For starters, there was phrenology, from the Greek words phrenos meaning mind and logos meaning study. This scheme was the brainchild—yes, pun intended—of a German physician named Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828). Noting that the human cerebral cortex, the wrinkled “gray matter” covering the brain, was larger than that of animals, Gall correctly identified it as the site of intelligence and personality. But then he went one step further off the cerebral cliff, insisting that the shape of the skull mirrored the shape of the cortex whose bumps and grooves and folds (sulci) he considered indicative of specific character traits, good, bad, and morally neutral. Gall was particularly taken with a number of bumps behind the ears, which he associated with nasty behavior such as thievery and deception; he associated other irregularities on the surface of the cranium with everything from loving one’s children to an intention to murder. After his death, Gall’s followers kept his ideas alive into the early twentieth century, but the theory faded from view as advances in surgery, neurology, and medical technology such as the encephalogram that records brainwaves, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and positron emission tomography (PET) permitted researchers to identify the actual loci of brain function and watch the path of neuronal activity in the living brain.
For Gall, the skull was all. Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914) took a larger view, using the physical structure of the entire body to predict behavior, criminal and otherwise. Bertillon was not a physician. He was a clerk employed by the Paris police, but he was a clerk with vision sharp enough to propose that anthropometry, the careful measurement of body parts, might be one way conclusively to tell one person from another. Modern anthropologists use anthropometry to describe and date traces of living things such as their bones or footprints. Bertillon wanted to use it to identify criminals. In 1888, the Parisians were so enchanted with the possibility that they made him head of a newly created department of judicial identity and gave him full permission to test his theories. Things were going swimmingly until the introduction of fingerprinting showed that two people could have exactly the same body measurements, but different fingerprints, thus eliminating anthropometry as a law enforcement tool.
But the reliance on physical characterizations to label or libel people continued apace.
As the Europeans moved into Africa, one obvious difference between the colonized and the colonizers was skin color, while back home the shape and size of the nose remained an accepted sign of Other-ness. So did a narrow chest, now considered a predictor of weakness leading to tuberculosis. And the flatfoot was always fair game, even in fairytales.
The Brothers Grimm, Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–1859), were German academics and folklorists. Their first book, Children’s and Household Tales (Kinder- und Hausmärchen) appeared in 1812. Tucked in among the stories was one called The Three Spinners, in which the sighting of a flatfoot spared a princess from having to spin flax into thread, a chore she loathed. It goes like this: A young girl who refused to do household chores was sent by her mother to live with a queen who showed her to a room filled with flax to be spun into thread. The queen promised her oldest son as a prize when the girl finished spinning the flax. Lacking the skill and the will to do the job, the girl goes to the window to look out, maybe even to climb out. Spying three odd-looking spinner women on the street below, she invites them up. They are not a pretty trio. The first has a large lower lip from moistening the flax; the second, a wide thumb from twisting the thread; and the third, a broad flatfoot from working the peddle on the spinning wheel. Bamboozled by the girl’s promise of an invitation to her royal wedding if they agree to spin the flax, the ladies go to work. They do the job. She reneges on her promise, and her prince, repelled by the spinners’ deformities, declares that his new princess shall never put hand to spinning wheel again.
It’s a happy ending for her, but not the end of the flatfoot as bad news.
Beginning in the 1930s, more than twenty-three centuries after Lycurgus, Plato, and the Decemvirs endorsed the elimination of infants with birth defects as a way to preserve the sanctity of “the guardians breed,” the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)—Nazis for short—adopted a program of murder in the name of racial purity, targeting adults who qualified as Other, a category whose descriptors included physique, physiognomy, birthplace, and, of course, religion.
By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the flatfoot was the “Jewish foot,” a linkage that survived in early twentieth century medicine and as a tenet of Nazi propaganda. In Der Giftpilz (The Poisoned Mushroom), a children’s book written by Julius Streicher (1885–1946), founder and publisher of the notorious anti-Semitic weekly tabloid Der Sturmer (The Attacker), one student, described as the best in the class, earns his teacher’s praise by explaining that “Jews are usually: Middle sized and have short legs…. Jews have curved legs and are flatfooted.”
