The Kallikak Family

First published in 1912, this infamous study helped establish Henry Herbert Goddard as a leading figure in the eugenics movement, which sought to advance the human race through selective breeding. By contrasting two branches of the pseudononymous “Kallikak Family,” Goddard argued for the existence of a hereditary trait, broadly-defined as “feeble-mindedness,” which contributes to crime, poverty, and other social problems. Informed by eugenics research, the United States forcibly sterilized over 65,000 individuals between 1907 and 1981, and passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which turned away members of “undesirable” racial groups. Goddard’s research has since been thoroughly debunked for its sloppy methodology, whereby upper-class fieldworkers were trained to assess feeble-mindedness at-a-glance, or by hearsay. The Kallikak Family is widely cited as one of the central texts of the eugenics movement, and as an exemplar of politically-motivated pseudoscience.