Kallikak Family

Pseudonym for a family involved in a psychological study of the hereditary aspects of

intelligence.
The history of intelligence testing in the United States has been troublesome from the beginning.
Although psychologists attempted to conduct legitimate research and apply psychological
knowledge to the study of intelligence, some of the early work was quite unscientific and led to
dubious results.

One case involved the descendants of an anonymous man referred to as Martin Kallikak. This
man produced two different lines of descent, one with a supposedly "feebleminded" bar maid
with whom he had had sexual relations and one with his wife, reputed to be an honest Quaker
woman. The offsprings from the two women generated two lineages that could not have been
more different. The pseudonym "Kallikak" was taken from two Greek words: kallos, meaning
beauty (referring to the descendants of the Quaker woman) and kakos, meaning bad (referring to
the descendants of the bar maid).

The psychologist Henry Goddard (1866-1957) investigated these two groups over a two-year
period. According to psychology historian David Hothersall, Goddard discovered that the
inferior branch of Martin Kallikak's family included "46 normal people, 143 who were
definitely feebleminded, 36 illegitimate births, 33 sexually immoral people, 3 epileptics, and 24
alcoholics. These people were horse thieves, paupers, convicts, prostitutes, criminals, and
keepers of houses of ill repute. On the other hand, Quaker side of the family included only 3
somewhat mentally "degenerate people, 2 alcoholics, 1 sexually loose person, and no illegitimate
births or epileptics."

These patterns of behavior were believed to be the results of heredity, rather than environment,
even though the two environments were radically different. Goddard also believed that
intelligence was determined by heredity, just like the inclination toward prostitution, theft, and
poverty.

Goddard was also a supporter of the eugenics movement in the United States. One of the
solutions that he proposed for controlling the creation of the "defective classes" was sterilization,
which he advocated as being as simple as having a tooth extracted. Later in his career, Goddard
retracted some of his earlier conclusions and maintained that, although intelligence had a
hereditary basis, morons (at that time a technical term) might beget other morons, but they could
be educated and made useful to society.
The Kallikak Family
The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness was a 1912
book by the American psychologist and eugenicist Henry H. Goddard. The work was an
extended case study of Goddard's for the inheritance of "feeble-mindedness," a general
category referring to a variety of mental disabilities including intellectual
disability, learning disabilities, and mental illness. Goddard concluded that a variety of
mental traits were hereditary and that society should limit reproduction by people
possessing these traits.
The name Kallikak is a pseudonym used as a family name throughout the book.
Goddard coined the name from the Greek words καλός (kallos) meaning good and
κακός (kakos) meaning bad.[1]

Summary
The book begins by discussing the case of "Deborah Kallikak" (real name Emma
Wolverton, 1889–1978),[2] a woman in Goddard's institution, the New Jersey Home for
the Education and Care of Feebleminded Children (now Vineland Training School). In
the course of investigating her genealogy, Goddard claims to have discovered that her
family tree bore a curious and surprising moral tale.
The book follows the genealogy of Martin Kallikak, Deborah's great-great-great
grandfather, a Revolutionary War hero married to a Quaker woman. On his way back
from battle the normally morally upright Martin dallied one time with a "feeble-minded"
barmaid. He impregnated her and then abandoned her. The young Martin soon
reformed and went on with his upright life, becoming a respected New England citizen
and father of a large family of prosperous individuals. All of the children that came from
this relationship were "wholesome" and had no signs of developmental disabilities.[3]
But according to Goddard, a child was born by the dalliance with "the nameless feeble-
minded girl". This single child, a male, called Martin Kallikak Jr. in the book (real name
John Wolverton, 1776–1861[2]), went on to father more children, who fathered their own
children, and on and on down the generations. And so with the Kallikaks, Goddard
claims to have discovered, one has as close as one could imagine an experiment in the
hereditability of intelligence, moral ability, and criminality.
On the "feeble-minded" side of the Kallikak family, descended from the abandoned
single-parent barmaid, the children wound up poor, mentally ill, delinquent, and
intellectually disabled. Deborah was, in Goddard's assessment, "feeble-minded": a
catch-all early 20th century term to describe various forms of intellectual or learning
disabilities. Goddard was interested in the heritability of "feeble-mindedness"—and
often wrote of the invisible threat of recessive "feeble-minded" genes carried by
otherwise healthy and intelligent looking members of the population (Mendel's laws had
only been rediscovered a decade before; Goddard's genetic shorthand was, in its day,
considered to be on par with cutting-edge science). It was in tracing the family history of
Deborah that Goddard and his assistants discovered that Deborah's family of drunks
and criminals was related—through Martin Kallikak—to another family tree of economy
and prosperity.
A set of Kallikak children on the "feeble-minded" side of the family
On the "normal" side of the Kallikak family tree, the children Martin had with his wife and
their descendants all ended up prosperous, intelligent, and morally upstanding. They
were lawyers, ministers, and doctors. None were "feeble-minded". Goddard concluded
from this that intelligence, sanity, and morality were hereditary, and every effort should
be undertaken to keep the 'feeble-minded' from procreating, with the overall goal of
potentially ending 'feeble-mindedness' and its accompanying traits. The damage from
even one dalliance between a young man and a "feeble-minded" woman could create
generations and generations worth of crime and poverty, with its members eventually
living off the generosity of the state (and consequently taxpayers), Goddard argued. His
work contains intricately constructed family trees, showing near-perfect Mendelian ratios
in the inheritance of negative and positive traits.
Goddard recommended segregating them in institutions, where they would be taught
how to work various forms of menial labor.

