VINELAND BEGAN as an idea for a perfect city.
In 1861, a businessman named Charles Landis traveled from Philadelphia into the empty Pine Barrens of New Jersey. He bought twenty thousand acres and laid down a map of lots. He called it Vineland. Farmers bought land to grow crops on the fertile soil, and retired Civil War soldiers later came to work in new glass-manufacturing plants. The idea of Vineland endured into the twenty-first century, in the generous width of its main streets, in the triumphant design of its municipal buildings. But a new city has grown on top of Landis’s idea: a city that lost its factories, that turned its outlying farms into suburbs, that brought in immigrants not from New England but from Mexico and India.
I came to Vineland on a bright cold day in February, driving along South Main Road, one of the original roads that ran along the city’s eastern edge. I passed a bleak, treeless row of gas stations, supermarkets, cell phone shops, and liquor stores. At the intersection with Landis Avenue, I pulled into a Wawa store parking lot and walked inside to buy a bag of peanuts. Car mechanics and home health aides were ordering sandwiches and coffee and lottery tickets. When I came back outside, I looked up at the grumpy, overheated winter sky. The clouds were tormenting the South Main traffic with tantrums of rain. My phone buzzed with a tornado warning for all of South Jersey. I pulled a wool cap onto my head and took a walk, eating peanuts for lunch.
The convenience store driveway curved around a wedge of grass by the intersection. A massive rounded stone stood in the center of the wedge, surrounded by bushes and spotlights anchored into the wood chips. I walked over to inspect it. The stone was inscribed with a name: S. Olin Garrison. No explanation, no date. The drivers of the passing cars and trucks paid the tombstone no notice. I doubt any of them knew who S. Olin Garrison was, let alone why he was buried in front of a Wawa store.
Turning my back to the noisy commercial strip, I looked eastward across a huge, empty field, crossed by a worn concrete path. I walked down the path, under a row of leafless trees that leaned over the left side. The trees had lost some of their boughs, and some were dead. But you could still sense that someone had planted them in grand, rational intervals long ago. The line of trees led my eye across the field to a pair of small, square gazebos in the distance, tilted on the frost-heaved earth. Beyond them was a scattering of old buildings. A late nineteenth-century edifice had a dome sprouting from one corner. Around it huddled a few old houses and outbuildings, falling into disrepair.
I had spent the morning at a nearby historical society looking over photographs of this spot from over a century earlier. Now that I was at the spot itself, I could see it as it looked on an October morning in 1897. There was no Wawa store—no stores at all, for that matter. People passed by on foot, bicycle, or horseback. South Main Road and Landis Avenue bordered a 125-acre farm, with pumpkin patches, apple orchards, and asparagus beds. A high gate stood at the corner, with a name arching overhead: VINELAND TRAINING SCHOOL.
I had come here, and cast my mind back, because the Vineland Training School holds an important place in the history of heredity. Within the walls of the school, Mendel’s research was applied to humans, with disastrous consequences. What happened here would influence thoughts about heredity for generations.
In 1897, a path led from the gate into the school grounds, flanked by newly planted trees. The gazebos were plumb and freshly painted. The buildings bustled with two hundred children. S. Olin Garrison, the founder and principal of the Vineland Training School, was very much alive in 1897, and I pictured him in the main school building, working at his desk. I listened to the sweet-toned bell ring from the school’s clock tower in the distance.
One morning in October 1897, an eight-year-old girl named Emma Wolverton arrived at the school gate. She was of average height, with a pretty, round face; a wide nose; and thick, dark hair. It’s impossible to know what Emma Wolverton was feeling that morning. In later years, she never got the chance to speak publicly for herself about her life. Of the many people who spoke for her, few particularly cared what she had to say. To most of them, she was a cautionary tale about all the ills that heredity could pass down through the generations.
We do know a little about how Emma Wolverton ended up at that corner in Vineland. Her mother, Malinda, grew up in the northern part of the state. At age seventeen, she started work as a servant. Soon Malinda became pregnant with Emma and was thrown out of her master’s house. Emma’s father, reputed to be a bankrupt drunk, abandoned Malinda, and she ended up in an almshouse, where she gave birth to Emma in 1889.
A charitable family took Malinda and her infant daughter out of the almshouse, and Malinda worked for them for a time. Soon she became pregnant again, and her benefactors insisted she get married to the father. Malinda and her husband had a second child together, after which the entire family moved into a rented house on a nearby farm. When Malinda got pregnant with a third child, her husband denied that the baby was his and abandoned her and the children.
The farm where she rented a house was owned by a bachelor. Not long after her husband left, she moved in with the farmer, and he admitted he had fathered the new baby. Emma’s benefactors tried to make things right yet again. They arranged a divorce between Emma’s mother and her stepfather, and then a remarriage to the farmer. He consented, but only if Malinda got rid of the children other than his own. It was not long afterward that Emma was delivered to the front gate of the Vineland Training School.
When S. Olin Garrison opened the school in 1888, he originally named it the New Jersey Home for the Education and Care of Feeble-Minded Children. He gave it a motto that would be stamped on their publications for decades to come: “the true education and training for boys and girls of backward or feeble minds is to teach them what they ought to know and can make use of when they become men and women in years.” Garrison was determined to provide a more humane place than the typical warehouses where those deemed feebleminded had been abandoned in previous generations. “Our aim is to awaken dormant faculties, to arouse ambition, to inject hope, and develop self-reliance,” the school declared in a brochure.
To get Emma admitted into the school, she was provided with a cover story: She didn’t get along with other children in her regular school. That somehow raised the worry that she was feebleminded. The definition of feebleminded was sprawlingly vague in the late 1800s. People brought children to the Vineland Training School because they suffered epileptic convulsions. Others suffered from cretinism, a combination of dwarfism and intellectual disability. Others had a condition that would later be called Down syndrome. Emma belonged to a class of students who had no obvious symptoms but were still judged unfit for society.
When Emma arrived at the school, the staff gave her a thorough examination to judge whether she should be admitted. They observed “no peculiarity in form or size of head.” Emma understood their commands, and she could use a needle, carry wood, and fill a kettle. She knew a few letters, but couldn’t read or count. But the staff found her “obstinate and destructive,” according to their notes. “Does not mind slapping and scolding.”
That was enough. The fact that she had been brought to Vineland because she had become a nuisance at home went unrecorded in her file. Her examiners declared her to be feebleminded. They took her in.
Emma moved into one of the cottages, which she shared with a small group of other children. Every day, the school filled Emma’s schedule with classes, duties, and games. Along with reading and math, she was taught about nature on walks through the fields and woods. “We show them the connection between nature and their being,” the deputy principal, E. R. Johnstone, said, “how dependent they are upon the plants and animals for their food and raiment.” Emma and the other students spent much of their time singing in music classes. “Proper training will cause these songs of savagery to become the songs of civilization,” Johnstone predicted.
“Happiness first and all else follows” was a slogan that hung on the school walls. A team of wealthy Philadelphia women, known as the Board of Lady Visitors, paid for a donkey-pulled streetcar that the children could ride around the perimeter of the farm. The ladies built a merry-go-round at the school, and a zoo stocked with bears, wolves, pheasants, and other creatures. Each year the school put on Christmas plays that residents of Vineland could attend, and each summer the school filled two train cars with students, who traveled to Wildwood Beach for an outing by the sea. One of the earliest photographs of Emma shows her in the back of an open wagon filled with girls and teachers. She sits on a pile of hay, looking back toward the photographer, smiling. The picture is labeled “off for camp.”
As an able-bodied child, Emma spent part of each day learning manual trades. She got a garden patch to raise fruits and vegetables. Girls like Emma were instructed in sewing, dressmaking, and woodworking, while the boys learned how to make shoes and rugs. The administrators claimed that this labor prepared the students to someday earn a living. But the school, like many asylums and prisons of the time, also depended on their work for their own income. Between May 1897 and May 1898, the school’s records indicated, the students made 30 new three-piece suits, 92 pairs of overalls, 234 aprons, 107 new pairs of shoes, and 40 dressed dolls. They washed 275,130 pieces of laundry. They sold $8,160.81 of produce from the school farm, including 1,030 bushels of turnips, 158 baskets of cantaloupes, and 83,161 quarts of milk. The fact that feebleminded children could do so much skilled labor was a paradox that never seems to have troubled the school’s administration. Nor did they feel guilty for the money they made on the children’s labor. “We are doing God’s work,” Johnstone explained.
For evidence of their divine mission, the school pointed to the lives they had saved. They were also sparing society the burden of feebleminded criminals. “The modern scientific study of the deficient and delinquent classes shows that a large proportion of our criminals and inebriates are really born more or less imbecile,” declared Isabel Craven, the president of the Board of Lady Visitors.
