The fruit of the family tree 1924

Front matter

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THE LIBRARY

The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

Preface

The preface to a book is probably always written last. After completing this incomplete account of the meaning of heredity and of biological forces in human life and society, I can only express the hope that the reader who is not a special student in these matters will learn as much and gain as much pleasure from reading it as I have gained from writing it. If it only stimulates him to reflect upon these problems in a new way, it will have fulfilled its purpose.

The special student will find large omissions in the literature of heredity, genetics and eugenics—especially in the field of biometrics—that might have been brought together and surveyed. But when we sum it all up, there have been very few investigators in these fields who have developed knowledge that seems immediately available for the work of social reconstruction, or which can be just now made interesting to the general reader. I have thought it best to describe more in detail the few investigations which have passed the gauntlet of scientific criticism and have secured an apparently safe place in scientific literature. This does not mean that other studies have not attained that position, but some of them are either incomplete, such as the very important researches now under way by Doctor Raymond Pearl, Professor Karl Pearson, Professor Edward L. Thorndike, and a few others; or else they are somewhat remote from immediate human interest and, therefore, difficult to make dramatic and readable for the general public. My thanks are due to all of these men and to other biolo-

PREFACE gists and psychologists who have lent me material, ealled my attention to special researches and also aided me with personal criticism and advice.. Needless to say, | am greatly indebted to Doctor Frederick Adams Woods.

Mr. Carl Easton Williams, editor and journalist, first induced me to believe, several years ago, that the general public might be interested in heredity and eugenics; and through his encouragement I wrote a num- — ber of magazine articles that seemed to win a generous response. This book is the outcome of that original encouragement—a, testimony to the influence of environment. My thanks are also due to Mr. Arthur T. Vance, the far-sighted editor of The Pictorial Review, for permission to reprint the main body of several articles which have appeared in that magazine. Throughout every phase of the work, my wife has been my constant and invaluable assistant. |

The lay reader must understand wm advance that this book is not an attempt to cover the problem or problems of eugenics and race improvement in their entirety. That would be impossible. The first criticism of the lay reader is likely to be, ‘‘ Who is going to do the selecting of parents?’’ I trust the reader will find from this book, that there is but one answer to that question and that answer is: ‘‘Except in rare instances of obvious hereditary defect, nobody 1s gomg to select parents for anybody.’’

The problems of eugenics—there is no one problem —are problems of psychology, of biology, of economics, of political science, of practical politics, of climate, of race, of art, history, education, morals, religion and of all those forces which play ceaselessly, whether he will or no, upon the organic nature and destiny of man. Eugenics is the basis of the new sociology, and sociology is the cap sheaf of all the sciences.

PREFACE

Eugenics is, therefore, the application of human intelligence to human evolution. I trust the following pages will indicate to the reader what some of these problems are and how some of them may be hopefully approached. If they succeed in doing this, they will deserve a small place in what will in time become the largest literature and the most extensive and intensive intellectual and spiritual discipline of mankind—the discipline of race-culture. This is the new humanism which science offers to mankind. It offers, for the first time, the possibility of building a social heredity which will by its own spirit and processes improve human heredity, and this improved human heredity will in its turn improve the social heritage. This is truly a great adventure. But it is the one final adventure of the human intelligence and spirit which, if it succeeds—and it will succeed—will bring the earthly redemption of man and fill the world with inborn intelligence, health and happiness.

A. BK. W.

New York City.

Vinee!

