Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot Com. 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 Jane Adams, 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 to focus on making humanity better through eugenics coined by English anthropologists Sir Francis Galton in 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 issues that were 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 this is 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. This you're one of the runners who listens in your 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 l 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 Calakak 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 doug Dale. Doug Dale'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 doug Dale'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 Calcas followed doug Dale's original book on the Jukes, and like Jukes, Calicas 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 Violence School at the age of eight. Her mother had been through a convoluted series of relationships and marriages, and had given 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 until nineteen eleven, when he was compiling his study, Deborrah 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 interaction their 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 Calicak 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 and 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 Calacac 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 had 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 postures 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 conclusion s 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 Calicas are 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 Calicas 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 costs 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 Calikas 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, twenty four 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. Pacific 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 generate race. Through the Calacac 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 past laws allowing and regulating the involuntary sterilization of people who were deemed to be feeble minded or otherwise unfit. Often, sterilization involved a vasectomy 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 Genics 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 we're not being upheld in court, and so these guys got together to draft a law that would be upheld as constitutional. In 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. Carry, 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 Calacac family was entered into evidence in this case. Harry H. Laughlin provided expert testimony. Dr Estabrook, the one who revised the study of the Jukes family, did as well. The Supreme Court found Virginia'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 nine 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 claus 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 into the 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 this 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 immigra Ration 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 nineteen teens. 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, eight 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 interracial marriage, and there is more on it in our two part podcast on Loving Versus Virginia from In addition to the sterilizations of the unfit that were codified in state's eugenics laws. There were also involuntary and coerce 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 terializations 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 sterializations of minorities have also made their way through the courts. Two black teenagers, Mary Alison many Ralph, 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 became coming began coming forward with similar allegations. In his opinion on Ralph versus Weinberger, Judge Gerhardt Guestl of the U. S. Dish Strict 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 that 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 caesarean section, with the option being presented to them after hours of difficult labor. Nearly a hundred and fifties 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 one case von 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. Report by the Center for Investigative Reporting detailed the sterilizations of it least a 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, news Channel five in Tennessee reported that General Sessions Judge Sam Benningfield allowed incarcerated people who either got a vasectomy or a contraceptive implant to get a thirty day credit towards their jail time. Judge Benningfield rescinded this order on July after it made headlines. While the story of the Calcax was just one part of the eugenics movement, the studies of the Calcax, 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, and that sterilization could be used to help guarantee white racial purity. And the same people writing books about the Calikacs 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. Laughlin'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 Laughlin's work. Laughlin 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. And Nazi Germany, more than a 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 policies that led to involuntary sterilizations and in Nazi Germany murders. Much of the story of the Calcas 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 twenty season 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 Wolvertone, and she really did arrive at the Vinolent School in eight 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 and relationships, it's very likely that it boiled down to poverty. Even the wording in the book is really cag 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 Calakak, 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 Violent School's kindergarten, and worked as a nurse's aid 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 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 institution's 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 Wolverton 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 Calikas 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 eight 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 Calikak Senior's descendants purportedly begins with Martin Jr. Was really John Wolverton. John Wolverton was the son of Gabriel Wolverton and Catherine Murray, but the Calikax study presents his father as a different John Wolverton, just thus the Martin Senior and Martin Jr. 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. A lot of this was based on stuff like family gossip. It was very scientific. 