Feeblemindedness was not just present at birth, Craven believed, but was passed down from parents to children. She shared the standard late nineteenth-century American belief in the heredity of bad behaviors. Somehow, feeblemindedness could be both a medical disorder and the wages of sin, passed down from the sinners to their children. Writing in the school’s annual report in 1899, Craven recounted one such story, about an alcoholic woman in Germany in the late 1700s. She had 834 descendants, out of which 7 became murderers, 76 criminals of other sorts, 142 professional beggars, 64 charity cases, and 181 women who led “disreputable lives,” as Craven put it.
The Vineland Training School was protecting future generations from this danger by removing feebleminded children from circulation, ensuring that they never got a chance to have children of their own. “What a legacy of crime and expense we may leave to the coming generation in our neglect to care for these incapable ones,” Craven warned.
Emma settled into her new home. Her teachers kept track of her progress in their notes. They logged her letters to Santa Claus, in which she asked for ribbons, gloves, dolls, and stockings. She learned to spell and count, although she struggled with arithmetic. She learned how to make a bed. Sometimes Emma’s teachers made a note of bad conduct. At other times, they said she marched well. She acted in the Christmas plays. She mastered the cornet and played songs such as “The Star-Spangled Banner” in the school band. She learned to use a sewing machine to make shirtwaists, and then she learned how to build boxes to put them in, complete with paneled tops and mortise-and-tenon joints.
When Emma became a teenager, she was ushered into the school’s unpaid labor force. “She is an almost perfect worker,” a school administrator noted in her records. Emma waited tables in the school dining room and served as a helper in the woodworking class. She proved herself so capable that Johnstone made her his housekeeper and later put his infant son in her care. For a time, Emma worked as a kindergarten aide at the school, and a visitor to the school mistook her for one of the teachers. It was not the only time that visitors would comment on how normal she seemed.
At age seventeen, Emma met a new member of the Vineland staff: a small, balding man named Henry Goddard. Goddard moved into a new office above one of the workshops, which he filled with strange instruments and machines. He would give children tasks to perform for him, such as having them poke a wand into holes drilled into a sheet of wood as fast as they could.
One day it was Emma’s turn to go to Goddard’s office.
“I have five cents in one pocket and five in another,” he said to her. “How many cents have I?”
“Ten,” Emma replied.
Dr. Goddard asked her another sixteen questions about numbers. All told, she got twelve right and five wrong.
Two years later, Goddard summoned her again for another round of questions. Use Philadelphia, money, and river in a sentence. Count backward from twenty.
Goddard’s assistants praised her for every answer, although she got a fair number wrong. Later, Goddard reviewed her test and summed up her performance—her entire existence, really—with a single word he had recently invented: moron.
Unbeknownst to Emma, Goddard had also started making discreet inquiries about her family. His assistants sought out friends of the Wolvertons for gossip. Goddard was sure of what they would discover: that Emma’s family were morons, too.
Henry Goddard first came to the Vineland Training School to build a science of childhood, having escaped a disastrous childhood of his own. Around the time he was born in 1869 in Maine, his father was gored by a bull. The injury eventually cost the family their farm, and for a few years Goddard’s father eked out a living as a day laborer before dying in 1878. Goddard spent the next three years with his older sister and her family, as his mother, a self-appointed Quaker missionary, vanished for months at a time to preach at Friends meetings across Canada and the Midwest. At age twelve, Goddard was sent to Providence on a scholarship to a Quaker boarding school. “Nobody knew me or cared a whit whether I lived or died,” Goddard recalled in his old age.
After finishing his time in “Quaker jail,” as he called it, Goddard then went to Haverford College. He wasn’t any fonder of that school either, considering it nothing but “a convenient way to keep the sons of rich Philadelphia Quakers out of mischief.” He came to hate the very institution of school. It was all a pointless exercise in the rote memorization of Latin and Greek, along with the endless worry that students would fall into sin. It made no difference to how people turned out, Goddard believed; the students from wealthy families went on to prosperous lives, while poorer students like Goddard were left to struggle. “In all my adult life,” he later said, “I have felt keenly the defects of my early training.”
For all Goddard’s scorn of schools, he ended up spending his life around them. He coached football at the University of Southern California for a while before teaching at high schools in Ohio and Maine. But at age thirty, Goddard heard a lecture by the psychologist G. Stanley Hall that changed how he thought about education. Hall told his audience that schools could scientifically liberate the minds of children. Hall’s own research had persuaded him that the mental development of children follows a predictable course, just like the metamorphosis of a wingless nymph into a dragonfly. If teachers and psychologists joined forces, Hall said, they could create a new kind of education based on science rather than superstitious traditions.
Goddard immediately quit his teaching job and traveled to Massachusetts to study under Hall at Clark University. After getting his PhD, Goddard moved to West Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1899 to become a psychologist at the state normal school. There, he began gathering the data that psychologists would need to transform teaching. Teachers from across Pennsylvania used Goddard’s eye charts to test the vision of their students so that he could figure out how many children were doing badly in school simply because they had trouble reading books and chalkboards. Goddard sent out questionnaires to gauge the moral development of students from one grade to the next. Much as his mother had traveled to Quaker meetings, Goddard went from conference to conference to preach to teachers about the glory of Child Study. He asked his audiences to join him on a quest for “a law of child nature which we can bank upon when once we have comprehended it.”
At a 1900 conference, Goddard met E. R. Johnstone, who invited him to visit the Vineland Training School. Goddard was impressed. The Vineland teachers didn’t mindlessly deliver the same lessons over and over again. They experimented, revising their teaching based on what helped the students improve. Johnstone insisted that Goddard spend some time during his visit talking with the students themselves. “I never dreaded anything more,” Goddard later admitted. But it went better than he had expected, perhaps because Goddard knew what it felt like to be an abandoned child. Afterward, Johnstone congratulated him. “You talked as though you were accustomed to talking to the feeble-minded,” he said.
Goddard came away from his visit convinced that Vineland was an exceptional place—“a great family of happy, contented, but mentally defective children,” he said. Over the next few years, he stayed in close contact with Johnstone, sharing ideas about using science to bring about a new way of teaching. In 1906, Johnstone invited Goddard to become Vineland’s first director of research.
To Goddard, it was a rare scientific opportunity. Vineland could reveal clues about the human mind that studies on ordinary children could not. Anatomists often studied simpler animals—flatworms or sea urchins, for example—to find important lessons that applied to humans as well. Psychologists might gain the same advantage by studying less complex minds. “The training school at Vineland, N.J., is a great human laboratory,” Goddard declared.
But when Johnstone announced Goddard’s appointment, he also let slip a gloomier motivation for bringing aboard a psychologist. The feebleminded were continuing to have more children, who were inheriting their defects, and society thus faced an impending disaster.
“Degeneracy is increasing, neurotic disease is increasing, defectiveness is increasing,” Johnstone warned. Building more Vinelands wouldn’t hold back the tide. “By the time more room is made it is filled and the waiting-list is larger than before.
“We must stop the increase,” Johnstone warned. “And that means to find where they come from, why they come and what to do to check the stream.”
Goddard didn’t share Johnstone’s bleak view, at least not at first. He hoped that someday his research at Vineland could lead to treatments that could lift up the mental state of the feebleminded. “Suppose we could find some way of exercising these brains so that other cells took up the work of the missing cells!” he mused in 1907. “Would we not find a far greater degree of intelligence than we have ever dreamed of?”
Before unlocking hidden intelligence, Goddard would first need a way to scientifically measure it. He wanted to assign intelligence a number, the way doctors measured blood pressure or body temperature or weight. In Goddard’s day, doctors regularly diagnosed children as imbeciles and idiots, but they did so mostly by intuition. Goddard tried to craft a test that could drill down to the biological basis of intelligence. He guessed that the speed of the nervous system was crucial, and so he would put Vineland students in front of an electric key and tell them to tap it with their finger as fast as they could. It worked badly. Some students couldn’t even understand what he wanted them to do. Goddard tried other tests. He had the students squeeze a dynamometer as hard as they could, to thread needles, to draw straight lines. But whenever Goddard sat down to analyze the test scores, he found they didn’t hang together. A student might do well at one and miserably at another.
“After two years my work was so poor, I had accomplished so little, that I went abroad to see if I could not get some ideas,” Goddard later said.
