Imbeciles

by Adam Cohen

  Francis Galton, Darwin’s half cousin, turned the newly emerging ideas about evolution into a science of human improvement. In 1869 Galton published Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences, a study of the families of some of history’s most brilliant thinkers and athletes. Galton concluded—as his title gave away—that genius was hereditary, in the same way various traits were passed on in the animal world. Galton, who was intent on being taken seriously as a scientist, boasted that his analysis was the first to treat “the subject in a statistical manner.”

  Galton went on to turn the science of human improvement that he was developing into an intellectual movement. In 1883 he published Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, the book in which he coined the word “eugenics.” Derived from the Greek “eu” for “good” and “genes” for born, eugenics was, Galton explained, a “brief word to express the science of improving stock.”

  Galton called on humanity to take its future into its own hands by adopting eugenics programs that would promote “the more suitable races or strains of blood . . . over the less suitable.” Through such efforts, he argued, “what Nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly.” Having invented eugenics and set out its ambitious goals, Galton wrote and lectured on the subject extensively, becoming, the journal Nature observed, “indefatigable in his zeal to promote the cause.”

  For Galton, eugenics was not only a hard and indisputable science but also an ethical and spiritual movement. Eugenics exalted marriage, in his view, by bringing greater focus to the quality of the offspring a union would generate. He considered eugenic measures to be a form of philanthropy bestowed by the present generation on future ones. Galton was convinced that eugenics would lift humanity to glorious new heights—it was, he declared, “a virile creed, full of hopefulness.”

  In his writings, Galton described two kinds of eugenics: “positive” and “negative.” Positive eugenics—the one that interested him the most—meant encouraging people with superior traits to have more children. In evaluating an individual’s worth to the species, he believed there were three main considerations: physique, ability, and character. All were important, and he deemed “inferiority in any of the three” to “outweigh superiority in the other two.”

  At the same time, Galton saw a value in negative eugenics, which called for preventing reproduction of those with “undesirable” traits. Galton was convinced that England was “overstocked and overburdened with the listless and the incapable.” He believed affirmative steps should be taken to address this drag on humanity—whether isolating the unfit so they could not reproduce, or through “some other less drastic yet adequate measure.” Galton was vague about the specifics, but he insisted that “our democracy will ultimately refuse consent to that liberty of propagating children which is now allowed to the undesirable classes.”

  While his half cousin was building a movement, Darwin was doing his own work on humans and evolution, though of a more elevated, scientific sort. In 1871 he published a second work of evolutionary theory, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, in which he applied many of the ideas he had laid out in On the Origin of Species to humanity. The book was wide-ranging in its subject matter, including extensive discussions of evolution of specific physical and mental traits in humans, the nature of racial distinctions, and division of labor between men and women.

  Darwin touched on some of the issues Galton and the eugenicists were speaking to, including the popular debate over whether society should help its weakest members. Many eugenicists believed philanthropy was a threat to the human race. As the philosopher and reformer Jane Hume Clapperton complained, charities “deliberately selected the half-starved, the diseased, the criminals, and enabled them to exist and propagate.” Many eugenicists and Tory politicians also opposed the widespread use of vaccinations, another intervention that, as they saw it, helped people survive who had been targeted by nature for illness and death.

  Darwin understood why eugenicists objected to smallpox vaccinations. “There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution, would formerly have succumbed to small-pox,” he wrote in The Descent of Man. Through interventions like these, “weak members of civilized societies” are allowed to “propagate their kind.” Anyone who had ever bred animals, he wrote, understood “this must be highly injurious to the race of man.”

  If Darwin had stopped there, he could have been mistaken for a hard-core eugenicist. He went on, however, to explain why humans should recoil at letting natural selection operate ruthlessly. The support that people gave “the helpless,” he said, derived from “the instinct of sympathy”—a social instinct that had, over time, become “more tender and more widely diffused.”

  Darwin believed humans could not “check our sympathy,” even at the urging of “hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.” Refusing to help the weak might provide “contingent benefit,” but it brought with it “a certain and great present evil.” For this reason, Darwin insisted, “we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind.”

  • • •

  The ideas of Galton and his contemporaries gained momentum as they crossed the Atlantic. The belief that some groups and individuals were inferior by nature was hardly a new one in the United States—a nation whose founding documents incorporated slavery based on race. The new thinking coming out of Britain, however, was giving human inferiority and superiority a modern, scientific orientation. Suddenly it seemed, as the historian Eric Foner noted, that “every serious thinker felt obligated to reckon with” Darwin’s writing and the fundamental questions it raised about human nature.

  In the United States, this reckoning was being done not through grand theories but through empirical, fact-based research. A new form of inquiry was emerging, one that would come to be called “criminal anthropology.” The book that set this field in motion in the United States, and did more than any other to launch American eugenics, was The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity: also Further Studies of Criminals, which was published in 1877 by a prison reformer who opposed almost everything the eugenicists stood for.

