Thesis

RICHARD STOCKTON COLLEGE OF NEW JERSEY
STEPS IN THE DARK: HOW EUGENICS SHAPED THE AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY
PROFESSION
A THESIS IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
BACHELOR OF ARTS
HISTORICAL STUDIES PROGRAM
BY
KATHERINE M. DEVLIN
APRIL 28, 2009

1
Chapter One
The purpose of this study is to prove that eugenicists and their theories shaped the
growing psychology profession in America during the early twentieth century. To do so it
examines the direct and indirect influences of eugenicists and their ideas on individual
psychologists and the profession as a whole.
Francis Galton first coined the word “eugenics” to communicate the idea of using
selective breeding to improve the human race as was done with other species. Before his death
his ideas were being disseminated in the United States, where men such as Charles Davenport
continued researching what human characteristics were inherited and how. At the same time,
psychologists were trying to break away from their long association with philosophy and
religion, and were studying the mental processes of the human being- how learning and thought
took place, as well as the nature of perception and the senses1. In the United States they were
specifically looking for a practical application for their study to prove usefulness of the
profession. As the eugenicists concluded that mental abilities were inherited characteristics, and
therefore predictable and permanent, psychologists saw the niche for which they had been
searching and came up with batteries of tests by which mental capacity could be determined.
The research into the relationship between eugenics theory and psychology in America is
significant because it is still a fairly new subject of research. Most of the writing on the history
of psychology has either been done by the psychologists themselves, or has been such a large
overview that not much space was devoted to the role eugenics played. Additionally, the subject
of eugenics itself has generally been regarded as controversial and has often been left out of the
1
Michael M. Sokal, “The Gestalt Psychologists in Behaviorist America,” The American Historical Review, vol. 89,
no. 5 (Dec. 1984), p. 1241.
2
history of psychology in order to protect psychology from the eugenics taint. Instead of avoiding
such an emotionally charged topics to protect objectivity, this thesis cannot is delving into it,
because I feel there cannot be an objective study of psychology in America if one possible
influence is being purposely ignored.
The title of this study is taken from the dedication of Henry Goddard’s Feeble-
mindedness: Its Causes and Consequences. The full quote is as follows: “Many men have
means; some men appreciate the value of scientific research; a few men have faith enough in the
value of truth to take steps in the dark2.” It was Goddard’s belief that his studies and works were
made in the best interest of humanity, and he was not alone in that belief. The hope of this study
is to objectively examine the influence that eugenics had upon the psychology profession in
America, and to understand the motives behind the actions that are so derided today.
This study utilizes the work of historians such as Paul Davis Chapman and Charles E.
Rosenberg, as well as the writings of psychologists, sociologists, and others outside of the
historical profession. James W. Trent and Kurt Salzinger bring a different perspective to the
table, as does Stephen Jay Gould. Gould had reveled in his position as a scientist writing about a
subject he viewed to be the realm of historians and psychologists, hopping that he would be able
to add new insight.
Paul Davis Chapman attended Stanford University for a graduate study of the history of
education, and afterwards worked at Reed College, San Francisco University High School, and
the Head-Royce School as teacher, college admissions officer, and school principal. His works
include Schools as Sorters: Lewis M. Terman, Applied Psychology, and the Intelligence Testing
2
Henry H. Goddard, Feeble-mindedness: Its Causes and Consequences (New York: Arno Press, 1973), p. x.
3
Movement, 1890-1930 (1988) as well as a similarly titled article, “Schools as Sorters: Testing
and Tracking in California, 1910-1925” (1981).
Chapman’s study explored the first use of intelligence tests to classify students according
to ability in the United States, focusing on the years from 1890 to 1930. He built the growth of
the testing movement around the work of Lewis Terman, who he identified as an active leader of
the movement. Specifically, Chapman sought to answer controversial questions regarding the
reasoning behind the relatively quick adoption of the intelligence test by public schools and
whether the concept of ability grouping had developed independently of intelligence testing. To
answer these questions Chapman explored the new professional network of educated
psychologists and school administrators, the pressing needs of public schools, and the
progressive values expressed by contemporaries of the movement.
As evidence, Chapman relied heavily on Terman’s own works, both his published books
and articles and his unpublished papers that were located at Stanford University. In addition, he
used the reports of the U.S. Bureau of Education for information on actual school practices3.
Chapman’s work built on other historical studies of intelligence testing. Such studies
originated in the 1960s, when criticism of the tests began in earnest for the first time since their
implementation in the public schools. Even so, not much space was devoted to the history of
testing in the early studies. Usually a brief history of the movement was included in broader
social histories of America, as in Lawrence Cremin’s The Transformation of the School (1961)4.
Willis Rudy’s Schools in an Age of Mass Culture (1965) chronicled intelligence testing from
Francis Galton’s studies of hereditary intelligence to the present, concluding that testing became
3
Paul Davis Chapman, Schools as Sorters: Lewis M. Terman, Applied Psychology, and the Intelligence Testing
Movement, 1890-1930 (New York: New York University Press, 1988).
4
Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961).
4
accepted in the schools systems as science became more prominent in education5. Raymond
Callahan, in Education and the Cult of Efficiency (1962), found that the rise of testing in public
schools could be traced back to the pressure for efficiency that the business community exerted
on school administrators6. In Eugenics (1961) Mark Haller studied the effects of hereditarian
values on American social policy, including a brief foray into intelligence testing7.
In the 1970s the debate about the value of testing continued, and historians such as
Clarence Karier and his student Russell Marks attacked the testing system and Lewis Terman
specifically, arguing that the meaning of intelligence, and therefore intelligence tests, were
racially and socially biased against the poor and immigrants. In “Putting Psychology on the
Map: Ideology and Intelligence Testing” (1979) Franz Samelson began to verify and disprove
the accepted events of the testing movement. For instance, he found that psychologists had made
fewer contributions to the war effort than had been assumed. He also disproved many of the
original testers’ claims to objectivity. Samelson’s conclusion that testing changed the American
understanding of intelligence from an indefinable force into an objective, easily-determined
number was echoed in Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (1981). Gould’s study
included intelligence testing methods that had appeared in the early 19th century, though a large
portion of the book was devoted to the intelligence testing movement in America. Gould
condemned mental testing and biological determinism for four errors into which he believed its
creators had fallen. These were reductionism, the explanation of complex phenomena by
deterministic behavior of the smallest constituent parts; reification, the conversion of abstract
concepts into definite, hard entities; dichotomization, attempting to divide complex realities into
5
Willis Rudy, Schools in an Age of Mass Culture: An Exploration of Selected Themes in the History of Twentieth-
Century American Education (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1965).
6
Raymond E. Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
7
Mark Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1963).
5
two, easily understood categories (black and white); and hierarchy, ranking items in a linear
series according to increasing worth8.
John O’Donnell’s The Origins of Behaviorism (1985) determined that psychology shifted
from a “science of consciousness to the science of behavior.” Psychology’s focus on objectivity
corresponded with a similar focus by American society, allowing psychology to find acceptance
more easily than it might have otherwise. Michael Sokal contributed numerous works on the
history of American psychology, notably Psychological Testing and American Society (1987)
and “Approaches to the History of Psychological Testing” (1984), in which he offers guidelines
for the future studies of the subject, in the hopes that it might be discussed without the biases that
have stalked the history of psychology in America.
Charles E. Rosenberg taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 1963 to 2000, and
served as chair of the department of History and the History & Sociology of Science
Departments. In 2001 he became Professor of the History of Science and Ernest E. Monrad
Professor in the Social Sciences at Harvard. His works include Cholera Years: The United
States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (1962); No Other Gods: On Science and American Social
Thought (1976); The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America’s Hospital System (1987);
Explaining Epidemics (1992); and Our Present Complaint: American Medicine, Then and Now
(2007).
Rosenberg’s article “The Bitter Fruit” explored the role of science in providing authority
and a vocabulary to communicate social beliefs in American culture as a religious world view
lost its relevance. One of Rosenberg’s points was that science was used to create explanations
for the unexplained, like diseases, and to justify and preserve existing social roles; overall, it
gave individuals a sense of control over their lives and those of their children. Rosenberg’s
8
Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996), pp. 26-7.
6
works provided a number of connections between science and, as his title suggests, social
thought9.
In Inventing the Feebleminded, James W. Trent, Associate Professor of Sociology and
Social Work at Southern Illinois University, compiled public documents, photographs, and
letters to explain the history of mental illness in America, including how mental illness was
identified and treated at various stages in the country’s history10.
Kurt Salzinger, Ph.D., has been the Executive Director for Science at the American
Psychological Association (APA) from 2001 to 2003 and served on its Board of Directors, as
well as serving as President of the New York Academy of Sciences and of the American
Association of Applied and Preventative Psychology. He has authored or edited twelve books
and over one hundred articles and book chapters, including The Roots of American Psychology.
Evidence for the study consists primarily of the works of Francis Galton, Charles
Davenport, Henry Goddard and the other men discussed later in this study. All of the men were
prolific writers, and many of their works were published in their own day, and are quite easily
accessible now. There are also autobiographies and letters; Galton, for instance, wrote an
autobiography and kept a detailed journal, much of which was published along with a collection
of his correspondences by his student Karl Pearson. If only all of the men were so obliging with
information about their thoughts and lives. Other sources come from contemporaries of
Goddard, Terman, and the others. One such writer was journalist Albert Deutsch. Born in New
York City in 1905 into a poor Jewish family, Deutsch was self-educated. In 1937 he published
The Mentally Ill in America, a scholarly social history that chronicled the treatment of the
9
Charles E. Rosenberg, “The Bitter Fruit: Heredity, Disease, and Social Thought” in No Other Gods: On Science
and American Social Thought (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
10
James W. Trent, Jr., Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994).
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mentally ill in the United States. Inspired by archival work Deutsch had been doing for a history
of the New York State Department of Welfare, The Mentally Ill was an immediate success and
established Deutsch’s reputation as a trusted historian on the subject.
Deutsch referred to the first two decades of the twentieth century as the “alarmist period
in the study and treatment of mental defect.” He blamed the attitudes on four principles: the
creation of mental testing and its use on the feebleminded; the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws of
heredity; the rise of eugenics, with its emphasis on mental heredity; and the publication and
spread of genealogical studies on “degenerate stock11.” The following men were responsible for
creating the alarmist period, from Galton and the introduction of eugenics to Goddard’s testing
of the feebleminded and Terman’s introduction of intelligence testing to public schools.
Chapter Two
Many men played a part in shaping the psychology profession in America, but a few
played roles large enough that they might be considered instrumental in incorporating eugenics
theories into the psychology profession. It is important to look at who these men were and the
circumstances that shaped them in order to understand the motives that orchestrated the change
in psychology.
