Bad Science Has Consequences: Eugenics and Emma Wolverton’s Story

Incorrect and often dangerous scientific conclusions can be produced and propagated in a number of ways.  Occasionally, the science is too complicated to be interpreted correctly by a simple method.  Occasionally, outright fraud is involved.  But probably the most common defect in the scientific method is associated with researchers whose preconceptions blind them to a proper interpretation of the data they have collected.  Scientists, like most other people, tend to find the results they set off looking for.

Carl Zimmer has produced a fascinating look into the history and current status of the science associated with heredity in She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity.  He devotes a chapter of his book to a description of early beliefs about genetic transmission of characteristics, and detailed how poorly understood concepts were used in developing eugenic policies.  The fear was that genetically “damaged” people would pass their faulty genes on to their children.  In the process, he relates the interesting history of Emma Wolverton and her family and the role it played in creating eugenic policies both in the US and abroad.

In 1888, S. Olin Garrison founded “The New Jersey Home for the Education and Care of Feebleminded Children.”  The name was changed to “The New Jersey Training School” in 1893. In 1911, the name was changed again to “The Training School at Vineland.”  The intent was to provide a home to children with learning or behavioral disabilities that would treat them more kindly than typical institutions and perhaps improve their capabilities in the process.  This noble intent would soon become perverted when the residents of the institution proved to be a useful data set for eugenicists worried about the “pollution” of the national population by “feebleminded” people breeding more “feebleminded” children. 

Zimmer tells us that the concept of being “feebleminded” might include those suffering from epilepsy, Down syndrome, and myriad other physical and behavioral disorders.  It was believed at the time that any of these disorders,  including socially unacceptable behaviors, were hereditary and could be passed on to children.

“Somehow, feeblemindedness could be both a medical disorder and the wages of sin, passed down from the sinners to their children.”

“Emma [Wolverton] belonged to a class of students who had no obvious symptoms but were still judged unfit for society.”

Emma was delivered to the school in 1897 when she was eight.  She was the child of a mother whose main skill seemed to be getting pregnant.  When the latest child was born, the father agreed to support her and the child, but not any children that weren’t his.  That meant Emma had to find a home.  In hope that the school would care for her, she was described as someone who had trouble getting along with other children at school.

Emma was accepted and treated like the other children.  They were taught whatever academic skills they could handle, given adequate playtime, and trained in manual skills as well.

“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.”

Henry Goddard had become a student of childhood education, believing that scientific methods could improve the process.  He viewed the Vineyard institution as the ideal place to study the minds of children, hoping that simpler minds would be easier to understand.  However, there were darker scientific currents swirling about simple-minded children.  When Goddard was appointed to be the school’s first head of research, he was given a mission statement by the administration that included the stemming of the growth of feeblemindedness within society.  The feebleminded must not be allowed to procreate.

Goddard initially believed that education methods could improve the lot of the feebleminded.  One of his contributions to the issue was to try to produce a method that would quantify the degree of feeblemindedness.  How can one detect improvement in a quantity that could not be measured?  He went to Europe searching for help on this matter and encountered the Simon-Binet test which was a series of questions that children could be given.  Based on how their answers compared to students in general, they could be given an effective grade level.  Despite warnings from French researchers that this was not an appropriate approach, Goddard brought it back home and tried it on the school’s students.

Children at the school were classified with specific labels according to their perceived mental capacities.  The lowest performers were referred to as “idiots.” Next came the “imbeciles,” and the highest performers among the feebleminded were the “morons,” a term invented by Goddard himself.  So, if one wishes to hurl an insult at another, the most appropriate term is now available for use.

When Goddard returned from Europe, he applied the Simon-Binet test to the children at the school and noted that the results reproduced the hierarchy of capabilities produced by the staff based on their observations.  Goddard concluded that a test of this kind was a valid tool for quantifying feeblemindedness.

Emma first encountered Goddard at the age of seventeen.  She had been a model student, behaving herself, getting along with others, and being productive as a worker.

“She proved herself so capable that Johnstone [the school’s administrator] made her his housekeeper and later put his infant son in her care.”

Goddard gave her a series of questions to answer and immediately concluded that she was a moron—a sort of compliment.

Goddard was now a firm believer in the inheritability of “feeblemindedness.”  The children at the school could provide a wealth of data if he could examine their backgrounds and verify its transmission from parent to child.  He found a eugenics researcher with money to spend who would finance this research.  Associates were hired to go out and review the children’s families and report back their findings.  The data he was given concerning Emma’s heritage would provide the perfect example of what he was looking for.

The results produced by his associates often indicated that dysfunctional children can be produced by perfectly normal parents, but in enough of the cases he could see a causal relationship between the child and the parents that satisfied his expectations.  It never seemed to occur to anyone involved that poverty and a disrupted family life could impact mental and behavioral characteristics.

The report presented to Goddard on Emma Wolverton’s family contained the claim that a John Wolverton, a militiaman during the Revolutionary War, spent a night at a tavern during that period and fathered a son by an unknown feebleminded woman.  Wolverton moved on and married a respectable woman and sired a family that produced generations of upstanding and prominent people.  The feebleminded woman named her son John Wolverton.  This man was himself feebleminded and sired a succession people who where characterized as feebleminded and/or criminal.  This would be interpreted by Goddard as the perfect example of a controlled experiment in heredity and fueled his passion for a solution to the nation’s most compelling problem.

