Nothing Natural: Social Darwinism, scientific racism and eugenics in America

The Supreme Court’s decision in Buck v. Bell (1927) legitimated compulsory sterilization of America’s socially unfit, but the Court’s opinion was hardly groundbreaking. White elites had been trying to control the bodies of those in their society they deemed unfit for decades, and even centuries. One could argue that for them, it was an extension of the white man’s burden. By the 1920s, many elites in the United States linked the country’s economic and political power to their ability to preserve the country’s racial and ethnic integrity. They sought neither acculturation nor assimilation for society’s unfit. Instead, they sought a more permanent way to eradicate what they considered to be the inheritable burden of degeneracy. Carrie Buck’s flawed pedigree and family history made her a model subject for compulsory sterilization. In the wild, the unfit would die off naturally, but in American society, unfit whites such as Carrie Buck survived and reproduced. To America’s elite, Buck’s life demonstrated that nature sometimes needed a helping hand.A study of Carrie Buck’s forced sterilization reveals more than how elites justified their control of poor whites. It demonstrates how gender and class shaped eugenic doctrines in the United States influenced international biopolitics in the first half of the twentieth century. More than that, it uncovers how elites redefined some people so they could treat them as less than human. To legitimately sterilize Buck, elites combined their interpretation of laissez-faire capitalist business models with the Darwinian theory of natural selection, and Herbert Spencer’s notion that only the fit should survive, to create a eugenic theory that became a powerful public policy based on sharp social and cultural distinctions. Elite definitions of unfit were based on their class and gender biases, both which are evident in the case of Carrie Buck.