Imbeciles
The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck
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Narrated by:
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Dan Woren
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By:
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Adam Cohen
About this listen
Longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction
One of America’s great miscarriages of justice, the Supreme Court’s infamous 1927 Buck v. Bell ruling made government sterilization of “undesirable” citizens the law of the land.
In 1927, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling so disturbing, ignorant, and cruel that it stands as one of the great injustices in American history. In Imbeciles, best-selling author Adam Cohen exposes the court’s decision to allow the sterilization of a young woman it wrongly thought to be “feebleminded” and to champion the mass eugenic sterilization of undesirable citizens for the greater good of the country. The 8–1 ruling was signed by some of the most revered figures in American law — including Chief Justice William Howard Taft, a former U.S. president; and Louis Brandeis, a progressive icon. Oliver Wendell Holmes, considered by many the greatest Supreme Court justice in history, wrote the majority opinion, including the court’s famous declaration “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Imbeciles is the shocking story of Buck v. Bell, a legal case that challenges our faith in American justice. A gripping courtroom drama, it pits a helpless young woman against powerful scientists, lawyers, and judges who believed that eugenic measures were necessary to save the nation from being “swamped with incompetence.”
At the center was Carrie Buck, who was born into a poor family in Charlottesville, Virginia, and taken in by a foster family, until she became pregnant out of wedlock. She was then declared “feebleminded” and shipped off to the Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded.Buck v. Bell unfolded against the backdrop of a nation in the thrall of eugenics, which many Americans thought would uplift the human race. Congress embraced this fervor, enacting the first laws designed to prevent immigration by Italians, Jews, and other groups charged with being genetically inferior. Cohen shows how Buck arrived at the colony at just the wrong time, when influential scientists and politicians were looking for a “test case” to determine whether Virginia’s new eugenic sterilization law could withstand a legal challenge. A cabal of powerful men lined up against her, and no one stood up for her — not even her lawyer, who, it is now clear, was in collusion with the men who wanted her sterilized.
In the end, Buck’s case was heard by the Supreme Court, the institution established by the founders to ensure that justice would prevail. The court could have seen through the false claim that Buck was a threat to the gene pool, or it could have found that forced sterilization was a violation of her rights. Instead, Holmes, a scion of several prominent Boston Brahmin families, who was raised to believe in the superiority of his own bloodlines, wrote a vicious, haunting decision upholding Buck’s sterilization and imploring the nation to sterilize many more. Holmes got his wish, and before the madness ended, some 60 to 70 thousand Americans were sterilized. Cohen overturns cherished myths and demolishes lauded figures in relentless pursuit of the truth. With the intellectual force of a legal brief and the passion of a front-page exposé, Imbeciles is an ardent indictment of our champions of justice and our optimistic faith in progress, as well as a triumph of American legal and social history.
©2016 Adam Cohen (P)2016 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“This well-written narrative of legal history demonstrates what happens when the powerful and elite in society fail to protect the powerless and poor.... Imbeciles combines an investigative journalist’s instinct for the misuse of power, a lawyer’s analytic abilities, and a historian’s eye for detail to tell this compelling and emotional story.... [The book] serves as a cautionary tale about what may happen when those who have, or obtain, power use the institutions of government and the law to advance their own interests at the expense of those who are poor, disadvantaged, or of different ‘hereditary’ stock'.” (Los Angeles Review of Books)
"In this detailed and riveting study, Cohen captures the obsession with eugenics in 1920s America.... Cohen's outstanding narrative stands as an exposé of a nearly forgotten chapter in American history.” (Publishers Weekly, starred review)
“An important new book…which details the eugenic horror that still haunts the American legal system.... Cohen’s narrative of the legal case that enshrined these practices is a page-turner, and the story it tells is deeply, almost physically, infuriating.... Cohen reminds us of the simple, shocking fact that while forced sterilizations are rare today, they remain legal because American courts have never overturned Buck v. Bell.” (The New Republic)
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Story
They began as close allies and friends of FDR, but the quest to shape a new Constitution led them to competition and sometimes outright warfare. Scorpions tells the story of four great justices: their relationship with Roosevelt, with each other, and with the turbulent world of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. It also serves as a history of the modern Constitution itself.
