Happy Saturday. Recently on the show, we talked about Ellen Swallow Richards, and one of the things that came up in that episode was the eugenics movement. The eugenics movement has come up several times on the show over the last year or so, and every time we've tried to give kind of a straightforward but also very brief explanation of what that movement was all about. But that is really not something you can just be through or nuanced about in a couple of sentences. We do have a whole episode about this, though, which came out on August nine, twenty seventeen, and it is Today's Saturday Classic. One of the things we talk about in this episode is people being pressured or coerced into sterilization. After forced sterilization programs were generally ended in the US, there have been additional allegations of this in the years since we recorded this episode, including in twenty twenty when migrant women who were held by ice at the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia reported that they had been given hysterectomies or other invasive procedures without their full knowledge or consent. We usually say enjoy at the end of this intro, but this episode involves just a particularly infuriating and upsetting period of history, So instead we hope your day is going well. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Several episodes of our show have touched on the Progressive era in the United States and the span from the late nineteenth into the early twentieth centuries. The Progressive era was really focused on trying to make society better and to counteract the downsides of industrialization and urbanization and rapid growth. So just as examples, we've talked about people like Atoms, known as the mother of social work, and we've talked about movements for women's suffrage, temperance, and organized labor. And the temperance movement did lead to prohibition, which was a spectacular failure. But other than that, these episodes have generally talked about overall positive reforms and education and public health and workplace safety, human rights. But the Progressive era also had a focus on making humanity better through eugenics coined by English anthropologists Sir Francis Galton in eighteen eighty three. Eugenics began with positive eugenics, and this was encouraging the people who were considered the healthiest and the most intelligent to have more children for the betterment of the species. But in a few countries, including the United States, the focus turned toward negative eugenics, or stopping people who were considered not as good from reproducing, spurred by the same fears and prejudices, and societal issue is that we're driving the progressive movement in general. The eugenics movement in the United States focused on identifying, sequestering, and even sterilizing people who were deemed to be unfit. So today we're going to talk about a family who became a case study for the eugenics movement, purportedly providing evidence for the idea that feeble mindedness was an inherited trait and that it would be best to keep people who had that trait from reproducing. This family is known as the Calikas. And just as a note, a lot of the language that was used to talk about disability at this time was insulting. And we're going to be reading from and referring to a bunch of material. It's just offensive. So anytime we say feeble minded or unfit or similar words like that's in air quotes. These are not real things to describe people, right. Also, heads up, it's a little loggy. It's a little longer than normal. So you're one of the runners who listens and new time your run to the episode. If you go the whole way, you've gone too far. Probably so, and that's probably the last jesty thing you'll hear in this episode. Yeah, yeah. So. In nineteen twelve, the McMillan Company published a book by Henry Herbert Goddard, director of the Research Laboratory at the Vineland Training School for Backward and feeble minded Children in Vineland, New Jersey. It was called the Calikak Family, a Study in the Heredity of feeble Mindedness. It was just one in a whole genre of literature called eugenic family studies. The first book in this genre was The Jukes, A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity, and this book was by Richard Dugdale. Dougdale's study came about after he visited the Ulster County Jail in New York and learned that six people who were incarcerated there were related to each other. Looking into it further, Dugdale found more family members who had arrests and convictions on their records, and he traced more of the lineage all the way back to a woman that he dubbed Margaret, the Mother of Criminals. He found forty two connected families, with five hundred forty of their seven hundred nine members blood relatives. According to Dugdale's estimate, their combined criminal proceedings, social assistance, and healthcare had cost a total of about one point three million dollars. A second book by Arthur H. Estabrook at the Eugenics Record Office came out in nineteen fifteen, and this traced another two thousand, one hundred eleven family members who he described as rife with quote feeble mindedness, indolence, licentiousness, and dishonesty, and costing taxpayers about two million dollars. Goddard's study of the Calikaks followed Dugdale's original book on the Jukes, and like Jukes, Calicak was pseudonym was a portmanteau of the Greek words callos for beauty and cacos for bad According to Goddard's account, Deborah Calicac had been born in an almshouse and had arrived at the Vinolin School at the age of eight. Her mother had been through a convoluted series of relationships and marriages and had given birth to several children, both in and out of wedlock, and according to Goddard, no man in her life was willing to support the young Deborah. Goddard maintained that from her admission at the school in October eighteen ninety seven until nineteen eleven, when he was compiling his study, Deborah had never tested above the age of nine on an intelligence scale. He described her as quote a high grade feeble minded person, the kind of wayward delinquent who quote fills our reformatories, generally causing trouble and creating a burden on society. So feeble minded was a catch all term used at the time to describe people who were, in one way or another behind their peers. It included everything from mental illnesses to disabilities and disorders that were noticeable but not necessarily severe. A person described as feeble minded might be able to take care of their own day to day needs while struggling with social interactions or academic skills or physical skills was considered to be a precise, medically and scientifically sound description at the time, but it is definitely not one we would use today to describe a disability, disorder, or condition. Goddard also coined a new word to describe people who fit this definition. That word was moron, defined as one who is lacking in intelligence, one who is deficient in judgment or sense, and like feeble minded, moron was adopted as an actual clinical term. Goddard claimed he had traced Deborah's ancestry all the way back to her great great great grandfather, who he dubbed Martin Calikak Senior. Martin Senior was described as having fathered a child with an unnamed feeble minded barmaid, Deborah's great great great grandmother. This barmaid's descendants were a family of quote an appalling amount of defectiveness. But then Martin Senior turned his life around and married a quote respectable girl of good family. His descendants from this marriage were, in Goddard's words, quote respectable citizens, men and women prominent in every phase of life. As printed in the book, the Calicac Lineage with its beautiful half and its bad half was accompanied by family trees emblazoned with ends and f's for normal and feeble minded, with ends in white and f's in black, along with notations of which ones were sexually immoral, insane, syphilitic, or criminalistic. All of these are words that God used, and the results are striking. One half of the tree, depicting the descendants of Martin Senior's children with the