Imbeciles

by Adam Cohen

  Once Carrie was declared feebleminded, the Dobbses wanted her gone quickly. She was not only a source of embarrassment and possible legal troubles for the family, but a distraction. The Dobbses’ daughter was also pregnant, and would end up giving birth three days before Carrie. Mrs. Dobbs wanted to be able to leave home to be with her daughter without having to worry about Carrie.

  There were, however, delays in carrying out the court’s order. Mary Duke forwarded the court papers to the colony, but they were sent back for technical deficiencies. New papers were sent, and a lawyer representing Duke wrote to the colony urging it to speed up Carrie’s admission. It was long past time, the lawyer said, for “the girl” to be “placed upon the waiting list and taken into your institution, where she so badly needs to be as soon as possible.”

  Caroline Wilhelm, a Red Cross social worker assigned to supervise Carrie’s transfer, also asked the colony to move quickly. Wilhelm wrote her own letter to the colony’s superintendent about the “long delayed” commitment, explaining the urgency in more detail. Carrie was due to give birth in mid-April, Wilhelm said, and it was “very important” that she “be admitted to the Colony before that time if it can be arranged.”

  The colony, however, would not be rushed. The superintendent, Dr. Albert Priddy, informed Wilhelm that his institution made it a rule “to positively refuse admission of any expectant mothers.” He told her she would have to “make some provision to keep” Carrie “until the child is born and disposed of.” Only after Carrie had given birth and her baby was “disposed of,” as Dr. Priddy put it, would the colony be prepared to admit her.

  In the final month of her pregnancy, Carrie was in limbo. The Dobbses had secured a legal order to remove her from their home, and they were insisting she leave immediately. But her future home, the colony, would not take her in. Her own family was not available: her father was likely dead, and her mother was locked up at the colony. Wilhelm found Carrie a temporary home not far from the Dobbses’ where she could stay until she gave birth. On March 28, earlier than expected, Carrie’s baby was born—a girl, who was given the name Vivian.

  Wilhelm did not know what to do with Carrie’s newborn. She wrote Dr. Priddy to tell him that finding a home was proving “very difficult” because she and her colleagues believed “a baby whose mother and grandmother are feeble-minded ought not to be placed out in a home for adoption.” Wilhelm said there had been one offer to take Vivian in—from John and Alice Dobbs. They emphasized, however, that if the baby turned out to be feebleminded they would insist on institutionalizing her.

  Dr. Priddy did not care where the baby ended up or if she was feebleminded. He told Wilhelm that Vivian could not come to the colony, because the law did not allow state hospitals for the feebleminded to admit anyone under the age of eight. The only advice Dr. Priddy offered about Carrie’s baby was that Wilhelm could “place it in the City Almshouse.” In the end, she placed Vivian with the Dobbses.

  • • •

  On June 4, Carrie set off on the same trip her mother had taken four years earlier. Wilhelm escorted Carrie and a man named Walter Allen, who had also been committed to the colony. The Red Cross social worker and her two charges traveled by train from Charlottesville to Lynchburg, which was then a bustling metropolis of thirty thousand, with an economy that was shifting from tobacco to manufacturing. After disembarking at Union Station, the three travelers took a buggy ride over the James River and arrived at the colony’s front door.

  Despite its somber mission of locking away people society had branded defective and dangerous, the Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded had an undeniable rustic charm. Like many such institutions, it functioned as a working farm. There were cows, pigs, and chickens, and orchards and gardens that produced rich harvests of fruits and vegetables. The landscape was dotted with newly constructed residence halls, recreation buildings, light industrial factories, and medical facilities.

  The “colony” system that gathered the feebleminded to live in settings of this kind served several purposes. The rustic surroundings were in keeping with the latest ideas about treatment of people with mental defects. Out in the country, the thinking went, far from the stresses of big-city life, inmates would be soothed by the “perfume of the pine and the cedar.” At the same time, having a working farm and factories allowed the colony to keep its inmates productively occupied.

  There were also financial advantages. Inmates were able to contribute to their own upkeep and reduce the burden on taxpayers. When states throughout the South first established colonies for the feebleminded, legislators and administrators hoped they would become financially self-sufficient, which would allow them to expand and take in ever-larger numbers of mentally deficient inmates, but none achieved that level of economic success.

  Carrie was admitted to the colony as patient 1692. Like her mother, she received a thorough examination, and the colony began to assemble a detailed file on her. The “History and Clinical Notes” drawn up on June 4, 1924, stated that Carrie was seventeen, in good general health, well nourished, and free of communicable diseases. She had no paralysis or deformity, talked distinctly, and had “good teeth and tonsils.” The next day, Dr. John Bell conducted a physical examination: Carrie was 5 feet 4¼ inches tall and weighed 134½ pounds. Dr. Bell noted her “low narrow forehead.” A few days later, a Wassermann test for syphilis came back negative.

  Carrie’s admissions records repeated the critical assessments the Dobbses and others had made about her. They stated that “nothing is known of her birth or early development,” but despite that lack of information the file went on to say that she “has always been subnormal.” In a section on “social history and moral reaction,” Carrie was described as “untruthful and dishonest” and labeled a “moral delinquent” for having given birth to an illegitimate child.