After World War II, Streicher was tried for “crimes against humanity” by the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial. The indictment against him read in part, “In his speeches and articles, week after week, month after month, he infected the German mind with the virus of anti-Semitism, and incited the German people to active persecution.” Streicher was convicted on October 1, 1946, and hanged two weeks later.
Jews weren’t the only ones tagged with flatfeet. Across the Atlantic, smack in the middle of a map of Hanover County in northeastern Virginia was a place called Negro Foot (sometimes Negrofoot), one of literally dozens, maybe hundreds, of spots throughout the American South whose names once included the offensive N-word. This particular enclave was home to Patrick Henry when he issued his famous challenge—“Give me liberty or give me death”—at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Richmond and while he was elected governor of Virginia in 1776. Ms. Dolley Payne, better known as Mrs. James Madison, also called it home. Today, the town is said to be virtually uninhabited.
In Podunk: Ramblin’ to America’s Small Places in a Dilapidated Delta 88 (2012), a journal of his travels to America’s “out-of-the-way communities,” author Peter Zimmerman offers three accounts of how Negro Foot was named. The first two deal with gruesomely unpleasant racial encounters leading to amputated feet. The third is equally biased, but barely more palatable. In 1716, just about one-hundred years after the first African slaves landed in Virginia in 1619, the British royal governor Alexander Spotswood (1676–1740) was traveling with his retinue of local nobs, Native Americans, soldiers, and the requisite servants across the Blue Ridge Mountains to explore the Shenandoah Valley. As the company marched along they suddenly saw in their path the print of a barefoot “which evidenced the flat arch and the broad toe span that belong only to the negroid races” and straightaway named the place where the footprint appeared. In keeping with the prejudices of the time, he gave it the unpleasant N-word name that appears to have remained on U.S. Department of Interior maps as late as 1989. But the times, as Bob Dylan told us, certainly are a-changin’. In October 2011, an OpEd in the Richmond Times Dispatch by editor/columnist A. Barton Hinkle cited a number of such places—“a couple of Negro Hollows, three Negro Points, four Negro Runs, the Negrohead summit in Rocking-ham”—and the modern move to re-name them, under a headline asking the salient question, “Would you ask a friend to lunch at Negro Foot?”
Spotswood was hardly the only one to classify flatfeet as an African American trait. Even so vocal an opponent of slavery as Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910), author of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, wrote in A Trip to Cuba (1859) that “the negro among negroes is a coarse, grinning, flat-footed, thick-skulled creature.” The sentiment, widely shared, gave opponents the opportunity to attack both Howe and her fellow abolitionists as hypocrites.
So imagine everyone’s surprise when, late in the twentieth century, three separate studies over a period of seven years appeared to confirm a link between ethnicity and flatfeet.
In 2003, a team of public health epidemiologi
sts from New England Research Institutes, Boston University School of Medicine, New England Baptist Hospital, and Sargent College funded by the National Institutes of Health’s Institute on Aging set up a “community-based, multiethnic (non-Hispanic White, African-American, and Puerto Rican) random sample of 784 community-dwelling adults aged sixty five or more years in 2001–2002 in Springfield, Massachusetts” to determine “The Prevalence of Foot and Ankle Conditions in a Multiethnic Community Sample of Older adults.” Telephone and in-home interviews plus orthopedic examinations showed an overall incidence of flatfeet (19 percent) matching most common estimates of 20 percent of the population, with similar figures for men and women and people of varying education levels. The one significant marker was race: Flatfeet were most common among African Americans, followed by non-Hispanic Whites and Puerto Ricans. High arches, found in 5.2 percent of the volunteers, were more common among women than among men, but the percentages did not differ by race.
