Three years later, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes would offer a revolutionary decision in Buck v. Bell, which gave the state the power to regulate the breeding of its citizens. Like Justice Taney in the Dred Scott decision, he believed that pedigree could be used to distinguish worthy citizens from the waste people. He ruled that sterilization was the appropriate recourse in order to curb “generations of imbeciles” from reproducing. Holmes argued that sterilization was a civic duty, saving the nation from being “swamped with incompetence.” He echoed what the English had argued in the 1600s: the unfit would either starve or be executed for some crime, so sending them to be sterilized was the humane option, as being sent to the colonies had been centuries before.69
Carrie Buck (of Buck v. Bell) had been chosen for sterilization on the order of Priddy, because she was one of “these people”—that “worthless class” of southern whites. She was, in a word, a perfect specimen of white trash. While Carrie Buck was the plaintiff, her mother and daughter were on trial too. Carrie tested at the “moron level” and her mother slightly lower, according to the highly biased experts. Her illegitimate child, examined at seven months, was termed feebleminded—this was based on the observations of a Red Cross worker and on a test administered by Estabrook. The experts’ pedigree chart proved degeneracy as well as sexual deviance: Carrie’s mother was a prostitute, and Carrie had been raped by the nephew of her adoptive parents. Her rapist went unpunished, and yet she was sterilized.70
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Eugenics suffused the culture of the twenties. Social classes were ranked according to levels of inheritable potential. At the top was the new professional “master class.” Many believed that intelligence was inherited and that tests of schoolchildren proved that the brightest pupils were those whose parents were highly educated professionals. This elite had to be not just mentally but also physically fit. At the Second International Congress of Eugenics in New York, in 1921, two statues were put on display at opposite ends of Darwin Hall in the Museum of Natural History. One was a composite of the biometric measures of the fifty most athletic men at Harvard, the other an amalgam of one hundred thousand doughboys of World War I—in other words, the “average American male.” The Harvard specimen was the decidedly more impressive of the two. A new word was coined for the cognitive elite: “aristogenic”—what we would call a genetic leadership class. One was once again born to a station, as in the traditional meaning of aristocracy, but it was not because of family name or wealth. Now it was the endowment of inborn qualities that marked off the superior class.71
Carrie Buck and her mother, Emma (1924). Carrie, her mother, and Carrie’s illegitimate daughter were all put on trial in Buck v. Bell (1927). Their crime was one of pedigree—a defective breed perpetuated over three generations.
Arthur Estabrook Collection, M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, University of Albany Libraries, Albany, New York
While eugenicists made it fashionable to celebrate a hereditary ruling class, they were as bent on organizing social classes on the basis of breeding capacity. One of the most popular eugenics lecturers, C. W. Saleeby, spoke up for something called “eugenic feminism,” insisting that the brightest women should not only take up the suffrage cause but also accept their patriotic duty to breed. He imagined female society organized as a bee colony: the queens of superior stock bred throughout their fertile years, while educated sterile women (or postmenopausal) were best suited for reform activity. Professor William McDougall at Harvard came up with an equally radical solution. He called for a breeding colony of “Eugenia,” a separate protectorate within the United States, in which the best and brightest would propagate a superior stock. Eugenia would be at once a university and a stud farm. Raised as “aristocrats” in the tradition of “noblesse oblige,” the products of the special colony would go out into the world as skilled public servants.72
The obsession with white trash did not lose any traction in the 1920s. Reformers and legislators pushed their campaigns, while journalists wrote sensational newspaper stories and published shocking photographs. The Supreme Court ruling in Buck v. Bell inspired Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia to pass sterilization laws similar to the one adopted in Virginia. Protecting and promoting “good blood” would mean little if removing “bad blood” did not receive the same attention.73
The decade also saw the appearance of a new generation of novelists who experimented with eugenic ideas. Of these, the very popular Sherwood Anderson stood out. He composed semiautobiographical tales about small-town life, publishing the unmistakably titled Poor White in 1920. His character Hugh McIvey is the son of white trash, born in a “hole” of a town on a muddy bank along the Mississippi, in Missouri. His nature is that of a listless dreamer, his sleepy mind unable to fix on anything important. He is saved from his “animal-like stupor” when the railroad comes through town, bringing a fresh-faced New England–born Michigander, in whose veins “flowed the blood of the pioneers,” and who becomes his schoolteacher. Almost Rousseau-like, she stimulates in him a new intellectual vitality.74
Wanting to escape his past and rise socially, Hugh leaves the South behind. He wanders from town to town for three years, eventually settling in Bridewell, Ohio. There, after he takes a job in a telegraph office, technology shapes his destiny, and his dreamy nature blossoms into what the reader recognizes as good old-fashioned American ingenuity. He invents a series of machines, the most successful of which is the McIvey Corn-Cutter. Transformed into a hero in his adoptive industrializing town, Hugh meets the rebellious Clara Butterfield, a college-educated, feminist-leaning woman. She chooses him for a husband, in an act of eugenic marital selection, preferring what she describes as a “kind horse” to a “wolf or wolfhound.”75
It is the force of reproduction that ultimately saves the couple from the tensions that arise amid the surge of modern life. After facing various dangers, Hugh becomes dark and brooding when he starts to see the machine age as nihilistic and futile. His wife pulls him back from the brink of insanity by reminding him of the son she carries in her belly. Feeling a primitive, animal impulse to reproduce allows him to carry on.76
Anderson’s novel rejected the jingoistic optimism of the nineteenth century, but it also pointed to the eugenic idea that poor whites suffered from “childish impotence” or “arrested development,” requiring the reactivation of their better Saxon qualities. Facing challenges, Hugh never reaches the level of hopelessness that infuses Erskine Caldwell’s first novel, The Bastard (1929). Caldwell was the son of a minister in Georgia, and his father was sympathetic to eugenics. The Bastard seeks to prove that no human can hide from his “inborn” traits, from the imprint of his ancestors.77
Caldwell’s protagonist is Gene Morgan (“Eugene” comes from the same root of wellborn as “eugenic”). Our ironically named hero is a bastard. He learns that his harlot mother was murdered in Louisiana, her belly slit open like a “swamp”—an allusion to the polluted wasteland inside her, from which he was spawned. Gene is a vicious white, a wanderer, and his only pleasure comes from violence. Raised by an old Negro woman and sexually attracted to a mulatto girl, he thoughtlessly transgresses the color line.78