The History of White People (34 page)

Poor people actually had been shipped to British North America during the colonial era, and the label of criminal was broad. As we have seen, British and Irish street children, the homeless, criminals, and indentured servants accounted for a sizable percentage of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century settlers, especially in Virginia. Great numbers of these forced immigrants actually had committed small-time thievery, the petty crimes of poverty, such as stealing food or flitching a pig. For others, the crime, so to speak, lay only in being poor or vulnerable to the kidnapping for export that amounted to organized crime.
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It was true that if they survived the transatlantic voyage, sale, resale, and many years of servitude, freedpeople and their descendants tended to remain poor. But survivors occasionally rose into the ranks of the landowning. Of the 5,000 indentured servants transported to Virginia between 1670 and 1680, 241 managed to acquire their own land. A dramatic instance of upward mobility lay in the person of the Irish-born Matthew Lyon (1749–1822). One of Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boy heroes of the American Revolutionary Battle of Ticonderoga, Lyon had begun his American career in servitude, ascending to the status of founder of the state of Vermont, member of the Vermont assembly, and U.S. congressman.
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Such exceptions—there were many more—did not make a dent in race theory.

People at the top of society have always been quick to condemn those at the bottom to perpetual service. Never mind that with time there often came improvement. In early America, the notion of hereditary criminality was already circulating among the favored classes. One Anthony Stokes in 1783 spoke for many when he wrote of “a swarm of men” he called “Crackers,” who were overrunning western Virginia and North Carolina: “Many of these people are descended from convicts that were transported from Great Britain to Virginia at different times, and inherit so much profligacy from their ancestors, that they are the most abandoned set of men on earth….”
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Here were ideas that stayed strong all the way to Theodore Roosevelt.

Roosevelt’s immensely popular, multivolume hymn to Manifest Destiny,
The Winning of the West
(1889), picked up on the bad-heredity theme. Chronicling the settlement of the South, Roosevelt recognizes some in the backwoods as “stern, manly, and honest” that was the best of them. But others were unsavory:

D
UGDALE AND
McCulloch, both social gospelers working closely with the poor, might seem far removed from the science of, say, William Z. Ripley on the Harvard University faculty. Actually little distance lay between eastern academia and midwestern local science, for Dugdale and McCulloch agreed with Roosevelt and got very good at deploying scientific rhetorical strategies. Exhibiting table after table, they modeled their presentations on the U.S. census then becoming the apogee of exact demographic science.
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In a paper at the 1888 meeting of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, McCulloch illustrated his findings with striking visuals that included a diagram 3’ by 12’ showing 250 biologically connected pauper households. McCulloch succeeded brilliantly. Elected president of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, he presided over the annual meeting in May 1891 in Baltimore. It was his last public appearance before his death the same year.
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Such diagrams of descent soon became a staple feature of eugenic publications fond of photographs of paupers, the feebleminded, and their unkempt children hanging around filthy, broken-down lodgings. While religion, charity, science, and prejudice had become comfortable bedfellows, reformers posing as scientists could go only so far, however. As eugenics hardened, real scholars stepped in.

M
C
C
ULLOCH’S CHURCH
had attracted an academic follower. The early career of David Starr Jordan (1851–1931) took him from Cornell to Indiana, where he taught high school science in Indianapolis and natural history at Northwestern Christian University (later Butler University). Within ten years Jordan had become the youngest college president in the United States—of Indiana University—at age thirty-four, and then first president of Stanford University. (See figure 18.3, David Starr Jordan.) Two related movements occupied Jordan: peace and eugenics. His belief in peace stemmed from a conviction that warfare and the celibate (Catholic) clergy were “dysgenic,” because they prevented “the best of the race”—soldier-warriors and scholars—from passing on their gifts. For Jordan, their loss became doubly catastrophic in light of what he saw as the heedless multiplication of so-called degenerate families and immigrant, or “alien,” races.

