THE MISMEASURE OF MANtrial society needs docile and dull workers to run its machinery and
accept low recompence. How can we convert the unbroken scale
into two categories at this crucial point, and still maintain the idea
that intelligence is a single, inherited entity? We can now under-
stand why Goddard lavished so much attention upon the moron.
The moron threatens racial health because he ranks highest among
the undesirable and might, if not identified, be allowed to flourish
and propagate. We all recognize the idiot and imbecile and know
what must be done; the scale must be broken just above the level
of the moron.
The idiot is not our greatest problem. He is indeed loathsome....
Nevertheless, he lives his life and is done. He does not continue the race
with a line of children like himself. ... It is the moron type that makes for
us our great problem (1912, pp. 101-102).
Goddard worked in the first flourish of excitement that greeted
the rediscovery of Mendel's work and the basic deciphering of
heredity. We now know that virtually every major feature of our
body is built by the interaction of many genes with each other and
with an external environment. But in these early days, many biol-
ogists naively assumed that all human traits would behave like the
color, size, or wrinkling of Mendel's peas: they believed, in short,
that even the most complex parts of a body might be built by single
genes, and that variation in anatomy or behavior would record the
different dominant and recessive forms of these genes. Eugenicists
seized upon this foolish notion with avidity, for it allowed them to
assert that all undesirable traits might be traced to single genes and
eliminated with proper strictures upon breeding. The early litera-
ture of eugenics is filled with speculations, and pedigrees labori-
ously compiled and fudged, about the gene for Wanderlust traced
through the family lines of naval captains, or the gene for temper-
ament that makes some of us placid and others domineering. We
must not be misled by how silly such ideas seem today; they repre-
sented orthodox genetics for a brief time, and had a major social
impact in America.
Goddard joined the transient bandwagon with a hypothesis that
must represent an ultimate in the attempted reification of intelli-
gence. He tried to trace the pedigrees of mental defectives in his
Vineland School and concluded that "feeble-mindedness" obeyed
Mendelian rules of inheritance. Mental deficiency must therefore