Francis Galton’s ideas sparked controversy within the scientific community, before
taking hold in the early 1900s. In the United States his ideas were championed by eugenicists
such as Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin, while many were influenced to become
hereditarians, like Henry Goddard, G. Stanley Hall, and Lewis Terman. All sought to understand
11
Albert Deutsch, The Mentally Ill in America: A History of their Care and Treatment from Colonial Times (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1946), p. 353.
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how genetics influenced the future potential of the individual and most sought to use science to
protect and preserve society.
Francis Galton was born February 16, 1822. The youngest son of Samuel Tertius Galton
and his wife, Frances Anne Violetta, daughter of Erasmus Darwin, Francis came from a long line
of scientists. Galton had a religious background; the majority of his grandparents on his father’s
side had been member of the Society of Friends, and he had be raised as an Anglican and
married into a prominent Anglican family. He remained Anglican until he read The Origin of
Species in 185912. As the youngest child with much older siblings, Francis received a great deal
of pampering from his sisters. But it was his sister Adele, who suffered from a spinal injury that
kept her confined to a couch during the day, who would have the earliest influence on him.
Adele begged her mother to be allowed to teach and care for her infant brother, and when her
mother agreed, five-month old Francis was placed in his twelve year-old sister’s care13.
Adele completely immersed herself in Francis, and set a rigorous pace for his education.
By twelve months he could recognize all capital letters, by eighteen months he knew both the
English and Greek alphabets. He read his first book at two and a half, and by five he knew
Homer. But Adele worried that Francis needed more social interaction; all of his siblings were
too old to play with him. So in 1827 he was sent to a small school in Birmingham. While it was
something of a shock for the precocious Francis, he quickly settled down and befriended the
other children14.
At eight years old he was sent to a boarding school in Boulogne, France, in part to fulfill
his father’s own dreams. Francis hated the school and was only able to keep in touch with his
12
John White, “Puritan Intelligence: The Ideological Background to IQ,” Oxford Review of Education, vol. 31, no. 3
(Sept., 2005), p. 428.
13
Martin Brookes, Extreme Measures: The Dark Visions and Bright Ideas of Francis Galton (New York:
Bloomsbury Press, 2004), p. 17.
14
Brookes, Extreme Measures, p. 17.
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family through letters until he finally was brought home in 1832. His grandparents Elizabeth and
Erasmus Darwin had just passed away, leaving the family a sizable inheritance. Francis was
then sent to a private boarding school run by the Reverend Mr. Atwood. He loved the school,
where he learned science, carpentry, cricket and archery along with the classics and theology. In
1835 he was sent to King Edward’s grammar school in Birmingham. The school was harsh and
Francis was unhappy. Soon enough Galton was removed from the school, not because of his
own dissatisfaction but because his mother wanted him to become a medical man like her
father15.
In 1837 Francis was enrolled in Birmingham’s General Hospital, where he endeavored to
understand as much as possible, going so far as to make a list of all of the medications he was
learning how to make and testing them on himself. The heavy workload was taking a toll on his
health but he persisted and in 1839 moved on to King’s College Medical School in London,
where his social life expanded. After a visit from his cousin, Charles Darwin, Francis had the
support he needed to convince his father to allow him to attend Cambridge, but the move proved
disastrous to his health as Galton had trouble keeping up to his own expectations with his work.
He eventually had a breakdown and left Cambridge16. Even so, his foray into the medical field
gave him a background in physiology that he would later put to use in his studies of heredity.
His father died in 1844 and Galton abandoned his medical career to travel in Egypt with
his friends17. After the trip Galton returned home unsure of how he should occupy his time now
that he no longer needed to work. A phrenologist who told him that he was qualified for
15
Brookes, Extreme Measures, pp. 20-26.
16
Brookes, Extreme Measures, p. 31, 35, 43-4, 47.
17
Brookes, Extreme Measures, pp. 51, 54.
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“roughing it” gave him the excuse he needed to continue traveling, and he was off to Africa18.
While there he spent his time taking measurements of the native women and observing the
different peoples he came in contact with. Upon his return to England, he was honored with a
gold medal by the Royal Geographical Society for his detailed maps and summarizations of the
areas he had explored19. His travels showed his early interest in classification of humans, and
offered him the chance to test out rudimentary methods of classification.
In August 1853 Francis Galton married Louisa Butler, only a few months after they had
met. There seemed to have been little the two had in common, and Galton made little mention of
her in his autobiography. Galton seemed to be haunted by his infertile marriage, and the fact that
it might have been caused by his own youthful indiscretions20.
Galton was interested in a variety of areas, knowing a little bit about everything and
making contributions to many fields of study. Galton drew up the first weather maps,
determined that finger prints could be used to identify individuals and pushed Scotland Yard to
use them, discovered the correlation coefficient, invented several types of engines and the Galton
whistle (which was used in early psychological laboratories). He was less interested in money
than the in knowledge itself, and thus was free of any outside obligations and free to study
whatever he pleased21.
In 1897, Louisa Galton died, and her death seemed to rouse Galton to further discoveries
despite his now morbid mindset. He returned to travel, this time with his great-niece Eva as his
nurse and companion, and she seemed to be as much his match as any woman had ever been. In
18
Phrenology was the doctrine that certain areas of the brain each controlled emotions, senses, and thoughts, and
that the external surface of the skull displayed these areas. Thus the bumps on a person’s head could be read to
determine that person’s strengths and weaknesses; Rosenberg, “The Bitter Fruit.”
19
Brookes, Extreme Measures, pp. 84,103-4.
20
Brookes, Extreme Measures, pp. 107-9, 139-40.
21
Vernon C. Hall, “Educational Psychology From 1890 to 1920,” in Educational Psychology: A Century of
Contributions, edited by Barry J. Zimmerman and Dale H. Schunk (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, 2003), p. 23.
11
1902 Galton was awarded the Darwin Award by the Royal Society, and then the Copley Medal
in 1910. He continued traveling and watched as his theories took on a life of their own until he
passed away on January 9, 191122.
Francis Galton received an intensive education starting at a young age, making him
something of a prodigy. Coupled with his rather prestigious family background, it is no wonder
he saw himself and his intellect as the product of heredity, and proof of his theory.
G. Stanley Hall was born in 1829 to Granville Bascom Hall and Abigail Beals. He was
raised on his father’s farm in rural Massachusetts. His father was a local leader, and the family
was socially ambitious, so while college attendance was not a popular option in his area, Hall
acquiesced when his mother insisted. Nevertheless, he did not tell any of his friends what he
planned to do. He received a B.A. from Williams College in 1867, and then, following his
family’s Congregational roots, enrolled in Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He
spent his free time enjoying the city, visiting the theater, churches and courts. His interest in
philosophy led his teachers to advise him to travel abroad in order to continue his education. To
do so, Hall obtained a loan and traveled to Berlin and Bronn, where he studied theology,
philosophy, and physics, and developed an interest in evolutionary naturalism23.
Hall returned to America and earned his divinity degree from Union in 1870. He
worked as a private tutor and as a language instructor at Antioch College before he joined James
at Harvard. While there he was given his doctorate in psychology upon the recommendation of
the philosophy department; the fact that it was upon recommendation led to some debate over
whether or not the degree counted. Again he traveled to Europe, this time to study with
22
Brookes, Extreme Measures, pp. 258, 266, 290-1.
23
Hall, “Educational Psychology,” p. 32; John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, “Hall, Granville Stanley,” American
National Biography, vol. 9 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 857-8.
12
Helmholtz. He became the first American student to study under German psychologist Wilhelm
Wundt, though it only lasted for one semester as Hall opted to drop out24.
When he returned to America though, he was jobless and now had a wife to support. He
gave some lectures on education at Harvard before being invited to Johns Hopkins in 1882. Two
years later he was appointed as professor of psychology and pedagogies. While there he began
to teach the importance of making psychology scientific. He set up a psychology laboratory in a
private home, and encouraged students to avoid metaphysical discussion and focus on problems
that could be solved in the laboratory. He was given $500 in 1887 to found a magazine for
psychical research. Hall instead used the money to found the American Journal of Psychology,
which he used to attack psychical research and other theoretical studies25.
Hall was eventually invited to become president of the newly-formed Clark University.
One well-known aspect of Hall’s teaching was his weekly seminar at his home. Hall would
invite a select group of students to his home on certain evenings. The thirty or so students would
enthusiastically discuss and critique the reports of one or two of their peers. Some praised the
critiquing method- Lewis Terman had loved it- but it proved to be too much for some students
who could not handle the sometimes vicious criticism26.
While in Germany, Hall had noticed the use of questionnaires on children, and he
advocated the use of this method of data collection in America as well. Hall himself used it to
research when and how morality developed in children. In 1904 he published a book on
adolescence that presented his theory of recapitulation. Derived from his reading of Darwin’s
theories, Hall’s ideas caused some controversy. His theory stated that children, beginning at
24
R. W. Rieber and Kurt Salzinger, The Roots of American Psychology: Historical Influences and Implications for
the Future (New York: The New York Academy of Sciences, 1977), p.18
25
Hall, “Educational Psychology,” p. 32; Garraty and Carnes, “Hall, Granville Stanley,” American National
Biography, p. 857.
26
Shurkin, Terman’s Kids, pp. 11-12; Hall, “Educational Psychology,” p. 32.
13
conception, recapitulate, moving through the development of the human race. Starting rapidly
and then slowing as they reached maturity, the child passed though the stages of subhuman
primate behavior, pre-civilization, and early civilization. It was interesting that Hall was
criticized by John Dewey for being too “narrowly scientific” and “contemptuous of philosophy,”
when by 1905 his own students would be criticizing his methods of research for not being
objective and scientific enough27.
One point brought up by today’s psychologists in condemnation against the thought of
eugenicists influencing psychology was the lack of time eugenicists spent studying under the
well-known scientists and psychologists in Germany. Galton had journeyed to Liebig to study in
the foremost chemistry laboratories, but this venture was short-lived as he decided that both his
knowledge of the subject and the German language was insufficient and he instead continued on
his travels. In fact, the decision both to go to Germany and to leave take up a total of only two
lines in his autobiography28. Galton was not alone though, and as mentioned, Hall attended
Wundt’s classes only to drop out after one semester. One of Hall’s later students, James
McKeen Cattell, managed to study longer under Wundt but had no interest in philosophy or
theorizing and Wundt called him “ganz Amerikanisch” or “typically American.” Wundt favored
theoretical studies, while many of his students taught applied psychology29. Hall was among
these, and his students included Terman and Goddard.
Hereditarian Lewis Terman was born on an Indiana farm on January 15, 1877. Lewis
was the twelfth of fourteen children born to James William Terman and his wife Martha
Cutsinger. Terman’s love of learning was shared and encouraged by his family. His father kept
a library in their home and one of Terman’s older brothers, John, had attended college and taught
27
Hall, “Educational Psychology,” p. 33, 85; Shurkin, Terman’s Kids, pp. 13.
28
Francis Galton, Memories of My Life (London: Methuen & Co., 1908), pp.48-9.
29
Rieber and Salzinger, The Roots of American Psychology, pp. 14-5, 18.
14
in a one-room schoolhouse. Terman began attending the one-room schoolhouse in Clark
Township at the age of five, and by twelve he had completed the eighth grade. There were no
nearby high schools and the family lacked the money to send Terman away to school, so he
attended school where his brother taught. Afterwards, Terman was sent to a state “normal
college”- Central Normal located in Danville, Indiana, just west of Indianapolis. Central Normal
was designed to train elementary school teachers, and the ten-week terms consisted of studying
