SYMHC Classics: The Kallikaks and the Eugenicists

In 2017, the show covered the fears, prejudices and societal issues that drove the eugenics movement in the U.S., which focused on identifying, sequestering and even sterilizing people who were deemed to be "unfit."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Recently on the show, we talked about Ellen
Swallow Richards, and one of the things that came up
in that episode was the eugenics movement. The eugenics movement
has come up several times on the show over the
last year or so, and every time we've tried to
give kind of a straightforward but also very brief explanation
of what that movement was all about. But that is

(00:24):
really not something you can just be through or nuanced
about in a couple of sentences. We do have a
whole episode about this, though, which came out on August nine,
twenty seventeen, and it is Today's Saturday Classic. One of
the things we talk about in this episode is people
being pressured or coerced into sterilization. After forced sterilization programs

(00:46):
were generally ended in the US, there have been additional
allegations of this in the years since we recorded this episode,
including in twenty twenty when migrant women who were held
by ice at the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia
reported that they had been given hysterectomies or other invasive
procedures without their full knowledge or consent. We usually say

(01:09):
enjoy at the end of this intro, but this episode
involves just a particularly infuriating and upsetting period of history,
So instead we hope your day is going well. Welcome
to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio. Hello,

(01:32):
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

(01:55):
urbanization and rapid growth. So just as examples, we've talked
about people like Atoms, known as the mother of social work,
and we've talked about movements for women's suffrage, temperance, and
organized labor. And the temperance movement did lead to prohibition,
which was a spectacular failure. But other than that, these
episodes have generally talked about overall positive reforms and education

(02:19):
and public health and workplace safety, human rights. But the
Progressive era also had a focus on making humanity better
through eugenics coined by English anthropologists Sir Francis Galton in
eighteen eighty three. Eugenics began with positive eugenics, and this
was encouraging the people who were considered the healthiest and

(02:40):
the most intelligent to have more children for the betterment
of the species. But in a few countries, including the
United States, the focus turned toward negative eugenics, or stopping
people who were considered not as good from reproducing, spurred
by the same fears and prejudices, and societal issue is
that we're driving the progressive movement in general. The eugenics

(03:03):
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

(03:23):
and that it would be best to keep people who
had that trait from reproducing. This family is known as
the Calikas. And just as a note, a lot of
the language that was used to talk about disability at
this time was insulting. And we're going to be reading
from and referring to a bunch of material. It's just offensive.

(03:44):
So anytime we say feeble minded or unfit or similar
words like that's in air quotes. These are not real
things to describe people, right. Also, heads up, it's a
little loggy. It's a little longer than normal. So you're
one of the runners who listens and new time your
run to the episode. If you go the whole way,

(04:05):
you've gone too far. Probably so, and that's probably the
last jesty thing you'll hear in this episode. Yeah, yeah. So.
In nineteen twelve, the McMillan Company published a book by
Henry Herbert Goddard, director of the Research Laboratory at the
Vineland Training School for Backward and feeble minded Children in Vineland,

(04:26):
New Jersey. It was called the Calikak Family, a Study
in the Heredity of feeble Mindedness. It was just one
in a whole genre of literature called eugenic family studies.
The first book in this genre was The Jukes, A
Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity, and this book

(04:47):
was by Richard Dugdale. Dougdale's study came about after he
visited the Ulster County Jail in New York and learned
that six people who were incarcerated there were related to
each other. Looking into it further, Dugdale found more family
members who had arrests and convictions on their records, and
he traced more of the lineage all the way back

(05:08):
to a woman that he dubbed Margaret, the Mother of Criminals.
He found forty two connected families, with five hundred forty
of their seven hundred nine members blood relatives. According to
Dugdale's estimate, their combined criminal proceedings, social assistance, and healthcare
had cost a total of about one point three million dollars.

(05:31):
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

(05:54):
the Calikaks followed Dugdale's original book on the Jukes, and
like Jukes, Calicak was pseudonym was a portmanteau of the
Greek words callos for beauty and cacos for bad According
to Goddard's account, Deborah Calicac had been born in an
almshouse and had arrived at the Vinolin School at the
age of eight. Her mother had been through a convoluted

(06:17):
series of relationships and marriages and had given birth to
several children, both in and out of wedlock, and according
to Goddard, no man in her life was willing to
support the young Deborah. Goddard maintained that from her admission
at the school in October eighteen ninety seven until nineteen eleven,
when he was compiling his study, Deborah had never tested

