American Passage (33 page)

When Goddard finally published these results in 1917, his paper displayed less of the confidence of a modern scientist than the confused and self-contradictory response of a man working his way around complex sociological and psychological problems. Within the same article, Goddard repeatedly contradicts himself as he tries to explain the data.

How did Goddard determine the intelligence of immigrants? When asked, through a translator, to give the definition of common terms such as “table” or “horse,” the feebleminded immigrant would respond only with that object’s most common use. A table is “something to eat on” and a horse “is to ride.” These answers showed Goddard a lack of imagination or creativity. In a similar vein, many immigrants had trouble taking three words and creating a sentence from them; nor could most dissect sentences, produce rhymes, or draw a design of an object from memory. Just as disconcerting, Goddard found that most of these immigrants did not know the current date.

Goddard asked whether these supposed failures were due to hereditary defects, as many eugenicists believed, or whether they were affected by environmental factors. To test this question, he set out to track those same immigrants to see whether their lives in the United States confirmed the original diagnosis of feeblemindedness. (Goddard’s tests were not legally binding on the admissibility of the immigrants.)

Two years after these tests were conducted, Goddard’s staff attempted to track the addresses of as many of their subjects as possible, traveling as far as St. Louis. Much to Goddard’s chagrin, few of the immigrants could be found. His staff encountered numerous problems, from incorrect addresses, immigrants who had moved, and uncertainty about the spelling of names. Tenement dwellers were often unwilling to help Goddard’s dutiful and earnest young female staffers.

The wild goose chase probably helped cause the delay in reporting Goddard’s results. So did the gnawing uncertainty Goddard felt about his study. He asked in his 1917 paper: “Are these results reasonable?” Goddard had already answered that question by cutting his initial estimate of feebleminded immigrants in half.

As for whether intelligence was inherited, Goddard repeated the mantra, “Morons beget morons.” Yet he also wrote in the same article that it seemed more likely that the poor showing of immigrants on these intelligence tests was due to environmental causes rather than genetic defects. Unlike the work of Edward Ross, Goddard avoided linking new immigrants to the weakening of America’s genetic stock. In fact, he mused with little evidence that “a very large percentage of these immigrants make good after a fashion.” On top of that, he said, these feebleminded immigrants did the work that Americans would not do. There was plenty of drudge work that needed to be done that required minimal intelligence.

Even a nonscientist can quickly point out the shoddy methodology of Goddard’s Ellis Island research. His own writings betrayed his second thoughts about his scientific discoveries. Goddard was attempting to make science useful to mankind to help create a more rational and healthier society. He also sought to establish psychology as a respected and useful part of the medical profession. Yet his science too often fell victim to the popular biases of the time.

The Survey
, the nation’s leading periodical for social workers, helped publicize Goddard’s study. “Two Immigrants Out of Five Feebleminded” ran a headline in the magazine’s editorial on the subject. “If you had gone over to Ellis Island shortly before the war began and placed your hand at random on one of the aliens waiting to be examined by government inspectors, you would very likely have found that your choice was feebleminded,” the editorial announced. Though the journal used the less inflammatory numbers from Goddard’s study, it still treated his work as scientific proof of large-scale immigrant deficiency. The editorial failed to inform its readers that Goddard’s tests were given to less than two hundred individuals who were not chosen from a representative sample.

Yet when Goddard began his work, he was agnostic on the relationship between immigrants and feeblemindedness. Before leaving for Ellis Island, Goddard had set out to test the opinion that many residents of American mental asylums and institutions were foreign-born. Looking at sixteen such institutions across the nation, he found less than 5 percent of the more than eleven thousand inmates were foreign-born. The fear that mentally ill immigrants were swamping the nation’s hospitals, schools, and institutions, Goddard wrote, was “grossly overestimated.”

For all the attention that Goddard received for his studies at Ellis Island, it was only a small part of intelligence testing taking place there. Not surprisingly, medical officers who sorted through thousands of immigrants each day resented Goddard and his team, who swooped into Ellis Island with great fanfare and then quickly left, leaving the heavy lifting of the daily inspection and testing to the doctors of the Public Health Service, whom Goddard implied were untrained for weeding out mental defectives and had let far too many immigrants of low intelligence slip through.

