She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity (15 page)

When Morgan looked at the pedigrees of families like the Kallikaks, he did not see undeniable proof of the heredity of feeblemindedness. He saw instead many generations of poor people suffering enduring hardships. “It is obvious that these groups of individuals have lived under
demoralizing
social conditions that might swamp a family of average persons,” Morgan wrote. “The effects may to a large extent be communicated rather than inherited.”

If that was true, Morgan argued, it was patently ridiculous to turn to eugenics to try to improve humanity's lot. “
The student of human heredity will do well to recommend more enlightenment on the social causes of deficiencies,” he concluded.

By the 1930s, many other geneticists had followed Morgan's example and repudiated eugenics, as both bad science and bad policy. The Eugenics Record Office, the hub of research and social policy based on human heredity, sank into disrepute. In his testimony to Congress, Harry Laughlin offered statistics that supposedly showed the intellectual superiority of northern Europeans. They turned out to be full of glaring errors. The Carnegie Institution, which gave much of the money to run the Eugenics Record Office, realized that its fieldworkers had been gathering sloppy, subjective data that would be useless for scientific research. Even the organization of the files turned out to be a “
futile system.” The office was shut down in 1939, having been judged “
a worthless endeavor from top to bottom.”

American eugenicists lost more followers as they cozied up to the Nazi government, pleased to see their policies put so aggressively into action. Laughlin even traveled to Germany to accept an honorary degree. Once the full scope of the Holocaust emerged, the eugenics of people like Laughlin and Davenport would never be able to separate itself from genocide.

The Kallikak Family
finally went out of print in 1939. By then it had worked its way into psychology textbooks, where it could terrify college students. A psychologist named Knight Dunlap complained of having to talk one of his students out of committing suicide for fear of having inherited a mental defect from her family. Fortunately, as he later recalled, he was able to ease her anxiety by promising that “
her chances of going insane were no better than my own.” In 1940, Dunlap published a blistering attack on
The Kallikak Family
in the journal
Scientific Monthly
. “Even in books
written by psychologists who ought to know better, the Kallikaks skulk in the corners of the pages, and leap out upon unwary students.”

In 1944, a doctor named
Amram Scheinfeld published a harsh memorial to mark the thirtieth anniversary of
The Kallikak Family
. Writing in the
Journal of Heredity,
Scheinfeld scoffed at the idea that a single mutant gene could have worked its way through one branch of the Kallikak family, causing feeblemindedness and other attendant ills along the way. He skewered Goddard for ignoring the possibility that what he thought was inherited behavior was the result of growing up in grinding poverty. The only reason that the Kallikak study had become so well-known, Scheinfeld said, was because it “would permit those on top to smugly keep their place, while relieving them of the necessity of doing very much for those at the bottom.” And its legacy had been dreadful, not just for genetics but for human society in general. The idea at the core of
The Kallikak Family
, that some people were genetically superior to others, Scheinfeld said, “helped to bring on the present war.”

These attacks—Dunlap, for example, declaring that “the Kallikak phantasy has been laughed out of psychology”—galled Goddard. The rising generation of psychologists were creating a caricature of him and his ideas. In the years after he was forced out of Vineland, Goddard drifted away from the eugenics movement. Rather than figuring out how to keep the feebleminded from having children, Goddard spent his time trying to find ways to help children, no matter their condition. “
As for myself,” Goddard once said, “I think I have gone over to the enemy.”

In truth, Goddard moved only a bit closer to the enemy. In 1931, he traveled from Ohio back to Vineland to speak at a meeting celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the research laboratory. As he spoke, it became clear that Morgan's genetics lessons had not sunk in. Goddard granted that perhaps feeblemindedness depended on more than one gene. But he still believed it was overwhelmingly hereditary. Sterilizing a feebleminded woman would very likely prevent the birth of more feebleminded babies. The Great Depression was reaching its depths when Goddard came back to Vineland, and he blamed it largely on America's lack of intelligence: Most
of the newly destitute didn't have the foresight to save enough money. “
Half of the world must take care of the other half,” Goddard said.

