UNLOCKED! Trickle Down Episode 1: Bad Seed (Part 1)
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In the early 20th century a psychologist named Henry Herbert Goddard aimed to prove that “feeblemindedness” was a hereditary trait. His work, fueled by the frenzy of eugenics research at the time, focused on the family line of an institutionalized girl named Emma Wolverton, but which he named “Deborah Kallikak” in his publications. Goddard’s 1912 study on the supposedly degenerate Kallikak family won him fame and acclaim. It was printed in textbooks and cited in a Supreme Court case that permitted the involuntary sterilization of people in institutions. But decades later the truth was eventually acknowledged by every honest academic: Goddard’s research, which was validated by heights of authority and power, was completely worthless from top to bottom.
Written by Travis View. Theme by Nick Sena (https://nicksenamusic.com). Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
https://qanonanonymous.com
REFERENCES:
Carlson, Axel Elof ( 2001) The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea
Smith, David J. and Wehmeyer, Michael L. (2012) Good Blood, Bad Blood. Science, Nature, and the Myth of the Kallikaks.
Smith, David J. and Wehmeyer, Michael L. (2012) Who Was Deborah Kallikak?
https://meridian.allenpress.com/idd/article/50/2/169/14846/Who-Was-Deborah-Kallikak
Smith, David J. (1985) Minds Made Feeble: The Myth and the Legacy of the Kallikaks
Zenderland, L. (1998). Measuring minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the origins of American intelligence testing.
In the winter of 1945, the pioneering research psychologist Henry Herbert Goddard sent a Christmas letter.
The letter touched on the subject of his life's work, human intelligence.
Intelligence is the degree of availability of one's experiences for the solution of immediate problems and the anticipation of future ones.
Goddard, now nearly 80 years old, defined intelligence this way, I have solved some of life's problems, though not always wisely.
I've made many mistakes because I did not have sufficient intelligence to see the end from the beginning.
Among those who received this letter was Goddard's most famous pupil, Emma Wolverton, but she was known all over the world by the pseudonym that Goddard gave her, Deborah Kalakak.
Decades earlier, Goddard worked as a researcher at the institution where Emma Wolverton lived, the Vineland Training Center in New Jersey.
Emma, like the rest of the inmates, lived there because she was diagnosed as feeble-minded.
In 1912, Goddard wrote a book about what he called the Kalakak family and concluded that this family's abundance of criminals and illegitimate children was due to feeble-mindedness passed down from generation to generation.
Emma Wolverton, after receiving this Christmas letter, boasted that she grasps Goddard's definition of intelligence.
The nicest thing about it is that he thought I had the brains to understand it, which of course I do.
For years before and after this letter was written, Goddard's story of the Kalakaks was used to justify the widespread oppression of people given the label of idiot, imbecile, or moron.
People were institutionalized en masse.
They were considered hopeless by the educational system.
States, one by one, legalized the involuntary sterilization of the feeble-minded for the good of society.
A Supreme Court case deemed that these practices were legal.
That case cited the Calicak story.
These policies were in place for decades, before scientists and policymakers finally recognized that Goddard's research, which was validated by the highest levels of academia and political power, was completely worthless from top to bottom.
I'm Travis Few, and this is Trickle Down, a podcast about what happens when bad ideas flow from the top.
With me is Julian Field and Jake Rokitansky.
Episode 1, Bad Seed, Part 1.
Well, boys, I'm glad that you're here to join me, because I'm going to talk about
what I think is one of the most disastrous debacles of 20th century American science.
You know how much I love science, but this is a real fuck-up, and I think it's worth discussing.
It's the story of an educational researcher named Henry Herbert Goddard, who believed that he found proof that everything that plagues society, like crime and people who are unable to care for themselves, boiled down to bad genes.
Goddard's story of the supposedly degenerate Kalakak family, as he called them, made him world famous.
Scientist Stephen Jay Gould once called the Kalakak family story the primal myth of the eugenics movement.
But the shoddy science that Goddard presented in his 1912 book on the Kalakak family was just one point in a long history of similar bad ideas.
In fact, Goddard didn't even come up with the idea of tracing a family history and counting the number of criminals, idiots, and alcoholics.
Forty years before Goddard published his story on the Kalakak family, the sociologist Richard Dugdale published research on a different family line that he called the Dukes.
When Richard Dugdale was a young man, he had an interest in the social sciences but wasn't wealthy enough to jump right into the field, so he worked as a merchant and manufacturer while taking night classes at the private college Cooper Union in New York.
He eventually joined several sociological organizations, including the Society for Political Education, the New York Social Science Society, the New York Sociology Club, and the Civil Service Reform Association.
In 1874, Richard Dugdale toured the 13 county jails in New York State.
He was there on assignment from the New York Prison Association, hoping to better understand the causes of poverty, criminality, and alcoholism.
While visiting the Ulster County Jail, he discovered that six people being held there were all related.
The oldest was a 55-year-old man who was awaiting trial for receiving stolen goods.
His 18-year-old daughter was being held as a witness against him.
Her uncle was held for burglary in the first degree.
An illegitimate daughter from the family was held until she was sent to a reformatory for vagrancy.
Two brothers from another branch of the family, aged 14 and 19, were accused of pushing a child over a high cliff and nearly killing him.
