Henry H. Goddard

Director of research at the New Jersey Home for the Education and Care of Feeble-Minded Children in Vineland, Henry H. Goddard used and elaborated Alfred Binet's intelligence tests for use with American students. Goddard made a number of important contributions in special education, including his guiding role in the establishment of the first state law mandating special education services. He is remembered, however, primarily for his work in popularizing Alfred Binet's approach to psychological testing in the United States and studying the hereditary roots of feeble-mindedness in his book, The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness (1912).

Background and Education

Goddard grew up in a devout Quaker family, and his initial educational experiences occurred at Haverford College, a Quaker institution in Pennsylvania. At various points during his education, he took teaching and administrative positions in Quaker schools. At one point, he lectured at the newly founded University of Southern California - where he held the distinction of being that university's first football coach. But Goddard's interests in psychology lured him to Clark University to study with G. Stanley Hall, where Goddard gained an appreciation for scientific approaches to studying human behavior.

Upon graduation with his doctorate, Goddard worked for several years at a teacher's college in Pennsylvania, where he became frustrated by the lack of emphasis on scientific psychology and pedagogy. As a result, in 1906 he accepted the position of director of research at the New Jersey Home for the Education and Care of Feeble-Minded Children in Vineland, a small town in the southern, rural part of the state. Although Goddard is best known for his work at the Vineland School, he also held two major positions in Ohio before his retirement.

Intelligence Testing

Early in the twentieth century, Goddard was concerned with separating, in his terms, the retarded - who suffered from poor health or environment and required remedial help - from the feeble-minded - who suffered from decreased mental capacity and required a special curriculum. Goddard believed that the Binet-Simon intelligence tests, recently developed in France, could aid in assessing the nature of this problem and began to advocate for the use of the scales in the United States.

About this time, American educators became concerned with the percentage of students who were older than would be expected given their grade. When the question of grade versus age became a major issue in American education, Goddard saw that the Binet scales with which he was already working could be used to study this issue. Goddard's advocacy for the Binet tests was enthusiastic and exhaustive. Well-connected in areas as diverse as medicine, education, psychology, and law, he championed the use of the tests in several venues. For example, he taught or organized courses for teachers on administration of the Binet tests at several institutions. These teachers proceeded to use the tests in educational settings throughout the United States. In addition, he advocated the value of test results as legal evidence. Goddard was also highly involved in the U.S. army psychological testing program during World War I, further legitimizing this particular approach to mental testing.

Goddard's advocacy of the Binet tests had two important outcomes. The mental testing approach gained popularity relative to the qualitatively different techniques used by Francis Galton and others who relied upon physical and physiological measures to estimate intelligence. Also, various forms of the Binet test, primarily revisions by Goddard and especially Lewis Terman, remain in use, and a majority of contemporary intelligence tests are based on similar methodologies. Without Goddard's influence, early-twenty-first century testing and related educational practices might look quite different.

The Kallikak Family Study

Goddard's other major contribution was his study of feeble-mindedness. Goddard's field-based research resulted in many publications, with the best known being The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness. Although Goddard and his assistants studied hundreds of families, the Kallikak family remains the most famous. The family was that of a Vineland student, Deborah. The name Kallikak is actually a pseudonym created from the Greek words kallos (beauty) and kakos (bad). The Kallikak family was divided into two branches - one "good" and one "bad," - both of which originated from Deborah's great-great-great grandfather, Martin Kallikak. When Kallikak was a young soldier, he had a liaison with an "unnamed, feeble-minded tavern girl." This tryst resulted in the birth of an illegitimate son, Martin Kallikak Jr., from whom the bad branch of the family descended. Later in his life, Martin Kallikak Sr. married a Quaker woman from a good family. The good branch descended from this marriage.