upstanding Quaker woman he married, is full of quote normal people flawlessly white, and then the other half, depicting the descendants of Martin's son with the unnamed barmaid, is dotted all over with black f's, with notations of undesirable traits all over the place. There are also photographs both of Deborah in her day to day life and of the bad Calikacs and their homes. The photos of Deborah are clearly posed, and they show an attractive young woman in a variety of day to day scenarios. The photos of the other Calikacs look like they could have inspired the X Files episode Home. The buildings are all very ramshackle, the people's postuous slouchy, and the facial expressions and features are oddly atypical, and Goddard's words quote, how do we account for this kind of individual? The answer is, in a word, heredity bad stock. We must recognize that the human family shows varying stocks or strains that are marked and that breed as true as anything in plant or animal life. Citing Gregor Mendel's theories on hereditary traits, Goddard goes on to advocate that normal, healthy society keep the feeble minded from breeding and spreading their inherited deficiencies. He suggests a combination of segregation into institutions or colonies and sterilization. We will talk about the colossal influence of this book. After a quick sponsor break, the Calikak Family, A Study in the Heredity of Feeble Mindedness, became enormously influential. It was an immediate bestseller and was reprinted more than ten times between nineteen twelve and nineteen thirty nine. Although the book did have some critics, a number of academic journals, including the American Journal of Psychology and the Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, gave it glowingly positive reviews. Both Calikak and Juke became slang terms for people thought of as unintelligent, backward and inbread. The book's conclusions were also widely accepted as scientific truth, and this was in spite of this admission printed in its introduction quote, it is true that we have made rather dogmatic statements and have drawn conclusions that do not seem scientifically warranted from the data. We have done this because it seems necessary to make these statements and conclusions for the benefit of the lay reader. Soon the Calikaks were being cited in mainstream biology and psychology textbooks. If you've heard our podcast on the Scopes trial, you might recall that we read from a civic biology presented in Problems, and that was the widely used biology textbook that was part of that case. Chapter seventeen of the nineteen fourteen edition, titled Heredity Variation, Plant and Animal Breeding, explains the term eugenics before discussing both the Calikas and the Jukes. It basically boils down the idea of eugenics to the science of being well born. In its discussion of the Jukes, the book mentions Margaret, mother of Criminals, the more than one million dollar tax cost to the state of New York and the large number of quote feeble minded, alcoholic, immoral, or criminal persons that were purportedly in the family. It then moves on to the Calikax quote. This family has been traced back to the War of the Revolution, when a young soldier named Martin Calikax seduced a feeble minded girl. She had a feeble minded son, from whom there have been to the present time four hundred eighty descendants. Of these, thirty three were sexually immoral, for confirmed drunkards, three epileptics, and one hundred forty three feeble minded. The man who started this terrible line of immorality and feeble mindedness later married a normal Quaker girl. From this couple, a line of four hundred ninety six descendants have come with no cases of feeble mindedness. The evidence and the moral speak for themselves. A civic biology goes on to say that if people were animals, we would probably just quote kill them off to prevent them from spreading. It goes on to explain, quote humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes and asylums or other places, and in various ways preventing intermarriage. And the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Through the Calikak family and other books and propaganda, the idea that defective people needed to be kept from breeding became common knowledge, and in the early decades of the twentieth century, more than thirty states passed laws allowing and regulating the involuntary sterilization of people who were deemed to be feeble minded or otherwise unfit. Often sterilization involved a vas ectomy or tubal ligation, but could also be as involved as a total hysterectomy. Many of these laws were patterned after a model law drafted by Harry H. Laughlin of the Eugenics Record Office at cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, who was one of Goddard's colleagues within the eugenics movement. Goddard himself consulted with states on their eugenics laws as well. Basically, states kept passing laws that were not being upheld in court, and so these guys got together to draft a law that would be upheld as constitutional. In nineteen twenty seven, one of these laws made its way to the Supreme Court in Buck versus Bell Carry Buck had been committed to the Virginia Colony for epileptics and feeble minded, and she was sterilized there. Carrie, her mother, and her daughter were all described as feeble minded, and Carrie and her mother were both described as immoral and promiscuous because they had had children out of wedlock. The Calikak family was entered into evidence in this case. Harry H. Laughlin provided expert testimony. Doctor Esterbrook, the one who revised the study of the Jukes family, did as well. The Supreme Court found for Jenia's eugenics law to be constitutional and upheld it, with the opinion authored by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junior, including the sentence quote three generations of imbeciles are enough. Involuntary sterilizations were also being performed on people convicted of crimes, but this generally ended after the Supreme Court ruled in Skinner versus Oklahoma in nineteen forty two. States had been sterilizing people convicted of some felonies but not others, and the Court ruled that this was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendments Equal Protection clause. But Buck versus Bell has never been overturned, meaning that the Supreme Court never officially reversed its decision on sterilization of people who were not convicted of a crime. Involuntary sterilizations of supposedly unfit people continued in the United States until the nineteen seventies, at which point at least sixty thousand people had been involuntarily sterilized, predominantly women. While there have been calls for reparations, North Carolina is the only state so far to pass legislation to do so. The idea of keeping bloodlines free from the taint of feeble mindedness also went hand in hand with the idea of keeping white bloodlines racially pure. Many of the same people who helped states write eugenics laws relating to the unfit also worked on legislation to protect white racial purity at the state and national level. For example, Harry H. Laughlin was a huge proponent of the Immigration Restriction Act of nineteen twenty four, which set quotas on immigration based on how many people already in the United States hailed from a particular place, so it allowed the most immigration from nations that were already the most similar to white Americans, which was Northwest Europe that allowed almost no immigration from Africa and barred immigration from Asia entirely. The Immigration Act was also influenced by Henry H. Goddard's work at Ellis Island, where he had set up an intelligence testing center to evaluate incoming immigrants and turn away the ones deemed insufficient in the nineteenteens. In his work intelligence classification of immigrants of different nationalities, he claimed that forty percent of immigrants were feeble minded, including eighty three percent of Jews, seventy nine percent of Italians, eighty percent of Hungarians, and eighty seven percent of Russians. These evaluations began with one tester identifying probable cases by sight and then referring