The Kallikak

Family

Goddard's book traced the genealogy of "Deborah

Kallikak", a woman in his institution.
The Kallikak Family: A Study in the
Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness was a
1912 book by the American
psychologist and eugenicist Henry H.
Goddard. The work was an extended
case study of Goddard's for the
inheritance of "feeble-mindedness," a
general category referring to a variety
of mental disabilities including
intellectual disability, learning
disabilities, and mental illness.
Goddard concluded that a variety of
mental traits were hereditary and that
society should limit reproduction by
people possessing these traits.

The name Kallikak is a pseudonym

used as a family name throughout the
book. Goddard coined the name from
the Greek words καλός (kallos)
meaning beautiful and κακός (kakos)
meaning bad.[1]
Goddard's Kallikak pedigree

Summary
The book begins by discussing the
case of "Deborah Kallikak" (real name
Emma Wolverton, 1889–1978),[2] a
woman in Goddard's institution, the
New Jersey Home for the Education
and Care of Feebleminded Children
(now Vineland Training School). In the
course of investigating her genealogy,
Goddard claims to have discovered
that her family tree bore a curious and
surprising moral tale.
The book follows the genealogy of
Martin Kallikak, Deborah's great-great-
great grandfather, a Revolutionary War
hero married to a Quaker woman. On
his way back from battle the normally
morally upright Martin dallied one time
with a "feeble-minded" barmaid. He
impregnated her and then abandoned
her. The young Martin soon reformed
and went on with his upright life,
becoming a respected New England
citizen and father of a large family of
prosperous individuals. All of the
children that came from this
relationship were "wholesome" and had
no signs of developmental
disabilities.[3]

But according to Goddard, a child was

born by the dalliance with "the
nameless feeble-minded girl". This
single child, a male, called Martin
Kallikak Jr. in the book (real name John
Wolverton, 1776–1861[2]), went on to
father more children, who fathered their
own children, and on and on down the
generations. And so with the Kallikaks,
Goddard claims to have discovered,
one has as close as one could imagine
an experiment in the hereditability of
intelligence, moral ability, and
criminality.

On the "feeble-minded" side of the

Kallikak family, descended from the
abandoned single-parent barmaid, the
children wound up poor, mentally ill,
delinquent, and intellectually disabled.
Deborah was, in Goddard's
assessment, "feeble-minded": a catch-
all early 20th century term to describe
various forms of intellectual or learning
disabilities. Goddard was interested in
the heritability of "feeble-mindedness"—
and often wrote of the invisible threat
of recessive "feeble-minded" genes
carried by otherwise healthy and
intelligent looking members of the
population (Mendel's laws had only
been rediscovered a decade before;
Goddard's genetic shorthand was, in its
day, considered to be on par with
cutting-edge science). It was in tracing
the family history of Deborah that
Goddard and his assistants discovered
that Deborah's family of drunks and
criminals was related—through Martin
Kallikak—to another family tree of
economy and prosperity.
 

A set of Kallikak children on the "feeble-minded"

side of the family

On the "normal" side of the Kallikak

family tree, the children Martin had with
his wife and their descendants all
ended up prosperous, intelligent, and
morally upstanding. They were lawyers,
ministers, and doctors. None were
"feeble-minded". Goddard concluded
from this that intelligence, sanity, and
morality were hereditary, and every
effort should be undertaken to keep the
'feeble-minded' from procreating, with
the overall goal of potentially ending
'feeble-mindedness' and its
accompanying traits. The damage from
even one dalliance between a young
man and a "feeble-minded" woman
could create generations and
generations worth of crime and
poverty, with its members eventually
living off the generosity of the state
(and consequently taxpayers), Goddard
argued. His work contains intricately
constructed family trees, showing near-
perfect Mendelian ratios in the
inheritance of negative and positive
traits.

Goddard recommended segregating

them in institutions, where they would
be taught how to work various forms of
menial labor.

