Free Download Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, by Adam Cohen
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Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, by Adam Cohen
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Review
“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 “[IMBECILES is] the story of an assault upon thousands of defenseless people seen through the lens of a young woman, Carrie Buck, locked away in a Virginia state asylum. In meticulously tracing her ordeal, Cohen provides a superb history of eugenics in America, from its beginnings as an offshoot of social Darwinism—human survival of the fittest—to its rise as a popular movement, advocating the state-sponsored sterilization of ‘feeble-minded, insane, epileptic, inebriate, criminalistics and other degenerate persons.’”—David Oshinksy, The New York Times Book Review (cover review) “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)“IMBECILES indicts and convicts any number of villains, albeit with proper judicial restraint. Cohen mostly lets the facts speak for themselves…[and] skillfully frames the case within the context of the early 20th century eugenics movement…[The book’s] considerable power lies in Cohen’s closer examination of the principal actors…Buck v. Bell has never been overturned. But thanks to Adam Cohen, we shall never forget it.” —Boston Globe “Cohen…tells the shocking story of one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in U.S. history…and demonstrates to a fare-thee-well how every step along the way, our system of justice failed…The last chapter of the case of Carrie Buck, Cohen reveals, hasn't been written…IMBECILES leaves you wondering whether it can happen here — again.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune “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 “Imbeciles is lively, accessible and, inevitably, often heart-wrenching.”—Nature “Searing…In this important book, Cohen not only illuminates a shameful moment in American history when the nation’s most respected professions—medicine, academia, law, and the judiciary—failed to protect one of the most vulnerable members of society, he also tracks the landmark case’s repercussions up to the present.”—Booklist (starred review)“The story of Carrie Buck…illustrates society’s treatment of the poor, of minorities and immigrants, and other populations considered ‘undesirable.’… This thought-provoking work exposes a dark chapter of American legal history.”—Library Journal “Imbeciles is a revelatory book. Eye-opening and riveting. In these pages, Adam Cohen brings alive an unsettling, neglected slice of American history, and does so with the verve of a master storyteller.” —Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here“Cohen revisits an ugly chapter in American history: the 1920s mania for eugenics…[in this] compelling narrative....He also tells a larger story of the weak science underlying the eugenics cause and the outrageous betrayal of the defenseless by some of the country's best minds…A shocking tale about science and law gone horribly wrong, an almost forgotten case that deserves to be ranked with Dred Scott, Plessy, and Korematsu as among the Supreme Court's worst decisions.”—Kirkus (starred review ) “Adam Cohen knows how to recognize a story and has the gift to tell it with disarming fidelity to facts that make us cringe. In that vein, Imbeciles made me question my longstanding admiration for the mind and character of Oliver Wendell Holmes and my fading hope that the Supreme Court can sometimes save us from ourselves.”—Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution “‘Three generations of imbeciles are enough’—these are among the most haunting words in the history of the Supreme Court. In Imbeciles, Adam Cohen unearths the secret history of the case that moved Oliver Wendell Holmes to utter that notorious sentence. The book provides a stark portrait of the resilient eugenics movement—and a welcome warning about its sinister appeal.”—Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Oath and The Nine “A powerfully written account of how the United States Supreme Court collaborated in the involuntary sterilization of thousands of poor and powerless women. Cohen’s Imbeciles is that rarest of books—it is a shocking story beautifully told, and also the definitive study of one of the darkest moments in the history of American law.”—John Fabian Witt, author of Lincoln’s Code and The Accidental Republic“Imbeciles is at once disturbing, moving, and profoundly important. With the zeal of an investigative journalist and a novelist’s insight, Adam Cohen tells the story of an injustice carried out at the highest levels of government, and how it reverberated across history and remains with us today. Cohen is one of our most gifted writers, and he has turned the story of the Supreme Court and American eugenics into one of the best books I’ve read in decades.”—Amy Chua, John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law, Yale Law School, and author of The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
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About the Author
ADAM COHEN, a former member of the New York Times editorial board and senior writer for Time magazine, is the author most recently of Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he was president of volume 100 of the Harvard Law Review.From the Hardcover edition.
