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.”16
Thanks to medical advances that made sterilization relatively easy and safe, Indiana had led off the sterilization wave in 1907 with a law proclaiming, “WHEREAS, heredity plays a most important part in the transmission of crime, idiocy, and imbecility…”17* Other states followed, but with mixed results, for involuntary sterilization remained controversial. The courts invalidated such laws on the basis of cruel and inhumane punishment, for lack of due process, and for failures in equal protection under the law. New Jersey’s state supreme court quickly struck down a compulsory sterilization law in 1913, and governors in Vermont, Nebraska, and Idaho vetoed others.18
If sterilization were to prevail, expert guidance was called for. Undaunted, in 1922 Davenport’s Eugenics Record Office offered a model eugenical sterilization law meant to assist states in crafting involuntary sterilization laws that could withstand court challenge. In 1924 Virginia passed the first such act, stating that “heredity plays an important part in the transmission of insanity, idiocy, and imbecility, epilepsy, and crime.”19 The court test that followed increased the visibility of “degenerate families” and, in light of the long-standing prejudice against poor white southerners, gave degeneracy a poor and female southern face.
THE FIRST person slated for sterilization under Virginia’s sterilization law was eighteen-year-old Carrie Buck.20 (See figure 19.1, Carrie Buck and her mother.) Buck had not been accused of a crime; she was described as a pregnant, unmarried, feebleminded daughter of an unmarried, feebleminded mother living in Virginia’s State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded. Prominent eugenicists entered the case against her to halt the propagation of “these people [who] belong to the shiftless, ignorant and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South.”21
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s sterilization law 8–1, led by American law’s eminence grise, the eighty-one-year-old Oliver Wendell Holmes, who wrote the majority opinion. Holmes accepted Goddard’s argument that Buck’s weaknesses were hereditary. He also agreed with the prevailing logic that criminals were born, not made, and that society could protect itself by preventing their birth. Holmes decreed it “better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” His famous conclusion—“Three generations of imbeciles are enough”—echoed throughout American law.22 The associate justices former president William Howard Taft and Louis D. Brandeis concurred. And so sterilization became settled law in many states, an acceptable means of dealing with people designated feebleminded—especially of poor women of all races bearing children out of wedlock.23
Fig. 19.1. Carrie Buck and her mother, Emma Buck, at the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded, just before going to trial in 1924.
During the 1930s, following Buck v. Bell, local law enforcement and welfare officials rounded up the poor and sterilized them practically en masse: by 1968, some 65,000 Americans had been sterilized against their will, with California far in the lead and Virginia a distant second.24* The American model eugenical sterilization law that had inspired Virginia’s 1924 law also worked in Germany. On gaining power in 1933, National Socialists quickly enacted a law for the prevention of progeny with hereditary diseases, which included deafness and blindness as well as mental handicap and chronic mental or physical illness. In Germany, as in the early twentieth-century United States, the prime targets of involuntary sterilization were poor people. Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, or Nordic ancestry did not spare poor whites stigmatized as Jukes, Ishmaelites, Kallikaks, and Bucks.
As it turned out, Carrie Buck represents an all too common case of personal vulnerability. At about age eight, she had been placed in a foster home. Some years later a member of that family raped her. Pregnant as a result of the rape, she was sent to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded to be sterilized as soon as she gave birth. Primitive, haphazardly administered Stanford-Binet intelligence tests rated her and her mother as imbeciles, but as an adult, Carrie showed no signs of impairment. Against a backdrop of degenerate-family studies demonizing poor white people, Carrie Buck’s sterilization had resulted from sexual abuse, not mental weakness.25
Despite its promise of preventing social ills on the cheap, sterilization never attained total acceptance, for doubts over who should make such intimate decisions never subsided, and bias characterized their execution. Opponents’ arguments mounted: Catholics objected to this breach of the human body, socialists pointed to the class bias of eugenics, and anthropologists argued that culture, not biology, explained characteristics that sterilization was supposed to extinguish.
Eugenic sterilization ultimately fell out of favor, but the fall was slow and gradual. During the 1930s, when German National Socialists took it up, demonstrating the deadly and perverse workings out of eugenics, the field lost its standing as objective science. Civil rights protests in the 1960s and 1970s against the involuntary sterilization of black, American Indian, and Latina women effectively stripped the practice of respectability as public policy. Different morals demanded different policies. Virginia repealed its sterilization law in 1974, but Carrie Buck died in 1983, before her vindication. On the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Buck v. Bell decision, in 2002, the state placed a commemorative marker in her hometown of Charlottesville, and the governor issued a formal apology. Oregon, North Carolina, and South Carolina followed Virginia’s repudiation.
