WHAT IT MEANS
The foregoing charts and text tell a story as instructive as it is
amazing. We have here a family of good English blood of the middle class,
settling upon the original land purchased from the proprietors of the
state in Colonial times, and throughout four generations maintaining a
reputation for honor and respectability of which they are justly proud.
Then a scion of this family, in an unguarded moment, steps aside from the
paths of rectitude and with the help of a feeble-minded girl, starts a
line of mental defectives that is truly appalling. After this mistake, he
returns to the traditions of his family, marries a woman of his own
quality, and through her carries on a line of respectability equal to that
of his ancestors.
We thus have two series from two different mothers but the same father.
These extend for six generations. Both lines live out their lives in
practically the same region and in the same environment, except in so far
as they themselves, because of their different characters, changed that
environment. Indeed, so close are they that in one case, a defective man
on the bad side of the family was found in the employ of a family on the
normal side and, although they are of the same name, neither suspects any
relationship.
We thus have a natural experiment of remarkable value to the sociologist
and the student of heredity. That we are dealing with a problem of true
heredity, no one can doubt, for, although of the descendants of Martin
Kallikak Jr. many married into feeble-minded families and thus brought in
more bad blood, yet Martin Jr. himself married a normal woman, thus
demonstrating that the defect is transmitted through the father, at least
in this generation. Moreover, the Kallikak family traits appear
continually even down to the present generation, and there are many
qualities that are alike in both the good and the bad families, thus
showing the strength and persistence of the ancestral stock.
The reader will recall the famous story of the Jukes family published by
Richard L. Dugdale in 1877, a startling array of criminals, paupers, and
diseased persons, more or less related to each other and extending over
seven generations.
Dr. Winship has undertaken to compare this family with the descendants of
Jonathan Edwards, and from this comparison to draw certain conclusions.
It is a striking comparison, but unfortunately not as conclusive as we
need in these days. The two families were utterly independent, of
different ancestral stock, reared in different communities, even in
different States, and under utterly different environment.
The one, starting from a strong, religious, and highly educated ancestor,
has maintained those traits and traditions down to the present day and
with remarkable results; the other, starting without any of these
advantages, and under an entirely different environment, has resulted in
the opposite kind of descendants.
It is not possible to convince the euthenist (who holds that environment
is the sole factor) that, had the children of Jonathan Edwards and the
children of “Old Max” changed places, the results would not have been such
as to show that it was a question of environment and not of heredity. And
he cites to us the fact that many children of highly developed parents
degenerate and become paupers and criminals, while on the other hand, some
children born of lowly and even criminal parents take the opposite course
and become respectable and useful citizens.
In as far as the children of “Old Max” were of normal mentality, it is not
possible to say what might not have become of them, had they had good
training and environment.
Fortunately for the cause of science, the Kallikak family, in the persons
of Martin Kallikak Jr. and his descendants, are not open to this argument.
They were feeble-minded, and no amount of education or good environment
can change a feeble-minded individual into a normal one, any more than it
can change a red-haired stock into a black-haired stock. The striking fact
of the enormous proportion of feeble-minded individuals in the descendants
of Martin Kallikak Jr. and the total absence of such in the descendants of
his half brothers and sisters is conclusive on this point. Clearly it was
not environment that has made that good family. They made their
environment; and their own good blood, with the good blood in the families
into which they married, told.
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.
In regard to prostitutes, we have no reliable figures. The groups of
delinquent girls to which we have already referred included among the
numbers several that were already known as prostitutes. A simple
observation of persons who are leading this sort of life will satisfy any
one who is familiar with feeble-mindedness that a large percentage of them
actually are defective mentally. So we have, as is claimed, partly from
statistical studies and partly from careful observation, abundant evidence
of the truth of our claim that criminality is often made out of
feeble-mindedness.
Mr. Winship in his comparison of the Jukes and Edwards families has
strengthened our claim in this respect. In all environments and under all
conditions, he shows the latter family blossoming out into distinguished
citizens, not primarily through anything from without but through the
imperious force within. Since we may conclude that none of the Edwards
family, who are described by Dr. Winship, were feeble-minded, therefore
none of them became criminals or prostitutes. But here again his argument
is inconclusive because he does not tell us of all the descendants.
With equal safety it may be surmised that many of the Jukes family
(perhaps the original stock, indeed) were feeble-minded and therefore
easily lapsed into the kind of lives that they are said to have lived.
In the good branch of the Kallikak family there were no criminals. There
were not many in the other side, but there were some, and, had their
environment been different, no one who is familiar with feeble-minded
persons, their characteristics and tendencies, would doubt that a large
percentage of them might have become criminal. Lombroso’s famous criminal
types, in so far as they were types, may have been types of
feeble-mindedness on which criminality was grafted by the circumstances of
their environment.
Such facts as those revealed by the Kallikak family drive us almost
irresistibly to the conclusion that before we can settle our problems of
criminality and pauperism and all the rest of the social problems that are
taxing our time and money, the first and fundamental step should be to
decide upon the mental capacity of the persons who make up these groups.
We must separate, as sharply as possible, those persons who are
weak-minded, and therefore irresponsible, from intelligent criminals. Both
our method of treatment and our attitude towards crime will be changed
when we discover what part of this delinquency is due to irresponsibility.
If the Jukes family were of normal intelligence, a change of environment
would have worked wonders and would have saved society from the horrible
blot. But if they were feeble-minded, then no amount of good environment
could have made them anything else than feeble-minded. Schools and
colleges were not for them, rather a segregation which would have
prevented them from falling into evil and from procreating their kind, so
avoiding the transmitting of their defects and delinquencies to succeeding
generations.
Thus where the Jukes-Edwards comparison is weak and the argument
inconclusive, the twofold Kallikak family is strong and the argument
convincing.
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.
Thus we see that the normal mentality of the good branch of the family was
able to cope successfully with this intense thirst, while the weakened
mentality on the other side was unable to escape, and many fell victims to
this appalling habit.
It is such facts as these, taken as we find them, not only in this family
but in many of the other families whose records we are soon to publish,
that lead us to the conclusion that drunkenness is, to a certain extent
at least, the result of feeble-mindedness and that one way to reduce
drunkenness is first to determine the mentally defective people, and save
them from the environment which would lead them into this abuse.
Again, eight of the descendants of the degenerate Kallikak branch were
keepers of houses of ill fame, and that in spite of the fact that they
mostly lived in a rural community where such places do not flourish as
they do in large cities.
In short, whereas in the Jukes-Edwards comparison we have no sound basis
for argument, because the families were utterly different and separate, in
the Kallikak family the conclusion seems thoroughly logical. We have, as
it were, a natural experiment with a normal branch with which to compare
our defective side. We have the one ancestor giving us a line of normal
people that shows thoroughly good all the way down the generations, with
the exception of the one man who was sexually loose and the two who gave
way to the appetite for strong drink.
This is our norm, our standard, our demonstration of what the Kallikak
blood is when kept pure, or mingled with blood as good as its own.
Over against this we have the bad side, the blood of the same ancestor
contaminated by that of the nameless feeble-minded girl.
From this comparison the conclusion is inevitable that all this degeneracy
has come as the result of the defective mentality and bad blood having
been brought into the normal family of good blood, first from the nameless
feeble-minded girl and later by additional contaminations from other
sources.
The biologist could hardly plan and carry out a more rigid experiment or
one from which the conclusions would follow more inevitably.