Present-day evaluation
 

Two Kallikaks. It is possible that the boy was born

with Down Syndrome, a former name of the
syndrome being mongolism.

In its day, The Kallikak Family was a

tremendous success and went through
multiple printings. It helped propel
Goddard to the status of one of the
nation's top experts in using
psychology in policy, and along with the
work of Charles B. Davenport and
Madison Grant is considered one of the
canonical works of early 20th-century
American eugenics.

Research published in 2001 by David

MacDonald and Nancy McAdams
revealed that Goddard's account of the
division of the Kallikak family into a
"good" lineage—descended from Martin
Kallikak Sr. and his wife—and a "bad"
lineage—descended from Martin
Kallikak Sr. and an unnamed feeble-
minded barmaid—was fictitious.[2]
Martin Kallikak Jr., the supposedly
illegitimate offspring of Martin Kallikak
Sr. and the barmaid, was in fact the son
of Gabriel Wolverton and his wife
Catherine Murray.[2] His real name was
John Wolverton (1776–1861), and he
was a landowner prosperous enough to
buy two tracts of land for cash in 1809.
Census records of 1850 show that all
the adults in his household (which
included Wolverton, one daughter, and
several grandchildren) were able to
read. The "bad" side of the Kallikak
family included poor farmers but also
school teachers, an Army Air Corps
pilot, and a bank treasurer.[2]

It has been argued that the effects of

malnutrition were overlooked in the
Kallikak family. Goddard's peer,
Davenport, even identified various
forms of diseases now known to be
caused by diet deficiencies as being
hereditary.

A detail of faces from the book—Stephen Jay

Gould alleged that Goddard had doctored them to
make them look more sinister.
make them look more sinister.

Another perspective has been offered

that the Kallikaks almost certainly had
undiagnosed fetal alcohol
syndrome.[4][5] In addition to poverty
and malnourishment, prenatal alcohol
exposure can create craniofacial and
other physical anomalies that could
account for their peculiar facial
features.[6] Furthermore, prenatal
alcohol exposure may also damage the
central nervous system, which can
result in impaired cognitive and
behavioral functioning similar to that
described by Goddard.

Alteration of photographs

The paleontologist and science writer

Stephen Jay Gould advanced the view
that Goddard—or someone working
with him—had retouched the
photographs used in his book in order
to make the "bad" Kallikaks appear
more menacing. In older editions of the
books, Gould said, it has become
clearly evident that someone has
drawn in darker, crazier looking eyes
and menacing faces on the children
and adults in the pictures. Gould
argues that photographic reproduction
in books was still then a very new art,
and that audiences would not have
been as keenly aware of photographic
retouching, even on such a crude level.
The 14 photos were subsequently
studied further to show the nature of
the retouching and subsequent use to
help make Goddard's points.[7]

The psychologist R. E. Fancher,

however, has claimed that retouching
of faces of the sort which is apparent in
Goddard's work was a common
procedure at the time, in order to avoid
a "washed out" look which was
common to early photographic printing
methods (poor halftones). Furthermore,
Fancher argued, malicious editing on
Goddard's part would take away from
one of his primary claims: that only a
trained eye can spot the moron in the
crowd.

Influence
 

A caricature of the Kallikak Family from a 1950s

psychology textbook. Modern research indicates
that there is nothing accurate about the

descriptions offered here.[2]

The overall effect of The Kallikak Family

was to temporarily increase funding to
institutions such as Goddard's, but
these were not seen to be worthwhile
solutions of the problem of "feeble-
mindedness" (much less "rogue"
"feeble-mindedness"—the threat of
idiocy as a recessive trait), and more
stringent methods, such as compulsory
sterilization of people with intellectual
disabilities, were undertaken.

The term "Kallikak" became, along with

"Jukes" and "Nams" (other case studies
of similar natures), a cultural shorthand
for the rural poor in the South and
Northeast United States.

