In 1918, the year of Rosemary’s birth, the scientific understanding of intellectual disability was primitive by modern standards. The term most commonly used — “feeblemindedness” — was a catch-all applied to an enormous range of conditions, from mild learning differences to severe cognitive impairment, from what we would now call intellectual disability to what we would now recognize as autism, dyslexia, or other neurodevelopmental conditions that have since been distinguished from one another with much greater precision.
The eugenics movement, which had been gaining strength in America since the late nineteenth century, treated feeblemindedness as both hereditary and dangerous. Organizations like the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, compiled family histories and argued for policies that would prevent people deemed intellectually unfit from reproducing. The Immigration Act of 1924 was partly shaped by eugenic arguments about the supposed inferiority of certain ethnic groups. Harry Laughlin, the Eugenics Record Office’s director, testified before Congress that feebleminded immigrants were corrupting the American gene pool.
Thirty-three states passed compulsory sterilization laws during the eugenics era. Indiana’s law dated from 1907. California sterilized more people than any other state — an estimated twenty thousand by the time sterilization programs wound down in the mid-twentieth century. The Supreme Court’s 1927 ruling in Buck v. Bell — “three generations of imbeciles are enough,” in Justice Holmes’s grotesque phrase — gave federal constitutional sanction to state sterilization programs.
The Kennedy family’s wealth insulated Rosemary from the worst of these institutional horrors. She was never committed to a state institution. She was never sterilized against her will. She had private tutors, private schools, private care. Her father’s resources meant that her disability was managed rather than warehoused.