Sterilization of Carrie Buck. David Smith

would be able to utilize the information to provide a deposition which would be helpful.

      My dear Dr. Laughlin:

      My friend and attorney, Col. Aubrey E. Strode, referred your letter of the 3rd inst. to me relative to your working out [a] genealogical tree and giving depositions in the case of Carrie Buck, a feebleminded girl in this institution…

      When I was instructed by the Governor in our General State Hospital Board, the governing body of the five institutions of Virginia in September of 1923, to prepare and have pushed through the General Assembly of Virginia, a Sterilization Law, I gave Col. Strode all of the information including your book on Eugenical Sterilization in the United States which you kindly gave me, and he prepared a bill which the Court of Justice Committee of our Senate, composed altogether of the best lawyers in that body, declared to be an admirable sterilization bill… though Dr. J. S. DeJarnette, Superintendent of the Western State Hospital, who has enthusiastically advocated sterilization for years, and myself, fully explained to these lawyers that in our mind, there was grave doubt as to whether a sterilization law could be passed, which would be upheld by the Courts of today; though with a progressive enlightenment as to the needs of eugenics, they might get away from their constitutional moorings within a few years, and give decisions which would meet this pressing need. It passed both branches of our General Assembly and became law on June 17th, 1924.

      I am willing to concede all that opponents of the Sterilization Law claim that they cannot and will not do, but with us in Virginia, it is strictly a humanitarian and economic provision. I conduct the only white institution for mental defectives in Virginia and this State, with a population of about 1,600,000 whites, is not financially able without a greatly increased tax rate to care for more than a handful, comparatively speaking, of anti-social women and girls of one hundred counties and twenty cities, who bear illegitimate children, and increase the population of mental defectives to a degree which cannot be calculated in fifty years by any mathematician.

      Our purpose is to use, as I have been trying for some ten years, this Institution as a kind of clearing house to give these young women educational, industrial and moral training, sterilize them and send them out to earn their own living, and permit them to enjoy ‘Liberty and the peaceful pursuit of happiness’ guaranteed in our Declaration of Independence, and to relieve the State of this enormous burden.