Henry Herbert Goddard
East Vassalboro, Maine, 1866 - 1957, Santa Barbara, California
After graduating Goddard became professor of pedagogy and psychology at the State Normal School in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Hoping to introduce a scientific spirit into American education, he started a child-study association for Pennsylvania schoolteachers. Through this work he met Edward Johnstone, superintendent of the Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys located in Vineland, New Jersey. In 1906 Goddard accepted a new position as director of psychological research at Johnstone's institution. Seeking new ways to study children suffering from the condition then called "feeblemindedness" (later termed "mental retardation"), he toured Europe in 1908 and learned of the new "intelligence tests" first developed in 1905 by French psychologist Alfred Binet and his assistant, Theodore Simon. Using Binet's tests to assess the mental abilities of the Vineland children, Goddard became the first American intelligence tester.
Between 1908 and 1918 Goddard was America's most successful disseminator of Binet testing. In 1910 he convinced doctors in the American Association for the Study of the Feeble-Minded to adopt intelligence testing to gauge different degrees of mental impairment. He also invented a new term for the most mildly impaired individuals: "moron," a word that he coined from a Greek root meaning "foolish" and that at the time had no English connotation.
Goddard soon turned his attention from institutions to schools. In 1910 he became the first American to test the intelligence of public schoolchildren. His efforts to promote special education proved especially influential. In 1911 Goddard helped New Jersey legislators pass the nation's first law mandating special classes for deaf, blind, and "feebleminded" children in public schools. He also studied New York City's special education program as part of its school survey of 1911-1912; his report was later expanded and published as School Training of Defective Children (1914). In addition, Goddard trained many educators, both at Vineland's summer school for special-class teachers and at New York University's School of Pedagogy, where he was a visiting lecturer.
Goddard also grew increasingly interested in studying the causes of mental impairments. In 1909 he met biologist Charles Davenport, leader of the American eugenics movement, who introduced him to the theories of Gregor Mendel. Such theories, Goddard argued, could explain the inheritance of feeblemindedness. In his first and most famous book, The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness (1912), he traced the relatives of a Vineland resident, pseudonymously named Deborah Kallikak, back to her revolutionary war ancestor, Martin Kallikak. Goddard reported that Martin had produced two distinct lines of descendants: a "normal" line, begun with his wife and consisting of generations of "respectable citizens"; and an "illegitimate" line, started when the soldier met "a feeble-minded girl by whom he became the father of a feeble-minded son" and containing paupers, criminals, prostitutes, and other moral and mental failures (including Deborah).
To Goddard, these two lines constituted a "natural experiment" illustrating the dangers of a "feeble" biological inheritance. He epitomized his argument in the family's pseudonym; "Kallikak" came from two Greek roots meaning "good" and "bad." In his next study, Feeble-Mindedness: Its Causes and Consequences (1914), Goddard traced the family histories of over 300 Vineland children. Alarmed by his findings, he suggested that society consider new means of reducing feeblemindedness, including sexual sterilization or permanent institutionalization. Low intelligence was probably a single trait inherited according to Mendelian ratios, Goddard concluded, and it was linked to just about every grave social problem of the day, including crime, poverty, truancy, prostitution, and alcoholism.
Goddard also used intelligence tests in other ways. In 1914 he became the first psychologist to present Binet's tests in court--experiences that he chronicled in The Criminal Imbecile (1915). Goddard also visited Ellis Island to see if such tests could diagnose feebleminded immigrants. In 1917 he served on the Committee on the Psychological Examining of Recruits for the U.S. Army. Two of his books included army data: Psychology of the Normal and Subnormal (1919) and Human Efficiency and Levels of Intelligence (1920). By this time, Goddard's psychology had evolved into a broad political philosophy. Intelligence, he proposed, was a biologically inherited, socially unchangeable, and psychologically measurable trait with immense significance for restructuring education, explaining antisocial behavior, and justifying class differences. In the following decades these ideas, as well as those of other testers, would contribute to an increasingly explosive debate between scientists emphasizing the importance of man's inherited "nature" and those stressing "nurture," or social environment.
In 1918 Goddard left Vineland to direct the Ohio Bureau of Juvenile Research, describing his work in Juvenile Delinquency (1921). Personnel conflicts, however, led to his resignation. In 1922 he became a professor of clinical and abnormal psychology at Ohio State University, where he remained until his retirement in 1938. While at Ohio State he published two monographs: Two Souls in One Body? (1927), which examined a case of multiple personality; and School Training of Gifted Children (1928), which described Cleveland's classes for the gifted.
Although by the 1920s Goddard had left the field of intelligence testing to others, his prewar writings became increasingly controversial in the postwar era. A new generation of geneticists began to overturn his ideas about feeblemindedness, while anthropologists challenged his theories about "nature" by elaborating new theories of "culture." By 1928 Goddard had conceded that many of his earlier ideas had been in error. By the 1930s he had become an avid New Deal Democrat whose writings largely focused on improving education. Yet his Kallikak study continued to be disseminated by the American eugenics movement; and the book's warnings against mixing good blood with bad proved useful to Nazi propagandists in the 1930s and to opponents of school integration in the 1950s--associations that cast a pall over Goddard's reputation. His last book, How to Rear Children in the Atomic Age (1948), emphasized kindly childrearing and the need to learn from one's mistakes. In 1947 Goddard moved to Santa Barbara, California, where he died.
Goddard lived to see most of his theories not only rejected but often ridiculed by prominent scientists. During the second half of the century his writings were often cited as illustrations of the ways that social biases can distort scientific judgment. Even so, Goddard left a complex legacy, for his studies of mental retardation proved profoundly influential in encouraging research in child development, special education, clinical psychology, and human genetics, and in promoting the use of psychological testing within American medicine, education, and law.
Bibliography
Goddard's papers are in the Archives of the History of American Psychology at the University of Akron. His correspondence with Davenport is in the Charles Benedict Davenport Papers at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. A full-length biography is Leila Zenderland, Measuring Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing (1998), which includes a bibliography of Goddard's publications. Goddard's theories are analyzed in Mark Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (1963); Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (1985); Peter L. Tyor and Leland V. Bell, Caring for the Retarded in America: A History (1984); James W. Trent, Jr., Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States (1994); and Raymond Fancher, The Intelligence Men: Makers of the IQ Controversy (1985). Goddard's Ellis Island research is assessed in Steven Gelb, "Henry H. Goddard and the Immigrants, 1910-1917: The Studies and Their Social Context," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 22 (1986): 324-32. Also see Michael Sokal, ed., Psychological Testing and American Society, 1890-1930 (1987). Ian Hacking, "Two Souls in One Body," Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer 1991): 838-67, considers Goddard's multiple personality research, and J. David Smith, Minds Made Feeble: The Myth and Legacy of the Kallikaks (1985), explores the history of Goddard's most famous book. Obituaries are in the New York Times, 22 June 1957, and the American Journal of Psychology 70 (Dec. 1957): 656-57.
Leila Zenderland
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Leila Zenderland. "Goddard, Henry Herbert";
http://www.anb.org/articles/14/14-00225.html;
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
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