Post by abraxas on Dec 7, 2009 12:35:46 GMT -5
While surfing through the awesome site Weird NJ (www.weirdnj.com), and reading several interesting stories about my home state, I came up with what I think will make a very interesting and different sort of story. I don't have much detail about it right now, but here are some aspects of the plot. As of right now I'm not sure how these things will actually fit into the story, but these are the basic elements of it:
THE KALLIKAK FAMILY
HENRY HERBERT GODDARD WAS A RESEARCHER who centered his attention on a single family and attributed their mental transgressions to what he termed “hereditary feeble-mindedness.”
Goddard assigned the name Kallikak to the Pinelands family that would be the focus of his study. It was his theory that at some point in their lineage, the Kallikak family had fractured into two factions. While one side of the clan lead normal lives, the other side produced nothing but depraved morons. The “good” side of the family had descended from the marriage of one Martin Kallikak Sr., to a fine upstanding Quaker woman. The defects of the “bad” side of the clan could all be traced back to the same patriarch’s tryst with a “nameless feeble-minded tavern wench.”
“This is a typical illustration of the mentality of a high-grade feeble-minded person, the moron, the delinquent, the kind of girl or woman that fills our reformatories. They are wayward, they get into all sorts of trouble and difficulties, sexually and otherwise...the teacher clings to the hope, indeed insists, that such a girl will come out all right. Such hopes are delusions...How do we account for this kind of individual? The answer is in a word "Heredity," – bad stock.
Goddard took it upon himself to suggest a few solutions to the overwhelming number of defectives that plagued our fair state. A few of the possible options Goddard pondered were segregation, colonization, sterilization, and elimination.
"Segregation and colonization is not by any means as hopeless a plan as it may seem. The earlier method proposed was unsexing, asexualization, as it is sometimes called, or the removing, from the male and female, the necessary organs for procreation...The operation itself is almost as simple in males as having a tooth pulled.”
Goddard’s use of the term “final solution.” This is a concept that would be picked up on a few years later by the Nazi Party.
“At best, sterilization is not likely to be a final solution of this problem...In considering the question of care, segregation through colonization seems in the present state of our knowledge to be the ideal and perfectly satisfactory method. Sterilization may be accepted as a makeshift, as a help to solve this problem because the conditions have become so intolerable.”
The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness was published in 1912. A German translation, Die Familie Kallikak, was first published in 1914 and re-published in 1933 when Adolph Hitler came to power and began putting Goddard’s suggestions of segregation, colonization, and sterilization into practice.
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. The Kallikak Family is widely cited as one of the central texts of the eugenics movement.
Here is a description from one of Goddard’s assistants, Ms. Kite, after a visit to a typical Kallikak household:
“.... A glance sufficed to establish his mentality, which was low... In this house of abject poverty, only one sure prospect was ahead, that it would produce more feeble-minded children with which to clog the wheels of human progress.”
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.
THE LAMBERTVILLE SCHOOL
Three years ago an art student friend of mine, Casey, overheard a classmate talking of weird painting inside an abandoned school. That was enough to entice us to find the school.
The brick and stone high school is located in Lambertville, New Jersey (just across the river from New Hope, PA). The structure sits on top of a hill overlooking the quaint tourist trap. The school closed, from what I hear, in the 1950s and a fire destroyed a portion of the roof in the 70s.
Etched into a blackboard that surrounded three-quarters of the room were faces of children. We speculated this was a clue that the room once held art classes. However, these figures covered the entire board (about twenty-five feet in length).
None of the children are smiling. They all have painful faces, and many have their arms clutched to their chests. The etchings all seemed to be looking to the right of the room, near the windows that give a beautiful view of the Delaware River and the woods of Pennsylvania. There was one girl, however, looking directly to the center, both arms crossed like she was in a coffin.
During the years prior to World War II, America was in the grips of the worst economic depression that the nation had ever experienced. There was a resurgence in the Communist Party in the U.S., and even the Ku Klux Klan was enjoying an era of record recruitment. Unrest and frustration amongst the working classes opened the door of opportunity to a number of fringe political ideologies that might never have seemed like viable alternatives before. Overseas in Germany, Adolph Hitler had taken a bankrupt post World War I nation in chaos and revitalized the economy and self image of the populous (albeit at the expense of certain ethnic groups which were blamed for all to the country’s ills).
