STEVENS POINT If youre looking for some light summer reading, dont pick up Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck.

Author Adam Cohen treats the humorless subject with appropriate seriousness in his 2016 book as he explores the American eugenics movement and bogus science that supported it in the early 20th century. Eugenics supporters preached that the improvement of the human species was best achieved by encouraging or permitting reproduction of only those people with genetic characteristics judged desirable.

We took it much further in the first four decades of the last century, using eugenic science to seek to eliminate through sterilization undesirables like epileptics and those labeled through bogus testing morons, idiots and imbeciles. These included poor people, those labeled sexual perverts, alcoholics, criminals and just about anyone else deemed to be capable of passing on undesirable traits. Eugenics supporters took it a step further, too, successfully limiting the immigration of undesirables such as Jews and Italians.

If it all sounds a bit like Nazi Germany, it should. The U.S. eugenics movement inspired the Nazis on their brutal racial purification journey, as author Cohen points out. And if it sounds a bit like some of the nationalistic fervor racing across the U.S. today, there are some unfortunate parallels, he notes.

A major difference between then and now is that progressives and conservatives alike embraced eugenics the last time around, if for different reasons. Progressives like Teddy Roosevelt believed sterilization and other eugenic activities would prevent unfit people from breeding and saw it as part of efforts to improve the lot of the majority of Americans. Conservatives were drawn to it in the belief that there was a natural elite, and that differences among people couldnt be eradicated by improving their environment.

The story of Carrie Buck is one of a young Virginia woman institutionalized in one of the states institutions for the feeble-minded. Using bogus science to establish she was a low-grade moron, eugenicists used her case to test the legality of their sterilization law. Her mother was labeled similarly with the same test, as was her infant daughter, born after Buck was raped. The case ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927, where justices ruled 8-1 that the law was legal. None other than the revered Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the opinion, proclaiming among other things: Three generations of imbeciles are enough. It apparently didnt matter to Holmes that Buck was labeled a moron, a less feeble-minded category than imbecile.

His ruling set the stage for tens of thousands of state-sponsored sterilizations across the country, most of them women.

Wisconsin has its own eugenic history. Lutz Kaelber, a historical sociologist at the University of Vermont and on the faculty committee of the Miller Center for Holocaust Studies, writes that of more than 1,800 recorded sterilizations in Wisconsin, almost 80 percent were women. This started in 1913, when the state passed its first sterilization law, and continued until 1963. Sterilizations increased dramatically after the Supreme Court ruling. Criminals, insane, feeble-minded, and epileptics were the chosen, he reports. All of this was facilitated by state law, with many of the procedures carried out at the Wisconsin Home for the Feeble-Minded in Chippewa Falls, now known as the Northern Wisconsin Center for the Developmentally Disabled.

It was progressives, dominant in Wisconsin politics at the time, who pushed the concept in the Legislature and Wisconsin's public arena, notes Kaelber.

All of this was a long time ago, so there is no need to be concerned today, right? Maybe we should be. For one thing, the Supreme Court ruling was never overturned. Public sentiment, led by the Catholic Church, turned states away from sterilization, but it is still technically legal in some cases.

Sterilization wasn't the only method used by proponents of eugenics. The desire to "improve" humankind fueled anti-immigration sentiment, and since Jews were among those considered undesirable, many thousands were turned away during the Nazi years. Todays anti-immigrant sentiment carries some of the same prejudices and dangers.

And while mass sterilization doesnt seem likely again soon, does denying medical care to the least among us amount to a 21st-century version of eugenics?

Bill Berry of Stevens Point writes a semimonthly column for The Capital Times. billnick@charter.net

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