Six years later, a report in Foot and Ankle International by a team of Costa Rican investigators showed a similar racial variation in two angles of the bones in the foot, each variation associated with either a higher or lower risk of flatfoot. The first angle, calcaneal pitch (CP), is visualized by drawing a horizontal line along the bottom of the foot and another line tracing the rise of the foot bones from the bottom of the heel: the lower the pitch, the flatter the foot; the higher the angle, the higher the arch. The second angle, the lateral talocalcaneal angle (TCA), is shown with a similar diagram, this time between the bottom of the heel and the ankle bone: here too, the lower the angle, the flatter the foot. Measuring the feet of 126 volunteers—forty-five African Americans, fifty-nine Caucasians, twenty-two Hispanics—the study found “significant” differences by race. As a rule, the African Americans had lower CP angles than either the Caucasians or the Hispanics; conversely, the Caucasians had higher TCA angles than the African Americans.
Finally, in 2010, arthritis researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill released data from a four-year survey of 1,536 volunteers designed to compare the frequency of foot disorders among African Americans versus Caucasians. Their study, “Racial Differences in Foot Disorders: The Johnston County Osteoarthritis Project,” showed that African Americans older than forty-five were three times more likely than Caucasians of the same age to have flatfeet, while the Caucasians appeared five times as likely to have high arches and insteps. Bunions and hammertoes were equal opportunity problems. “That suggests there is a real racial difference,” said the study’s lead author, Yvonne M. Golightly. “The next step in our research is to determine the origin of these disorders.”
Perhaps owing to the absence of Asians from Boston, Costa Rica, and North Carolina, these studies have no statistics on the incidence of Asian arches, high or low, but at least one shoemaker was literally banking on the former. In 2011, British designer Rupert Sanderson created a shoe with a four-inch high heel and extra padding at the instep to fit the presumably higher Asian female arch. Unfortunately, his design, based on a mold of the highly arched foot of one female friend, contradicts podiatric studies which suggest that Asian feet are slightly broader in front and lower in the arch than Western European feet and that the incidence of flatfeet among Asians may run as high as 80 percent, the exact opposite of Western feet. But the good news is that high arch or low, the extra padding raises the foot and makes the high heel feel lower and less stressful.
Eventually, Western sensitivity to ethnic and religious slurs changed “Jewish foot” to “weak foot,” but a flat arch was still considered reason enough to exclude men from the armed forces, the ultimate protector from the Other. Around the world, the military exhibited a serious interest in the state of a recruit’s or conscript’s feet. When you think of it, this is probably not surprising considering that in pre-mechanized times, an Army really did march on its feet.
On November 15,1863, The New York Times published a list of 41 “Disease and Infirmities” the War Department considered serious enough to guarantee exemption from the draft for the Union Army. In addition to the usual imbecility, insanity, epilepsy, paralysis, habitual and confirmed intemperance or “solitary vice,” incontinence, loss of a limb or a finger, deafness, blindness, a curved spine, excessive obesity and so on, there was this: “Club feet; total loss of a great toe. Other permanent defects or deformities of the feet, such as will necessarily prevent marching.” That may or may not have meant flatfeet. Either way, it was number 39 on the list, clearly not a high priority item.
The British, on the other hand, were positively obsessed with problem feet. In 1989, two researchers at the British Military Hospital at Rinteln, West Germany, tracked the British military’s treatment of flat-footed servicemen over a period of 300 years. In their paper “The Longstanding Problem of Flatfeet” (note the subtle play on words; people with flatfeet may indeed have trouble standing or marching comfortably for long periods), they include an Army order in 1690 directing that “[f]or the exercise of the musket … the musket being shoulder’d, the feet are to be at one step distance, the heels in a straight line, the toes a little turn’d outwards.”
Fast forward 200 years, and the flatfoot problem becomes one of dollars and cents, or, in this case, pounds and pence. After World War I, British bean counters auditing medical discharges found that “[i]n 1922–23, each recruit enlisted and subsequently discharged after a period of training cost the State 50 pounds, and discharges for flatfeet accounted for 8.5% of all medical discharges during training.”
