She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity (14 page)

American racism of the 1920s divided humanity into far thinner slices than just black and white, though. Eugenicists declared that northern Europeans were superior to people from the rest of the continent. They pointed once more to Goddard's work on Ellis Island, as well as to the army intelligence tests, on which immigrant Italians, Russians, and Jews did poorly. They also ignored the fact that these soldiers came from families that had only recently arrived in the United States.

Harry Laughlin, who worked for Davenport at the Eugenics Record Office, testified to Congress that immigration threatened to pollute the American gene pool. “The lesson is that immigrants should be examined, and the family stock should be investigated,
lest we admit more degenerate ‘blood,'” he said. In 1924, Congress tightened immigration with the passage of the National Origins Act, keeping out undesired races.

The Kallikaks became celebrities far beyond America's shores as well. In 1914, Goddard's book was published in Germany to great acclaim. For years, many German doctors and biologists had been calling for
a government-run program to breed the best parents, along with sterilization of the unfit. When Adolf Hitler was imprisoned in 1924, he learned of the Kallikaks in a book he read about heredity. Soon after, Hitler wrote
Mein Kampf
, in which he mimicked the language of American eugenicists, declaring that sterilization of defective people “is the most humane act of mankind.”

When Hitler came to power, an appalling number of German scientists and doctors heartily joined him in his campaign to alter humanity. “
The head of the German ethno-empire is the first statesman who has made the tenets of hereditary biology and eugenics a directing principle of state policy,” declared the geneticist Otmar von Verschuer. In 1933, the year Hitler seized power, a new German edition of
The Kallikak Family
was published. In his introduction, the translator, Karl Wilker, made clear just how important Goddard's work had been to the Nazis.

“
Questions which were only cautiously touched upon by Henry Herbert Goddard at that time . . . have resulted in the law for the prevention of sick or ill offspring,” Wilker wrote. “Just how significant the problem of genetic inheritance is, perhaps no example shows so clearly as the Kallikak family.”

The Nazis used the Kallikaks as a teaching tool. In 1935, the government released an educational film called
Das Erbe
(“Inheritance”). It begins with two older male scientists explaining to their eager young female assistant about the laws of heredity. Over a montage of flowers and birds, of racehorses and hunting dogs, they talk about how to produce new breeds of animals and plants. A breeder's success depends on picking the right individuals to produce the next generation. The same is true for people. No better example of the harm of poorly planned families is the Kallikak family, “the work of American eugenicist Henry Goddard,” one of the German scientists says.

The screen turns black, and a title appears across the top: “The Descendants of Lieutenant Kallikak.” The lieutenant is marked by a circle, from which springs downward branches—493 “superior offspring” from a woman
of healthy stock, along with 434 “inferior offspring” from a woman with a hereditary disease.

“A single ancestor with hereditary disease was enough to leave a large number of unfortunate descendants,” one of the scientists explains. “This is just one example among thousands.” Sympathy for the suffering of such people required preventing them from reproducing—“by all means.”

After the pedigree appears in full, it is replaced on the screen by a quotation from Hitler: “He who is not healthy and dignified in spirit
can not perpetuate his suffering in the body of his child.”

In the same year that
Das Erbe
was released, the Nazis put on the Exhibition for Hereditary Care, where visitors could look at exhibits on the many disabilities that needed to be eradicated. A doctor got into a conversation with a skeptical visitor. To persuade him of the importance of eugenics, the doctor recounted the story of the Kallikaks. “This examination was initiated and directed by the American Professor Goddard,” the doctor assured the visitor. “There is even a book about it.”

The visitor was persuaded, asking the doctor if all the “cripples and idiots” shown at the exhibition were due to the same cause.

“Yes,” the doctor replied. “
There is only one answer: heredity.”

Hitler followed up on this propaganda by establishing a new set of “
racial hygiene” laws. Hereditary health courts accepted applications from doctors for people who were so unfit they should not be allowed to have children. The feebleminded made up the majority of the approvals. Psychiatrists devised intelligence tests for the courts. In one exam, they gave subjects
a suitcase, books, bottles, and other objects. They had to pack the suitcase so that the lid could be easily closed. Their lives might depend on that suitcase.

Within a year of the passage of the first racial hygiene law, the hereditary health courts approved more than 64,000 sterilizations, and by 1944, Germany sterilized at least 400,000 people, including the mentally ill, the deaf, Gypsies, and Jews.

In 1939, Hitler expanded his campaign against the feebleminded, launching
a program to kill children judged to be idiots, along with those
suffering deformities. Their parents were told that they had died during surgery or due to an accidental overdose of sedatives. Soon children were being killed for being teenage delinquents, or just for being Jewish. Hitler then added yet another program to kill adults who were institutionalized for feeblemindedness or other defects. Before extermination, children would be asked questions that wouldn't have been out of place at Vineland, such as “
Can you name the four seasons?”

The program, known as T4, would ultimately claim 200,000 lives. It operated on a scale so far beyond what the Nazis had attempted before that they had to invent new technology for the slaughter—including gas chambers. McKim's eugenic dream had become real.

A few people saw straight through the Kallikak story right away. In 1922, the journalist and political commentator
Walter Lippmann delivered an attack in the
New Republic
. He granted that Binet's original tests had some value as a way to identify children in need of special education. But since then, in the hands of people like Goddard, they had been used to promote monstrous distortions. “The statement that the average mental age of Americans is only about fourteen is not inaccurate. It is not incorrect. It is nonsense,” he wrote.

It was nonsense, Lippmann declared, to treat intelligence as something as straightforward as height or weight, when psychologists had yet to actually define it. Until that day, intelligence would remain simply the thing that intelligence tests measure. But those tests were constantly in flux, as their designers adjusted their thresholds to produce results that satisfied their expectations. To conclude from these tests, then, that intelligence was a hereditary trait was downright pernicious. “Obviously this is not a conclusion obtained by research,” Lippmann declared. “It is a conclusion planted by the will to believe.”