Goddard had been particularly critical of the powers of observation of Ellis Island doctors, yet their writings show that these officials also put a great deal of faith in initial observations of immigrants. Dr. C. P. Knight described in detail the easily detectable warning signs of a possible idiot, ranging from “low receding forehead” to the size of a face out of proportion the size of the head, to deformed or twisted ears, to excessively deep eye sockets created by a protruding brow. Idiots drooled, and were often apathetic or overly excited. “The expression is stupid, the eyes dull, the speech defective, the tongue swollen and protruding, while the limbs are short and bent and the skin is thick, sallow and greasy,” Knight wrote.

For immigrants suffering from “dementia, mental deficiency, or epilepsy,” doctors were on the lookout for “stupidity, confusion, inattention, lack of comprehension, facial expressions of earnestness or preoccupation . . . general untidiness . . . talking to one’s self, incoherent talk . . . evidence of negativism, silly laughing, hallucinating, awkward manner, biting nail.” In a sample of about 30,000 steerage passengers inspected at Ellis Island in the summer of 1916, some 3,000 received a chalk mark
X
, although after the battery of tests were completed, only 108 were certified as feebleminded.

Ellis Island doctors also paid attention to ethnic characteristics when assessing mental capacity. While it was perfectly normal for an Italian to show emotion “on the slightest provocation,” if an Italian showed the “solidity and indifference” of a Pole or a Russian, that would signal a need for further testing. Similarly, English and Germans should answer questions in a straightforward manner, but if they became “evasive as do the Hebrews, we would be inclined to question their sanity.” If an Englishman behaved like an Irishman, Dr. E. H. Mullan argued, inspectors would suspect him of mental problems. If an Italian behaved like a Finn, depression might be suspected.

Howard Knox was one of the leading experts on mental testing there. The twenty-seven-year-old Knox arrived at Ellis Island in the spring of 1912, around the same time as Henry Goddard’s second visit. He had spent less than three years as a doctor in the Army Medical Corps before resigning in April 1911. The Dartmouth-educated doctor, whose round, fleshy face bore a resemblance to Babe Ruth, had been married three times in as many years. (When he left Ellis Island in 1916, he would be on marriage number four.) Knox then applied for a position in the Public Health and Marine-Hospital Service and was assigned to Ellis Island. Like Thomas Salmon, he had not been trained as a psychologist.

Knox shared many of the prejudices and biases of the time. He believed mentally defective immigrants were like drops of ink in a barrel of water, polluting the nation’s bloodstream. If the feebleminded were not caught at Ellis Island, Knox argued, they would “start a line of defectives whose progeny, like the brook, will go on forever, branching off here in an imbecile and there in an epileptic.”

Knox was also sensitive to the flaws in intelligence tests and recognized that many immigrants did poorly not because of innate inferiority but because of a lack of formal education. He warned that intelligence tests like the ones Goddard used would make nearly all immigrants from peasant backgrounds appear to be mentally defective. Another Ellis Island doctor, E. K. Sprague, argued that using Binet tests originally designed for French schoolchildren on poor, uneducated immigrants “is as sensible as to claim that with a single instrument any operation in surgery can be successfully performed.”

“After studying carefully the methods used at the various schools for the feebleminded,” Knox wrote, “the medical officers at Ellis Island were obliged to discard the great majority of them as unsuitable for their work and unfair to the immigrant.” Knox claimed that one of Goddard’s female assistants had pulled out and tested thirty-six immigrants as mentally deficient. When she turned them over to be certified by Knox and his colleagues, they refused. Using their own methods, they found that in each case the immigrant was either of normal intelligence or suffered from poor vision.

