Immediately following the campaign against abortion in the 1860s and 1870s, a profusion of hereditarian and biological determinist theories emerged that would lay the groundwork for the eugenics movement. Rooted in social Darwinism, Italian criminal anthropology, phrenology, and genealogical studies of "degenerate" families, such theories were widely accepted by American penal and social reformers, as well as by physicians. The assumption that crime, insanity, poverty, and prostitution and other forms of illicit sex were the manifestations of inherited diseases that could "be shown to run in the blood/’ as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, became a dominant ideology in a social context of accelerated immigration and labor unrest. That context gave the ideology its importance as a political tool to control class, racial, and ethnic conflicts.53 Biological determinist ideology conjured up a peculiar confusion of genetic, behavioral, and moralistic ideas, particularly regarding lower-class sexuality. Typical is this passage by the social reformer Charles Loring Brace:
It is well known to those familiar with the criminal classes that certain appetites or habits, if indulged abnormally or excessively through two or more generations come to have an almost irresistible force, and no doubt, modify the brain so as to constitute almost an insane condition. This is especially true of the appetite for liquor and of the sexual passion and sometimes of the peculiar weakness, dependence and laziness which make confirmed paupers. . . .
[Describing a young girl of "licentious habits and desires"] the "gemmules," or latent tendencies, or forces, or cells of her immediate ancestors were in her blood, producing irresistible effects on her brain, nerves, and mental emotions, and finally, not being met early enough by other moral, mental and physical influences, they have modified her organization, until she is scarcely able to control them and she gives herself up to them.54
There is a neat fit between the revival in the early twentieth century of neo-Malthusian thinking about the dire consequences of "overbreeding" among poor and "unfit" populations and hereditarian explanations of the inevitable, incurable deficiencies of those populations. Both lay the moral blame for poverty and social distress on the poor themselves rather than the conditions they must contend with. In the 1920s the eugenics movement arose out of these two connected ideological strands, along with the timely rediscovery of Mendelian genetics, to present an allegedly scientific basis for controlling both the quantity and "quality" of births.
The racist, nativist, and class-biased thinking of eugenicists is familiar but cannot be overstressed. American intellectuals, scientists, and physicians were strongly influenced by the ideas of Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin and founder and leader of the eugenics movement in England. They borrowed from Galtonian eugenics its belief in the innate superiority of famous and "successful men" and the innate inferiority of lower-class and delinquent members of the population, along with a belief in the existence of biologically superior and inferior races. It was common for eugenicists to equate biological "fitness" with social class and to conclude "that college-educated, native, white Protestants (like themselves) were the bearers of the valuable genes of society."55
Eugenicists rested their claims to scientific objectivity on a positivistic methodology that armed them with a number of newly developed quantitative tools: the census, intelligence testing, and the use of statistics to measure every sort of social problem; "populations" became subject to comparison and measurement.56 Measuring devices lent the eugenics movement an aura of optimism and activism, an emphasis on "social engineering" to improve "the race" that went beyond the grim predictions of their Malthusian forerunners. Whether focused on "positive eugenics"—schemes of education, tax incentives, and the like to increase the propagation of the "superior"—or "negative eugenics"—schemes involving involuntary confinement, immigration restrictions, and surgical sterilization to diminish the numbers of the "inferior"—the assumption of eugenicists was that the manipulation of populations was a worthy object of social intervention. In the long run, the negative (antinatalist) strategies were the ones developed beyond rhetoric into government policy. These measures (e. g., a proliferation of institutions for the "feebleminded," a rash of compulsory sterilizations) were justified on explicitly social and racial (i. e., "eugenic") grounds: "to cut off defective germ plasm through the medium of segregation" and "to protect society from the menace [of the feebleminded]."57
The eugenics movement spread rapidly across the country during the 1920s. Eugenics became part of the curricula of many major universities and prompted the establishment of numerous publications, international congresses, and local and national organizations.58 The general public was less influenced by the propaganda of the Eugenics Record Office and its organizational affiliates, however, than was the growing group of professionals who had become stalwarts of hereditarianism. The "new professions"—social workers, prison wardens, psychiatrists in prisons and mental asylums, and administrators of institutions for the alcoholic and the feebleminded—had arisen with custodial institutions, and their "direct responsibility was with persons who became wards of the state for care and cure." These new agents of "public welfare" found hereditary explanations most amenable to their professional outlook and thus became, along with academics and social scientists, the major promoters of eugenics as a "cause." The transformation of eugenics from a creed into public policy in the legislative campaigns of the 1920s was achieved, not through public demand, but primarily through "expert testimony before legislative committees" by specialists and practitioners of eugenics.59 Like the medical profession earlier, these specialists derived their autonomy and centralized bureaucratic authority in part from an assertion of control over the fertility of women—in this case, women of the poor rather than the middle class.
