What vesture have you woven for my year?
O Man and Woman who have fashioned it
Together, is it fine and clean and strong,
Made in such reverence of holy joy,
Of such unsullied substance, that your hearts
Leap with glad awe to see it clothing me,
The glory of whose nakedness you know?
"The Song of the Unborn"
Amelia Josephine Burr
There is but one practical and feasible program in handling the great
problem of the feeble-minded. That is, as the best authorities are
agreed, to prevent the birth of those who would transmit imbecility to
their descendants. Feeble-mindedness as investigations and statistics
from every country indicate, is invariably associated with an abnormally
high rate of fertility. Modern conditions of civilization, as we are
continually being reminded, furnish the most favorable breeding-ground
for the mental defective, the moron, the imbecile. "We protect the
members of a weak strain," says Davenport, "up to the period of
reproduction, and then let them free upon the community, and encourage
them to leave a large progeny of `feeble-minded': which in turn,
protected from mortality and carefully nurtured up to the reproductive
period, are again set free to reproduce, and so the stupid work goes on
of preserving and increasing our socially unfit strains."
The philosophy of Birth Control points out that as long as civilized
communities encourage unrestrained fecundity in the "normal" members
of the population--always of course under the cloak of decency and
morality--and penalize every attempt to introduce the principle of
discrimination and responsibility in parenthood, they will be faced with
the ever-increasing problem of feeble-mindedness, that fertile parent
of degeneracy, crime, and pauperism. Small as the percentage of the
imbecile and half-witted may seem in comparison with the normal members
of the community, it should always be remembered that feeble-mindedness
is not an unrelated expression of modern civilization. Its roots strike
deep into the social fabric. Modern studies indicate that insanity,
epilepsy, criminality, prostitution, pauperism, and mental defect, are
all organically bound up together and that the least intelligent and the
thoroughly degenerate classes in every community are the most prolific.
Feeble-mindedness in one generation becomes pauperism or insanity in the
next. There is every indication that feeble-mindedness in its protean
forms is on the increase, that it has leaped the barriers, and that
there is truly, as some of the scientific eugenists have pointed out, a
feeble-minded peril to future generations--unless the feeble-minded are
prevented from reproducing their kind. To meet this emergency is the
immediate and peremptory duty of every State and of all communities.
The curious situation has come about that while our statesmen are
busy upon their propaganda of "repopulation," and are encouraging the
production of large families, they are ignoring the exigent problem of
the elimination of the feeble-minded. In this, however, the politicians
are at one with the traditions of a civilization which, with its
charities and philanthropies, has propped up the defective and
degenerate and relieved them of the burdens borne by the healthy
sections of the community, thus enabling them more easily and more
numerously to propagate their kind. "With the very highest motives,"
declares Dr. Walter E. Fernald, "modern philanthropic efforts often tend
to foster and increase the growth of defect in the community.... The only
feeble-minded persons who now receive any official consideration are
those who have already become dependent or delinquent, many of whom have
already become parents. We lock the barn-door after the horse is stolen.
We now have state commissions for controlling the gipsy-moth and
the boll weevil, the foot-and-mouth disease, and for protecting the
shell-fish and wild game, but we have no commission which even attempts
to modify or to control the vast moral and economic forces represented
by the feeble-minded persons at large in the community."
How the feeble-minded and their always numerous progeny run the gamut
of police, alms-houses, courts, penal institutions, "charities and
corrections," tramp shelters, lying-in hospitals, and relief afforded by
privately endowed religious and social agencies, is shown in any
number of reports and studies of family histories. We find cases of
feeble-mindedness and mental defect in the reports on infant mortality
referred to in a previous chapter, as well as in other reports published
by the United States government. Here is a typical case showing the
astonishing ability to "increase and multiply," organically bound up
with delinquency and defect of various types:
"The parents of a feeble-minded girl, twenty years of age, who was
committed to the Kansas State Industrial Farm on a vagrancy charge,
lived in a thickly populated Negro district which was reported by
the police to be the headquarters for the criminal element of the
surrounding State.... The mother married at fourteen, and her first
child was born at fifteen. In rapid succession she gave birth to sixteen
live-born children and had one miscarriage. The first child, a girl,
married but separated from her husband.... The fourth, fifth and sixth,
all girls, died in infancy or early childhood. The seventh, a girl,
remarried after the death of her husband, from whom she had been
separated. The eighth, a boy who early in life began to exhibit criminal
tendencies, was in prison for highway robbery and burglary. The ninth, a
girl, normal mentally, was in quarantine at the Kansas State Industrial
Farm at the time this study was made; she had lived with a man as
his common-law wife, and had also been arrested several times for
soliciting. The tenth, a boy, was involved in several delinquencies when
young and was sent to the detention-house but did not remain there
long. The eleventh, a boy... at the age of seventeen was sentenced to the
penitentiary for twenty years on a charge of first-degree robbery; after
serving a portion of his time, he was paroled, and later was shot and
killed in a fight. The twelfth, a boy, was at fifteen years of age
implicated in a murder and sent to the industrial school, but escaped
from there on a bicycle which he had stolen; at eighteen, he was shot
and killed by a woman. The thirteenth child, feeble-minded, is the girl
of the study. The fourteenth, a boy was considered by police to be the
best member of the family; his mother reported him to be much slower
mentally than his sister just mentioned; he had been arrested several
times. Once, he was held in the detention-home and once sent to the
State Industrial school; at other times, he was placed on probation.