CONTENTS:

Wuart Herepiry TELLS AND How Ir TeEuis It

Wuar Herepiry TELLS AND How It TrEuus It (Continued)

Wuat PrRenatTAL INFLUENCE TELLS (Continued) WHat Twins TELL ABOUT HEREDITY

WHat Twins TELL AaBouT HEREDITY (Continued) WHAT CousIN MARRIAGES TELL ABOUT HEREDITY PI SW ARE INT GRIPE Bele oki Ue nl tetiienty hon ale Is BraIn-POWER A ho 103 TO OES

Is Bratn-Power INHERITED? (Continued) . . MEASURING HEREDITY IN ROYALTY

MEASURING HEREDITY IN RoyALty (Continued) THE INFLUENCE OF LEADERS UPON NATIONAL LIFE . CAN WE MAKE THE HUMAN Rack MorE BEAUTIFUL? WoMAN’S PLACE IN RACE IMPROVEMENT

Can WE MaAkrE MOTHERHOOD FASHIONABLE? BiIRTH-CONTROL—A Two-Ep¢Ep SWorD

Dors HEREDITY OR ENVIRONMENT MAKE MEN? WHat You CAn Do To IMPROVE THE HUMAN RACE APPENDIX fae FRULT OF THE PAM Y: TREE

Chapter I Does Blood Tell?

UNLEss a man understands heredity he can not possibly understand human life. He can not understand one of the largest forces—probably the largest—that has made him the kind of mortal being that he is. And every man would like to know how he came to be what he is, how he came to have his bodily size and appearance, his weaknesses and strength, his likelihood to contract this or that disease, his capacity to do this or that kind of work, his peculiar sort of temper and temperament, and his general mental and physical make-up, tendencies and powers. Unless one understands heredity he can not form any conception as to where his own natural endowments came from, nor what he will transmit to his children. He will not know whether his strength or weakness lies in his hair or in his brains; or whether he got them all by wellunderstood processes from some of his ancestors, and is likely to hand them on by the same processes to his descendants.

Not only that, he will not know how he ought to act as husband, father or citizen. In the first place, he will no more know whom he ought to marry than do the beasts of the field know; second, he will not know what sort of ideas and ideals to teach his children with reference to human nature and character, or with reference to their marriages; and third, he will not be able to vote intelligently upon many public questions, such as taxation, education, the care of the poor, the problems of crime, the promotion of public health, child-labor, minimum wages, the regulation of public . morals, the spread of birth-contnon and a thousand other matters which vitally affect both the present happiness and the future destiny of his fellow-men. He can not approach any of these problems intelligently ; indeed, without a knowledge of heredity, there are very few problems of life which he can approach intelligently, because he is in total ignorance of one of the largest forces that enters every moment into human life, human character and social destiny.

It would seem, therefore, to be one of the highest duties of the citizen to learn what scientists have discovered about this thing called heredity—what it is, how it operates, what it does to a man, to his family and to his race and nation. To explain the word heredity is the first object of this book, and the second is to indicate what heredity means to all mankind.

Nearly every one believes in heredity, or to use the popular phrase that ‘‘blood will tell’’ in plants and animals. People do not expect to gather grapes from thorns nor figs from thistles. They do not expect great race horses to be born from draught horses, nor prize cattle from scrubs. And the commendable thing is that they regulate their social, political and economic customs to fit in with and promote these beliefs. But when it comes to the human family many people honestly believe that good children will be born from bad parents quite as often as from good parents; that health will come out of weakness, and that wisdom will be the fruit of the family tree of fools. And they wrongly build their economic, political and social ma-

LORS

DOES BLOOD TELL?

SS ehinery and customs, their educational systems, their marriage ideals, their very religions to fit in with these false beliefs.

In addition to this, even when children are born weak, unhealthy, short-lived or foolish, such well-intentioned persons believe that education, moral teaching, medical science and good environment generally, will transform natural weakness into strength, folly into wisdom, and put brains into empty heads. The truly scientific students of both heredity and environment the world over know that these hopes are only to a small degree justified. The surface effects of environment are often so immediate and gratifying that we are misled as to what is really going on underneath. The enthusiast for environment fails to observe that many of his vast efforts to improve human weakness do not have to be undertaken for everybody, but only for certain people. And if he should take the trouble to survey the family history of these people by critical methods he would arrive at the conclusion, amazing to him, that this weakness is related

_in most cases to similar weaknesses among these people’s ancestors. He would learn in a new way that

- some people are born long and some are born short and that his best service to humanity at large would be to take account of this fact. His own measures would, in the end, be far more effective. And if he went still further and found that even where he does improve the individual by medicine, moral suasion and education, that this improvement is not transmitted to his children—as we shall find proved in a later chapter—he would gain a new conception of what he is doing and seek to adopt methods known to science which would insure just as much success in the end for his own ideals, and that his success would be permanent.

