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In the event, Carrie Buck’s child, a girl who later died of measles, was not retarded at all but “bright.” Whether Carrie herself was retarded is also open to doubt. Her sister, who was also sterilized (without her knowledge), was apparently not.59

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Stanley also felt that sterilization would “do much to stamp out crime. The right to bear children” should be “reserved to the fit.” But he also reported that the California statute on sterilization of criminals had not been enforced, and that he knew of no such operations “as punishment” in all the many years he had served. Stanley did report, however, that there were many voluntary vasectomies; over six hundred prisoners asked for and got a vasectomy, including “Bluebeard” Watson, who “had murdered many of his twenty-two wives.”61

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There are, to this day, a handful of survivors: for example, Washington, which permits a court to order sterilization for anyone “adjudged guilty of carnal abuse of a female person under the age of ten, or of rape,” or who was “adjudged to be an habitual criminal.”66

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The defendant and a friend had been arrested for rape, after an incident in a deserted parking lot in Newark. The state’s case was weak; the men denied using force, and the women were perhaps prostitutes. The judge then told counsel he intended to charge the jury that fornication was a “lesser included offense of rape.” Defense counsel objected, “pointing out that the statute was in ‘disrepute’ and rarely applied.”104

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The same general attitude cropped up in laws and cases that seem to have as their goal hiding sex, banishing it to the periphery, forcing it indoors and underground. There was, for example, the celebrated case of Jo Carol LaFleur, a junior-high teacher in Cleveland, Ohio. She successfully challenged a rule that prevented women from teaching after their fourth month of pregnancy; the school board gave a lot of reasons for the rule, but surely one of them was that it was indecent for students to see a swollen belly.120 There were also rules in many high schools (later challenged) that excluded married students, perhaps because they knew too much about sex or were having too much of it legitimately.121

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Self-censorship was a powerful force, even when no police or court were involved. In 1913, Lee Schubert reluctantly withdrew a play, The Lure, from Broadway; it dealt with white slavery. He acted under the shadow of a grand jury investigation. Schubert felt the play belonged on Broadway; that it performed an “important public purpose”; but he refused, in his words, “to be placed in the position of offending the sense of propriety of even a small minority of serious people who take a different view.” After he acted, the grand jury dropped its inquiry, and public morality (but not the play) was saved.123

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Woolsey’s opinion was United States v. One Book Called “Ulysses,” 5 F. Supp. 182 (S.D. N.Y., 1933). The dirty words, said Woolsey, were “old Saxon words known to almost all men and, I venture, to many women.” True, the book paid a great deal of attention to the “theme of sex,” but “it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season spring.” The Court of Appeals’ decision was United States v. One Book Entitled Ulysses by James Joyce, 72 Fed. 2d 705 (C.A. 2, 1934). Augustus Hand, who wrote the decision, praised the book; at times, it was “coarse, blasphemous, and obscene,” but it did not “tend to promote lust.”

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The First Amendment as such applies only to the federal government; the Supreme Court has decided that the Fourteenth Amendment has “incorporated” it, thus making it applicable to the states as well. Also, each state has its own bill of rights and its own clause about freedom of speech.

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The first case to come before the Supreme Court was Doubleday & Co. v. New York.129 The book was Memoirs of Hecate County, written by Edmund Wilson, the famous critic and writer. The state’s sensibilities were offended by this novel, a judgment that, needless to say, would seem ludicrous