In Europe, Goddard visited universities, schools, and laboratories to observe their research. While he was staying in Belgium, a physician offhandedly gave him a sheet of paper with a series of questions on it. It was a new exam called the Simon-Binet test, named after its creators, the French psychologist Alfred Binet and his assistant, Théodore Simon. At the request of the French government, Binet and Simon set out to design an exam schools could use to identify children who would need special help in class.
Binet recognized he would need a way to measure intelligence, “otherwise called good sense, practical sense, initiative, the faculty of adapting one’s self to circumstances,” he said. But how could he measure this quality, like a thermometer measures temperature? Instead of trying to measure it directly, Binet decided to measure how each child compared to other children.
Ordinary children got better over time at mental tasks. Highly intelligent ones seemed to Binet to develop faster, while feebleminded children lagged behind. Binet and Simon determined the average score that children of a given age got on a given test. They could then test other children and assign them a mental age based on how well they scored. A feebleminded ten-year-old might have a mental age of five.
It shocked Goddard that a psychologist would try to measure the human mind without some finely machined instrument—a chronoscope, perhaps, or an automatograph. All Binet claimed he needed was for children to answer some questions. Other European researchers warned Goddard that the Simon-Binet test was bogus, but he ended up tucking it into his papers anyway. When he arrived back in Vineland, he discovered it once more and decided to give it a try. After all, he had nothing left to lose.
Goddard administered the test to some of the Vineland students and then looked over the scores. The Simon-Binet test did a remarkably good job of matching the judgments of Vineland teachers. Students who had been determined to be idiots consistently got the lowest scores. The imbeciles did somewhat better, and the children who were simply slow and difficult—like Emma Wolverton—did better still, their mental ages lagging just a few years behind their chronological ones.
Here, Goddard decided, was the measuring tool he had been searching for. Idiots had a mental age less than three; imbeciles, between three and seven. People like Emma Wolverton functioned at a higher level, but lacked a proper label. For those with a mental age between eight and twelve, Goddard reached back to his dreary classics classes and coined the word moron, based on the Greek word for “fool.” Goddard even sliced each of these new categories into three subdivisions apiece: low-grade, medium-grade, and high-grade.
Once Goddard was done testing Vineland students, he cast his eye over other schools. He managed to get permission to send out five assistants to a nearby school district and test two thousand ordinary students. They found that 78 percent of children had a mental age within a year of their chronological age. Four percent were more than a year ahead, while 15 percent were two to three years behind. Trailing at the rear, 3 percent of the children were three years behind.
“These figures practically amount to a mathematical proof of the accuracy of the Binet tests,” Goddard declared. The regularity of the scores, no matter who took the tests, convinced him that they were accurately measuring a biological trait—the mysterious wellspring of intelligence in the brain. They may have also played a part in changing how he thought about intelligence itself. Instead of something malleable, which could be increased by strengthening brain cells, he came to see it as largely determined by heredity.
“It cannot be cured,” Goddard concluded. “It is caused, in at least eighty per cent of cases, by disturbances of function in parents or grandparents that might have been prevented.”
When Goddard spoke this way, he betrayed his nineteenth-century concept of heredity. He shared the common belief that people who took up a life of crime or alcoholism might somehow taint future generations with their sins. Growing curious about the degeneration of his students, Goddard thumbed through Vineland’s admission forms, looking for details about their families. He could find only a little information. To get more, he drafted an “after-admission blank” for parents and physicians to fill out. Goddard asked whether Vineland students had any relatives who were insane, alcoholic, feebleminded.
When the blanks came back filled out, Goddard was surprised at how many relatives suffered from these weaknesses. To gauge the full scope, Goddard wanted to hire a team of skilled assistants to “collect data on heredity.”
How he would pay for the project, Goddard couldn’t say. In the midst of this uncertainty, a letter arrived at the school in March 1909 like an answered prayer. One of the country’s leading scientists, a geneticist by the name of Charles Davenport, wanted to know if anyone at Vineland had data about the heredity of feeblemindedness.
Davenport had leaped to fame only a few years before writing to Vineland. He had earned a PhD in zoology at Harvard in 1892, going on to a solid but obscure career studying scallops and other marine animals. He moved to Cold Spring Harbor, a Long Island village, where he ran a summer school for biology teachers.
But Davenport had great ambitions far beyond beachcombing. He pioneered new statistical methods to make precise comparisons between animals, based on their size and shape. Once these methods had matured, Davenport predicted, “biology will pass from the field of speculative sciences to exact sciences.” He struggled to use statistics to understand heredity, comparing parents to their offspring. When Mendel’s work came to light in 1900, with its concepts of dominant and recessive characters, it hit Davenport like a lightning bolt to the skull.
Davenport persuaded the Carnegie Institution to turn Cold Spring Harbor from a sleepy summer school into a full-time research station for genetics. In 1904 the Station for Experimental Evolution opened its doors. Hugo de Vries traveled by train to Cold Spring Harbor and gave a speech to celebrate the event. He celebrated Davenport in particular as its director. “With him it will open up wide fields of unexpected facts, bringing to light new methods of improvement of our domestic animals and plants,” de Vries said.
For his first few years as director, Davenport fulfilled that prediction. He brought together a team of scientists who embarked on studies on heredity, investigating flies, mice, rabbits, and ducks. George Shull, the botanist who would later inspect Luther Burbank’s gardens, grew corn and primroses in the Cold Spring Harbor fields. Davenport himself studied chickens and canaries. Inspecting his canaries, he concluded that the crest of feathers on their head was a dominant Mendelian trait.
But Davenport wasn’t content with canaries. He wanted to decipher human heredity, too. Davenport couldn’t study human heredity by raising experimental families. Instead, he set out to create a science of pedigrees. For centuries, people had been recording their genealogy, and sometimes those trees offered hints of heredity. The Habsburg jaw reappeared in generation after generation of royal portraits. In the nineteenth century, asylums kept records hinting that insanity tended to run in families. Davenport realized that if pedigrees were detailed enough, they might reveal Mendel’s signature over many human generations.
Working with his wife, Gertrude, a zoologist, Davenport started with simple studies on the color of people’s eyes and their hair. He then expanded his research, training a team of fieldworkers to search across New England for families with hereditary disorders such as Huntington’s disease. Davenport also wondered if American asylums and other institutions—homes for the deaf and blind, insane asylums, prisons—might already have the information he was looking for. When he wrote to the Vineland Training School, he was stunned to get a letter back from Goddard, explaining all the work he had already done.
“I can hardly express my enthusiasm over these blanks,” Davenport told Goddard, “and my enthusiasm that you are planning, I trust, extensive work in the pedigree of feeble minded children.”
Davenport traveled to Vineland to meet Goddard and help launch the project. He showed Goddard how to manage field researchers and analyze the data they brought back. Most important of all, Davenport gave Goddard a crash course in genetics.
By 1909, a growing number of biologists had come to accept Mendel’s findings. But none of them could yet say for sure what was responsible for his patterns. The Danish plant physiologist Wilhelm Johannsen gave Mendel’s factors a new name: genes. “As to the nature of the ‘genes,’” Johannsen warned, “it is as yet of no value to propose any hypothesis.”
Under Davenport’s guidance, Goddard swiftly embraced Mendelism. It remained to be seen whether feeblemindedness was a recessive trait, arising in children when they inherited the same gene from both parents. To search for evidence, Goddard talked a Philadelphia philanthropist into paying for a study on heredity. He built up his field team, choosing only women, who he required to have “a pleasing manner and address such as inspire confidence,” he said, along with “a high degree of intelligence which would enable her to comprehend the problem of the feeble-minded.” Goddard would come to depend most of all on his top fieldworker, a former school principal named Elizabeth Kite, who had studied at the Sorbonne and the University of London.
Kite and the other fieldworkers began traveling to meet the families of the Vineland students. Within a matter of months, Goddard claimed he saw patterns that “seem to conform perfectly to the Mendelian law.”
Writing about the results in the school’s annual report, he predicted great things for Vineland. “Once we prove that the law holds true for man we shall be in the possession of a powerful solvent for some of the most troublesome problems,” he said. “We are within reach of a great contribution to science that would make the New Jersey Training School famous the world over and for all time.”
Fanning out from Vineland across New Jersey and neighboring states, Goddard’s fieldworkers gathered data on 327 families of students. In a few cases, the families had normal intelligence. The feeblemindedness of the students seemed to arise from some unknown source. It was far more common, however, for the fieldworkers to find families with many feebleminded members, not to mention alcoholics and criminals.
Back in Vineland, Goddard gathered what he believed to be more evidence that feeblemindedness was inherited like Mendel’s wrinkled peas. If two feebleminded parents had children, the school records seemed to show, much of their family might end up feebleminded, too. Based on his pedigrees, Goddard estimated that about two-thirds of feebleminded people owed their condition to heredity. “They have inherited the condition just as you have inherited the color of your eyes, the color of your hair, and the shape of your head,” he said.
