN : 0801898242
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"Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Few lines from Supreme Court opinions are as memorable as this declaration by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in the landmark 1927 case Buck v. Bell. The ruling allowed states to forcibly sterilize residents in order to prevent "feebleminded and socially inadequate" people from having children. It is the only time the Supreme Court endorsed surgery as a tool of government policy. Paul Lombardo's startling narrative exposes the Buck case's fraudulent roots.In 1924 Carrie Buck-involuntarily institutionalized by the State of Virginia after she was raped and impregnated-challenged the state's plan to sterilize her. Having already judged her mother and daughter mentally deficient, Virginia wanted to make Buck the first person sterilized under a new law designed to prevent hereditarily "defective" people from reproducing. Lombardo's more than twenty-five years of research and his own interview with Buck before she died demonstrate conclusively that she was destined to lose the case before it had even begun. Neither Carrie Buck nor her mother and daughter were the "imbeciles" condemned in the Holmes opinion. Her lawyer-a founder of the institution where she was held-never challenged Virginia's arguments and called no witnesses on Buck's behalf. And judges who heard her case, from state courts up to the U.S. Supreme Court, sympathized with the eugenics movement. Virginia had Carrie Buck sterilized shortly after the 1927 decision.Though Buck set the stage for more than sixty thousand involuntary sterilizations in the United States and was cited at the Nuremberg trials in defense of Nazi sterilization experiments, it has never been overturned. Three Generations, No Imbeciles tracks the notorious case through its history, revealing that it remains a potent symbol of government control of reproduction and a troubling precedent for the human genome era.
Books with free ebook downloads available Free Download Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell [Paperback]
- Paperback: 384 pages
- Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press; 1 edition (August 31, 2010)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 9780801898242
- ISBN-13: 978-0801898242
- ASIN: 0801898242
- Product Dimensions: 0.9 x 5.9 x 8.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Free Download Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell
Paul A. Lombardo's history of Buck v. Bell, Three Generations, No Imbeciles, is a terrific telling of case of Carrie Buck, a young woman sterilized by Virginia in 1927 in order to prevent her from having more "socially inadequate" offspring.
In 1924, supporters of a statute known as the Virginia Sterilization Act challenged the very law they helped author in hopes of gaining legal cover for their eugenic efforts. They claimed that reproduction among the "feebleminded" was a proximate threat to the body social. According to the "expert" brought in by counsel to defend the Act, Buck was the daughter of a feebleminded woman, was feebleminded herself, and had demonstrated that she was a danger to the community by bearing an illegitimate feebleminded daughter.
The case made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In its 8-1 affirmation, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously opined, "Three generations of imbeciles is enough."
Lombardo presents documentary proof that Carrie Buck and her daughter were perfectly normal, perhaps even a bit above average, and that the 1924 proceedings which led to the Supreme Court's review were a sham, with prosecution and defense attorneys colluding to produce the desired outcome. Adding insult, Buck's daughter, the birth of whom signaled to many that Carrie was genetically predisposed to promiscuity, was the product of an incestuous rape.
But Lombardo's story is about much more than a poor court decision.
Lombardo tells a crackling tale, and tells it so passionately and so well that one barely notices that this is not a popularization or polemic, but a thoroughly documented work of history.
The full contents of this book should be required reading in every college and university in the United States. However, in my opinion, the most important piece of information in this book does not come until Pg. 239, when Paul Lombardo provides the reader with the revelation that the 1927 Buck v. Bell opinion was entered as evidence in the defense of Hitler's henchmen in order to prove that the U.S. Supreme Court had deemed eugenic sterilization legal. Eugenics was the core concept of Hitler's regime. Eugenic considerations were used to decide even which works of art were to be accepted by the Third Reich, which books, and just about every other aspect of Hitler's domestic policy. Thus, providing proof that eugenics was an accepted science by the U.S. government was a strong defense for the National Socialists on trial at Nuremberg.
In these last pages, Paul Lombardo also explains that one of the top German scientists that was primarily responsible for the Third Reich's various eugenic programs was captured by the U.S. Army and the released when he conveyed extensive knowledge of the eugenics movement inside of the U.S.. Ernst Rudin was that man, and he was no ordinary National Socialist. Rudin was one of the men that Joseph Mengele answered to in the National Socialist hierarchy. Rudin was let go because he would have exposed the large amount of collaboration that America's top scientists and their respective universities and institutions gave German eugenicists.
Clearly my preference is to tell the reader why the book is so critically important at the beginning, in order to set up why the history of this crucial 1927 Supreme Court case is so important.
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