The Kallikak Problem (Part One of Two)

It's relatively rare for a research study to get much attention in non-academic circles.  Still, when the 121-page book titled, The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness, came out in 1912,  even the book's author, Herbert Henry Goddard,  didn't expect to see it become a best-seller.   But it was likely not that surprising for a book that Stephen Gould  would later call the “primal myth of the eugenics movement”.  

Goddard, the director of the psychological laboratory at the Vineland Training School  in Vineland, New Jersey, was already well-known for his work in eugenics and intelligence, a reputation that would be firmly cemented when his book came out.   When the Vineland School was founded in the 19th century as the "New Jersey Home for the Education and Care of Feebleminded Children", it quickly became one of the principal training centers for training children deemed incapable of functioning in normal schools.  Often dismissed as "cretins" and "imbeciles" throughout the late 19th and early 20th century, such children typically faced extreme hardship and abuse, something that Henry Goddard was determined to fight when he first took over the school's psychological laboratory in 1906. Already well-known for translating Alfred Binet's intelligence test into English and standardizing the test on Vineland's students, Goddard also established himself as a prominent eugenics researcher through his research into the genetic background of the students he dealt with at Vineland. (he would also introduce the term "moron" to the English language).  

As for his most famous work, it apparently began in 1898 when an eight-year-old girl identified only as "Deborah" first came to the Vineland Training School.   In describing Deborah to his readers, Goddard was emphatic in portraying her as having  " 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."    To bolster his case for Deborah's feeble-mindedness, his verbal description of her included numerous references to the kind of "abnormal" behaviours to which she was prone, i.e., jerking movements while walking and a tendency to stare blankly when people spoke to her.

Additional proof of Deborah's feeble-mindedness came the newly-translated Binet Test which he had administered to all the Vineland students,   As Goddard wrote, "By the Binet Scale this girl showed, in April, 1910, the mentality of a nine-year-old child with two points over; January, 1911, 9 years, 1 point; September, 1911, 9 years, 2 points; October, 1911, 9 years, 3 points. (p. 11)."   He also added that, "Here is a child who has been most carefully guarded. She has been persistently trained since she was eight years old, and yet nothing has been accomplished in the direction of higher intelligence or general education. 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."  

But children like Deborah were hardly limited to training schools where they could be properly helped.   Under Goddard's guidance, the Vineland Training School sent out field workers to investigate the families of these children to learn more about their backgrounds.   Though these field workers were highly-trained, they were often ill-prepared to deal with the kind of deep-rooted poverty and social problems the families they studied often faced.   Instead, all they could do was make reports about what they found without any attempt at explaining why the families were as backward as they reported.  And, as Goddard himself concluded from these reports that: "The surprise and horror of it all, was that no matter where we traced them, whether in the prosperous rural district, in the city slums to which some had drifted, or in the more remote mountain regions, or whether it was a question of the second or the sixth generation, an appalling amount of defectiveness was everywhere found."  In other words, feeble-minded children came from feeble-minded parents.

As for Deborah, Goddard's investigators managed to trace her ancestry back for generations and discovered something that, to them, seemed remarkable.   Deborah's great-great-grandfather was a man identified only as "Martin Kallikak"  (I'll get into the significance of the name a little bit later.)   Prior to fighting in the American Revolution, Martin had become the father of an illegitimate child who would become Deborah's ancestor.   The boy's mother had given the child the same name as his father despite his illegitimate status and he passed this name down to his children.   During the course of Goddard's research into Martin Kallikak Junior's descendants, one hundred and forty-three of the nearly five hundred known descendants  they traced "were or are feeble-minded, while only forty-six have been found normal. The rest are unknown or doubtful."

But Martin Kallikak Senior had other children later in his life after marrying a "respectable girl of good family."   Despite having the same surname as the other Kallikak family branch, the descendants of Martin's legitimate children were much more illustrious.  As Goddard pointed out, "All of the legitimate children of Martin Sr. married into the best families in 
their state, the descendants of colonial governors, signers of the Declaration of Independence, soldiers and even the founders of a great university. There are doctors, lawyers, judges, educators, traders, landholders, in short, respectable citizens, men and women prominent in every phase of social life. There have been no feeble-minded among them; no illegitimate children; no immoral women. There has been no epilepsy, no criminals, no keepers of houses of prostitution."    It was the comparison of these two family branches which inspired the Kallikak pseudonym that Goddard assigned to Martin and his descendants (the name came from the Greek words καλός (kallos) meaning good and κακός (kakos) meaning bad).

In comparing these two family branches, Goddard concluded that feeble-mindedness, criminal behaviour, and immorality were basically genetic in nature, a finding very much in vogue at the time given the popularity of eugenics   In Martin Kallikak's case, having a child with a feeble-minded woman led to generations of crime, poverty, and social disorder, not to mention hundreds of descendants who ultimately became wards of the state (including Deborah Kallikak).   Goddard bolstered his arguments with elaborate family trees showing each family branch along with how the proliferation of positive and negative traits matched Gregor Mendel's own conclusions about genetic inheritance.   

Along with the elaborate family trees and verbal descriptions of the "feeble-mindedness" found in Deborah Kallikak and her relatives, Goddard also included numerous photographs presenting the "bad" Kallikaks in a menacing light. Later authors such as Stephen J. Gould would argue that the photos had been deliberately retouched to highlight their defectiveness though this remains controversial.   In all, Goddard's book was intended to be a searing indictment of the dangers of unrestricted breeding.   

While hardly the only study of its kind published up to that time, Goddard's book would prove to be the most influential.    It also established Goddard as of the the country's leading authorities in eugenics, the book would prove enormously influential in boosting public support for eugenics, both in North America and in Europe.  

Continue to Part Two