Goddard also defended the data he had collected at Vineland against the growing number of critics. “No one has shown where the Vineland figures are in error,” he declared in his 1931 speech. But privately, Goddard had an inkling that something was wrong.

The attacks on
The Kallikak Family
led him to write to Elizabeth Kite about her fieldwork. Kite confessed that she had never bothered to find out the name of the girl in the tavern. Her excuse for this lapse was that discovering the tawdry origin of the feebleminded Kallikak line had left her stunned. “That was
all I could stand for one day!” Kite told Goddard.

In 1942, when Goddard published a defense of the Kallikak research, he lied about Kite's lapse. He said that he knew the woman's name but had withheld it for the sake of privacy. The only flaw Goddard could see in his work was that it was ahead of its time. “
Much in the way of polish is lacking in this pioneer study,” he said.

That marked the end of Goddard's attempts to salvage his reputation. Soon afterward he retired from Ohio State University and published a guide to parenting called
Our Children in the Atomic Age
. He thought about writing an autobiography, but he only got as far as a decidedly un-eugenic title:
As Luck Would Have It.
In 1957, Goddard died at age ninety. In their obituary, the Associated Press remembered him for two accomplishments: coining the word
moron
and discovering the Kallikaks. “
The author's conclusion was that ‘the Kallikak family presents a natural experiment in heredity,'” the obituary writer reported. “Later some other psychologists cast some doubt on his deductions.”

Even after Goddard's death, the Kallikak family lived on. Henry Garrett, a psychologist at Columbia University who served for a time as president of the American Psychological Association, would retell the story for decades. In 1955, he published a textbook called
General Psychology
that included a full-page illustration of the Kallikak genealogy. Martin Kallikak stands like a towering colonial colossus. His arms are akimbo, and the left half of his body shaded. Down his left side spills a cascade of demonic faces.

“He dallied with
a feeble-minded tavern girl,” Garrett wrote alongside the illustration. “She bore a son known as ‘Old Horror' who had ten children. From ‘Old Horror's' ten children came hundreds of the lowest types of human beings.” Their hair was swept back like demon horns.

On his right side, Kallikak was white, flanked by tranquil faces of men and women in proper hats. “He married a worthy Quakeress,” Garrett wrote. “She bore seven upright worthy children. From these seven worthy children came hundreds of the highest types of human beings.”

The textbook would go through many editions, and students would still be looking at the Kallikak family in the 1960s. In 1973, the year of his death, Garrett railed against the constitutional right to vote, complaining how “
the vote of the feeble-minded person counts as much as that of an intelligent man.”

In the 1980s,
curious investigators uncovered Deborah Kallikak's real name.
A pair of genealogists, David Macdonald and Nancy McAdams, worked back through Goddard's account, determining the true identity of Emma Wolverton's relatives. In the process, every piece of Goddard's book—the founding testimony of modern eugenics and an inspiration for one of the greatest crimes in history—simply vanished.

It turned out that Elizabeth Kite had misunderstood an old woman she interviewed in 1910. Kite got the impression that a soldier named John Wolverton had a bastard son named John Wolverton. In fact, the two John Wolvertons were second cousins. In other words, Goddard's natural experiment in heredity never happened.

The bad branch of the Wolverton clan turned out not to be a horde of feebleminded monsters. John Wolverton—whom Goddard called Martin “Old Horror” Kallikak—was not an unwashed drunk who rolled off porches after too much cider.
Public records show he was a landowner, and that he eventually transferred his property to his children and grandchildren. The 1850 census indicates that he lived with his daughter and her children, all of whom could read. Just before his death in 1861, his property was valued
at the respectable sum of $100. Old Horror's descendants didn't match Goddard's grotesque portraits either. Their ranks included bank treasurers, policemen, coopers, Civil War soldiers, schoolteachers, and a pilot in the Army Air Corps.