While living in Indianapolis, Jordan had joined McCulloch’s Plymouth Congregational Church; even after moving on, he continued to quote and praise McCulloch in his own books on eugenics and religion.
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(In another merger of religion, morals, and hereditarian thought, the American Unitarian Association published Jordan’s eugenics books aimed at the general public.)

Fig. 18.3. David Starr Jordan as president of Stanford University.

Here was a bridge. Jordan’s impeccable scholarly credentials boosted degenerate-family studies into widely recognized intellectual respectability. In
The Heredity of Richard Roe
(1911), for instance, Jordan quotes Dugdale and McCulloch alongside Harvard’s Charles Benedict Davenport and the luminous Francis Galton of the University of London.

Jordan, like Dugdale, McCulloch, and Theodore Roosevelt, effortlessly wrapped himself in the mantle of dispassionate fact as he dissected a mass of degenerate Anglo-Saxons. Pity, for example, the poor whites of the North Carolina mountains consigned by Jordan “to the lineage of England’s pauperism transported first to her colonies, afterward driven from the plains to the mountains.” England’s defectives, he announced, left a “trail of pauperism and crime from Virginia across Carolina, Kentucky, Indiana, Missouri, even to California and Oregon.” And it was still happening in the early twentieth century, when Jordan lamented that European nations continued to ship their defectives to the United States to reproduce “the same inefficient men, sickly women, frowsy children, starved horses, barking cur dogs, carelessness, vindictiveness, and neglect of decency.”
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Generation after generation, century after century, Jordan warned, these poor white people passed down faults as indelible as race was assumed to be. So perilous a situation demanded vigorous action, vigorous science. Quantification was on its way.

H
enry H. Goddard, Ph.D., a sweet-tempered Quaker from Maine, directed research at the Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys in New Jersey from 1906 to 1918. In the larger history of racial ideas, he bridges two critical fields—degenerate-family studies and immigrant intelligence testing—by connecting the charities and corrections community of Dugdale and McCulloch to the hereditarian and eugenicist.
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*

A scholar and humanitarian, Goddard (1866–1957) received his doctorate from Clark University in 1899.
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After study at the University of Leipzig and a stint at the West Chester, Pennsylvania, Normal School, Goddard moved to Vineland in 1906 and took that institution to the cutting edge of the child-study movement for the scientific study of pedagogy.
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Renowned for his personal touch, Goddard treated his young charges with the utmost kindness. All reported that he respected each and every one as a uniquely valuable individual. Goddard would therefore seem a most unlikely candidate to recommend a policy later associated with the Nazis. Even so, it is to Goddard and the Vineland school that this story leads. Tender care of the “feebleminded” was part of that care, but so were the implications of family ancestry.

Who better to suggest the study of those implications than Charles Benedict Davenport (1866–1944), the independently wealthy scion of a Connecticut family who claimed Puritan descent and whose father had traced the family back to England in 1066? Davenport had taught at Harvard and the University of Chicago, making a reputation with his studies of chicken breeding, then moving—in what seemed a natural progression—to look into “heredity in the human race.” He placed particular emphasis on “the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood.”
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In 1898 Davenport had become director of the summer school of the biological laboratory of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences at Cold Spring Harbor, on Long Island, not far from Theodore Roosevelt’s country place at Oyster Bay. From there he gained grants from the recently created Carnegie Institution of Washington and founded the Carnegie Institution Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor in 1904. In 1910, having secured access to Mrs. E. H. Harriman’s railroad fortune, Davenport established the Eugenics Record Office (ERO). Between 1910 and 1918 the Harriman contribution to the ERO grew to half a million dollars.
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Inspiration for such wide ambition came from London. As a bright young Harvard professor, Davenport in 1901 had visited Francis Galton (1822–1911), the founding father of eugenics and a deep thinker on the matter of controlled human breeding.

