That Time in 1927 When SCOTUS OK’d Sterilizing ‘Imbeciles’
One of the primary arguments that the Nazis raised in their defense was the fact that they had largely lifted those policies from the United States where more than half the state legislatures had passed forced sterilization laws, where states had already carried out tens of thousands of such sterilizations, and where the Supreme Court in a 1927 case called Buck v. Bell said it was perfectly legal to do so.
.. The president of Harvard was a eugenicist. There were two major geneticists at Harvard writing in a positive way about eugenics. Medical journals were filled with pro-eugenics sterilization articles. The American Bar Association president endorsed a eugenics law in Connecticut. The thought leaders thought it was a great idea that would lift up humanity.
.. In 2016, it seems like an Italian or a Jewish person from the Ukraine seems a lot like another Caucasian, but back then there were very big distinctions. Jews and Italians were regarded as very other and not all that white. I was shocked reading the way people spoke in the 1920s — including members of Congress — about Italians and Jews. It was incredibly raw and bigoted
.. She was taken in by a foster family in Charlottesville, Virginia. She did OK there until a nephew rapes her and she’s pregnant out of wedlock. This was a day and age when that was not acceptable, and the family was possibly worried that the nephew would be prosecuted.
Rather than send her to a home for unwed mothers, they had her declared feebleminded which wasn’t hard to do for a woman pregnant out of wedlock.
.. The Nazis were adopting their own eugenic sterilization modeled largely on our program. The more people associated eugenics with this idea of building a master race and anti-Semitism and racism, it came to be seen as un-American.
.. The other was reading how Oliver Wendell Holmes thought. I had learned about him as this great justice, and the degree to which he was incredibly bigoted and condescending toward people who weren’t of his so-called high birth made him in many ways a terrible judge.