And here ends the compulsory sterilization story that began with degenerate-family research. Another story with shared roots unfolded at the same time, leading to the mental testing of immigrants and to immigration restriction.
20
INTELLIGENCE TESTING OF NEW IMMIGRANTS
Mental tests: such a simple and accurate means of rating human intelligence, even, as Robert Yerkes, a leading tester claimed, of appraising “the value of a man.”1 Once Henry H. Goddard had imported Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon’s mental tests into the United States, it became apparent that their usefulness reached far beyond their limited role in France. There, the tests designated schoolchildren for special education; in the United States, they rated the children at the Vineland school for the feebleminded and then went on to serve other, much wider purposes. Officials at Ellis Island figured Goddard’s tests in Vineland could help them decide who, among immigrants streaming into the country, could stay and who had to return.
What were these tests like? In 1917 masses of U.S. Army draftees who could read answered questions like these:
Why do soldiers wear wrist watches rather than pocket watches? Because
they keep better time.
they are harder to break.
they are handier.
Glass insulators are used to fasten telegraph wires because
the glass keeps the pole from being burned.
the glass keeps the current from escaping.
the glass is cheap and attractive.
Why should we have Congressmen? Because
the people must be ruled.
it insures truly representative government.
the people are too many to meet and make their laws.2
Men who could not read answered pictorial questions. Soldiers were to say what was missing from each picture:3* (See figure 20.1, “Test 6.”)
Fig. 20.1. “Test 6,” in Carl C. Brigham, A Study of American Intelligence (1923).
Testers aimed high, promising to measure innate intelligence, not simply years of education or immersion in a particular cultural milieu. This claim was obviously absurd, but no matter. The allure of mental testing proved irresistible, because demand for ranking people was high, and the process was cheap and, best of all, apparently scientific. The juxtaposition of congressional mandates and the ambitions of early twentieth-century social scientists explains how Goddard went from degenerate families to intelligence testing of immigrants.
NATIVISTS HAD long denigrated immigrants on the grounds of their supposed inferiority. Prescott Farnsworth Hall, one of the then recent Harvard graduates founding the Immigration Restriction League in 1894, mashed together degenerate families, immigrants, and competitive breeding: “The same arguments which induce us to segregate criminals and feebleminded and thus prevent their breeding apply to excluding from our borders individuals whose multiplying here is likely to lower the average of our people.”4 This logic steadily gained ground.
From the 1890s onward, federal legislation toughened standards for excluding “lunatics,” “idiots,” people likely to become public charges, the insane, epileptics, beggars, anarchists, “imbeciles, feeble-minded and persons with physical or mental defects which might affect their ability to earn a living.”5 But with five thousand immigrants passing through Ellis Island daily, sorting through them imposed an impossible task on ten or so Public Health Service physicians. Something had to be done. Learning of Goddard’s methods, the commissioner of immigration concluded that help lay at hand right there in New Jersey. He invited Goddard to use his newfangled intelligence tests to speed up the exclusion process, an assignment Goddard carried out with the help of his lady testers from Vineland.6* Certain alarming conclusions leaped off the pages of Goddard’s report:
The intelligence of the average “third class” immigrant is low, perhaps of moron grade….
Each test taken by itself seems to indicate a very high percentage of defectness. There is no exception to this….
The immigration of recent years is of a decidedly different character from the earlier immigration…. It is admitted on all sides that we are getting now the poorest of each race…. “of every 1000 Polish immigrants all but 103 are laborers and servants.”…
According to TABLE II. INTELLIGENCE CLASSIFICATION OF IMMIGRANTS OF DIFFERENT NATIONALITIES, 83 percent of the Jews, 80 percent of the Hungarians, 79 percent of the Italians, 87 percent of the Russians were feebleminded. Sixty percent of the Jews were morons.7
In sum: most of the immigrants currently passing through Ellis Island were mentally defective. With this crucial point made and quantified, intelligence testing took a further step, as the new field of psychology seized wartime opportunities.
By 1917 Goddard had joined a new group of immigration opponents who had no connection to charitable institutions. Based in academia, Robert Yerkes and Lewis Terman did not associate with the poor or feel concern for their well-being. As scholars, they shaped their truths—drawn, they said, from science—toward their preferred results. Not compulsory sterilization this time, but the classification of the American population according to intelligence and race on the basis of quantifiable methodology. Once again, Charles Benedict Davenport of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, supplied the missing link.