Man gains real happiness only by looking nature squarely in the face. Good education and good environment should be given to every child that comes into the world. This is the only way to bring to its full expression the child’s natural powers. But we must learn that these things will never add anything to the child’s natural equipment. The adage that ‘‘the world owes every man a living’’ is in one sense true. If we are to have a decent world to live in for ourselves, we are forced to make it a world where every man has his fullest possible chance. But if we believe along with this that blood does not tell we are likely to build a civilization where the weakling and the dullard are not only given an equal economic, political and social chance, but an equal biological chance, that is a chance to propagate their kind equally with the wise, prudent and strong. If we do this, in the end the race will go down. We can not have anything which we can eall civilization until the lazy, shiftless and harebrained get a fair deal, and, if they can not make their own living, are provided for by their abler brethren. We should never forget this. But we can not have a progressive civilization—one that can progressively take better care of both its able and unable—until the more richly endowed are given both the opportunity and encouragement to reproduce their kind in greater numbers than those of less natural endowments. If civilization is not conducted upon this plan, the very care and sympathy which the strong give to the weak simply hands on an increasing burden of defectiveness and social wreckage to be carried by the men of to-morrow. And, in the end, our noblest sympathy wrecks the very civilization that it has tried to serve. The honest truth is that without an eugenical policy as wide as society itself, civilization is self-destructive. It sets going forces that often silently and slowly wreck the race that built it. But with a wise eugeni-

DOES BLOOD TELL?

cal policy there is no biological reason, at least, why a civilization might not go on with increasing glory and grandeur for ever.

After a generation of exact experimentation and study by the biologists and psychologists, we can now say that blood, that is heredity, will always tell. As some wit has said, ‘‘Sometimes the less it tells the better.’’? Butin some families the more it tells the better. I think I can bring this fact home by the following very commonplace example—an example which proves that blood not only tells, but that sometimes it also barks.

A friend of mine, Mr. Clay Smith, of the Smith- Spring-Holmes Orchestral Quintet, known all over America in the chautauquas, believed blood would not tell. Or, rather, he believed it would tell the good and not tell the bad.

Mr. Smith purchased a fine female setter puppy for one hundred fifty dollars. It waxed rapidly in stature and, as the owner supposed, in wisdom. But reckoning on pups is a doubtful business. One day Mr. Smith entered his library where the pup was lying asleep. He scratched a match which happened to go off like a pistol. The dog with a yell made one leap over the library table, smashing a handsome lamp. The next leap she went through the window carrying the sash and shutter into the yard. From there she made a wild dash to the rear of the house and crawled up under the floor as far as her poor frightened body could wriggle. There she stayed for four days and nights without food or water in spite of all coaxings and threats of punishment.

‘‘A gun-shy pup!’’ said Mr. Smith in disgust. ‘‘But I shall get my money back easily enough. No foolish pup can get the better of me.’’ So he mated her with Champion Rodfield, the greatest sire of bird dogs the world up to that time had ever known. Champion gold at one time for fourteen thousand dollars. There had not been a gun-shy dog in Champion’s pedigree since some peace-loving Chinaman invented gunpowder.

In due time Mr. Smith’s dog presented him with nine little puppies.

They also grew rapidly and soon pointed birds with all of grandfather Rodfield’s wisdom and agility. Mr. Smith saw his one hundred fifty dollars coming back with a profiteer’s margin. But he reckoned with blood only on one side. He forgot that the mother’s blood will tell as much as the father’s. He sold the nine little puppies to sportsmen all over the central states at seventy-five dollars each.

