By: Jerry Bergman
Montpelier, Ohio
My earlier column on Deborah Kallikak brought several responses, mostly asking how a multi-talented girl could ever be judged as feeble-minded.
She was judged feeble-minded by the psychologists using tests which have now been shown to be problematic.
The story of Deborah’s family, titled The Kallikak Family, written by Harvard-trained biologist Charles Davenport and Ohio State University professor Henry Goddard, was soon retold in hundreds of books.
One of the worst examples was in the textbook used by John Scopes titled A Civic Biology by George William Hunter (1863-1948).
This textbook, which openly taught racism, contained an entire chapter on eugenics based on the Kallikak family.
For nearly a decade, Hunter’s book was the most widely used high school science textbook in America. It was endorsed by many distinguished professors, including those at elite universities such as Brown (Providence, RI) and Columbia (New York, NY).
Hunter’s Civic Biology text describes the Kallikak study in glowing terms as definitive proof of the inheritance of feeble-mindedness, alcoholism, immorality, and criminality.
Hunter proposed in his text that, to solve most social problems all we had to do was identify the genetic human carriers of maladies such as feeble-mindedness, then sterilize them to ensure that these traits were eventually eradicated from humanity.
As late as 1955, one leading high school biology textbook uncritically endorsed the claim that the feeble-minded Deborah Kallikak clan had caused enormous harm to society.
Between 1907 and 1963, at least 60,000 persons were sterilized in the United States for eugenic reasons, the majority being women.
To silence the opposition to eugenics from the churches that taught all humans were children of Adam and Eve, and no races were therefore inferior, the eugenicists brought a case to the Supreme Court.
The Court sided with the eugenicists. The highly respected Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, ruled because “heredity plays an important part in the transmission of insanity, imbecility..… It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.
The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough” (Buck v. Bell, 1927, pp. 206-207).
The Deborah Kallikak Family story was enormously important for the eugenics movement, not only in America, but also in Nazi Germany.
Hitler learned about the Kallikak Family study when he was imprisoned in 1924 for his part in the Nazi’s attempt to overthrow the government by force.
The year Hitler assumed power in Germany, 1933, a German language edition of The Kallikak Family, translated by Karl Wilker, was published.
In his introduction, Wilker made it clear how important the Kallikak Family research was in Nazi Germany’s adoption of eugenic programs.
The Nazis even used the book’s conclusions as a teaching tool in German schools. The result of the German indoctrination program was, the Nazi government eventually murdered over 200,000 persons they judged feeble-minded or otherwise an inferior race.
We now know The Kallikak Family book was a grossly distorted account based on the conviction that Darwinian eugenics could improve society.
Deborah, who was not educated in regular schools, may not have done well on the Stanford-Binet IQ test, but she was nevertheless a very talented woman who mastered many skills, including cooking, embroidery, basketry, and woodworking.
She also played the cornet beautifully and was a talented actress playing the star roles in the performances put on by the institution (i.e., New Jersey’s Vineland Training School).
Deborah also helped to care for the children of the institution’s employees. The children absolutely adored her, some of whom sent letters to her for the rest of her life.
In the end, the eugenics movement led to the Holocaust and the murder of 12 million people judged inferior by the leading professors and doctors in the most educated nation on earth, Germany.
The indoctrination into Darwinism that occurred in Nazi Germany by the educated elite still plagues the world today.
No longer is the indoctrination focused on Darwinian racism, but on the total Darwinian evolutionary worldview.
This worldview philosophy has replaced theism with functional atheism and an intolerance for the theistic worldview and its values.
Both Darwinian racism and Darwinian evolutionism are myths that have caused an enormous amount of suffering.
As Professor Søren Løvtrup, when chairman of the Swedish Developmental Biologists has said in his book Darwinism: The Refutation Of A Myth page 422, “I believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science.
When this happens many people will pose the question: how did this ever happen?” Below is a picture of Deborah Kallikak.
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Dr. Jerry Bergman has taught biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology for over 40 years at several colleges and universities including Bowling Green State University, Medical College of Ohio where he was a research associate in experimental pathology, and The University of Toledo. He is a graduate of the Medical College of Ohio, Wayne State University in Detroit, the University of Toledo, and Bowling Green State University. He has over 1,800 publications in 12 languages and 60 books and monographs. His books and textbooks that include chapters that he authored are in over 1,500 college libraries in 27 countries.