Virginia Ran A Secret Eugenics Program That Didn't End Until 1979

At the beginning of the 20th century, eugenics was seen as cutting-edge science that could improve society. The term was coined in 1883 by Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, and it held the promise of giving people the power to improve the human race. Galton theorized two ways that eugenics could help society, which he called positive and negative eugenics. 

Positive eugenics promoted the use of education, tax incentives, and payments for healthy children to encourage the “right” people to procreate. In this scheme, a large family of the "right" kind of people would have lower taxes, for example. Education was supposed to convince “fit” people to procreate for the common good, while tax credits and bonus payments for children were also intended to encourage childbirth. But there was also a dark side to the eugenics movement that encouraged the state to pass laws to stop "unfit" people from procreating. 

Negative eugenics sought to actively discourage “unfit” people from procreating. Some of the methods were relatively tame, such as encouraging the “unfit” to voluntarily not have children, but eugenicists also encouraged the government to pass laws to restrict which Americans could procreate. Many miscegenation laws, designed to stop interracial marriages, were passed using the (completely bunk) “scientific” argument that “race mixing” degenerated the country’s genetic pool. 

Arguments against interracial marriage existed long before the rise of eugenics, as this 1864 cartoon arguing that Lincoln’s policies would create a “miscegenation ball” show. But eugenics provided a “scientific” argument to ban interracial marriage. In 1913, 29 states had laws forbidding interracial marriages, and 22 of them penalized those unions with fines or prison terms. Eugenicists like Harry Laughlin promoted new laws based on eugenics like Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924. 

And states also began passing laws arguing that the “unfit” should be sterilized to guarantee that their “genetic defects” would not be passed on to subsequent generations. 

In the early 20th century, “feebleminded” was a broad category that included all sorts of people. It was defined as anyone who demonstrated abnormal behavior or very low scores on IQ tests, and feeblemindedness was also linked to promiscuity, criminality, and social dependency. Negative eugenics promised a solution to these social problems by ensuring that the feebleminded could not reproduce. The argument claimed that science could provide social and economic benefits to society by identifying the "unfit" and stopping them from reproducing. 

In 1914, eugenicist Harry Laughlin, who was head of the Eugenics Record Office proposed a “eugenical sterilization law” that would stop the feebleminded from reproducing. Laughlin defined the category incredibly broadly, proclaiming them “socially inadequate” people who were “maintained wholly or in part by public expense.” Laughlin included the feebleminded in this category, along with the “insane, criminalistic, epileptic, inebriate, diseased, blind, deaf, deformed, and dependent.” Laughlin argued that these conditions were somehow genetic, and the only way to protect the public interest was sterilization.

Laughlin also targeted “orphans, ne’er-do-wells, tramps, the homeless, and paupers,” claiming that they were corrupted and should not be allowed to procreate. 

Eugenicists used Martin Kallikak as an example of the dangers of feebleminded people in the gene pool. Kallikak was an American Revolutionary War soldier who had children with two women: one was an upstanding Quaker woman who had seven “worthy children.” According to The Kallikak Family, a 1912 book written by eugenicist Henry Herbert Goddard, these descendants became “respectable citizens, men and women prominent in every phase of life. 

But Martin also had children with a “feeble-minded tavern girl.” Their son became known as “Old Horror” and went on to have 10 children, creating a disreputable ancestral line. They were “the lowest types of human beings,” proving that even one child born by a “feeble-minded” mother could destroy America’s gene pool and cost society through the burden of “unfit” people. 

This story would eventually be entered into the record when the Supreme Court was deciding whether sterilization laws were legal.

In March of 1924, Virginia passed a law known as the “Eugenical Sterilization Act.” The act said that individuals confined to state institutions could be sterilized, specifically naming those “afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity that are recurrent, idiocy, imbecility, feeble-mindedness or epilepsy.” The law was intended to protect the purity of the “American race” – short-hand for Anglo-Saxon whites – from the dangers of genetic degeneration.

On the same day, Virginia passed the “Racial Integrity Act.” These two acts, targeting the “feeble-minded” and banning whites from marrying non-whites, were both supported by “scientific” arguments based on eugenics. Both laws used pseudo-science to attack the rights of marginalized groups. 

Later that year, Virginia sterilized a woman named Carrie Buck who had been institutionalized at the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. Carrie Buck’s case would go all the way to the Supreme Court.

Virginia was not the first state to pass a law making it legal for the state to selectively sterilize its citizens. In 1907, Indiana passed America’s first sterilization law, which allowed the state to give vasectomies to prison inmates to prevent the transmission of “degenerate traits.” One of the first doctors to perform vasectomies worked in Indiana. His name was Dr. Harry Sharp, and he showed that vasectomies were cheap and safe. Eugenicists quickly argued that the medical procedure could help society by saving future costs for prisons and asylums by limiting the reproduction of criminals. 

During the nearly 70 years that sterilization was legal in Indiana, approximately 2,500 people were sterilized against their will. Dr. Sharp went on to sterilize as many as 800 men in Indiana prisons and state institutions. Over 30 states went on to adopt compulsory sterilization laws, but Virginia’s became the most famous because of Carrie Buck.