Curious at the revelation of a family of criminals, Dugdale investigated.
The sheriff referred Dugdale to two men, one of whom was an 84-year-old town doctor who offered genealogies of many of the branches of this family.
Dugdale ultimately reconstructed genealogies of 42 families that could be traced to a common ancestor, an American frontiersman born between 1720 and 1740 who was the descendant of early Dutch settlers.
A disproportionate number of these family members had been imprisoned, engaged in behavior deemed criminal or immoral, or were impoverished.
In fact, according to Dugdale, this clan was "so despised by the reputable community
that their family name had come to be used generically as a term of reproach."
In 1877, Dugdale published the story of this family in the book "The Jukes,"
a study of crime, pauperism, disease, and heredity.
Though the word heredity was used in the title, Dugdale claimed, with few exceptions, that what was inherited was a bad environment rather than bad physiology.
In fact, Dugdale noted that the Jukes were a composite of 42 families and not a single group.
Of the 709 people examined by his study, only 540 had any blood relation.
Goddard later glossed over the fact that the Dukes weren't a single family by calling them more or less related to each other.
Richard Dugdale condemned the prison system as ineffective in preventing crime, writing this, Indeed, so conspicuous is the failure of the punitive and reformatory institutions of our state that we cannot call these establishments the results of wisdom of our generation, but rather the cumulative accidents of popular negligence, indifference, and incapacity.
Doug Dale thought that the plight of people like the Jukes could be solved if they were simply given a healthier environment to live in.
One suggested reform was providing decent housing to those in need because
"love of home and pride in it are the most powerful motives in checking vagrancy
and in organizing the environment that can perpetuate these essential domestic sentiments."
Dugdale also suggested that crime could be curbed by offering kindergarten,
which was then a quirk of the German education system.
He believed that a single generation of intense social reform would lead to dramatic results.
Such an energetic, judicious, and thorough training of the children of our criminal population would, in 15 years, show itself by the greatest decrease in the number of commitments.
Dugdale also argued that people will turn away from crime if wages are worth more than the gain from theft.
To prove his point, he observed that many prominent and wealthy families made their fortunes by cheating other investors or the public.
But once they attained their wealth, they sought respectability for themselves and their families.
Everyone who closely read Dugdale's book understood that he made a case for social ills being caused by a bad environment.
The sociologist Frank H. Giddings, who edited the fourth edition of the book, said this.
An impression quite generally prevails that The Jukes is a thoroughgoing demonstration of hereditary criminality, hereditary pauperism, hereditary degeneracy, and so on.
It's nothing of the kind and its author never made such a claim for it.
However, Dugdale could not help that his study of the Jukes was misinterpreted by his contemporaries and future generations.
In fact, Dugdale suffered from health problems and died in his early 40s from heart disease in 1883, rendering him unable to defend his perspective.
It's easy to imagine a different history in which policymakers took Dugdale's recommendations seriously, or a history in which other researchers continued Dugdale's research to more closely examine how environmental factors lead to antisocial behavior.
But that's not the history of what happened.
Many readers saw in the Jukes a history of people condemned and irredeemable by virtue of their blood.
And so the story of the Jukes spurred other researchers to write their own family histories.
But the goal of these researchers was to prove that some families are predisposed to being idiots and criminals.
Following the Jukes, three other family studies were published by the end of the century.
In 1888, a reverend named Oscar McCullough published The Tribe of Ishmael, about a poor family who lived in Indianapolis.
In 1897, sociologist Frank Blackmar published a study called The Smoky Pilgrims, which examined a poor family living in rural Kansas.
And in 1900, Albert Winship published a study called Jukes-Edwards, a study in education and heredity.
Winship's book begins with a short summary of Dugdale's study of the Jukes and contrasts it against a family line of famous colonial preacher Jonathan Edwards, which was successful and prosperous.
This was a landmark of family studies because it was the first to tell the story of two families, one degenerative and the other high-achieving.
It was assumed that this split could be explained by the fact that goodness and badness are passed down the family line, just like height or eye color.
This is the core idea of eugenics, which did not yet have a name when Dugdale's study of the Jukes was published.
At this point in history, eugenics was an old idea that was gaining credibility among the well-educated.
In Plato's Republic, Plato suggests the creation of a class of people called guardians who are tasked with protecting society from threats.
Plato took inspiration from the selective breeding of domestic animals to recommend that these guardians only breed with their class to ensure the most fit offspring.
But 2,000 years later, eugenics received a scientific glow thanks to the publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of the Species in 1859.
Darwin described the evolution of life through natural selection.
The complexity and diversity of life, including fungi, plants, birds, and humans, can all be explained by traits passed down from generation to generation.
The heritable traits which favor survival and reproduction allow some species to flourish, while the heritable traits that don't cause some species to go extinct.
And therefore everything that's alive shares a common ancestor, some being that is the grandfather of all life, from which species branched out and slowly changed and diversified in response to environmental pressures.
Nothing about the theory of evolution actually lends support to eugenics.
In fact, according to evolution, the smartest, strongest human being is just as evolved as an amoeba.
They both just belong to species that evolved to survive and reproduce in different ecological niches in this particular time in the history of life.
Evolution doesn't suggest how human beings ought to be or that they are evolving in a particular direction.