the people she spotted to her colleague for an assessment. Goddard employed women for this purpose because he thought their intuition was better for it. As another example, Harry H. Laughlin also helped draft Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of nineteen twenty four, which defined race according to the one drop rule, meaning that anyone who had one drop of African or Native American blood was considered black or Native American by law. The only exception was for people who were one sixteenth or less Native American, and this exception was to allow prominent Virginians purportedly descended from Pocahontas to still be considered legally white. This act also prohibited into racial marriage, and there is more on it in our two part podcast on Loving Versus Virginia from twenty thirteen. In addition to the sterilizations of the unfit that were codified in state's eugenics laws, there were also involuntary and coerced sterilizations of poor people and racial and ethnic minorities, including Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans, stretching all the way into the nineteen seventies. Because these were not conducted under any particular law or official program, the exact numbers are harder to estimate. In many cases, these sterilizations were performed in conjunction with other procedures and without the patient's knowledge. This practice was so prevalent in the South that it was nicknamed a Mississippi appendectomy that was either coined or popularized by Fanny Lew Hamer, who is on the list for a future podcast episode. As with Buck versus Bell and the forced sterilizations of people considered unfit, cases regarding the forced or coerced sterilizations of minorities have also made their way through the courts. Two black teenagers, Mary Alice and many Relfh were sterilized without their parents' consent in nineteen seventy three. Their mother, who was not literate, had believed she was signing a consent form for birth control shots, and when the case made headlines, many more black and Native American women began coming forward with similar allegations. In his opinion on Ralph versus Weinberger, Judge Gerhard Guessel of the U. S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote that federal programs had funded the sterilization of one hundred thousand to one hundred fifty thousand low income women during the previous few years. He went on quote, although Congress has been insistent that all family planning programs function on a purely voluntary basis, there is uncontroverted evidence in the record that miners and other incompetence have been sterilized with federal funds, and that an indefinite number of poor people have been improperly coerced into accepting a sterilization operation under the threat various federally supported welfare benefits would be withdrawn unless they submitted to irreversible sterilization. In another case, Madrigal versus Quilligan was a class action lawsuit with ten plaintiffs who alleged that Los Angeles County USC Medical Center had either coerced or misled them into being sterilized during a cesarean section, with the option being presented to them after hours of difficult labor. Nearly one hundred and fifty Spanish speaking women had come forward with similar allegations. In nineteen seventy eight, Judge Jesse W. Curtis ruled in favor of the hospital, calling it quote a breakdown in communications between the patients and the doctors, and although the plaintiffs didn't win in this case, it did ultimately lead to laws requiring Spanish speaking staff to explain procedures and obtain consent from Spanish speaking patients. Coerced sterilizations have also continued well beyond the nineteen seventies. Buck versus Bell was cited as precedent in the two thousand and one case Vaughan versus Utz, heard in the Eighth Circuit Court, in which a social service worker at a hospital coerced a woman who had been diagnosed with a mild intellectual disability into getting a tubal ligation by telling her that it would help her regain custody of her children. A twenty thirteen report by the Center for Investigative Reporting detailed the sterilizations of at least one hundred forty eight incarcerated women in California prisons, which had been performed without the required state approvals, even though California banned forced sterilizations in nineteen seventy nine. Numerous women described being coerced and pressured into the procedure while incarcerated, and in July twenty seventeen, news Channel five in Tennessee reported that General Sessions Judge Sam Benningfield allowed incarcerated people who either got of aasectomy or a contraceptive implant to get a thirty day credit towards jail time. Judge Benningfield rescinded this order on July twenty sixth after it made headlines. While the story of the Calikaks was just one part of the eugenics movement, the studies of the Calikaks, the Jukes, and other families were widely cited heavily used pieces of evidence of the eugenicists idea that it was better to keep so called defectives from breeding, and by extension, that sterilization could be used to help guarantee white racial purity, and the same people writing books about the Calikaks and the Jukes were actively working with lawmakers to create policies to do exactly that. The book's influence spread beyond the United States as well. A German language translation of The Calikak Family was printed in Germany in nineteen fourteen, and it was reprinted in nineteen thirty three. Germany's own eugenics law law for the Prevention of hereditarily Diseased Offspring, was passed in nineteen thirty three as well, and was also based on Harry H. Lachlin's model law that was being used as a template in the United States. And it wasn't just a matter of Nazi Germany picking up and repurposing Lachlan's work. Lachlan actively corresponded with eugenicists in Germany, writing in one of his letters how pleased he was that Hitler understood that quote the central mission of all politics is race hygiene. In Nazi Germany, more than one hundred and fifty thousand Germans with disabilities were involuntarily sterilized under this eugenics law between nineteen thirty four and nineteen thirty nine. In nineteen thirty nine, the focus shifted from sterilization to extermination, an eighty thousand disabled Germans were murdered in a little less than two years. It was only in the face of this atrocity that the eugenics movement in the United States started to fall out of favor, although the sterilizations that the movement had advocated have continued for decades. On top of being used to support policy that led to involuntary sterilizations and in Nazi Germany murders, much of the story of the Calikaks wasn't even true, and we're going to talk more about that. After a sponsor break, Henry H. Goddard began publicly refuting his previous opinions about the quote feeble minded and eugenics, beginning in the late nineteen twenties and into the nineteen thirties. He made a number of public statements that his intelligence testing had been incorrect and that he had been wrong to believe that feeble minded people could not be educated, and that feeble minded people should be allowed to have children if they chose, and should not be segregated from the rest of society. But this reversal came too late to stop the eugenics movement, or even to change the life of the star of his most famous work, Deborah Calikak was really Emma Wolverton, and she really did arrive at the Violent School in eighteen ninety seven at the age of eight, and it's not clear if there was a specific reason for her to be institutionalized. Although the book does seem to have embellished her mother's life in relationships, it's very likely that it boiled down to poverty. Even the wording in the book is really cage here quote on the plea that the child did not get along at school and might possibly be feeble minded. She gained admission to the training school, but by the time Goddard published The Calikak Family, the Violent School and Goddard himself were using Emma as an example of a success story for the school. In addition to being in the book, her picture and