Snapler

In 1912 a book published in New York provided the American public with a diverting detailed account of a family with a strange name and an unsavory past. The book was titled: The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness. The author, Henry Herbert Goddard (1866-1957), was an educator and a psychologist already well-known in professional circles--and an ardent eugenicist. In his new book, and in later lectures, he proposed that the feeble-minded inherited their constitutional inferiority, that they were a dangerous source of criminality, and that if sterilization of such people was impractical, segregation should be instituted to protect the rest of society. And how were the feeble-minded to be recognized in order to be segregated? When their physical appearance was not conclusive, he had the instrument: an intelligence test perfected by a Frenchman named Binet.

In the decade that preceded the Great War, in the dying days of Victorian blustering about class, destiny, and patriotism, social Darwinism coupled itself to eugenics, a nasty marriage that would bring misery to two generations in Europe and America. Henry Goddard was not the first American eugenicist, but he was the most influential eugenicist in education, clinical psychology, and public policy in his time. His book on the Kallikak family was an instant commercial success. Professional journals were particularly impressed. The Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology published an adoring review that began, "This is a book whose value in the study of heredity cannot be overestimated. The standing of the author and of the school with which he is connected are such guarantees of the authenticity of its data and the correctness of the work as to make it invaluable."

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