Goddard's genealogical research revealed that the union with the feeble-minded girl resulted in generations plagued by feeble-mindedness, illegitimacy, prostitution, alcoholism, and lechery. The marriage of Martin Kallikak Sr. to the Quaker woman yielded generations of normal, accomplished offspring. Goddard believed that the remarkable difference separating the two branches of the family was due entirely to the different hereditary influences from the two women involved with the senior Kallikak.

Goddard's work had a powerful effect. Scholars were generally impressed by the magnitude of the study, and The Kallikak Family became very popular. Critical reaction in the popular press was positive, with more muted reaction within the scientific community. For example, James McKeen Cattell praised the contribution and conclusions but criticized the research design. The Kallikak study was a powerful ally to eugenicist movements, including that of the Nazi party, and contributed to the atmosphere in which compulsory sterilization laws were passed in many states.

Controversy

Controversy followed Goddard throughout his career. However, the Kallikak study and Goddard's eugenicism in the 1910s created the most serious problems. For example, Goddard concluded The Kallikak Family with recommendations of forced sterilization and segregation of the feeble-minded in isolated colonies. His work also had a strong antiimmigrant tone at a time when immigrants were seeking citizenship in record numbers. Goddard later admitted that many of his recommendations on social policy had been misguided, but his controversial role earlier in the twentieth century helped to place his work in low regard by the 1940s.

By the end of the twentieth century, Goddard's research once again came under fire. A photographic expert suggested that some of the Kallikak photographs - those of the bad branch of the family - were retouched. Critics charged that the modifications were made by Goddard to give a more disturbing appearance. However, several researchers have concluded that fraud appears to be unlikely. As Leila Zederland noted, a main thrust of Goddard's work was to show that feeble-minded people looked normal and were often quite attractive; he was advocating for mental testing, not visual inspection, to determine feeble-mindedness.

Contribution

Henry Goddard made substantial contributions to American education, including the popularizing of mental testing, compulsory special education, and gifted education. His research into the hereditary nature of feeble-mindedness and related eugenicist activities, however, has helped to paint the rather negative picture many people continue to hold of Goddard and his work.

Bibliography

Fancher, Raymond E. 1987. "Henry Goddard and the Kallikak Family Photographs: 'Conscious Skullduggery' or 'Whig History'?" American Psychologist 42:585 - 590.

Goddard, Henry H. 1912. The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness. New York: Macmillan.

Goddard, Henry H. 1914. Feeble-Mindedness: Its Causes and Consequences. New York: Macmillan.

Goddard, Henry H. 1927. "Who Is a Moron?" Scientific Monthly 24:41 - 46.

Goddard, Henry H. 1942. "In Defense of the Kallikak Study." Science 95:574 - 576.

Gould, Stephen J. 1981. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: Norton.

Smith, John D. 1985. Minds Made Feeble: The Myth and Legacy of the Kallikaks. Rockville, MD: Aspen.

Zenderland, Leila. 1998. Measuring Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

— JONATHAN A. PLUCKER, AMBER M. ESPING

Henry H. Goddard

Henry Herbert Goddard (August 14 1866 – June 18 1957) was a prominent American psychologist and eugenicist in the early 20th century. He is known especially for his 1912 work The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness, which he himself came to regard as deeply flawed, and for being the first to translate the Binet intelligence test into English in 1908 and distributing an estimated 22,000 copies of the translated test across the United States; he also introduced the term "moron" into the field. He was the leading advocate for the use of intelligence testing in societal institutions including hospitals, schools, the legal system and the military. He played a major role in the emerging field of clinical psychology, in 1911 helped to write the first U.S. law requiring that blind, deaf and mentally retarded children be provided special education within public school systems, and in 1914 became the first American psychologist to testify in court that subnormal intelligence should limit the criminal responsibility of defendants.

