Opening book details…
Can I read Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell on EtoBox?
Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell by Paul A. Lombardo is a history book available to read on EtoBox.
What is Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell about?
"Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Few lines from Supreme Court opinions are as memorable as this declaration by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in the landmark 1927 case __Buck v. Bell__. The ruling allowed states to forcibly sterilize residents in order to prevent "feebleminded and socially inadequate" people from having children. It is the only time the Supreme Court endorsed surgery as a tool of government policy. Paul Lombardo’s startling narrative exposes the __Buck__ case’s fraudulent roots. In 1924 Carrie Buck—involuntarily institutionalized by the State of Virginia after she was raped and impregnated—challenged the state’s plan to sterilize her. Having already judged her mother and daughter mentally deficient, Virginia wanted to make Buck the first person sterilized under a new law designed to prevent hereditarily "defective" people from reproducing. Lombardo’s more than twenty-five years of research and his own interview with Buck before she died demonstrate conclusively that she was destined to lose the case before it had even begun. Neither Carrie Buck nor her mother and daughter were the "imbeciles" condemned in the Holmes opinion. Her lawyer—a founder of t
Who reads Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell?
It is typically read by self-directed learners exploring a subject in depth.
Common subject areas: history, science, philosophy, social sciences.
- Author
- Paul A. Lombardo
- Publisher
- The Johns Hopkins University Press
- Published
- 2010
- Language
- EN
- ISBN
- 9780801898242
- Category
- history
- Subjects
- Law, Fiction, Science
- Rating
- 3.83 / 5 (108 ratings)
- Updated
- 2026-03-14