‘It is better for all the world,’ wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in the court’s majority decision, ‘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.’ Holmes, often venerated as one of America’s greatest legal minds, concluded with a brutal judgement on the Buck family: ‘Three generations of imbeciles are enough.’
