The Kallikaks and the Eugenicists

Spurred by the same fears, prejudices and societal issues that were driving the progressive movement in general, the eugenics movement in the U.S. focused on identifying, sequestering and even sterilizing people who were deemed to be "unfit."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
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

(00:21):
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

(00:42):
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

(01:05):
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

(01:25):
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

(01:45):
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

(02:08):
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

(02:29):
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.

(02:54):
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.

(03:18):
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

(03:40):
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,

(04:05):
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,

(04:26):
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

(04:49):
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

(05:11):
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

(05:36):
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

(05:58):
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

(06:18):
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

(06:39):
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

(07:03):
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

(07:24):
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

(07:44):
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.

(08:06):
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

(08:26):
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

(08:49):
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

(09:10):
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

(09:33):
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,

(09:57):
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

(10:19):
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

(10:41):
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,

(11:02):
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

(11:22):
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.

(11:46):
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,

(12:10):
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

(12:30):
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

(12:50):
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,

(13:11):
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,

(13:35):
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.

(13:59):
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,

(14:19):
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,

(14:39):
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.

(15:02):
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

(15:24):
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

(15:47):
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

(16:10):
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

(16:34):
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

(16:54):
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

(17:15):
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

(17:37):
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

(17:59):
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.

(18:20):
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

(18:41):
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

(19:03):
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,

(19:26):
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

(19:47):
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,

(20:07):
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

(20:32):
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

(20:58):
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

(21:21):
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

(21:43):
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

(22:05):
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

(22:28):
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

(22:50):
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

(23:10):
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

(23:32):
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

(23:56):
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

(24:16):
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

(24:36):
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

(25:00):
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

(25:22):
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

(25:44):
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

(26:04):
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

(26:26):
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

(26:48):
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

(27:11):
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.

(27:31):
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

(27:52):
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

(28:15):
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

(28:36):
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

(28:57):
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

(29:20):
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

(29:42):
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

(30:03):
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,

(30:26):
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

(30:47):
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.

(31:08):
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.

(31:33):
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.

(31:56):
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

(32:17):
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

(32:38):
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

(33:00):
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

(33:22):
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

(33:46):
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

(34:12):
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,

(34:35):
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

(34:58):
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.

(35:18):
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,

(35:41):
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

(36:02):
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

(36:24):
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,

(36:47):
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

(37:07):
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

(37:28):
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,

(37:50):
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

(38:12):
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.