American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [139]
As for whether intelligence was inherited, Goddard repeated the mantra, “Morons beget morons.” Yet he also wrote in the same article that it seemed more likely that the poor showing of immigrants on these intelligence tests was due to environmental causes rather than genetic defects. Unlike the work of Edward Ross, Goddard avoided linking new immigrants to the weakening of America’s genetic stock. In fact, he mused with little evidence that “a very large percentage of these immigrants make good after a fashion.” On top of that, he said, these feebleminded immigrants did the work that Americans would not do. There was plenty of drudge work that needed to be done that required minimal intelligence.
Even a nonscientist can quickly point out the shoddy methodology of Goddard’s Ellis Island research. His own writings betrayed his second thoughts about his scientific discoveries. Goddard was attempting to make science useful to mankind to help create a more rational and healthier society. He also sought to establish psychology as a respected and useful part of the medical profession. Yet his science too often fell victim to the popular biases of the time.
The Survey , the nation’s leading periodical for social workers, helped publicize Goddard’s study. “Two Immigrants Out of Five Feebleminded” ran a headline in the magazine’s editorial on the subject. “If you had gone over to Ellis Island shortly before the war began and placed your hand at random on one of the aliens waiting to be examined by government inspectors, you would very likely have found that your choice was feebleminded,” the editorial announced. Though the journal used the less inflammatory numbers from Goddard’s study, it still treated his work as scientific proof of large-scale immigrant deficiency. The editorial failed to inform its readers that Goddard’s tests were given to less than two hundred individuals who were not chosen from a representative sample.
Yet when Goddard began his work, he was agnostic on the relationship between immigrants and feeblemindedness. Before leaving for Ellis Island, Goddard had set out to test the opinion that many residents of American mental asylums and institutions were foreign-born. Looking at sixteen such institutions across the nation, he found less than 5 percent of the more than eleven thousand inmates were foreign-born. The fear that mentally ill immigrants were swamping the nation’s hospitals, schools, and institutions, Goddard wrote, was “grossly overestimated.”
For all the attention that Goddard received for his studies at Ellis Island, it was only a small part of intelligence testing taking place there. Not surprisingly, medical officers who sorted through thousands of immigrants each day resented Goddard and his team, who swooped into Ellis Island with great fanfare and then quickly left, leaving the heavy lifting of the daily inspection and testing to the doctors of the Public Health Service, whom Goddard implied were untrained for weeding out mental defectives and had let far too many immigrants of low intelligence slip through.
Goddard had been particularly critical of the powers of observation of Ellis Island doctors, yet their writings show that these officials also put a great deal of faith in initial observations of immigrants. Dr. C. P. Knight described in detail the easily detectable warning signs of a possible idiot, ranging from “low receding forehead” to the size of a face out of proportion the size of the head, to deformed or twisted ears, to excessively deep eye sockets created by a protruding brow. Idiots drooled, and were often apathetic or overly excited. “The expression is stupid, the eyes dull, the speech defective, the tongue swollen and protruding, while the limbs are short and bent and the skin is thick, sallow and greasy,