Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity
By Harry Bruinius
Knopf, 401 pages, $30
Over the course of the 20th Century, doctors in state psychiatric hospitals sterilized more than 65,000 American men and women they deemed to be physically, mentally, or behaviorally unfit and inferior. These procedures were undertaken as a form of social engineering designed to prevent the “unfit” from bearing children and, supposedly, passing along their genetic problems to their offspring. The result would be, doctors believed, a reduction in the number of “defectives” in society as well as in the social cost of maintaining them.
In his book “Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity,” Harry Bruinius, a Chicago native and professor of journalism at Hunter College in New York City, argues that this program was part of a broader campaign by Americans to promote racial purity through the so-called science of eugenics. In his engaging, often moving story, he brings to life an extensive and colorful cast of characters, especially the men (and the occasional woman) who energetically applied English scientist Francis Galton’s vision of “a scientifically organized Utopia” to American society.
Proponents of eugenics and the so-called better breeding of humans were not a radical fringe, Bruinius makes clear. Rather, they were, in their own way, farsighted and deeply concerned–if misguided and bigoted–scientists who genuinely believed they could save the nation’s bloodline and gene pool from the severe threats against them.
Bruinius’ starting point is the case of Carrie Buck, a patient at the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-minded, who had been diagnosed as a ” `Middle Grade Moron.’ ” Firmly convinced that her alleged condition was hereditary, her doctors argued that unless stopped by sterilization, she would produce (following her mother) equally unfit children who would join the ” `shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South’ ” who would constitute a burden on society. The U.S. Supreme Court concurred. “It is better for all the world,” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously wrote for the majority in the 1927 case of Buck vs. Bell, “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.” Thus vindicated, the Virginia Colony, along with doctors in numerous other states, proceeded to sterilize Buck and many others they viewed as a “growing degenerate horde” that was “sapping the country’s strength.”
Bruinius explores the origins, implications and fate of the eugenic ideal behind Buck’s sterilization largely through a biographically oriented narrative organized around the principal proselytizers of eugenics. At center stage stood Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin, two indefatigable scientists obsessed with biological degeneration. Their base of operations was Davenport’s Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, N.Y., a well-funded operation devoted to collecting data on heredity and family lineages and propagating the eugenics creed.
Both men were firmly convinced that America’s apparently growing problems–pauperism, criminality, alcoholism and shiftlessness, among others–sprang not from environmental or economic causes but from inferior germ plasm. Drawing upon the nativist currents and the racial thought of their times–which Bruinius unfortunately only lightly addresses–they readily identified an abundance of these traits in the new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. The political implications of their “findings” were straightforward: Reduce immigration, sterilize the unfit and, in good social Darwinian spirit, cease protecting the weak–those whom Dr. John Kellogg, famous for his cornflakes and Battle Creek Sanitarium, called ” `lunatics, idiots, paupers, and criminals,’ ” the ” `mighty host of mental and moral cripples.’ ” Eugenics, Davenport declared, could be ” `the salvation of the race through heredity.’ “
And yet for all their passion, their quest was hardly “America’s Quest for Racial Purity,” as the book’s subtitle boldly declares. Although states passed sterilization laws, Fitter Family contests aimed at promoting better human breeding flourished at state fairs, and popular magazines ran glowing tributes to eugenics, Davenport and Laughlin never fully got their way. Catholic and fundamentalist Christian groups opposed them at every turn on moral grounds, and many state legislators voted down their proposals. No national bureaucracy was created to undertake the “sweeping scientific study of the population” Davenport had sought; only a fraction of the “unfit” were subjected to sterilization; and eugenic techniques and goals were increasingly discredited by the 1930s.
But the damage caused by their ideas was real enough, and not just for those institutionalized patients forced to undergo sterilization. They provided a scientific underpinning for the radical immigration-restriction laws of the early 1920s (whose origins extended well beyond eugenics) and inspired Nazi sterilization programs in the 1930s.
Bruinius, who studied theology and journalism in college, is a better storyteller than he is an analyst of American culture, religion and science. Succeeding admirably in humanizing the victims and victimizers in his tale, he is too quick to frame the story of eugenics’ devotees around the tired motif of New England Puritans’ commitment to maintaining a “shining city upon a hill.” (Bruinius melodramatically insists that believers, who felt that the “eugenic quest could bring a modern Great Awakening,” were following a uniquely American “theological imperative implanted at the nation’s birth” to create a new Israel in the New World and to “be as innocent as a blushing new bride.”) Even more problematic is Bruinius’ lack of engagement with the scientific side of the eugenics program. Although he recounts how distinguished geneticists scathingly denounced the Eugenics Record Office’s techniques and conclusions in the early 1930s, Bruinius himself barely explores the ideological preconceptions, conceptual leaps and methodological flaws that allowed early eugenicists to provide a scientific gloss for their anti-Semitic, nativist and racist views.
Bruinius overstates his case in yet another regard. Too often authors and their publishers think that eye-catching subtitles will call needed attention to their books. In this instance, the packaging is deceiving, for the history of forced sterilization is hardly a secret. In the first decades of the 20th Century, proponents of eugenics were a loud lot, publishing up a storm and delivering countless speeches . The state legislatures that passed sterilization laws certainly knew what they were doing, as did their opponents. Even Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trials invoked the American precedent for their own inhuman efforts, though to no avail. In recent decades, class-action suits, journalistic investigations and even official state apologies have put the sordid history of forced sterilization back in the news. Historians of science, social and medical policy, and race and immigration–including Daniel Kevles, Leila Zenderland, Elazar Barkan, Alexandra Minna Stern and Edwin Black–have written extensively on eugenics. If readers today are unfamiliar with this tale, it’s less because its history is “secret” than because Americans’ command of history is not necessarily what it should be.
“Better for All the World” may provide an accessible introduction to its subject, but it leaves out and simplifies too much to be the final word on the subject.
