When Mortals Play God: Eugenics and One Family’s Story of Tragedy, Loss, and Perseverance

Journalist Erickson debuts with a heart-wrenching study of his grandmother’s forced sterilization under Minnesota state law in 1926. Passed between 1907 and 1937 in 32 states and upheld by the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell (1927), eugenic sterilization laws were based on farm husbandry practices and designed to “prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” Erickson’s grandmother, Rose DeChaine, was twice divorced and had two children by the time she was 20, and gave birth to her third child eight months after entering a mental institution; she became subject to sterilization because she was an alleged prostitute classified as “feebleminded.” Drawing on family and state records, Erickson interweaves profiles of Rose’s family members with analysis of the medical and sociological theories behind the eugenics movement. Both of Rose’s sons, one who had contact with her and one who didn’t, exhibited traits of mental illness and alcoholism. On the other hand, her daughter, Erickson’s mother, “serves as a daily reminder of the wrongheadedness of eugenics,” he contends. Unfortunately, the narrative suffers from overwrought prose (Rose was “defiled by the cruelest of man’s blunders”) and an overabundance of tangential material. Still, this is a well-researched and intimate account of a dark chapter in American history. (Sept.)