In 1877, Richard Dugdale published a study of a family whom he called the \u201cJukes\u201d family. He referred to a mother several generations back in the family as \u201cMargaret, the mother of criminals,\u201d and then studied her descendants. He said that in 75 years, her descendants had cost the state of New York over $1.25 million\u2014which, at the end of the 19th century, was a stupendous sum of money. Dugdale\u2019s book became very fashionable, and many other people wrote similar studies.<\/p>\n
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Henry Goddard, a member of the AES [American Eugenics Society], published a book in 1912, tracing the descendants of a man whom he called Martin Kallikak, a fictitious name for a Revolutionary War soldier. According to Goddard\u2019s account, Martin seduced a feeble-minded girl, and she produced a feeble-minded son, who had 480 descendants (as of 1912). Of the 480, Goddard said, 33 were sexually immoral, 24 were drunkards, three were epileptics, and 143 were feeble-minded. To clarify the case, Goddard claimed that Martin married a young woman of normal intelligence, and they had 496 descendants, with no feeble-minded children at all. Goddard\u2019s study seemed to provide evidence for a link between bad genes, feeblemindedness and immoral behavior.<\/p>\n
Among the books in the new literary genre, the Kallikak case history was the most dramatic, and was cited often. The point of all the stories, of course, was that feeble-minded people multiply like hamsters, dragging society down more and more in each generation. Allowing them to breed just makes a bad problem worse.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
Writers used Goddard\u2019s study to stir up prejudice against the disabled and to build support for eugenics programs. For example, in her book Woman and the New Race<\/em>, Margaret Sanger (AES member) wrote: \u201cThe offspring of one feebleminded man named Jukes has cost the public in one way and another $1,800,000 in seventy-five years. Do we want more such families?\u201d<\/p>\n Goddard\u2019s work went beyond his effort to link bad genes, weak brains and poor morals. He was one of the pioneers in the effort to measure intelligence. Like [Francis] Galton, he believed that intelligence was an innate ability, rather than a set of abilities that a child develops under supervision and training. Like Galton, he thought that intelligence could be measured on a sliding scale.<\/p>\n Galton\u2019s ideas about measuring intelligence attracted researchers in Europe and America. In France, Alfred Binet (1857-1911) developed tests to measure intelligence, and Lewis Terman (1877-1956) of Stanford University revised them for the United States. Terman was also a member of the Advisory Council of the AES. The Stanford-Binet tests are still used to measure one\u2019s intelligence quotient, or IQ.<\/p>\n Goddard did research at the Training School for Feebleminded Boys and Girls in southern New Jersey, and he invented the word \u201cmoron\u201d to describe some of the children there. Moron is the Greek word for fool, and Goddard used it to refer to people with an IQ of 50 to 75.<\/p>\n Goddard was on a committee that developed IQ tests for the Army in World War I. Robert Means Yerkes (AES member) organized IQ testing for 1.7 million US Army recruits in 1919, and summarized his findings in Psychological Examining in the United States Army. This was the report that led to Henry Fairfield Osborn\u2019s nasty remark that World War I was worth the bloodshed because this book came out of it, and showed \u201conce and for all that the negro is not like us.\u201d<\/p>\n =================================<\/p>\n Plato\u2019s Words about Eugenics<\/a><\/p>\n Sterilizing the \u201cUnfit\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Post World War II Eugenics<\/a><\/p>\n Eugenics in Roe v. Wade<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n For more of our blog posts on racism, see:<\/em><\/p>\n Historical Black Voices: Racism Kills\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n The Poor Cry Out for Justice, and We Respond with Legalized Abortion<\/a> (Graciela Olivarez)<\/p>\n More than Double the Trouble: Another Way of Connecting<\/a> (intersectionality)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by John Cavanaugh-O\u2019Keefe Editor\u2019s note: this is an excerpt from the book The Roots of Racism and Abortion: An Exploration of Eugenics, pp. 52-54 In 1877, Richard Dugdale published a study of a family whom he called the \u201cJukes\u201d family. He referred to a mother several generations back in the family as \u201cMargaret, the mother… <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/consistent-life.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/1blog-OKeefe-book.jpg\")
For other excerpts from this book, see:<\/em><\/p>\n