Their day-to-day familiarity with immigrants caused Ellis Island’s doctors to reject the overly deterministic testing conducted by Goddard’s team, and they were not shy about airing their criticisms in print. Knox repeatedly criticized the methods of Goddard and his staff, calling them “lay-workers with no knowledge of medicine, psychiatry, or neurology.” He complained that they often confused temporary psychological disorders, brought about by environmental conditions, with a mental defect and “call such a patient ‘stupid’ or rate him as ‘seven years old on the Binet.’ ”

Knox noted one case of an immigrant selected by the Goddard team as feebleminded because of a head shape that Knox classified as “simian reversion type with stigmata including malformation of helix.” To Goddard’s team, the shape of the man’s head placed him lower on the evolutionary scale and signified low intelligence. When Knox’s colleagues tested the man, they found that he had above average intelligence and spoke three languages fluently. He was admitted.

Another Ellis Island doctor, Bernard Glueck, told the story of a thirty-five-year-old southern Italian man. Based on intelligence tests similar to those used by Goddard, the immigrant was classified with a mental age of between eight and ten, a certifiable moron. Yet Glueck discovered that the man had been in the country before, working as a laborer for two years, during which time he sent back to his family in Italy some $400. He was married with two children, owned property in Italy that he had bought with money earned in the United States, and was returning to earn still more money. “I have no doubt that he will succeed in doing this,” recalled Glueck, who saw the story as a refutation of the Binet test’s ability to measure intelligence. “I am inclined to assume in this case the existence of strongly presumptive evidence that this particular individual is not feebleminded,” concluded Glueck.

Ignoring Goddard’s work, Ellis Island doctors created their own system of testing the mental capacity of immigrants. Knox began with the realization that the conditions under which immigrants arrived at Ellis Island were less than ideal. “After ten days of sea-sickness, fatigue, and excitement,” Knox wrote, such an individual “could not be expected to do himself justice.” Therefore, immigrants should have a solid meal, bath, and good night’s sleep before taking any mental tests.

The testing room should be no warmer than 70 degrees, well ventilated, and quiet, and there should be no more than three people in the room. Those administering the test should “have a pleasant and kindly manner.” To ease the mind of the person being tested, Knox argued that the room should not have “an official air,” but instead resemble a den in someone’s home. If possible, tests should be conducted over two days. Doctors should make allowances for the “fear and mental stress under which the subject may be laboring.” While these precautions may have been cold comfort for dazed and confused immigrants, they at least show that doctors were aware of the pitfalls of their assignment.

Once the conditions had been established, doctors began with a battery of questions. What day of the week is it? What is the date? Where is the immigrant? Next came questions that dealt with common knowledge, such as the number of hours in a day, months in a year, and names of flowers and animals. Immigrants were asked questions about their homeland, such as the capital of their native country and the name of their currency. Other questions were more culturally subjective, such as the significance of Easter. In a random survey of fifty uneducated Polish immigrants, Glueck found that while 98 percent knew the number of months of the year, only 66 percent knew the significance of Easter. Glueck admitted that these questions were relatively useless in judging intelligence among uneducated immigrants.

Other questions would test mathematical ability with simple addition problems. Immigrants would next be asked to repeat back a series of four to seven numbers given to them by their examiner and were then asked to count to twenty, sometimes by twos, and then count backwards from twenty. They were tested on their ability to gain new knowledge, so they were asked the name of the steamship they arrived on, what port they left from, and how the ships were powered.

This battery of questions confused Codger Nutt, a boy actor and mascot of the Drury Lane Theatre in London, who was coming to New York to appear in a play. The diminutive thespian could neither read nor write, spoke with a strong Cockney accent, and seemed lost at Ellis Island. Doctors suspected him of being feebleminded, so they asked him whether he knew the difference between a horse and a cow. “I told ’em that an ’orse could be driven but ye couldn’t drive a cow,” Nutt replied. Then they asked him what he would do if he saw someone in the road “cut up into a ’undred pieces,” to which he responded that he would report it to the police. Officials were not convinced by the diminutive actor’s answers, but Secretary Charles Nagel allowed him to enter the country and join the rest of his acting troupe, as long as he left the country after a year.