In the prewar years, Davenport’s institution had diligently compiled hereditary studies of defective families. His statistics dovetailed nicely with omnibus characteristics Davenport considered Mendelian unit traits: pauperism, low intelligence test scores, epilepsy, criminalism, insanity, height, and sexual immorality. While the First World War interrupted such degenerate-family work and sterilization, wartime conscription presented eugenicists with great new opportunities in mass mental testing. Robert Yerkes (1876–1956), Davenport’s erstwhile student at Harvard, moved to the fore.
Yerkes was no vaunted New Englander. His humble provenance does not get much attention from his biographers, in stark contrast to works by and about proud Yankees like Davenport. Perhaps in an elite environment, his farm-boy background contributed to his early reputation for ordinary intellectual ability, coupled with rigidity, stubbornness, and a tee-totaler’s lack of bonhomie. Indifferent to wealth, power, fame, popularity, and personal beauty, he was not the sort to win popularity polls. Born on a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Yerkes had attended an ungraded rural school, then the State Normal School at West Chester, where Goddard had begun his professional career. With the support of an uncle willing to trade tuition money for chores, Yerkes was able to transfer to Ursinus College, in the greater Philadelphia area, before going on to Harvard, where he took an A.B. in 1898 and a Ph.D. in 1902.8 Once again, the nation’s most prestigious center of learning would play a pivotal role in race theory.
Harvard’s importance in eugenics does not imply some nefarious scheme or even a mean-spirited ambiance. Rather, Harvard’s import in this story attests to the scholarly respectability of eugenic ideas at the time. Yerkes’s most influential teachers at Harvard were the German philosopher Hugo Münsterberg—a great believer in the importance of mental testing, ranking people hierarchically, and letting elites make society’s decisions—and Charles Benedict Davenport, that venerator of Francis Galton.9
Yerkes began teaching at Harvard in 1902 and published his first book in 1907. Entitled The Dancing Mouse and the Mind of a Gorilla, it dealt with animal sexuality considered in the light of evolution.10 He also worked half-time at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital alongside the esteemed Elmer Ernest Southard, inventor of “cacogenics,” the clumsily named study of racial deterioration. Yerkes and Southard started administering mental tests in 1913, just when Goddard began testing immigrants on Ellis Island. Yerkes’s rise was rapid—he was elected president of the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1916—but it was also uncertain, since he had been denied tenure at Harvard, which evidently held a low estimate of the new field of psychology.11 An odd situation.
As president of the APA, but still lacking tenure, Yerkes chafed at his field’s lack of scholarly standing. Not that the prejudice lacked merit. Still separating from philosophy in the 1910s, psychology seemed soft and lacking in scholarly rigor. The beautifully quantified results of mental testing, so Yerkes and others realized, offered a promising route to academic respectability. As the United States prepared to enter the First World War, Yerkes sought to extend intelligence testing to millions of servicemen. Such a mass of statistical data, unique in its comprehensiveness, would doubtless command respect in academe.
But gathering a data bank of this magnitude would obviously be a huge undertaking. Yerkes found a route in the National Academy of Sciences, which in 1916 created the National Research Council to bring scientists into the war effort. In May of 1917 Yerkes convened a committee of testers that included Goddard and Lewis Terman of Stanford. Working at Goddard’s Vineland Training School, the team had by July 1917 created three sets of tests for use on Army recruits.12 The Army Alpha was directed toward men who could read; the Army Beta served illiterates; and individual tests filled in where needed in special cases—in theory, at least.
When the project closed down in January of 1919, some 1,750,000 men had been tested, generating a huge body of data and further encouraging wide-scale use of intelligence tests. Before the war, intelligence testing had sometimes inspired ridicule, not infrequently as leading citizens tested out as imbeciles. The patina of science, however, had carried the day, securing the Army tests’ role as science’s last word on intelligence. This prestige was something new. That word contained overweening ambition. Henry Godda
rd kindly pronounced intelligence testing “the most valuable piece of information which mankind has ever acquired about itself…a unitary mental process [that is] the chief determiner of human conduct.”13
In a 1923 Atlantic Monthly article Yerkes confidently assumed that intelligence testing could gauge much more than mental capacity. The tests, he maintained, could determine a man’s entire human worth. Yerkes was thinking about the immigrants who, he thought, diminished the effectiveness of the Army and, by extension, the overall health of American society: “Whereas the mental age of the American-born soldier is between thirteen and fourteen years, according to army statistics, that of the soldier of foreign birth serving in our army is less than twelve years….” These numbers would echo loudly in hereditarian circles. Yerkes warned of the recently arrived foreign-born, “Altogether they are markedly inferior in mental alertness to the native-born American.” He explained that differences between the white racial groups were “[a]lmost as great as the intellectual difference between negro and white in the army.”14 Once again, a scientist was speaking of “white racial groups” as a means of classification.
The History of White People Page 28