The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

JQC? THE MISMEASURE OF MAN

were not enough merely dull workers to fill the vast number of

frankly undesirable jobs. The moron might have to be recruited:

"They do a great deal of work that no one else will do.... There is

an immense amount of drudgery to be done, an immense amount

of work for which we do not wish to pay enough to secure more

intelligent workers.... May it be that possibly the moron has his

place" (1917, p. 269).

Nonetheless, Goddard rejoiced in the general tightening of

standards for admission. He reports that deportations for mental

deficiency increased 350 percent in 1913 and 570 percent in 1914

over the average of the five preceding years:

This was due to the untiring efforts of the physicians who were

inspired by the belief that mental tests could be used for the detection of

feeble-minded aliens. ... If the American public wishes feeble-minded

aliens excluded, it must demand that congress provide the necessary facil-

ities at the ports of entry (1917, p. 271).

Meanwhile, at home, the feeble-minded must be identified and
kept from breeding. In several studies, Goddard exposed the men-
ace of moronity by publishing pedigrees of hundreds of worthless
souls, charges upon the state and community, who would never
have been born had their feeble-minded forebears been debarred
from reproduction. Goddard discovered a stock of paupers and
ne'er-do-wells in the pine barrens of New Jersey and traced their
ancestry back to the illicit union of an upstanding man with a sup-
posedly feeble-minded tavern wench. The same man later married
a worthy Quakeress and started another line composed wholly of
upstanding citizens. Since the progenitor had fathered both a good
and a bad line, Goddard combined the Greek words for beauty
(kallos) and bad (kakos), and awarded him the pseudonym Martin
Kallikak. Goddard's Kallikak family functioned as a primal myth
of the eugenics movement for several decades.

Goddard's study is little more than guesswork rooted in conclu-
sions set from the start. His method, as always, rested upon the
training of intuitive women to recognize the feeble-minded by
sight. Goddard did not administer Binet tests in pine-barren
shacks. Goddard's faith in visual identification was virtually
unbounded. In 1919 he analyzed Edwin Markham's poem "The
Man With The Hoe":