(06:40):
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

(07:03):
another behind their peers. It included everything from mental illnesses
to disabilities and disorders that were noticeable but not necessarily severe.
A person described as feeble minded might be able to
take care of their own day to day needs while
struggling with social interactions or academic skills or physical skills

(07:23):
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

(07:46):
judgment or sense, and like feeble minded, moron was adopted
as an actual clinical term. Goddard claimed he had traced
Deborah's ancestry all the way back to her great great
great grandfather, who he dubbed Martin Calikak Senior. Martin Senior
was described as having fathered a child with an unnamed

(08:09):
feeble minded barmaid, Deborah's great great great grandmother. This barmaid's
descendants were a family of quote an appalling amount of defectiveness.
But then Martin Senior turned his life around and married
a quote respectable girl of good family. His descendants from
this marriage were, in Goddard's words, quote respectable citizens, men

(08:33):
and women prominent in every phase of life. As printed
in the book, the Calicac Lineage with its beautiful half
and its bad half was accompanied by family trees emblazoned
with ends and f's for normal and feeble minded, with
ends in white and f's in black, along with notations
of which ones were sexually immoral, insane, syphilitic, or criminalistic.

(08:58):
All of these are words that God used, and the
results are striking. One half of the tree, depicting the
descendants of Martin Senior's children with the upstanding Quaker woman
he married, is full of quote normal people flawlessly white,
and then the other half, depicting the descendants of Martin's
son with the unnamed barmaid, is dotted all over with

(09:21):
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

(09:43):
they could have inspired the X Files episode Home. The
buildings are all very ramshackle, the people's postuous slouchy, and
the facial expressions and features are oddly atypical, and Goddard's
words quote, how do we account for this kind of individual?
The answer is, in a word, heredity bad stock. We

(10:05):
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

(10:25):
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,

(10:51):
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

(11:13):
and Criminology, gave it glowingly positive reviews. Both Calikak and
Juke became slang terms for people thought of as unintelligent,
backward and inbread. The book's conclusions were also widely accepted
as scientific truth, and this was in spite of this
admission printed in its introduction quote, it is true that

(11:34):
we have made rather dogmatic statements and have drawn conclusions
that do not seem scientifically warranted from the data. We
have done this because it seems necessary to make these
statements and conclusions for the benefit of the lay reader.
Soon the Calikaks were being cited in mainstream biology and
psychology textbooks. If you've heard our podcast on the Scopes trial,

(11:57):
you might recall that we read from a civic biology
presented in Problems, and that was the widely used biology
textbook that was part of that case. Chapter seventeen of
the nineteen fourteen edition, titled Heredity Variation, Plant and Animal Breeding,
explains the term eugenics before discussing both the Calikas and
the Jukes. It basically boils down the idea of eugenics

(12:20):
to the science of being well born. In its discussion
of the Jukes, the book mentions Margaret, mother of Criminals,
the more than one million dollar tax cost to the
state of New York and the large number of quote
feeble minded, alcoholic, immoral, or criminal persons that were purportedly
in the family. It then moves on to the Calikax quote.

(12:42):
This family has been traced back to the War of
the Revolution, when a young soldier named Martin Calikax seduced
a feeble minded girl. She had a feeble minded son,
from whom there have been to the present time four
hundred eighty descendants. Of these, thirty three were sexually immoral,
for confirmed drunkards, three epileptics, and one hundred forty three

(13:04):
feeble minded. The man who started this terrible line of
immorality and feeble mindedness later married a normal Quaker girl.
From this couple, a line of four hundred ninety six
descendants have come with no cases of feeble mindedness. The
evidence and the moral speak for themselves. A civic biology
goes on to say that if people were animals, we

(13:26):
would probably just quote kill them off to prevent them
from spreading. It goes on to explain, quote humanity will
not allow this, but we do have the remedy of
separating the sexes and asylums or other places, and in
various ways preventing intermarriage. And the possibilities of perpetuating such
a low and degenerate race. Through the Calikak family and

(13:51):
other books and propaganda, the idea that defective people needed
to be kept from breeding became common knowledge, and in
the early decades of the twentieth century, more than thirty
states passed laws allowing and regulating the involuntary sterilization of
people who were deemed to be feeble minded or otherwise unfit.