The fifteenth, a girl sixteen years old, has for a long time had a bad
reputation. Subsequent to the commitment of her sister to the Kansas
State Industrial Farm, she was arrested on a charge of vagrancy, found
to be syphilitic, and quarantined in a state other than Kansas. At the
time of her arrest, she stated that prostitution was her occupation.
The last child was a boy of thirteen years whose history was not
secured...."(1)
The notorious fecundity of feeble-minded women is emphasized in studies
and investigations of the problem, coming from all countries. "The
feeble-minded woman is twice as prolific as the normal one." Sir James
Crichton-Browne speaks of the great numbers of feeble-minded girls,
wholly unfit to become mothers, who return to the work-house year after
year to bear children, "many of whom happily die, but some of whom
survive to recruit our idiot establishments and to repeat their mothers'
performances." Tredgold points out that the number of children born to
the feeble-minded is abnormally high. Feeble-minded women "constitute
a permanent menace to the race and one which becomes serious at a time
when the decline of the birth-rate is... unmistakable." Dr. Tredgold
points out that "the average number of children born in a family is
four," whereas in these degenerate families, we find an average of 7.3 to
each. Out of this total only a little more than ONE-THIRD--456 out of
a total of 1,269 children--can be considered profitable members of the
community, and that, be it remembered, at the parents' valuation.
Another significant point is the number of mentally defective children
who survive. "Out of the total number of 526 mentally affected persons
in the 150 families, there are 245 in the present generation--an
unusually large survival."(2)
Speaking for Bradford, England, Dr. Helen U. Campbell touches another
significant and interesting point usually neglected by the advocates of
mothers' pensions, milk-stations, and maternity-education programs.
"We are also confronted with the problem of the actually mentally
deficient, of the more or less feeble-minded, and the deranged,
epileptic... or otherwise mentally abnormal mother," writes this
authority. "The `bad mothering' of these cases is quite unimprovable
at an infant welfare center, and a very definite if not relatively very
large percentage of our infants are suffering severely as a result of
dependence upon such `mothering."'(3)
Thus we are brought face to face with another problem of infant
mortality. Are we to check the infant mortality rate among the
feeble-minded and aid the unfortunate offspring to grow up, a menace to
the civilized community even when not actually certifiable as mentally
defective or not obviously imbecile?
Other figures and studies indicate the close relationship between
feeble-mindedness and the spread of venereal scourges. We are informed
that in Michigan, 75 per cent. of the prostitute class is infected with
some form of venereal disease, and that 75 per cent. of the infected
are mentally defective,--morons, imbeciles, or "border-line" cases
most dangerous to the community at large. At least 25 per cent. of the
inmates of our prisons, according to Dr. Fernald, are mentally defective
and belong either to the feeble-minded or to the defective-delinquent
class. Nearly 50 per cent. of the girls sent to reformatories are
mental defectives. To-day, society treats feeble-minded or "defective
delinquent" men or women as "criminals," sentences them to prison or
reformatory for a "term," and then releases them at the expiration
of their sentences. They are usually at liberty just long enough to
reproduce their kind, and then they return again and again to prison.
The truth of this statement is evident from the extremely large
proportion in institutions of neglected and dependent children, who are
the feeble-minded offspring of such feeble-minded parents.
