Henry Herbert Goddard

“ Such facts as those revealed by the Kallikak family drive us almost irresistibly to the conclusion that before we can settle our problems of criminality and pauperism and all the rest of the social problems that are taxing our time and money, the first and fundamental step should be to decide upon the mental capacity of the persons who make up these groups. We must separate, as sharply as possible, those persons who are weak-minded, and therefore irresponsible, from intelligent criminals. ”

“ The whole family was a living demonstration of the futility of trying to make desirable citizens from defective stock through making and enforcing compulsory education laws. Here were children who seldom went to school because they seldom had shoes, but when they went, had neither will nor power to learn anything out of books. The father himself, though strong and vigorous, showed by his face that he had only a child’s mentality. ”

“ If the Jukes family were of normal intelligence, a change of environment would have worked wonders and would have saved society from the horrible blot. But if they were feeble-minded, then no amount of good environment could have made them anything else than feeble-minded. Schools and colleges were not for them, rather a segregation which would have prevented them from falling into evil and from procreating their kind, so avoiding the transmitting of their defects and delinquencies to succeeding generations. ”

“ We should not forget, however, that one fourth of his grandchildren would be feeble-minded and that two other fourths had the power of begetting feeble-minded children. We must not forget, either, that these are averages, and that for the full carrying out of these figures there must be a large enough number of offspring to give the law of averages room to have full play. In other words, any marriage which, according to the Mendelian principle, would give normals and defectives in the ratio of three to one might result in only one child. ”

“ At times she works hard in the field as a farm hand, so that it cannot be wondered at that her house is neglected and her children unkempt. Her philosophy of life is the philosophy of the animal. There is no complaining, no irritation at the inequalities of fate. Sickness, pain, childbirth, death—she accepts them all with the same equanimity as she accepts the opportunity of putting a new dress and a gay ribbon on herself and children and going to a Sunday School picnic. ”

“ We are thus face to face with the problem in a practical way and we ask ourselves the next question, What can we do? For the low-grade idiot, the loathsome unfortunate that may be seen in our institutions, some have proposed the lethal chamber. But humanity is steadily tending away from the possibility of that method, and there is no probability that it will ever be practiced.
But in view of such conditions as are shown in the defective side of the Kallikak family, we begin to realize that the idiot is not our greatest problem. ”

“ We have come to the point where we no longer leave babies or little children to die uncared for in our streets, [92] but who has yet thought of caring intelligently for the vastly more pathetic child-man or child-woman, who through matured sex powers, which they do not understand, fill our land with its overflowing measure of misery and crime? Such thoughts as these filled the mind of the field worker on the ride home.
Arrived at B——, her first care was to obtain an interview with the doctor who had attended Guss’s wife when she died. ”

“ Half a dozen towns in New Jersey are named from the families into which Martin’s descendants have married. There have been no feeble-minded among them; no illegitimate children; no immoral women; only one man was sexually loose. There has been no epilepsy, no criminals, no keepers of houses of prostitution. Only fifteen children have died in infancy. There has been one “insane,” a case of religious mania, perhaps inherited, but not from the Kallikak side. The appetite for strong drink has been present here and there in this family from the beginning. ”

“ We have claimed that criminality resulting from feeble-mindedness is mainly a matter of environment, yet it must be acknowledged that there are wide differences in temperament and that, while this one branch of the Kallikak family was mentally defective, there was no strong tendency in it towards that which our laws recognize as criminality. In other families there is, without doubt, a much greater tendency to crime, so that the lack of criminals in this particular case, far from detracting from our argument, really strengthens it. ”

“ The most that one can say is that if such a family is allowed to go on and develop in its own way unmolested, it is pretty certain not to improve, but rather to propagate its own kind and fill the world with degenerates of one form or another. The formerly much discussed [54] question of the hereditary character of crime received no solution from the Jukes family, but in the light of present-day knowledge of the sciences of criminology and biology, there is every reason to conclude that criminals are made and not born. ”

“ That we are dealing with a problem of true heredity, no one can doubt, for, although of the descendants of Martin Kallikak Jr. many married into feeble-minded families and thus brought in more bad blood, yet Martin Jr. himself married a normal woman, thus demonstrating that the defect is transmitted through the father, at least in this generation. Moreover, the Kallikak family traits appear continually even down to the present generation, and there are many qualities that are alike in both the good and the bad families, thus showing the strength and persistence of the ancestral stock. ”

“ Or we may turn to the Mendelian law and we discover that according to that law there might be in rare instances such a combination of circumstances that a normal child might be born from two parents that function as feeble-minded. For practical purposes it is, of course, pretty clear that it is safe to assume that two feeble-minded parents will never have anything but feeble-minded children. ”

“ This is a typical illustration of the mentality of a high-grade feeble-minded person, the moron, the delinquent, the kind of girl or woman that fills our reformatories. They are wayward, they get into all sorts of trouble and difficulties, sexually and otherwise, and yet we have been accustomed to account for their defects on the basis of viciousness, environment, or ignorance. ”

“ The reader must remember that the type of feeble-mindedness of which we are speaking is the one to which Deborah belongs, that is, to the high grade, or moron. All the facts go to show that this type of people makes up a large percentage of our criminals. We may argue a priori that such would be the case. Here we have a group who, when children in school, cannot learn the things that are given them to learn, because through their mental defect, they are incapable of mastering abstractions. They never learn to read sufficiently well to make reading pleasurable or of practical use to them. ”