Present-day evaluation
Two Kallikaks. It is possible that the boy was born with Down Syndrome, a former name
of the syndrome being mongolism.
In its day, The Kallikak Family was a tremendous success and went through multiple
printings. It helped propel Goddard to the status of one of the nation's top experts in
using psychology in policy, and along with the work of Charles B.
Davenport and Madison Grant is considered one of the canonical works of early 20th-
century American eugenics.
Research published in 2001 by David MacDonald and Nancy McAdams revealed that
Goddard's account of the division of the Kallikak family into a "good" lineage—
descended from Martin Kallikak Sr. and his wife—and a "bad" lineage—descended from
Martin Kallikak Sr. and an unnamed feeble-minded barmaid—was fictitious.[2] Martin
Kallikak Jr., the supposedly illegitimate offspring of Martin Kallikak Sr. and the barmaid,
was in fact the son of Gabriel Wolverton and his wife Catherine Murray. [2] His real name
was John Wolverton (1776–1861), and he was a landowner prosperous enough to buy
two tracts of land for cash in 1809. Census records of 1850 show that all the adults in
his household (which included Wolverton, one daughter, and several grandchildren)
were able to read. The "bad" side of the Kallikak family included poor farmers but also
school teachers, an Army Air Corps pilot, and a bank treasurer.[2]
It has been argued that the effects of malnutrition were overlooked in the Kallikak
family.[citation needed] Goddard's peer, Davenport, even identified various forms of diseases
now known to be caused by diet deficiencies as being hereditary.

A detail of faces from the book—Stephen Jay Gould alleged that Goddard had doctored
them to make them look more sinister.
Another perspective has been offered that the Kallikaks almost certainly had
undiagnosed fetal alcohol syndrome.[4][5] In addition to poverty and malnourishment,
prenatal alcohol exposure can create craniofacial and other physical anomalies that
could account for their peculiar facial features.[6] Furthermore, prenatal alcohol exposure
may also damage the central nervous system, which can result in
impaired cognitive and behavioral functioning similar to that described by Goddard.
Alteration of photographs[edit]
The paleontologist and science writer Stephen Jay Gould advanced the view that
Goddard—or someone working with him—had retouched the photographs used in his
book in order to make the "bad" Kallikaks appear more menacing. In older editions of
the books, Gould said, it has become clearly evident that someone has drawn in darker,
crazier looking eyes and menacing faces on the children and adults in the pictures.
Gould argues that photographic reproduction in books was still then a very new art, and
that audiences would not have been as keenly aware of photographic retouching, even
on such a crude level. The 14 photos were subsequently studied further to show the
nature of the retouching and subsequent use to help make Goddard's points. [7]
The psychologist R. E. Fancher, however, has claimed that retouching of faces of the
sort which is apparent in Goddard's work was a common procedure at the time, in order
to avoid a "washed out" look which was common to early photographic printing methods
(poor halftones). Furthermore, Fancher argued, malicious editing on Goddard's part
would take away from one of his primary claims: that only a trained eye can spot the
moron in the crowd.
Influence

A caricature of the Kallikak Family from a 1950s psychology textbook. Modern research
indicates that there is nothing accurate about the descriptions offered here. [2]
The overall effect of The Kallikak Family was to temporarily increase funding to
institutions such as Goddard's, but these were not seen to be worthwhile solutions of
the problem of "feeble-mindedness" (much less "rogue" "feeble-mindedness"—the
threat of idiocy as a recessive trait), and more stringent methods, such as compulsory
sterilization of people with intellectual disabilities, were undertaken.
The term "Kallikak" became, along with "Jukes" and "Nams" (other case studies of
similar natures), a cultural shorthand for the rural poor in the South and Northeast
United States.
In August 1977, NBC premiered a situation comedy called The Kallikaks,[8] which
depicted the comic misadventures of an Appalachian family that moved to California
and feuded with another family named the Jukes; the series lasted only five episodes. A
June 8, 1987, cartoon in The New Yorker provided a further update to the concept,
depicting "The Jukes and Kallikaks Today
Jukes family
The Jukes family was a New York "hill family" studied in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The
studies are part of a series of other family studies, including the Kallikaks, the Zeros and the Nams,
that were often quoted as arguments in support of eugenics, though the original Jukes study,
by Richard L. Dugdale, placed considerable emphasis on the environment as a determining factor in
criminality, disease and poverty (euthenics).

