We may now repeat the ever insistent question, and this time we indeed have good hope of answering it. The question is, “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 as marked and that breed as true as anything in plant or animal life.
Formerly such a statement would have been a guess, an hypothesis. We submit in the following pages what seems to us conclusive evidence of its truth.
CHAPTER II
THE DATA
The Vineland Training School has for two years employed field workers. These are women highly trained, of broad human experience, and interested in social problems. As a result of weeks of residence at the Training School, they become acquainted with the condition of the feeble-minded. They study all the grades, note their peculiarities, and acquaint themselves with the methods of testing and recognizing them. They then go out with an introduction from the Superintendent to the homes of the children and there ask that all the facts which are available may be furnished, in order that we can know more about the child and be better able to care for him and more wisely train him.
Sometimes all necessary information is obtained from the one central source, but more often, especially where the parents are themselves defective, many visits to other homes must be made. Parents often send the field worker to visit near and distant relatives as well as neighbors, employers, teachers, physicians, ministers, overseers of the poor, almshouse directors, etc. These must be interviewed and all the information thus obtained must be weighed and much of it verified by repeated visits to the same locality before an accurate chart of the particular child’s heredity can be made.
In determining the mental condition of people in the earlier generations (that is, as to whether they were feeble-minded or not), one proceeds in the same way as one does to determine the character of a Washington or a Lincoln or any other man of the past. Recourse is had to original documents whenever possible. In the case of defectives, of course, there are not many original documents. Oftentimes the absence of these, where they are to be expected, is of itself significant. For instance, the absence of a record of marriage is often quite as significant as its presence. Some record or memory is generally obtainable of how the person lived, how he conducted himself, whether he was able to make a living, how he brought up his children, what was his reputation in the community; these facts are frequently sufficient to enable one to determine, with a high degree of accuracy, whether the individual was normal or otherwise. Sometimes the condition is marked by the presence of other factors. For example, if a man was strongly alcoholic, it is almost impossible to determine whether he was also feeble-minded, because the reports usually declare that the only trouble with him was that he was always drunk, and they say if he had been sober, he would have been all right. This may be true, but on the other hand, it is quite possible that he was feeble-minded also.
After some experience, the field worker becomes expert in inferring the condition of those persons who are not seen, from the similarity of the language used in describing them to that used in describing persons whom she has seen.
In Deborah’s case, the woman first visited was the one who interested herself in the child and its mother when the latter had just given birth to her baby in the almshouse. From this woman was learned the subsequent history of Deborah’s mother as given in the first part of this description. But references, supplied by her, soon led to further discoveries. The present family was found living within twenty miles of what was afterwards learned to be its ancestral home and in a region that was neither the slums of a city nor the wild desolation of the extreme rural community, but rather in the midst of a populous farming country, one of the best districts in the State. Thorough and carefully conducted investigations in the small town and among the farmers of this region showed that the family had always been notorious for the number of defectives and delinquents it had produced; and this notoriety made it possible to trace them back for no less than six generations.
It was determined to make a survey of the entire family and to discover the condition, as far as possible, of every person in each generation.
The surprise and horror of it all was that no matter where we traced them, whether in the prosperous rural district, in the city slums to which some had drifted, or in the more remote mountain regions, or whether it was a question of the second or the sixth generation, an appalling amount of defectiveness was everywhere found.
In the course of the work of tracing various members of the family, our field worker occasionally found herself in the midst of a good family of the same name, which apparently was in no way related to the girl whose ancestry we were investigating. In such cases, there was nothing to be done but to beat a retreat and start again in another direction. However, these cases became so frequent that there gradually grew the conviction that ours must be a degenerate offshoot from an older family of better stock. Definite work was undertaken in order to locate the point at which the separation took place. Over and over, the investigation was laid aside in sheer despair of ever being able to find absolute proofs or to establish missing links in the testimony. Then some freshly discovered facts, that came often quite unexpectedly, would throw new light on the situation, and the work would be resumed.
The great-great-grandfather of Deborah was Martin Kallikak.[1] That we knew. We had also traced the good family, before alluded to, back to an ancestor belonging to an older generation than this Martin Kallikak, but bearing the same name. He was the father of a large family. His eldest son was named Frederick, but there was no son by the name of Martin. Consequently, no connection could be made. Many months later, a granddaughter of Martin revealed in a burst of confidence the situation. She told us (and this was afterwards fully verified) that Martin had a half brother Frederick—and that Martin never had an own brother “because,” as she now naïvely expressed it, “you see, his mother had him before she was married.” Deeper scrutiny into the life of Martin Kallikak Sr., which was made possible through well-preserved family records, enabled us to complete the story.
When Martin Sr., of the good family, was a boy of fifteen, his father died, leaving him without parental care or oversight. Just before attaining his majority, the young man joined one of the numerous military companies that were formed to protect the country at the beginning of the Revolution. At one of the taverns frequented by the militia he met a feeble-minded girl by whom he became the father of a feeble-minded son. This child was given, by its mother, the name of the father in full, and thus has been handed down to posterity the father’s name and the mother’s mental capacity. This illegitimate boy was Martin Kallikak Jr., the great-great-grandfather of our Deborah, and from him have come four hundred and eighty descendants. One hundred and forty-three of these, we have conclusive proof, were or are feeble-minded, while only forty-six have been found normal. The rest are unknown or doubtful.
Among these four hundred and eighty descendants, thirty-six have been illegitimate.
There have been thirty-three sexually immoral persons, mostly prostitutes.
There have been twenty-four confirmed alcoholics.
There have been three epileptics.
Eighty-two died in infancy.
Three were criminal.
Eight kept houses of ill fame.
These people have married into other families, generally of about