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A MOST HONOURABLE SWANSONG
- By Dudley H. Williams on 05-27-12
By: Noah Feldman
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The Majesty of the Law
- Reflections of a Supreme Court Justice
- By: Sandra Day O'Connor
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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In this remarkable book, Sandra Day O’Connor explores the law, her life as a Supreme Court Justice, and how the Court has evolved and continues to function, grow, and change as an American institution. Tracing some of the origins of American law through history, people, ideas, and landmark cases, O’Connor sheds new light on the basics, exploring through personal observation the evolution of the Court and American democratic traditions.
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Informative and well-written
- By James on 07-11-05
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Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy
- Oxford University Press: Pivotal Moments in US History
- By: James T. Patterson
- Narrated by: Steve Anderson
- Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Most Americans still see Brown v. Board of Education as a triumph - but was it? James T. Patterson shrewdly explores the provocative questions that still swirl around the case. A wide range of characters animates the story, from the little-known African-Americans who dared to challenge Jim Crow with lawsuits; to Thurgood Marshall, who later became a Justice himself; to Earl Warren, who shepherded a fractured Court to a unanimous decision.
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The Fight Against Inequality
- By Marcus on 03-05-15
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The Supreme Court
- The Personalities and Rivalries That Defined America
- By: Jeffrey Rosen
- Narrated by: Alan Sklar
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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A leading Supreme Court expert recounts the personal and philosophical rivalries that forged our nation's highest court and continue to shape our daily lives. The Supreme Court is the most mysterious branch of government, and yet the Court is at root a human institution, made up of very bright people with very strong egos, for whom political and judicial conflicts often become personal.
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Overruled!
- By Stephen McLeod on 08-23-08
By: Jeffrey Rosen
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A People's History of the Supreme Court
- The Men and Women Whose Cases and Decisions Have Shaped Our Constitution
- By: Peter Irons, Howard Zinn - foreword
- Narrated by: David Drummond
- Length: 28 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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A comprehensive history of the people and cases that have changed history, this is the definitive account of the nation's highest court.
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Really enjoyed this book
- By Paul on 02-19-20
By: Peter Irons, and others
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Unexampled Courage
- The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring
- By: Richard Gergel
- Narrated by: Richard Gergel - introduction, Tom Zingarelli
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Richard Gergel’s Unexampled Courage details the impact of the blinding of Sergeant Woodard on the racial awakening of President Truman and Judge Waring and traces their influential roles in changing the course of America’s civil rights history.
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Well-paced political-legal history woven around the intersecting stories of the 3 title characters
- By Courtney J. Corda on 03-07-19
By: Richard Gergel
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Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women's Rights Movement
- By: Sally McMillen
- Narrated by: Barbara Goodson
- Length: 12 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In the quiet town of Seneca Falls, New York, over the course of two days in July 1848, a small group of women and men, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, held a convention that would launch the woman's rights movement and change the course of history. The implications of that remarkable convention would be felt around the world - and indeed are still being felt today.
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A Good Listen
- By Kindle Customer on 09-28-18
By: Sally McMillen
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Pox
- An American History
- By: Michael Willrich
- Narrated by: K. Todd Freeman
- Length: 14 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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At the turn of the last century, a smallpox epidemic swept the United States. The age-old disease spread swiftly through an increasingly interconnected American landscape: from southern plantations to the immigrant neighborhoods of northern cities to far-flung villages on the edges of the American empire. In Pox, historian Michael Willrich offers a gripping chronicle of how the nation's continent-wide fight against smallpox launched one of the most important civil liberties struggles of the 20th century.