Confronted with these shocking truths about the menace of
feeble-mindedness to the race, a menace acute because of the unceasing
and unrestrained fertility of such defectives, we are apt to become the
victims of a "wild panic for instant action." There is no occasion for
hysterical, ill-considered action, specialists tell us. They direct our
attention to another phase of the problem, that of the so-called "good
feeble-minded." We are informed that imbecility, in itself, is not
synonymous with badness. If it is fostered in a "suitable environment,"
it may express itself in terms of good citizenship and useful
occupation. It may thus be transmuted into a docile, tractable, and
peaceable element of the community. The moron and the feeble-minded,
thus protected, so we are assured, may even marry some brighter member
of the community, and thus lessen the chances of procreating another
generation of imbeciles. We read further that some of our doctors
believe that "in our social scale, there is a place for the good
feeble-minded."
In such a reckless and thoughtless differentiation between the "bad"
and the "good" feeble-minded, we find new evidence of the conventional
middle-class bias that also finds expression among some of the
eugenists. We do not object to feeble-mindedness simply because it
leads to immorality and criminality; nor can we approve of it when it
expresses itself in docility, submissiveness and obedience. We object
because both are burdens and dangers to the intelligence of the
community. As a matter of fact, there is sufficient evidence to lead us
to believe that the so-called "borderline cases" are a greater menace
than the out-and-out "defective delinquents" who can be supervised,
controlled and prevented from procreating their kind. The advent of the
Binet-Simon and similar psychological tests indicates that the mental
defective who is glib and plausible, bright looking and attractive, but
with a mental vision of seven, eight or nine years, may not merely lower
the whole level of intelligence in a school or in a society, but may
be encouraged by church and state to increase and multiply until he
dominates and gives the prevailing "color"--culturally speaking--to an
entire community.
The presence in the public schools of the mentally defective children
of men and women who should never have been parents is a problem that
is becoming more and more difficult, and is one of the chief reasons for
lower educational standards. As one of the greatest living authorities
on the subject, Dr. A. Tredgold, has pointed out,(4) this has created
a destructive conflict of purpose. "In the case of children with a low
intellectual capacity, much of the education at present provided is
for all practical purposes a complete waste of time, money and
patience.... On the other hand, for children of high intellectual
capacity, our present system does not go far enough. I believe that
much innate potentiality remains undeveloped, even amongst the working
classes, owing to the absence of opportunity for higher education, to
the disadvantage of the nation. In consequence of these fundamental
differences, the catchword `equality of opportunity' is meaningless
and mere claptrap in the absence of any equality to respond to such
opportunity. What is wanted is not equality of opportunity, but
education adapted to individual potentiality; and if the time and money
now spent in the fruitless attempt to make silk-purses out of sows'
ears, were devoted to the higher education of children of good natural
capacity, it would contribute enormously to national efficiency."
In a much more complex manner than has been recognized even by students
of this problem, the destiny and the progress of civilization and of
human expression has been hindered and held back by this burden of the
imbecile and the moron. While we may admire the patience and the deep
human sympathy with which the great specialists in feeble-mindedness
have expressed the hope of drying up the sources of this evil or of
rendering it harmless, we should not permit sympathy or sentimentality
to blind us to the fact that health and vitality and human growth
likewise need cultivation. "A LAISSER FAIRE policy," writes one
investigator, "simply allows the social sore to spread. And a quasi
LAISSER FAIRE policy wherein we allow the defective to commit crime
and then interfere and imprison him, wherein we grant the defective the
personal liberty to do as he pleases, until he pleases to descend to a
plane of living below the animal level, and try to care for a few of his
descendants who are so helpless that they can no longer exercise that
personal liberty to do as they please,"--such a policy increases and
multiplies the dangers of the over-fertile feeble-minded.(5)
The Mental Survey of the State of Oregon recently published by the
United States Health Service, sets an excellent example and should be
followed by every state in the Union and every civilized country as
well. It is greatly to the credit of the Western State that it is one of
the first officially to recognize the primary importance of this problem
and to realize that facts, no matter how fatal to self-satisfaction,
must be faced. This survey, authorized by the state legislature, and
carried out by the University of Oregon, in collaboration with Dr. C.
L. Carlisle of the Public Health service, aided by a large number of
volunteers, shows that only a small percentage of mental defectives and
morons are in the care of institutions. The rest are widely scattered
and their condition unknown or neglected. They are docile and
submissive, they do not attract attention to themselves as do the
criminal delinquents and the insane. Nevertheless, it is estimated that
they number no less than 75,000 men, women, and children, out of a total
population of 783,000, or about ten per cent. Oregon, it is thought, is
no exception to other states. Yet under our present conditions, these
people are actually encouraged to increase and multiply and replenish
the earth.