In the 1930s, there were 112,000 German-born immigrants living in New Jersey. So how did these new New Jerseyans deal with the political climate here, and the influence of the Nazi Party which was becoming all powerful back in their homeland?
THE KALLIKAK FAMILY
HENRY HERBERT GODDARD WAS A RESEARCHER who centered his attention on a single family and attributed their mental transgressions to what he termed “hereditary feeble-mindedness.”
Goddard assigned the name Kallikak to the Pinelands family that would be the focus of his study. It was his theory that at some point in their lineage, the Kallikak family had fractured into two factions. While one side of the clan lead normal lives, the other side produced nothing but depraved morons. The “good” side of the family had descended from the marriage of one Martin Kallikak Sr., to a fine upstanding Quaker woman. The defects of the “bad” side of the clan could all be traced back to the same patriarch’s tryst with a “nameless feeble-minded tavern wench.”
“This is a typical illustration of the mentality of a high-grade feeble-minded person, the moron, the delinquent, the kind of girl or woman that fills our reformatories. They are wayward, they get into all sorts of trouble and difficulties, sexually and otherwise...the teacher clings to the hope, indeed insists, that such a girl will come out all right. Such hopes are delusions...How do we account for this kind of individual? The answer is in a word "Heredity," – bad stock.
Goddard took it upon himself to suggest a few solutions to the overwhelming number of defectives that plagued our fair state. A few of the possible options Goddard pondered were segregation, colonization, sterilization, and elimination.
"Segregation and colonization is not by any means as hopeless a plan as it may seem. The earlier method proposed was unsexing, asexualization, as it is sometimes called, or the removing, from the male and female, the necessary organs for procreation...The operation itself is almost as simple in males as having a tooth pulled.”
Goddard’s use of the term “final solution.” This is a concept that would be picked up on a few years later by the Nazi Party.
“At best, sterilization is not likely to be a final solution of this problem...In considering the question of care, segregation through colonization seems in the present state of our knowledge to be the ideal and perfectly satisfactory method. Sterilization may be accepted as a makeshift, as a help to solve this problem because the conditions have become so intolerable.”
The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness was published in 1912. A German translation, Die Familie Kallikak, was first published in 1914 and re-published in 1933 when Adolph Hitler came to power and began putting Goddard’s suggestions of segregation, colonization, and sterilization into practice.
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. The Kallikak Family is widely cited as one of the central texts of the eugenics movement.
Here is a description from one of Goddard’s assistants, Ms. Kite, after a visit to a typical Kallikak household:
“.... A glance sufficed to establish his mentality, which was low... In this house of abject poverty, only one sure prospect was ahead, that it would produce more feeble-minded children with which to clog the wheels of human progress.”
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.
THE LAMBERTVILLE SCHOOL
Three years ago an art student friend of mine, Casey, overheard a classmate talking of weird painting inside an abandoned school. That was enough to entice us to find the school.
The brick and stone high school is located in Lambertville, New Jersey (just across the river from New Hope, PA). The structure sits on top of a hill overlooking the quaint tourist trap. The school closed, from what I hear, in the 1950s and a fire destroyed a portion of the roof in the 70s.
Etched into a blackboard that surrounded three-quarters of the room were faces of children. We speculated this was a clue that the room once held art classes. However, these figures covered the entire board (about twenty-five feet in length).
None of the children are smiling. They all have painful faces, and many have their arms clutched to their chests. The etchings all seemed to be looking to the right of the room, near the windows that give a beautiful view of the Delaware River and the woods of Pennsylvania. There was one girl, however, looking directly to the center, both arms crossed like she was in a coffin.
During the years prior to World War II, America was in the grips of the worst economic depression that the nation had ever experienced. There was a resurgence in the Communist Party in the U.S., and even the Ku Klux Klan was enjoying an era of record recruitment. Unrest and frustration amongst the working classes opened the door of opportunity to a number of fringe political ideologies that might never have seemed like viable alternatives before. Overseas in Germany, Adolph Hitler had taken a bankrupt post World War I nation in chaos and revitalized the economy and self image of the populous (albeit at the expense of certain ethnic groups which were blamed for all to the country’s ills).
In the 1930s, there were 112,000 German-born immigrants living in New Jersey. So how did these new New Jerseyans deal with the political climate here, and the influence of the Nazi Party which was becoming all powerful back in their homeland?
