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

by Henry Herbert Goddard

Environment does indeed receive some support from three cases in our chart. On [Chart II], two children of Martin Jr. and Rhoda were normal, while all the rest were feeble-minded. It is true that here one parent was normal, and we have the right to expect some normal children. At the same time, these were the two children that were adopted into good families and brought up under good surroundings. They proved to be normal and their descendants normal. Again, on [Chart IX-a], we have one child of two feeble-minded parents who proves to be normal—the only one among the children. This child was also taken into a good family and brought up carefully. Another sister ([Chart IX-b]) was also taken into a good family and, while not determined, yet “showed none of the traits that are usually indicative of feeble-mindedness.” It may be claimed that environment is responsible for this good result. It is certainly significant that the only children in these families that were normal, or at least better than the rest, were brought up in good families.

However, it would seem to be rather dangerous to base any very positive hope on environment in the light of these charts, taken as a whole. There are too many other possible explanations of the anomaly, e.g. these cases may have been high-grade morons, who, to the untrained person, would seem so nearly normal, that at this late day it would be impossible to find any one who would remember their traits well enough to enable us to classify them as morons.

We must not forget that, on [Chart IX-e], we also have the daughter of Justin taken into a good family and carefully brought up, but in spite of all that, she proved to be feeble-minded. The same is probably true of Deborah’s half brother.

We have claimed that criminality resulting from feeble-mindedness is mainly a matter of environment, yet it must be acknowledged that there are wide differences in temperament and that, while this one branch of the Kallikak family was mentally defective, there was no strong tendency in it towards that which our laws recognize as criminality. In other families there is, without doubt, a much greater tendency to crime, so that the lack of criminals in this particular case, far from detracting from our argument, really strengthens it. It must be recognized that there is much more liability of criminals resulting from mental defectiveness in certain families than in others, probably because of difference in the strength of some instincts.

This difference in temperament is perhaps nowhere better brought out than in the grandparents of Deborah. The grandfather belonging to the Kallikak family had the temperament and characteristics of that family, which, while they did not lead him into positive criminality of high degree, nevertheless did make him a bad man of a positive type, a drunkard, a sex pervert, and all that goes to make up a bad character.

On the other hand, his wife and her family were simply stupid, with none of the pronounced tendencies to evil that were shown in the Kallikak family. They were not vicious, nor given over to bad practices of any sort. But they were inefficient, without power to get on in the world, and they transmitted these qualities to their descendants.

Thus, of the children of this pair, the grandparents of Deborah, the sons have been active and positive in their lives, the one being a horse thief, the other a sexual pervert, having the alcoholic tendency of his father, while the daughters are quieter and more passive. Their dullness, however, does not amount to imbecility. Deborah’s mother herself was of a high type of moron, with a certain quality which carried with it an element of refinement. Her sister was the passive victim of her father’s incestuous practice and later married a normal man. Another sister was twice married, the first time through the agency of the good woman who attended to the legalizing of Deborah’s mother’s alliances, the last time, the man, being normal, attended to this himself. He was old and only wanted a housekeeper, and this woman, having been strictly raised in an excellent family, was famous as a cook, so this arrangement seemed to him best. None of these sisters ever objected to the marriage ceremony when the matter was attended to for them, but they never seem to have thought of it as necessary when living with any man.

The stupid helplessness of Deborah’s mother in regard to her own impulses is shown by the facts of her life. Her first child had for its father a farm hand; the father of the second and third (twins) was a common laborer on the railroad. Deborah’s father was a young fellow, normal indeed, but loose in his morals, who, along with others, kept company with the mother while she was out at service. After Deborah’s birth in the almshouse, the mother had been taken with her child into a good family. Even in this guarded position, she was sought out by a feeble-minded man of low habits. Every possible means was employed to separate the pair, but without effect. Her mistress then insisted that they marry, and herself attended to all the details. After Deborah’s mother had borne this man two children, the pair went to live on the farm of an unmarried man possessing some property, but little intelligence. The husband was an imbecile who had never provided for his wife. She was still pretty, almost girlish—the farmer was good-looking, and soon the two were openly living together and the husband had left. As the facts became known, there was considerable protest in the neighborhood, but no active steps were taken until two or three children had been born. Finally, a number of leading citizens, headed by the good woman before alluded to, took the matter up in earnest. They found the husband and persuaded him to allow them to get him a divorce. Then they compelled the farmer to marry the woman. He agreed, on condition that the children which were not his should be sent away. It was at this juncture that Deborah was brought to the Training School.

In visiting the mother in her present home and in talking with her over different phases of her past life, several things are evident; there has been no malice in her life nor voluntary reaction against social order, but simply a blind following of impulse which never rose to objective consciousness. Her life has utterly lacked coördination—there has been no reasoning from cause to effect, no learning of any lesson. She has never known shame; in a word, she has never struggled and never suffered. Her husband is a selfish, sullen, penurious person who gives his wife but little money, so that she often resorts to selling soap and other things among her neighbors to have something to spend. At times she works hard in the field as a farm hand, so that it cannot be wondered at that her house is neglected and her children unkempt. Her philosophy of life is the philosophy of the animal. There is no complaining, no irritation at the inequalities of fate. Sickness, pain, childbirth, death—she accepts them all with the same equanimity as she accepts the opportunity of putting a new dress and a gay ribbon on herself and children and going to a Sunday School picnic. There is no rising to the comprehension of the possibilities which life offers or of directing circumstances to a definite, higher end. She has a certain fondness for her children, but is incapable of real solicitude for them. She speaks of those who were placed in homes and is glad to see their pictures, and has a sense of their belonging to her, but it is faint, remote, and in no way bound up with her life. She is utterly helpless to protect her older daughters, now on the verge of womanhood, from the dangers that beset them, or to inculcate in them any ideas which would lead to self-control or to the directing of their lives in an orderly manner.

The same lack is strikingly shown, if we turn our attention to the question of alcoholism in this family. We learn from a responsible member of the good branch of the family that the appetite for alcoholic stimulants has been strong in the past in this family and that several members in recent generations have been more or less addicted to its use. Only two have actually allowed it to get the better of them to the extent that they became incapacitated. Both were physicians. In the other branch, however, with the weakened mentality, we find twenty-four victims of this habit so pronounced that they were public nuisances. We have taken no account of the much larger number who were also addicted to its use, but who did not become so bad as to be considered alcoholic in our category.