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Best book on smallpox
- By Chris M. White on 09-07-21
By: Michael Willrich
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The Firebrand and the First Lady
- Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice
- By: Patricia Bell-Scott
- Narrated by: Karen Chilton
- Length: 14 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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An important, groundbreaking book - two decades in work - that tells the story of the unlikely but history-changing 28-year bond forged between Pauli Murray (granddaughter of a mulatto slave who, against all odds, as a lesbian Black woman, became a lawyer, civil rights pioneer, Episcopal priest, poet, and activist) and Eleanor Roosevelt (first lady of the United States from 1933 to 1948 and human rights internationalist) that critically shaped Eleanor Roosevelt's, and therefore FDR's, view of race and racism in America.
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Inspiring
- By Jean on 02-20-16
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The Metaphysical Club
- By: Louis Menand
- Narrated by: Henry Leyva
- Length: 6 hrs and 53 mins
- Abridged
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Hardly a club in the conventional sense, the organization referred to in the title of this superb literary hybrid (part history, part biography, part philosophy) consisted of four members and probably existed for less than nine months.
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The Great American Experiment
- By Victoria on 12-08-03
By: Louis Menand
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Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr
- By: Michael Vinson Williams
- Narrated by: Brandon Church
- Length: 19 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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This biography of a seminal civil rights leader draws on personal interviews from Myrlie Evers-Williams (Evers's widow), his two remaining siblings, friends, grade-school-to-college schoolmates, and fellow activists to elucidate Evers as an individual, leader, husband, brother, and father. Extensive archival work in the Evers Papers, the NAACP Papers, oral history collections, FBI files, Citizen Council collections, and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Papers, to list a few, provides a detailed account of Evers's NAACP work and more.
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Incredible Narration
- By Estella Owoimaha on 10-02-17
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Supreme Power
- 7 Pivotal Supreme Court Decisions That Had a Major Impact on America
- By: Ted Stewart
- Narrated by: Art Allen
- Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Best-selling author Ted Stewart explains how the Supreme Court and its nine appointed members now stand at a crucial point in their power to hand down momentous and far-ranging decisions. Today's Court affects every major area of American life, from health care to civil rights, from abortion to marriage. This fascinating book reveals the complex history of the Court as told through seven pivotal decisions.
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Polemical, downright ridiculous at times
- By Joe Igla on 11-04-17
By: Ted Stewart
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At America's Gates
- Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943
- By: Erika Lee
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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With the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese laborers became the first group in American history to be excluded from the United States on the basis of their race and class. This landmark law changed the course of US immigration history, but we know little about its consequences for the Chinese in America or for the United States as a nation of immigrants. At America's Gates is the first book devoted entirely to both Chinese immigrants and the American immigration officials who sought to keep them out.
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steeped in critical race theory
- By Amazon Customer on 01-30-22
By: Erika Lee
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The Great Dissent
- How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind and Changed the History of Free Speech in America
- By: Thomas Healy
- Narrated by: Danny Campbell
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Free speech as we know it comes less from the First Amendment than from a most unexpected source: Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. A lifelong skeptic, he disdained all individual rights, including the right to express one's political views. But in 1919, it was Holmes who wrote a dissenting opinion that would become the canonical affirmation of free speech in the United States.
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How a 78 year old man can learn & change his mind
- By Jean on 09-23-13
By: Thomas Healy
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Gandhi Before India
- By: Ramachandra Guha
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 23 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Ramachandra Guha takes us from Gandhi's birth in 1869 through his upbringing in Gujarat, his two years as a student in London, and his two decades as a lawyer and community organizer in South Africa. Guha has uncovered myriad previously untapped documents, including private papers of Gandhi's contemporaries. Using this wealth of material in an exuberant, brilliantly nuanced and detailed narrative, Guha describes the social, political, and personal worlds inside of which Gandhi began the journey that would earn him the honorific Mahatma: "Great Soul".
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Somewhat repetitive and lacking
- By freehope on 03-10-21
By: Ramachandra Guha
What listeners say about Imbeciles
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Doc Gina
- 04-09-17
Heartbreaking and scary - worth the listen
This book works well as an audiobook and anyone and everyone needs to listen/read this text given what we are facing in the word today. For something that dives into historical documents, the currency is all too relevant.