(14:11):
Often sterilization involved a vas ectomy or tubal ligation, but
could also be as involved as a total hysterectomy. Many
of these laws were patterned after a model law drafted
by Harry H. Laughlin of the Eugenics Record Office at
cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, who was one of Goddard's colleagues
within the eugenics movement. Goddard himself consulted with states on

(14:35):
their eugenics laws as well. Basically, states kept passing laws
that were not being upheld in court, and so these
guys got together to draft a law that would be
upheld as constitutional. In nineteen twenty seven, one of these
laws made its way to the Supreme Court in Buck
versus Bell Carry Buck had been committed to the Virginia

(14:56):
Colony for epileptics and feeble minded, and she was sterilized there. Carrie,
her mother, and her daughter were all described as feeble minded,
and Carrie and her mother were both described as immoral
and promiscuous because they had had children out of wedlock.
The Calikak family was entered into evidence in this case.

(15:16):
Harry H. Laughlin provided expert testimony. Doctor Esterbrook, the one
who revised the study of the Jukes family, did as well.
The Supreme Court found for Jenia's eugenics law to be
constitutional and upheld it, with the opinion authored by Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Junior, including the sentence quote three generations of

(15:37):
imbeciles are enough. Involuntary sterilizations were also being performed on
people convicted of crimes, but this generally ended after the
Supreme Court ruled in Skinner versus Oklahoma in nineteen forty two.
States had been sterilizing people convicted of some felonies but
not others, and the Court ruled that this was a

(15:57):
violation of the Fourteenth Amendments Equal Protection clause. But Buck
versus Bell has never been overturned, meaning that the Supreme
Court never officially reversed its decision on sterilization of people
who were not convicted of a crime. Involuntary sterilizations of
supposedly unfit people continued in the United States until the

(16:19):
nineteen seventies, at which point at least sixty thousand people
had been involuntarily sterilized, predominantly women. While there have been
calls for reparations, North Carolina is the only state so
far to pass legislation to do so. The idea of
keeping bloodlines free from the taint of feeble mindedness also

(16:40):
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,

(17:03):
which set quotas on immigration based on how many people
already in the United States hailed from a particular place,
so it allowed the most immigration from nations that were
already the most similar to white Americans, which was Northwest
Europe that allowed almost no immigration from Africa and barred
immigration from Asia entirely. The Immigration Act was also influenced

(17:27):
by Henry H. Goddard's work at Ellis Island, where he
had set up an intelligence testing center to evaluate incoming
immigrants and turn away the ones deemed insufficient in the nineteenteens.
In his work intelligence classification of immigrants of different nationalities,
he claimed that forty percent of immigrants were feeble minded,

(17:48):
including eighty three percent of Jews, seventy nine percent of Italians,
eighty percent of Hungarians, and eighty seven percent of Russians.
These evaluations began with one tester identifying probable cases by
sight and then referring the people she spotted to her
colleague for an assessment. Goddard employed women for this purpose

(18:09):
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

(18:31):
black or Native American by law. The only exception was
for people who were one sixteenth or less Native American,
and this exception was to allow prominent Virginians purportedly descended
from Pocahontas to still be considered legally white. This act
also prohibited into racial marriage, and there is more on

(18:51):
it in our two part podcast on Loving Versus Virginia
from twenty thirteen. In addition to the sterilizations of the
unfit that were codified in state's eugenics laws, there were
also involuntary and coerced sterilizations of poor people and racial
and ethnic minorities, including Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans,

(19:13):
stretching all the way into the nineteen seventies. Because these
were not conducted under any particular law or official program,
the exact numbers are harder to estimate. In many cases,
these sterilizations were performed in conjunction with other procedures and
without the patient's knowledge. This practice was so prevalent in
the South that it was nicknamed a Mississippi appendectomy that

(19:37):
was either coined or popularized by Fanny Lew Hamer, who
is on the list for a future podcast episode. As
with Buck versus Bell and the forced sterilizations of people
considered unfit, cases regarding the forced or coerced sterilizations of
minorities have also made their way through the courts. Two

(19:59):
black teenagers, Mary Alice and many Relfh were sterilized without
their parents' consent in nineteen seventy three. Their mother, who
was not literate, had believed she was signing a consent
form for birth control shots, and when the case made headlines,
many more black and Native American women began coming forward
with similar allegations. In his opinion on Ralph versus Weinberger,

(20:23):
Judge Gerhard Guessel of the U. S. District Court for
the District of Columbia wrote that federal programs had funded
the sterilization of one hundred thousand to one hundred fifty
thousand low income women during the previous few years. He
went on quote, although Congress has been insistent that all
family planning programs function on a purely voluntary basis, there

(20:45):
is uncontroverted evidence in the record that miners and other
incompetence have been sterilized with federal funds, and that an
indefinite number of poor people have been improperly coerced into
accepting a sterilization operation under the threat various federally supported
welfare benefits would be withdrawn unless they submitted to irreversible sterilization.

