Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [213]
The nineteenth century had read in horror about the “Juke” family. Their twentieth-century equivalent was the pseudonymous “Kallikak” family, a cautionary tale of bad blood, told by Henry Herbert Goddard, director of research at a New Jersey institution for the feeble-minded..44 The family descended from Martin Kallikak, a soldier in the Revolutionary War. Martin fathered a bastard, a “feeble-minded” son; the mother was a “feeble-minded” woman he had met at a tavern. This encounter produced a miserable line of 480 descendants; 143 of these were “feebleminded,” forty-six were “normal.” (As to the rest, who knows?) There were thirty-six illegitimate children, thirty-three “sexually immoral persons, mostly prostitutes,” along with alcoholics, epileptics, criminals, and keepers of “houses of ill fame.” Kallikak, after his tavern fling, met and married a respectable woman; this union produced a “good family.” The Kallikak family tree was a kind of “natural experiment.” It proved, Goddard thought, that mental weakness and other undesirable traits were handed down from father and mother to daughter and son, according to the very laws that Gregor Mendel discovered in his work “on the propagation of the ordinary garden pea.”45
What was to be done? Goddard asked. Defectives and degenerates were breeding like rabbits, with appalling consequences. Sterilization had to be the answer: “The operation itself is almost as simple in males as having a tooth pulled. In females it is not much more serious.”46 Indeed, by the time Goddard wrote these words, eugenic sterilization was no mere theory; some states had written it into law.
Even in the late nineteenth century, there were some tentative experiments (see chapter 6). Indiana has the honor of passing the first law (1907) that made sterilization official policy. The law solemnly recited that “Heredity plays a most important part in the transmission of crime, idiocy and imbecility.” Every institution in Indiana that housed “confirmed criminals, idiots, rapists and imbeciles” was to add two “skilled surgeons” to its staff. The regular doctor and the board of managers of the institution would recommend inmates to the surgeons for examination. If this “committee of experts,” together with the board of managers, decided that “procreation is inadvisable,” and if there was “no probability of the improvement of the mental condition of the inmate,” the surgeon might “perform such operation for the prevention of procreation as shall be decided safest and most effective.”47
This was only the beginning. California, in 1909, passed a law on the “asexualization” of prisoners—convicts committed twice for sexual offenses, three times for any other crime, or serving a life sentence—if any such inmate gave “evidence while ... in a ... prison in this state that he is a moral and sexual pervert.”48 Within a generation, about half of the states had some sort of eugenics statute; many of them, like Indiana, indiscriminately mixed together criminals and “idiots.”
Some states sterilized with a vengeance. In Indiana, the aptly named Dr. Harry Sharp, a doctor at the Indiana Reformatory in Jeffersonville, was a pioneer in vasectomy. He began in 1899, when a nineteen-year-old patient who masturbated between four and ten times a day asked the doctor to castrate him so that he could rid himself of this horrible habit. Sharp performed a vasectomy instead; this (he claimed) did the trick. Later, he sterilized some three hundred inmates.49
Behind the fear of hereditary crime and degeneracy was, perhaps, another source of uneasiness for old-line Americans: the influx of riffraff from various parts of the world who threatened to swamp the good old Americans and bury their values in rubble. The stupid and feebleminded masses