Early life

Goddard was born in East Vassalboro, Maine, the fifth and youngest child – and only son – of farmer Henry Clay Goddard and his wife Sarah Winslow Goddard, who were devout Quakers. (Two of his sisters died in infancy.) His father was gored by a bull when the younger Goddard was a small child, and eventually lost his farm and had to work as a farmhand; he died of his lingering injuries when the boy was nine. The younger Goddard went to live with his married sister for a brief time, but in 1877 was enrolled at the Oak Grove Seminary [1], a boarding school in Vassalboro. During this period, Sarah Goddard began a new career as a traveling Quaker preacher; she married missionary Jehu Newlin in 1884, and the couple regularly traveled throughout the United States and Europe. In 1878, Henry Goddard became a student at the Friends School in Providence, Rhode Island. During his youth he began an enduring friendship with Rufus Jones, who would go on to co-found (in 1917) the American Friends Service Committee, which received the 1947 Nobel Peace Prize.

Goddard entered Haverford College in 1883, where he played on the football team, and graduated in 1887; he took a year off from his studies to teach in Winthrop, Maine from 1885-1886. After graduating, he traveled to California to visit one of his sisters, and stopped en route in Los Angeles to present some letters of introduction at the University of Southern California, which had been established just seven years earlier. After seeking posts in the Oakland area for several weeks, he was surprised to receive an offer of a temporary position at USC, teaching Latin, history and botany. He also served as co-coach (with Frank Suffel) of the first USC football team in 1888, with the team winning both of its games against a local athletic club.^[1] But he departed immediately thereafter, returning to Haverford to earn his master's degree in mathematics in 1889.

From 1889 to 1891 he became principal of the Damascus Academy, a Quaker school in Damascus, Ohio, where he also taught several subjects and conducted chapel services and prayer meetings. On August 7 1889, he married Emma Florence Robbins, who became one of the two other teachers at the Academy. In 1891 he returned to teach at the Oak Grove Seminary in Vassalboro, becoming principal in 1893. In 1896 he enrolled at Clark University, intending to study only briefly, but he remained three years and received his doctorate in psychology in 1899. He then taught at the State Normal School in West Chester, Pennsylvania until 1906.

Vineland

From 1906 to 1918 Goddard was the Director of Research at the Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys in Vineland, New Jersey, which was the first known laboratory established to study mental retardation. While there, he is quoted as stating that "democracy means that the people rule by selecting the wisest, most intelligent and most human to tell them what to do to be happy."

At the May 18 1910 annual meeting of the American Association for the Study of the Feeble-Minded, Goddard proposed definitions for a system for classifying individuals with mental retardation based on intelligence quotient (IQ). Goddard used the terms moron for those with an IQ of 51-70, imbecile for those with an IQ of 26-50, and idiot for those with an IQ of 0-25 for categories of increasing impairment. This nomenclature was the standard of the field for decades. A moron, by his definition, was any person with mental age between eight and twelve. Morons, according to Goddard, were unfit for society and should be removed from society either through institutionalization, sterilization, or both. Because of this he was called Hardly Humane Goddard.^{[citation needed]} What Goddard failed to see was that his bias towards morons would greatly influence his data later.

Goddard's best-known work, The Kallikak Family, was published in 1912. He had studied the background of several local groups of people which were somewhat distantly related, and concluded that they were all descended from a single Revolutionary War soldier. He believed that the families which included a high incidence of mental retardation and various antisocial behaviors were descended from the soldier's illegitimate child by a simple-minded barmaid, and that the more intelligent and prosperous families were descended from the soldier's later marriage to a socially prominent woman. While the book rapidly became a success, his research methods were soon called into question; within ten years he came to agree with the critics, and no longer promoted the conclusions he had reached.

Goddard was a strong advocate of eugenics. Although he believed that "feeble-minded" people bearing children was inadvisable, he hesitated to promote compulsory sterilization – even though he was convinced that it would solve the problem of mental retardation – because he did not think such a plan could gain widespread acceptance. Instead he suggested that colonies should be set up where the feeble-minded could be segregated.

