As a student, advocate, and researcher in the field of Educational Psychology David took an interest in the traditional (mis-)conceptions which shaped the thinking in his field. In this regard, his work follows in the footsteps of Stephen Jay Gould's Mismeasure of Man: revisiting the research of prior generations, research that had become part of common lore and that has insinuated itself into textbooks and practices.
Two books unravel with fascinating detail how deeply flawed research served as the basis of Eugenic policies in the first decades of the century. Minds Made Feeble (J. David Smith, Rockville: Aspen Publications, 1985) deals with "The Myth and the Legacy of the Kallikaks." The Kallikaks had come to represent a paradigm case in teachings on Eugenics and racial purity not only in the United States but also in Germany. Their story was to explain how dominant gene traits can destroy the quality of a hereditary line, showing that "it is not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity" dominant unit traits for alcoholism, tuberculosis, feeble-mindedness, epilepsy, and the like (the quote is from George William Hunter's A Civic Biology of 1914: the modern presentation of evolutionary theory and the controversial textbook in the Scopes trial). H.H. Goddard had presented the "Kallikaks" as a family which 200 years ago divided into two branches: a good branch of upstanding citizens and a bad branch of feeble-minded morons (we learned that the term 'moron' was coined to designate a particularly insidious, because hardly detectable form of feeble-mindedness). According to Goddard's reconstruction, this division in the line had come about through a single pre-marital affair between Martin Kallikak and a morally deficient tavern-girl. H.H. Goddard's presentation of this "natural experiment in degeneracy" ended with his description of the last descendant of the feeble-minded Kallikaks, a young woman who was supposedly profiting from her lifelong confinement in the Vineland School for Feeble-Minded Boys and Girls.
David's researches dismantled every aspect of this legend: starting with evidence that there was no good reason to keep the young woman confined, going on to show that the 'two lines' of the Kallikaks did not divide into 'good' and 'bad' as Goddard had suggested. He also detailed some of the difficulties confronting the historian who runs up against the privacy even of very old medical records (and his share of luck in uncovering the true identity of the "Kallikaks").
David's second study looked more closely at the ways in which assumptions of a questionable racial science enter into legal sanctioned policies. It begins with Oliver Wendell Holmes pronouncement that the law is the expression of felt necessity. If the conception of "felt necessity" refers to scientific findings, the law can only be as good as the science on which it relies. This became particularly apparent with the Supreme Court's decision in 1927 to uphold a Virginia law providing for the compulsory sterilization of feeble-minded persons. It was this case concerning the sterilization of Carrie Buck which prompted Holmes's infamous remark that "three generations of imbeciles are enough." Again, David and his collaborator K.R. Nelson were able to show, for example, that there was in this case a fourth generation and that Carrie Buck's child was not mentally retarded. But since this 'fact' didn't fit into the picture of Eugenics, the mental health of Carrie Buck's child was misrepresented in the Supreme Court hearings. (Cf. The Sterilization of Carrie Buck, Far Hills: New Horizon Press, 1989).
David's investigations thus shed light on the very strange and discomforting relationship between 'serious' pursuits in evolutionary biology and genetics on the one hand, Eugenics on the other. The very 'best' scientists were drawn to Eugenics, i.e., also to its genetically implausible assumptions about 'bad' dominant unit traits that are responsible for progressive degeneracy, traits that were often associated with women and female sexuality.
David's last book (for now) on the subject-matter appeared in 1993: J. David Smith, The Eugenic Assault on America: Scenes in Red, White and Black (Fairfax: George Mason University Press). Since then he published a number of relevant articles in the journal Mental Retardation: "Reflections on Mental Retardation and Eugenics, Old and New: Mensa and the Human Genome Project" (vol. 32, 1994, pp. 234-238), "The Bell Curve and Carrie Buck: Eugenics Revisited" (vol. 33, 1995, pp. 60f.), and "For Whom the Bell Curves: Old Texts, Mental Retardation, and the Persistent Argument" (vol. 33, 1995, pp. 199-202).
Alfred Nordmann
| Membership Directory | General Information | Topics and Issues | Calendar |
This page last updated September 15th, 1997. It is maintained by the Philosophy Department. © 1997 by the Board of Trustees of the University of South Carolina. Credits.