There’s a television commercial that makes me cringe more than any other. It features former baseball star Frank “the Big Hurt” Thomas trying to convince aging men to buy a product he claims he consumes regularly and enthusiastically. The miracle potion, he swears, has helped him recapture lost youth by filling him with energy and vitality. And the ladies like it, too, says the Big Hurt.
The part that really does me in is when the name of the product is revealed: Nugenix. Who the hell thought of that name? And didn’t it occur to them—or anyone else in their orbit—that this name sounds shockingly like eugenics?
Maybe it is indicative of how little many people know about the horrifying eugenics movement, the product of pseudo-scientists with a very Nazi-esque view of life who believed the human race could be perfected through selective breeding. This meant preventing those considered to be undesirable and defective from polluting the gene pool by stopping them from reproducing. Of course, people with disabilities were high on the list of those considered to be undesirable and defective.
M.E. Grenander Special Collections and Archives, University at Albany
Carrie Buck (left) joined her biological mother, Emma Buck, at the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded after Carrie was committed there by her foster parents in 1924. Shewas portrayed by those defending a new law legalizing involuntary eugenic sterilization as an example of why people needed to be kept from reproducing, for the good of society.
Eugenics was essentially genocide, an attempt to get rid of certain kinds of people. But it was vigorously expounded by many influential thought leaders of the time. Starting in 1935, the Los Angeles Times ran a weekly column titled “Social Eugenics,” written by veteran reporter Fred Hogue, who used it to sing the praises of the eugenics movement and the big strides it was making across the world. The column ran until 1941, the year of Hogue’s death. While it was being published, Hitler had been rapidly rising to power in Germany, trumpeting many of the same ideas.
For decades in the early twentieth century, the eugenics mentality swept the nation like a dance craze. Thirty-two states passed eugenic sterilization laws during that period, and more than 60,000 people were sterilized as a result. One of them was Carrie Buck, who resided in a state institution called the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. She was committed there by her foster parents in 1924, when she was just seventeen years old, after she had become pregnant.
That same year, Virginia passed a law legalizing involuntary eugenic sterilization. It was challenged all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Buck was used by those defending the law as an example of why people like her needed to be kept from reproducing, for the good of society.
In 1927, in an 8-1 decision, the Court resoundingly upheld the law in the case of Buck v. Bell. Writing the majority opinion, the revered Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” Regarding Buck’s poverty-stricken biological family, Holmes wrote, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Which brings me to the subject of reparations: Almost a century later, Virginia became one of three states whose legislatures voted to pay financial reparations to the living victims of forced eugenic sterilization.
California, one of the first states to adopt eugenics sterilization laws in 1909, also became one of the most prolific in carrying them out, forcibly sterilizing some 20,000 people living in state-run hospitals, homes, and institutions. Last year, Governor Gavin Newsom approved a state budget that allotted $7.5 million for reparations to victims of the forced sterilizations who are alive today. Of that money, $4.5 million will be divided evenly among those who apply and qualify. The rest will be spent on implementing the program and placing plaques at designated sites to acknowledge that the state forcibly sterilized its own residents.
California repealed its eugenics laws in 1979. But a 2014 report by the California State Auditor found that from 2005 to 2013, 144 women inmates in the state’s prison system were sterilized. Of those, the report states, thirty-nine were sterilized following deficiencies in the mandated informed consent process.
In 1929, North Carolina’s General Assembly passed a law stating that “the governing body or responsible head of any penal or charitable institution supported wholly or in part by the State of North Carolina . . . is hereby authorized and directed to have the necessary operation for asexualization or sterilization performed upon any mentally defective or feeble-minded inmate or patient thereof.” The law added that the procedures must be in the best interest of the “mental, moral, or physical improvement of the individual, or for the public good.” North Carolina became the seventeenth state to pass such a law. All told, more than 7,600 people were forcibly sterilized in that state, which ranked second among states in the number of forced sterilizations. Eighty-five percent of the victims in North Carolina were women.
In 2013, North Carolina became the first state to order compensation for victims of forced sterilization, after state lawmakers passed legislation designating $10 million to survivors. Two years later, Virginia became the second state to do so, with each victim receiving only $25,000.
Virginia’s eugenics law, which was in effect from 1924 to 1979, called for the forced sterilization of anyone confined to a state institution who was “afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity . . . idiocy, imbecility, feeble-mindedness, or epilepsy.” And so 7,325 people were sterilized in that state, behind only California and North Carolina. Twenty-two percent were African Americans, and two-thirds were women.
It’s important to remember that none of these reparations programs just fell from the sky. They were the result of long, hard-fought activist campaigns in which survivors and their supporters, journalists, and a bipartisan group of sympathetic lawmakers persisted until justice finally prevailed.
All three states repealed their eugenics laws and offered official apologies many years before reparations legislation was passed. North Carolina lawmakers repealed that state’s eugenics law in 2003, with then-Governor Mike Easley issuing a public apology, stating, “To the victims and families of this regrettable episode in North Carolina’s past, I extend my sincere apologies and want to assure them that we will not forget what they have endured.” But victims in North Carolina would have to wait several years before reparations payments were finally approved in 2013.
In 2001, the Virginia General Assembly expressed “profound regret” for that state’s role in promoting eugenics. One year later, then-Governor Mark Warner offered an official apology, calling the eugenics movement “a shameful effort in which state government never should have been involved.” Warner’s mea culpa was delivered on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Buck v. Bell ruling.
Yet when it came to paying for past mistakes with actual money, Virginia lawmakers took their time. In 2012, on the eighty-fifth anniversary of the ruling, one Democratic member of the state legislature, Patrick Hope, called for the state to pay reparations. The next year, he proposed legislation to create a compensation fund for eugenics victims. But nothing was passed until 2015.
The same thing happened in California. In 2003, then-Governor Gray Davis apologized to the victims “of this past injustice,” adding that “the people of California are deeply sorry for the suffering you endured over the years. Our hearts are heavy for the pain caused by eugenics. It was a sad and regrettable chapter . . . that must never be repeated.”
Like Warner and Easley, Davis left it at that and said nothing about possible reparations. It took nearly twenty years for those payments to be made possible. As in Virginia and North Carolina, there were several failed attempts to pass reparations legislation along the way—the legislation Newsom signed last year was the fourth attempt by the state at making reparations to victims.
All of this foot-dragging has gone a long way toward making eugenics reparations add up to being too little, too late. Most eugenic sterilizations happened decades ago, so the majority of victims are no longer living. Each year that lawmakers and governors failed to take action, more victims died without receiving a penny in compensation.
On January 1, the California Victim Compensation Board began its two-year mission of locating the living residents of the state who were forcibly sterilized, in order to sign them up for reparations. According to the governor’s office, there are likely about 600 victims to be found.