  Richard Dugdale was examining an upstate New York jail in 1874 when it struck him that six of the inmates he met were related. Dugdale investigated the family, which he called the Jukes, to find out whether there were high levels of criminality in its past, and what the causes were. He looked back five generations and discovered that of the 709 people he identified, more than half were criminals or prostitutes.

  The Jukes resembled the eugenic family studies that Galton conducted but with one key difference: Dugdale concluded that the Jukes’s problems were more due to environment than heredity. He argued that society should provide better education and other material support to families like the Jukes, which showed dysfunction over generations, to help them break the cycle of crime and poverty.

  Eugenicists were quick to seize on The Jukes. They ignored Dugdale’s conclusions about causation and focused instead on the facts he presented about the family. To the eugenicists, Dugdales’s findings were evidence that bad traits were hereditary—and that these traits explained the persistence of social problems.

  This interpretation of The Jukes was a clear perversion of Dugdale’s work. When the book was republished after Dugdale’s death, the sociologist who wrote the introduction lamented that the “impression quite generally prevails that ‘The Jukes’ is a thorough-going demonstration of ‘hereditary criminality,’ ‘hereditary pauperism,’ ‘hereditary degeneracy,’ and so on. It is nothing of the kind.” But these objections could not stop people from saying, as many did, that The Jukes was evidence that delinquency ran in families, and that some people were born bad.

  More studies of troubled families and communities soon follo
wed, and the focus shifted from environmental factors to heredity. In 1878 Oscar McCulloch, a minister with the National Conference of Charities and Correction, began work on what would be one of the most influential post-Jukes studies. For a decade, McCulloch studied an impoverished extended family in the Indianapolis area, which he called the “Tribe of Ishmael.” In The Tribe of Ishmael: A Study in Social Degradation, he described generation after generation of murderers, thieves, beggars, and prostitutes.

  In his analysis of the Tribe of Ishmael’s failings, McCulloch agreed with Dugdale that environmental factors were important. He described the harsh conditions in which they lived: “mostly out of doors in the river bottoms, in old houses.” He believed the family’s situation would be improved by “changed surroundings,” and he advocated taking its children away and raising them under better conditions.

  More than environment, however, McCulloch believed the Ishmaelites’ problems were due to their “decaying stock.” He urged his fellow reformers and philanthropists to stop trying to alleviate the poverty of people like the Ishmaelites. Their hereditary flaws were so serious, he argued, that the government and private aid that was directed to them by “the benevolent public” did not cure their “generally diseased” condition. It simply “encouraged them” in their “idle, wandering life,” and in the “propagation of similarly disposed children.”

  This growing attention to the role of heredity in antisocial behavior received a significant boost in 1900, when the scientific world embraced the work of Gregor Mendel. Mendel, a monk who lived in a monastery in what is now the Czech Republic, discovered many basic laws of heredity in his experiments breeding pea plants. He died in obscurity in 1884, his research all but unknown, but at the dawn of the twentieth century his findings were rediscovered. His theories revolutionized genetics and had a profound impact on the emerging field of eugenics.

  Before Mendel, it was widely assumed that heredity worked by blending; that is, a tall plant crossed with a short plant would produce a medium-height plant. Mendel found, instead, that when he crossed peas one trait dominated. When green peas and yellow peas were crossed, the first generation was all yellow—the dominant trait. In the next generation, however, the recessive trait would reassert itself, and one-quarter of the offspring would be green.

  Mendel’s work provided experimental precision, quantitative analysis, and certitude in a field that had so far been marked by mere speculation. This new science of heredity was precisely what the eugenicists were looking for. Eugenics argued that positive and negative traits were passed down from generation to generation, and with Mendel’s pea plants, Galton and his followers now had, or so they believed, a scientific basis for saying so.

  The eugenicists argued that just like traits such as height and color in pea plants—or blood type and color blindness in humans—the physical and mental qualities they focused on were inherited in predictable patterns. They created elaborate pedigrees showing how feeblemindedness, drunkenness, criminality, and moral degeneracy were inherited within families. In the eugenicists’ view, Mendel’s laws supported their belief that if the “socially defective” were prevented from having children, and the highest-quality people had more, bad traits could be bred out, and good traits would proliferate.

  There were, of course, fundamental problems with the eugenicists’ science. They were making the mistake of assuming that “like produces like”—that brilliant parents produce brilliant children, and criminals produce criminals. Intelligence, indolence, dependency, and other human qualities are not, however, “unit characters”—traits passed on in a single gene from parent to child. And as Mendel’s work suggested, in reproduction genes combine and are expressed in complex ways, particularly for the sort of human qualities eugenics focused on. The eugenicists’ plan of ending feeblemindedness simply by preventing the feebleminded from reproducing had no basis in genetics.

  The eugenicists also failed to take environmental factors into account. There were many reasons people were poor or indolent—or scored low on intelligence tests—that were unrelated to biology. In a few years, Thomas Hunt Morgan, a Columbia University geneticist who would go on to win a Nobel Prize, would argue that many human deficiencies were more the result of “demoralizing social conditions” than heredity. Supporters of eugenics had little interest, however, in the effect of an impoverished childhood or a poor education on life outcomes.