A month later the quail and partridge season opened. Within three days Mr. Smith was besieged with angry telegrams from every purchaser of his pups demanding his money back. Every pup was so gun-shy that at the first crack of the gun the owner found himself left alone to contemplate the beauties of nature, while his fine pedigreed setter was shooting for home like a meteor. One man wrote Smith that he tried to shoot his dog, but that it ran so fast that the shot failed to catch him.

Smith is now a wiser and poorer man. So is every man and every nation that reckons spiritual and physical assets without taking account of heredity—the power of blood. No more ruinous belief ever entered the human mind than the belief that blood will not tell. It has cost the lives of families and empires. It has cost America a large share of its labor troubles, its political chaos, many of its frightful riots and bomb- _ Ings—the doings and undoings of its undesirable _ citizens. Investigation proves that an enormous | proportion of its undesirable citizens are descended | from undesirable blood overseas. America’s immigra- 6

DOES BLOOD TELL?

tion problem is mainly a problem of blood. For over a generation America has been changing her blood.

And no nation can change its blood by ever so little but | in stil NR sees that it will change the very nature and the practical | workings of its institutions and ideals. Just so long as | the fatuous belief holds sway that American institu- | tions, climate, environment and Uncle Sam’s opportu- | nities for getting rich and securing good clothes, will | ‘‘Americanize’’ any truly foreign stock with different — blood, ideals and history, which are largely the outcome of heredity, and transform it into the grand old , native stock that founded this nation, gave it its Con- | stitution and ideals; just so long as this belief prevails _ ‘‘the low foreigner’’ will constitute our chief national © problem. The notion that environment will in reality © transform one kind of people into another kind of people is just as fatuous, as a western congressman bluntly put it, as the belief that you ‘‘can run a dairy with a herd of mules.”’

Professor William E. Castle, of Harvard, has proved that blood will tell in the mental qualities of animals. He crossed ordinary wild rats with white ‘‘albino”’ rats. As one scientist said, ‘‘The albino rat is about as wild as a bag of meal.’’ They are often given to babies to play with. But the children of this cross were all wild and would literally chew a baby to pieces.

Martin Kallikak was another man who believed that blood would not. tell; or, if it did tell, it would not tell on him. Martin’s dramatic history, and the history of his germ-cells, his blood, have been related in a little book entitled The Kalhkak Family, by Doctor Henry H. Goddard, Director of the Juvenile Research Bureau of the State of Ohio, and formerly Superintendent of the famous School for Feeble-Minded at Vineland, New Jersey. He is one of our highest authorities on feeble-mindedness. Blood has been telling its stories of tragedy and splendor ever since Hiden; but seldom has it been painted in such clear contrasting colors as upon this little chart of the blood of the Kallikaks. very parent and every young man and woman, every educator and statesman, should study this simple, but dramatic canvas. The forces that build and destroy empires are here displayed in all their nudity, in all their certainty.

Martin Kallikak was a young soldier of the Revolu-. tionary War. His ancestry was excellent. But one

She lawful Wife The nameless feeble-minded Girl

Martin Kallikak

Deborah Prominent Citizen THE KALLIKAK FAMILY

From Goddard’s The Kallikak Family. Courtesy of the Macmillan Company.

The present writer has added the words, Virtues and Sins of the Fathers, etc. Ancestry of Martin, the central figure, not included, but Martin came from an excellent family. On the left side of the chart, through his lawful wife, Martin Kallikak’s 496 descendants, all normal, have included nation builders, governors, soldiers, university founders, doctors, lawyers, judges, educators, They have all been a credit to their country. Through the other branch of the family, Martin’s progeny by the fecble-minded girl, the Kallikaks have given to the country 480 nation-destroying descendants, including 143 feeble-minded persons, 33 immoral, 36 illegitimate, 3 epileptics, 3 criminals, and 8 brothel keepers.

DOES BLOOD TELL?

wild night up the Hudson River Martin forgot his noble blood. In this night of dissipation he met a physically attractive, feeble-minded girl. The result of that meeting was a feeble-minded boy. This boy grew up and married a woman of whose mentality Doctor Goddard could secure no record. But she was evidently of the same ilk. They produced a numerous progeny with a large percentage of feeble-mindedness. These grew up lazy, thriftless, shiftless, trifling, thieving people. Marrying into their own kind, another generation of the same general character came upon the human scene. This has gone on now for six generations.