This dawning realization revolted Goddard. He felt as if he was pulling a scrim away from American society, revealing a hidden rot. And none of the stories gathered by his fieldworkers appalled him more than that of Emma Wolverton.
When Goddard first examined Emma, she seemed just one of many morons in the school’s care. She was a pleasant enough student within the confines of Vineland. But she would be doomed if she stepped off the property. “She would lead a life that would be vicious, immoral, and criminal, though because of her mentality she herself would not be responsible,” Goddard predicted.
Goddard’s curiosity about Emma sharpened when Kite dug into the history of the Wolverton family. Kite first managed to track down Emma’s mother, Malinda. By then, Malinda had eight children and was earning money by working as a farmhand and selling soap. Kite told Goddard that Malinda seemed indifferent to her family—even to herself. “Her philosophy of life is the philosophy of the animal,” Goddard later declared.
Kite pushed further back into Emma’s pedigree. She investigated Emma’s aunts and uncles and cousins. She traveled to the reaches of New Jersey—to slums, to farms, to mountain cabins—and came back with more disturbing tales of filthy half-naked children, of unheated tenements, of mothers covered in vermin, of incest.
Kite sometimes proffered a letter from the school to get into people’s houses, but other times she hid her mission, sweetly asking if she could get shelter from impending storms or pretending to be a historian researching the Revolutionary War. She asked old people about their dim memories of long-dead relatives. They told of horse thieves, of young women seduced by lawyers, of an old drunk nicknamed “Old Horror” who would show up at the polls on Election Day to vote for whoever would pay him.
Kite eventually traced 480 Wolvertons to a single founding father, named John Wolverton. She claimed conclusive proof of feeblemindedness in 143 of his descendants. But Kite also encountered descendants of John Wolverton who were doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and other respectable citizens. Their intelligence seemed utterly different from Emma’s relatives. The two branches of the family, the high and the low, didn’t seem to know of each other.
Kite was confused until an elderly informant dispelled the fog. John Wolverton, Kite learned, had been born into an upstanding colonial family. At the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, he joined a militia, and when the militia stopped one night at a tavern, he got drunk and slept with a feebleminded girl who worked there. John promptly got back on the respectable path, married a woman of good Quaker stock, and went on to have a happy family, with many descendants who rose to prominence.
John had no idea that he had impregnated the tavern girl, who gave birth to a feebleminded son. She named him John Wolverton after his missing father. When John the younger grew up, he turned out an utterly different man—depraved enough to earn the nickname “Old Horror.” He started a family of his own, and the two lines of Wolvertons veered in different directions over the next 130 years—one to greater respectability, the other into feeblemindedness and crime.
“The biologist could hardly plan and carry out a more rigid experiment,” Goddard said. The data flowing into Vineland “was among the most valuable that have ever been contributed to the subject of human heredity,” he said.
Goddard convinced himself the United States was sliding into a crisis of heredity. “If civilization is to advance, our best people must replenish the Earth,” he said. To Goddard, the best people in the United States were his fellow New Englanders, “the stock than which there is no better.” But one by one, the great New England families were disappearing for lack of children. Meanwhile, the feebleminded were multiplying at over twice the average rate, according to Goddard’s estimates.
Goddard was hardly the first person to contemplate controlling human heredity. Four centuries beforehand, Luis Mercado had advised people with hereditary disorders to avoid having children together. In the early 1800s, alienists urged that the insane be prevented from starting families. Francis Galton turned these concerns into something far more extreme: a call to governments to breed their citizens like cows or corn. Galton recognized that in order to win people to his cause, he would need, as he put it, “a brief word to express the science of improving stock.” In 1883, he came up with an enduring term: eugenics. To Galton, eugenics was full of happy visions of arranged marriages that would lead to ever-better generations of humans. “What a galaxy of genius might we not create!” Galton promised.
Galton’s enthusiasm attracted some noteworthy English biologists, who formed the Eugenics Education Society. But they never gained much power or influence over British affairs. By the dawn of the twentieth century, eugenics had begun taking root in the United States, and there it flowered into darker blooms. American eugenicists wanted to prevent people with bad traits from having children. Some argued for institutionalizing the feebleminded to stop them from having sex. Some called for sterilization. In 1900, an American physician named W. D. McKim went so far as to call for “a gentle painless death.” He envisioned the construction of gas chambers to kill “the very weak and the very vicious.” It would be pointless to try to improve these people through experience, because, McKim declared, “heredity is the fundamental cause of human wretchedness.”
Davenport embraced eugenics without any hesitation, and he argued that Mendel’s rediscovery only strengthened the case for it. If genes were carried in the germ line, there was nothing to be done about the bad ones except to keep them from poisoning the next generation. Davenport believed that eugenics would have to be carried out based on a thorough knowledge of hereditary traits, and so he established a repository of data—the Eugenics Record Office—next to the research station at Cold Spring Harbor in 1910. Ultimately, Davenport predicted, eugenics would provide “the salvation of the race through heredity.”
Under Davenport’s sway, Goddard quickly became a eugenicist, too. In 1909, he joined Davenport on a prominent committee of eugenicists, and two years later he published a manifesto entitled “The Elimination of Feeble-Mindedness.” Goddard wrote that it was possible for environmental causes, such as an illness during pregnancy, to cause feeblemindedness, “but all these causes combined are small compared to the one cause—heredity.”
To eliminate feeblemindedness, Goddard rejected the calls of people like McKim to kill the feebleminded. But he did want to make sure they didn’t get to have children. And by “they,” Goddard mostly meant women.
Goddard conjured up a specter of attractive, feebleminded women wantonly seducing decent men. He warned that the country’s reformatories were full of feebleminded girls who “do not conform to the conventions of society,” who were “boy crazy” or, worst of all, “preferred the company of colored men to white.” These feebleminded girls “in many instances are quite attractive,” Goddard warned, requiring them to be put “under the care, guidance, and direction of intelligent and humane people, who will make their lives happy and partially useful, but who will insist upon the one important thing, and that is that this race should end with them; they shall never become the mothers of children who are like themselves.”
Institutionalization wasn’t the only way to keep women from becoming mothers. Goddard joined the movement to sterilize women deemed unfit. In the early 1900s, an Indiana prison surgeon named Harry Sharp performed vasectomies to stop men from transmitting defective “germ plasm,” and in 1907 the Indiana legislature made sterilization a state policy. In New Jersey, Goddard lobbied for a similar bill, which Governor Woodrow Wilson signed in 1911. The first woman slated to be sterilized took her case to New Jersey’s Supreme Court, which ruled it unconstitutional in 1913 as cruel and unusual punishment. Goddard responded to the defeat by redoubling his efforts. He joined new committees with ominous names, like the Committee for the Heredity of Feeble-mindedness, and the Committee to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means of Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the American Population. “There is no question that there should be a carefully worded sterilization law upon the statute book of every State,” Goddard said.
Lobbying governments and publishing reports would not be enough for Goddard. He wanted to win over public opinion. The heap of data he was collecting from hundreds of families would not make the country as a whole appreciate the threat of feeblemindedness. He needed to find a parable to illustrate the destructiveness of feeblemindedness through a single family. The choice was obvious: Emma Wolverton and her ancestors.
Goddard began work on a book, his first. He used the school’s notes about Emma to put together a short biography up to age twenty-two. To protect her identity, he referred to her as Deborah Kallikak. Her last name was another one of Goddard’s Greek creations—a combination of the words kalos (“good”) and kakos (“bad”). Yet he felt no compunction about adding photographs of Emma to the book. In one picture she posed at her sewing machine. In another, she held a book open in her lap, her thick black hair kept neat in a bow. Casual readers might not see anything amiss with this young woman, but Goddard was quick to set them aright: Intelligence tests showed that she had a mental age of a nine-year-old.
“The question is, ‘How do we account for this kind of individual?’” Goddard asked. “The answer is in a word ‘Heredity,’—bad stock.”
To prove his point, Goddard used Kite’s research to tell the story of the Wolvertons. He started with John Wolverton, renaming him Martin Kallikak. Interspersed with the tales of drunks and horse thieves, Goddard’s book included photographs Kite took of Emma’s relatives—old women and dirty children scowled at the camera, standing in front of sheds or sitting on sagging porches. Goddard also added family trees to the book, drooping with squares and circles, some of which were colored black to indicate feeblemindedness. The defect flowed down through six generations of the trees, demonstrating the power of heredity.
