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Authors: Nell Irvin Painter
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as the first football coach at the University of Southern California.
† Clark, then headed by the psychologist G. Stanley Hall, was at its peak as an institution dedicated to the ideals of German scholarship. Franz Boas was leaving Clark as Goddard was receiving his doctorate. Like many of the men interested in race and heredity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Goddard was another Yankee who loved the outdoors. Although married for many years, he had no children.
‡ The child-study movement professionalized social-gospeler impulses and plugged them into the vast spread of childhood institutions as all the states mandated compulsory education between 1880 and 1918.
* The Cold Spring Harbor institution serves currently as a center of research on the human genome.
† In Inquiries into Human Faculty (1883) Galton praised the founding study of hereditary degeneracy, “The Jukes.”
* Pearson, with his own example of a degenerate family, mentions “a certain bad stock as far back as 1680” that was still producing “drunkenness, insanity, and physical breakdown” in 1900, proof that “this law of inheritance is as inevitable as the law of gravity, we shall cease to struggle against it.” In National Life from the Standpoint of Science (1905), Pearson also declared, “Lunacy is one of the things which we may quite definitely accept as an inherited character.”
* Binet died in 1911, before the great American vogue in intelligence testing and the controversies it aroused. He had never meant his tests as means to rank adults.
† “Morons” were rated as smarter than “imbeciles,” who, in turn, were considered more intelligent than “idiots.”
* Even early on, however, the book’s positive reception contained a hint of reservation regarding Goddard’s assumption that intelligence was a single Mendelian unit trait.
† Goddard’s reasoning regarding feeblemindedness (though not by that name) reappears as the source of social ills and defective human beings in the best-selling analysis of intelligence and human destiny of the late twentieth century: The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994), by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray.
* Vasectomy for men, tubal ligation for women. The earliest vasectomy had been performed in Chicago in 1897.
* Between 1907 and 1956, 60,166 people had been sterilized as mentally deficient, insane, or epileptic. California led the way with 19,998; Virginia followed with 6,811, North Carolina with 4,777, Michigan with 3,597, and Kansas with 3, 025.
* In his course on biology as a social weapon, the Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould administered the Army test for illiterates to fifty-three of his students. The students did very well: thirty-one scored A; sixteen scored B; but six scored C, placing them at what Gould called the intellectual borderline and fit only for buck private duties.
* Not everyone agreed with Goddard. Public Health Service M.D.s at Ellis Island regarded his Binet-inspired tests skeptically; they altered or ignored them as they thought necessary.
* Grant’s and Gould’s own books fared differently among the general public. Grant’s Passing of the Great Race became a sensation, whereas Gould’s America: A Family Matter (1922), which argued, according to Yerkes’s foreword, “for pure-bred races,” never gained a large following.
* Lapouge called 70 percent of northern Germans and 70 percent of Americans, but only 20 percent of southern Germans, dolichocephalic (i.e., superior). He located the highest proportion of dolichocephalics—85 percent—in Spain, but he would have dismissed them as Mediterraneans rather than Nordics. His next highest proportions of dolichocephalics were in England and Scandinavia, where they were safely Nordic.
* After the
† Clark, then headed by the psychologist G. Stanley Hall, was at its peak as an institution dedicated to the ideals of German scholarship. Franz Boas was leaving Clark as Goddard was receiving his doctorate. Like many of the men interested in race and heredity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Goddard was another Yankee who loved the outdoors. Although married for many years, he had no children.
‡ The child-study movement professionalized social-gospeler impulses and plugged them into the vast spread of childhood institutions as all the states mandated compulsory education between 1880 and 1918.
* The Cold Spring Harbor institution serves currently as a center of research on the human genome.
† In Inquiries into Human Faculty (1883) Galton praised the founding study of hereditary degeneracy, “The Jukes.”
* Pearson, with his own example of a degenerate family, mentions “a certain bad stock as far back as 1680” that was still producing “drunkenness, insanity, and physical breakdown” in 1900, proof that “this law of inheritance is as inevitable as the law of gravity, we shall cease to struggle against it.” In National Life from the Standpoint of Science (1905), Pearson also declared, “Lunacy is one of the things which we may quite definitely accept as an inherited character.”
* Binet died in 1911, before the great American vogue in intelligence testing and the controversies it aroused. He had never meant his tests as means to rank adults.
† “Morons” were rated as smarter than “imbeciles,” who, in turn, were considered more intelligent than “idiots.”
* Even early on, however, the book’s positive reception contained a hint of reservation regarding Goddard’s assumption that intelligence was a single Mendelian unit trait.
† Goddard’s reasoning regarding feeblemindedness (though not by that name) reappears as the source of social ills and defective human beings in the best-selling analysis of intelligence and human destiny of the late twentieth century: The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994), by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray.
* Vasectomy for men, tubal ligation for women. The earliest vasectomy had been performed in Chicago in 1897.
* Between 1907 and 1956, 60,166 people had been sterilized as mentally deficient, insane, or epileptic. California led the way with 19,998; Virginia followed with 6,811, North Carolina with 4,777, Michigan with 3,597, and Kansas with 3, 025.
* In his course on biology as a social weapon, the Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould administered the Army test for illiterates to fifty-three of his students. The students did very well: thirty-one scored A; sixteen scored B; but six scored C, placing them at what Gould called the intellectual borderline and fit only for buck private duties.
* Not everyone agreed with Goddard. Public Health Service M.D.s at Ellis Island regarded his Binet-inspired tests skeptically; they altered or ignored them as they thought necessary.
* Grant’s and Gould’s own books fared differently among the general public. Grant’s Passing of the Great Race became a sensation, whereas Gould’s America: A Family Matter (1922), which argued, according to Yerkes’s foreword, “for pure-bred races,” never gained a large following.
* Lapouge called 70 percent of northern Germans and 70 percent of Americans, but only 20 percent of southern Germans, dolichocephalic (i.e., superior). He located the highest proportion of dolichocephalics—85 percent—in Spain, but he would have dismissed them as Mediterraneans rather than Nordics. His next highest proportions of dolichocephalics were in England and Scandinavia, where they were safely Nordic.
* After the
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