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The Jukes family was a New York "hill family" studied in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The studies are part of a series of other family studies, including the Kallikaks, the Zeros and the Nams, that were often quoted as arguments in support of eugenics, though the original Jukes study, by Richard L. Dugdale, placed considerable emphasis on the environment as a determining factor in criminality, disease and poverty (euthenics).
Elisha Harris, a doctor and former president of the American Public Health Association, published reports that Margaret, in Upstate New York, was the "mother of criminals" and he described her children as "a race of criminals, paupers and harlots". [1]
In 1874, sociologist Richard L. Dugdale, a member of the executive committee of the Prison Association of New York, and a colleague of Harris' was delegated to visit jails in upstate New York. [1] [2] In a jail in Ulster County he found six members of the same "Juke" family (a pseudonym), though they were using four different family names. On investigation, he found that, of 29 male "immediate blood relations", 17 had been arrested, and 15 convicted of crimes. [2]
He studied the records of inmates of the 13 county jails in New York State, as well as poorhouses and courts, while researching the New York hill family's ancestry in an effort to find the basis for their criminality. His book claimed Max, a frontiersman who was the descendant of early Dutch settlers and who was born between 1720 and 1740, [2] had been the ancestor of more than 76 convicted criminals, 18 brothel-keepers, 120 prostitutes, over 200 relief recipients, and two cases of "feeble-mindedness". [3]
Many of the criminals could also be linked to "Margaret, the Mother of Criminals", renamed "Ada" in his report, who had married one of Max's sons. [1] [2] Dugdale created detailed genealogical charts and concluded that poverty, disease, and criminality plagued the family. Dugdale estimated to the New York legislature that the family had cost the state $1,308,000. He published his findings in The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity in 1877. [2] Dugdale debated the relative contribution of environment and heredity and concluded that the family's poor environment was largely to blame for their behavior: "environment tends to produce habits which may become hereditary" (page 66). He noted that the Jukes were not a single family, but a composite of 42 families and that only 540 of his 709 subjects were apparently related by blood. [2]
He urged public welfare changes and improvements in the environment in order to prevent criminality, poverty and disease, writing: "public health and infant education... are the two legs upon which the general morality of the future must travel" (page 119). [3] The book was widely read in the 19th century and stimulated discussion about the roles of heredity and environment. [4] The term "Jukes" became, along with "Kallikaks" and "Nams" (other case studies of a similar nature), a cultural shorthand for the rural poor in the Southern and Northeastern United States. [3] Legal historian Paul A. Lombardo states that very soon the Jukes family study was turned into a "genetic morality tale", which combined religious notions of the sins of the father and eugenic pseudoscience. [1]
A follow-up study was published by Arthur H. Estabrook of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York in 1916 as The Jukes in 1915. Estabrook noted that Dugdale's conclusions were that the 1877 study "does not demonstrate the inheritance of criminality, pauperism, or harlotry, but it does show that heredity with certain environmental conditions determines criminality, harlotry, and pauperism". [4] Estabrook reanalyzed Dugdale's data and updated it to include 2,820 persons, adding 2,111 Jukes to the 709 studied by Dugdale. He claimed that the living Jukes were costing the public at least $2,000,000. [2]
Estabrook's data suggested that the family had actually shown fewer problems over time, but he pronounced that the Jukes family were "unredeemed" and suffering from just as much "feeblemindedness, indolence, licentiousness and dishonesty" as they had been in the past. [2] Strongly emphasizing heredity, Estabrook's conclusions reversed Dugdale's argument about the environment, proposing that such families be prevented from reproducing, since no amount of environmental changes could alter their genetic inheritance towards criminality. [3]
Photographs of members of the Jukes family and their homes, as well as family trees of some branches of the Jukes family, were displayed at the Second International Congress of Eugenics, held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City in 1921. [2] Historians have noted that Dugdale's conclusions have been misused by subsequent generations: "Estabrook's version is the one that carried the day. After 1915, the Jukes came to symbolize the futility of social change and the need for eugenic segregations and sterilization". [5] American scientists, doctors, politicians, clergy and the legal profession all embraced the eugenic movement, and the Jukes family research was used as evidence in Buck v. Bell, a 1927 US Supreme Court case which made forced sterilizations legal in the United States. [1] In the 1930s eugenics was widely repudiated by geneticists, and after the Nazi eugenics program became known, its influence died out. [1]