The story of the Kallikaks, Goddard concluded, was a powerful argument for rounding up the feebleminded and putting them in colonies, at least until a better solution could be found. Sterilization might turn out to be that solution, but Goddard warned against simply operating on every member of feebleminded families. To Goddard, his pedigrees seemed to show that feeblemindedness was a Mendelian trait, carried on a gene. If that was true, then it was entirely possible for a moron to have some children who were feebleminded and others who were of normal intelligence. To sterilize them all would be like using a hatchet when a scalpel would do.
The one thing that would not save the country from feeblemindedness was naive hope. “No amount of education or good environment can change a feeble-minded individual into a normal one,” Goddard warned, “any more than it can change a red-haired stock into a black-haired stock.”
In 1912, Goddard published The Kallikak Family. It gave a modern, Mendelian polish to old beliefs about feeblemindedness as a punishment for sin. The Evening Star, a Washington, DC, newspaper, reprinted large excerpts from The Kallikak Family, accompanied by a shuddering commentary: “I doubt if there is in all literature a more damning presentation of how one single sin can perpetuate itself in generations of untold misery and suffering, to the end of time.”
The book became a bestseller, turning Goddard—a psychologist at a little-known backwoods institution—into one of the most famous scientists in the United States. His fame helped attract more attention to his imported intelligence tests. The New York City school system adopted them, administering them to all their students, and soon other school districts across the country followed suit. The United States Public Health Service reached out as well. They didn’t need his help to teach students. Rather, they wanted to test the flood of immigrants arriving in the United States.
Between 1890 and 1910, more than twelve million immigrants traveled from Europe to Ellis Island. Doctors inspected thousands of people arriving there each day to make sure they were in good physical health. In 1907, Congress passed a law to also exclude “imbeciles, feeble-minded and persons with physical or mental defects which might affect their ability to earn a living.” The new law meant that the doctors on Ellis Island had to inspect the minds of immigrants as well as their bodies. Congress gave them no guidance, and so the Health Service asked Goddard if he could adapt his test to find the feebleminded among the immigrants.
“We were in fact most inadequately prepared for the task,” Goddard later admitted. He knew that a test designed for American children might not work well on adults who didn’t speak English or understand anything of American culture. But Goddard accepted the request, unwilling to pass up the opportunity, and created a new test for immigrants.
Goddard brought his team of fieldworkers to Ellis Island on a series of trips, starting in 1912. When ships docked and immigrants shuffled into the main building on the island, Goddard’s fieldworkers scanned them. They pointed out those who looked like they might be feebleminded. The selected immigrants were pulled out of the crowd and taken to a side room. There, another fieldworker and an interpreter would give each immigrant a series of tasks, such as fitting blocks into holes or telling them what year it was.
Goddard’s staff kept careful records of the tests, which he analyzed back in Vineland. The results stunned him: A huge proportion of the immigrants tested as feebleminded. Goddard broke down the results by ethnic group: 79 percent of Italians were feebleminded, 83 percent of Jews, 87 percent of Russians.
When Goddard published the figures, they were seized upon by opponents of immigration. For years they had been claiming that the new wave of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe was a burden to the country. More recently, they translated their bigotry into the language of eugenics. In 1910, Prescott Hall, a leader of the Immigration Restriction League, made the connection clear. “The same arguments which induce us to segregate criminals and feebleminded and thus prevent their breeding,” he said, “apply to excluding from our borders individuals whose multiplying here is likely to lower the average of our people.” Goddard now handed them seemingly hard numbers, which they would use to justify slashing immigration quotas.
Goddard himself was more suspicious of his own results. “They can hardly stand by themselves as valid,” he said. Immigrants might score badly on tests for all sorts of reasons. A Russian peasant might never get the chance to learn how to count; calendars might be useless to him, as he worked on a farm. Goddard worked through the numbers again, using a more lenient cutoff for feebleminded, and found that the fraction dropped by half.
On reflection, Goddard seemed comfortable with the notion that 40 percent of immigrants were morons. “It is admitted on all sides that we are getting now the poorest of each race,” he said. But Goddard didn’t argue that any race was inherently less intelligent. He did suspect that some immigrants inherited their feeblemindedness—“Morons beget morons,” Goddard said—but poverty might be to blame for the low test scores of many other immigrants. “If the latter, as seems likely, little fear may be felt for the children,” Goddard said.
Goddard’s team was now overwhelmed with work. In addition to studying immigrants, he was continuing to analyze the data from hundreds of families that Kite and others had interviewed. Goddard was also training psychologists at Vineland in mental testing. But the work at the lab came almost entirely to a halt when the United States entered World War I and much of his staff enlisted. Goddard decided he could help the cause in his own way as well. He warned the army that it might risk losing the war by unwittingly drafting hundreds of thousands of morons.
The army had Goddard and a group of his fellow intelligence experts draw up a test they could give to draftees. In 1917, he hosted a meeting at Vineland, where they adapted their tests to examine young men. The army then hired four hundred psychologists, who administered the new test to 1.7 million soldiers. It was an intelligence study thousands of times bigger than anything ever attempted before.
“The knowledge derived from testing of the 1,700,000 men in the Army is probably the most valuable piece of information which mankind has ever acquired about itself,” Goddard later declared. The soldiers followed the same swelling curve that Goddard had seen when he had tested New Jersey schoolchildren six years earlier. Most of the scores were close to the overall average, while a few soldiers scored exceptionally far above or below the rest. Goddard saw the army results as a vindication of everything he had been saying about the biological nature of intelligence.
Yet the average score of the soldiers was startlingly low. According to Goddard’s standards, 47 percent of the white soldiers and 89 percent of the blacks should be categorized as morons. The average white soldier, the psychologists found, had a mental age of thirteen years, just barely above the cutoff for feeblemindedness. The majority of Americans, in other words, was feebleminded or close to it.
When news of the results got out, it caused many Americans to look at their country with a new sense of self-loathing. “We have a working majority of voters who have children’s minds,” a prominent newspaper editor named William Allen White declared.
White was convinced that the “moron majority,” as he dubbed it, must be a recent development. “A new biological condition faces us,” he warned. The new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe lacked the mental grasp of the colonists who fought in the revolution. “Our darker-skinned neighbors breed faster than we,” he explained, and their descendants inherited their feeblemindedness. “The plasm of the lame brain keeps right on producing lame brains,” White concluded.
To Goddard, the army test results demanded a new form of government. Only about 4 percent of soldiers got an A on the test, meaning that they possessed “very high intelligence.” The top 4 percent of the country must be allowed to rule over the remaining 96. The fact that the United States was a democracy might make this arrangement hard to achieve, but Goddard believed that if the most intelligent came to understand how to make other Americans comfortable and happy, they would be elected to rule. “And then will come perfect government,” Goddard declared in a 1919 lecture at Princeton.
To put it another way, Goddard had decided that the entire country had to be turned into a giant Vineland Training School. The children at the school had not voted to put Goddard and the rest of the administration in charge of their care, of course. “But they would do so if given a chance because they know that the one purpose of that group of officials is to make the children happy,” Goddard said.
Almost no one outside of Vineland knew that Emma Wolverton was Deborah Kallikak. But in the tiny world of the training school, everyone was aware, Emma included. Yet her local fame did not protect her from the brutal indifference of institutional life. Two years after the publication of The Kallikak Family, Johnstone summoned her to his office to tell her that she was going to have to leave.
Rich children could stay for life at the Vineland Training School if their parents paid a onetime fee of $7,500. Poor children, whose care was paid for by the state of New Jersey, had to move out when they grew up. By the time they became adults, only a few of Vineland’s students could be trusted to live on their own. The rest needed to be moved elsewhere. Now twenty-five, Emma Wolverton walked back out the gate she had entered seventeen years before. Garrison had died in 1900, and now his tomb stood at the corner just outside the gate. She stopped to thank him for her time there. “The Training School,” she whispered. “My home.”
Her trip was short. Emma was moved across Landis Avenue to the New Jersey State Institution for Feeble-Minded Women. Its mission was to keep its inmates from “propagating their kind.”
Across the street, the institution staff also knew that Emma was the real Deborah Kallikak. While she might have been famous for her monstrous family, they found Emma capable and well trained. She got to work with a “dignified courtesy,” according to a social worker there named Helen Reeves. She cared for the children of the institution’s staff, including that of the assistant supervisor. The children adored her and would send letters to her for the rest of her life. Emma also worked in the institution’s hospital, even serving as a special nurse during an outbreak in the early 1920s. One day a patient bit one of her fingers so badly it had to be amputated. She sported the injury with pride.
