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Chief Justice William Howard Taft Signs Letter to Key Eugenicist
Chief Justice William Howard Taft Signs Letter to Key Eugenicist
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Taft William

Chief Justice William Howard Taft Signs Letter to Key Eugenicist

 

 

In this letter, Chief Justice William Howard Taft writes to Leon F. Whitney of the American Eugenics Society in response to a query from Whitney. Taft died on March 8, 1930, fewer than three months after signing this letter.

 

 

WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT, Typed Letter Signed, on Supreme Court of the United States letterhead, to Leon F. Whitney, December 21, 1929. 1 p., 8 x 10½ in. Some foxing on edges. Very good with bold, clear signature.

 

 

Excerpt:

 

 

“I have your letter of December 18th. I do not keep track of the newspaper reports of Supreme Court rulings. I have transmitted your letter to the Clerk to learn whether there is any such report as that you refer to and where it is to be found.”

 

 

 

Whitney likely wrote to Chief Justice Taft for a copy of a report related to the case of Buck v. Bell, decided by the Supreme Court in 1927.  In 1924, Virginia adopted a statute that authorized the compulsory sterilization of the intellectually disabled.  Later that year, Dr. Albert Sidney Priddy, superintendent of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, filed a petition with his Board of Directors to sterilize 18-year-old patient Carrie Buck.  He argued that she represented a genetic threat to society.

 

 

As the test case made its way through the courts, Priddy died, and Dr. John Hendren Bell, Priddy’s successor as superintendent, took up the case. The Board of Directors approved the sterilization request, and Buck’s guardian appealed the case to the county circuit court, which upheld the decision of the Board. The Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia likewise approved the sterilization law as consistent with both the state and federal constitutions.

 

 

In the appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, Buck and her guardian argued that the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment had been violated in her case. In an 8-1 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s involuntary sterilization law and accepted the argument that Buck, her mother, and her daughter were “feeble-minded” and “promiscuous.” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote in his opinion for the court, “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.... Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

 

 

By the mid-1930s, some twenty thousand involuntary sterilizations had been performed in the United States.

 

 

William Howard Taft (1857-1930) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and graduated from Yale College in 1878. He received a bachelor of laws degree in 1880 from Cincinnati Law School. After gaining admission to the bar, Taft worked on the Cincinnati Commercial newspaper full time, covering local courts. After a brief stint as an assistant prosecutor, Taft was appointed to the Superior Court of Cincinnati in 1887. In 1890, President Benjamin Harrison appointed him as Solicitor General of the United States, a position he held until Harrison appointed him to the United States Court of Appeals, where he served from 1892 to 1900. He was Governor-General of the Philippines from 1901 to 1903, then Secretary of War under President Theodore Roosevelt from 1904 to 1908. In 1908, he was elected President of the United States as a Republican over Democrat William Jennings Bryan. After his defeat in the three-way election of 1912, Taft joined the faculty of the Yale Law School, until President Warren G. Harding appointed him as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court in 1921, a position he held until his death nine years later.

 

 

Leon F. Whitney (1894-1973) was born in New York City, and graduated from the University of Massachusetts in 1916. He became a biologist and veterinarian and wrote numerous books about the care of pets, especially dogs. He was also a radical eugenicist and secretary of the American Eugenics Society. In his 1934 book The Case for Sterilization, Whitney called for the sterilization of ten million “defective” Americans. Adolf Hitler sent Whitney a letter commending the book, and Whitney praised Hitler as “one of the greatest statesmen and social planners in the world” for his plan to sterilize as many as 400,000 “defective” Germans. From 1940 to 1964, Whitney was a clinical instructor in pathology at the Yale School of Medicine. He married Katharine Carroll Sackett in 1916, and they had two children.

 

 

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