Despite that, Darwin's origin of species strongly influenced 19th century ideas about the causes of human behavior and social conditions.
Natural selection was seen to be responsible for many physical and social problems that had previously not been causally linked together.
Physical impairment, disease, poverty, and crime all have their own common ancestor, biological deficiency, or as the eugenicists called it, degeneracy.
This comes from a Latin word, degenerare, meaning to depart from one's kind.
The flawed reasoning process of the eugenicists basically went like this.
Biologically impaired people are genetically unfit to compete in the struggle for survival.
The poor have not fared well in the struggle for survival.
Therefore, they too are genetically unfit.
Since the poor are genetically unfit, they are biologically impaired individuals.
And since poor people are implicated in most social problems, therefore social problems are caused by the biological impairments of poor people.
There are lots of problems with this reasoning process, both rational and empirical.
On the rational side, it commits the category error of conflating the biological struggle for species to survive and reproduce with the social struggle for financial stability.
A poor person who has 10 children is more fit in the evolutionary sense than a rich person who has none.
This doesn't mean it's good to have many children and bad to have none because, again, it's fallacious to derive what people ought to do from the evolutionary explanation of why biological diversity exists.
However, the scientific breakthrough of evolution by natural selection was immediately seized upon by intellectuals to explain human society.
The earliest and most notable of these is the British polymath Sir Francis Galton, who happened to be the half-cousin of Charles Darwin.
Galton thought that human ability was hereditary.
To test this, he counted the number of the relatives of various degrees of eminent men.
If the qualities were hereditary, he reasoned, there should be more eminent men among the relatives than the general population.
Galton obtained extensive data from a broad range of biographical sources, which he tabulated and compared in various ways.
This pioneering work was described in detail in his book Hereditary Genius in 1869.
Here he showed, among other things, that the numbers of eminent relatives dropped off when going from the first degree to the second degree relatives, and from the second degree to the third.
One might interpret these findings as evidence of the importance of close connections to power and wealth, but he took this as evidence of the inheritance of abilities.
Speaking in 1877, Francis Galton argued that the criminal nature tends to be inherited and cited the case of the Jukes as evidence.
In 1883, one year after Darwin's death, Galton gave his research a name, eugenics.
There were two strains of thought about eugenics.
There was positive eugenics, which is all about encouraging the spread of good heritable genes.
More notoriously, there is negative eugenics, or discouraging the spread of supposedly bad heritable traits.
These ideas were already attractive to the educated class, but for them to really take hold and be used to remake society, it needed backing by more research that had the appearance of scientific rigor, which is exactly what Henry Herbert Goddard provided decades later.
Henry Herbert Goddard was born in 1866 in Vassalboro, Maine, the fifth and youngest child of devout Quakers.
He started his career as an educator.
After graduating from Haverford College in 1887, he briefly taught Botany, History, and Latin at the University of Southern California.
From 1889 to 1891, he was the principal of a Quaker school in Damascus, Ohio, where he also taught several subjects and conducted chapel services and prayer meetings.
On August 7, 1889, he married Emma Florence Robbins, who became one of the other two teachers at the academy.
In 1891, he returned to teach at the Oak Grove Seminary in Vassalboro, becoming principal in 1893.
But Goddard's renown wouldn't come from teaching children.
It would be from studying them.
Goddard found the path that would make him famous thanks to the influence of the eminent president of Clark University in Massachusetts, Granville Stanley Hall.
In America, perhaps no one is responsible for the emergence of psychology as a respectable field of study distinct from philosophy than Hall.
In 1878, Granville Study Hall earned the first psychology doctorate awarded in America, which he received from Harvard.
In 1887, Hall founded the American Journal of Psychology.
In 1892, he was appointed as the first president of the American Psychological Association.
By the turn of the 20th century, Hall's students held more than half of all psychology doctorates awarded in North America.
Sigmund Freud called him a kingmaker.
Randall Stanley Hall was also an open eugenicist and anti-Semite.
In 1911, Hall wrote an essay called Eugenics as a New Creed.
In it, he hopes that eugenics will find new ways of "improving the human stock and helping the world on towards
the kingdom of some kind of Superman, to which the men of today may someday prove to be only a
transition."
Another way to phrase "kingdom of Superman" might be "nation of the master race."
Hall's reputation made him one of the most influential educational lecturers in America.
At an 1891 National Education Association meeting, he had drawn 150 teachers to an unofficial lecture simply by pinning a notice to a bulletin board.
It was rare to find such a scholar spending so much time with school teachers.
Hall's view of psychology was itself influenced by Darwin.
To Hall, the mind was a fluid, complex entity that evolved over time in response to its environment, much in the same way that biological species themselves evolved over time.
Therefore, the best way to understand the mind was by first understanding simpler, less evolved manifestations of the mind.
Of course, the concept of less evolved manifestations carried with it the racism that was common among American academics of the time.
One of Hall's followers put his ideas this way.
The phenomena necessary for such a study can be found in the animal world, others in the history of mankind, still others in the primitive races or in imbeciles or in other undeveloped groups.
All can be found in children.
When Hall spoke at the Maine State Teachers Association in Lewiston, a young Henry Herbert Goddard was in attendance.
It was Hall who finally offered Goddard guidance, purpose, and a mission.