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- Emily Mann
- 03-19-16
go ahead get this!
fantastic book- great story, great writing, great narration. you will not be disappointed - I plan on listening again
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1 person found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 08-07-18
Thought provoking
Imbeciles was a thought-provoking book about the people and historical circumstances involved in the Buck vs Bell Supreme Court decision, which allowed involuntary eugenic sterilization of people diagnosed as having inferior genetics or intellectual disabilities, broadly defined. There are some repetitive parts of the book that are apparent when listening to it, and it is jarring to hear "imbeciles," "morons," and "feeble-minded" repeatedly, as these were specific diagnoses given to people and used to justify their involuntary sterilization. It was very timely to hear how the rise of eugenics and push for sterilization of the "feeble-minded" occurred at the same time and by the same people as the introduction of exclusionary quota based/ merit based immigration laws and how these precedents set by the US were used as justifications by the Nazis. It was also thought provoking and disturbing to see how faulty intelligence testing and social judgments resulted in the classification of people as justifying involuntary sterilization or immigration exclusion to purify the American "genetic stock." And ultimately very sad and horrific to see the injustice done to people by legal/ justice, social service, educational, and public health systems and how Carrie Buck not only should never have been classified as an imbecile or feeble minded, had such horrible legal representation, and was not actually told that she was sterilized until years later.
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- Francy_B
- 09-27-16
Too detailed and not detailed enough
It's an interesting book and story, but the narration focuses a lot on the other "characters" that appear and their background, rather than Carrie Buck herself and her story. It's very detailed about people, I'm not sure it gives a complete overall picture of the movement.
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- D. Littman
- 03-19-16
One of the best history books I've read in years
This is a powerful, fascinating book. Deeply researched yet highly readable. It works well as an audio book. The story is horrifying, especially to early 21st century.intellectual sensibilities. But the author makes a good attempt to explain the context of the eugenics movement from the Gilded Age to the 1920s. How some members of the upper classes.in the U.S. got swept up in social Darwinism.& how that.in turn led some to find eugenics an attractive extension. The story is told in episodes, which makes it easy.to pick up & put down. But it hangs together well. It's structure does create some competitiveness. But the books powerful narration makes.it.easy to forgive some repetition.
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7 people found this helpful
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- Charla
- 09-07-17
Forgotten History
It's a shame that this important piece of history is not taught in schools. Incredible how easy it was for Carrie and others to be determined to be feeble minded and how a few zealots in power could determine the path of so many lives.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Lane Willson
- 07-06-16
Scary boys and girls!
George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Bram Stoker and Stephen King got nothing on Adam Cohen! Cohen's tale is no tale at all, but a tragic and shameful story from our past. The most frightening part is that so many of those we now hail as our nation's greatest minds thought the forced sterilization of "imbeciles" was a noble idea.
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- Roberta Casper Watson
- 07-04-18
Tedious at first, but it gets more interesting.
I bought this book on the recommendation of a friend. At first, I had trouble sticking to it, both because the presentation was tedious but because it was the story of such a depressing chapter in our history. Later, it gets into a discussion of the judicial philosophical evolution of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and that was very interesting and compelling, although disappointing to realize how unenlightened Justice Holmes had been.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Tundrabeast
- 10-04-18
A Very Tough Listen
When I first heard the author on late night radio talking about this case I thought it was very interesting so I bought the audiobook. I had to stop listening about half way through because of the descriptions of scholars, doctors, and judges who conspired to make it legal to sterilize those who were "Defective" and worried they would pass on those defective traits if allowed to breed. In my opinion the book just became too depressing. I could not stand to listen to this huge railroading by people who should have been advocates....Not monsters.....
Maybe others can get through it on a clinical level, but I could not
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1 person found this helpful
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- TODD D KEISTER
- 04-02-16
important and interesting story
great book and narration. gets too deep in the weeds as to how eugenics laws were composed in Virginia, but other than that, excellent!
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1 person found this helpful