Imbeciles

Starred review from March 14, 2016
In this detailed and riveting study, Cohen (Nothing to Fear) captures the obsession with eugenics in 1920s America, especially as that foment is illustrated in the case of Carrie Buck, a young girl consigned to be sterilized by Virginia's Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. Cohen follows the traumas of Buck's life, including her foster childhood with the Dobbs family, who treated her more as slave than daughter; her rape byher foster mother's nephew; and her foster family committing her to the colony. Along the way, readers meet several players in Carrie's poignant case, including Harry Laughlin, the manager of the Eugenics Record Office and leading expert in the cause of eugenic sterilization; Aubrey Strode, the trial lawyer representing the state hospital's interests against Carrie; and Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court justice notable for a lack of interest in facts, whose philosophy "left scant room for the disadvantaged and the weak." In the midst of the pro-eugenics era, the court upheld Carrie's sterilization, giving little thought to the woman who was a dedicated worker, devoted to family, and possessed of a quiet intelligence. Cohen's outstanding narrative stands as an exposé of a nearly forgotten chapter in American history. Agent: Kris Dahl, ICM.

Starred review from November 15, 2015
Attorney, journalist, and bestselling author Cohen (Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America, 2009, etc.) revisits an ugly chapter in American history: the 1920s mania for eugenics. Among "the most brutal aphorisms in American jurisprudence," Oliver Wendell Holmes' 1927 pronouncement in Buck v. Bell--"Three generations of imbeciles are enough"--marked the high point of a shameful enthusiasm among the social elite for ridding the species of so-called mental defectives. With the nation anxious about changes wrought by unprecedented immigration, industrialization, and urbanization, and with marriage laws ineffective and segregation and warehousing of defectives too expensive and castration too barbaric, eugenics enthusiasts turned to mass sterilization as the solution to prevent the feebleminded from reproducing. The movement attracted its share of crackpots, racists, and conservatives intent on preserving an Anglo-Saxon heritage, but a shocking gallery of the very best people--professionals, intellectuals, feminists, and progressives--formed the vanguard. From this class came the principal players in Carrie Buck's case: the physician/supervisor of Virginia's Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded, the drafter of the state's sterilization law who defended it in the Supreme Court, the national scientific expert who affirmed its utility, and the celebrated justice who upheld its constitutionality. The stories of these four men and that of Carrie herself--a teenage girl neither mentally nor morally deficient, as her caretakers charged, and never informed of the purpose and effect the operation Virginia demanded--form the spine of Cohen's compelling narrative. Through them, he also tells a larger story of the weak science underlying the eugenics cause and the outrageous betrayal of the defenseless by some of the country's best minds. Carrie Buck died in 1983. The 8-1 decision, joined by the likes of Chief Justice William Howard Taft and Louis Brandeis, has never been overruled. A shocking tale about science and law gone horribly wrong, an almost forgotten case that deserves to be ranked with Dred Scott, Plessy, and Korematsu as among the Supreme Court's worst decisions.

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Starred review from December 15, 2015
In 1927, the Supreme Court upheld eugenic sterilization in Buck v. Bell, which allowed the state of Virginia to sterilize a young woman named Carrie Buck. Buck, to use the jargon of the time, was labeled feebleminded. As Cohen (Nothing to Fear, 2009) notes in this searing study, some of the most distinguished men in the annals of American law sealed Carrie Buck's tragic fate, including chief justice and former president William Howard Taft, the progressive Louis Brandeis, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., considered one of our greatest legal minds. Cohen describes the massive popularity of the eugenics movement, which, he notes, permeated the popular culture from best-selling books to mass-market magazines. The driving force behind its popularitythe collective fears of native-born, white, middle-class Protestants about a changing Americaare as relevant today as then. As far as Buck herself is concerned, Cohen points out that she was of perfectly normal intelligence and that rather than being of loose morals she was, in fact, a victim of rape. In this important book, Cohen not only illuminates a shameful moment in American history when the nation's most respected professionsmedicine, academia, law, and the judiciaryfailed to protect one of the most vulnerable members of society, he also tracks the landmark case's repercussions up to the present.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

October 15, 2015

In 1927, when the eugenics movement was sweeping the country, the Supreme Court allowed the superintendent of the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded to sterilize a young woman named Carrie Buck, deemed to be an "imbecile." Among the eight justices voting in the majority in Buck v. Bell were legal luminaries Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Shockingly, Buck v. Bell has never been overturned. Cohen (Nothing To Fear), a former member of the New York Times editorial board, can clarify the legal issues here as a graduate of Harvard Law School.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2015

The Supreme Court case of Buck v. Bell (1927) made forced sterilization legal in the United States and resulted in the sterilization of 70,000 Americans. Cohen (former senior writer, Time Magazine; Nothing To Fear) examines the eugenics movement that led to the court case and that was used as a model for eugenics in Nazi Germany. In the book's introduction, the author describes 1920s America as "caught in a mania to use newly discovered scientific laws of heredity to perfect humanity." The story of Carrie Buck, who became pregnant after being raped by an acquaintance and was then wrongly institutionalized by the state of Virginia as feebleminded, illustrates society's treatment of the poor, of minorities and immigrants, and other populations considered "undesirable." Throughout the book, the author says that the legal system failed to act in Buck's best interests and consistently ignored her human rights. VERDICT This thought-provoking work exposes a dark chapter of American legal history but is not for the casual reader. Law students, those studying the health professions, and students of social history should read. Recommended for academic, health sciences, and law libraries. [See Prepub Alert, 9/28/15.]--Becky Kennedy, Atlanta-Fulton P.L.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.