In August 1977, NBC premiered a

situation comedy called The Kallikaks,[8]
which depicted the comic
misadventures of an Appalachian
family that moved to California and
feuded with another family named the
Jukes; the series lasted only five
episodes. A June 8, 1987, cartoon in
The New Yorker provided a further
update to the concept, depicting "The
Jukes and Kallikaks Today".[9]

See also
Carrie Buck
Compulsory sterilization
Critical thinking
Degeneration theory
Dysgenics
Ecology
Educational attainment in the United
States
Environment and intelligence
Eudaimonia
Eugenics
Euphenics
Euthenics
Fertility and intelligence
Flynn effect
 Home economics
Impact of health on intelligence
The Jukes' family
Population health
Social design

References
1. Deutschmann, Linda B. Deviance &
Social Control, p. 168.
2. J. David Smith and Michael L.
Wehmeyer, Who Was Deborah Kallikak?
Intellectual and developmental
disabilities 50(2):169–178, 2012 |
doi:10.1352/1934-9556-50.2.169.
3. Goddard, H. H. (1912). The Kallikak
family: A study in the heredity of feeble
mindedness.New York: MacMillan.
4. Karp, R.J. (1993). Introduction: A
history and overview of malnourished
children in the United States. In R.J.
Karp (Ed.), Malnourished Children in the
United States: Caught in the Cycle of
Poverty. New York: Springer-Verlag.
5. Karp, R.J., Quazi, Q.H., Moller, K.A.,
Angelo, W.A., & Davis, J.M. (1995). Fetal
alcohol syndrome at the turn of the
century: An unexpected explanation of
the Kallikak family. Archives of
Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine,
149(1), 45–48.
6. Streissguth, A.P. (1997). Fetal Alcohol
Syndrome: A Guide for Families and
Communities. Baltimore, MD: Brookes.
7. Elks, Martin A. (August 2005). O'Brien,
John, ed. "Visual indictment: a
contextual analysis of the Kallikak
family photographs". Mental
Retardation. 43 (4): 268–280.
doi:10.1352/0047-
6765(2005)43[268:VIACAO]2.0.CO;2 .
ISSN 0047-6765 . PMID 16000027 .
8. "The Kallikaks" . Retrieved
December 1, 2017 – via
www.IMDb.com.
9. "The Jukes And The Kallikaks Today
by Roz Chast" . Conde Nast. Retrieved
December 1, 2017.

Further reading
Henry H. Goddard, The Kallikak
Family: A Study in the Heredity of
Feeble-Mindedness, New York:
Macmillan, 1912.
Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure
of Man, Norton: New York, 1996,
revised edn.
R. E. Fancher, "Henry Goddard and
the Kallikak family photographs,"
American Psychologist, 42 (1987),
585-590.
J. David Smith, Minds Made Feeble :
The Myth and Legacy of the Kallikaks,
Rockville, MD : Aspen, 1985 ISBN 0-
87189-093-3
Spiro, Jonathan P. (2009). Defending
the Master Race: Conservation,
Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison
Grant. Univ. of Vermont Press.
ISBN 978-1-58465-715-6. Lay
summary (September 29, 2010).
 J. David Smith, Michael L. Wehmeyer,
"Good Blood, Bad Blood: Science,
Nature, and the Myth of the
Kallikaks," Washington, DC : AAIDD,
2012 ISBN 978-1-937604-03-5
Shirley Garton Straney, "The Kallikak
Family: A Genealogical Examination
of a Classic in Psychology," The
American Genealogist, 69 (April
1994): 65-80.

External links
Wikimedia Commons has media
related to The Kallikak Family.
 About half of the text of 1913 edition
of the book
Latest Book on the Kallikak Family /
Good Blood, Bad Blood: Science,
Nature, and the Myth of the
Kallikaks
1919 Report by the Kansas
Commission on Provision for the
Feeble Minded The Kallikaks of
Kansas

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