3 Generations of Imbeciles

When he was a high school junior, my dopey brother wrote an application to the Virginia state Governor's School about how Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was his intellectual mentor.  It was a pretty clear declaration of his opposition to civil liberties given that Holmes authored the infamous Buck v. Bell decision that upheld the legality of Virginia's forced sterilization law, ostensibly intended for the intellectually and physically impaired but really used to cull those deemed socially and racially undesirable.

It was even more provocative because he was headed to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, the place where Carrie Buck worked as a maid and was raped and impregnated by a male member of the family, only to be sent to a state farm for the "mentally enfeebled" near Lynchburg and ordered to be sterilized.  He even ended up living across 14th Street from Venable Elementary School, where Buck's daughter made the honor roll.

And because the Governor's School was held in Staunton, site of the DeJarnette Sanitarium and Western State Hospital.  Joseph DeJarnette was the enthusiastic proponent of the Virginia sterilization law and program who helped inspire the Nazi eugenics effort.  He even game himself the nickname "Sterilization" DeJarnette to celebrate his efforts.  And throughout the 1930s, he repeatedly lobbied the state General Assembly to extend the scope of the sterilization law to keep pace with the Nazis saying, "The Germans are beating us at our own game and are more progressive than we are."