  In evaluating Carrie’s intellect, the colony noted that she had “attended school 5 years and attained the 6th grade,” though her file did not mention her grades or other evaluations. The colony also observed that she took “proper notice of things” and “recognize[d] colors.” The only mental assessment that mattered, however, was the Binet-Simon test that she was given on arrival, the same one her mother had taken. Based on it, the colony determined that Carrie had a mental age of nine, and it designated her a “Middle grade Moron.”

  • • •

  The Binet-Simon test that Carrie was given was not an accurate measure of intelligence, and its creators never intended it to be. It had been invented in 1905 when the Paris school system commissioned Alfred Binet, director of the Sorbonne’s psychology laboratory, to develop a way to identify mentally challenged children. Binet and another psychologist, Theodore Simon, devised a series of questions and tasks, such as describing how two objects were similar or repeating numbers from memory. Binet and Simon admitted to not putting a great deal of thought into deciding what to ask. “One might almost say, ‘It matters very little what the tests are so long as they are numerous,’” Binet said.

  Binet and Simon were attempting to create a test that would identify those children who could benefit from extra help in the classroom. They established a scale to rank children’s performance, identifying a “mental age” that could differ significantly from a child’s chronological age. Binet insisted that the test was not an intelligence test, and that it should not be used to identify students who were inherently less mentally able. He intended his scale “to identify in order to help and improve,” Harvard biology professor Stephen Jay Gould observed, “not to label in order to limit.” Binet was troubled when teachers wrote off students as inherently unintelligent. “They have neither sympathy nor respect,” he said, “and their intemperate language leads them to say such things in their presence as ‘This is a child who will never amount to anything . . . he is poorly endowed . . . he is not intelligent at all.’ How often have I heard these imprudent words.”

  When
the Binet-Simon test arrived in the United States, it was transformed. The psychologists, academics, and institutional administrators who embraced it were not looking, as Binet and Simon had been, for ways to identify children who needed extra educational help. They wanted a method of sorting people into inflexible categories that could be presented with the trappings of science.

  The man who launched this transformation was Henry Goddard of the Vineland Training School for Feeble-minded Girls and Boys.Goddard discovered the Binet-Simon test in Europe and brought it back to America. He began administering the test at the Vineland School, hoping it would be able to instantly assess and categorize students in the same way Vineland staff did after getting to know them over time. When he reviewed the results, Goddard was convinced he had found what he was looking for. “The tests,” he said, “do come amazingly near what we feel to be the truth in regard to the mental status of any child tested.”

  Goddard championed the Binet-Simon and presented it as what it was not intended to be: a tool for measuring inherent intelligence. He used the test in its new, American form to create a “hierarchical, unidimensional vision of intelligence.” Goddard argued that intelligence levels were characteristics that people were born with—and limited by. “Each human being has a potentiality for a definite amount of intelligence . . . and beyond that point all efforts at education are useless,” he said.

  Goddard redefined the field of mental disability in 1910, at a meeting of the American Association for the Study of the Feeble-Minded, when he unveiled a three-part hierarchy of mental defects. At the bottom of Goddard’s pyramid were “idiots,” people whose minds were developed below the level of a normal three-year-old’s. Next were what he called “imbeciles,” people whose mental level fell between ages three and seven. At the top were “morons” (a term he coined from the Greek word for “fool”), people with mental ages from eight to twelve. Goddard was most concerned about this final category, because they were the hardest to spot. “Morons are often normal looking with few or no obvious stigmata of degeneration,” he said.

  Goddard also promoted the rigidity of mental categories in another way: by arguing that they were strongly hereditary. He was not much interested in whether individuals had been raised in a deprived environment, where there was little access to education or proper nutrition, or if they were not good at test taking. Intellectual deficiencies, he insisted, were innate, and “no amount of education or good environment can change a feeble-minded individual into a normal one, any more than it can change a red-haired stock into a black-haired stock.”

  The Binet-Simon test was reconceived again when Lewis Terman, a Stanford psychologist, created a revised version, known as the Stanford Revision. Terman added new questions and dropped old ones, and he administered the test on California students to get more information about the validity and difficulty of particular parts. Terman also introduced the idea of the IQ, or intelligence quotient, which was calculated by dividing mental age by chronological age and multiplying by one hundred. A ten-year-old who tested at ten years would have a score of 100, and one who tested at eleven years would have a score of 110.

  The Binet-Simon was presented as measuring innate intelligence, but many of its questions required specific knowledge or had class or cultural biases. It also left considerable room for examiners to make subjective evaluations. The unreliability of the Binet-Simon as a measure of intelligence was evident in the questions the colony posed to Carrie on her arrival. According to the “Record Sheet” in her files, Carrie was judged to be a “Middle grade Moron” on the basis of such questions as “What is the thing to do: (a) Broken something? (b) Danger of being tardy? (c) Playmate hits you?” Carrie was also asked questions about “Fables,” including “Hercules and wagoners,” “Maid and eggs,” and “Farmer and stork.” Her files do not reveal how she answered the questions, or what the colony would have accepted as intelligent responses.