In 1896, Goddard enrolled at Clark University, where Hall was a professor.
Intending to study only briefly, Goddard remained there for three years and received his doctorate in psychology.
Goddard then taught at the State Normal School in Westchester, Pennsylvania until 1906.
From there, he accepted a position at the Vineland Training Center, not as a teacher, but as a researcher.
The Vineland Training Center opened in 1888 as the New Jersey Home for the Education and Care of Feeble-Minded Children.
It was founded by the Methodist minister Stephen O. Garrison.
Garrison had a lifelong interest in the needs of people with intellectual disabilities.
Two of Garrison's siblings were considered feeble-minded.
With no public institution to care for the intellectually disabled, Garrison and his wife Elizabeth opened their home to seven children in need.
Many more families sought their help, which would have exceeded the capacity of their house.
So, Garrison began to raise money for a larger facility.
With the help of a philanthropist who donated 40 acres of land, Garrison built his institution.
Rather than writing off the children in his care as hopeless, Garrison believed that they should be taught practical skills so that they could lead independent lives.
Garrison also rejected the typical practice of cramming institutionalized children in dormitories.
Rather, he believed children should live in smaller, free-standing houses that more closely approximated family life.
In 1892, he began moving students into cottages.
Garrison's approach was called the Cottage Plan, which came to dominate thinking on custodial care.
He diversified the school's curriculum and created a medical staff including a neurologist, an ophthalmologist, a gynecologist, a pathologist, an otologist, a laryngologist, and specialists in speech defects.
The first wave feminist Frances Bjorkman described the violent housing system this way.
The children, some 400 in number, are housed in large family groups classified according to mental grade, in ten attractive little cottages, furnished in as home-like and non-institutional a manner as the most exacting could ask.
Each of these is presided over by a house mother, selected not only for her experience, but for her love for and sympathetic understanding of the particular class of children with which she has to deal.
Stephen Garrison died in 1900.
He died unaware that the facility he built with the goal of helping children was about to be turned into a research laboratory that would help justify the forced institutionalization and sterilization of the feebleminded.
After Garrison died, a man named Edward R. Johnstone took over as principal of the Vineland Training Center.
By 1906, Edward R. Johnstone was ready to turn the facility into more than just a school or a colony for the feebleminded.
The problem was, so little was known about how to properly care for and educate feebleminded children.
Johnstone lamented, Time after time we found questions raised by the teachers and also by ourselves which we did not seem to be able to answer.
But Johnstone saw a potential solution in science.
He wanted the Vineland Training Center to become a grounds for experimentation.
The children there were an untapped source of scientific data which may contain the answers he sought.
Johnstone made his case to the patrons of the Vineland Training Center this way.
We must study these children.
Not with the knife of the surgeon, not with the scalp of the vivisectionist.
But with a loving heart and mind, and with the eye and ear of the trained observer who bends to catch the slightest whisper, the least movement that leads to truth.
Truth which is indeed scientific.
Johnstone was ready to hire a psychologist to conduct this research, so he asked the eminent Granville Stanley Hall for a recommendation.
Hall recommended Henry Herbert Goddard.
In September of 1906, at the age of 40, Goddard moved to Vineland to accept his new mission as a psychologist living among and studying the feeble-minded.
He founded the Psychological Research Laboratory, the first research facility in the U.S.
devoted to studying mental deficiencies.
By the time Goddard entered the Vineland Training Center, feeblemindedness had been the subject of academic study for decades.
Despite that, the field offered little insight into the issue, let alone solutions or treatments.
The first academic who attempted to address mental deficiency in a systematic way is the French physician Édouard Séguin.
Around 1840, Séguin established the first private school in Paris dedicated to the education of individuals with intellectual disabilities.
In 1846, he published the textbook, The Moral Treatment, Hygiene, and Education of Idiots and Other Backward Children.
Sagan later moved to America and helped form a professional organization for people in his field of study, the Association of Medical Officers of American Invitations for Idiotic and Feebleminded Persons.
In 1896, this group started publishing their own journal.
At the time, even the rudimentary act of categorizing different kinds of mental disability was pseudoscientific.
Physicians used imprecise terms that survive only today as casual insults.
The most impaired patients were dubbed idiots, those less impaired were called imbeciles, and those only mildly impaired were called a variety of different names including the deviates and the almosts.
High-functioning people with mental deficiencies were also called by the generic term feebleminded.
This was naturally confusing because that meant feebleminded was a broad term for everyone deemed mentally deficient and also a specific term for a certain category of feebleminded person.
After years of supposed research into the matter, these categories had no universally accepted boundaries.
An idiot in one institution could be an imbecile in another.
Edouard Sagan himself offered useless advice to physicians hoping to diagnose idiocy.
He actually recommended that doctors look for physiological disorders.
Doctors, he said, should watch for a swinging walk, automatically busy hands, saliva dripping from the mouth, a lustrous and empty look, and limited or repetitive speech.
From these physical signs, he said, a doctor could determine both a child's inner state and his destiny as a productive member of society.
Like every other means of assessing cognition at the time, this method was as backwards and useless as reading tea leaves.
Even medical textbook writers confessed that there was no one common order of classification.
In a 1904 textbook called Mental Defectives, Their History, Treatment, and Training, the author offers a summary of over a dozen conflicting classification systems.