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 man records, that 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 is 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 study. Emma Wilverton died at the age of eighty nine. In nine she knew that she had been written about as Deborah calcac 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 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, uh, but mostly this whole episode makes me incredibly angry. Yeah, Like it's the it's the magical combination right of like uh, poorly executed biased science and I'm using the air quotes there used to uh 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 more babies. Um 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. These conversations do not include things like telling a woman if she has her tubes tied she can get her kids back that nothing like that. Yeah, I have some listener mailing. Yeah, so we got this email. It was actually, um more than a month ago at this point, and it's a throwback to an episode from quite quite a while before that. But it's one of these emails that when I saw the subject line, I had a moment that was like, am I gonna read this? Because the subject line of the email is my experience with Robert the doll um, And like I had a moment of I'm not I'm not a very like a superstitious person. Really in a lot I mean, in some ways, I definitely am. I think a lot of people are. But I tend to be skeptical about paranormal things. But when I read the subject line of my experience with Robert the Doll, I had a moment of just visceral terror. This is this is Rich, and Rich says hello, try seeing Holly. I'm a relatively new listener to your podcast, and I've been listening to the backlog of your shows. I recently listened to you one of your Impossible episodes, which included the portion about Robert the haunted doll in Key West had to run in with Robert Back in two thousand one. A friend of mine who lived and Key West, was telling me about this doll in a museum down there. He told me the basic story behind it, which more or less matched what you mentioned to your podcast. After speaking to him, I looked up Robert on the Internet to see photos of the doll, certainly very creepy. As a joke, I downloaded a photo of Robert and photo shopped it with a word bubble that read I see you. My emailed this photo to my friend and Key West. Meanwhile, a coworker of mine who was in on this conversation, went out to lunch, and again as a joke, I made this photo of Robert as the wallpaper on his computer. When he returned from lunch, he turned on his computer to see this photo, and he was a bit freaked out. But here's where he gets interesting. His computer was completely frozen and would not respond the screen loaded with the photo of Robert, but it was otherwise non functional. He restarted his computer several times the same result. Eventually, I t had to come wipe the hard drive and reinstall everything. Back to my friend and Key West. About an hour later, he called me and asked what I had emailed to him. He said he clicked on the attachment and it immediately crashed his computer and it would not turn on again. That computer never worked again. I'm generally a skeptic and I'm not superstitious. In your show, when you mentioned cameras and other electronics often failed when around Robert, I immediately got excited remembering what had happened to me. I'm telling you this from firsthand experience with Robert. Maybe it's a coincidence, but it seems very odd. To me that it crashed two computers within an hour. Hopefully reading this email has no ill effects on your computer. Thanks for all you do, Rich Rich. It did not have any ill effects on our computer, and I hope reading this email does not cause any ill effects in our listeners uh smartphones or m P three players or other devices. I did feel like we needed a moment of levity after talking about Usnix for forty five minutes. Robert be cool, It'd be cool, Robert's electronic. We just we needed to think about something else for just a minute. This was I think the hardest episode I've ever worked on for the show. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast, We're at History Podcast at how stuff Works dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in history and on Twitter at miss in History. Our tumbler is it miss in history dot tumbler dot com. We're on Pinterest and Instagram, both at miss in history. If you would like to come to our parent company's website, which is how stuff Works dot com, you can find information about anything your heart desires. And if you want to come to our website, which is missing History dot com. You'll find show notes of every episode Holly and I have ever done. The page for this episode will have one of those family trees we talked about. Uh. You can also find an archive of every episode ever, so you can do all that in a whole lot more at house to works dot com or Missed than History dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot Com. 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 Jane Adams, 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 to focus on making humanity better through eugenics coined by English anthropologists Sir Francis Galton in 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 issues that were 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 this is 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. This you're one of the runners who listens in your 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 l 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 Calakak 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 doug Dale. Doug Dale'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 doug Dale'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 Calcas followed doug Dale's original book on the Jukes, and like Jukes, Calicas 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 Violence School at the age of eight. Her mother had been through a convoluted series of relationships and marriages, and had given 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 until nineteen eleven, when he was compiling his study, Deborrah 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 interaction their 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 Calicak 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 and 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 Calacac 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 had 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 postures 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 conclusion s 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 Calicas are 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 Calicas 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 costs 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 Calikas 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, twenty four 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. Pacific 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 generate race. Through the Calacac 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 past laws allowing and regulating the involuntary sterilization of people who were deemed to be feeble minded or otherwise unfit. Often, sterilization involved a vasectomy 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 Genics 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 we're not being upheld in court, and so these guys got together to draft a law that would be upheld as constitutional. In 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. Carry, 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 Calacac family was entered into evidence in this case. Harry H. Laughlin provided expert testimony. Dr Estabrook, the one who revised the study of the Jukes family, did as well. The Supreme Court found Virginia'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 nine 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 claus 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 into the 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 this 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 immigra Ration 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 nineteen teens. 