Goddard established an intelligence testing program on Ellis Island in 1913. This program rejected an estimated 80% of immigrants as "feeble-minded", including 83% of Jews, 80% of Hungarians, 79% of Italians, and 87% of the Russians, and resulted in an exponential increase in deportations. The Immigration Act of 1924 was strongly influenced by American eugenics' efforts. It restricted numbers of immigrants from "undesirable" racial groups. Upon signing the bill into law, President Calvin Coolidge commented, "America must remain American."

Goddard also publicized purported race-group differences on Army IQ tests (Army Alpha and Beta) during World War I (the results were, even in their day, challenged as scientifically inaccurate, and later resulted in a retraction from the head of the project, Carl Brigham) and claimed that the results showed that Americans were unfit for democracy. He was one of the many scientists (including Francis Galton and Lewis Terman) whose work was used to defend the scientific racism movement in Europe and the United States.

Later career

In 1918 he became director of the Ohio Bureau of Juvenile Research; in 1922 he became a professor in the Department of Abnormal and Clinical Psychology at the Ohio State University, a position he held until his retirement in 1938. His wife Emma died in October 1936; they had no children. He received an honorary law degree from Ohio State in 1943, and an honorary degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1946. In 1946 he was among the supporters of Albert Einstein's Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists.

By the 1920s, Goddard had come to candidly admit that he had made numerous errors in his early research, and regarded The Kallikak Family as obsolete. He devoted the latter part of his career to seeking improvements in education, reforming environmental influences in childhood, and working toward better child-rearing practices. But others continued to use his early work to support various arguments with which Goddard did not agree, and he was constantly perplexed by the fact that later generations found his studies to be dangerous to society. Henry Garrett of Columbia University was one of the few scientists to continue to use Kallikak in his teaching, doing so until 1954; he used Goddard's work to bolster his own arguments regarding racial superiority, despite Goddard's clearly non-racist conclusions.

Goddard moved to Santa Barbara, California in 1947. He died at his home there at age 90, and his cremated remains were interred with those of his wife at the Vineland Training School.

In August 1977, NBC premiered a situation comedy called The Kallikaks [2], which depicted the comic misadventures of an Appalachian family that moved to California and feuded with another family named the Jukes; the series lasted only five episodes. A June 8 1987 cartoon in The New Yorker provided a further update to the concept, depicting "The Jukes and Kallikaks Today."

Publications

• The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness (1912)
• Standard method for giving the Binet test (1913)
• Feeble-Mindedness: Its Causes and Consequences (1914)
• School Training of Defective Children (1914)
• The Criminal Imbecile: An Analysis of Three Remarkable Murder Cases (1915)
• Psychology of the Normal and Subnormal (1919)
• Human Efficiency and Levels of Intelligence (1920)
• Juvenile Delinquency (1921)
• Two Souls in One Body? (1927)
• School Training of Gifted Children (1928)
• How to Rear Children in the Atomic Age (1948)

See also

• Mainstreaming in education

Notes and references

1. ^ In The Trojans: Southern California Football (1974; ISBN 0-8092-8364-6), author Don Pierson suggests that Goddard and Suffel each coached one game. The fact that the games were played two months apart on November 14 and January 19, along with the fact that Goddard was no longer teaching at USC in 1889, lends credibility to the suggestion.

• Zenderland, Leila (1998). Measuring Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-44373-3. 

External links

• About half of the text of 1913 edition of Goddard's Kallikak Family

Preceded by First coach

University of Southern California Football Coach 1888 (co-coach with Frank Suffel)

Succeeded by Lewis Freeman (1897)

USC Trojans Head Football Coaches

Goddard • Suffel • Freeman • Tappaan • Walker • Holmes • Traeger • Cromwell • Glaze • Henderson • Jones • Barry • Cravath • Hill • Clark • McKay • Robinson • Tollner • Smith • Hackett • Carroll

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