Harris' reports[edit]
Elisha Harris, a doctor and former president of the American Public Health Association, published
reports that Margaret, in Upstate New York, was the "mother of criminals" and he described her
children as "a race of criminals, paupers and harlots". [1]

Dugdale's study[edit]
In 1874, sociologist Richard L. Dugdale, a member of the executive committee of the Prison
Association of New York, and a colleague of Harris' was delegated to visit jails in upstate New
York.[1][2] In a jail in Ulster County he found six members of the same "Juke" family (a pseudonym),
though they were using four different family names. On investigation he found that, of 29 male
"immediate blood relations", 17 had been arrested, and 15 convicted of crimes.[2]
He studied the records of inmates of the thirteen county jails in New York State, as well as
poorhouses and courts, while researching the New York hill family's ancestry in an effort to find the
basis for their criminality. His book claimed Max, a frontiersman who was the descendant of early
Dutch settlers and who was born between 1720 and 1740,[2] had been the ancestor of more than 76
convicted criminals, 18 brothel-keepers, 120 prostitutes, over 200 relief recipients, and 2 cases of
"feeble-mindedness".[3]
Many of the criminals could also be linked to "Margaret, the Mother of Criminals", renamed "Ada" in
his report, who had married one of Max's sons.[1][2] Dugdale created detailed genealogical charts and
concluded that poverty, disease, and criminality plagued the family. Dugdale estimated to the New
York legislature that the family had cost the state $1,308,000. He published his findings in The
Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity in 1877.[2] Dugdale debated the relative
contribution of environment and heredity and concluded that the family's poor environment was
largely to blame for their behavior: "environment tends to produce habits which may become
hereditary" (page 66). He noted that the Jukes were not a single family, but a composite of 42
families and that only 540 of his 709 subjects were apparently related by blood.[2]
He urged public welfare changes and improvements in the environment in order to prevent
criminality, poverty and disease, writing: "public health and infant education... are the two legs upon
which the general morality of the future must travel"(page 119).[3] The book was widely read in the
nineteenth century and stimulated discussion about the roles of heredity and environment.[4] The
term "Juke" became, along with "Kallikaks" and "Nams" (other case studies of a similar nature), a
cultural shorthand for the rural poor in the South and Northeast United States.[3] Legal historian Paul
A. Lombardo states that very soon the Jukes family study was turned into a "genetic morality tale"
which combined religious notions of the sins of the father and eugenic pseudoscience.[1]

Estabrook's study[edit]
A follow-up study was published by Arthur H. Estabrook of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold
Spring Harbor, New York in 1916 as The Jukes in 1915. Estabrook noted that Dugdale's conclusions
were that the 1877 study "does not demonstrate the inheritance of criminality, pauperism, or harlotry,
but it does show that heredity with certain environmental conditions determines criminality, harlotry,
and pauperism".[4] Estabrook reanalyzed Dugdale's data and updated it to include 2,820 persons,
adding 2,111 Jukes to the 709 studied by Dugdale. He claimed that the living Jukes were costing the
public at least $2 million.[2]
Estabrook's data suggested that the family had actually shown fewer problems over time, but he
pronounced that the Jukes family were "unredeemed" and suffering from just as much
"feeblemindedness, indolence, licentiousness and dishonesty" as they had been in the
past.[2] Strongly emphasizing heredity, Estabrook's conclusions reversed Dugdale's argument about
the environment, proposing that such families be prevented from reproducing, since no amount of
environmental changes could alter their genetic inheritance towards criminality.[3]
Photographs of members of the Jukes family and their homes as well as family trees of some
branches of the Jukes family were displayed at the Second International Congress of Eugenics, held
at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City in 1921.[2] Historians have noted that
Dugdale's conclusions have been misused by subsequent generations: "Estabrook's version is the
one that carried the day. After 1915, the Jukes cames to symbolize the futility of social change and
the need for eugenic segregations and sterilization".[5] American scientists, doctors, politicians, clergy
and the legal profession all embraced the eugenic movement, and the Jukes family research was
used as evidence in Buck v. Bell a 1927 US Supreme Court case which made forced sterilizations
legal in the United States.[1] In the 1930s eugenics was widely repudiated by geneticists, and after
the Nazi World War II eugenics program became known, its influence died out.[1]

Further research[edit]
Research in the 1960s pointed out fundamental problems with the studies, such as the subjects
were not one family and not necessarily related. In addition, the attempt to link a trait such as
poverty to genetic makeup, ignoring environmental issues, has been "totally discredited", as noted
by geneticist Andrés Ruiz Linares in a 2011 historical review.[1]
In 2001 a poorhouse graveyard was discovered in New Paltz, in Ulster County. Some of the
unmarked graves belonged to members of the so-called Jukes family. Further information was found
in the archives at the State University of New York at Albany and in records of a forgotten Ulster
County poorhouse. A code book, labeled "classified", was found and listed the real surnames of the
"Jukes" family. Hundreds of names were listed, including Plough, Miller, DuBois, Clearwater, Bank
and Bush. Max, the "founder", was identified as Max Keyser.[2] However, "the mythology of so-called
'genetically problematic families' is still with us," said Paul A. Lombardo of the Center for Biomedical
Ethics at the University of Virginia. "Even today, the Jukeses seem to be getting a third life on the
Internet as we see some religious and political groups invoking them as examples of inherited
immorality."[2]