Darwin, Huxley, William James, and the Greek scholars. About this time Terman became
disinterested in the Protestant religion with which he had been raised, becoming agnostic30. At
seventeen, Terman was assigned his own one-room schoolhouse in which to teach, but after only
a year he decided to go back to Danville for his Bachelor of science degree, a forty-eight week
program. He again taught in a one-room schoolhouse, and then he served as president of a forty-
student high school for three years, but finally returned to Danville to earn his bachelors of
pedagogy and arts degrees in 189931.
Terman could learn no more through Danville, and so he entered Indiana University in
1901 as an undergraduate junior. He was unable to afford the schooling, but his family, ever
supportive of his education, lent him money and he took on boarders to help pay the rest. One of
Terman’s teachers was Ernest H. Lindley. Under him, Terman studied the psychology of mental
deficiency, criminality, and genius. It was while doing research for one of Lindley’s seminars
that Terman first noticed the work of Alfred Binet, and for his master’s thesis Terman conducted
a study on leadership in children using a test that Binet had developed to measure suggestibility.
Three of Terman’s psychology professors at Indiana had received their doctorates from Clark
University, and they recommended that Terman go study there as well under Clark’s president G.
30
White, “Puritan Intelligence,” p.435.
31
Shurkin, Terman’s Kids, pp. 8-9.
15
Stanley Hall. Terman was reluctant to continue his education at this point. His second child,
Helen, had just been born and he still needed to pay off his debt to his family. But his father and
brother, at least, supported his education and lent him $1,200 in addition to his previous loan so
that he could go to Clark32.
Terman thrived on the easy-going atmosphere at Clark, where the students were free to
study at their own pace. He also picked up a few habits from Hall that he would keep for the rest
of his life. He began to employ Hall’s detailed schedule keeping, planning out every event of his
day in order to maximize the use of his time. He later copied the format of Hall’s well-known
seminars, though Terman would invite undergraduates along with graduate students. Terman did
disagree with Hall’s reliance on questionnaires in his research, and instead decided that the best
method to obtain information was to administer objective tests to the subject directly, the subject
in this case being children. Because of this conflict, another or Clark’s professors, E. C. Sanford,
became Terman’s advisor. In 1905, Terman passed his final exam and graduated from Clark
University. President Theodore Roosevelt handed him his Ph.D.33.
In September of 1899, Terman married Anna Belle Minton. Another student of Central
Normal, Anna Belle had been praised by Terman’s friends as being the prettiest girl in their
class. Their first child, a son they named Frederick Emmons Arthur Terman in honor of a friend,
was born nine months after the wedding. Terman still continued his education, this time through
Teacher’s Reading Circle, a state reading program. The books he found most interesting were
those on education and child psychology, which he claimed had first drawn his attention as a
32
33
16
child, when a visitor to his family’s home had analyzed the bumps on his head to determine his
intelligence34.
After graduating from Clark, Terman moved his family to California where he first
worked as a principal at a high school in San Bernadino. He then spent four years teaching at the
Los Angeles Normal School (now the University of California at Los Angeles) as a professor of
child study and pedagogy. In 1909, he returned to Indiana University to teach near his family,
but did not feel he was living up to his full intellectual potential in that position. So when a job
as assistant professor at Stanford University was offered he gladly accepted even though the new
position meant a decrease in pay from what he was already receiving. The environment was
good for Terman’s health and he enjoyed his teaching at Stanford, where he was finally able to
implement Hall’s seminar techniques. Both of his children ended up attending Stanford, though
Terman kept very strict gender stereotypes. His son Fred was Terman’s responsibility, while his
daughter was Anna’s. Fred was the favorite child, and despite being allowed to learn at his own
pace (which meant he did not learn to read until eight years old) he eventually graduated Phi
Beta Kappa and became dean of engineering. Anna went to school like a normal child, and
Terman never expected much of her. When she graduated “with distinction” Terman was
actually surprised. She ended up marrying a lawyer, the extent of both her and her parents’
dreams, but finally divorced him and worked as a secretary at Stanford35.
Terman’s family had a predisposition for tuberculosis. When he was three, his older
sister had contracted it and died, and the memories of her suffering haunted him throughout his
life. Before he entered Indiana University he had suffered two episodes of it, and he was told
that for his health he should move to a more suitable climate. His feelings of obligation to his
34
35
Shurkin, Terman’s Kids, pp.14-17.
17
family were stronger, however, than his concern for his health, and so he remained in Indiana
searching for work. He did try to watch his health, constructing a strict diet and exercise
regiment. He took his temperature and pulse at least once a day, and slept with the windows
open at night, regardless of the weather. He had another attack while he was attending Clark,
and then another while in San Bernadino. Though he always recovered quickly, he remained
paranoid about his health. This preoccupation with health and hygiene led to Terman’s interest
in the hygiene practiced within the school systems. He published numerous articles and the book
The Teacher’s Health (1913). In 1914 he followed that up with The Hygiene of the School Child
and Health Work in the Schools, both books designed to encourage better hygiene habits and to
educate parents as well as teachers36.
Terman had been encouraged to learn by his family, and they had supported his education
regardless of the cost. As a result, Terman had a drive to accomplish his goals, and was very
sure of the value of his own ideas. Unfortunately, he could not handle the criticism of his peers
very well. Terman’s family life had other impacts upon his later work. He grew up in a very
traditional family, and raised his children much the same. Those ideals would bleed over into his
work as Terman chose the intellectual norms for intelligence tests, and his choices meant that the
test norms reinforced existing social standings. Terman’s family disposition for tuberculosis and
his own poor health supported hereditarian ideas that he incorporated into his work. His time
teaching and his own lengthy education meant that Terman likely saw the importance and
influence inherent in education, and so improving education became his niche.
Charles Benedict Davenport was born on June 1, 1866, on his family’s farm “Davenport
Ridge” near Stamford, Connecticut. Though he was raised in Brooklyn, he was quite proud of
his heritage as a descendant of Puritan immigrants to New England. The son of real estate agent
36
Shurkin, Terman’s Kids, pp. 8, 10, 13-14, 16-17.
18
and devout Protestant Amzi Benedict Davenport and Jane Joralemon Dimon, religious skeptic
and avid naturalist, Davenport was a quiet child who kept detailed journals37. He was tutored at
home and employed as an errand boy and janitor for his father’s business.
His father insisted on Charles earning an engineering degree so that he might obtain a job
and financial security. In 1879, Davenport entered Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute
where he graduated with honors in 1886 after some difficulty. He worked as a railroad rodman
for almost a year before entering Harvard College to study natural history against his father’s
wishes. From Harvard, he received an B.A. in 1889 and his Ph.D. in zoology in 1892. As a
graduate student he studied under the morphologist Edward L. Mark38.
In 1894 Davenport married Gertrude Crotty, a graduate student at the predecessor of
Radcliff College. An instructor of zoology at the University of Kansas, Gertrude coauthored
several papers with her husband. They had three children. It is interesting that many of the
educated men in America mentioned in this study married educated women. Davenport taught at
Harvard 1892 to 1899, where his work was characterized by a focus on actual experimentation
rather than descriptive work, as well as a focus on quantitative methods39. He then became an
assistant professor at the University of Chicago in 1901, where he remained until the opening of
the Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. He served as
director of the Station until his retirement in 193440.
One of Hall’s students, Herbert Henry Goddard was born in East Vassalboro, Maine, in
1866 to farmers and devout Quakers, Henry Clay Goddard and Sarah Winslow Goddard.
37
John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, “Davenport, Charles Benedict,” American National Biography, vol. 6 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 126.
38
Garraty and Carnes, “Davenport, Charles Benedict,” American National Biography, p. 126; Rosenberg, “Charles
B. Davenport and American Eugenics,” p. 90.
39
Garraty and Carnes, “Davenport, Charles Benedict,” American National Biography, p. 126.
40
Rosenberg, “Charles B. Davenport and American Eugenics,” p. 90.
19
Goddard’s father passed away in 1875 and his mother became a missionary for the Society of
Friends (Quakers), so Goddard was able to receive scholarships allowed him to attend Quaker
boarder schools. He earned his first two degrees from Haverford College in Pennsylvania in
1887, and afterwards worked as a teacher of Latin, history, and botany at the University of
California. He also coached the school’s first football team. In 1889, Goddard both earned his
M.A. in mathematics from Haverford and was married. His wife, Emma Florence Robbins, was
a schoolteacher. They had no children together. For seven years the couple taught at small
Quaker academies in Maine and Ohio before Goddard decided to attend Clark. He earned his
Ph.D. in 189941.
Goddard also traveled abroad, not during his education, but for his job. He was professor
of pedagogy and psychology at West Chester State Teacher’s College until 1906, when he
became the director of research at the Training School for the Feebleminded in Vineland, New
Jersey. He traveled to Europe in the spring of 1908 to visit and learn from similar institutions,
and this is when he first encountered Binet’s intelligence tests in the use of Dr. Decroly and
Mademoiselle Degard. Goddard’s interest in the tests was sparked. In fact, Zenderland, in a
1987 article, observed that Binet and Goddard had some similarities in their interests. Both men
were technically outside of academic psychology though they greatly influenced it, they were
both involved in child study movements and worked to teach the handicapped, and both had
become familiar with medical personnel and ideas through their work with handicapped children.
Goddard decided to use Binet’s tests at the Vineland school when he returned, and he was
pleased when the scores the tests produced matched the informal diagnoses he and the staff had
reached. He used these exact scores to create a classification system for children that he hoped
41
Hall, “Educational Psychology,” p. 25; Garraty and Carnes, “Goddard, Henry Herbert,” American National
Biography, p. 133
20
would be adopted by the medical association. He also began translating Binet’s work and
encouraging its circulation in America42.
Goddard was a firm believer in Darwin’s theories, and when he looked at the work of
Mendel, newly of interest in the scientific community, he believed that it supported his own
developing theories concerning heredity and the idea that intelligence and social pathology are
genetically determined. His famous study of the Kallikak family, published in 1913, set out to
prove these theories. In it Goddard traced the two families descended from Martin Kallikak,
who had fathered a child by a barmaid but then later married a respectable woman and had
children by her. Goddard proposed that the barmaid’s descendants were social misfits and
hazards to society, while those of the respectable woman had become successful and useful to
society43.
Goddard also believed that one result of low intelligence was the inability to tell right
from wrong. Because of this, he believed that eugenics and voluntary sterilization (with
incentives offered) were the best ways to protect society. The Journal of Educational
Psychology (June 1914) recorded Dr. Goddard’s involvement in the case of Jean Gianni, who
was accused of murdering his teacher. Goddard used the Binet test on Gianni and determined
that he had the mental age of ten and was feebleminded. The courts found him not guilty
because of insanity, and the article’s author stated that Goddard’s testimony was the first expert
testimony by a non-medical specialist on the subject of feeblemindedness that the courts had ever
accepted44.
42
Hall, “Educational Psychology,” p. 25
43
Hall, “Educational Psychology,” p. 25; Julie Berebitsky, Like Our Very Own: Adoption and the changing Culture
of Motherhood, 1851-1950 (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2000), p. 28.
44
Hall, “Educational Psychology,” p. 26.
21
He also felt that it would be the most beneficial to all if the mentally retarded were
segregated. As a consultant for the New York Public Schools he encouraged the use of his
specialized form of the Binet tests to classify children into special classes. There were both
negatives and positives to such classification. Children who had been wrongly placed in