Galton had written
Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences
(1869), the urtext of eugenics tying heredity to social prominence, or “genius.”
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†
Nowadays Galton is remembered mainly as a founder of statistics, especially for his theory of correlations and statistical deviation recognized in the bell curve. But being a scholar of many interests, he also founded eugenics with his protégé in mathematical statistics, Karl Pearson, an ardent eugenicist in his own right and another giant of twentieth-century statistics.
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Even the word “eugenics” was Galton’s invention, combining the Greek words for “good” and “inheritance.” Like so many hereditarians, Galton (the cousin of Charles Darwin) was independently wealthy; also like other rich men interested in human reproduction, he had no children. Like Carlyle and Emerson, Galton combined a fragile constitution—nervous breakdowns, dizziness, and palpitations—with a glorification of masculine strength.

Along with his admiration of “vigorous [male] animals,” Galton appreciated feminine beauty. Traveling around Great Britain, he surreptitiously compiled a “beauty map” locating the ugliest British women in industrial, working-class, Celtic Scotland and the most beautiful in wealthy, Anglo-Saxon London.
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Galton describes his methodology in his autobiography:

Interestingly enough, given turn-of-the-century correlations of race and head shape, photographs of Galton show him to have had dark hair and a flat back of the head; that is, he was brachycephalic, not dolichocephalic, which counted heavily for some of his contemporaries.

Galton also mistrusted democracy, figuring the “average citizen…too base…for the everyday work of modern civilization.”
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His version of evolution made natural selection into an engine for determining the characteristics of races as well as classes.
Hereditary Genius
proclaims that “Jews are specialized for a
parasitical
existence.”
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So powerful was Galton’s reputation and influence that, after the First World War, this bigoted view circulated as a scientific commonplace.

Convinced the “brains of the nation lie in the higher of our classes,” Galton advocated procreation between people of the upper crust. At the same time, while frowning on the heedless breeding of the poor, he did not advocate its curtailment. That would be left for others. Galton, ever the patrician, shared Roosevelt’s concentration on his own, higher class. From his Eugenics Record Office at the University of London, Galton offered a treasure trove to American eugenicists and to Charles Davenport in particular.

Not that Galton and Davenport agreed totally. With his ability to combine variables (i.e., regression and correlation analysis), Galton’s theories of human heredity could take several factors into account at the same time. Davenport and most American eugenicists rejected complexity, preferring to believe that human inheritance acted in a simple on-off fashion, like the height, color, and wrinkling of Gregor Mendel’s sweet peas. Intelligence could then be mapped and numbered along a single yardstick, allowing Davenport to speak of intelligence as a “unit character” or “unit trait.”
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In today’s parlance, he saw intelligence as a single heritable gene. It followed that unit characters decreed an individual to be either normal or feebleminded. Unit traits—genes, if you will—also determined shiftlessness, nomadism, or “thalassophilia” (love of the sea), all, as in the degenerate-family studies, hereditary. Thalassophilia, Davenport thought, was a sex-linked, recessive trait like color blindness, because he had always found it only in males. This kind of theorizing moved Karl Pearson to confide to Galton, “[O]ur friend Davenport is not a clear strong thinker.”
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One cannot but wonder how Davenport would have correlated his weird category of thalassophilia with, say, shiftlessness.

Galton and Davenport were creatures of their cultures. Class ruled Galton’s Britain and his classification; race ruled Davenport’s United States and his classification. For Davenport, Poles, Irish, Italians, Hebrews, and others behaved differently, each according to their race. He believed, as did William Z. Ripley, that immigrants from southern and eastern Europe would make the American population “darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial…more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape, and sex immorality.”
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Davenport passed this twisted racial theory, co-opted in part from Francis Galton, to Henry Goddard in New Jersey at the Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys. In the Garden State it fell on fertile ground, for Goddard had spotted the perfect case, a “feeble-minded” Vineland resident he called Deborah Kallikak.

This was an invented name. Goddard had joined two Greek words—
kallos
, meaning “beauty,” and
kakos
, meaning “bad”—to come up with it.
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Deborah Kallikak, the child of an impoverished, unwed mother, had come to Vineland in 1897 at age eight.
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The child’s progress was uneven. By age twenty-three she was a nice-looking young person skilled in sewing but slow in reading and writing. For Goddard, her skills were practically beside the point. She and the thousands like her represented a threat to the welfare of the race.

