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Victoria F Nourse, IN RECKLESS HANDS: SKINNER v OKLAHOMA AND THE NEAR TRIUMPH OF AMERICAN EUGENICS New York: W W Norton (www.wwnorton.com), 2008. 240 pp. ISBN 9780393065299. US$24.95.

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Published date01 May 2010
Pages354-355
AuthorJames Chalmers
Date01 May 2010
DOI10.3366/elr.2010.0025

McAlester Prison, now the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, is best-known as the institution where Tom Joad, in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, served time for murder. It also, however, achieved prominence in the mid-twentieth century when a group of its prisoners formed a “brain trust” to challenge an Oklahoma statute providing for the sterilisation of “habitual criminals”. Jack Skinner, whose descent into habitual criminality commenced with stealing chickens in 1926, succeeded before the Supreme Court in 1942. As he succeeded, so did the progress of eugenics in the United States of America wither.

Eugenics has reached such a state of disrepute today that it is difficult to appreciate just how strong its foundations could seem in the early twentieth century. Few images in Nourse's study of Skinner v Oklahoma are more striking than that of a New York Daily News article from 1933, where pictures of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Adolf Hitler and Oklahoma Governor Alfalfa Bill Murray appeared together under the heading “Sterilization – How it Works”, favourably analogising Nazi sterilisation programmes to American precedents. In 1927, Holmes had written the brusque opinion of the Supreme Court in Buck v Bell, asserting that it was “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”. It was that precedent which underpinned the laws which Skinner and the “brain trust” sought to challenge. Nourse's thorough and careful archival research pieces together the story behind those efforts.

Ultimately...

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