that pseudonym appear in the school's reports and fundraising materials as a shining example of their work. When she was transferred to a facility for adults across the street at the age of twenty five. Her quote acquisition was viewed as a success for them. A social worker described it this way. Quote Deborah at this time was a handsome young woman twenty five years old, with many accomplishments, though her academic progress had remained stationary, just beyond second grade. For our part, we knew we had acquired distinction in acquiring Deborah Calikak, for by this time the story of her pedigree was becoming well known, and such a capable, well trained, and good looking girl must be an asset in terms of well trained. Emma Wolverton was excellent at embroidery, woodworking, basketry, and gardening. She made and repaired costumes for the school plays, was in charge of the Violin School's kindergarten, and worked as a nurse's aide in the school's hospital. She also played the coronet beautifully. Was an avid reader and a devoted correspondent, and bred Persian cats and her adulthood. Visitors to her institution often mistook her for a staff member. She distinguished herself to the point that she was allowed to work for the Family of Violence. Superintendent along with others in the community. And to be clear, although working for the superintendent's family was framed as a privilege and a reward, all of this work was actually compulsory. It's difficult to diagnose historical figures who aren't alive to be examined, and this is even more difficult in Emma Wolverton's case, since her school records are often contradictory and the institutions caring for her had a vested self interest in people, simultaneously believing that she needed to be institutionalized while also demonstrating a success story in terms of what the institution could accomplish. But by cross referencing school records with witness accounts, modern research suggests that she probably had a learning disability. Whether she had a disability or what that disability was has no bearing on her worth as a human being. But it's clear that the institutions housing her were using her for their own ends, and that her portrayal in the book that made her famous was far from the truth. The photos of Emma will in the Calikak Family clearly served to show her as both a success and a warning. She's neatly dressed either shown in association with something productive like sewing or serving a meal, or with something considered intelligent, like reading a book. These are in contrast with the photos of the Calikacs in their homes, which are clearly meant to suggest something nefarious. The pictures of the other Calikacs have definitely been retouched, and there's some debate about whether that retouching served to deliberately exaggerate them or just to prepare them for publication. Regardless, the book is making a very clear implication and a very clear value judgment on all the Calikacs based on their physical appearance and their surroundings. It's that without the constant care, supervision, and custody in an institution, Emma Wolverton would have been just another degenerate living in a hovel, and without keeping her segregated from society, she would have just made more of them. However, that dichotomy between Emma Wolverton and the rest of the family, or between the families quote good and bad branches, just doesn't add up. The bad line of Martin Calikax Senior's descendants purportedly begins with Martin Junior. I was really John Wolverton. John Wolverton was the son of Gabriel Wolverton and Katherine Murray, but the Calikax study presents his father as a different John Wolverton, just thus the Martin Senior and Martin Junior. But according to a genealogy of the family that was published in the nineteen eighties, the second John Wolverton was not his father. They were second cousins, so the book's entire premise is not correct. In addition to the two John Wolverton's not being father and son, both parts of the family really had their share of troubles, as every family does. But Goddard and field worker Elizabeth S. Kite had set out to compile their study with the goal of finding a hereditary thread for feeble mindedness. So consciously or unconsciously, when piecing together the history of the family members, some of whom had long since died, they ignored evidence of people in the good line who they might have described as feeble minded, and they flagged people in the bad line based on just the thinnest of evidence. Claud of this was based on stuff like family gossip. They would very scientific, right, They would interview elderly family members about people on the other side of the family and folks would be like, oh, yeah, he was totally a drunk, so that person would be marked down as feeble minded, even though if you looked at things like tax records and property records, it seemed as though this person was like a landowner, not fothering anyone, perfectly living their life just fine. So in reality, going back to the eighteenth century, the Wolverton's were overall not particularly affluent, but mostly self sufficient farmers living in rural New Jersey. In the late nineteenth century, industrialization and urbanization led several of them to move from the country to Trenton and other cities. As with so many other people who moved from the country to the city during this time, they found themselves in an unfamiliar environment, with a totally different social structure and economy, and without a lot of resources or education. So when they lost jobs, as Emma's mother, for example, did, they no longer had an extended family network nearby to turn to for support, instead often winding up in jail or in a poorhouse. So this was definitely not something that could be explained by some kind of hereditary taint. Similarly, some of Arthur h Esterbrook's papers containing the Jukes family's real names were found in the early twenty first century, and it turned out that many of them were respected citizens of Ulster County, New York. Their existence had conveniently been ignored in Esterbrook's study. Emma Wolverton died at the age of eighty nine in nineteen seventy eight. She knew that she had been written about as Deborah Calcak, and that she had been used as a widely read and even famous example of a quote high grade feeble minded person. It's not really clear whether she knew that that depiction had been at the heart of the eugenics movement or what that had ultimately meant. She was offered the chance to leave the institution toward the end of her life, but she didn't feel that she could because at that point she developed severe arthritis and she really needed a lot of medical care. She spent the last year of her life in a hospital, and at the time of her death she had been institutionalized for eighty one years. I normally say something to wrap up here, but mostly this whole episode makes me incredibly angry. Yeah, Like it's the it's the magical combination, right of like a poorly executed biased science and I'm using the air quotes there used to one work this whole like superiority angle as well as really damaged the lives of people without their consent, and most of those people were women. Yeah, and like even the more the positive eugenics angle that we referenced very briefly at the beginning of the show, Like even that is founded on the idea that some people are better than others, and that the better people should have the most babies, which, like that might sound okkay at a surface level, but pretty quickly falls apart when you think about, like who's deciding who is worthy of having right more babies. My mom worked with people with a range of disabilities for a lot of her career, and it's like there are definitely complicated moral and ethical questions when people are capable of having a child but genuinely not necessarily capable of taking care of a child. Right, These conversations do not include things like telling a woman if she has her tubes tied, she can get her kids back, right that nothing like that. Yeah, thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Happy Saturday. Recently on