by
J. David Smith
In March of 1988, before Dr. Ray Nelson joined me as co-author, I received a letter from Stephen Jay Gould. His letter came as a reply to my having written to him with the news that The Sterilization of Carrie Buck would be published. I had shared with him earlier the first draft of the manuscript, so it was with great excitement and gratitude that I read the words of his letter.
Professor Gould’s books, particularly The Mismeasure of Man, have been valuable sources of learning and as vessels of encouragement. Stephen Gould shares his scientific brilliance, his expressive talent and his sensitivity to the human condition in ways that caution and inspire those who read his writings or listen to his lectures. He has not confined himself to university halls and academic publications. He has shared his expertise and insight with broader constituencies in a nation and world still struggling with old problems. Recently, for example, he served as an expert witness on evolution in a judicial revisit of the evolution/creationism curriculum issue by the Supreme Court. He has also personally taken his message of equality as a contingent fact of human history to southern Africa.
I was honored and elated to receive the words that follow from Stephen Jay Gould as an endorsement for the story of Carrie Buck. Both Dr. Nelson and I cannot imagine a foreword for this book that would be more meaningful. We are pleased to be able to share it with you, the reader, as you begin this account of the intersecting of an individual human life with a social movement.
March 29, 1988
Dr. J. David Smith
Professor of Education and Human Development
Lynchburg College
Lynchburg, Virginia 24501
Dear Dave,
The story of Carrie Buck is the focal episode in a major story of 20th century social history. (I would compare it to the Scopes trial, which of course occurred at about the same time, as the key item in the history of a social and legislative movement not resolved until our Supreme Court victory of last year.) Eugenical sterilization surely had a greater impact on people’s lives than creationism. Just think of the 40,000 sterilized in this country, not to mention the half million based on Germany’s version of the law that Carrie Buck challenged and lost in the Supreme Court. Yet while books, not to mention television dramas, abound about the Scope’s trial, no one has yet properly presented Carrie’s story to a mass audience. I congratulate you on your effort.
Sincerely,
Stephen Jay Gould
Harvard University
During October of 1927, Charles A. Lindbergh was in the final days of a sweep through all forty-eight states, completing a hero’s tour for his solo, nonstop, transatlantic flight. On the 19th, a rainy Wednesday, Lindbergh’s plane appeared out of a cloudy southwest sky and touched down at Logan Field in Baltimore, Maryland. Struggling from the plane, he was covered with a slicker to protect him in the open car and his triumphant parade through the downtown streets of the city began.
Ticker tape and drizzle mixed in the air as office workers craned their necks from windows to catch a glimpse of the “Lone Eagle,” America’s latest hero. The News in Lynchburg, Virginia reported that the crowds in Baltimore pressed so closely to the automobile in which Lindbergh was riding that police had difficulty keeping the way open.
October 19, 1927 was also a cloudy day in Lynchburg itself. At the State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-minded, another historic event was occurring.
For this one, there would be no ticker tape and no parade.
There would be no celebration.
But the surgery performed that day at the hospital on the heights above Lynchburg would influence human history as surely as Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic.
On that same early autumn day in 1927, a young woman named Carrie Buck was being sexually sterilized. Without her understanding of what was being done to her, or her agreement to allow the surgery, her capability to have children was taken away.
The operation to sterilize Carrie Buck came following the United States Supreme Court’s decision earlier that year, upholding the right of Virginia to impose sterilization upon any person judged to be mentally defective.
Carrie Buck was the subject of the test case leading to that decision.
Fifty years later, when reporters questioned how she’d felt, Carrie would reply, “They just told me I had to have an operation, that was all.”
Later, when she spoke of her childhood, what Carrie remembered most vividly was “the endless work,” “the servants’ chores” and the feeling of “never being a family member in the house” in which she lived. The loneliness she had felt and seen followed her. She bore it stoically, but it showed in her dark, brooding eyes and permeated even the few happy moments of her life.
The small stone house on Grove Street in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which she lived for almost eighteen years, was really the house of J. T. Dobbs, his wife and daughter. Carrie had become the Dobbs’ ward at age three, given into their care because it was said that her natural mother, Emma Buck, lived a desolate existence as a prostitute, bringing Carrie into a constant stream of seamy environments and relationships. Carrie had been Emma’s first child, the only one born of Emma’s marriage to Frank Buck. Some say Frank Buck died in an unfortunate accident, leaving his poverty-stricken widow to earn her living on the streets. Others insist he merely ran away from his own poverty-stricken existence.
Though Carrie said of her years with the Dobbs, “I had good days and I had bad days,” even as a small child she had been aware they were not her real parents. She referred to them only as “the Dobbs,” never mother or father. The so-called adoption, of which they spoke afterward, was probably not a legal one, but an informal arrangement or “an act of kindness,” as they so often put it.
And when, by chance, they met Carrie’s natural mother in town, or heard some idle gossip from their neighbors about Emma’s “loose ways,” it was to this same “act of kindness” that they attributed the fact that Carrie too, despite her “bad blood,” was not living on the streets as her mother and her younger half-sister, Doris, and half-brother Roy did.
It was in these few chance meetings that Carrie began to develop strong feelings for her mother. They were feelings of protectiveness, of caring that would endure over a lifetime—a lifetime in which they were often separated by the hardships and misfortunes that plagued both their lives—but which also served to forge a strong bond between mother and daughter, and even between Carrie and her half-sister, Doris, and her half-brother, Roy, whom she was only to know in the few moments they crossed each other’s paths on the streets of Charlottesville.
Perhaps the only really happy days of her childhood had been those she spent in school. Although it was later to be reported that she had been a dull child who had spent her time writing “notes to the boys in her class,” the records of the McGuffey School in Charlottesville and the Midway