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

by Henry Herbert Goddard

The field worker was not able to locate Guss, but she found that a minister farther up the State had, in 1910, married his late wife to the man with whom she was living. The couple, however, had gotten wind that some one was looking for them, so when the field worker arrived, she found that they had moved on, leaving no address.

The following story shows the continuation of these conditions into the next generation:—

It was considered desirable to see the illegitimate son of Guss, who had been born to the feeble-minded girl after Guss had been turned adrift by his lawful wife. This child had had, when young, a severe attack of scarlet fever which deprived him of his hearing. He had been admitted into a home for deaf children, but the mother had taken him out. It was learned that this girl had married her own cousin and that the pair were living on the outskirts of a country town, with this deaf boy and four of their own children.

Arrived at this place, the field worker first sought the school where these children were supposed to go, hoping to obtain some light on the question of their mentality and also to learn their school record. She found that they so seldom attended school that the teacher could give very little information regarding them. By dint of persistent inquiry, the family was discovered living in the back shed of a dilapidated country tenement.

It was a bitter, cold day in February and about eleven in the morning when the field worker knocked at the door. Used as she was to sights of misery and degradation, she was hardly prepared for the spectacle within. The father, a strong, healthy, broad-shouldered man, was sitting helplessly in a corner. The mother, a pretty woman still, with remnants of ragged garments drawn about her, sat in a chair, the picture of despondency. Three children, scantily clad and with shoes that would barely hold together, stood about with drooping jaws and the unmistakable look of the feeble-minded. Another child, neither more intelligent nor better clad, was attempting to wash a few greasy dishes in cold water. The deaf boy was nowhere to be seen. On being urgently requested, the mother went out of the room to get him, for he was not yet out of bed. In a few moments she returned. The boy with her wore an old suit that evidently was made to do service by night as well as by day. A glance sufficed to establish his mentality, which was low. The whole family was a living demonstration of the futility of trying to make desirable citizens from defective stock through making and enforcing compulsory education laws. Here were children who seldom went to school because they seldom had shoes, but when they went, had neither will nor power to learn anything out of books. The father himself, though strong and vigorous, showed by his face that he had only a child’s mentality. The mother in her filth and rags was also a child. In this house of abject poverty, only one sure prospect was ahead, that it would produce more feeble-minded children with which to clog the wheels of human progress. The laws of the country will not permit children ten years old to marry. Why should they permit it when the mentality is only ten? These and similar questions kept ringing through the field worker’s mind as she made her way laboriously over the frozen road to the station.

Early in the course of this investigation, it had been learned that the father of Deborah’s mother had come, when a young man, to the prosperous rural community where his daughter was living at the time of our investigation. The informant could not say whence he had come, but the name of a person was given who was supposed to know. Many fruitless attempts to find this person were made before the object was attained. When at last discovered, she turned out to be an elderly lady of refinement and culture. Strangely enough, long afterwards it was learned that she was connected with the good side of the Kallikak family, but was all unconscious of the relationship which existed between it and the degenerate branch. She was delighted to go back in memory and recall impressions made on her mind in youth.

She had been raised in B——, a town at the foot of a mountain chain upon whose top the grandfather of Deborah’s grandfather, Martin Kallikak Jr., had always lived. When she was a little girl, he was a very old man. She remembered being taken to drive, when a child, and seeing the old hut on the mountain, where he lived with his strange daughters, “Old Moll,” “Old Sal,” and Jemima. The dilapidated dwelling, with its windows bulging with rags, formed a picture she had never forgotten. There were in her mind floating memories of great scandals connected with these women and their lonely mountain hut. The father went by the name of the “Old Horror,” and as she remembered him, he was always unwashed and drunk. At election time, he never failed to appear in somebody’s cast-off clothing, ready to vote, for the price of a drink, the donor’s ticket.

This information, coming when it did, seemed amazing and carried with it the probability of establishing the certainty of defect transmitted through five generations. But the town in question was remote and the probability of finding any living person able to give accurate information seemed so slight that nothing further was done in this direction for many months.

In the meantime, the families of the fifteen brothers and sisters of Deborah’s grandfather had been worked out, and the names of several living relatives back in the mountain ascertained. The time was ripe.