the show, we talked about Ellen Swallow Richards, and one of the things that came up in that episode was the eugenics movement. The eugenics movement has come up several times on the show over the last year or so, and every time we've tried to give kind of a straightforward but also very brief explanation of what that movement was all about. But that is really not something you can just be through or nuanced about in a couple of sentences. We do have a whole episode about this, though, which came out on August nine, twenty seventeen, and it is Today's Saturday Classic. One of the things we talk about in this episode is people being pressured or coerced into sterilization. After forced sterilization programs were generally ended in the US, there have been additional allegations of this in the years since we recorded this episode, including in twenty twenty when migrant women who were held by ice at the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia reported that they had been given hysterectomies or other invasive procedures without their full knowledge or consent. We usually say enjoy at the end of this intro, but this episode involves just a particularly infuriating and upsetting period of history, So instead we hope your day is going well. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Several episodes of our show have touched on the Progressive era in the United States and the span from the late nineteenth into the early twentieth centuries. The Progressive era was really focused on trying to make society better and to counteract the downsides of industrialization and urbanization and rapid growth. So just as examples, we've talked about people like Atoms, known as the mother of social work, and we've talked about movements for women's suffrage, temperance, and organized labor. And the temperance movement did lead to prohibition, which was a spectacular failure. But other than that, these episodes have generally talked about overall positive reforms and education and public health and workplace safety, human rights. But the Progressive era also had a focus on making humanity better through eugenics coined by English anthropologists Sir Francis Galton in eighteen eighty three. Eugenics began with positive eugenics, and this was encouraging the people who were considered the healthiest and the most intelligent to have more children for the betterment of the species. But in a few countries, including the United States, the focus turned toward negative eugenics, or stopping people who were considered not as good from reproducing, spurred by the same fears and prejudices, and societal issue is that we're driving the progressive movement in general. The eugenics movement in the United States focused on identifying, sequestering, and even sterilizing people who were deemed to be unfit. So today we're going to talk about a family who became a case study for the eugenics movement, purportedly providing evidence for the idea that feeble mindedness was an inherited trait and that it would be best to keep people who had that trait from reproducing. This family is known as the Calikas. And just as a note, a lot of the language that was used to talk about disability at this time was insulting. And we're going to be reading from and referring to a bunch of material. It's just offensive. So anytime we say feeble minded or unfit or similar words like that's in air quotes. These are not real things to describe people, right. Also, heads up, it's a little loggy. It's a little longer than normal. So you're one of the runners who listens and new time your run to the episode. If you go the whole way, you've gone too far. Probably so, and that's probably the last jesty thing you'll hear in this episode. Yeah, yeah. So. In nineteen twelve, the McMillan Company published a book by Henry Herbert Goddard, director of the Research Laboratory at the Vineland Training School for Backward and feeble minded Children in Vineland, New Jersey. It was called the Calikak Family, a Study in the Heredity of feeble Mindedness. It was just one in a whole genre of literature called eugenic family studies. The first book in this genre was The Jukes, A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity, and this book was by Richard Dugdale. Dougdale's study came about after he visited the Ulster County Jail in New York and learned that six people who were incarcerated there were related to each other. Looking into it further, Dugdale found more family members who had arrests and convictions on their records, and he traced more of the lineage all the way back to a woman that he dubbed Margaret, the Mother of Criminals. He found forty two connected families, with five hundred forty of their seven hundred nine members blood relatives. According to Dugdale's estimate, their combined criminal proceedings, social assistance, and healthcare had cost a total of about one point three million dollars. A second book by Arthur H. Estabrook at the Eugenics Record Office came out in nineteen fifteen, and this traced another two thousand, one hundred eleven family members who he described as rife with quote feeble mindedness, indolence, licentiousness, and dishonesty, and costing taxpayers about two million dollars. Goddard's study of the Calikaks followed Dugdale's original book on the Jukes, and like Jukes, Calicak was pseudonym was a portmanteau of the Greek words callos for beauty and cacos for bad According to Goddard's account, Deborah Calicac had been born in an almshouse and had arrived at the Vinolin School at the age of eight. Her mother had been through a convoluted series of relationships and marriages and had given birth to several children, both in and out of wedlock, and according to Goddard, no man in her life was willing to support the young Deborah. Goddard maintained that from her admission at the school in October eighteen ninety seven until nineteen eleven, when he was compiling his study, Deborah had never tested above the age of nine on an intelligence scale. He described her as quote a high grade feeble minded person, the kind of wayward delinquent who quote fills our reformatories, generally causing trouble and creating a burden on society. So feeble minded was a catch all term used at the time to describe people who were, in one way or another behind their peers. It included everything from mental illnesses to disabilities and disorders that were noticeable but not necessarily severe. A person described as feeble minded might be able to take care of their own day to day needs while struggling with social interactions or academic skills or physical skills was considered to be a precise, medically and scientifically sound description at the time, but it is definitely not one we would use today to describe a disability, disorder, or condition. Goddard also coined a new word to describe people who fit this definition. That word was moron, defined as one who is lacking in intelligence, one who is deficient in judgment or sense, and like feeble minded, moron was adopted as an actual clinical term. Goddard claimed he had traced Deborah's ancestry all the way back to her great great great grandfather, who he dubbed Martin Calikak Senior. Martin Senior was described as having fathered a child with an unnamed feeble minded barmaid, Deborah's great great great grandmother. This barmaid's descendants were a family of quote an appalling amount of defectiveness. But then Martin Senior turned his life around and married a quote respectable girl of good family. His descendants from this marriage were, in Goddard's words, quote respectable citizens, men and women prominent in every phase of life. As printed in the book, the Calicac Lineage with its beautiful half and its bad half was accompanied by family trees emblazoned with ends and f's for normal and feeble minded, with ends in white and f's in black, along with notations of which ones were sexually immoral, insane, syphilitic, or criminalistic. All of these are words that God used, and the results are striking. One half of the tree, depicting the descendants of Martin Senior's children with the upstanding Quaker woman he