Emma discovered plays to perform in her new home as well. Once, when she played Pocahontas in a play at the institution, she had to throw herself on a dummy that represented Captain John Smith.
“You could put more pep in it,” the superintendent shouted during rehearsal.
“If it were a real man, I would,” she replied.
Emma even managed to find a few real men. While she worked as a nurse during the epidemic, she moved into a room near the patients where she was under less monitoring. Using her skills at woodworking, she tinkered with the window screen so that she could slip in and out at night unnoticed. In the moonlight, she would meet a maintenance worker. They were eventually caught, and her suitor was “kindly dismissed by a lenient justice-of-the-peace,” as Reeves later put it.
Emma became involved with at least two other men, but each time the authorities broke it off. Only a few clues about those relationships survive. In 1925, the institution hired Emma out as a maid, but her service was cut short after less than a year. Over thirty years later, Emma met a psychology intern named Elizabeth Allen. Allen later recalled the stories told about Emma at the institution. “Apparently every time she was released to work on the ‘outside’ she would return pregnant,” Allen wrote. If Emma did indeed become pregnant, there’s no record of a child, an abortion, or sterilization.
“It isn’t as if I’d done anything really wrong,” Emma later complained. “It was only nature.”
Only four years after Emma Wolverton was forced out of the Vineland Training School, Henry Goddard was forced out as well. Johnstone shut down Goddard’s laboratory in 1918, but the documents that have survived don’t offer many clues as to why things ended so badly. Writing to one of his funders, Goddard condemned the decision as a “fatal error.”
Perhaps the parents of Goddard’s subjects grew weary of him using them as psychological guinea pigs. Whatever the reason, Goddard abruptly left the Vineland School for Ohio. His celebrated work on eugenics and intelligence came to an end. In Ohio, he worked in relative obscurity, studying how to prevent juvenile delinquency and to help gifted children thrive.
The Kallikak family had gained so much strength in the popular imagination that they no longer depended on Goddard. They endured without him. Paul Popenoe, the editor of the Journal of Heredity, recounted their story as he lobbied for more states to sterilize the feebleminded. “Such children should never be born,” Popenoe declared. “They are a burden to themselves, a burden to their family, a burden to the state, and a menace to civilization.” In 1927, the Supreme Court heard a case about a young Virginia woman named Carrie Buck who had been scheduled for sterilization. The eugenicists submitted The Kallikak Family as evidence that Buck’s children would be doomed. The Supreme Court approved the state’s petition, and Buck was sterilized. The court’s decision led to a boom in sterilizations in the years that followed.
In the 1920s, Goddard’s work with the US Army also continued to fuel scientific racism. Eugenicists pointed to the difference between black and white soldiers on the army tests as proof of hereditary differences in intelligence between the races, and that the races should not be allowed to intermarry. The eugenicist Madison Grant declared that miscegenation was “a social and racial crime of the first magnitude.”
American racism of the 1920s divided humanity into far thinner slices than just black and white, though. Eugenicists declared that northern Europeans were superior to people from the rest of the continent. They pointed once more to Goddard’s work on Ellis Island, as well as to the army intelligence tests, on which immigrant Italians, Russians, and Jews did poorly. They also ignored the fact that these soldiers came from families that had only recently arrived in the United States.
Harry Laughlin, who worked for Davenport at the Eugenics Record Office, testified to Congress that immigration threatened to pollute the American gene pool. “The lesson is that immigrants should be examined, and the family stock should be investigated, lest we admit more degenerate ‘blood,’” he said. In 1924, Congress tightened immigration with the passage of the National Origins Act, keeping out undesired races.
The Kallikaks became celebrities far beyond America’s shores as well. In 1914, Goddard’s book was published in Germany to great acclaim. For years, many German doctors and biologists had been calling for a government-run program to breed the best parents, along with sterilization of the unfit. When Adolf Hitler was imprisoned in 1924, he learned of the Kallikaks in a book he read about heredity. Soon after, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, in which he mimicked the language of American eugenicists, declaring that sterilization of defective people “is the most humane act of mankind.”
When Hitler came to power, an appalling number of German scientists and doctors heartily joined him in his campaign to alter humanity. “The head of the German ethno-empire is the first statesman who has made the tenets of hereditary biology and eugenics a directing principle of state policy,” declared the geneticist Otmar von Verschuer. In 1933, the year Hitler seized power, a new German edition of The Kallikak Family was published. In his introduction, the translator, Karl Wilker, made clear just how important Goddard’s work had been to the Nazis.
“Questions which were only cautiously touched upon by Henry Herbert Goddard at that time . . . have resulted in the law for the prevention of sick or ill offspring,” Wilker wrote. “Just how significant the problem of genetic inheritance is, perhaps no example shows so clearly as the Kallikak family.”
The Nazis used the Kallikaks as a teaching tool. In 1935, the government released an educational film called Das Erbe (“Inheritance”). It begins with two older male scientists explaining to their eager young female assistant about the laws of heredity. Over a montage of flowers and birds, of racehorses and hunting dogs, they talk about how to produce new breeds of animals and plants. A breeder’s success depends on picking the right individuals to produce the next generation. The same is true for people. No better example of the harm of poorly planned families is the Kallikak family, “the work of American eugenicist Henry Goddard,” one of the German scientists says.
The screen turns black, and a title appears across the top: “The Descendants of Lieutenant Kallikak.” The lieutenant is marked by a circle, from which springs downward branches—493 “superior offspring” from a woman of healthy stock, along with 434 “inferior offspring” from a woman with a hereditary disease.
“A single ancestor with hereditary disease was enough to leave a large number of unfortunate descendants,” one of the scientists explains. “This is just one example among thousands.” Sympathy for the suffering of such people required preventing them from reproducing—“by all means.”
After the pedigree appears in full, it is replaced on the screen by a quotation from Hitler: “He who is not healthy and dignified in spirit can not perpetuate his suffering in the body of his child.”
In the same year that Das Erbe was released, the Nazis put on the Exhibition for Hereditary Care, where visitors could look at exhibits on the many disabilities that needed to be eradicated. A doctor got into a conversation with a skeptical visitor. To persuade him of the importance of eugenics, the doctor recounted the story of the Kallikaks. “This examination was initiated and directed by the American Professor Goddard,” the doctor assured the visitor. “There is even a book about it.”
The visitor was persuaded, asking the doctor if all the “cripples and idiots” shown at the exhibition were due to the same cause.
“Yes,” the doctor replied. “There is only one answer: heredity.”
Hitler followed up on this propaganda by establishing a new set of “racial hygiene” laws. Hereditary health courts accepted applications from doctors for people who were so unfit they should not be allowed to have children. The feebleminded made up the majority of the approvals. Psychiatrists devised intelligence tests for the courts. In one exam, they gave subjects a suitcase, books, bottles, and other objects. They had to pack the suitcase so that the lid could be easily closed. Their lives might depend on that suitcase.
Within a year of the passage of the first racial hygiene law, the hereditary health courts approved more than 64,000 sterilizations, and by 1944, Germany sterilized at least 400,000 people, including the mentally ill, the deaf, Gypsies, and Jews.
In 1939, Hitler expanded his campaign against the feebleminded, launching a program to kill children judged to be idiots, along with those suffering deformities. Their parents were told that they had died during surgery or due to an accidental overdose of sedatives. Soon children were being killed for being teenage delinquents, or just for being Jewish. Hitler then added yet another program to kill adults who were institutionalized for feeblemindedness or other defects. Before extermination, children would be asked questions that wouldn’t have been out of place at Vineland, such as “Can you name the four seasons?”
The program, known as T4, would ultimately claim 200,000 lives. It operated on a scale so far beyond what the Nazis had attempted before that they had to invent new technology for the slaughter—including gas chambers. McKim’s eugenic dream had become real.
A few people saw straight through the Kallikak story right away. In 1922, the journalist and political commentator Walter Lippmann delivered an attack in the New Republic. He granted that Binet’s original tests had some value as a way to identify children in need of special education. But since then, in the hands of people like Goddard, they had been used to promote monstrous distortions. “The statement that the average mental age of Americans is only about fourteen is not inaccurate. It is not incorrect. It is nonsense,” he wrote.
It was nonsense, Lippmann declared, to treat intelligence as something as straightforward as height or weight, when psychologists had yet to actually define it. Until that day, intelligence would remain simply the thing that intelligence tests measure. But those tests were constantly in flux, as their designers adjusted their thresholds to produce results that satisfied their expectations. To conclude from these tests, then, that intelligence was a hereditary trait was downright pernicious. “Obviously this is not a conclusion obtained by research,” Lippmann declared. “It is a conclusion planted by the will to believe.”