“ There is the same fireplace, the same high-backed chairs, the clock, desk, and china cupboard. Every summer the family has come back to the old place to enjoy the country air, the luscious grapes and other fruit planted by their ancestor. ”

“ The real sin of [103] peopling the world with a race of defective degenerates who would probably commit his sin a thousand times over, was doubtless not perceived or realized. It is only after the lapse of six generations that we are able to look back, count up and see the havoc that was wrought by that one thoughtless act.
Now that the facts are known, let the lesson be learned; let the sermons be preached; let it be impressed upon our young men of good family that they dare not step aside for even a moment. ”

“ To-day if this young woman were to leave the Institution, she would at once become a prey to the designs of evil men or evil women and would lead a life that would be vicious, immoral, and criminal, though because of her mentality she herself would not be responsible. There is nothing that she might not be led into, because she has no power of control, and all her instincts and appetites are in the direction that would lead to vice. ”

“ In regard to prostitutes, we have no reliable figures. The groups of delinquent girls to which we have already referred included among the numbers several that were already known as prostitutes. A simple observation of persons who are leading this sort of life will satisfy any one who is familiar with feeble-mindedness that a large percentage of them actually are defective mentally. So we have, as is claimed, partly from statistical studies and partly from careful observation, abundant evidence of the truth of our claim that criminality is often made out of feeble-mindedness. ”

“ After Deborah’s birth in the almshouse, the mother had been taken with her child into a good family. Even in this guarded position, she was sought out by a feeble-minded man of low habits. Every possible means was employed to separate the pair, but without effect. Her mistress then insisted that they marry, and herself attended to all the details. After Deborah’s mother had borne this man [65] two children, the pair went to live on the farm of an unmarried man possessing some property, but little intelligence. The husband was an imbecile who had never provided for his wife. ”

“ Martin Kallikak did what unfortunately many a young man like him has done before and since, and which, still more unfortunately, society has too often winked at, as being merely a side step in accordance with a natural instinct, bearing no serious results. ”

“ Feeble-mindedness is hereditary and transmitted as surely as any other character. We cannot successfully cope with these conditions until we recognize feeble-mindedness and its hereditary nature, recognize it early, and take care of it.
In considering the question of care, segregation through colonization seems in the present state of our knowledge to be the ideal and perfectly satisfactory method. Sterilization may be accepted as a makeshift, as a help to solve this problem because the conditions have become so intolerable. ”

“ Stifling his sobs, he went on, “And now they say I am to send my children to school—and what can I do? Look there!” pointing to a lump of humanity, a girl who, at first glance, had thrown her imbecilic shadow over the whole group, making them all look imbecilic—“do you see that girl? She’s always fallin’ into fits, and nobody can’t do nothin’ with her.” Breaking in here, the field worker said, “But, Mr. Saunders, you ought not to have the burden and the care of that girl; she could be made so happy and comfortable in a place where they understand such cases. ”

“ On the outskirts of B—— lived the owner of the Cedarhill farm worked by Guss Saunders. He proved to be an intelligent man, with an admirably appointed home. He was keenly alive to the needs of the family, about which the field worker came to inquire. “The pity about Guss,” he began, “is that he can never let drink alone. Why, do you know, if I paid that man wages, he’d use every cent for rum. I ceased giving him money long ago, for if I had, the town would have had to look after his children. ”

“ Sometimes all necessary information is obtained from the one central source, but more often, especially where the parents are themselves defective, many visits to other homes must be made. Parents often send the field worker to visit near and distant relatives as well as [14] neighbors, employers, teachers, physicians, ministers, overseers of the poor, almshouse directors, etc. These must be interviewed and all the information thus obtained must be weighed and much of it verified by repeated visits to the same locality before an accurate chart of the particular child’s heredity can be made. ”

“ As a result of weeks of residence at the Training School, they become acquainted with the condition of the feeble-minded. They study all the grades, note their peculiarities, and acquaint themselves with the methods of testing and recognizing them. They then go out with an introduction from the Superintendent to the homes of the children and there ask that all the facts which are available may be furnished, in order that we can know more about the child and be better able to care for him and more wisely train him. ”

“ Before considering any other method, the writer would insist that segregation and colonization is not by any means as hopeless a plan as it may seem to those who look only at the immediate increase in the tax rate. If such colonies were provided in sufficient number to take care of all the distinctly feeble-minded cases in the community, they would very largely take the place of our present almshouses and prisons, and they would greatly decrease the number in our insane hospitals. ”

“ In the city, the individual is lost in the very immensity of the crowd that surrounds him, so that his [88] individual actions, except such as he himself chooses to reveal or can be made to reveal, are lost to the people about him; therefore there was little hope of obtaining much side light on the problem here presented. During the short interview the older woman showed unmistakable signs of wanting to appear respectable in the midst of her depravity, something quite characteristic of the high-grade moron type in the family. ”

“ On another hill, less than two miles distant, lives a granddaughter of the same Amos and Elizabeth. Her father had been, in his day, one of the wealthiest and most prominent citizens of the community. In an old desk, part of his inheritance from his mother, was found a number of valuable papers belonging to the Kallikak family. One of these is the famous deed of the original purchase made in 17— by Casper Kallikak, signed by the governor of the colony. These papers the daughter guards with great pride. She is a woman of ability and manages her large farm with admirable skill. ”