Psychology and parenthood

by H. Addington Bruce

Even the facts emphasised by the eugenists themselves sometimes tend, on close examination, to bear out the belief that it is in the surroundings and training of a child rather than in his heredity that the sources of his ultimate goodness or badness are mainly to be found. The history of the notorious Juke family, featured by almost every modern advocate of the “fatal heredity” theory, is a case in point.

The first Jukes of whom anything is known were five sisters of obscure parentage who lived in Ulster County, New York, in the second half of the eighteenth century. At least four of the five took early to a life of vice, and eventually all married and had children. Many years afterward a visitor to an Ulster County jail noticed that among its inmates, awaiting trial on various charges, were six members of one family, including two boys accused of assault with intent to kill. Inquiry showed that the six were directly descended from the oldest Juke girl, and that more than half of their male blood-relatives in the county were likewise in some degree criminal.

Impressed by these facts the jail visitor, Mr. R. L. Dugdale, determined to make a genealogical research into the life histories of as many of the descendants of the five Juke sisters as could be traced. Altogether it was found possible to obtain pretty complete data concerning seven hundred and nine of these, with the following astonishing results:

Of the entire seven hundred and nine, not twenty had been skilled workers, and ten of these had learned their trade in prison; only twenty-two had been persons of property, and of this number eight had lost the little they acquired; sixty-four had been in the county alms-house; one hundred and forty-two had received outdoor relief; one hundred and twenty-eight had been prostitutes, and eighteen keepers of houses of ill-fame; finally, seventy-six were reported as criminals, with one hundred and fifteen more or less serious crimes to their discredit. All this in seven generations of a single family.

Surely one might well be tempted to find here “the most striking proof of the heredity of crime,” as Cesare Lombroso did not hesitate to pronounce this sad history of the Jukes. But there is something to be added.

Following the publication of Mr. Dugdale’s book, “The Jukes,” giving the family record, there came under the care of a charitable organisation an eighth-generation descendant of the oldest Juke sister, a foundling baby boy, cast upon the tender mercies of the world with all the burden of “innate depravity” transmitted from his vicious ancestors. Instead of taking it for granted that he would inevitably come to an evil end, the charity-workers decided to give him the benefit of a refined environment and good family care. Accordingly a home was found for him with a kind-hearted widow, whose own sons had grown to a worthy manhood, and from her for ten years he received the loving and intelligent training which is the birthright of every child.

At the end of that time he had developed into a fine, manly boy, with, however, a somewhat superabundant fund of animal spirits and a tendency to unruliness. It was evident that, owing to her advanced age, his foster-mother could not give him the stricter discipline he now seemed to need, and arrangements were made for his adoption by a farmer and his wife living in a Western State. By them he was again treated with the utmost affection, coupled with more firmness than he had hitherto known. Little by little his unruliness disappeared; he became eager to excel both at school and in the work of the farm, and soon became known as one of the best boys of the neighbourhood. The older he grew the more evidence he gave of possessing a strong moral foundation on which to build his future career. When last heard from by the charitable organisation to which he owed so much, he had struck out for himself, an alert, vigorous, forceful young man, of sterling character, and full of the self-confidence which wins success.

Moreover, Mr. Dugdale himself, in the course of his exhaustive account of the evil ways of the Jukes, calls attention to the case of a fifth-generation descendant, the daughter of a brothel-keeper, and having two sisters who eventually became prostitutes. Nor did it seem at all likely that she would turn out any better than they; for, before she was fifteen, she had been arrested and imprisoned for vagrancy. But, as good fortune would have it, shortly after her release from jail she met, fell in love with, and married a young German, a cement-burner of steady, industrious habits. Taken by him out of her former debasing environment, given a good home and the example of a strong character, she grew to a reputable womanhood, respected and admired by all who knew her.

Many similar instances of the saving power of good surroundings might be cited. “One of the most useful men I know of to-day,” testifies Mr. Ernest K. Coulter, formerly clerk of the New York Children’s Court, “saw his father murder his mother in cold blood. There was a bad record on her side of the house, too. But a good man saw something in that boy while he was being detained as a witness against his father. As a result of that man’s interest, that boy to-day is serving his fellow-men and his country in a most important field.”