It seems clear how an ideology linking deviant behavior to heredi — tarian and germ theories would lend itself to penal and social welfare policies that involved, in the late-nineteenth-century seaboard states such as Massachusetts and New York, increasing bureaucratization and centralized state control. Assumptions about "incurability" helped justify larger public appropriations for institutional "quarantine" and custodial incarceration. But while "the numbers cared for in institutions nearly tripled from 1904 to 1923,,,6° in the next decade the method that came to typify the eugenic approach to limiting "deviant" populations was surgical sterilization, mostly of women. Eugenicists, unlike their pessimistic Malthusian and social-Darwinist predecessors, established the premise that some deliberate technical intervention could be applied to deal with social deviance, differential population growth, and their sexual roots. This interventionist thrust of the eugenic period bridged the gap between the previous era and the later development of family planning and population control organizations. Compulsory sterilization epitomized the two-sided character of eugenics as a means of social-sexual control. It concentrated an attack on populations deemed expendable or socially threatening (poor, uneducated women, who were its usual victims), and a symbolic attack on sex and the sexual danger or contagion that those women were felt (by middle-class professionals and reformers) to represent.
Efforts at "systematic asexualization in the United States for eugenic purposes" had taken place in the 1890s, but a major turning point came somewhat later with the development of the relatively simple surgical procedures of vasectomy and salpingectomy, making it possible to sterilize people without destroying sexual feeling. Thereafter, there were many proposals in favor of legalizing sterilization, followed by the enactment of eugenic—and sometimes punitive—sterilization laws in thirty-two states. The first such law, that of Indiana in 1907, authorized the compulsory sterilization, upon recommendation of a "board of experts," of "confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists in state institutions."61 In 1914 a report of the Eugenics Section of the American Breeders’ Association, under Harry Laughlin, advocated sterilization as a "means of reducing defective germ plasma," estimating that 10 percent of the total population was "socially inadequate." Laughlin proposed that such eugenic sterilization be directed at the insane, the "criminalistic," the feebleminded, orphans, vagrants, and paupers, among others.62 All this activity resulted in the involuntary sterilization of over 45,000 persons in the United States in the years between 1907 and 1945, half of them mentally ill (as opposed to mentally defective) and the great majority of them poor women. The systematic character of sterilization procedures reached the point where "many mentally retarded or unstable persons were being admitted to the institutions merely to be sterilized and then released."63
Carrie Buck was one such person. In 1926 the U. S. Supreme Court finally gave its stamp of approval to the compulsory sterilization laws when Justice Holmes, in Buck v. Belt, delivered his famous defense of Carrie Buck’s sterilization on the grounds of "a compelling state interest in preventing the procreation of children who will become a burden on the state":
It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or 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.64
Compulsory sterilization, more than any other eugenic "remedy," symbolizes the urge to exorcise danger, to "purify," to cut off social deviance and unrest at its (presumed) source. As a populationist strategy, it aims to eliminate the "unfit" or the expendable by simply preventing them from being born; the class and racial interests it perpetuates are transparent. A poor and unskilled mass of unemployed comprises not only a cheap labor reserve economically but also a potential source of social rebellion and hence a threat to the established order. Eugenic techniques of social control such as involuntary sterilization, insofar as they promised literally to extirpate this threat, must have furnished a comforting safety valve in the eyes of a predominantly white Anglo-Saxon bourgeoisie. But the focus of compulsory sterilization laws—most of which are still on the books—was population control and sexual control. Their aim was not only to reduce numbers or root out "defective genes" but also to attack and punish sexual "promiscuity" and the sexual danger thought to emanate from the lower classes, especially lower-class women. That surgical sterilization directly affects not sexuality but pregnancy is irrelevant to its implicit sexually punitive intent. In particular for women, in a patriarchal culture that defines women’s sexuality in terms of their reproductive capacity, involuntary sterilization does indeed mean "systematic asexualization."
The message of Holmes’ pronouncement on the violability of the Fallopian tubes is that the state may and will penetrate the body—its sexuality, its reproductivity—in its function as moral police. It will "vaccinate" society (or its elite classes) against "degenerates" and "pollutants," will regulate populations through the regulation of women’s bodies and claim jurisdiction over women’s bodies through the exigencies of population. Buck v. Bell is the first major policy statement by an arm of the U. S. government legitimating its direct role in fertility control politics. The sexual message of this decision speaks directly and menacingly to women. For there is little question that, to the institution where she was incarcerated as to the court, Carrie Buck’s sterilization was the condition for her release. Its punitive meaning is absolutely clear. She would be not only "sanitized" and "neutralized" as a "carrier" of "bad genes" but also stigmatized and made an example for her promiscuity and her lust.