Goddard noted this problem, telling his physician colleagues this, I was early impressed with the fact that we are not all using the same classification.
This results in confusion.
Many physicians resolve this confusion by thinking they could diagnose mental deficiency intuitively.
They knew it when they saw it.
Goddard himself said this, Most people of long experience in institutions for the feeble-minded come to have the power of guessing rather accurately the grade of a child.
After 50 years of studying children's development, the best they could do was experience guessing.
However, Goddard believed that he had a breakthrough for this problem when he discovered the work of French psychologist Alfred Binet, who invented the first practical IQ test.
Binet argued that the best way to assess the intellectual development of institutionalized children was by comparing their behavior to the behavior of children he considered normal.
Binet's new approach to classification involved arranging a series of simple tasks and questions according to their degree of difficulty, as experienced by normal children 3, 5, 7, 9, and 11 years old.
For example, children were asked to follow a lit match with their eyes, identify objects, make rhymes, compare sentences, or compare lines of different lengths.
Institutional patients labeled idiots, he argued, did not seem to be able to go beyond the 6th of his 30 tests, while those labeled imbeciles rarely got beyond the 15th.
From this, Binet devised a new means of determining degrees of feeble-mindedness.
Binet developed a comprehensive battery of these sorts of tests in the 1908 book The Development of Intelligence in the Child.
For example, there was this test in that book, which Binet said tests for the normal intelligence of a six-year-old.
Ask the child, show me your right hand, and then show me your left ear.
This is almost a catch question, for by asking the child to show his right hand, he has a tendency to show his right ear.
At four years, no child shows his left ear.
They all show the right ear.
At five years, half of the children commit errors.
At six years, there are no mistakes.
It is, therefore, a test which is of great value for classification.
By comparing an individual child's responses against norms established empirically for children between the ages of 3 and 13, he argued, one could measure a child's relative mental level.
Tests for the age of 8 included counting backward from 20 to 1 in 20 seconds.
Age 9 tests included making change, knowing the date, naming the days of the week, and arranging weights by order of size.
At age 10, children had to name the months of the year within 15 seconds and draw a design from memory after having been shown it for 10 seconds.
By age 11, children were supposed to identify the nonsense within 3 of 5 provided scenarios.
All of the scenarios were very strange and gruesome, but Ney reported that French children found them funny but perhaps something was lost in translation.
Here are 3 of these questions.
An unfortunate bicycle rider has had his head broken and is dead from the fall.
They have taken him to the hospital and they do not believe that he will recover.
What is the nonsense?
Yesterday there was an accident on the railroad, but it was not very bad.
There were only 48 killed.
What is the nonsense?
Someone said, if in a moment of despair I should commit suicide, I should not choose Friday, for Friday is an unlucky day, and that would bring me bad luck.
What is the nonsense?
According to this test, failing to properly answer these questions indicated that a child had a mental age of 10 years or younger.
To Goddard, Binet's intelligence testing method was revelation.
In July of 1911, Goddard spoke at the first meeting of the Department of Child Study of the National Education Association in San Francisco.
He told the educators and researchers who gathered there this, "We owe many things to France and the Frenchmen,
but I predict that we shall find nothing that is more value to us than this scale,
which will enable us to understand children better than we have understood them before,
and to treat them more wisely." Goddard tried Binet's scale on the children at the
violin training school and found that the categorization matched his intuition.
From the scale, Goddard defined an idiot as someone who tested below a mental age of 3 on the Binet scale.
An imbecile was one testing between the mental ages of 3 and 7.
Goddard proposed a new name for a person of arrested mental development with the intelligence comparable to a normal 8-12 year old child.
Goddard coined the term from the Greek word moros, which means foolish and is the root of words like sophomore or oxymoron.
His new anglicized word, free from the derogatory implications and imprecise meaning of past terms, was moron.
Goddard naively believed that by inventing a new word, he could control its meaning.
It has the advantage of not being already in use in English in any sense.
Consequently, we would have no choral or no necessity for saying that we use it in a special way.
We would simply define its meaning once and for all, and by using it, make it stand for what we want.
For the rest of his life, Goddard regarded his adding a new word to the dictionary as one of his greatest accomplishments.
And here's something interesting.
Today, if you look up the word moron in a modern dictionary, it'll tell you that it's an offensive word for a foolish person, but there's an outdated meaning, which was once used in a technical context in the early 20th century.
But it's a little different if you look up the word moron in the Oxford English Dictionary, which is considered the, you know, the principal historical dictionary of the English language.
If you look up the word moron in the latest edition of the OED, which was published in 1989, the first two illustrative quotations to show you like how the word is supposed to be used come from Henry Herbert Goddard.
The first quotations from a letter that Goddard wrote in 1910 And the second quotation is from page 54 of his book on the
Kalakak family.
And that quotation says this, "The type of feeble mindedness of which we are
speaking is the one to which Deborah belongs, that is, to the high grade or
moron." I think it's really fascinating because this basically means that
eugenics is still to this day etched in our official record of the English
But the good news is that the Oxford University Press is working on a third edition of their dictionary, which is expected to be completed in 2034.
Researchers at the time thought that Goddard had done something far more important than introducing a new diagnostic technique.
They believed that, through the use of this new method, a previously unrecognized mental deficiency had been identified.
