Liberalism and the Forced Sterilization of the "Unfit."
One of the great historical shell-games is the way that progressive and liberal historians, i.e., "historians," have managed to file off the common denominator between liberals and Nazis: they both relied on science to inform their social policy, particularly Darwin's evolutionary theory, and they weren't going to listen to "religious fundamentalists" and their nancy talk about human dignity.
Cato has an article on Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and the Buck v. Bell decision:
Today, the Charlotte Observer reports on the ongoing attempts to find restitution for the 3,000 living North Carolinians who were victims of the state’s forced sterilization program. It may surprise many readers, but forced sterilization has a long and shameful history in the United States. In North Carolina, the last forced sterilization was performed as late as 1974.
The most famous case of forced sterilization was the 1927 Supreme Court case of Buck v. Bell. Carrie Buck, a “feeble minded” woman from Virginia who was deemed the “probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring,” challenged the state’s attempt to forcibly sterilize her. In an opinion that even his colleagues called “brutal,” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. curtly did away with Buck’s pleas, ramming home his decision with one of the most heartless and ignominious lines in all of the Supreme Court history:
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.
Amazingly, Justice Holmes’s original draft of the opinion contained worse language. He later wrote to Harold Laski that he was “amused” that his fellow justices suggested rhetorical changes when he “purposely used short and rather brutal words… that made them mad.” Nevertheless, despite his desire to use crueler language, Justice Holmes was satisfied with himself, once telling a friend, “One decision that I wrote gave me pleasure, establishing the constitutionality of a law permitting the sterilization of imbeciles.”
It has continually fascinated me that Buck v. Bell seems to be rarely found on the short list of worst Supreme Court decisions. Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Korematsu (the case upholding the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII) are nearly household terms used to describe the height of Supreme Court folly. But if Buck is among the rogue’s gallery of Supreme Court opinions, it certainly isn’t higher than Lochner v. New York. The term most often used to describe Supreme Court error is to “Lochnerize.”
That prioritization fits my experience of law school in the early '80s.
The explanation is that Lochner was a "conservative" decision by "conservative" judges, which actually served libertarian interests by limiting the power of the government to interfere with the economy. So, it had to be attacked root and branch on an ideological level. Buck was written by a favorite of the progressives - and actually was part of the same progressive/liberal/elitist ideology that came to dominate jurisprudence in a later generation. So, it had to be explained as a sad anomaly on the part of a great justice.
But Buck wasn't an anomaly. Anyone who read histories or contemporary accounts written at the time that eugenics and forced sterilization were considered by the academic class and other elites as entirely unremarkable. Holmes was simply following the conventional wisdom of his class.
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