Star Trek is of course fiction. Ditto the Eugenics Wars, which should have taken place during the Clinton Administration according to the original timeline. However, the idea that eugenics, or “good breeding,” could bring about a superior race of superior men permeates early twentieth century popular culture and politics. Book after book, pamphlet after pamphlet, political reformers and politicians and popular writers all assumed that if one can get a champion horse or cow or pig by breeding the best to the best, it should be perfectly possible to do the same thing with human beings and acted accordingly.
That these “superior humans” so often were portrayed as flaxen haired and blue eyed, with milky skin and strong jaws (men) or flawless cheekbones and firm, bountiful breasts (women), only showed that German/Anglo-Saxon/Aryan stock was the very best, not the most advantaged, and thus deserved to be what one early science fiction writer termed “the Race that Rules.” By the 1940’s the whole “blond=good/brunet = bad” trope was so common that comic book historians have speculated that one of the reasons Jack Kirby and Joe Simon decided to make their superheroic plea for intervention against the Axis, Captain America, yellow haired and blue eyed was specifically to satirize the Nazi obsession with blond perfection since Cap’s superior strength, speed, and agility were thanks to a Jewish-American scientist, not an impeccable Aryan pedigree.
Is it any wonder that Heinrich Himmler set up the Lebensborn program to encourage healthy SS officers to beget as many offspring as they could? That Abenaki Indians in New England and African-Americans in the South and working class reform school inmates throughout the country were sterilized, usually without their knowledge or consent? That even today, the man squatting in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue can babble about having “superior genes” based solely on his pasty white complexion? Or that pale young men marched last summer bearing the shield of St. Maurice to “reclaim their heritage,” and never mind that St. Maurice himself was from Africa?
Or that this dangerous, scientifically bogus concept continues to infect our culture and our discourse despite study after study showing that race is a social construct, that all of humanity descends from African hominids, and that the much vaunted pale hair and eyes are a mutation that arrived in Europe barely 10,000 years ago? Moderns may cringe at the idea of well meaning reformers like David Starr Jordan of Stanford University publishing The Blood of the Nation: A Study in the Decay of Races, or Nobel Prize Winners like Alexis Carrel advocating that “defectives” be gassed, but even now, seventy years after the bloodiest war in history was fought at least in part over eugenics, moral philosophers like Peter Singer can and do argue that handicapped infants should be quietly euthanized. And it was only in 2006 that Richard Lynn, then a respected professor in Northern Ireland, published the blatantly racist Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis via a white supremacist publisher...and despite an avalanche of criticism, it took a student petition twelve years later before the University of Ulster finally stripped him of his emeritus status and fired him.
To quote James Lovell, “Houston, we have a problem.”
Tonight I bring you only one book, but it’s a doozy. This classic of racism is a prime example of how even a well meaning researcher, raised in one of the most liberal of churches, could be so convinced of the validity of eugenics that he penned one of the most illiberal books in American letters. Hugely influential, largely fictional, tonight’s selection became both a household word and yet more evidence that there is a GIANT HORRIBLE FESTERING MOUND O’ RACISM basically stinking up American life:
The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness, by Henry H. Goddard — few people today have heard of Henry H. Goddard, but a century ago he was the expert on what used to be called “feeblemindedness” and today would probably be called “mental disability.” Born into a solid Quaker family, he studied psychology at Clark University and went on to head the New Jersey Home for the Education and Care of Feebleminded Children (now the Vineland Training School).
Goddard, who counted among his friends the founder of the American Friends Service Committee, soon became fascinated by human intelligence. He proposed the use of the then-new, exciting, cutting edge Binet test (now the Stanford-Binet) to classify the feebleminded according to whether they were morons (IQ of 51-70), imbeciles (25-50), or idiots (under 25), which remained the accepted terminology for decades despite all three definitions becoming popular terms for “really, really stupid.” He even studied new immigrants at Ellis Island, where he learned that around 80% of Eastern Europeans were feebleminded, and never you mind that all his test subjects were steerage passengers who probably spoke about five words of English each and had no idea what was going on. Henry H. Goddard was an expert, and his words carried weight in the medical community.
And not just in the medical community. Goddard opined that
“Democracy, then, means that the people rule by selecting the wisest, most intelligent and most human to tell them what to do to be happy”
and it’s little wonder he pushed for the establishment of colonies for the feebleminded where they could do whatever the mentally defective do without disturbing polite society or interbreeding with normal humans. That this was disturbingly reminiscent of leper colonies meant little; isolating the feebleminded in their own little world was better than sterilizing them, which even Goddard knew was so politically charged that he never dared press for it in public. He also swore that his research about the terminal stupidity of immigrant Hungarians, Jews, Russians, and Italians played no role in the 1920’s immigration acts that kept the dusky and the non-Christian from arriving on the hallowed shores of Columbia, but he was so respected and his views so accepted that it’s all but certain his work did indeed figure in the debate to at least a certain extent
And then there was the startling discovery he made during his years in New Jersey: not only was intelligence inherited, but one — just one — inferior ancestor could irrevocably taint an entire family for generations to come, just like “one drop” of African blood meant that even the palest, blondest, bluest eyed, squarest jawed citizen was black, not white.
The ancestor was a tavern girl who dallied with a worthy Quaker soldier (hmmm) just after the Revolutionary War whom Goddard called “Martin Kallikak.” She bore him a son, Martin Jr., nicknamed “Old Horror,” who fathered ten little horrors of his own. They in turn went on a century-plus spree of crime, debauchery, and the begetting of yet more feebleminded children whose poverty, alcoholism, and just plain bad behavior made them a public menace throughout New Jersey and the surrounding area. One of these descendants, Deborah, was even a student at Goddard’s own school. She was the illegitimate daughter of a female Kallikak who’d abandoned her to marry the father of yet another child, and though she was pleasant and personable, she had great difficulties in learning to read and write.