specialized classes because of physical disabilities or their teacher’s personal opinions could be
tested and then moved out of special classes. Unfortunately, once tested and placed in a special
class, very little would be expected of children since their intelligence was predetermined and
they would presumably never improve45. Goddard’s work proved useful to both Terman and
Davenport, with whom he kept in contact.
Born in March of 1880 in Oskaloosa, Iowa to George Hamilton Laughlin, preacher and
professor of ancient languages, and Deborah Jane Ross, Harry Laughlin graduated from North
Missouri State Normal School in 1900. Like many of the others he was quickly hired as
principal of a nearby high school before attending Iowa State College where he took agricultural
courses but never earned a graduate degree. Harry Laughlin married Pansy Brown in 1902, but
they had no children. His interest in eugenics was sparked during planning for experiments that
involved breeding poultry to improve the stock. He wrote to Davenport for information and was
soon invited to become the superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Springs
Harbor46.
Though not all of the men were as outgoing as Laughlin on controversial topics, all of
those who were interested in eugenics and heredity had their reputations tainted and irrevocably
linked with its study. Galton and Davenport did much to popularize eugenics, while Hall
incorporated hereditarian ideals in his teaching that influenced his own psychology students as
45
Hall, “Educational Psychology,” p. 25-26.
46
Garraty and Carnes, “Laughlin, Harry Hamilton,” American National Biography, p. 252.
22
well others interested in child study. Laughlin was influential in creating social policy based on
eugenics, while Goddard and Terman utilized and created intelligence tests that incorporated
eugenics ideals while also creating an acceptable niche for psychologists.
Chapter Three
The eugenics theories originally developed by Francis Galton were accepted by many of
the men who would be instrumental in shaping the “new psychology” profession in the United
States. Psychology had long been associated with the study of philosophy and religions, but
efforts were being made to separate it from the theoretical and make psychology a practical,
applied science. Not all of the new psychologists claimed to be eugenicists, but even so, the
influence of eugenics could be seen in their theories. All of these men, eugenicists and
psychologists alike, employed similar means to develop their ideas and spread them to their
intended audiences, whether the academic community or the public at large. They were all
23
instructors or guest lecturers at universities at some time in their lives, and they all wrote
prodigiously, publishing articles, books, and other papers. Many of them headed institutions or
learned societies at some point, and a few even founded societies or journals in order to help
promote their studies.
For the most part, the men wrote about studies that they had performed, though in some
cases the book of theories preceded the actual experimentation. Galton personally collected vast
amounts of data concerning what he termed the “pedigrees” of individuals, and these collections
appeared in most of his writing. His two-part article “Hereditary Talent and Character,”
published in 1865, was his first use of this technique. Inspired by Darwin’s The Origin of
Species and the talent that seemed to run in their family, Galton used the pedigrees of six-
hundred and five notable men to argue that nature determined ability, his proof being that one-
hundred and two members of the larger group were closely related to each other. The
overarching goal of the article was to show that talent and character were inherited traits, similar
to the traits that were selectively bred in animals. If this was the case then humans could be
subject to a selective breeding program as well, and Galton outlined a program he would
advocate for the rest of his life, one which encouraged the reproduction of people who possessed
good qualities while discouraging the reproduction of those with inferior qualities. Though the
article received little notice at first, Galton had chosen Macmillan’s Magazine, which appealed to
wide range of intellectuals, in which to publish it, showing that he was interested in reaching a
diverse audience with his theories47.
Galton’s Hereditary Genius (1869) expanded on the Macmillan papers, categorizing men
by reputation, though first Galton had to justify the use of reputation as a measurement of ability.
The conclusion this time was that male relatives of eminent men were more likely to become
47
Gillham, A Life of Sir Francis Galton, pp. 155-7.
24
eminent themselves the more closely related they were. Galton again began with pedigrees, this
time taking the percentages of eminent men in each level of kinship48.
English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture was published in 1874, and continued
Galton’s tradition of using pedigrees. This time though, criticism from his peers made Galton
choose his subjects more carefully. Only the most truly exceptional could qualify, first having to
be a fellow of the Royal Society. On top of that, the men must have also received medals or
have presided over a learned society. Once he chose one-hundred and eighty British scientists,
Galton sent each man a lengthy questionnaire to fill out, a novel method of gathering data at the
time. Galton still believed that mental capacity was inherited, though in response to criticism he
did examine the role environment played and determined that the support of family and friends
in encouraging natural talent was important. This was also the first appearance of the phrase
“nature and nurture,” which Galton posed as concisely containing all of the different elements
that formed personality, nature representing all of the mental and physical characteristics a child
was born with, and nurture all of the outside influences on the child49.
Galton’s Hereditary Improvement, which had been published in 1873, was the result of
an accumulation of data on physical characteristics that Galton had hoped would provide some
key to quantifying behavior. Galton had tested composite photography and fingerprinting as
methods for using physical characteristics that would indicate mental state. If he could find such
a method Galton believed it could be used in a system to improve the human race by determining
early on which individuals were the most gifted. His goal of improving the human race was
continued in Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, where Galton pointed out the
variation in the psychological development of individuals and claimed that all differences were
48
49
Gillham, A Life of Sir Francis Galton, pp. 191-2. Martin Brookes, Extreme Measures, pp 192-4.
25
due to heredity. It therefore became the duty of every individual to do everything that was
legally in their power to help further the development of the human race50.
In 1899 Francis Galton and his follower Karl Pearson met Charles Davenport. Davenport
was a biologist and had recently become the director of the Brooklyn Academy of Arts and
Sciences Biological Laboratory in Cold Springs Harbor, Long Island. The three had much to
talk about, and it did not take long before Davenport became an admirer and staunch support of
Galton’s methodology. The admiration was mutual, and two years later Davenport was invited
to be coeditor of the Galton and Pearson’s journal, Biometrika. Back in the United States,
Davenport released Statistical Methods with Special Reference to Biological Variation (1899),
which began the introduction of quantitative and biometrical methods into the study of biology in
the United States. In 1907, Davenport and his wife Gertrude, a biologist herself, began
publishing a series of papers that applied the principles of heredity to the physical human
appearance. Soon after, in 1910, Davenport published his most notable contribution to eugenics:
Heredity in Relation to Eugenics. In it, Davenport defined “eugenics” as “the science of human
improvement by better breeding.” His book included explanations of eugenics and its purpose,
demonstrated how traits were inherited, and included the analyses of some proposed American
families. One family of social reprobates was the Jukes, and the analysis was reminiscent the
Kallikak family study that Goddard performed. Davenport concluded that social problems were
caused by biological problems, and that science through eugenics was the only way to fix them51.
Though not directly involved in eugenics, G. Stanley Hall made significant contributions
to the new study of psychology in the United States, and taught a number of young men who
50
Gillham, A Life of Sir Francis Galton, pp. 195-7, 207.
51
Charles B. Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1972).
Garraty and Carnes, “Davenport, Charles Benedict,” American National Biography, pp. 126-7; Charles B.
Davenport, “Research in Eugenics,” Science, vol. 54, no. 1400 (Oct., 1921), p. 397.
26
went on to be influential to the study in their own right, including Henry Goddard and Lewis
Terman. Hall’s work was also read and admired by Alfred Binet, who created the first
intelligence test52. Hall’s article, “The Contents of Children’s Minds Upon Entering School,”
(1893) is credited with beginning the child study movement. The article was based on a study
Hall conducted employing the use of questionnaires on children directly to discover what they
knew and felt before they began schooling in order to determine when morality began to develop
in children, how long it took, and who influenced its development. He also developed a theory
of recapitulation, claiming that children go through three stages of development that correspond
to the stages of human evolution as they grow to adulthood. He began proclaiming this theory
before he had even begun his research, though it was not published until his book on
adolescence. His Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relation for Physiology, Anthropology,
Sociology, Sex Crimes, Religion, and Education, published in 1904, was the result of a ten-year
study where Hall had sent out fifteen to twenty thousand questionnaires to teachers, principals
and other school officials who administered them to children. Though he championed the use of
the questionnaire as a method of data gathering, Hall was often criticized for its use since there
was no standardization of the procedure53.
Like Davenport, Charles Goddard was more involved in his work than writing, though he
documented all of his studies and a few are well-known. This may be because Goddard and
Davenport met in 1909 kept up a correspondence with one another. In fact, it was Davenport
who took Goddard’s interest in the causes of feeblemindedness in the children he cared for and
directed it into years of study on the inheritance of feeblemindedness. In 1912 Goddard
52
Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, p. 157; Theta H. Wolf, Alfred Binet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1973), pp. 207, 284.
53
Garraty and Carnes, “Hall, Granville Stanley,” American National Biography, pp. 857-8. Alice Boardman Smuts,
Science in the Service of Children, 1893-1935 (New Haven: Yale university Press, 2006), pp. 34-6, 38.
27
published one study of a local family he pseudonymously titled The Kallikak Family, from the
Greek roots for “good” and “bad.” This study in the heredity of feeblemindedness followed the
two families descended from martin Kallikak. One line descended from a feebleminded
barmaid, and another from the respectable, normal woman he later married. The barmaid’s
descendants were supposedly all criminal and feebleminded degenerates, while the wife’s were
useful members of society. Goddard followed The Kallikak Family with Feeblemindedness: Its
Causes and Consequences in 1914, in which he traced the family histories of more than three
hundred children in the town of Vineland, New Jersey. From his studies Goddard came to
believe that intelligence was inherited and that it was the cause of every social ill, including
crime, alcoholism, prostitution and even poverty. He thought that sexual sterilization or
permanent institutionalization of the feebleminded could help reduce their number, because if
intelligence was biological then it could not be changed, only prevented54.
Goddard was also in communications with another Clark graduate, Lewis Terman.
Goddard gave Terman one of his translations of Binet in 1916, and Terman revised the test and
published it as the Stanford-Binet IQ test in 1916. In 1916 Terman published The Measurement
of Intelligence, in which he cited Goddard’s studies on the correlations between low intelligence
and the potential for degenerate behavior. Terman believed that morality required the capability
of making good judgments, and those with low intelligence had trouble making such judgments;
therefore, it was more likely that those with low intelligence would have a harder time not falling
into immorality. Terman also became interested in the tests themselves, not just their
application. In 1917 he was part of a committee hired by the United States Army to develop
screening tests for new recruits. He then collaborated on the formation of A National
54
Garraty and Carnes, “Goddard, Henry American National Biography, p. 134. Barry J. Zimmerman and Dale H.
Schunk, Educational Psychology: A Century of Contributions (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003), p.
25.
28
Intelligence Test to be used on Grades 3 to 8, and then formed his own test for Grades 7 to 12,
the Terman Group Test of Mental Ability. Soon after he contributed to the creation of the
Stanford Achievement Test, the first major standardized test of academic achievement55. To
promote his tests, Terman conducted studies on the progress of children through the educational
system. In The Intelligence of School Children he analyzed the data he collected and concluded