Concerning the importance of the Oregon survey, we may quote Surgeon
General H. C. Cumming: "the prevention and correction of mental
defectives is one of the great public health problems of to-day. It
enters into many phases of our work and its influence continually crops
up unexpectedly. For instance, work of the Public Health Service in
connection with juvenile courts shows that a marked proportion of
juvenile delinquency is traceable to some degree of mental deficiency
in the offender. For years Public Health officials have concerned
themselves only with the disorders of physical health; but now they are
realizing the significance of mental health also. The work in Oregon
constitutes the first state-wide survey which even begins to disclose
the enormous drain on a state, caused by mental defects. One of the
objects of the work was to obtain for the people of Oregon an idea
of the problem that confronted them and the heavy annual loss, both
economic and industrial, that it entailed. Another was to enable the
legislators to devise a program that would stop much of the loss,
restore to health and bring to lives of industrial usefulness, many of
those now down and out, and above all, to save hundreds of children from
growing up to lives of misery."
It will be interesting to see how many of our State Legislatures have
the intelligence and the courage to follow in the footsteps of Oregon in
this respect. Nothing could more effectually stimulate discussion, and
awaken intelligence as to the extravagance and cost to the community of
our present codes of traditional morality. But we should make sure
in all such surveys, that mental defect is not concealed even in such
dignified bodies as state legislatures and among those leaders who are
urging men and women to reckless and irresponsible procreation.
I have touched upon these various aspects of the complex problem of the
feeble-minded, and the menace of the moron to human society, not merely
for the purpose of reiterating that it is one of the greatest and most
difficult social problems of modern times, demanding an immediate, stern
and definite policy, but because it illustrates the actual harvest of
reliance upon traditional morality, upon the biblical injunction to
increase and multiply, a policy still taught by politician, priest
and militarist. Motherhood has been held universally sacred; yet, as
Bouchacourt pointed out, "to-day, the dregs of the human species, the
blind, the deaf-mute, the degenerate, the nervous, the vicious, the
idiotic, the imbecile, the cretins and the epileptics--are better
protected than pregnant women." The syphilitic, the irresponsible, the
feeble-minded are encouraged to breed unhindered, while all the powerful
forces of tradition, of custom, or prejudice, have bolstered up the
desperate effort to block the inevitable influence of true civilization
in spreading the principles of independence, self-reliance,
discrimination and foresight upon which the great practice of
intelligent parenthood is based.
To-day we are confronted by the results of this official policy. There
is no escaping it; there is no explaining it away. Surely it is an
amazing and discouraging phenomenon that the very governments that have
seen fit to interfere in practically every phase of the normal citizen's
life, dare not attempt to restrain, either by force or persuasion, the
moron and the imbecile from producing his large family of feeble-minded
offspring.
In my own experience, I recall vividly the case of a feeble-minded girl
who every year, for a long period, received the expert attention of a
great specialist in one of the best-known maternity hospitals of New
York City. The great obstetrician, for the benefit of interns and
medical students, performed each year a Caesarian operation upon this
unfortunate creature to bring into the world her defective, and, in
one case at least, her syphilitic, infant. "Nelly" was then sent to a
special room and placed under the care of a day nurse and a night nurse,
with extra and special nourishment provided. Each year she returned to
the hospital. Such cases are not exceptions; any experienced doctor or
nurse can recount similar stories. In the interest of medical science
this practice may be justified. I am not criticising it from that
point of view. I realize as well as the most conservative moralist that
humanity requires that healthy members of the race should make certain
sacrifices to preserve from death those unfortunates who are born with
hereditary taints. But there is a point at which philanthropy may become
positively dysgenic, when charity is converted into injustice to the
self-supporting citizen, into positive injury to the future of the race.
Such a point, it seems obvious, is reached when the incurably defective
are permitted to procreate and thus increase their numbers.
The problem of the dependent, delinquent and defective elements in
modern society, we must repeat, cannot be minimized because of their
alleged small numerical proportion to the rest of the population. The
proportion seems small only because we accustom ourselves to the habit
of looking upon feeble-mindedness as a separate and distinct calamity to
the race, as a chance phenomenon unrelated to the sexual and biological
customs not only condoned but even encouraged by our so-called
civilization. The actual dangers can only be fully realized when we have
acquired definite information concerning the financial and cultural cost
of these classes to the community, when we become fully cognizant of the
burden of the imbecile upon the whole human race; when we see the funds
that should be available for human development, for scientific, artistic
and philosophic research, being diverted annually, by hundreds of
millions of dollars, to the care and segregation of men, women, and
children who never should have been born. The advocate of Birth Control
realizes as well as all intelligent thinkers the dangers of interfering
with personal liberty. Our whole philosophy is, in fact, based upon
the fundamental assumption that man is a self-conscious, self-governing
creature, that he should not be treated as a domestic animal; that he
must be left free, at least within certain wide limits, to follow his
own wishes in the matter of mating and in the procreation of children.