At the bottom of the chart we see the end of this unhappy road on which Martin started nearly one hundred and fifty years ago. The last character is Deborah Kallikak, a young feeble-minded woman, about twenty-five years old, now being cared for at the school at Vineland, New Jersey. Her mental capacity, which means her capacity for happiness and usefulness, is only that of a little child. Her highest ability to bless the world is to do simple forms of housework.

This line of Martin’s blood has never created anything, never produced any substantial wealth, never invented anything, never dreamed any dreams nor added anything to human worth or happiness. This line has given 480 descendants. Among them have been 143 known feeble-minded and many more probably, not known, 36 illegitimates, 33 sexually immoral, 24 confirmed alcoholics, 3 epileptics, 3 criminals, 8 keepers of brothels and 83 children so feeble that they died in infancy.

However, on the other side of the canvas, blood has painted a different and wonderful story. Later in his life Martin married a young Quaker woman of splendid talents and heroic ancestry. It seemed that this line of children simply could not turn out badly in any environment. Indeed, like all blood, good or bad, it made its own environment. This line has given us ' 496 direct descendants. All have been normal people. As Doctor Goddard says they have given us descendants of the highest respectability and social usefulness including among their members ‘‘doctors, lawyers, judges, educators, landholders, traders, and men and women prominent in every phase of social life.”’ The last one on the chart is now a man of wealth and influence.

Nobody ever had to build asylums, penitentiaries, reformatories or special schools for this line of blood. The other line has cost society hundreds of thousands of dollars to restrain their evil tendencies and care for. their feeble minds and bodies. One line has torn down, the other has built up; one line has reaped, and the other has scattered; one has contributed nothing but wickedness and woe, while the other has blessed the earth with beauty and achievement.

The reader should perhaps be cautioned that we could not be sure that heredity was the cause of the differences in these two lines of blood, since the factors of heredity and environment are not separated, but we feel sure from certain other more exact studies to be analyzed in detail later that heredity and not environment was the chief cause of the differences between the two streams of descent.

We can not escape the fact that blood for ever tells its story of shame or beauty, whether it flows in plants and animals, or in the veins of beggars, poets and kings.

Two interesting events have recently happened that ee honors to America by virtue of truly royal

lood.

In 1920 on the Aqueduct race track near New York

DOES BLOOD TELL?

City the great horse, Man o’ War, ran the fastest mile and a quarter ever covered by a horse in human history. He clipped a fifth of a second off the previous world’s record. He covered the mile and a quarter in one minute, forty-nine and one-fifth seconds. The record for the same distance had been held by two horses, Barrow and Boots. They each covered the distance in one minute, forty-nine and two-fifths seconds. It would seem that one or both of these horses could have speeded up a bit and clipped off that tiny one-fifth second. But try as they would the trainers could never eliminate that one-fifth second from the record. It could only be done by faster blood. And where did Boots, Barrow and Man o’ War get their speed? From training? Only partly. They got it chiefly from the blood of Eclipse and Hambletonian 10, two horses of over one hundred years ago. I have seen the pedigrees of hundreds of the world’s great race horses. I saw one pedigree that covered three large window blinds written in the finest handwriting. But they practically all go back to Eclipse and Hambletonian 10. These horses ‘‘varied’’ in the direction of speed. And David Starr Jordan assures us that *‘the blood of Kclipse is to-day flowing in the veins of every great race horse of the world.’’

