Disability Futures

In a different time, Estabrook, with his neatly parted hair and defined features, could have become a well-known character actor, a face “in all those movies.” But Estabrook was employee at the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, and he was more than prepared to testify to the inferiority of Carrie and her bloodline. Most of his life had been devoted to diagnosing and describing “defective bloodlines” that, in his view, held humanity back. At the urging of Aubrey Strode, the lawyer for Dr. Priddy and the Virginia State Colony, Estabrook rushed down to Lynchburg to testify against Carrie. Strode believed that the testimony of a true expert in eugenics would be crucial to developing an unassailable legal record proving that Carrie, Emma, and Vivian all carried defective genes and, therefore, that the state had both the authority and the right to sterilize Carrie to prevent any further “feeble-minded” offspring. He needed such expert testimony if the appellate courts, and possibly even the U.S. Supreme Court, were going to uphold Carrie’s sterilization and thus ratify not only Dr. Priddy’s plans for the mass sterilization of “genetic defectives,” but also the plans of thousands of similar eugenicists around the country. Eugenics was Estabrook’s life work, so of course he came as quickly as he could.