married, is full of quote normal people flawlessly white, and then the other half, depicting the descendants of Martin's son with the unnamed barmaid, is dotted all over with black f's, with notations of undesirable traits all over the place. There are also photographs both of Deborah in her day to day life and of the bad Calikacs and their homes. The photos of Deborah are clearly posed, and they show an attractive young woman in a variety of day to day scenarios. The photos of the other Calikacs look like they could have inspired the X Files episode Home. The buildings are all very ramshackle, the people's postuous slouchy, and the facial expressions and features are oddly atypical, and Goddard's words quote, how do we account for this kind of individual? The answer is, in a word, heredity bad stock. We must recognize that the human family shows varying stocks or strains that are marked and that breed as true as anything in plant or animal life. Citing Gregor Mendel's theories on hereditary traits, Goddard goes on to advocate that normal, healthy society keep the feeble minded from breeding and spreading their inherited deficiencies. He suggests a combination of segregation into institutions or colonies and sterilization. We will talk about the colossal influence of this book. After a quick sponsor break, the Calikak Family, A Study in the Heredity of Feeble Mindedness, became enormously influential. It was an immediate bestseller and was reprinted more than ten times between nineteen twelve and nineteen thirty nine. Although the book did have some critics, a number of academic journals, including the American Journal of Psychology and the Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, gave it glowingly positive reviews. Both Calikak and Juke became slang terms for people thought of as unintelligent, backward and inbread. The book's conclusions were also widely accepted as scientific truth, and this was in spite of this admission printed in its introduction quote, it is true that we have made rather dogmatic statements and have drawn conclusions that do not seem scientifically warranted from the data. We have done this because it seems necessary to make these statements and conclusions for the benefit of the lay reader. Soon the Calikaks were being cited in mainstream biology and psychology textbooks. If you've heard our podcast on the Scopes trial, you might recall that we read from a civic biology presented in Problems, and that was the widely used biology textbook that was part of that case. Chapter seventeen of the nineteen fourteen edition, titled Heredity Variation, Plant and Animal Breeding, explains the term eugenics before discussing both the Calikas and the Jukes. It basically boils down the idea of eugenics to the science of being well born. In its discussion of the Jukes, the book mentions Margaret, mother of Criminals, the more than one million dollar tax cost to the state of New York and the large number of quote feeble minded, alcoholic, immoral, or criminal persons that were purportedly in the family. It then moves on to the Calikax quote. This family has been traced back to the War of the Revolution, when a young soldier named Martin Calikax seduced a feeble minded girl. She had a feeble minded son, from whom there have been to the present time four hundred eighty descendants. Of these, thirty three were sexually immoral, for confirmed drunkards, three epileptics, and one hundred forty three feeble minded. The man who started this terrible line of immorality and feeble mindedness later married a normal Quaker girl. From this couple, a line of four hundred ninety six descendants have come with no cases of feeble mindedness. The evidence and the moral speak for themselves. A civic biology goes on to say that if people were animals, we would probably just quote kill them off to prevent them from spreading. It goes on to explain, quote humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes and asylums or other places, and in various ways preventing intermarriage. And the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Through the Calikak family and other books and propaganda, the idea that defective people needed to be kept from breeding became common knowledge, and in the early decades of the twentieth century, more than thirty states passed laws allowing and regulating the involuntary sterilization of people who were deemed to be feeble minded or otherwise unfit. Often sterilization involved a vas ectomy or tubal ligation, but could also be as involved as a total hysterectomy. Many of these laws were patterned after a model law drafted by Harry H. Laughlin of the Eugenics Record Office at cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, who was one of Goddard's colleagues within the eugenics movement. Goddard himself consulted with states on their eugenics laws as well. Basically, states kept passing laws that were not being upheld in court, and so these guys got together to draft a law that would be upheld as constitutional. In nineteen twenty seven, one of these laws made its way to the Supreme Court in Buck versus Bell Carry Buck had been committed to the Virginia Colony for epileptics and feeble minded, and she was sterilized there. Carrie, her mother, and her daughter were all described as feeble minded, and Carrie and her mother were both described as immoral and promiscuous because they had had children out of wedlock. The Calikak family was entered into evidence in this case. Harry H. Laughlin provided expert testimony. Doctor Esterbrook, the one who revised the study of the Jukes family, did as well. The Supreme Court found for Jenia's eugenics law to be constitutional and upheld it, with the opinion authored by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junior, including the sentence quote three generations of imbeciles are enough. Involuntary sterilizations were also being performed on people convicted of crimes, but this generally ended after the Supreme Court ruled in Skinner versus Oklahoma in nineteen forty two. States had been sterilizing people convicted of some felonies but not others, and the Court ruled that this was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendments Equal Protection clause. But Buck versus Bell has never been overturned, meaning that the Supreme Court never officially reversed its decision on sterilization of people who were not convicted of a crime. Involuntary sterilizations of supposedly unfit people continued in the United States until the nineteen seventies, at which point at least sixty thousand people had been involuntarily sterilized, predominantly women. While there have been calls for reparations, North Carolina is the only state so far to pass legislation to do so. The idea of keeping bloodlines free from the taint of feeble mindedness also went hand in hand with the idea of keeping white bloodlines racially pure. Many of the same people who helped states write eugenics laws relating to the unfit also worked on legislation to protect white racial purity at the state and national level. For example, Harry H. Laughlin was a huge proponent of the Immigration Restriction Act of nineteen twenty four, which set quotas on immigration based on how many people already in the United States hailed from a particular place, so it allowed the most immigration from nations that were already the most similar to white Americans, which was Northwest Europe that allowed almost no immigration from Africa and barred immigration from Asia entirely. The Immigration Act was also influenced by Henry H. Goddard's work at Ellis Island, where he had set up an intelligence testing center to evaluate incoming immigrants and turn away the ones deemed insufficient in the nineteenteens. In his work intelligence classification of immigrants of different nationalities, he claimed that forty percent of immigrants were feeble minded, including eighty three percent of Jews, seventy nine percent of Italians, eighty percent of Hungarians, and eighty seven percent of Russians. These evaluations began with one tester identifying probable cases by sight and then referring the people she spotted