War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition (17 page)

Legitimacy, recognition and proliferation were only the beginning. In 1911, Davenport had authored a textbook entitled
Heredity in Relation to Eugenics.
It had been published by the prestigious Henry Holt & Co. The volume blended genuine biological observation with bizarre pseudoscientific postulations on personal habits and even simple preferences commanded by one’s heredity. “Each ‘family’ will be seen to be stamped with a peculiar set of traits depending upon the nature of its germ plasm,” wrote Davenport. “One family will be characterized by political activity, another by scholarship, another by financial success, another by professional success, another by insanity in some members with or without brilliancy in others, another by imbecility and epilepsy, another by larceny and sexual immorality, another by suicide, another by mechanical ability, or vocal talent, or ability in literary expression.”
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Davenport’s book promulgated a law of heredity that condemned the marriage of cousins as prohibited consanguinity, or marriage of close relatives. “[Should] a person that belongs to a strain in which defect is present … marry a cousin or other near relative … such consanguineous marriages are fraught with grave danger.” Nonetheless, Davenport and his colleagues extolled the marriage of cousins among the elite as eugenically desired; for example, they commonly pointed to great men, such as Darwin, who married his first cousin.
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In the same textbook, Davenport insisted that if immigration from southeastern Europe continued, America would “rapidly become darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial, more attached to music and art, more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape and sex-immorality.” He added a scholarly note about Jews: “There is no question that, taken as a whole, the horde
of J
ews that are now coming to us from Russia and the extreme southeast of Europe, with their intense individualism and ideals of gain at the cost of any interest, represent the opposite extreme from the early English and the more recent Scandinavian immigration with their ideals of community life in the open country, advancement by the sweat of the brow, and the uprearing of families in the fear of God and the love of country. “
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Davenport’s textbook concluded, “In other words, immigrants are desirable who are of ‘good blood’; undesirable who are of ‘bad blood.”‘
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The volume declared that, without question, Mendel’s laws governed all human character: “Man is an organism-an animal; and the laws of improvement of corn and of race horses hold true for him also.” In Davenport’s mind, this axiom spawned far-reaching social consequences. Applying Mendelian formulas to pauperism, for example, Davenport cited “shiftlessness” as a genuine genetic trait, which could be rated for severity. On page 80 of his textbook, Davenport explained with mathematical authority, “Classifying all persons in these two families as
very shiftless, somewhat shiftless,
and
industrious,
the following conclusions are reached. When both parents are
very shiftless,
practically all children are
very shiftless
or
somewhat shiftless.
… When both parents are shiftless in some degree, about 15 percent of the known offspring are recorded as
industrious.”
Not even the sudden onset of a prolonged disease incapacitating or killing the family breadwinner, and thereby creating financial woes for widows and orphans, was an excuse for poverty. “The man of strong stock,” Davenport’s textbook explained, “will not suffer from prolonged disease.”
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As a solution to society’s eugenic problem, Davenport’s textbook strongly advocated for mass compulsory sterilization and incarceration of the unfit, a proliferation of marriage restriction laws, and plenty of government money to study whether intelligence testing would justify such measures against a mere 8 percent of America’s children or as many as 38 percent.
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But could Davenport’s eugenic textbook, and two or three others like it, become accepted doctrine at the nation’s universities? American eugenicists were firmly entrenched in the biology, zoology, social science, psychology and anthropology departments of the nation’s leading institutions of higher learning. Methodically, eugenic texts, especially Davenport’s, were integrated into college coursework and, in some cases, actually spurred a stand-alone eugenics curriculum. The roster was long and prestigious, encompassing scores of America’s finest schools. Harvard University’s two courses were taught by Drs. East and Castle. Princeton University’s course was taught by Dr. Schull and Laughlin himself. Yale’s by Dr. Painter. Purdue’s by Dr. Smith. The University of Chicago’s by Dr. Bisch. Northwestern University, a hotbed of radical eugenic thought, offered a course by Dr. Kornhauser, who had interned at Cold Spring Harbor
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Each school wove eugenics into its own academics. At the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Holmes’s semester-long sociology course was simply named “Eugenics.” At New York University, Dr. Binder’s fifteen-week sociology course was named “Family and Eugenics,” and was attended by some twenty-five male and female students. At Stanford University, Dr. V. L. Kellogg taught a course covering zoology and eugenics. Even tiny schools inaugurated eugenics courses. At Alma College in Michigan, the biology department offered Dr. MacCurdy’s “Heredity and Eugenics” as an eighteen-week course. At tiny Bates College in Maine, Dr. Pomeroy’s eighteen-week biology course was called “Genetics.”
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Eugenics rocketed through academia, becoming an institution virtually overnight. By 1914, some forty-four major institutions offered eugenic instruction. Within a decade, that number would swell to hundreds, reaching some 20,000 students annually.
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High schools quickly adopted eugenic textbooks as well. Typical was George William Hunter’s high school biology book, published by the nation’s largest secondary school book publisher, the American Book Company. Hunter’s 1914 textbook,
A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems,
echoed many of Davenport’s principles. For example, in one passage Hunter railed against unfit families “spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country.” His text added, “Largely for them, the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.” Before long, the overwhelming majority of high schools employed eugenic textbooks that emphasized clear distinctions between “superior families” and “inferior families.”
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But impeding Davenport and Laughlin’s campaign for eugenic programs of sterilization, segregation and social restriction was the lack of easy-to-apply standards to earmark the inferior. Measuring man’s intelligence had always been a eugenic pursuit. In 1883, Galton established what amounted to an intelligence test center in London, charging applicants three pence each to be evaluated. He measured physical response time to auditory, tactile and visual cues. In 1890, Galton’s idea was refined by his associate, the psychologist James Cattell, who devised a series of fifty tests he called “Mental Tests and Measurements.” Like Galton’s intelligence examinations, these “mental tests” logged physical reaction time to sounds and pressures.