In 1924, the eugenicist W.E.
Fernald praised Goddard for the discovery.
Goddard not only named the moron, but he discovered him.
For in the pre-Binet days, the 9, 10, and 11 mental defective with an intelligence quotient of 60, 65, and 70 was seldom recognized as being feeble-minded.
This classification system had a major impact on American medicine.
Using Binet's ideas, Goddard had convinced institutional doctors to redefine mental deficiency in terms of tested intelligence, a stunning professional victory for applied psychology.
And with this, he turned his new insights to the study of the feebleminded in schools, and how they came to be feebleminded in the first place.
To conduct this research into the causes of feeble-mindedness, Goddard had field workers at the Vineland Training Center investigate the families of children with mental defects.
One of these field workers was named Elizabeth Kite, who came to the Vineland Training School at the age of 45 in 1909.
Kite began her project by visiting relatives of Vineland children and sometimes hiding the true purpose of her investigation.
In asking questions about long-dead relatives, Kite sometimes suggested that she was a historian gathering information about the Revolutionary War era, because otherwise she would have to confess that she's investigating whether their children are feeble-minded because her hosts have bad genetic stock.
When Elizabeth Kight investigated the history of Emma Wolverton, she discovered that the student was born in an unstable environment.
She was born in an almhouse, or a public institution for the homeless.
After Emma was born, her mother met and married another man and the pair had two more children.
After this, the husband and wife moved to the property of a farmer, but the husband wasn't much of a provider and he left.
The farmer and Emma's mother lived together and had two or three more children.
Some leading citizens of the town tracked down the estranged husband and convinced him to allow for a divorce so she could marry the farmer.
The farmer agreed to marry Emma's mother on the condition that the children that weren't his be sent away.
And this is what caused 8-year-old Emma Wolverton to be brought to the Vineland Training Center.
Goddard tested Emma Wolverton with a variation of the Binet Intelligence Test in 1910 when she was 21 years old.
According to Goddard, the test found that she had the mentality of a nine-year-old.
She failed tests that involved repeating digits, counting stamps, making rhymes, rearranging words into sentences, and defining abstract terms.
More information about the history of the Wolverton family, which Goddard gave the name Calicac to conceal their identity, was gathered through historical documents and the recollections of old people.
Here's what Elizabeth Kite uncovered, according to Goddard's 1912 book.
No matter where we trace them, whether in the prosperous rural district, in the city
slums to which some had drifted, or in the more remote mountain regions, or whether it
was a question of the second or the sixth generation, an appalling amount of defectiveness
was everywhere found.
In the course of the investigation, Elizabeth Kite came across another line of this family
that was separate from Emma and her ancestors.
This family line mostly produced upstanding and prosperous citizens.
From this finding, Goddard gradually became convinced that Emma's genealogy was a degenerate offshoot of a better family line.
Then, the researchers made what they believed was a connection between the two offshoots of the family.
The great-great-great-grandfather of Emma was a man that Goddard named Martin Calicac.
During the early days of the American Revolution, Martin Calicac joined the militia.
At a New Jersey tavern frequented by soldiers, he met and slept with a barmaid.
From this, a son was born, Martin Calicac Jr., the great-great-grandfather of Emma.
Goddard concluded that Martin Calicat Jr.
had 480 descendants, of which 143 were feebleminded, while only 46 were normal.
The mental conditions of the rest were unknown.
This, in the estimation of Goddard, was the bad line.
But they also found the source of the supposedly good line.
Upon leaving the Revolutionary War militia, Martin Calicak Sr.
returned home and married a respectable Quaker woman from a good family.
Goddard's book tells how productive this family line became.
Indeed, in this family and its collateral branches, we find nothing but good representative citizenship.
There are doctors, lawyers, judges, educators, traders, landholders.
In short, respectable citizens.
Men and women prominent in every phase of social life.
They have scattered over the United States and are prominent in their communities wherever they have gone.
Half a dozen towns in New Jersey are named from the families into which Martin's descendants have married.
There have been no feeble-minded among them, no illegitimate children, no immoral women.
Only one man was sexually loose.
There has been no epilepsy, no criminals, no keepers of houses of prostitution.
Goddard called this whole story a natural experiment in heredity.
It's the supposed family split that led Goddard to give them the name Kalakak.
Kalakak is derived from the Greek words kalos and kakos, meaning beauty and bad.
To Goddard, this finding was proof that diagnosing social problems meant identifying the intelligence of individuals.
Such facts as those revealed by the Kalakak family drive us almost irresistibly to the conclusion that before we can settle our problems of criminality and pauperism and all the rest of the social problems that are taxing our time and money, The first and fundamental step should be to decide upon the mental capacity of the persons who make up these groups.
But what should be done with those with low mental capacity?
Goddard suggested segregating the feeble-minded into colonies, but he also allowed for sterilizing the feeble-minded as a kind of makeshift solution.
Feeble-mindedness is hereditary and transmitted as surely as any other character.
We cannot successfully cope with these conditions until we recognize feeble-mindedness and its hereditary nature, recognize it early, and take care of it.
In considering the question of care, segregation through colonization seems, in the present state of our knowledge, to be the ideal and perfectly satisfactory method.
Sterilization may be accepted as a makeshift, as a help to solve this problem because the conditions have become so intolerable.