To reach that conclusion, testing advocates had to ignore all sorts of experiences that could influence the scores—especially those in early childhood, when the brain is still developing. And they had to embrace stories like that of the Kallikaks without any healthy skepticism.
In fact, Lippmann warned, there was “some doubt as to the Kallikaks.”
Even if the story was true, it wouldn’t be as compelling an experiment as Goddard claimed. To see how powerful heredity really was, it would have been necessary for Martin Kallikak to have fathered an illegitimate child with a healthy (but poor) woman. Likewise, his respectable marriage would need to be with a feebleminded woman from a prosperous family. “Then only would it have been possible to say with complete confidence that this was a pure case of biological rather than of social heredity,” Lippmann said.
Some scientists questioned the Kallikak story as well. In 1925, a Boston neurologist named Abraham Myerson mocked the lurid tale of Martin Kallikak’s disastrous dalliance with a feebleminded girl, after which he “used his germplasm in orthodox fashion by marrying a nice girl who bore him nice children and started a row of nice people—all nice, no immoral, no syphilitics, no alcoholics, no insane, no criminals.”
Myerson found it ridiculous that Goddard thought he could diagnose generations of Kallikaks based on the stories collected by Elizabeth Kite. “I cannot get any definite information about my great-great-grandfather, much as I have tried,” Myerson joked, “but a girl who left so little impression on her times as to be ‘nameless’ is positively declared to be feeble-minded.”
Perhaps the most important opponent of the Kallikaks was a biologist who spent much of his time in a lab full of milk bottles packed with rotting bananas. Thomas Hunt Morgan didn’t know much about psychology, and yet his attack on The Kallikak Family was the most profound of all. More than anyone, he could see how weak the foundations were on which Goddard built his story.
Morgan kept rotting bananas in his lab at Columbia University in New York City in order to feed a species of fly called Drosophila melanogaster. He had begun studying them in 1907, hoping to catch one of de Vries’s species-creating mutations. But Morgan came to realize that no single mutation could create a new species. It could give rise to a new trait, however. One day, Morgan and his colleagues spotted a male fly that grew white eyes instead of the normal red. The scientists put the white-eyed male together with a red-eyed female and the insects mated. The female then produced healthy eggs, which developed into red-eyed offspring. Morgan’s team then bred those flies with each other, and found that in the following generation, some of the male insects had white eyes. It was puzzling that only males could inherit white eyes, but could not pass them down to their own sons. In search of an explanation, Morgan and his colleagues made a major discovery about the nature of genes.
Morgan’s flies, like all animals, had chromosomes in their cells. Chromosomes usually came in identical pairs, with one exception—a mismatched set of chromosomes that came to be known as X and Y. Studying insect cells, scientists discovered that males carried one X and one Y, while females carried two Xs. This discovery raised the possibility that the X and Y chromosomes carried hereditary factors—what came to be known as genes—that determined which sex an insect would be. The fact that Morgan’s male flies could develop white eyes might mean that a gene located on the X or Y chromosomes determined eye color.
After many experiments with the flies, Morgan’s team figured out that this was indeed the case. White eyes are produced by a recessive mutation on a gene located on the X chromosome. Females with one copy of the white-eye mutation can have red eyes anyway, because their other X chromosome is normal. But since males have only one X chromosome, they can’t compensate for the mutation and develop white eyes. Further experiments in Morgan’s lab revealed that the sex chromosomes could also carry mutations to other traits, such as one that turns the bodies of flies yellow or shrinks their wings. It became clear from experiments like these that chromosomes carried genes, and that a single chromosome could carry many of them.
As Morgan’s team pinned down the location of more genes, they came to realize that heredity was a lot more complicated than scientists had previously thought. When Mendel’s work was initially rediscovered, many geneticists assumed that each trait was controlled by a single gene. Morgan’s team found that many genes could influence a single trait. For example, they identified twenty-five different genes that could change the color of a fly’s eyes.
“It is of the utmost importance that this hypothesis be understood,” the Journal of Heredity declared when Morgan published some of his findings in 1915. If genes worked in such an intricate way in flies, the story in humans had to be far more complex. “Those who accept it must give up talking about, e.g., Roman nose being due to a determiner for Roman nose in the germplasm. The modern view would say that the ‘Romanness’ of the nose is due to the interaction of a very large number of factors.”
Early in his career, Morgan had started out on good terms with Charles Davenport and other American eugenicists. But he was appalled to see how desperately they clung to a Roman-nose view of heredity, even as the evidence piled up against it. In a 1925 book, Morgan spelled out all that was wrong with their approach to human nature.
It was true that individual genes might play a small part in explaining behavior, Morgan granted. Davenport and other scientists had gathered compelling evidence that a single dominant mutation caused Huntington’s disease, for example. But Morgan doubted Goddard’s claim that something as amorphous as “feeblemindedness” could have such a simple hereditary explanation.
“It is extravagant to pretend to claim that there is a single Mendelian factor for this condition,” Morgan wrote.
Morgan didn’t think it would be possible to really begin to study the heredity of feeblemindedness until scientists decided what they actually mean by intelligence itself. “In reality our ideas are very vague on the subject,” he wrote. Scientists would also have to give more credit to the ways in which the environment influenced the human mind. In Morgan’s own research on flies, he had learned to respect the power of the environment. His students discovered one strain of flies that developed normally if they were born in the summer but tended to sprout extra legs if they were born in the winter. It turned out that the researchers could get the same outcomes in their lab simply by changing the temperature in which they reared the fly eggs. It was thus meaningless to talk about the effect of their mutation without taking into account their environment.
When Morgan looked at the pedigrees of families like the Kallikaks, he did not see undeniable proof of the heredity of feeblemindedness. He saw instead many generations of poor people suffering enduring hardships. “It is obvious that these groups of individuals have lived under demoralizing social conditions that might swamp a family of average persons,” Morgan wrote. “The effects may to a large extent be communicated rather than inherited.”
If that was true, Morgan argued, it was patently ridiculous to turn to eugenics to try to improve humanity’s lot. “The student of human heredity will do well to recommend more enlightenment on the social causes of deficiencies,” he concluded.
By the 1930s, many other geneticists had followed Morgan’s example and repudiated eugenics, as both bad science and bad policy. The Eugenics Record Office, the hub of research and social policy based on human heredity, sank into disrepute. In his testimony to Congress, Harry Laughlin offered statistics that supposedly showed the intellectual superiority of northern Europeans. They turned out to be full of glaring errors. The Carnegie Institution, which gave much of the money to run the Eugenics Record Office, realized that its fieldworkers had been gathering sloppy, subjective data that would be useless for scientific research. Even the organization of the files turned out to be a “futile system.” The office was shut down in 1939, having been judged “a worthless endeavor from top to bottom.”
American eugenicists lost more followers as they cozied up to the Nazi government, pleased to see their policies put so aggressively into action. Laughlin even traveled to Germany to accept an honorary degree. Once the full scope of the Holocaust emerged, the eugenics of people like Laughlin and Davenport would never be able to separate itself from genocide.
The Kallikak Family finally went out of print in 1939. By then it had worked its way into psychology textbooks, where it could terrify college students. A psychologist named Knight Dunlap complained of having to talk one of his students out of committing suicide for fear of having inherited a mental defect from her family. Fortunately, as he later recalled, he was able to ease her anxiety by promising that “her chances of going insane were no better than my own.” In 1940, Dunlap published a blistering attack on The Kallikak Family in the journal Scientific Monthly. “Even in books written by psychologists who ought to know better, the Kallikaks skulk in the corners of the pages, and leap out upon unwary students.”
In 1944, a doctor named Amram Scheinfeld published a harsh memorial to mark the thirtieth anniversary of The Kallikak Family. Writing in the Journal of Heredity, Scheinfeld scoffed at the idea that a single mutant gene could have worked its way through one branch of the Kallikak family, causing feeblemindedness and other attendant ills along the way. He skewered Goddard for ignoring the possibility that what he thought was inherited behavior was the result of growing up in grinding poverty. The only reason that the Kallikak study had become so well-known, Scheinfeld said, was because it “would permit those on top to smugly keep their place, while relieving them of the necessity of doing very much for those at the bottom.” And its legacy had been dreadful, not just for genetics but for human society in general. The idea at the core of The Kallikak Family, that some people were genetically superior to others, Scheinfeld said, “helped to bring on the present war.”