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, eight 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 interracial marriage, and there is more on it in our two part podcast on Loving Versus Virginia from In addition to the sterilizations of the unfit that were codified in state's eugenics laws. There were also involuntary and coerce 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 terializations 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 sterializations of minorities have also made their way through the courts. Two black teenagers, Mary Alison many Ralph, 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 became coming began coming forward with similar allegations. In his opinion on Ralph versus Weinberger, Judge Gerhardt Guestl of the U. S. Dish Strict 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 that 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 caesarean section, with the option being presented to them after hours of difficult labor. Nearly a hundred and fifties 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 one case von 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. Report by the Center for Investigative Reporting detailed the sterilizations of it least a 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, news Channel five in Tennessee reported that General Sessions Judge Sam Benningfield allowed incarcerated people who either got a vasectomy or a contraceptive implant to get a thirty day credit towards their jail time. Judge Benningfield rescinded this order on July after it made headlines. While the story of the Calcax was just one part of the eugenics movement, the studies of the Calcax, 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, and that sterilization could be used to help guarantee white racial purity. And the same people writing books about the Calikacs 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. Laughlin'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 Laughlin's work. Laughlin 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. And Nazi Germany, more than a 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 policies that led to involuntary sterilizations and in Nazi Germany murders. Much of the story of the Calcas 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 twenty season 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 Wolvertone, and she really did arrive at the Vinolent School in eight 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 and relationships, it's very likely that it boiled down to poverty. Even the wording in the book is really cag 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 Calakak, 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 Violent School's kindergarten, and worked as a nurse's aid 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 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 institution's 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 Wolverton 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 Calikas 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 eight 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 Calikak Senior's descendants purportedly begins with Martin Jr. Was really John Wolverton. John Wolverton was the son of Gabriel Wolverton and Catherine Murray, but the Calikax study presents his father as a different John Wolverton, just thus the Martin Senior and Martin Jr. 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. A lot of this was based on stuff like family gossip. It was very scientific. 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 man records, that 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 is 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 study. Emma Wilverton died at the age of eighty nine. In nine she knew that she had been written about as Deborah calcac 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 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, uh, but mostly this whole episode makes me incredibly angry. Yeah, Like it's the it's the magical combination right of like uh, poorly executed biased science and I'm using the air quotes there used to uh 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 more babies. Um 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. These conversations do not include things like telling a woman if she has her tubes tied she can get her kids back that nothing like that. Yeah, I have some listener mailing. Yeah, so we got this email. It was actually, um more than a month ago at this point, and it's a throwback to an episode from quite quite a while before that. But it's one of these emails that when I saw the subject line, I had a moment that was like, am I gonna read this? Because the subject line of the email is my experience with Robert the doll um, And like I had a moment of I'm not I'm not a very like a superstitious person. Really in a lot I mean, in some ways, I definitely am. I think a lot of people are. But I tend to be skeptical about paranormal things. But when I read the subject line of my experience with Robert the Doll, I had a moment of just visceral terror. This is this is Rich, and Rich says hello, try seeing Holly. I'm a relatively new listener to your podcast, and I've been listening to the backlog of your shows. I recently listened to you one of your Impossible episodes, which included the portion about Robert the haunted doll in Key West had to run in with Robert Back in two thousand one. A friend of mine who lived and Key West, was telling me about this doll in a museum down there. He told me the basic story behind it, which more or less matched what you mentioned to your podcast. After speaking to him, I looked up Robert on the Internet to see photos of the doll, certainly very creepy. As a joke, I downloaded a photo of Robert and photo shopped it with a word bubble that read I see you. My emailed this photo to my friend and Key West. Meanwhile, a coworker of mine who was in on this conversation, went out to lunch, and again as a joke, I made this photo of Robert as the wallpaper on his computer. When he returned from lunch, he turned on his computer to see this photo, and he was a bit freaked out. But here's where he gets interesting. His computer was completely frozen and would not respond the screen loaded with the photo of Robert, but it was otherwise non functional. He restarted his computer several times the same result. Eventually, I t had to come wipe the hard drive and reinstall everything. Back to my friend and Key West. About an hour later, he called me and asked what I had emailed to him. He said he clicked on the attachment and it immediately crashed his computer and it would not turn on again. That computer never worked again. I'm generally a skeptic and I'm not superstitious. In your show, when you mentioned cameras and other electronics often failed when around Robert, I immediately got excited remembering what had happened to me. I'm telling you this from firsthand experience with Robert. Maybe it's a coincidence, but it seems very odd. To me that it crashed two computers within an hour. Hopefully reading this email has no ill effects on your computer. Thanks for all you do, Rich Rich. It did not have any ill effects on our computer, and I hope reading this email does not cause any ill effects in our listeners uh smartphones or m P three players or other devices. I did feel like we needed a moment of levity after talking about Usnix for forty five minutes. Robert be cool, It'd be cool, Robert's electronic. We just we needed to think about something else for just a minute. This was I think the hardest episode I've ever worked on for the show. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast, We're at History Podcast at how stuff Works dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in history and on Twitter at miss in History. Our tumbler is it miss in history dot tumbler dot com. We're on Pinterest and Instagram, both at miss in history. If you would like to come to our parent company's website, which is how stuff Works dot com, you can find information about anything your heart desires. And if you want to come to our website, which is missing History dot com. You'll find show notes of every episode Holly and I have ever done. The page for this episode will have one of those family trees we talked about. Uh. You can also find an archive of every episode ever, so you can do all that in a whole lot more at house to works dot com or Missed than History dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com.