Mental deficiency

The term “mental deficiency” served as a more general term encompassing various levels of mental disability, which were ranked in accordance with an intelligence scale. Such designations as “idiot,” “imbecile,” and “moron” were introduced into the psychological community as scientific descriptors denoting various levels of mental deficiency. The ranking of mental deficiencies depended on the possibility of creating an objective assessment of an individual’s intelligence. The idea that scientists could create a test that would measure human intelligence was pioneered by Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911) who was the first to attempt to measure intelligence by functionally relating intelligence to degrees of sensory discrimination. The Intelligence Quotient (IQ) test was developed in France in 1905 by physician Théodore Simon (1873-1961) and psychologist Alfred Binet (1857-1911); they intended their test to be used on small populations of special needs children, rather than as a broad-based standardized test (see Gould 1996 for an accessible work on the history of IQ testing). In the hands of American eugenicist Henry Goddard, however, mental testing became widely popularized as a way of establishing grades of mental deficiency; testing was meant to isolate the mentally deficient in an attempt to curb the “dangerous” proliferation of undesirable traits.

Binet based his scale on the notion of “normalcy,” which resulted in the concept of “mental age.” Binet’s scale referred to what “normal/average” children can do at different ages as the measure of an individual’s mental development. A child with a mental age of 7, for example, can do things that are typically shown by the average performance of normal children at age 7. If an individual’s mental age was considerably lower than his or her actual (chronological) age, then that individual would be judged mentally deficient. The ratio of mental age and actual (chronological) age, when multiplied by 100, would form an intelligence index. The intelligence index was gradually replaced by a statistically defined intelligence quotient test score, which is a method of IQ testing still in common use today.

Henry Goddard served as the Director of Research at the Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys in Vineland, New Jersey from 1906-1918. Between 1908, when Goddard first translated a version of the Binet scale and had it published in America, and 1930, over nine million adults and children had been tested using this scale. Standardized mental measurement cemented the authority of psychology as a serious science.

Binet’s original scale of mental measurement had included two gradations of deficiency: the “idiot,” who had a mental age of 2 or younger, and the “imbecile,” who had a mental age of 3 to 7 years. However, Goddard was not satisfied that this scale adequately addressed the problem of mental deficiency (see Thomson 1998). He believed the greatest threat to civilization’s advance lay with those who demonstrated a mental age of 8 to 12 years. This group, consisting of those closest to a “normal” mental age (13 or older), posed the greatest danger, in his opinion. Goddard hoped to draw attention to their presence in the public school systems that were struggling to make “normal” people out of them by keeping them in regular classes. Government agencies were making a grave error in treating them as “normal,” in Goddard’s mind. Even the highest grade of the feebleminded could never become normal, he argued, though they could pass for normal, making them the most likely culprits for spreading the defect to future generations. Rather than trying to disguise or ignore their disabilities, physicians and superintendents needed to underscore them.

Goddard needed a word that would carry scientific legitimacy and arouse public concern, for as Goddard stressed, physicians needed public assistance in hunting out individuals with high-grade deficiencies. Yet there was no word in the English language which 
adequately expressed the distinctiveness and urgency of their condition. Goddard, therefore, constructed his own term from the Greek word for foolish, moronia and the result was the diagnostic label of the “moron” for those who exhibited a mental age of 8 to 12 years.

Goddard’s interest in targeting those he believed to possess a mental age of 8 to 12 years old dated back to his graduate training with the eminent psychologist G. Stanley Hall at Clark University. Hall, like his protégé, sought academic solutions to what he regarded as racial degeneracy and the decline of civilization. In particular, he believed that as men evolved into higher beings, they became physically weaker and lost their virility. Hall, like most scientists of the late nineteenth century, believed in the Lamarckian notion of inheritance of acquired characteristics (see Lamarck 1809) developed by the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), which was eventually overshadowed by the early 1900s by Mendelian genetic theory. As each generation advanced, Hall believed, it would pass its acquired developments on to the next generation, and thus civilization would continually evolve.

Goddard came of age after the scientific discrediting of recapitulation theory and what was called “Lamarckism” or “soft heredity” (a theory of biological evolution holding that species evolve by the inheritance of traits acquired or modified through the use or disuse of body parts). Mendelian genetics, or “hard heredity,” dismissed Lamarckism and its inclusion of environmental factors, claiming that traits were passed through genes and therefore were entirely independent from the external environment. Goddard thus modernized his mentor’s theories by applying them within a eugenic, hereditary framework. The “moron” represented those who could not develop beyond the primitive savagery of adolescence. He (or she), because of faulty genes resulting in low intelligence, remained trapped in this primitive phase of development.

Thus christened “morons,” patients at training schools for the feeble-minded in the 1910s were perceived as a threat to progressive culture. Yet the term itself was decidedly vague; claiming to represent those with a mental age of 8 to 12 years, it gave diagnosticians great leeway in determining who fit the category. By adding the “moron” class to the definition of feeblemindedness, Goddard effectively broadened the scope of mental deficiency to include a wider range of symptoms. This new category essentially blurred the distinction between what behaviour was unmistakably “normal” and what was “pathological,” allowing for new social “symptoms,” such as unwed motherhood or prostitution, to permit a diagnosis of “feeblemindedness.” More recently, patients like Leilani Muir (see Muir 2014) often had the notation of “borderline moron” or “high-grade moron” in their patient files, which further contributed to the blurring of the distinction between “normal” and “pathological” behaviour.

Goddard’s central evidence for the dangerous and prolific nature of morons was set forth in his own popular work, The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness, published in 1912. In this study, he traced the ancestry of a young girl (called “Deborah”) whom he considered a moron with “immoral tendencies,” and found that her genetic flaw could be traced back to her great-great-great grandmother, a feebleminded tavern girl. From this one tavern girl, he claimed, had come 143 feebleminded descendants, including alcoholics, prostitutes, and criminals. While earlier family studies, such as Richard Dugdale’s The Jukes (1877) emphasized the importance of environmental influences on human development, the story of The Kallikaks emphasized heredity exclusively. Deborah’s great-great-great grandfather, Martin, had married a prominent Quaker woman after his affair with the tavern girl, and from this union came hundreds of upstanding citizens. Deborah had had the misfortune of coming from Martin’s first union, thus inheriting the defective gene, while her half-siblings profited from the strong genetic stock of both their parents. Goddard, never one to choose a name without significant meaning, invented “Kallikak” from the Greek words for good, kallos, and bad, kakos, to emphasize the inevitable destruction of worthy families through a moment of transgression. Stephen Jay Gould (1996) provides an excellent exposé of the flaws of the Kallikak study. One indictment in particular is the accusation that Goddard had retouched the photographs in his book in order to make the “defective” Kallikaks look menacing by, for example, drawing in darker, more disturbed looking eyes (see Elks 2005).

-Wendy Kline