For all that she was feebleminded, however, Deborah did make one valuable contribution: investigation into her family tree showed that there was another Kallikak family, worthy and intelligent, who’d been models of civic virtue for just as long as Deborah’s ancestors had fornicated, boozed it up, and generally rioted their way through the years. These worthy citizens were descended from Martin via his “lawful wife,” whose intelligence and good character had been passed down to the doctors, lawyers, ministers, and similar upstanding citizens who’d graced New Jersey over the years.
Goddard’s conclusion, backed up with genealogies, photographs of various poverty-stricken Kallikaks, and a great deal of plausible sounding psychological jargon, was simple: intelligence was inherited, the feebleminded should be trained for menial tasks but not allowed to breed, and eventually society would be free of crime, poverty, drunkenness, and similar Kallikakishness.
Needless to say, the book was a sensation. Eugenicists embraced it as scientific proof that “bad blood” was the source of bad behavior, politicians used it as the basis for passing legislation allowing the sterilization of the unworthy, and reformers either reacted in horror (the real problem was poverty and malnutrition!) or argued that otherwise good ideas (birth control!) would lead not just to the empowerment of women but to fewer slum dwellers and thus less crime, poverty, and (of course) feeblemindedness. Goddard himself rode The Kallikak Family’s success straight to the top of his profession, solidifying his reputation as the expert on IQ and winning appointment to the faculty of Ohio State University.
It was all very neat and tidy and influential.
And, as later investigation conclusively proved, it was all wrong.
For it seems that Deborah Kallikak (tn Emma Wolverton) was almost certainly not feebleminded; she was a skilled woodworker and seamstress, and so poised and articulate that visitors to the training school frequently mistook her for a staff member. She eventually moved to the New Jersey State Institute for Feebleminded Women, where she became a valued childcare worker, carpenter, dressmaker, and practical nurse. She had a bad temper, true, but who could blame her for chafing at a lifetime as a ward of the state? Modern scholars think she was likely learning disabled, not brain damaged, and her love of books, photography, and correspondence bears this out. Why Goddard decided to use as an example of unfitness is a good question, since Emma’s own life put the lie to his conclusions.
If that weren’t enough, Goddard’s entire account of her family was wrong. Martin Kallikak, Jr. (tn John Wolverton) was actually born to Gabriel Wolverton and his wife Catherine, not an unknown barmaid, and was a prosperous, respectable landowner, not an Old Horror who begat a nest of criminals. His descendants included the poor and the desperate, absolutely, but also bank executives, teachers, and that most elite of warriors, an Army Air Corps pilot. Modern researchers believe that Goddard’s research into the Wolvertons/Kallikaks had failed to control for childhood malnutrition, fetal alcohol syndrome, and poverty when he traced Emma Wolverton’s family tree, which made her branch of the Wolvertons look like habitual degenerates.
Worst of all? Goddard made the whole story of Martin Sr. and the barmaid up. His thesis was so dependent on what was known of Mendelian genetics that he had to create a “bad seed” who’d contaminated one branch of the Wolvertons because otherwise they were the usual mix of rich, poor, wild, controlled, intelligent, feckless, successful, and failed that constitutes pretty much every family that’s ever lived, in every country, in every era. He was so convinced that intelligence and good character were inherited that he decided to create evidence where there was none to prove his point, and never mind the damage that this might cause to individuals like Emma Wolverton and society at large.
To be fair, Goddard himself came to regard The Kallikak Family as severely flawed within a decade. He wanted to encourage good eugenics, marriage and reproduction among the intelligent and successful, not conduct scientific studies. Eventually he shifted his efforts to education reform and improving childrearing practices, and to the end of his life he was bewildered when reformers called The Kallikak Family dangerous and prejudiced; that poor immigrants with low IQ’s actually did just fine when they’d gotten decent jobs and learned to speak English, or that “feebleminded” children who were fed a balanced diet did well in school, never quite registered. Neither did the uncomfortable fact that his work, and that of other American advocates for the suppression of reproduction by the unworthy, was the direct inspiration for later the German campaign to sterilize, gas, and institutionalize the mentally ill, the handicapped, and the non-Aryan.
Ironically enough, one of Goddard’s closest friends was a man named Rufus Jones. This fellow Quaker, who’s now all but forgotten, received the 1947 Nobel Peace Prize for his work cofounding what became the American Friends Service Committee. This group saved literally thousands of Eastern Europeans from Nazi persecution, did extensive war relief work, and worked to place Japanese-American college students in Eastern schools to avoid the 1940’s relocation camps. The AFSC, along with the similar Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, has been a sterling example of non-partisan work to better the entire world, not just members of a particular group. As their mission statement says, the AFSC’s work is based on
"[T]he unfaltering belief in the essential worth of every human being, non-violence as the way to resolve conflict, and the power of love to overcome oppression, discrimination, and violence."
What Henry H. Goddard, who faked his data to support his beliefs, would have thought of this...well, that’s not for me to say. But it certainly is intriguing to consider how different the world would have been if Goddard had simply reported Emma Wolverton’s ancestry instead of altering it.
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Did you first hear about eugenics from Star Trek? Are you tired of Battleship Cumberland playing any and every part Hollywood can sling in his general direction? Is your last name either “Juke” or “Kallikak”? Have you ever wondered why the most fervent advocates for superior genes often turn out to be complete idiots? Step right up to the chimenea and share….
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