(21:07):
In another case, Madrigal versus Quilligan was a class action
lawsuit with ten plaintiffs who alleged that Los Angeles County
USC Medical Center had either coerced or misled them into
being sterilized during a cesarean section, with the option being
presented to them after hours of difficult labor. Nearly one
hundred and fifty Spanish speaking women had come forward with

(21:30):
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

(21:55):
have also continued well beyond the nineteen seventies. Buck versus
Bell was cited as precedent in the two thousand and
one case Vaughan versus Utz, heard in the Eighth Circuit Court,
in which a social service worker at a hospital coerced
a woman who had been diagnosed with a mild intellectual
disability into getting a tubal ligation by telling her that

(22:16):
it would help her regain custody of her children. A
twenty thirteen report by the Center for Investigative Reporting detailed
the sterilizations of at least one hundred forty eight incarcerated
women in California prisons, which had been performed without the
required state approvals, even though California banned forced sterilizations in

(22:37):
nineteen seventy nine. Numerous women described being coerced and pressured
into the procedure while incarcerated, and in July twenty seventeen,
news Channel five in Tennessee reported that General Sessions Judge
Sam Benningfield allowed incarcerated people who either got of aasectomy
or a contraceptive implant to get a thirty day credit

(22:59):
towards jail time. Judge Benningfield rescinded this order on July
twenty sixth after it made headlines. While the story of
the Calikaks was just one part of the eugenics movement,
the studies of the Calikaks, the Jukes, and other families
were widely cited heavily used pieces of evidence of the

(23:19):
eugenicists idea that it was better to keep so called
defectives from breeding, and by extension, that sterilization could be
used to help guarantee white racial purity, and the same
people writing books about the Calikaks and the Jukes were
actively working with lawmakers to create policies to do exactly that.
The book's influence spread beyond the United States as well.

(23:42):
A German language translation of The Calikak Family was printed
in Germany in nineteen fourteen, and it was reprinted in
nineteen thirty three. Germany's own eugenics law law for the
Prevention of hereditarily Diseased Offspring, was passed in nineteen thirty
three as well, and was also based on Harry H.
Lachlin's model law that was being used as a template

(24:04):
in the United States. And it wasn't just a matter
of Nazi Germany picking up and repurposing Lachlan's work. Lachlan
actively corresponded with eugenicists in Germany, writing in one of
his letters how pleased he was that Hitler understood that
quote the central mission of all politics is race hygiene.
In Nazi Germany, more than one hundred and fifty thousand

(24:27):
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

(24:49):
started to fall out of favor, although the sterilizations that
the movement had advocated have continued for decades. On top
of being used to support policy that led to involuntary
sterilizations and in Nazi Germany murders, much of the story
of the Calikaks wasn't even true, and we're going to
talk more about that. After a sponsor break, Henry H.

(25:18):
Goddard began publicly refuting his previous opinions about the quote
feeble minded and eugenics, beginning in the late nineteen twenties
and into the nineteen thirties. He made a number of
public statements that his intelligence testing had been incorrect and
that he had been wrong to believe that feeble minded
people could not be educated, and that feeble minded people

(25:40):
should be allowed to have children if they chose, and
should not be segregated from the rest of society. But
this reversal came too late to stop the eugenics movement,
or even to change the life of the star of
his most famous work, Deborah Calikak was really Emma Wolverton,
and she really did arrive at the Violent School in
eighteen ninety seven at the age of eight, and it's

(26:03):
not clear if there was a specific reason for her
to be institutionalized. Although the book does seem to have
embellished her mother's life in relationships, it's very likely that
it boiled down to poverty. Even the wording in the
book is really cage here quote on the plea that
the child did not get along at school and might
possibly be feeble minded. She gained admission to the training school,

(26:26):
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

(26:48):
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,

(27:10):
we knew we had acquired distinction in acquiring Deborah Calikak,
for by this time the story of her pedigree was
becoming well known, and such a capable, well trained, and
good looking girl must be an asset in terms of
well trained. Emma Wolverton was excellent at embroidery, woodworking, basketry,
and gardening. She made and repaired costumes for the school plays,

(27:35):
was in charge of the Violin School's kindergarten, and worked
as a nurse's aide in the school's hospital. She also
played the coronet beautifully. Was an avid reader and a
devoted correspondent, and bred Persian cats and her adulthood. Visitors
to her institution often mistook her for a staff member.
She distinguished herself to the point that she was allowed

(27:55):
to work for the Family of Violence. Superintendent along with
others in the community. And to be clear, although working
for the superintendent's family was framed as a privilege and
a reward, all of this work was actually compulsory. It's
difficult to diagnose historical figures who aren't alive to be examined,
and this is even more difficult in Emma Wolverton's case,

(28:18):
since her school records are often contradictory and the institutions
caring for her had a vested self interest in people,
simultaneously believing that she needed to be institutionalized while also
demonstrating a success story in terms of what the institution
could accomplish. But by cross referencing school records with witness accounts,

(28:38):
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.

