Fall 2008 - The Johns Hopkins University Press

Three Generations, No ImbecilesEugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. BellPaul A. LombardoThree Generations, No Imbeciles is a chronicle of the 1927 Supreme Courtcase Buck v. Bell, which approved laws allowing states to perform surgeryin order to prevent “feebleminded and socially inadequate” people from havingchildren.The Buck case was the first and only time in Supreme Court history whenan intrusive medical procedure—involuntary sterilization—was endorsed as atool of government eugenic policy. It is doubly notorious for the court’s decision,written by renowned Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes’ declaration“Three generations of imbeciles are enough” led to lifelong infamy forCarrie Buck and her family.Paul A. Lombardo’s startling narrative is the only fully documented account ofthe Buck case ever written. He was the last person to interview Carrie Buckbefore she died, and the book incorporates materialhe discovered over more than twenty-five yearsof research. Items such as Carrie Buck’s medicalrecords, the honor roll grade book of her daughterVivian, private correspondence of the lawyer whowas named to represent her, and the only existingphotos of all three generations of the Buck familysupport the conclusion that the Buck case was a fraud,initiated to hide the shame of a poor girl, pregnantafter she had been raped.Though the Buck decision set the stage for morethan sixty thousand operations in the United Statesand was cited at the Nuremberg trials in defenseof Nazi sterilization experiments, it has never beenoverturned. This book tracks the career of Buck inAmerican memory, as a potent symbol of governmentcontrol of reproduction, and a troubling precedentin the human genome era.• Advance reading copies• National mediaPaul A. Lombardo is a professor of law at Georgia StateUniversity College of Law. He has played a key role,both as an historian and a lawyer, in the movementto solicit state apologies and legislative denunciationsof past eugenic laws.• National advertisingOctober 384 pages 6 x 917 halftones, 8 line drawings978-0-8018-9010-9 0-8018-9010-1$29.95 / £16.00 hcAmerican HistoryTHE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS www.press.jhu.edu