Imbeciles

The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck

By: Adam Cohen

Narrated by: Dan Woren

Length: 13 hrs and 19 mins

Publisher's summary

Longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction

One of America’s great miscarriages of justice, the Supreme Court’s infamous 1927 Buck v. Bell ruling made government sterilization of “undesirable” citizens the law of the land.

In 1927, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling so disturbing, ignorant, and cruel that it stands as one of the great injustices in American history. In Imbeciles, best-selling author Adam Cohen exposes the court’s decision to allow the sterilization of a young woman it wrongly thought to be “feebleminded” and to champion the mass eugenic sterilization of undesirable citizens for the greater good of the country. The 8–1 ruling was signed by some of the most revered figures in American law — including Chief Justice William Howard Taft, a former U.S. president; and Louis Brandeis, a progressive icon. Oliver Wendell Holmes, considered by many the greatest Supreme Court justice in history, wrote the majority opinion, including the court’s famous declaration “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Imbeciles is the shocking story of Buck v. Bell, a legal case that challenges our faith in American justice. A gripping courtroom drama, it pits a helpless young woman against powerful scientists, lawyers, and judges who believed that eugenic measures were necessary to save the nation from being “swamped with incompetence.”

At the center was Carrie Buck, who was born into a poor family in Charlottesville, Virginia, and taken in by a foster family, until she became pregnant out of wedlock. She was then declared “feebleminded” and shipped off to the Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded.Buck v. Bell unfolded against the backdrop of a nation in the thrall of eugenics, which many Americans thought would uplift the human race. Congress embraced this fervor, enacting the first laws designed to prevent immigration by Italians, Jews, and other groups charged with being genetically inferior. Cohen shows how Buck arrived at the colony at just the wrong time, when influential scientists and politicians were looking for a “test case” to determine whether Virginia’s new eugenic sterilization law could withstand a legal challenge. A cabal of powerful men lined up against her, and no one stood up for her — not even her lawyer, who, it is now clear, was in collusion with the men who wanted her sterilized.

In the end, Buck’s case was heard by the Supreme Court, the institution established by the founders to ensure that justice would prevail. The court could have seen through the false claim that Buck was a threat to the gene pool, or it could have found that forced sterilization was a violation of her rights. Instead, Holmes, a scion of several prominent Boston Brahmin families, who was raised to believe in the superiority of his own bloodlines, wrote a vicious, haunting decision upholding Buck’s sterilization and imploring the nation to sterilize many more. Holmes got his wish, and before the madness ended, some 60 to 70 thousand Americans were sterilized. Cohen overturns cherished myths and demolishes lauded figures in relentless pursuit of the truth. With the intellectual force of a legal brief and the passion of a front-page exposé, Imbeciles is an ardent indictment of our champions of justice and our optimistic faith in progress, as well as a triumph of American legal and social history.

©2016 Adam Cohen (P)2016 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“This well-written narrative of legal history demonstrates what happens when the powerful and elite in society fail to protect the powerless and poor.... Imbeciles combines an investigative journalist’s instinct for the misuse of power, a lawyer’s analytic abilities, and a historian’s eye for detail to tell this compelling and emotional story.... [The book] serves as a cautionary tale about what may happen when those who have, or obtain, power use the institutions of government and the law to advance their own interests at the expense of those who are poor, disadvantaged, or of different ‘hereditary’ stock'.” (Los Angeles Review of Books)

"In this detailed and riveting study, Cohen captures the obsession with eugenics in 1920s America.... Cohen's outstanding narrative stands as an exposé of a nearly forgotten chapter in American history.” (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

“An important new book…which details the eugenic horror that still haunts the American legal system.... Cohen’s narrative of the legal case that enshrined these practices is a page-turner, and the story it tells is deeply, almost physically, infuriating.... Cohen reminds us of the simple, shocking fact that while forced sterilizations are rare today, they remain legal because American courts have never overturned Buck v. Bell.” (The New Republic)

Heartbreaking and scary - worth the listen

This book works well as an audiobook and anyone and everyone needs to listen/read this text given what we are facing in the word today. For something that dives into historical documents, the currency is all too relevant.

go ahead get this!

fantastic book- great story, great writing, great narration. you will not be disappointed - I plan on listening again

Thought provoking

Imbeciles was a thought-provoking book about the people and historical circumstances involved in the Buck vs Bell Supreme Court decision, which allowed involuntary eugenic sterilization of people diagnosed as having inferior genetics or intellectual disabilities, broadly defined. There are some repetitive parts of the book that are apparent when listening to it, and it is jarring to hear "imbeciles," "morons," and "feeble-minded" repeatedly, as these were specific diagnoses given to people and used to justify their involuntary sterilization. It was very timely to hear how the rise of eugenics and push for sterilization of the "feeble-minded" occurred at the same time and by the same people as the introduction of exclusionary quota based/ merit based immigration laws and how these precedents set by the US were used as justifications by the Nazis. It was also thought provoking and disturbing to see how faulty intelligence testing and social judgments resulted in the classification of people as justifying involuntary sterilization or immigration exclusion to purify the American "genetic stock." And ultimately very sad and horrific to see the injustice done to people by legal/ justice, social service, educational, and public health systems and how Carrie Buck not only should never have been classified as an imbecile or feeble minded, had such horrible legal representation, and was not actually told that she was sterilized until years later.

Too detailed and not detailed enough

It's an interesting book and story, but the narration focuses a lot on the other "characters" that appear and their background, rather than Carrie Buck herself and her story. It's very detailed about people, I'm not sure it gives a complete overall picture of the movement.

One of the best history books I've read in years

This is a powerful, fascinating book. Deeply researched yet highly readable. It works well as an audio book. The story is horrifying, especially to early 21st century.intellectual sensibilities. But the author makes a good attempt to explain the context of the eugenics movement from the Gilded Age to the 1920s. How some members of the upper classes.in the U.S. got swept up in social Darwinism.& how that.in turn led some to find eugenics an attractive extension. The story is told in episodes, which makes it easy.to pick up & put down. But it hangs together well. It's structure does create some competitiveness. But the books powerful narration makes.it.easy to forgive some repetition.

Forgotten History

It's a shame that this important piece of history is not taught in schools. Incredible how easy it was for Carrie and others to be determined to be feeble minded and how a few zealots in power could determine the path of so many lives.

Scary boys and girls!

George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Bram Stoker and Stephen King got nothing on Adam Cohen! Cohen's tale is no tale at all, but a tragic and shameful story from our past. The most frightening part is that so many of those we now hail as our nation's greatest minds thought the forced sterilization of "imbeciles" was a noble idea.

Tedious at first, but it gets more interesting.

I bought this book on the recommendation of a friend. At first, I had trouble sticking to it, both because the presentation was tedious but because it was the story of such a depressing chapter in our history. Later, it gets into a discussion of the judicial philosophical evolution of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and that was very interesting and compelling, although disappointing to realize how unenlightened Justice Holmes had been.

A Very Tough Listen

When I first heard the author on late night radio talking about this case I thought it was very interesting so I bought the audiobook. I had to stop listening about half way through because of the descriptions of scholars, doctors, and judges who conspired to make it legal to sterilize those who were "Defective" and worried they would pass on those defective traits if allowed to breed. In my opinion the book just became too depressing. I could not stand to listen to this huge railroading by people who should have been advocates....Not monsters.....

Maybe others can get through it on a clinical level, but I could not

important and interesting story

great book and narration. gets too deep in the weeds as to how eugenics laws were composed in Virginia, but other than that, excellent!