In 1912 a book published in New York provided the American public with a diverting detailed account of a family with a strange name and an unsavory past. The book was titled: The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness. The author, Henry Herbert Goddard (1866-1957), was an educator and a psychologist already well-known in professional circles--and an ardent eugenicist. In his new book, and in later lectures, he proposed that the feeble-minded inherited their constitutional inferiority, that they were a dangerous source of criminality, and that if sterilization of such people was impractical, segregation should be instituted to protect the rest of society. And how were the feeble-minded to be recognized in order to be segregated? When their physical appearance was not conclusive, he had the instrument: an intelligence test perfected by a Frenchman named Binet.
In the decade that preceded the Great War, in the dying days of Victorian blustering about class, destiny, and patriotism, social Darwinism coupled itself to eugenics, a nasty marriage that would bring misery to two generations in Europe and America. Henry Goddard was not the first American eugenicist, but he was the most influential eugenicist in education, clinical psychology, and public policy in his time. His book on the Kallikak family was an instant commercial success. Professional journals were particularly impressed. The Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology published an adoring review that began, "This is a book whose value in the study of heredity cannot be overestimated. The standing of the author and of the school with which he is connected are such guarantees of the authenticity of its data and the correctness of the work as to make it invaluable."
Unfortunately, fifty unhappy years had to pass before the public understood that too much of the data in the book was either faked or in error. Fakery and ignorance were more involved than science. Given Goddard's eminence in his profession and his influence on public policy, it's an ugly story.
At the time the book was published, Goddard was Director of Research at the Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys in Vineland, New Jersey, a prestigious research center for the study of mental retardation. Before becoming research director at Vineland, Goddard was a teacher in several ordinary schools in Ohio and Pennsylvania. He had neither medical training nor any training in biology or genetics.
In Goddard's book of 1912, the Kallikak family name was fictitious, but the family itself apparently real. According to Goddard, a tracing through five generations of the genealogy of Deborah Kallikak, a contemporary resident of the Vineland Training School, revealed two lineages originating in a man named Martin Kallikak, a Revolutionary War soldier who died in the 1830s. This Martin Kallikak supposedly impregnated a nameless feeble-minded woman, which started one line of descendants, and then he married "a respectable girl of good family" and started a second line of descendants. In the book, Goddard presented the differences in the life histories of the two lineages as proof by a "natural experiment" that feeble-mindedness is inherited in accordance with Mendelian genetic theory, which had been rediscovered in the 1890s.
The book contained six photographs of Deborah Kallikak in the Vineland Training School and eight photographs of her family and their ancestral homes. According to Goddard, Deborah's family descended from the impregnation by Martin Kallikak of the nameless feeble-minded girl, the feeble-mindedness of the lineage evident in the photographs of various family members. The ancestral homes were the hovels commonly associated at the time with degenerate families. The photographs were considered documentary evidence to support Goddard's analysis, since both the public and professionals at the time believed the feeble-minded could be recognized by their physical appearance and how they lived. The photographs of Deborah, immaculately dressed, seeming happy, and even holding an open book in her hands, implied that the Vineland Training School had rescued her from a degraded life--an incentive for private donations to the funding of the school and Goddard's research.
The degree to which nineteenth century degeneration theory had seeped into the American psyche is made evident by a passage from a article about a family called "the Pineys" by Elizabeth Kite, one of Goddard's fieldworkers, that appeared in 1913:
"But the real Piney has no inclination to labor, submitting to every privation in order to avoid it. Lazy, lustful and cunning he is a degenerate creature who has learned to provide for himself the bare necessities of life without entering into life's stimulating struggle. Like the degenerate relative of the crab that ages ago gave up a free roving life and, gluing its head to a rock, built a wall of defense around itself, spending the rest of its life kicking food into its mouth and enjoying the functionings of reproduction, the Piney and all the rest of his type have become barnacles upon our civilization, all the higher functions of whose manhood have been atrophied through disease."
Yes, we Americans were like that, the fortunate calling the unfortunate "lazy, lustful and cunning."
It's probable that any current intelligent high school student could demolish the ideas of Goddard and his followers in five minutes. But it did not happen during Goddard's time. Between 1900 and 1930, the social Darwinist-eugenics fever pervaded American society. The general idea was that those apparently unfit were to be despised because of their inherited unfitness. Henry Goddard knew next to nothing about the biology and medicine of mental retardation. That did not stop him or stop his public policy propaganda. Arrogance is hardly ever stopped by ignorance.
In 1933, when the Nazis came into power in Germany, they started burning a great many books. One book they did not burn was Henry Goddard's The Kallikak Family. Instead, the Nazis published a new edition of the book in German.
Much of Goddard's success was a consequence of the support of the leisure class--the class always in a constant hunt to justify its privileges. We've had a similar current experience in the DNA craze of recent decades, the gene-mongering idea that individual destiny is foretold, everything in the genes, so why bother with social mobility? Nothing appeals to the leisure class more than the idea that genes and heredity determine social position.
We Americans like to think of ourselves as a nation of great nobility, providers of democracy and decency to the world. The idea does make us happy. But we also have attitudes that provide other things to the world, including the roots of ugly tyranny. We do need to understand the history of our own arrogance--especially the arrogance of those of our experts who turn out to be dangerous imbeciles.