To reach that conclusion, testing advocates had to ignore all sorts of experiences that could influence the scores—especially those in early childhood, when the brain is still developing. And they had to embrace stories like that of the Kallikaks without any healthy skepticism.

In fact, Lippmann warned, there was “some doubt as to the Kallikaks.”

Even if the story was true, it wouldn't be as compelling an experiment as Goddard claimed. To see how powerful heredity really was, it would have been necessary for Martin Kallikak to have fathered an illegitimate child with a healthy (but poor) woman. Likewise, his respectable marriage would need to be with a feebleminded woman from a prosperous family. “Then only would it have been possible to say with complete confidence that this was a pure case of biological rather than of social heredity,” Lippmann said.

Some scientists questioned the Kallikak story as well. In 1925, a Boston neurologist named
Abraham Myerson mocked the lurid tale of Martin Kallikak's disastrous dalliance with a feebleminded girl, after which he “
used his germplasm in orthodox fashion by marrying a nice girl who bore him nice children and started a row of nice people—all nice, no immoral, no syphilitics, no alcoholics, no insane, no criminals.”

Myerson found it ridiculous that Goddard thought he could diagnose generations of Kallikaks based on the stories collected by Elizabeth Kite. “I cannot get
any definite information about my great-great-grandfather, much as I have tried,” Myerson joked, “but a girl who left so little impression on her times as to be ‘nameless' is positively declared to be feeble-minded.”

Perhaps the most important opponent of the Kallikaks was a biologist who spent much of his time in a lab full of milk bottles packed with rotting bananas. Thomas Hunt Morgan didn't know much about psychology, and yet his attack on
The Kallikak Family
was the most profound of all. More than anyone, he could see how weak the foundations were on which Goddard built his story.

Morgan kept rotting bananas in his lab at Columbia University in New York City in order to feed a species of fly called
Drosophila melanogaster.
He had begun studying them in 1907, hoping to catch one of de Vries's species-creating mutations. But Morgan came to realize that no single mutation could create a new species. It could give rise to a new trait, however. One day, Morgan and his colleagues spotted a male fly that grew white eyes instead of the normal red. The scientists put the white-eyed male together with a red-eyed female and the insects mated. The female then produced healthy eggs, which developed into red-eyed offspring. Morgan's team then
bred those flies with each other, and found that in the following generation, some of the male insects had white eyes. It was puzzling that only males could inherit white eyes, but could not pass them down to their own sons. In search of an explanation, Morgan and his colleagues made a major discovery about the nature of genes.

Morgan's flies, like all animals, had chromosomes in their cells. Chromosomes usually came in identical pairs, with one exception—a mismatched set of chromosomes that came to be known as X and Y. Studying insect cells, scientists discovered that males carried one X and one Y, while females carried two Xs. This discovery raised the possibility that the X and Y chromosomes carried hereditary factors—what came to be known as genes—that determined which sex an insect would be. The fact that Morgan's male flies could develop white eyes might mean that a gene located on the X or Y chromosomes determined eye color.

After many experiments with the flies, Morgan's team figured out that this was indeed the case. White eyes are produced by a recessive mutation on a gene located on the X chromosome. Females with one copy of the white-eye mutation can have red eyes anyway, because their other X chromosome is normal. But since males have only one X chromosome, they can't compensate for the mutation and develop white eyes. Further experiments in Morgan's lab revealed that the sex chromosomes could also carry mutations to other traits, such as one that turns the bodies of flies yellow or shrinks their wings. It became clear from experiments like these that chromosomes carried genes, and that a single chromosome could carry many of them.

As Morgan's team pinned down the location of more genes, they came to realize that heredity was a lot more complicated than scientists had previously thought. When Mendel's work was initially rediscovered, many geneticists assumed that each trait was controlled by a single gene. Morgan's team found that
many genes could influence a single trait. For example, they identified twenty-five different genes that could change the color of a fly's eyes.

“
It is of the utmost importance that this hypothesis be understood,” the
Journal of Heredity
declared when Morgan published some of his findings in 1915. If genes worked in such an intricate way in flies, the story in
humans had to be far more complex. “Those who accept it must give up talking about, e.g., Roman nose being due to a determiner for Roman nose in the germplasm. The modern view would say that the ‘Romanness' of the nose is due to the interaction of a very large number of factors.”

Early in his career, Morgan had started out on good terms with Charles Davenport and other American eugenicists. But he was appalled to see how desperately they clung to a Roman-nose view of heredity, even as the evidence piled up against it. In a 1925 book, Morgan spelled out all that was wrong with their approach to human nature.

It was true that individual genes might play a small part in explaining behavior, Morgan granted. Davenport and other scientists had gathered compelling evidence that a single dominant mutation caused Huntington's disease, for example. But Morgan doubted Goddard's claim that something as amorphous as “feeblemindedness” could have such a simple hereditary explanation.

“
It is extravagant to pretend to claim that there is a single Mendelian factor for this condition,” Morgan wrote.

Morgan didn't think it would be possible to really begin to study the heredity of feeblemindedness until scientists decided what they actually mean by intelligence itself. “
In reality our ideas are very vague on the subject,” he wrote. Scientists would also have to give more credit to the ways in which the environment influenced the human mind. In Morgan's own research on flies, he had learned to respect the power of the environment. His students discovered one strain of flies that developed normally if they were born in the summer but tended to sprout
extra legs if they were born in the winter. It turned out that the researchers could get the same outcomes in their lab simply by changing the temperature in which they reared the fly eggs. It was thus meaningless to talk about the effect of their mutation without taking into account their environment.