The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness

by Henry Herbert Goddard

So far as the Jukes family is concerned, there is nothing that proves the hereditary character of any of the crime, pauperism, or prostitution that was found. The most that one can say is that if such a family is allowed to go on and develop in its own way unmolested, it is pretty certain not to improve, but rather to propagate its own kind and fill the world with degenerates of one form or another. The formerly much discussed question of the hereditary character of crime received no solution from the Jukes family, but in the light of present-day knowledge of the sciences of criminology and biology, there is every reason to conclude that criminals are made and not born. The best material out of which to make criminals, and perhaps the material from which they are most frequently made, is feeble-mindedness.

The reader must remember that the type of feeble-mindedness of which we are speaking is the one to which Deborah belongs, that is, to the high grade, or moron. All the facts go to show that this type of people makes up a large percentage of our criminals. We may argue a priori that such would be the case. Here we have a group who, when children in school, cannot learn the things that are given them to learn, because through their mental defect, they are incapable of mastering abstractions. They never learn to read sufficiently well to make reading pleasurable or of practical use to them. The same is true of number work. Under our compulsory school system and our present courses of study, we compel these children to go to school, and attempt to teach them the three R’s, and even higher subjects. Thus they worry along through a few grades until they are fourteen years old and then leave school, not having learned anything of value or that can help them to make even a meager living in the world. They are then turned out inevitably dependent upon others. A few have relatives who take care of them, see that they learn to do something which perhaps will help in their support, and then these relatives supplement this with enough to insure them a living.

A great majority, however, having no such interested or capable relatives, become at once a direct burden upon society. These divide according to temperament into two groups. Those who are phlegmatic, sluggish, indolent, simply lie down and would starve to death, if some one did not help them. When they come to the attention of our charitable organizations, they are picked up and sent to the almshouse, if they cannot be made to work. The other type is of the nervous, excitable, irritable kind who try to make a living, and not being able to do it by a fair day’s work and honest wages, attempt to succeed through dishonest methods. “Fraud is the force of weak natures.” These become the criminal type. The kind of criminality into which they fall seems to depend largely upon their environment. If they are associated with vicious but intelligent people, they become the dupes for carrying out any of the hazardous schemes that their more intelligent associates plan for them. Because of their stupidity, they are very apt to be caught quickly and sent to the reformatory or prison. If they are girls, one of the easiest things for them to fall into is a life of prostitution, because they have natural instincts with no power of control and no intelligence to understand the wiles and schemes of the white slaver, the cadet, or the individual seducer. All this, we say, is what is to be expected. These are the people of good outward appearance, but of low intelligence, who pass through school without acquiring any efficiency, then go out into the world and must inevitably fall into some such life as we have pictured.

Let us now turn to our public institutions. These have not yet been sufficiently investigated, nor have we adequate statistics to show what percentage of their inmates is actually feeble-minded. But even casual observation of our almshouse population shows the majority to be of decidedly low mentality, while careful tests would undoubtedly increase this percentage very materially.

In our insane hospitals may also be found a group of people whom the physicians will tell you are only partially demented. The fact is they properly belong in an institution for feeble-minded, rather than in one for the insane, and have gotten into the latter because an unenlightened public does not recognize the difference between a person who has lost his mind and one who never had one.

In regard to criminality, we now have enough studies to make us certain that at least 25 per cent of this class is feeble-minded. One hundred admissions to the Rahway Reformatory, taken in order of admission, show at least 26 per cent of them distinctly feeble-minded, with the certainty that the percentage would be much higher if we included the border-line cases.

An investigation of one hundred of the Juvenile Court children in the Detention Home of the City of Newark showed that 67 per cent of them were distinctly feeble-minded. From this estimate are excluded children who are yet too young for us to know definitely whether the case is one of arrested development. This point once determined would unquestionably swell the percentage of defect.

An examination of fifty-six girls from a Massachusetts reformatory, but out on probation, showed that fifty-two of them were distinctly feeble-minded. This was partially a selected group, the basis being their troublesomeness; they were girls who could not be made to stay in the homes that were found for them, nor to do reasonable and sensible things in those homes, which fact, of itself, pointed toward feeble-mindedness.

The foregoing are figures based on actual test examinations as to mental capacity. If we accept the estimates of the mental condition of the inmates made by the superintendents of reformatories and penal institutions, we get sometimes a vastly higher percentage; e.g. the Superintendent of the Elmira Reformatory estimates that at least 40 per cent of his inmates are mental defectives.

Indeed, it would not be surprising if careful examination of the inmates of these institutions should show that even 50 per cent of them are distinctly feeble-minded.