  While the Binet-Simon test was rapidly being adopted to decide whether to lock people up as feebleminded, a few skeptical voices were raised. Cyril Burt, a prominent British psychologist, objected that scores on these new “intelligence tests” might reflect environmental factors like “a prosperous history” or “the want of a cultured home” more than innate ability, leading to “gross distortion.” Other critics questioned whether whatever it was the tests were measuring could be called intelligence at all. “Intelligence,” an article in Mental Hygiene objected, “is defined in terms of the subject’s ability to do the tests, which is exactly the point to be proved!”

  The most damning evidence against the Binet-Simon test and others like it was what happened when they were actually administered. Reports were emerging about just how off the results were. J. E. Wallace Wallin, a St. Louis psychologist, gave an account of administering the test to a group of Iowa farmers. “Not a single one of these persons could by any stretch of the imagination be considered feeble-minded,” he wrote. Yet based on the scores they received, “every one” of the people he tested “would be feeble-minded.”

  Goddard administered the Binet-Simon to newly arriving immigrants at Ellis Island in 1913 and got startling results. When he graded the tests, he found that 79 percent of Italians, 80 percent of Hungarians, 83 percent of Jews, and 87 percent of Russians were feebleminded. After reworking the results, he came up with figures that still defied belief: he reported that between 40 and 50 percent of these groups were feebleminded—with a mental age of less than twelve.

  At this point Goddard might have concluded that there were problems with the Binet-Simon test or with how it was administered. He could have considered the effect of weeks of travel across the ocean in steerage, or the disorientation of arriving in the chaos of Ellis Island, or the bewilderment many would have felt on being given a multiple-choice test by a stranger after, perhaps, never having taken a test before. He might have questioned the quality of the translations, or even how committed these preoccupied new immigrants were to correctly answering his questions. Instead, Goddard made a definitive pronouncement. “We cannot escape the general conclusion,” he declared, “that these immigrants were of surprisingly low intelligence.”

  The most infamous intelligence testing of all came in 1917, when Robert Yerkes, a Harvard psychologist, administered a Binet-Simon-style test to 1.75 million U.S. Army enlistees. Yerkes worked with Terman, Goddard, and other experts to devise special mental tests for this group. Yerkes found that in this largely native-born group, fully 47.3 percent of the white test takers were feebleminded.

  Yerkes’s results were broadly accepted, even though they were no less absurd than Goddard’s findings at Ellis Island. If more than 47 percent of white army enlistees were feebleminded that would make the United States, as one critic observed, “a nation of morons.” It was, of course, far more likely that the overwhelming majority of army enlistees and newly arriving immigrants were not feebleminded—and that it was the tests and categorizations that had failed.

  • • •

  Carrie was assigned to live in Ward FB9. Every colony resident received a work assignment on the farm, in manufacturing, or with the institution’s operations. Carrie was given kitchen duty, which meant making and serving meals for the roughly two hundred residents of her ward. Preparations for breakfast began early, and she spent much of the day cooking, serving, or cleaning up for one meal or another.

  Carrie was reunited with her mother, who was by now a colony veteran. The two women became close for the first time in years. Carrie was a dutiful daughter, and helped to care for Emma, bringing her food from the kitchen and spending time with her. Carrie also kept in touch with her own daughter, arranging furloughs to visit Vivian at the Dobbses’ home in Charlottesville.

  Carrie had already been a victim of a great deal of bad luck in her short life, and it continued when she arrived at the colony. The Virginia legislature had just enacted a law authorizing state hospitals to perform steri
lizations on their patients for eugenic purposes. Before sterilizing anyone, the leaders of the state hospital system wanted a ruling from the courts that the new law was constitutional. They were working to create a test case, which meant they needed an inmate to place at the center of it. Just as this decision was about to be made, Carrie had the misfortune of catching the eye of the man who would be making it—the colony superintendent, Dr. Albert Priddy.

  Two

  Albert Priddy

  In the summer of 1924, Dr. Albert Priddy was in his fourteenth year as superintendent of Virginia’s Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded. The superintendent of a Virginia state hospital in the 1920s was a combination of chief medical officer, chief executive officer, and plantation master. Dr. Priddy, who was the colony’s first superintendent, was all of these things. He was also something else: a social reformer, with a keen vision of the role he wanted the colony to play in improving society.

  Dr. Priddy was a man of medicine who had dedicated his life to mental health. His institution housed many people with mental disabilities and epilepsy, and it was a source of frustration to him that, although there were therapies and regimens that could help, there was no cure for his inmates’ disabilities. At the start of the twentieth century, however, the rapidly growing eugenics movement promised something even better than a cure: a way of ensuring that, over time, the conditions he was working to treat would completely disappear, and future generations would not suffer from them.

  The answer to feeblemindedness, as Dr. Priddy saw it, lay not in treating the condition but in improving the gene pool and rooting out its hereditary basis. In many states, doctors were among the first to be drawn to eugenics because they were closest to the problems of disease and defect, and they saw it as their responsibility to find a cure. Dr. Priddy was one of these pioneers, among the earliest people in Virginia to advocate for state eugenic policies to stamp out feeblemindedness.