Emma happened to have the bad luck to be born into a Wolverton family that was ripped apart in the great migration of American farmers into cities in the late 1800s. Her maternal grandparents moved to the outskirts of Trenton, where her grandfather worked as a laborer. There were eleven children in the family, six of whom died young. Life for the remaining five was hard, and at times unbearable. Emma's grandfather appears to have been a menace to his children, who were all removed from the household. Emma's aunt Mary visited her parents in 1882 at age twelve. Her father attacked her, and she gave birth to a child, who soon died. Emma's grandfather was prosecuted for incest a few months later, but there's no record that he served time in prison.

Despite growing up in a poor, uneducated, violent family, Emma's relatives endured. Emma's aunt Mary returned to her foster family for the rest of her childhood, and later in life she got married. Emma's uncle George, whom Goddard described as a feebleminded horse thief, actually made a living as a farmhand and was a member of the Salvation Army. Emma's uncle John held jobs as a millworker and rubber worker in Trenton.

Even Emma's mother, Malinda, eventually found a stable life. After she married her second husband, Lewis Danbury, in 1897, they stayed together for thirty-five years, until her death in 1932. Lewis was later buried next to her. Emma's half brothers and sisters, dismissed by Goddard as feebleminded, were nothing of the sort. Fred Wolverton fought in World War I and worked as a car mechanic. One of Emma's nephews became a career army man, while another worked as a golf pro.

By the time Emma Wolverton's true history came to light, she had been dead for years, buried on the institution's grounds. She had lived there for fifty-three years. In her later years, she worked in the institution's gymnasium, producing plays performed by the inmates. Emma would sew the costumes and build the sets. She filled her spare time reading books and
magazines or wrote letters to friends. She even left the institution from time to time, accompanying the staff on outings. She wandered among the dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History and fed bits of bread to the squirrels in Central Park.

In 1957, the year that Goddard died, Emma met the intern Elizabeth Allen. “
Emma was tall and reticent,” Allen later recalled. “She reminded me of anyone's elderly aunt.”

Emma was sixty-eight. She had stopped producing plays, but she still worked, ironing institution uniforms. A space at the institution was converted into a tiny apartment where she could live by herself. Allen was shocked when Emma told her that she was Deborah Kallikak. The story of the Kallikaks was well-known to all psychologists in the 1950s, and Allen found it hard to believe Emma was the dangerous moron of Goddard's description.

“I found her to be informative and interesting to talk with,” Allen said. “She was considerate and personable and certainly not what I would think of as a retarded person. It was said that her judgment was not fully developed—understandable for someone practically raised in an institution.”

In later years, Emma developed arthritis. She stopped sewing and woodworking. Instead of writing letters, she dictated them. But even in her eighties, confined to a wheelchair, she still sang songs from the plays she had performed in.

I'm a gypsy, I'm a gypsy

Oh I am a little gypsy girl

The forest is my home

And there I love to roam

For I am a little gypsy girl.

She never did roam. Capable as Emma proved herself over the decades of hard work, she came to believe that she deserved to remain, in effect, a prisoner. “
I guess after all I'm where I belong,” she told Helen Reeves. “I don't like this feeble-minded part but anyhow I'm not idiotic like some of
the poor things you see around here.” In her old age, she was offered the chance to leave the institution, but declined. She lived out her days there, dying at age eighty-nine in 1978. She was buried on the institution grounds.

After Emma left the Vineland Training School, she never saw Goddard again. But she once told Reeves that she had named one of the cats Henry, “
for a dear, wonderful friend who wrote a book. It's the book what made me famous.”

“
She was devoted to the people who conducted the study, as though they were her family,” Allen recalled. When Goddard sent Emma a Christmas card in 1946, Reeves wrote back to him to let him know how happy Emma was to receive it.

“
The nicest thing about it,” Emma told Reeves, “is that he thought I have the brains to understand it which of course I do.”