to her colleague for an assessment. Goddard employed women for this purpose because he thought their intuition was better for it. As another example, Harry H. Laughlin also helped draft Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of nineteen twenty four, which defined race according to the one drop rule, meaning that anyone who had one drop of African or Native American blood was considered black or Native American by law. The only exception was for people who were one sixteenth or less Native American, and this exception was to allow prominent Virginians purportedly descended from Pocahontas to still be considered legally white. This act also prohibited into racial marriage, and there is more on it in our two part podcast on Loving Versus Virginia from twenty thirteen. In addition to the sterilizations of the unfit that were codified in state's eugenics laws, there were also involuntary and coerced sterilizations of poor people and racial and ethnic minorities, including Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans, stretching all the way into the nineteen seventies. Because these were not conducted under any particular law or official program, the exact numbers are harder to estimate. In many cases, these sterilizations were performed in conjunction with other procedures and without the patient's knowledge. This practice was so prevalent in the South that it was nicknamed a Mississippi appendectomy that was either coined or popularized by Fanny Lew Hamer, who is on the list for a future podcast episode. As with Buck versus Bell and the forced sterilizations of people considered unfit, cases regarding the forced or coerced sterilizations of minorities have also made their way through the courts. Two black teenagers, Mary Alice and many Relfh were sterilized without their parents' consent in nineteen seventy three. Their mother, who was not literate, had believed she was signing a consent form for birth control shots, and when the case made headlines, many more black and Native American women began coming forward with similar allegations. In his opinion on Ralph versus Weinberger, Judge Gerhard Guessel of the U. S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote that federal programs had funded the sterilization of one hundred thousand to one hundred fifty thousand low income women during the previous few years. He went on quote, although Congress has been insistent that all family planning programs function on a purely voluntary basis, there is uncontroverted evidence in the record that miners and other incompetence have been sterilized with federal funds, and that an indefinite number of poor people have been improperly coerced into accepting a sterilization operation under the threat various federally supported welfare benefits would be withdrawn unless they submitted to irreversible sterilization. In another case, Madrigal versus Quilligan was a class action lawsuit with ten plaintiffs who alleged that Los Angeles County USC Medical Center had either coerced or misled them into being sterilized during a cesarean section, with the option being presented to them after hours of difficult labor. Nearly one hundred and fifty Spanish speaking women had come forward with similar allegations. In nineteen seventy eight, Judge Jesse W. Curtis ruled in favor of the hospital, calling it quote a breakdown in communications between the patients and the doctors, and although the plaintiffs didn't win in this case, it did ultimately lead to laws requiring Spanish speaking staff to explain procedures and obtain consent from Spanish speaking patients. Coerced sterilizations have also continued well beyond the nineteen seventies. Buck versus Bell was cited as precedent in the two thousand and one case Vaughan versus Utz, heard in the Eighth Circuit Court, in which a social service worker at a hospital coerced a woman who had been diagnosed with a mild intellectual disability into getting a tubal ligation by telling her that it would help her regain custody of her children. A twenty thirteen report by the Center for Investigative Reporting detailed the sterilizations of at least one hundred forty eight incarcerated women in California prisons, which had been performed without the required state approvals, even though California banned forced sterilizations in nineteen seventy nine. Numerous women described being coerced and pressured into the procedure while incarcerated, and in July twenty seventeen, news Channel five in Tennessee reported that General Sessions Judge Sam Benningfield allowed incarcerated people who either got of aasectomy or a contraceptive implant to get a thirty day credit towards jail time. Judge Benningfield rescinded this order on July twenty sixth after it made headlines. While the story of the Calikaks was just one part of the eugenics movement, the studies of the Calikaks, the Jukes, and other families were widely cited heavily used pieces of evidence of the eugenicists idea that it was better to keep so called defectives from breeding, and by extension, that sterilization could be used to help guarantee white racial purity, and the same people writing books about the Calikaks and the Jukes were actively working with lawmakers to create policies to do exactly that. The book's influence spread beyond the United States as well. A German language translation of The Calikak Family was printed in Germany in nineteen fourteen, and it was reprinted in nineteen thirty three. Germany's own eugenics law law for the Prevention of hereditarily Diseased Offspring, was passed in nineteen thirty three as well, and was also based on Harry H. Lachlin's model law that was being used as a template in the United States. And it wasn't just a matter of Nazi Germany picking up and repurposing Lachlan's work. Lachlan actively corresponded with eugenicists in Germany, writing in one of his letters how pleased he was that Hitler understood that quote the central mission of all politics is race hygiene. In Nazi Germany, more than one hundred and fifty thousand Germans with disabilities were involuntarily sterilized under this eugenics law between nineteen thirty four and nineteen thirty nine. In nineteen thirty nine, the focus shifted from sterilization to extermination, an eighty thousand disabled Germans were murdered in a little less than two years. It was only in the face of this atrocity that the eugenics movement in the United States started to fall out of favor, although the sterilizations that the movement had advocated have continued for decades. On top of being used to support policy that led to involuntary sterilizations and in Nazi Germany murders, much of the story of the Calikaks wasn't even true, and we're going to talk more about that. After a sponsor break, Henry H. Goddard began publicly refuting his previous opinions about the quote feeble minded and eugenics, beginning in the late nineteen twenties and into the nineteen thirties. He made a number of public statements that his intelligence testing had been incorrect and that he had been wrong to believe that feeble minded people could not be educated, and that feeble minded people should be allowed to have children if they chose, and should not be segregated from the rest of society. But this reversal came too late to stop the eugenics movement, or even to change the life of the star of his most famous work, Deborah Calikak was really Emma Wolverton, and she really did arrive at the Violent School in eighteen ninety seven at the age of eight, and it's not clear if there was a specific reason for her to be institutionalized. Although the book does seem to have embellished her mother's life in relationships, it's very likely that it boiled down to poverty. Even the wording in the book is really cage here quote on the plea that the child did not get along at school and might possibly be feeble minded. She gained admission to the training school, but by the time Goddard published The Calikak Family, the Violent School and Goddard himself were using Emma as an example of a success story for the school. In addition to being in the book, her picture and that pseudonym appear in the