Positioning oneself on the right side of history before History has rendered its verdict, it’s a tricky business.[1] If Bolshevism was the progressive cause du jour internationally in the first half of the 20th century, eugenics was all the rage domestically in progressive circles. A veritable Who’s Who of progressive thinkers—Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger, and Helen Keller in the US; Bertrand Russell, Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells in the UK—embraced the eugenical improvement of the human race via scientific breeding. States in the Union that had “enlightened” governments such as Wisconsin passed mandatory sterilization laws to weed out “defectives” (those born with congenital handicaps and illnesses) and the “feebleminded” (those possessed of low morals and I.Q.s, which were said to go hand-in-hand). Such legislation met resistance, however, in the “backward,” God-fearing Protestant Bible-Belt states of the Deep South, as they embraced the sanctity of our common humanity (salvation was within reach of all God’s children).[2] Eventually, however, the Deep South, too, fell into line as these states succumbed before the juggernaut of “progress.” The legality of state-enforced sterilization came before the US Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell (1927). The defendant, Carrie Buck, along with her mother and daughter, was alleged to be feeble-minded. (There appears to have been no evidentiary basis for this contention.) Revered Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes upheld not just the legality but also the desirability of sterilization.
— source normanfinkelstein.com | Norman Finkelstein | May 5, 2022