Epilogue

IN 1927 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR., delivered the Supreme
Court's decision upholding the Virginia sterilization law in Buck v.
Bell. Carrie Buck, a young mother with a child of allegedly feeble
mind, had scored a mental age of nine on the Stanford-Binet. Car-
rie Buck's mother, then fifty-two, had tested at mental age seven.
Holmes wrote, in one of the most famous and chilling statements
of our century:
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.

... Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

(The line is often miscited as "three generations of idiots... ." But

Holmes knew the technical jargon of his time, and the Bucks,

though not "normal" by the Stanford-Binet, were one grade above

idiots.)

Buck v. Bell is a signpost of history, an event linked with the

distant past in my mind. The Babe hit his sixty homers in 1927,

and legends are all the more wonderful because they seem so dis-

tant. I was therefore shocked by an item in the Washington Post on

23 February 1980—for few things can be more disconcerting than

a juxtaposition of neatly ordered and separated temporal events.

"Over 7,500 sterilized in Virginia," the headline read. The law that

Holmes upheld had been implemented for forty-eight years, from

1924 to 1972. The operations had been performed in mental-

health facilities, primarily upon white men and women considered

feeble-minded and antisocial—including "unwed mothers, prosti-

tutes, petty criminals and children with disciplinary problems."