The second event of world-wide interest was the preservation by America of the American Yachting Cup through the speed of the yacht Resolute. Won-

der has often been expressed that this cup has for nearly seventy-five years remained with America despite all of Hngland’s efforts to win it. It seems strange, too, since England is much more of a maritime nation than are we Yankees. But, I think, as does Doctor Charles B. Davenport, of the Carnegie Institution, that the explanation is again chiefly the one word ‘‘blood.’’ Many of the boats of recent races have been designed by the Herreshoff family. This family has had numerous boat-builders, indeed, has shown a special artistic and mechanical genius for several generations. While Mr. N. G. Herreshoff, the designer of the Resolute, the last victorious yacht, personally disclaimed in a letter to me any special gifts from heredity, his opinion is outweighed by an investigation of his ancestry. Nearly all great men believe their success is due to some specious cause. They usually ascribe it to ‘‘sheer hard work,’’ ‘‘attention to business,’’ or some ‘‘inspiration’’ of their mothers, or some peculiar ‘‘education.’’ They do not stop to inquire what gave them great energy to begin with; why they turned their attention to their special profession, or what made their mothers such inspiring women. Nearly all great men of energy and genius have had inspiring mothers from whom they drew their blood. Everywhere, and always, it is blood that tells the tale of national greatness or decay.

It is commonly said that God raises up some great man to lead the people in times of distress and peril. _ There is no basis in history for this belief. Leaders 'come not by prayer, sacrifice, hope and desire, but _ solely by germ-cells. As an instance, Spain has been calling for three hundred years for some great man to restore her former world prestige, but either God has seen fit to chastise her, or else, what seems more probable, the blood that produces great men of a political and military type, at least, has gone. In his research, The Influence of Monarchs, which is reviewed fully in a later chapter, Doctor Frederick Adams Woods has shown that the political greatness of Spain lies buried with the blood of her former kings. No doubt in their closing hours Babylon, Crete, Carthage, Greece and Rome cried out to their gods for some heaven-sent leader to save them. But the gods did not because they

DOES BLOOD TELL?

could not respond. Nearly one-half of all the great men of the world have been born from great ancestry or else have left great descendants. That is, they have belonged to great human breeds. And these great families have consisted of scarcely more than four or five individuals out of every thousand persons ever born on earth. Yet their noble heredity, their superior blood, their more richly endowed germ-cells have produced as much genius as has all the balance of the human race.

We often hear it said, and I have often seen it stated by irresponsible journalists, that the House of Lords in England is a proof that blood does not tell, and that their inferiority proves that the aristocratic families from which they spring are in reality very deficient in the qualities of political and social leadership. The fallacy of such reasoning lies in the fact that the House of Lords with its three or four hundred members is pitted against all the balance of the population of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. That is, such hasty reasoners are demanding that a few score families shall produce as much genius as springs from thirty-five or forty millions of people, constituting hundreds of thousands of families. This is asking entirely too much of heredity. The simple fact is that there have been many great families among the lords and, true to expectation, these families have produced many times as much genius as the balance of the lords and many, many times as much genius as has been produced from the same number of the common people. Even the man of great mental qualities from commonplace parents is usually found to have received some special talent from ancestors more remote than his parents, that made him notable.

On the western plains of America it is a legend that Indian ponies will not buck if they have yellow ankles and yellow nostrils. It is not the possession of yellow feet and yellow nostrils that makes them gentle. It seems to be because the Arabian horse is the gentlest horse in the world. He is gentle because he has been bred as a household pet for centuries. Petting him and keeping him in the family did not make him gentle. But the wild and vicious colts were sold off or killed, and the gentle ones kept for breeding. As the breeder says, ‘‘They were bred for gentleness.’? And what has this to do with the ponies of the western plains? The story seems substantiated that La Salle and the French missionaries three hundred years ago brought with them some fine Arabian steeds. Some of these horses escaped and bred with the ponies of the plains. And now we see the remnants of noble mental quality in the gentleness of these ponies. And, by mere chance, the factors in the germ-cell that produce gentleness are probably associated with the factors that produce the tawny feet and nostrils. If this particular legend is not true, many experiments that have been performed in the laboratories tell precisely the same story of blood, both in plants and animals. While we commonly use the word ‘‘blood,’’ what we mean in reality is the germ-cells, or reproductive cells. It is the germ-cell alone, as we shall see later, which carries all the heredity from one generation to the next.