that children with different mental capacities were being placed in the same classes, and with the
teachers unable gauge ability, both slow and bright children were receiving inadequate attention.
His solution was a system of intelligence testing and classification of students to ensure that
students of similar mental ability were taught together56.
All of the men discussed were active in promoting their ideas beyond just writing about
them, and they all went to great lengths to obtain data to study. Different methodologies were
employed to collect data, and usually on different subjects. Galton and Hall, for instance, were
both supports of the questionnaire method, while Terman found this particularly unscientific.
Not all of them studied adult behavior, though Davenport was the only one who did not study
children in some way.
One of Galton’s first studies on children involved surveying sets of twins, thirty-five
identical and twenty nonidentical, to examine the influences nature and nurture had on growing
children57. Another study he had received permission for was the collection of physical
measurements such as weight and height from the boys who attended the Marlborough School in
1874. To help organize the data from this particular study, Galton created a new statistical tool
55
Zimmerman and Schunk, Educational Psychology, pp. 26-7, 158-9, 163.
56
Chapman, Schools as Sorters, p. 86.
57
29
that could arrange measurements on a single scale. He called it the “ogive,” though it has since
come to be known as “the inverse normal cumulative distribution function.”58
Galton was constantly searching for ways to collect more information to analyze,
especially on human pedigrees. He once wrote an article in the Fortnightly titled “Medical
Family Register,” offering prize money in return for information from doctors concerning the
physical and mental characteristics of their families. This is did not succeed, so two years later
in 1884, Galton published a similar ad along with one of his articles in Macmillan’s. This offer
was open to anyone who would fill out the fifty-page questionnaire, and one-hundred and fifty
individuals completed and returned the form. Galton was also the editor of the Life-History
Album. The idea for the Album came from a subcommittee of Life-History that Galton chaired,
which was part of the Collective Investigation Committee of the British Medical Association.
The Album was to be given to new parents, with the hopes that they and their children would
take up the task of keeping their own detailed family pedigrees59.
In 1884, Galton succeeded in opening an Anthropomorphic Laboratory at the
international health Exhibition held in the Gardens of the Royal Horticultural Society I South
Kensington. Visitors paid a three pence admission fee and received a card layered with carbon
paper and a thin transfer paper, on which all of their measurements would be recorded. The
visitor would keep the original card and the lab the carbon copy. Galton had collected the
information on 9,337 individuals by the time the Exhibition closed in 1885. The Laboratory was
then moved to a room of the Science Galleries of the South Kensington Museum. The
58
59
Gillham, A Life of Sir Francis Galton, p. 209.
30
information gathered by Galton between 1877 and 1888, including the data from the Laboratory,
was analyzed and published in 1889 in Natural Inheritance60.
In 1901 Galton delivered the second Huxley lecture at the Royal Anthropological
Institute. He focused on eugenics in Britain, referencing the sociological study of London’s
working men that had recently been conducted by Charles Booth. Galton stressed the
importance of positive eugenics, increasing those of better heredity rather than just suppressing
the inferior. He was also a featured speaker for the newly formed Sociological Society on April
18, 1904. He titled his address “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims,” and laid a five-point
plan for the society to follow in order to successfully promote eugenics and create a program in
Great Britain61.
As Galton’s acquaintance and the leading promoter of eugenics in the United States,
Charles Davenport’s writings carried a great deal of weight. In fact, his book Heredity in
Relation to Eugenics was one of the most comprehensive and trusted sources of information
regarding eugenics doctrines during the height of the eugenics movement62. Yet Davenport had
always been much more interested on the experimentation itself than the description of it, and he
was involved in the founding of organizations key to eugenics study in the United States.
Already the director of the Biological Laboratory in Cold Springs Harbor, Davenport succeeded
in convincing the Carnegie Institute of Washington to open a center for the experimental
breeding of large, agriculturally important animals, and in 1904 the Station for Experimental
Evolution in Cold Springs Harbor opened with Davenport as director. The purpose of the Station
was to encourage and coordinate research on heredity and variation using hybridization,
60
61
Gillham, A Life of Sir Francis Galton, pp. 324-8; Francis Galton, “Studies in Eugenics,” The American Journal of
Sociology, vol. 11, no. 1 (July, 1905).
62
Charles E. Rosenberg, “Charles Benedict Davenport and the Beginning of Human Genetics,” Bulletin of the
History of Medicine 35 (1961): pp. 266-276.
31
selection and cytology. In 1903, Davenport became one of the founders of the American
Breeders Association. As his interest in genetics began to narrow in on human genetics and
eugenics, Davenport realized that he needed to conduct research on what physical, physiological,
and behavioral traits were inherited and how. In order to make use the information he gathered,
Davenport also knew he would need to use education and political lobbying to promote a
eugenics program. In 1910, after receiving funds from a number of independent persons who
Davenport convinced of the value of eugenics, the Eugenics Record Office opened in Cold
Springs Harbor, again with Davenport as director. Davenport’s investigations into the
inheritance of personality of mental traits began in earnest, and a number of papers were written
on the genetics behind alcoholism, criminality, prostitution, and feeblemindedness. Though he
acknowledged the need for political involvement in support of eugenics, Davenport did not
actively engage in such activities, preferring to support the more politically active Harry
Laughlin, superintendent of the Eugenics Records Office63.
Laughlin had published a manifesto on eugenical sterilization in 1922 called Eugenical
Sterilization in the United States, as well many articles and analyses of statistical data regarding
immigration, which included A Statistical Directory of State Institutions for the Defective,
Dependent and Delinquent Classes (1919), Analysis of America’s Modern Melting Pot (1922),
and Europe as an Emigrant Exporting Continent and the United States as an Immigrant
Receiving Nation (1924), and he became regarded as an expert on eugenics. Even so, his work
was not well though of by most scientists, and was rarely seen in peer-reviewed journals. His
influence was most notably seen in the Buck v. Bell case, where he served as an expert witness
63
Garraty and Carnes, “Davenport, Charles Benedict,” American National Biography, vol. 6, pp. 126-7.
32
for the state in the sterilization petition of Carrie Buck, and in the immigration laws which were
passed, based in part on Laughlin’s studies64.
Hall also founded a number of institutions and journals, and much of his influence was
seen in the students he taught rather than in his writing alone. Hall lectured at Harvard and was
professor of psychology and pedagogies at Johns Hopkins- the first chair devoted to psychology
in the United States- where he established a psychological laboratory at a private home. During
his years at Johns Hopkins, he was also offered $500 to found a journal about psychical research,
which Hall used instead to found the American Journal of Psychology. In fact, Hall was
adamant about separating psychology from psychical and religious research, believing them to
be unscientific. This is the reason he established so many psychological laboratories; he
believed that if psychologists investigated only scientific problems using standardized laboratory
methods psychology would become an accepted part of the scientific community. In 1891 Hall
founded the Pedagogical Seminary, now the Journal of Genetic Psychology, and in 1892 he
organized and became the first president of the American Psychological Association (APA). He
also became the first president of the child study department of the National Education
Association in 1894. Much of Hall’s later work showed a trend to educate teachers and parents
about his ideas, rather than just the scientific community. Pedagogical Seminary was intended to
bring teachers into contact with psychology65.
In 1888 he was approached by Joseph Gilman Clark to plan the university Clark wanted
to fund. Hall traveled to Europe and brought the new ideas back to Clark University in an
attempt to make it a model of advanced education, employing scientific research as its main
methodology. Differing goals for the school left Hall and Clark in constant disagreement, and
64
Garraty and Carnes, “Laughlin, Harry Hamilton,” American National Biography, vol. 13, pp. 252-3.
65
Garraty and Carnes, “Hall, Granville Stanley,” American National Biography, vol. 9, pp. 857-8. Smuts, Science
in the Service of Children, p. 55.
33
many of the faculty left the uncomfortable arrangement for the new University of Chicago in
1892. Nevertheless, hall managed to make Clark an informal school that allowed the students
freedom to study at their own pace. Students simply turned in their names to hall’s secretary to
register; there were no majors. Attendance was not required and the only test students ever took
was a four-hour exam once they had completed all of the required courses. If they passed they
graduated with a Ph.D. Hall also employed the use of weekly seminars to gather students
together to critique (sometimes harshly) one another’s work66.
One of Hall’s students, Charles Goddard, went on to become the director of
psychological research at the Vineland Training School in 1906. He had met Edward Johnstone,
the superintendent of the Training School for Feebleminded Girls and Boys in Vineland, New
Jersey, while creating a child-study association for Pennsylvania schoolteachers in order to
encourage the acceptance of scientific methodology in education. Goddard went to Europe to
research techniques to use at the school, and while there came across the Binet intelligence tests.
The use of these tests on the children at the Training School resulted in scores that matched
Goddard’s own informal opinions and allowed him to develop a classification system for the
children’s different levels of mental ability. Goddard became an enthusiastic supporter of the
tests, translating and circulating Binet’s work in America and encouraging the American
Association for the Study of the Feeble-Minded to use the tests as he had to classify children by
their level of impairment67.
In 1910 Goddard became the first American to test the intelligence of public school
children, and in 1911 he helped New Jersey legislators pass the first law mandating special class
for the blind, deaf and feebleminded in the United States. He conducted a study of New York
66
Zimmerman and Schunk, Educational Psychology, p. 33.
67
Garraty and Carnes, “Goddard, Henry Herbert,” American National Biography, vol. 9, pp. 133-5. Zimmerman
and Schunk, Educational Psychology, p. 25.
34
City’s special education program which he published in 1914 as School Training of Defective
Children. Goddard also trained educators for special classes, both at Vineland’s summer school
for special class teachers and at lectures held at New York University’s School of Pedagogy68.
Lewis Terman became head of the Department of Psychology at Stanford university in
1922 and then president of the American Psychological Association in 1923. But one of
Terman’s most interesting acts was a study he conducted on a group of children he had tested
who scored within the genius range. The study was funded by the Commonwealth Foundation in
1921, with the intent to observe the mental and physical adjustment of the gifted throughout their
lives, since before the study it was assumed that the very intelligent were often sickly and
eccentric. Terman became personally involved in the lives of many of the children, offering
monetary support when needed. The study persisted even after Terman’s death, and the
information was collected within five volumes69.
It is important to understand that one of the reasons for the fairly quick acceptance and
integration of eugenics was that the idea of heredity was already assumed, as evidenced by the
familiar phrase, “like begets like.” The idea was based on principles that were accepted and
understood by both physicians and laymen: the concept that behavioral characteristics were
inherited; that heredity was a process that began with conception and ended at weaning; and that
any illness or disease was not an entity unto itself with a specific cause, but was the result of the
total physiological process of a person’s life. Thus both body and mind were either healthy or
ill. Without actually scientific knowledge, the physicians had to lay the blame for diseases on
heredity or risk admitting that they could neither explain nor cure illnesses. Heredity also
offered the public a way to explain crime and poverty that essentially left blame on the individual
68
Garraty and Carnes, “Goddard, Henry Herbert,” American National Biography, vol. 9, pp. 133-5.
69
Zimmerman and Schunk, Educational Psychology, p. 160. Joel N. Shurkin, Terman’s Kids: The Groundbreaking
Study of How the Gifted Grow Up (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1992).
35