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French psychologist Alfred Binet was not a eugenicist; he believed that one’s environment shaped one’s mind. In 1905, at the request of the French education ministry, Binet and physician Theodor Simon published the first so-called “intelligence test” to help classify the levels of retarded children, allowing them to be placed in proper classes. The Binet-Simon Test offered students thirty questions of increasing difficulty from which the test grader could calculate a “mental level.” But Binet insisted that his test did not yield fixed numbers. With assistance, special educational methods and sheer practice a child could improve his score, “helping him literally to become more intelligent than he was before.” To this end, Binet developed mental and physical exercises designed to raise his students’ intelligence levels. These exercises actually yielded improved scores.
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Heredity was in no way a predeterminer of intelligence, he insisted.

But Binet’s intent was turned upside down by American eugenicists. The key instrument of that distortion was psychologist Henry Goddard, an ardent eugenic crusader who became the movement’s leading warrior against the feebleminded. In 1906, the year after Binet published his intelligence test, Goddard was hired to direct the research laboratory at the Vineland Training School for Feebleminded Girls and Boys in Vineland, New Jersey. When the ERO was created a few years later, Goddard routinely made his patients available for assessment and family tracing.
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In 1913, Goddard published an influential book in the eugenics world,
The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeblemindedness.
In the tradi- tion of
The Jukes
and
The Tribe of Ishmael,
Goddard traced the ancestry, immorality and social menace of a large family he named the Kallikaks. He created the surname by combining the Greek words for “beauty” and “bad.” The story of the Kallikaks presented more than just another defective genealogy. The book spun a powerful eugenic lesson and moral warning.
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Family patriarch Martin Kallikak, from the Revolutionary War era, was actually a splendid eugenic specimen who fathered an illustrious line of American descendants by his legitimate and eugenically sound Quaker wife. But Goddard claimed that the same Martin Kallikak had also engaged in an illicit affair with a feebleminded girl, which spawned “a race of defective degenerates.”
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Foreshadowing a philosophy that low intelligence was a hereditary curse, Goddard wrote that the bad Kallikaks were “feebleminded, and no amount of education or good environment can change a feebleminded individual into a normal one, any more than it can change a red-haired stock into a black-haired stock.” To drive his point home, Goddard included a series of photographs of nefarious-looking and supposedly defective Kallikak family members. These photos had been doctored, darkening and distorting the eyes, mouths, eyebrows, nose and other facial features to make the adults and children appear stupid. Although retouching published photos was common during this era, the consistent addition of sinister features allowed Goddard to effectively portray the Kallikaks as mental and social defectives.
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Added to the ominous photos were highly detailed descriptions of the Kallikak family tree. Goddard had anticipated that some might question how such meticulous biographical information about Kallikak ancestors-often hailing back nearly a century and a half-could be reliably extracted from feebleminded descendants. His answer: “After some experience, the field worker becomes expert in inferring the condition of those persons who are not seen, from the similarity of the language used in describing them to that used in describing persons whom she has seen. “
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For example, Goddard’s assistant asked one farmer, “Do you remember an old man, Martin Kallikak, who lived on the mountain edge yonder?” The book’s text quotes the exchange: “‘Do I?’ he answered. ‘Well, I guess! Nobody’d forget him. Simple,’ he went on; ‘not quite right here,’ tapping his head, ‘but inoffensive and kind. All the family was that.’” Goddard recited this documentation in a chapter entitled “Further Facts.”
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Mass sterilization, in Goddard’s view, was merely the first step in corralling the feebleminded. Sterilization did not diminish sexual function, just reproductive capability. Therefore, Goddard asked, “What will be the effect upon the community in the spread of debauchery and disease through having within it a group of people who are thus free to gratify their instincts without fear of consequences in the form of children? … The feebleminded seldom exercise restraint in any case.”
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His answer: mass incarceration in special colonies. “Segregation through colonization seems in the present state of our knowledge to be the ideal and perfectly satisfactory method.”
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Davenport and Goddard both craved a more scientific measurement to identify the feebleminded they targeted. To that end, Goddard translated Binet’s intelligence test into English to create a new American tool for intelligence testing. Binet had originally labeled the highest class of retarded child
débile,
French for “weak.” Goddard changed that, coining a new word:
moron.
It was derived from
moros,
Greek for “stupid and foolish.”
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Financing would be needed to prove Goddard’s new test reliable in the field. “It would be very valuable for the general problem of Eugenics,” Goddard outlined to Davenport in a July 25, 1912 letter, “…in connection with the heredity of feeble-mindedness because … we could judge the probable development of the child from the mental condition of the parents.” The problem? “Our finances have failed us,” wrote Goddard. “I trust you will be able to provide for some such work as this.”
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Goddard was provided for. By 1913, he had taken his new intelligence test and a team of testers to Ellis Island to conduct experiments. American eugenicists long believed that the majority of immigrants, especially brown-haired Irish, Eastern European Jews and southeastern Italians, were genetically defective. As such, they could be expected to contribute a disproportionate number of feebleminded to American shores. At Ellis Island’s massive intake centers, Goddard’s staff initially selected just twenty Italians and nineteen Russians for assessment because they “appeared to be feebleminded.” He believed in the “unmistakable look of the feeble-minded,” bragging that to spot the feebleminded, just “a glance sufficed.” Ultimately, 148 Jews, Hungarians, Italians and Russians were chosen for examination.
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