Indeed, the great menace of someone like Deborah Kallikak lay in her normal, even attractive appearance and the likelihood, should she ever leave Vineland, of her having sex and, consequently, of bearing children. Once beyond institutional protection, “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.” Goddard tested her on the Binet-Simon scale in 1910 and gave her a mental age of nine—low intelligence of “moron” grade—which, he concluded, would deprive her of moral judgment.

The Binet-Simon intelligence tests are the second half of Goddard’s contribution to the literature of the “warfare of the cradle.” He had discovered the work of the French researchers Alfred Binet and his associate Theodore Simon on a European trip in 1908.
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Employed by the French Ministry of Public Instruction, they had devised a mental test, whose results they figured on a numerical scale. The numbers were meant to help schools identify pupils in need of special education. Goddard adapted Binet’s tests for use in English and immediately began testing the Vineland inmates. With its nicely quantified results, the test rapidly gained popularity. By 1910 Goddard was giving it to New Jersey schoolchildren, a year later to New York City children, and by 1913 to immigrants at Ellis Island. The intelligence test had labeled Deborah Kallikak, in Goddard’s invented terminology, a “moron.” How, Davenport asked Goddard, did she get to be that way?
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Goddard worked backward, tracing Deborah Kallikak’s genealogy to the American Revolution. There he found two Kallikak families. One consisted of upstanding citizens with “a marked tendency toward professional careers.” They had married into the best families of New Jersey and produced “nothing but good representative citizenship. There are doctors, lawyers, judges, educators, traders, landholders, in short, respectable citizens, men and women prominent in every phase of social life.”

The other branch had produced Deborah Kallikak. Her family branch, some 480 of them, included 36 illegitimate children, 33 “sexually immoral persons, mostly prostitutes,” 3 epileptics (epilepsy was then considered hereditary), 82 dead babies, 3 criminals, and 8 keepers of “houses of ill fame.” Both branches descended from the same man, Martin Kallikak Sr., but from two different women. Therein lay the difference. The bad Kallikaks derived from Martin Kallikak’s unmarried sex with “a feeble-minded girl” who worked in a tavern. Goddard’s book
The Kallikak Family
appeared in 1912 to a fine critical reception and excellent sales. Social scientists heralded its importance, applauding the “authenticity of its data and the correctness of the work.”
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In the child-study field and beyond, its research had an enormous effect in pushing a growing hereditarian belief that ancestry was everything, environment nothing.
^†
Its message rang loud and clear: for the public good, the feebleminded must not breed; otherwise society will suffer. “There are Kallikak families all about us,” Goddard warned. “They are multiplying at twice the rate of the general population.”
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In the “warfare of the cradle,” the inferior would always outbreed superior stocks, and “no amount of education or good environment can change a feeble-minded individual into a normal one.” Like slavery on the black side of the color line, indenture, crime, or illegitimacy on the white side means permanent damnation. Slum clearance and other palliative remedies are equally useless, for “these mentally defective people who can never be taught to live otherwise than as they have been living” are promiscuously breeding squalor.
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How, then, is society to protect itself? At first Goddard cast a vote for segregation of the mentally impaired, but segregation was immensely expensive. To sequester the feebleminded until they passed breeding age, as Goddard knew well, cost dearly. Harking back to Josephine Shaw Lowell, he finally broached the alternative, sterilization, and the die was cast. Many in the United States were more than ready, even eager, to stem the degenerate tide threatening to swamp its Anglo-Saxon genetic pool.

By 1912, when Goddard published
The Kallikak Family
, several states had already turned to compulsory sterilization as a cheap means of controlling the reproduction of undesirables. Eugenicists spearheaded this movement, but they had support from liberals in the charities and corrections wing of humanitarian reform. Leading social reformers were quite willing to deplore the “debasing and demoralizing influence of an unrestrained feebleminded woman.”
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