  The eugenicists stuck to their own beliefs about genetics. When Bleecker van Wagenen, a leading American eugenicist and a trustee of the Vineland School, addressed the First International Eugenics Congress in London, he listed groups whose flaws should be regarded as hereditary in origin. He included criminals, paupers, the blind and deaf, and “the deformed.” Van Wagenen urged that they be “eliminated from the human stock.”

  • • •

  The weakness of the science did not slow the spread of eugenics in the United States. While eugenics theoreticians continued to refine their views on “defective” groups, and criminal anthropologists kept up their fieldwork on what they regarded as hereditarily cursed communities, the movement’s main focus in these early years was a practical concern: an obsession with what came to be known as “the menace of feeblemindedness.”

  Leading eugenicists were starting to warn that the single biggest threat to the nation’s hereditary “stock” was feeblemindedness, and they were studying the problem intensively. Some of the most urgent warnings were coming from Henry Goddard of the Vineland Training School for Feeble-minded Girls and Boys, the inventor of the categories of “idiots,” “imbeciles,” and “morons.” In 1912 Goddard published his own enormously influential work of criminal anthropology. Unlike many of its predecessors, which discussed a wide array of defects, Goddard’s book concerned itself with a single problem: feeblemindedness.

  In The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness, Goddard examined six generations of a New Jersey family and showed how it supported his theories of inherited mental defect. Goddard began his tale during the Revolutionary War, with “Martin Kallikak” (a fictitious name, like all the others in the book). Kallikak produced two lines of descendants, one through his wife, “a woman of his own quality,” and another through a “feeble-minded girl” he met in a tavern. The line from Kallikak’s wife, Goddard found, included generations of doctors, judges, and other successful men. The line from the “feeble-minded girl” was rife with prostitutes, criminals, and epileptics.

  Goddard presented the Kallikaks as a “natural experiment in heredity,” and he drew larger lessons from it. He was not concerned, he said at the outset, with the “low-grade idiot.” Some had “proposed the lethal chamber,” he noted, but he said somewhat wistfully that he saw “no probability” society would support mass executions of its least intelligent members. The “idiot” is “indeed loathsome,” Goddard said, but fortunately, because he was unlikely to become a parent, “he lives his life and is done.” The problem, he said, was what to do about the higher-level feebleminded.

  Two years later, Goddard published Feeble-Mindedness: Its Causes and Consequences, a 599-page study that drew on cases he observed at the Vineland School. In his new work, he continued to warn about the menace of feeblemindedness. As much as 2 percent of the school population might be feebleminded, he said, and the causes were “mostly hereditary.” Not only was feeblemindedness a problem in its own right, he argued, but it “underlies all our social problems.” Marshaling questionable data, Goddard contended that as much as 50 percent of criminals, prostitutes, and almshouse residents were feebleminded. What was at stake in the war on feeblemindedness, he insisted, was nothing less than “the future welfare of the race.”

  Goddard was only one of many influential voices urging the nation to awaken to the threat posed by the feebleminded in their midst. Lewis Terman, the Stanford professor who revised the Binet-Simon test, warned urgently about feeblemindedness among the youn
g. In his 1917 essay “Feeble-Minded Children in the Public Schools of California,” he said feeblemindedness was “one of the most important factors in delinquency, crime, alcoholism, pauperism, prostitution, and the spread of venereal diseases.” He estimated that more than 1 percent of California students were afflicted.

  The nation’s universities churned out large quantities of these reports, all expressing alarm. Samuel J. Holmes, a University of California zoology professor, warned in The Trend of the Race: A Study of Present Tendencies in the Biological Development of Civilized Mankind that the feebleminded were reproducing at a rapid rate. “The best blood of a nation is its most priceless possession,” he insisted. Holmes ended his book with a plaintive question: “The race has its fate in its own hands to make or to mar. Will it ever take itself in hand and shape its own destiny?”

  The government joined in, issuing its own stern reports on the tide of feeblemindedness. A study prepared for the California state legislature in 1915 said the problem had always existed “but only recently have we begun to recognize how serious a menace it is to the social, economic, and moral welfare of the state.” The same year, Virginia’s State Board of Charities and Corrections published a booklet on the problem, using the phrase that now seemed to be everywhere—“the menace of feeble-mindedness”—and assuring Virginians their state was taking steps “for the elimination and prevention of this evil.”

  The anxieties of these experts were mirrored in the general-interest media, which was engaged in its own mania. Scientific American warned in 1912 that the “reproduction of feeblemindedness” was “rife” in much of the country. An article the following year in Life and Health: The National Health Magazine helpfully explained that the time was approaching when feeblemindedness, which was a “definite, inheritable Mendelian unit” trait, could be eliminated, allowing society to “cultivate instead the valuable physical and mental traits and talents.”