rather than society, and was also a justification for existing social norms. With the belief in
heredity understood, eugenics offered people a way to take control of the uncontrollable, to
change society and protect their own children70.
Psychology made such use of eugenics in an effort to establish itself as a profession. All
of the disciplines were making strides towards professionalization, and a professional was
understood to be an individual of superior skill and knowledge. This was in part due to the
lengthy and difficult education process that was required in order to obtain a degree or license.
The most important aspect of the professional though was their position of authority. Since
America had no traditional source of authority, universities related science as truth to the public.
Truth could only be found through strict observations and repeatable experiments. Ideological
theories were only useful if they were supported by facts. It became the job of the professional
to understand nature through science, and to use their own superior judgment to change society
to better reflect that understanding. This calling to serve mankind through an understanding of
nature made the professional accountable only to himself and his profession, and the use of
science meant that the professional was outside of the realm of political favoritism and personal
interest71. Psychology used the “science” of eugenics and its verification of hereditarianism as
justification for the role of psychologists as professionals in determining intellect and mental
capacity.
Francis Galton’s theory of eugenics impacted the growing interest in psychology through
the fevered efforts of both stalwart eugenics and the determined new psychologists. These men
70
Rosenberg, “The Bitter Fruit;” “Nearsightedness Could Be Wiped out by Eugenics,” The Science News-Letter,
vol. 41, no. 25 (June, 1942), pp. 387-8; Steven Selden, “Transforming Better Babies into Fitter Families: Archival
Resources and the History of the American Eugenics Movement, 1908-1930,” Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society, vol. 149, no. 2 (June 2005).
71
Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education
in America (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1976), pp.86-92, 326-7; Peter Novick, That Noble Dream:
The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1998), pp. 524-5.
36
believed that they had found correlations between human mental abilities and biological
heredity, and in doing so thought that they had also found a way to solve society’s problems.
They conducted numerous studies and experiments, and went to great lengths to gather data to
analyze. They advocated their theories in books, classrooms, and, occasionally, venues
accessible to the public at large. It was only through their persistence that eugenics theories
became as widespread as they did, and that psychology was able to become a valid, scientific,
field of study.
Chapter Four
Eugenicists shaped the psychology profession that emerged in America, their theories
inspiring further studies into the nature of intellect even as the belief in the hereditary condition
of intellect gained popular acceptance. Psychologists strove to emulate the eugenicists and other
scientists by quantifying their data, and the IQ tests that resulted were put to use categorizing
individuals in order to better society as understood through the eugenics theory.
Francis Galton had concluded that mental abilities were an inherited characteristic and
though the theory had its opponents, it remained prevalent long after Galton’s death. Charles
Davenport and other eugenicists took Galton’s theories and worked to make eugenics an
37
acceptable ideology in the United States. G. Stanley Hall was one of the men who believed the
eugenics doctrine, and his position as a leading psychologist influenced others, such as his
students, to incorporate eugenics into their own world views. The men who were able to shape
the role of the psychologist based on those eugenics theories were the next generation of sorts.
These men did not just gather information and teach it, but actively used that information to
change public policy.
Terman, Goddard, and Laughlin all believed that the studies they conducted utilizing
family trees and IQ tests were proof of the heredity of intellect, and for many the idea was so
ingrained that it was just understood as a fact. Therefore, there was no question that people of
lesser intellect would bear children much the same. Because intellect was inherited, it was a
permanent attribute that could not be changed; the mental abilities an individual was born with
would remain the same throughout their entire lives.
Under this presumption it made sense to test children early so they might be classified.
Their classification would determine the level of education they would receive, since only so
much would ever be expected of those with lesser capabilities, and even those who were average
would never be pushed beyond that. The IQ tests would also allow for career placement advice.
Since their mental capabilities would not change, professionals would be able to look at a child’s
score to determine the job for which their particular intellect was suited.
The trust in and enthusiasm for science that was prevalent in the early 20th century played
a large part in the influence eugenics had on society. It was also a reason for early
psychologists’ efforts to be seen as scientific. Science was gaining an air of authority, not
because it was seen as infallible, but because people believed that it would eventually be able to
pinpoint the causes of human failures so that those causes could be dealt with and resolved.
38
Health and happiness could be achieved through the objectivity and methodological problem-
solving that science represented, and many eugenicists saw it as the key to the next stage of
human evolution. Psychologists went through a great deal of effort to perfect their methods and
their image, to take psychology out of the realm of philosophy and religion with which it had
been associated. It became increasingly important to make sure their data was quantifiable, and
the IQ tests (which Galton had always tried to create) gave psychologists a tool by which they
could measure previously unquantifiable characteristics and justify their role as experts on
human thought and behavior.
IQ tests became popular not just because the psychologists felt they were important, but
because schools needed them. Schools were changing in the early 20th century; in part due to an
influx of immigrant children and new laws requiring student attendance. Large percentages of
children were found to be having trouble making it though the educational system and studies
were conducted to discover what the reason for this was and if it was due to insufficient funding.
The majority of the studies found the cause to be significant numbers of retarded children in the
school system; these children were not gaining from the inflexible directed at the other students.
Leonard P. Ayres, a former superintendent of schools for Puerto Rico, conducted one of the
studies and concluded that the school systems were simply inefficient, stating that “Retardation
means- not that we are spending too much- but that we are spending it wastefully.” The general
recommendation of those who conducted the studies was that a differentiated curriculum would
help solve the problem, but the students would need to be classified according to their needs
first72.
72
Paul Davis Chapman, Schools as Sorters: Lewis M. Terman, Applied Psychology, and the Intelligence Testing
Movement, 1890-1930 (New York: New York University Press, 1988), pp. 44-5.
39
IQ tests were ideal for this since they could identify individuals by their abilities, making
it easier to group together those with similar mental abilities. Terman’s handbook for the
administration of the Stanford-Binet tests included the concept of the intelligence quotient, or IQ,
which was the ratio of mental age to chronological age. The mental age was determined by how
well an individual could perform certain intellectual tasks. Terman enthusiastically touted uses
for the test in schools: the tests would allow the creation of special classes for below average
students, more individualized attention to the educational needs of students of all levels, and
vocational guidance. Grade promotion could be based on actual intellectual ability rather than
age, and normal children would have the opportunity to learn outside of the presence of children
with lower intellects73.
But though schools would eventually use them, the tests would need to prove their value
first, and the military during World War I would be their trial. In May of 1917, Robert M.
Yerkes, president of the American Psychological Association, called upon Terman to help
develop group intelligence tests for the army. The goal was to examine recruits in order to
identify those who were unfit for service due to psychological problems. Goddard was on one of
the committees the Association had created and he offered the use of the Vineland Training
School’s facilities in order to develop and assess the effectiveness of the tests. Eventually, the
tests created went beyond just identifying the unfit and were able to be used to classify the entire
army. Despite the evidence to the contrary provided by the test results, the creators of the test
happily believed that it was an indication of natural ability, and this was what the army agreed
when it recommended the test to the public74.
73
Chapman, School as Sorters, pp. 17-8, 27; Shurkin, pp. 17-25.
74
Chapman, Schools as Sorters, pp. 66-8, 71.
40
The army testing had also provided the opportunity for an important development in the
psychological community. One committee that had been formed during the war was the
Committee on Qualifications for Psychological Examiners, of which Terman was a member.
The committee created a system to classify psychological examiners, ranking them by their
education and training in psychology, and how qualified they were to make determinations. The
committee also compiled a proposal of requirements and training that should be necessary for
examiners to meet, and after the war the American Psychological Association established the
committee to serve as a national certification board75.
It was in 1919 that Terman and Yerkes finally received funding from the General
Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation to develop intelligence tests for public use.
Three meetings of the Elementary School Intelligence Examination Board were scheduled, and
at the first of these meetings the board developed a scale to measure grades 3 to 8. The
subsequent meetings initiated trails of the test in public and private elementary schools, and
determined what would be the standard norms by which intelligence would be judged76.
Terman believed that the efforts to increase the number of children successfully
completing school were ultimately ineffective because the causes of that failure had not been
correctly portrayed. Terman argued that much of the problem was that retardation was blamed
on outside influences, such as poor attendance, late entrance into the school system, or physical
defects, when the real issue was a difference in mental ability amongst the students. He
conducted a study of children in first, firth and ninth grades to prove this point. After testing their
mental ages, Terman found that not only did the IQs vary widely amongst children in each class
75
Chapman, Schools as Sorters, pp. 74-5.
76
Chapman, Schools as Sorters, pp. 80-1; Barry J. Zimmerman and Dale H. Schunk, Educational Psychology: A
Century of Contributions (Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates, 2003), pp. 26-7, 158-9, 163.
41
of the same grade level, but there were children in the first grade whose IQ was on par with the
lowest of the ninth graders. He concluded that low IQ lead to poor performance in school77.
To correct for the variation in mental ages that was found within classes and grades, and
the inability of many teachers to accurately determine each student’s abilities, Terman proposed
a system of intelligence testing and classification of students to ensure that students of similar
mental abilities were taught together, so that students were not forced to meet unreasonably high
standards for their mental ability or held back from more challenging work because of their
classmates. To accomplish this, Terman determined that all children would be individually
tested in the first grade and then every other year they would take a group test. He argued
against naysayers of the group test that individualized, selective testing every year meant that not
all of the students could be tested, and those who needed it the most would be overlooked. He
also emphasized that while the tests would be supervised by a school psychologist or
administrator, the ultimate success of the tests depended on the teachers being willing to use
them, even if the school board had not decided to implement testing78.
Terman also proposed a “multiple-track plan” in Intelligence Tests and School
Reorganization, which included five groupings for children that ranged from “gifted” to
“special.” Intelligence tests would allow for specialized teaching methods and content for each
class, and the curriculum could be adjusted to ultimately include classes for vocational teaching
or college prep. Terman asserted that the intelligence groupings would never be permanent, but
flexible and allowing movement within the tracks. Anything else would be “repugnant to the
American ideals of democracy.” In fact, he called the single-track system “a straight jacket
which dwarfs the mental development of the inferior as well as the gifted.” In spite of his
77
78
42
assurance that movement between the tracks would be available, Terman did not think it would
ever happen. He strongly believed that intelligence was inherited and permanent, which was