For years, the armies of the world waged their war on flatfeet, turning down men and women whose lack of arches actually posed no problem in favor of those with discernible arches whose common but hidden disabilities often surfaced during basic training. In 1901, when Albert Einstein (1879–1955) was called up for military service in the Swiss army, his feet ruled him out; fifty-nine years later, author Stephen King’s Maine draft board turned him down for (among other things) the same reason. Barred from the army, Einstein became a technical expert at the Bern Patent Office at 3,500 francs per year; in his spare time, he pursued his studies in theoretical physics, on his way to the Nobel Prize in 1922. As for King, a supporter of the anti-Vietnam War movement, he went home to become a high school English teacher and write the stories and books that earned him several millions more than Albert Einstein’s 3,500 francs a year plus the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (2003). As he has often said, King owed his success at least in part to his wife Tabitha, who in a moment of true literary prescience, is said to have fished the first pages of the manuscript for Carrie out of the garbage where King had tossed it and then convinced him to finish what went on to be his first published novel, selling more than one million copies in the first year after publication in 1974.
Physicists and novelists weren’t the only ones rejected, or depending on your point of view, saved by their arches.
During the Vietnam era, future Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee enrolled in the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) in college and expected to serve in combat, but was ruled out by his feet, as was South Dakotan Tom Brokaw, who wanted to serve in the Navy, and applied to Officer Candidate School. Boston-born New York mayor Michael Bloomberg was rejected by the Army. Flatfooted Newt Gingrich, a hawk on Vietnam, was a nearsighted graduate student with several children who said his deferments didn’t matter because he “didn’t think one person would make a difference.” But the man with the best flatfoot deferment story is Charles Dubin, a television director who was rejected by the Army during WWII and then blacklisted after the war in 1958 for refusing to give names to the House Un-American Activities Committee. After a few bumpy years, Dubin went on to become the person who directed the largest number of episodes of the hugely popular, hugely anti-war television show M*A*S*H, including one in 1979 titled “Are You Now, Margaret?” in which Hot Lips Houlihan (Loretta Swit) was pressured by a Congressional aide to name f
riends she knew to be Communists. Margaret just said, “No,” thus proving that for Dubin revenge against a government that had twice dissed him—first for his flatfeet and then for his presumed disloyalty—was twenty-one years later indeed “a dish best eaten cold.” Today, the U.S. Department of Defense only turns down men and women with “pronounced cases [of] … decided eversion [turning outward] of the foot and marked bulging of the inner border, due to rotation of the talus [ankle bone], regardless of the presence or absence of symptoms.”
Like various armed forces, American cops have had a long-standing semantic relationship with flatfeet. My Merriam-Webster New Collegiate Dictionary dates the first use of the term “flatty” as shorthand for a police officer to 1899 in Akron, Ohio, where it was used to distinguish foot patrolmen from officers riding in the recently introduced electric motor-powered patrol wagons. Actually, Merriam missed the mark; The National Police Gazette had used the term thirty-three years earlier, reporting that some miscreants were “pulled in by a flatty cop.” In 1911, Damon Runyon (1880–1946) published his first book, a collection of poems titled The Tents of Trouble (Ballads of the Wanderbund, and Other Verse), which included this line: “We croaked a flatty in Baltimore and we beat, by a nose, the law.” And in 1913, Canadian novelist, screenwriter and poet Arthur Stringer (1874-1950) wrote a mystery titled, The Shadow (no relation to Lamont Cranston, hero of the later radio program that ended each week warning that “The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Crime does not pay…. The Shadow knows!”) featuring “Never-Fail” Blake, a detective hero who dealt frequently with “confident striding ‘flatties’ with their ash night-sticks.”
Foot patrolmen weren’t the only law enforcement officers identified by their feet or foot coverings. The word gumshoe originally meant simply a shoe with a rubber sole, but by the turn of the twentieth century, it had evolved into a nickname for a detective—also known as a dick, an operative, a private eye, a P.I. (private investigator), a Sherlock, or a shamus, this last perhaps a corruption of the name Seamus and an obvious nickname for a profession then dominated by the Irish—because the shoes allowed a man to walk quietly, following his prey without being noticed. For the same reason, the canvas-topped rubber-soled shoes introduced in 1916 by the U.S. Rubber Company under the Keds brand name were christened sneakers by Henry Nelson McKinney, an executive with N.W. Ayer & Son, the agency that created the ads for the shoes.
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