Before we move on to discussing what impact Goddard's book had on the world, it's worth examining what we know about Emma Woolverton, the girl that Goddard named Deborah Kalakak.
She was, after all, the starting point of the investigation.
Her family line was held up as Exhibit A in the scientific case for eugenics in the 20th century.
So who was she?
Emma Wolverton was admitted to the Vineland School in November of 1897 when she was 8 years old.
This is from her admission file.
Average size and weight.
No peculiarity in form or size of head.
Washes and dresses herself except for fastening clothes.
Knows all the colors.
Not fond of music.
Can use a needle.
Careless in dress.
Obstinate and destructive.
Does not mind slapping and scolding.
By age 10, Emma could do some reading, writing, and counting.
Another report about her from 1900, when she was 11, contradicts the earlier report that she didn't like music.
Good in entertainment work.
Memorizes quickly.
can always be relied upon for either speaking or singing.
Marches well, knows different notes, plays the song "Jesus, Lover of My Soul" nicely,
plays a scale of C and F on cornet.
By age 15, Emma was skilled on the sewing machine and made some of her own clothing.
She continued to play the cornet and had learned to read music.
Four years later, another report listed defects in her academic work but praised her talents in arts and crafts.
Drawing, painting, coloring, and any kind of handwork she does quite nicely.
This year she had made a carved book rest with mission ends and is now working on a shirt waste box with mortise and tenon joints and lap joints.
The top will be paneled.
When Emma was 20 years old, this note was made.
Made the suit which she had embroidered earlier in the year, using the machine in making it.
Helped FB put her chair together and really acted as a teacher in showing her how to upholster it.
Will be a helper in wood carving class this summer.
Descriptions of Emma repeatedly referred to her beauty and charm.
A man named Edgar Dahl was a one-time director of research at Vineland.
In 1983, his son Eugene Dahl wrote this.
There is no doubt that, whatever her mentality, she radiated that extra spark of personality which makes one stand out in a crowd and which not only attracts but holds friends.
An eminent American psychologist wrote urbanely of his first encounter with Deborah, finding her in charge of the kindergarten at the training school and mistaking her for the teacher.
At lunchtime, he was surprised to find the same attractive young woman waiting on his table.
Time and again, visitors in both the training school and the Vineland State School, to which Deborah was later transferred, commented on her seeming normality.
In the early 1920s, when an epidemic broke out in one of the buildings at the state school, Emma served as a nurse's aide.
It was reported that she mastered the details of routine treatment and was devoted to her charges.
These descriptions of Emma Wolverton obviously describe a woman who was multi-talented, compassionate, and charming.
Modern researchers later revealed the truth of the Calicax story, most notably J. David Smith, who wrote the books Minds Made Feeble, The Myth and Legacy of the Calicax, and Good Blood, Bad Blood, Science, Nature, and the Myth of the Calicax.
He and other researchers have noted that it appears that Emma suffered from some kind of learning disability.
I mean, she had difficulty reading, she did math by counting on her fingers, and had difficulty with abstractions.
But her challenges were not debilitating.
Even if Emma did struggle with serious cognitive disability, that wouldn't change the fact that the research into the Kalakak family was worthless, and certainly wouldn't affect her worth as a person.
Emma Wolverton loved animals, nature, and spiritual experiences.
Eugene Dahl wrote this.
Her published photographs show her with stray animals she had befriended.
Unpublished ones show her peeking coyly through the apertures of a rose garden.
In the spring she loved to walk among the daffodils and flowering shrubs.
She had a child's appreciation for the daisies and the dandelions or a bouquet of colorful leaves.
She was fond of church and religious festivals.
Alternately exulting and suffering on Christmas and Good Friday, she reveled in the rhythm of poetry.
Emma had a special fondness for Persian cats.
Once she tried to turn this love into a business by selling litters of kittens, but they bred too quickly for her, so she abandoned the project.
But she did retain one Persian as a pet, which she named Henry, after Dr. Goddard.
Emma Wolverton also knew romance.
While she was working as a nurse's aide during the epidemic, she fell in love with a maintenance worker and devised a clever way to meet him in secret.
Her work as a nurse meant that she had to stay in a room near the patients rather than her usual living area.
This meant that she wasn't as closely watched, but she still wasn't able to just walk in and out of the front door of the facility.
So she used her woodworking skill to alter her window screen for easy exit and entry.
Emma and the maintenance worker enjoyed the moonlit grounds and each other in a romantic interlude before being discovered.
As a consequence, the young man was dismissed and regulations were tightened for Emma.
After a similar experience sometime later, Emma mourned, "It isn't as if I'd done anything really wrong. It was only
nature."
In 1939, when Emma Wolverton was around 50, she would again fall in love.
But even then, the institution didn't think she had a right to romantic involvement.
The Vineland teacher Helen Reeves wrote this about that incident.
In the early fall of 1939, I returned to Vineland after a month's leave to find Deborah's spirits and morale at low ebb.
She'd worked hard during the summer, trying to do justice to a housework job for one of the official family, keeping on meanwhile with her responsibilities as custodian of the gymnasium and costume room.
She'd also managed to fall in love while I was away, which romance had been discovered and quietly nipped in full bloom without her knowledge.
Emma had her own quirks.