Nor do we believe that the community could or should send to the
lethal chamber the defective progeny resulting from irresponsible and
unintelligent breeding.
But modern society, which has respected the personal liberty of the
individual only in regard to the unrestricted and irresponsible bringing
into the world of filth and poverty an overcrowding procession of
infants foredoomed to death or hereditable disease, is now confronted
with the problem of protecting itself and its future generations
against the inevitable consequences of this long-practised policy of
LAISSER-FAIRE.
The emergency problem of segregation and sterilization must be faced
immediately. Every feeble-minded girl or woman of the hereditary
type, especially of the moron class, should be segregated during the
reproductive period. Otherwise, she is almost certain to bear imbecile
children, who in turn are just as certain to breed other defectives. The
male defectives are no less dangerous. Segregation carried out for one
or two generations would give us only partial control of the problem.
Moreover, when we realize that each feeble-minded person is a potential
source of an endless progeny of defect, we prefer the policy of
immediate sterilization, of making sure that parenthood is absolutely
prohibited to the feeble-minded.
This, I say, is an emergency measure. But how are we to prevent the
repetition in the future of a new harvest of imbecility, the recurrence
of new generations of morons and defectives, as the logical and
inevitable consequence of the universal application of the traditional
and widely approved command to increase and multiply?
At the present moment, we are offered three distinct and more or less
mutually exclusive policies by which civilization may hope to protect
itself and the generations of the future from the allied dangers of
imbecility, defect and delinquency. No one can understand the necessity
for Birth Control education without a complete comprehension of the
dangers, the inadequacies, or the limitations of the present attempts at
control, or the proposed programs for social reconstruction and racial
regeneration. It is, therefore, necessary to interpret and criticize
the three programs offered to meet our emergency. These may be briefly
summarized as follows:
(1) Philanthropy and Charity: This is the present and traditional method
of meeting the problems of human defect and dependence, of poverty and
delinquency. It is emotional, altruistic, at best ameliorative, aiming
to meet the individual situation as it arises and presents itself. Its
effect in practise is seldom, if ever, truly preventive. Concerned
with symptoms, with the allaying of acute and catastrophic miseries, it
cannot, if it would, strike at the radical causes of social misery. At
its worst, it is sentimental and paternalistic.
(2) Marxian Socialism: This may be considered typical of many widely
varying schemes of more or less revolutionary social reconstruction,
emphasizing the primary importance of environment, education, equal
opportunity, and health, in the elimination of the conditions (i. e.
capitalistic control of industry) which have resulted in biological
chaos and human waste. I shall attempt to show that the Marxian doctrine
is both too limited, too superficial and too fragmentary in its
basic analysis of human nature and in its program of revolutionary
reconstruction.
(3) Eugenics: Eugenics seems to me to be valuable in its critical and
diagnostic aspects, in emphasizing the danger of irresponsible and
uncontrolled fertility of the "unfit" and the feeble-minded establishing
a progressive unbalance in human society and lowering the birth-rate
among the "fit." But in its so-called "constructive" aspect, in seeking
to reestablish the dominance of healthy strain over the unhealthy, by
urging an increased birth-rate among the fit, the Eugenists really offer
nothing more farsighted than a "cradle competition" between the fit
and the unfit. They suggest in very truth, that all intelligent and
respectable parents should take as their example in this grave matter of
child-bearing the most irresponsible elements in the community.
(1) United States Public Health Service: Psychiatric
Studies of Delinquents. Reprint No. 598: pp. 64-65.
(2) The Problem of the Feeble-Minded: An Abstract of the
Report of the Royal Commission on the Cure and Control of
the Feeble-Minded, London: P. S. King & Son.
(3) Cf. Feeble-Minded in Ontario: Fourteenth Report for
the year ending October 31st, 1919.
(4) Eugenics Review, Vol. XIII, p. 339 et seq.
(5) Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem: A True Story of the
Social Aspect of Feeble-mindedness. By A. C. Rogers and
Maud A. Merrill; Boston (1919).