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Product details
Paperback: 416 pages
Publisher: Penguin Books; Reprint edition (March 7, 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0143109995
ISBN-13: 978-0143109990
Product Dimensions:
5.4 x 0.9 x 8.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.1 out of 5 stars
100 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#116,318 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
This book is a horrifying story of the movement to sterilize so-called incompetents, as embodied and culminating in the 1927 U.S. Supreme Court case of Buck v. Bell. The facts are every bit as horrifying as those in the fictionalized masterpiece "The Underground Railroad", but unlike the "magical realism" employed to such great effect by Colson Whitehead in that book, "Imbeciles" is entirely factual to the point of being utterly surreal.If that were it, I would likely have given this book a five-star rating. However, while the author's passion and anger at the injustices perpetrated upon Carrie Buck are understandable and even noble, he does not control his emotions, and the book suffers as a result. In particular, his fury leads him to provide such massive digressions about the people he perceives to be evildoers -- up to and including Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes -- that he misses the point. HIs biographical screed about Justice Holmes takes up a full 10% of the book, and he provides similar biographical information about many of the other players; while I haven't calculated how much total space is occupied by these rants, I wouldn't be surprised if they amounted to 40 or even 50% of the book, leaving very little time to consider the human tragedy at the core of the book. In fact, his rage is so out of control that I was forced to wonder whether the facts were as bad as he paints.The book would have been far better and much more effective if he had let the facts speak for themselves instead of trying to analyze, psychologize and rationalize the behavior of the lawyers and others, including Justice Holmes, who forced Ms. Buck and so many others to undergo life-altering surgery and thus be deprived of their right to bear children without any meaningful due process.
From the vantage point of 2016 it is at one and the same time both strangely anachronistic and dismayingly pertinent to read Adam Cohen's meticulously researched and compellingly written book about the legal high point of the American eugenics movement. Anachronistic, because it is hard for many of us today to understand how so many leading (white) progressive reformers could have signed onto the cause of eugenics so enthusiastically at the same time they advocated for so many other causes that put them ahead of their time in terms of social reform. Margaret Sanger and other leading feminists, Teddy Roosevelt, leading clergy, lawyers, doctors and academics -- so many supported eugenics and, implicitly if not explicitly, the racist and classist pseudo-science that undergirded it. (As Cohen notes, the Nazi Party's eugenics program was explicitly modeled after the American movement.) It's so clearly not part of a progressive agenda we're used to that one can't help but wonder how these socially conscious forebears didn't see how brutal and tyrannical it was to a marginalized group of people. Saying that these reformers were in this instance captured by elitist, moralizing groupthink and ardor for government use of science to reform society doesn't wholly explain it.The book is pertinent for a number of reasons Cohen references, and for two reasons he couldn't have anticipated when he began it. First of the unanticipated developments is the particular way in which the Republican presidential primary and Donald Trump's ascendancy is buoyed by, and in turn contributes to the huge upswing of anti-immigrant, racist fear mongering. Mass immigration and social disruption (today, globalization and its discontents, and fear of terrorism) are threatening to large numbers of people, just as Cohen notes was the case when the eugenics movement arose. While there are many differences to be noted between that movement of a century ago on the one hand, and today's anti-immigration, anti-minority groundswell on the other, both cite repeatedly to "facts" that do not bear scrutiny and to nativist sentiment of one kind or another.The second development that gives this book even more relevance is the way in which Justice Scalia's death shines a renewed spotlight on the role the U.S. Supreme Court plays -- or abdicates -- when it comes to protecting the weak and powerless. As Cohen notes, the Court has far more consistently ruled in favor of powerful elites and against those who need the protection of our society and its laws most. Buck v. Bell, the case upholding -- on few facts, and most of them inaccurate -- the forced sterilization of a supposedly feebleminded woman, Carrie Buck, is far from the only case illustrating that proclivity. Examples continue to this day.It is gut wrenching to read how implacably the most powerful segments of society marched toward depriving a poor, uneducated but, as Cohen shows, perfectly intelligent young woman of her liberty, her dignity, her bodily integrity and her right to choose whether to bear children. And this was a woman who bore a child (the third generation of "imbeciles" in Justice Holmes' infamous term) because she was the victim of rape, not, as her "guardians" said, because she was a feebleminded "defective" who acted immorally due to inherited defectiveness. (The parallels to opponents of abortion who cite to the intention of "protecting" women's health by passing laws closing clinics come to mind.) These powerful forces close over Carrie so disproportionately, it is like watching a tsunami in slow motion, moving to obliterate her in so many ways.This is a book that would make a good addition to high school and college curricula. And an important read for all of us.
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