Since the Vineland Training Center is in New Jersey, an obvious outing for the residents is the Jersey Shore.
But Emma did not like the beach.
She complained of, Once, Emma Wolverton spent weeks at a beachfront cottage with the family that she worked for.
But when she got back, she complained that, When Helen Reeves argued that she could see the most wonderful sight in the world at that location, Emma shot back, Emma was much more impressed with her 1941 trip to Niagara Falls.
When she first saw the waterfall, she stood in stunned amazement at its power.
She asked her caretakers a series of questions.
Goddard acknowledged that Emma Wolverton appeared perfectly normal, but he nonetheless insisted that she was only safe in an institution.
Goddard wrote this.
Rather good-looking, bright in appearance, with many attractive ways, the teacher clings to the hope, indeed insists, that such a girl will come out all right.
Our work with Deborah convinces us that such hopes are delusions.
Today, if this young woman were to leave the institution, she would at once become prey to the designs of evil men or evil women, and would lead a life that would be vicious, immoral, or criminal.
Though because of her mentality, she herself would not be responsible.
There is nothing that she might not be led into because she has no power of control, and all her instincts and appetites are in the direction that would lead to vice.
Emma Woolverton herself was wary of the outside world.
Helen Reeves wrote that Emma thought that life outside the institution was rife with violence.
Deborah does not feel socially secure away from the institution.
Not that questions of finance or etiquette bother her, but, quote, the world is a dangerous place, she will tell you, and confirms this observation with instance of murder, arson, and rape, gathered from pictures in the more lurid tabloids.
So Deborah is apt to be very much on her guard when she is out, darting a swift sideways glance at passing males but torn between hope and fear that they will give her what she calls the eye in return.
Helen Reeves wasn't the only person to notice Emma's ability to attract the attention of men.
Another Vineland Training Center employee noted the effect of her feminine charm when a group of the institution's girls went on a boardwalk stroll.
Every time we passed a man or group of men, they would stop, turn, look after Debra, and occasionally start to follow us.
I do not know what signals Debra was sending out, but it seemed that one glance from her eyes could summon a following.
I was uneasy until we got home, though Debra had done nothing really fresh or out of order.
Emma Wolverton was charming, competent in her favorite tasks, and dutiful.
But in the analysis of Goddard, she became something else.
She was instead Deborah Calicac, the latest inheritor of genes that were ruining the country.
In fact, to him, the seeming normality of Emma made her a greater threat.
Because the low-grade feebleminded rarely reproduced, but the high-grade feebleminded, the moron type like Emma, had many children.
Worse yet, they may move in society unnoticed until they are identified by the kind of tests that Goddard recommended.
To Goddard, his work was conclusive.
We may now repeat the ever-insistent question, and this time we indeed may hope of answering it.
The question is, how do we account for this kind of individual?
The answer is in a word.
Heredity.
Bad stock.
We must recognize that the human family shows varying stalks or strains that are as marked and that breed as true as anything in plant or animal life.
Formerly such a statement would have been a guess, a hypothesis.
We submit in the following pages what seems to us conclusive evidence of its truth.
Buried just below Goddard's scientific language was an old-fashioned religious sermon about the dire consequence of sexual immorality.
In his view, Martin Kalakax Sr.
sowing his wild oats in one thoughtless act led to generations of destruction.
Now that the facts are known, let the lesson be learned.
Let the sermons be preached.
Let it be impressed upon our young men of good family that they dare not step aside for even a moment.
When the story of the Kalakax was published, it was greeted with acclaim and achieved great popularity.
The book became a bestseller.
Over the course of the next three decades, The Kalakak Family would be printed 11 more times.
Its story would also be told and retold in scientific textbooks, court cases, political speeches, public exhibits, and popular magazines.
Virtually every biology text in the years after the book's publication cites the study as definite proof of the hereditary nature of feeble-mindedness.
The book also made Emma Wolverton, in the words of teacher Helen Reeves, the world's best-known moron.
But the truth of the Kalakak story was eventually acknowledged by every honest researcher who re-examined Goddard's work.
The conclusions were fatally flawed because the methodology was sloppy and unscientific.
It diagnosed people as feeble-minded based on little information.
It failed to control for environmental factors.
And most damningly, the genealogy of the Kalakak family presented in the book was completely wrong.
How is it that a psychological study that is wholly devoid of merit could hoodwink the entire field of psychology and education at the time?
We're going to get into that in the next episode, where we'll discuss the rise and fall of Goddard,
the eugenics mania that swept over the country, and the fate of Emma Wolverton.
Hey, QAnon Anonymous listeners, you just listened to the first episode of Trickle Down.
This is a 10 episode It's a podcast series about what happens when high-authority misinformation affects the rest of us.
Really, more than anything, it's an excuse for me to research and talk about some subjects that I'm really interested in and the same kind of like, I guess, still fall under my general interest in people who are wrong and the consequences of wrongness.
Yeah, we're going to talk about HIV-AIDS denialism.
We're going to talk about what they call the white slavery panic in the early 20th century.
I think it's really fascinating stuff, and best of all, Jake and Julian only speak when I give them permission to.
If you're a Patreon supporter of QAnon Anonymous, you'll already get access to the other nine episodes.
Just some extra content as a way of saying thank you for helping us and supporting the show.