These attacks—Dunlap, for example, declaring that “the Kallikak phantasy has been laughed out of psychology”—galled Goddard. The rising generation of psychologists were creating a caricature of him and his ideas. In the years after he was forced out of Vineland, Goddard drifted away from the eugenics movement. Rather than figuring out how to keep the feebleminded from having children, Goddard spent his time trying to find ways to help children, no matter their condition. “As for myself,” Goddard once said, “I think I have gone over to the enemy.”
In truth, Goddard moved only a bit closer to the enemy. In 1931, he traveled from Ohio back to Vineland to speak at a meeting celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the research laboratory. As he spoke, it became clear that Morgan’s genetics lessons had not sunk in. Goddard granted that perhaps feeblemindedness depended on more than one gene. But he still believed it was overwhelmingly hereditary. Sterilizing a feebleminded woman would very likely prevent the birth of more feebleminded babies. The Great Depression was reaching its depths when Goddard came back to Vineland, and he blamed it largely on America’s lack of intelligence: Most of the newly destitute didn’t have the foresight to save enough money. “Half of the world must take care of the other half,” Goddard said.
Goddard also defended the data he had collected at Vineland against the growing number of critics. “No one has shown where the Vineland figures are in error,” he declared in his 1931 speech. But privately, Goddard had an inkling that something was wrong.
The attacks on The Kallikak Family led him to write to Elizabeth Kite about her fieldwork. Kite confessed that she had never bothered to find out the name of the girl in the tavern. Her excuse for this lapse was that discovering the tawdry origin of the feebleminded Kallikak line had left her stunned. “That was all I could stand for one day!” Kite told Goddard.
In 1942, when Goddard published a defense of the Kallikak research, he lied about Kite’s lapse. He said that he knew the woman’s name but had withheld it for the sake of privacy. The only flaw Goddard could see in his work was that it was ahead of its time. “Much in the way of polish is lacking in this pioneer study,” he said.
That marked the end of Goddard’s attempts to salvage his reputation. Soon afterward he retired from Ohio State University and published a guide to parenting called Our Children in the Atomic Age. He thought about writing an autobiography, but he only got as far as a decidedly un-eugenic title: As Luck Would Have It. In 1957, Goddard died at age ninety. In their obituary, the Associated Press remembered him for two accomplishments: coining the word moron and discovering the Kallikaks. “The author’s conclusion was that ‘the Kallikak family presents a natural experiment in heredity,’” the obituary writer reported. “Later some other psychologists cast some doubt on his deductions.”
Even after Goddard’s death, the Kallikak family lived on. Henry Garrett, a psychologist at Columbia University who served for a time as president of the American Psychological Association, would retell the story for decades. In 1955, he published a textbook called General Psychology that included a full-page illustration of the Kallikak genealogy. Martin Kallikak stands like a towering colonial colossus. His arms are akimbo, and the left half of his body shaded. Down his left side spills a cascade of demonic faces.
“He dallied with a feeble-minded tavern girl,” Garrett wrote alongside the illustration. “She bore a son known as ‘Old Horror’ who had ten children. From ‘Old Horror’s’ ten children came hundreds of the lowest types of human beings.” Their hair was swept back like demon horns.
On his right side, Kallikak was white, flanked by tranquil faces of men and women in proper hats. “He married a worthy Quakeress,” Garrett wrote. “She bore seven upright worthy children. From these seven worthy children came hundreds of the highest types of human beings.”
The textbook would go through many editions, and students would still be looking at the Kallikak family in the 1960s. In 1973, the year of his death, Garrett railed against the constitutional right to vote, complaining how “the vote of the feeble-minded person counts as much as that of an intelligent man.”
In the 1980s, curious investigators uncovered Deborah Kallikak’s real name. A pair of genealogists, David Macdonald and Nancy McAdams, worked back through Goddard’s account, determining the true identity of Emma Wolverton’s relatives. In the process, every piece of Goddard’s book—the founding testimony of modern eugenics and an inspiration for one of the greatest crimes in history—simply vanished.
It turned out that Elizabeth Kite had misunderstood an old woman she interviewed in 1910. Kite got the impression that a soldier named John Wolverton had a bastard son named John Wolverton. In fact, the two John Wolvertons were second cousins. In other words, Goddard’s natural experiment in heredity never happened.
The bad branch of the Wolverton clan turned out not to be a horde of feebleminded monsters. John Wolverton—whom Goddard called Martin “Old Horror” Kallikak—was not an unwashed drunk who rolled off porches after too much cider. Public records show he was a landowner, and that he eventually transferred his property to his children and grandchildren. The 1850 census indicates that he lived with his daughter and her children, all of whom could read. Just before his death in 1861, his property was valued at the respectable sum of $100. Old Horror’s descendants didn’t match Goddard’s grotesque portraits either. Their ranks included bank treasurers, policemen, coopers, Civil War soldiers, schoolteachers, and a pilot in the Army Air Corps.
Emma happened to have the bad luck to be born into a Wolverton family that was ripped apart in the great migration of American farmers into cities in the late 1800s. Her maternal grandparents moved to the outskirts of Trenton, where her grandfather worked as a laborer. There were eleven children in the family, six of whom died young. Life for the remaining five was hard, and at times unbearable. Emma’s grandfather appears to have been a menace to his children, who were all removed from the household. Emma’s aunt Mary visited her parents in 1882 at age twelve. Her father attacked her, and she gave birth to a child, who soon died. Emma’s grandfather was prosecuted for incest a few months later, but there’s no record that he served time in prison.
Despite growing up in a poor, uneducated, violent family, Emma’s relatives endured. Emma’s aunt Mary returned to her foster family for the rest of her childhood, and later in life she got married. Emma’s uncle George, whom Goddard described as a feebleminded horse thief, actually made a living as a farmhand and was a member of the Salvation Army. Emma’s uncle John held jobs as a millworker and rubber worker in Trenton.
Even Emma’s mother, Malinda, eventually found a stable life. After she married her second husband, Lewis Danbury, in 1897, they stayed together for thirty-five years, until her death in 1932. Lewis was later buried next to her. Emma’s half brothers and sisters, dismissed by Goddard as feebleminded, were nothing of the sort. Fred Wolverton fought in World War I and worked as a car mechanic. One of Emma’s nephews became a career army man, while another worked as a golf pro.
By the time Emma Wolverton’s true history came to light, she had been dead for years, buried on the institution’s grounds. She had lived there for fifty-three years. In her later years, she worked in the institution’s gymnasium, producing plays performed by the inmates. Emma would sew the costumes and build the sets. She filled her spare time reading books and magazines or wrote letters to friends. She even left the institution from time to time, accompanying the staff on outings. She wandered among the dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History and fed bits of bread to the squirrels in Central Park.
In 1957, the year that Goddard died, Emma met the intern Elizabeth Allen. “Emma was tall and reticent,” Allen later recalled. “She reminded me of anyone’s elderly aunt.”
Emma was sixty-eight. She had stopped producing plays, but she still worked, ironing institution uniforms. A space at the institution was converted into a tiny apartment where she could live by herself. Allen was shocked when Emma told her that she was Deborah Kallikak. The story of the Kallikaks was well-known to all psychologists in the 1950s, and Allen found it hard to believe Emma was the dangerous moron of Goddard’s description.
“I found her to be informative and interesting to talk with,” Allen said. “She was considerate and personable and certainly not what I would think of as a retarded person. It was said that her judgment was not fully developed—understandable for someone practically raised in an institution.”
In later years, Emma developed arthritis. She stopped sewing and woodworking. Instead of writing letters, she dictated them. But even in her eighties, confined to a wheelchair, she still sang songs from the plays she had performed in.
I’m a gypsy, I’m a gypsy
Oh I am a little gypsy girl
The forest is my home
And there I love to roam
For I am a little gypsy girl.
She never did roam. Capable as Emma proved herself over the decades of hard work, she came to believe that she deserved to remain, in effect, a prisoner. “I guess after all I’m where I belong,” she told Helen Reeves. “I don’t like this feeble-minded part but anyhow I’m not idiotic like some of the poor things you see around here.” In her old age, she was offered the chance to leave the institution, but declined. She lived out her days there, dying at age eighty-nine in 1978. She was buried on the institution grounds.
After Emma left the Vineland Training School, she never saw Goddard again. But she once told Reeves that she had named one of the cats Henry, “for a dear, wonderful friend who wrote a book. It’s the book what made me famous.”
“She was devoted to the people who conducted the study, as though they were her family,” Allen recalled. When Goddard sent Emma a Christmas card in 1946, Reeves wrote back to him to let him know how happy Emma was to receive it.
“The nicest thing about it,” Emma told Reeves, “is that he thought I have the brains to understand it which of course I do.”