school's reports and fundraising materials as a shining example of their work. When she was transferred to a facility for adults across the street at the age of twenty five. Her quote acquisition was viewed as a success for them. A social worker described it this way. Quote Deborah at this time was a handsome young woman twenty five years old, with many accomplishments, though her academic progress had remained stationary, just beyond second grade. For our part, we knew we had acquired distinction in acquiring Deborah Calikak, for by this time the story of her pedigree was becoming well known, and such a capable, well trained, and good looking girl must be an asset in terms of well trained. Emma Wolverton was excellent at embroidery, woodworking, basketry, and gardening. She made and repaired costumes for the school plays, was in charge of the Violin School's kindergarten, and worked as a nurse's aide in the school's hospital. She also played the coronet beautifully. Was an avid reader and a devoted correspondent, and bred Persian cats and her adulthood. Visitors to her institution often mistook her for a staff member. She distinguished herself to the point that she was allowed to work for the Family of Violence. Superintendent along with others in the community. And to be clear, although working for the superintendent's family was framed as a privilege and a reward, all of this work was actually compulsory. It's difficult to diagnose historical figures who aren't alive to be examined, and this is even more difficult in Emma Wolverton's case, since her school records are often contradictory and the institutions caring for her had a vested self interest in people, simultaneously believing that she needed to be institutionalized while also demonstrating a success story in terms of what the institution could accomplish. But by cross referencing school records with witness accounts, modern research suggests that she probably had a learning disability. Whether she had a disability or what that disability was has no bearing on her worth as a human being. But it's clear that the institutions housing her were using her for their own ends, and that her portrayal in the book that made her famous was far from the truth. The photos of Emma will in the Calikak Family clearly served to show her as both a success and a warning. She's neatly dressed either shown in association with something productive like sewing or serving a meal, or with something considered intelligent, like reading a book. These are in contrast with the photos of the Calikacs in their homes, which are clearly meant to suggest something nefarious. The pictures of the other Calikacs have definitely been retouched, and there's some debate about whether that retouching served to deliberately exaggerate them or just to prepare them for publication. Regardless, the book is making a very clear implication and a very clear value judgment on all the Calikacs based on their physical appearance and their surroundings. It's that without the constant care, supervision, and custody in an institution, Emma Wolverton would have been just another degenerate living in a hovel, and without keeping her segregated from society, she would have just made more of them. However, that dichotomy between Emma Wolverton and the rest of the family, or between the families quote good and bad branches, just doesn't add up. The bad line of Martin Calikax Senior's descendants purportedly begins with Martin Junior. I was really John Wolverton. John Wolverton was the son of Gabriel Wolverton and Katherine Murray, but the Calikax study presents his father as a different John Wolverton, just thus the Martin Senior and Martin Junior. But according to a genealogy of the family that was published in the nineteen eighties, the second John Wolverton was not his father. They were second cousins, so the book's entire premise is not correct. In addition to the two John Wolverton's not being father and son, both parts of the family really had their share of troubles, as every family does. But Goddard and field worker Elizabeth S. Kite had set out to compile their study with the goal of finding a hereditary thread for feeble mindedness. So consciously or unconsciously, when piecing together the history of the family members, some of whom had long since died, they ignored evidence of people in the good line who they might have described as feeble minded, and they flagged people in the bad line based on just the thinnest of evidence. Claud of this was based on stuff like family gossip. They would very scientific, right, They would interview elderly family members about people on the other side of the family and folks would be like, oh, yeah, he was totally a drunk, so that person would be marked down as feeble minded, even though if you looked at things like tax records and property records, it seemed as though this person was like a landowner, not fothering anyone, perfectly living their life just fine. So in reality, going back to the eighteenth century, the Wolverton's were overall not particularly affluent, but mostly self sufficient farmers living in rural New Jersey. In the late nineteenth century, industrialization and urbanization led several of them to move from the country to Trenton and other cities. As with so many other people who moved from the country to the city during this time, they found themselves in an unfamiliar environment, with a totally different social structure and economy, and without a lot of resources or education. So when they lost jobs, as Emma's mother, for example, did, they no longer had an extended family network nearby to turn to for support, instead often winding up in jail or in a poorhouse. So this was definitely not something that could be explained by some kind of hereditary taint. Similarly, some of Arthur h Esterbrook's papers containing the Jukes family's real names were found in the early twenty first century, and it turned out that many of them were respected citizens of Ulster County, New York. Their existence had conveniently been ignored in Esterbrook's study. Emma Wolverton died at the age of eighty nine in nineteen seventy eight. She knew that she had been written about as Deborah Calcak, and that she had been used as a widely read and even famous example of a quote high grade feeble minded person. It's not really clear whether she knew that that depiction had been at the heart of the eugenics movement or what that had ultimately meant. She was offered the chance to leave the institution toward the end of her life, but she didn't feel that she could because at that point she developed severe arthritis and she really needed a lot of medical care. She spent the last year of her life in a hospital, and at the time of her death she had been institutionalized for eighty one years. I normally say something to wrap up here, but mostly this whole episode makes me incredibly angry. Yeah, Like it's the it's the magical combination, right of like a poorly executed biased science and I'm using the air quotes there used to one work this whole like superiority angle as well as really damaged the lives of people without their consent, and most of those people were women. Yeah, and like even the more the positive eugenics angle that we referenced very briefly at the beginning of the show, Like even that is founded on the idea that some people are better than others, and that the better people should have the most babies, which, like that might sound okkay at a surface level, but pretty quickly falls apart when you think about, like who's deciding who is worthy of having right more babies. My mom worked with people with a range of disabilities for a lot of her career, and it's like there are definitely complicated moral and ethical questions when people are capable of having a child but genuinely not necessarily capable of taking care of a child. Right, These conversations do not include things like telling a woman if she has her tubes tied, she can get her kids back, right that nothing like that. Yeah, thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. 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