why vocational training based on mental groupings would be possible. He cited a correlation
between mental ability and different vocations, from the professional classes to unskilled
laborers. Terman hoped that early testing would prove an efficient way to determine an
individual’s profession and best utilize the country’s “talent79.”
Since Terman had developed many tests and the technology used to implement and
understand them, as well as actively pushing for their adoption, many of his views influenced
and were accepted by other psychologists as well as teachers and school administrators. These
views included the idea that intelligence was easily measurable through testing, that intelligence
was inherited and that the inherent mental capacities of different races and classes justified their
unequal treatment, and that intelligence testing in schools would be ability to identify ability and
therefore the future of students80.
The tests were rapidly being accepted by schools around the country, and in December of
1920, the Psychological Association’s Committee on Tests finally ended and the Division of
Anthropology and Psychology of the National Research Council took over the responsibility for
the tests81.
The ultimate hope for IQ tests was that they would be able to help psychologists better
society. Eugenicists had argued that intelligence was inherited and though the idea still had its
opponents it also had some very influential believers. Their next point was a link between
intelligence and morals. The eugenicists now argued that an individual needed to be intelligent
to tell right from wrong and to fully understand their actions and the consequences of their
79
Chapman, Schools as Sorters, pp. 89-91; White, “Puritan Intelligence,” p. 427.
80
81
43
decisions. Since those of lesser intelligence (specifically those deemed “feebleminded”) lacked
this ability, they would always be drawn to criminal activities and immoral pursuits.
Terman strongly believed in the connection between low intelligence and crime. His
hope was that his tests could help rescue society from the “menace of the feeble-minded” by
identifying so-called defective individuals early enough to deal with them and thereby put an end
to crime, poverty, and all other social ills82. Terman was not alone in his belief: Henry Goddard
was also called on to testify in the case of Jean Gianni, a young man accused of murdering his
teacher. Goddard applied the Binet test to Gianni to determine his mental age and therefore, his
ability to tell right from wrong. The test came back with the result that Gianni had a very young
mental age and was therefore feebleminded. Goddard stated that because Gianni was
feebleminded, he could not be held responsible for his actions, and the court agreed, finding
Gianni not guilty by reason of insanity. His testimony was the first expert testimony by a non-
medical specialist on the subject of feeble-mindedness that the courts had ever accepted83.
The links between intelligence and heredity, and then intelligence and morals led
eugenicists to conclude that moral character was also an inherited trait, and that children would
inevitably follow in their parents’ moral footsteps. This was no concern when the families
discussed met certain eugenics characteristics that determined them useful to society- being of a
certain class, and possessing a high intellect and education- but when the families were lower
class and of inferior mental abilities, the thought of couples propagating and producing more
inferior citizens induced a panic. The result was a rush of negative eugenics policies which
included the sterilization, or at the very least segregation, of those considered “feebleminded”
82
83
Zimmerman and Schunk, Educational Psychology, p. 26.
44
and laws to restrict the influx of immigrants into America, as an upsurge in nativism combined
with the idea that most immigrants were mentally inferior and therefore dangerous to society.
Much of the push for sterilization and immigration laws came from eugenicists and their
supporters. Prescott Hall, a lawyer and classmate of Davenport at Harvard, and Robert deCourcy
Ward, a Harvard professor, founded the Immigration Restriction League in 1894. The League
urged law-makers to require literacy testing of foreign immigrants, though this was never passed.
When the League became interested in eugenics teachings and requested information, Davenport
recognized potential allies and appointed Prescott Hall to the Immigration Subcommittee of the
American Breeder’s Association Eugenic Committee84. In 1882, Congress barred the admission
of lunatics and idiots into the United States, and then, in 1903, epileptics. In February of 1912
the Chamber of Congress of New York State urged the Commissioner of Immigration to exclude
feebleminded individuals85.
Davenport’s first concern was still the Eugenics Record Office, and he stood by his
policy to keep it out of any negative publicity; he made it clear to Hall that he refused to allow
the Eugenics Record Office to be involved in any lobbying of Congress for changes in
immigration laws. He did point out, however, that the American Breeder’s Association and its
journal, the Journal of Heredity, were open for Prescott Hall’s use in conveying ideas to the
public86.
Harry Laughlin, superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office, originally became
involved in immigration policy as a result of Davenport’s interest. During hearings in 1921,
84
Elof Axel Carlson, The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea (New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2001),
p. 257.
85
James W. Trent, Jr., Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994), p. 157.
86
Carlson, The Unfit, p. 258; Garraty and Carnes, “Davenport, Charles Benedict,” American National Biography,
pp. 126.
45
Laughlin was called as an “expert witness” in favor of more restrictive immigration laws.
Laughlin himself was in favor of doing physical and mental screenings of potential immigrants
in their homelands, to ensure that only eugenically sound individuals entered the country.
Congress dismissed his idea, but this was not the only result of his political involvement. The
very thing Davenport had avoided beset Laughlin; the Carnegie Institute, which funded the Cold
Springs Harbor Laboratory, delivered a warning that Laughlin was becoming less than
respectable and scientific in his accusations, and had best keep his opinions to himself and
continue his research to see if anything useful would come of it87.
While it was up to eugenicists to provide expert knowledge of biological reasons to
restrict immigration, this did not mean that psychologists had no involvement in the matter.
Terman for one believed that his studies had indicated that intelligence was a mostly inherited
trait. During his study on the IQs of children in first, fifth and ninth grades, he had analyzed the
scores with respect to racial origin. He found that there was a correlation between race and
intellect, with the average score of “Spanish” students being nearly feeble-minded, while most
“American” and “North European” students scored above average. Terman became strongly in
favor of using science to control the future evolution of the race, and he saw laws that would
restrict the immigration of southern and eastern Europeans to the United States88. Goddard, in
his unusual position of both eugenicist and psychologist, was actually given funding to apply the
Binet scale to immigrants on Ellis Island in 1912. In 1917 he announced that forty to fifty
percent of the immigrants he tested were classified as feebleminded. This information had been
used by Davenport and Laughlin as evidence for the necessity of immigration restriction, but it
87
Carlson, The Unfit, pp. 258-9; Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, p. 198.
88
Chapman, Schools as Sorters, pp. 31-2, 85.
46
was not until 1924 that the Johnson-Lodge Immigration Act was passed, allowing only two
percent of the 1890 level of immigrants of each nationality89.
Goddard had strong convictions regarding the feeble-minded, and he made them clear
when he began his proposal for a eugenic plan for addressing the issue, saying, “The feeble-
minded person is not desirable, he is a social encumbrance, often a burden to himself.” He
believed that the feeble-minded would not have enough intelligence to prevent themselves from
procreating, and therefore society had to take steps if it was to eliminate the problems caused by
those of lesser intellect. He put forth two proposals to curb their reproduction: colonization and
sterilization. The first he deemed impractical, since it would be both expensive and neigh on
impossible to find and colonize all of the feeble-minded. The second he worried would never
catch on because it offended the sensibilities of many of eugenics’ opponents. Regardless, he
argued that both options had their place, though simply identifying the feeble-minded though
testing would go a long way towards improving the care of those individuals, and ensuring that
they were treated as what they were- men and women with the minds of children90.
Chapter Five
One goal of this study was to build upon previous works that have mentioned in passing
the influence eugenics exerted during the early 20th century. Eugenics was capable of shaping
89
Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, pp. 168-9; White, “Puritan Intelligence,” p. 424.
90
Henry H. Goddard, Feeble-mindedness: Its Causes and Consequences (New York: Arno Press, 1973), pp.558,
566, 589; Patrick J. Ryan, “Unnatural Selection: Intelligence Testing, Eugenics, and American Political Cultures,”
Journal of Social History, vol. 30, no. 3 (Spring, 1997), p. 671.
47
many facets of society because of its basic claim to be able to explain human nature; this study
specifically looked at how eugenics touched the growing field of psychology.
As individuals began looking to science to provide explanations and cures for the
problems that plagued humanity, increasing importance was placed on the objectivity and
efficiency that science extolled, as well as the role of the expert in interpreting and passing on
information to the masses. The growing psychology profession sought to separate itself from the
realm of philosophy with which it had long been associated, and began adopting scientific
methodology as a public declaration of psychology’s potential usefulness and respectability.
Eugenics’ long interest in the study of human heredity and the subsequent categorization of
individuals according to their inherited mental abilities offered psychology a role that could
prove its use to society. Intelligence tests allowed for the objective categorization of individuals,
which would both increase the efficiency of school systems and the military, and allow
psychologists to fill a vital role as experts introducing and controlling this new technique.
Often studies use the role of eugenics in the history of psychology as evidence in an
argument concerning the moral responsibilities of psychologists, or to pass a “right or wrong”
judgment of psychological techniques, like the use of the IQ test. In these cases, if someone is
against IQ testing in schools they will reference the role eugenicists played in the original use
and spread of the tests, as if this alone should be grounds for their condemnation. Very often in
histories of psychology, the influence of eugenics theories and of the eugenicists themselves is
downplayed as much as possible.
There is a reason for this. Eugenics is a very emotionally charged subject, and has been
irrevocably linked with racial disparity, forced sterilization, and genocides which have claimed
eugenics as their inspiration and justification. The majority of those who write about eugenics
48
treat it as a dark part of humanity that is best forgotten, and should only be brought up as a
condemnation or as a warning against some action. The men and women who perpetuated
eugenics theories are treated as eccentric individuals on the fringe of society at best, and sub-
human monsters more often than not.
Sadly, this is an unfair characterization meant to reassure that bad things only happen
because of bad people, and those people are easy to identify. In truth, eugenics ideals were
created and spread in the belief that they would be able to free humanity from all social evils;
eugenicists were often well-known and respected members of society, and they often had
supporters who held influential positions.
The study of history can be divided into four aspects for study: those of power, nature,
identity, and belief. The aspect of nature applies to the study and analysis of events that have
involved science and the environment, and the impact those events have had upon society. The
study of eugenics and its shaping of the American psychology profession falls into this category,
as it is essentially a study of how people have tried to understand the workings of the human
body and mind.
One of the draws of science has always been its objectivity, the perceived notion that
since it is the investigation of pure facts using repeatable experimentation, there is no room for
human error. In science, the key to ensuring that the truth is reached in any study is the quality
of the data gathered, and enormous importance is placed on making sure that data is quantifiable
in order to lessen the influence of the people conducting the experiment. But even with these
precautions, the ability of science to remove human error is a misconception, since with science
as with history, truth and error is all in the interpretation of information. Interpretation will
always be influenced by the circumstances surrounding the experiment, and by the interpreter’s
49
own past experiences. As seen in the case of eugenics, science is not always certain; mistakes
are made quite often and by those with the best of intentions, dissolving the hope that science is
all about facts, and all disputes can be solved by going back to the evidence.