(28:58):
The photos of Emma will in the Calikak Family clearly
served to show her as both a success and a warning.
She's neatly dressed either shown in association with something productive
like sewing or serving a meal, or with something considered intelligent,
like reading a book. These are in contrast with the
photos of the Calikacs in their homes, which are clearly

(29:19):
meant to suggest something nefarious. The pictures of the other
Calikacs have definitely been retouched, and there's some debate about
whether that retouching served to deliberately exaggerate them or just
to prepare them for publication. Regardless, the book is making
a very clear implication and a very clear value judgment
on all the Calikacs based on their physical appearance and

(29:42):
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,

(30:05):
or between the families quote good and bad branches, just
doesn't add up. The bad line of Martin Calikax Senior's
descendants purportedly begins with Martin Junior. I was really John Wolverton.
John Wolverton was the son of Gabriel Wolverton and Katherine Murray,
but the Calikax study presents his father as a different

(30:26):
John Wolverton, just thus the Martin Senior and Martin Junior.
But according to a genealogy of the family that was
published in the nineteen eighties, the second John Wolverton was
not his father. They were second cousins, so the book's
entire premise is not correct. In addition to the two
John Wolverton's not being father and son, both parts of

(30:49):
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

(31:12):
of people in the good line who they might have
described as feeble minded, and they flagged people in the
bad line based on just the thinnest of evidence. Claud
of this was based on stuff like family gossip. They
would very scientific, right, They would interview elderly family members
about people on the other side of the family and
folks would be like, oh, yeah, he was totally a drunk,

(31:36):
so that person would be marked down as feeble minded,
even though if you looked at things like tax records
and property records, it seemed as though this person was
like a landowner, not fothering anyone, perfectly living their life
just fine. So in reality, going back to the eighteenth century,
the Wolverton's were overall not particularly affluent, but mostly self

(31:59):
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,

(32:20):
and without a lot of resources or education. So when
they lost jobs, as Emma's mother, for example, did, they
no longer had an extended family network nearby to turn
to for support, instead often winding up in jail or
in a poorhouse. So this was definitely not something that
could be explained by some kind of hereditary taint. Similarly,

(32:43):
some of Arthur h Esterbrook's papers containing the Jukes family's
real names were found in the early twenty first century,
and it turned out that many of them were respected
citizens of Ulster County, New York. Their existence had conveniently
been ignored in Esterbrook's study. Emma Wolverton died at the
age of eighty nine in nineteen seventy eight. She knew

(33:05):
that she had been written about as Deborah Calcak, and
that she had been used as a widely read and
even famous example of a quote high grade feeble minded person.
It's not really clear whether she knew that that depiction
had been at the heart of the eugenics movement or
what that had ultimately meant. She was offered the chance
to leave the institution toward the end of her life,

(33:27):
but she didn't feel that she could because at that
point she developed severe arthritis and she really needed a
lot of medical care. She spent the last year of
her life in a hospital, and at the time of
her death she had been institutionalized for eighty one years.
I normally say something to wrap up here, but mostly

(33:50):
this whole episode makes me incredibly angry. Yeah, Like it's
the it's the magical combination, right of like a poorly
executed biased science and I'm using the air quotes there
used to one work this whole like superiority angle as

(34:18):
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

(34:39):
the most babies, which, like that might sound okkay at
a surface level, but pretty quickly falls apart when you
think about, like who's deciding who is worthy of having
right more babies. My mom worked with people with a
range of disabilities for a lot of her career, and

(35:02):
it's like there are definitely complicated moral and ethical questions
when people are capable of having a child but genuinely
not necessarily capable of taking care of a child. Right,
These conversations do not include things like telling a woman
if she has her tubes tied, she can get her

(35:23):
kids back, right that nothing like that. Yeah, thanks so
much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode
is out of the archive, if you heard an email
address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the
course of the show that could be obsolete now. Our

(35:45):
current email address is History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Our old health stuff works email address no longer works,
and you can find us all over social media at
missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show
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else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History

(36:10):
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