“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 not alone in being alarmed at the prospect of the nation being overrun by the feebleminded.  There were many who believed that institutionalizing or sterilizing the feebleminded was necessary in order to prevent them from any opportunity to reproduce.  And then there was a Dr. McKim who advanced a concept that must have seemed incredible even to other eugenicists at the time.

“….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’.”

Goddard changed the name of the Wolvertons to the Kallikaks (a name formed from the Greek words for good and bad) and published the Wolverton history as The Kallikak Family in 1912.

“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 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 best seller, turning Goddard—a psychologist at a little-known backwoods institution—into one of the most famous scientists in the United States.”

People across the nation wanted Goddard’s intelligence tests to assist them in policy decisions.

“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 reach students.  Rather, they wanted to test the flood of immigrants arriving in the United States.”

Goddard sent his assistants to Ellis Island with an appropriate test to identify any feebleminded persons who should be prohibited from entering the country.

“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 the Italians were feebleminded, 83 percent of Jews, 87 percent of Russians.”

One might think that a scientist would reevaluate his methods and search for a more reasonable result.  But that is not what a scientist inebriated on success and fame tends to do.  His numbers were deemed credible by the people who were lobbying for restricted immigration and they appreciated the ammunition with which to advance their agenda.

Goddard had enough confidence when the US entered the world war to warn the army “that it might risk losing the war by unwittingly drafting hundreds of thousands of morons.”  The army made the soldiers, 1,700,000 in all, available for testing using a Goddard-devised quiz.

“….the average score of the soldiers was startingly 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….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.”

Again, these unlikely results were taken as hard evidence of the rapid decline in the quality of the US citizenry caused by the influx and reproduction of lesser peoples.  Democracy itself was questioned as pundits considered a voting population dominated by morons.  Eugenicists continued to use Goddard’s test results to push for forced sterilization laws and restrictions on immigration.

This madness was not restricted to the United States.  In 1914 The Kallikak Family was published in Germany and became a hit there.  It supported the German eugenicists who had also been clamoring for elimination of the unfit via sterilization programs.  Hitler became aware of the Kallikaks and the lessons Goddard had propagated became Nazi dogma.

“When Adolph 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’.”

“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 the time….have resulted in the law for the prevention of sick or ill offspring,’ Wilker wrote.  ‘Just how significant is 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.”

The American Dr. McKim would see his “gentle painless death” in gas chambers put into action.  The Nazis would begin using fumes from automobile engines as an inexpensive means to kill various defectives.  Soon they would be using the same technique on Jews and other undesirable peoples before perfecting the technique at Auschwitz.

The realization of what the Nazis had been up to in Germany permanently cast American eugenics into a downward spiral.  But the damage had already been done.  Forced sterilization of defectives had become a common practice in a number of states.  Although the book went out of publication in 1939, it lived on in psychology texts which would suggest frightening prospects for students who may have come from families where disabilities existed.  Goddard’s work continued to fuel scientific racism.  Henry Garrett was a dedicated segregationist.  He claimed that “blacks were as intelligent on average as a white person after a lobotomy.”  As a former president of the American Psychological Association and a professor at Columbia University, he brought some credibility to these claims.  He wrote a textbook called General Psychology in 1955 that kept Goddard’s Kallikak claims alive for another decade or so. 

“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’.”

Many people were never fooled by Goddard’s work and his description of the Kallikaks.  But it would take advances in learning that recognized the complexity of genetic inheritance to finally dispose of such simple-minded hypotheses.  Unfortunately, learned publications propagate knowledge much more slowly than those that play to popular fantasies.

In the 1980s a pair of genealogists decided to redo the tracking of Emma Wolverton’s family back in time.  They discovered that a terrible error had been made.  There were two John Wolvertons, but one was not the illegitimate son of the other via a feebleminded woman.  Instead they were second cousins with the same name.  Goddard’s great genetic experiment never happened.  Both extended Wolverton families produced their share of successful people.  Emma was just unfortunate enough to come from a line that fell on hard times for a few generations. 

Goddard’s associates tracked her family as far as was convenient.  When they were provided information that satisfied the picture they sought, they stopped looking—an example of sloppy science if there ever was one.

The consequences of their error were enormous.  Besides providing Nazis justifications for some of their more evil schemes, they promoted the Jim Crow laws of the American South, helped justify colonial powers in their domination of native populations, forced the unnecessary sterilization of thousands in our country, and fostered generations of anti-immigrant feelings.

We will never know whether Emma Wolverton deserved to be labeled a moron.  After growing too old for the Vineyard Training School she was shipped to the New Jersey State Institution for Feeble-Minded Women which happened to be in the same town.  She would spend her remaining days there, dying in 1978 at the age of 89.  Most descriptions of her over the years spoke of her as a seemingly normal person who was occasionally mistook for a staff member rather than an inmate.  After 80 years of incarceration, the institutions in which she lived had become home and she seemed content.

At one point she told one of the staff that she had named a cat she kept Henry, “for a dear, wonderful friend who wrote a book.  It’s the book that made me famous.”