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RICHARD STOCKTON COLLEGE OF NEW JERSEY

STEPS IN THE DARK: HOW EUGENICS SHAPED THE AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY

A THESIS IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

HISTORICAL STUDIES PROGRAM

APRIL 28, 2009

growing psychology profession in America during the early twentieth century. To do so it

psychologists and the profession as a whole.

influence is being purposely ignored.

to add new insight.

and Tracking in California, 1910-1925” (1981).

progressive values expressed by contemporaries of the movement.

understanding of intelligence from an indefinable force into an objective, easily-determined

series according to increasing worth8.

from a “science of consciousness to the science of behavior.” Psychology’s focus on objectivity

have stalked the history of psychology in America.

In Inventing the Feebleminded, James W. Trent, Associate Professor of Sociology and

identified and treated at various stages in the country’s history10.

established Deutsch’s reputation as a trusted historian on the subject.

of the feebleminded and Terman’s introduction of intelligence testing to public schools.

protect and preserve society.

In 1837 Francis was enrolled in Birmingham’s General Hospital, where he endeavored to

offered him the chance to test out rudimentary methods of classification.

it might have been caused by his own youthful indiscretions20.

passed away on January 9, 191122.

philosophy, and physics, and developed an interest in evolutionary naturalism23.

to teach the importance of making psychology scientific. He set up a psychology laboratory in a

which he used to attack psychical research and other theoretical studies25.

who could not handle the sometimes vicious criticism26.

objective and scientific enough27.

One point brought up by today’s psychologists in condemnation against the thought of

these, and his students included Terman and Goddard.

in a one-room schoolhouse. Terman began attending the one-room schoolhouse in Clark

pedagogy and arts degrees in 189931.

that he could go to Clark32.

University. President Theodore Roosevelt handed him his Ph.D.33.

dreams, but finally divorced him and worked as a secretary at Stanford35.

educate parents as well as teachers36.

influence inherent in education, and so improving education became his niche.

graduate student he studied under the morphologist Edward L. Mark38.

In 1894 Davenport married Gertrude Crotty, a graduate student at the predecessor of

Radcliff College. An instructor of zoology at the University of Kansas, Gertrude coauthored

director of the Station until his retirement in 193440.

encouraging its circulation in America42.

Davenport, with whom he kept in contact.

eugenics ideals while also creating an acceptable niche for psychologists.

promote their studies.

diverse audience with his theories47.

time taking the percentages of eminent men in each level of kinship48.

was no standardization of the procedure53.

directed it into years of study on the inheritance of feeblemindedness. In 1912 Goddard

intelligence was biological then it could not be changed, only prevented54.

students of similar mental ability were taught together56.

children in some way.

come to be known as “the inverse normal cumulative distribution function.”58

take up the task of keeping their own detailed family pedigrees59.

In 1884, Galton succeeded in opening an Anthropomorphic Laboratory at the

was analyzed and published in 1889 in Natural Inheritance60.

Institute. He focused on eugenics in Britain, referencing the sociological study of London’s

on the genetics behind alcoholism, criminality, prostitution, and feeblemindedness. Though he

Laughlin, superintendent of the Eugenics Records Office63.

Laughlin had published a manifesto on eugenical sterilization in 1922 called Eugenical

passed, based in part on Laughlin’s studies64.

be unscientific. This is the reason he established so many psychological laboratories; he