Research in the 1960s pointed out fundamental problems with the studies, such as the subjects were not one family and not necessarily related. In addition, the attempt to link a trait such as poverty to genetic makeup, ignoring environmental issues, has been "totally discredited", as noted by geneticist Andrés Ruiz Linares in a 2011 historical review. [1]
In 2001 a poorhouse graveyard was discovered in New Paltz, in Ulster County. Some of the unmarked graves belonged to members of the so-called Jukes family. Further information was found in the archives at the State University of New York at Albany and in records of a forgotten Ulster County poorhouse. A code book, labeled "classified", was found and listed the real surnames of the "Jukes" family. Hundreds of names were listed, including Plough, Miller, DuBois, Clearwater, Bank and Bush. Max, the "founder", was identified as Max Keyser. [2] However, "the mythology of so-called 'genetically problematic families' is still with us," said Paul A. Lombardo of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Virginia. "Even today, the Jukeses seem to be getting a third life on the Internet as we see some religious and political groups invoking them as examples of inherited immorality." [2]
Eugenics is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have altered various human gene frequencies by inhibiting the fertility of people and groups purported to be inferior or promoting that of those purported to be superior.
Henry Herbert Goddard was an American psychologist, eugenicist, and segregationist during the early 20th century. He is known especially for his 1912 work The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness, which he himself came to regard as flawed for its ahistoric depiction of the titular family, and for translating the Binet-Simon Intelligence Test into English in 1908 and distributing an estimated 22,000 copies of the translated test across the United States. He also introduced the term "moron" for clinical use.
The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness was a 1912 book by the American psychologist and eugenicist Henry H. Goddard, dedicated to his patron Samuel Simeon Fels. Supposedly an extended case study of Goddard’s for the inheritance of "feeble-mindedness", a general category referring to a variety of mental disabilities including intellectual disability, learning disabilities, and mental illness, the book is noted for factual inaccuracies that render its conclusions invalid. Goddard believed that a variety of mental traits were hereditary and that society should limit reproduction by people possessing these traits.
The Eugenics Record Office (ERO), located in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, United States, was a research institute that gathered biological and social information about the American population, serving as a center for eugenics and human heredity research from 1910 to 1939. It was established by the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Station for Experimental Evolution, and subsequently administered by its Department of Genetics.
Harry Hamilton Laughlin was an American educator and eugenicist. He served as the superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office from its inception in 1910 to its closure in 1939, and was among the most active individuals influencing American eugenics policy, especially compulsory sterilization legislation.
The American Eugenics Society (AES) was a pro-eugenics organization dedicated to "furthering the discussion, advancement, and dissemination of knowledge about biological and sociocultural forces which affect the structure and composition of human populations". It endorsed the study and practice of eugenics in the United States. Its original name as the American Eugenics Society lasted from 1922 to 1973, but the group changed their name after open use of the term "eugenics" became disfavored; it was known as the Society for the Study of Social Biology from 1973–2008, and the Society for Biodemography and Social Biology from 2008–2019. The Society was disbanded in 2019.
The Adelphi Genetics Forum is a non-profit learned society based in the United Kingdom. Its aims are "to promote the public understanding of human heredity and to facilitate informed debate about the ethical issues raised by advances in reproductive technology."
Eugenics has influenced political, public health and social movements in Japan since the late 19th and early 20th century. Originally brought to Japan through the United States, through Mendelian inheritance by way of German influences, and French Lamarckian eugenic written studies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Eugenics as a science was hotly debated at the beginning of the 20th, in Jinsei-Der Mensch, the first eugenics journal in the Empire. As the Japanese sought to close ranks with the West, this practice was adopted wholesale, along with colonialism and its justifications.
Richard Louis Dugdale was an American merchant and sociologist, best known for his 1877 family study, The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity.
Three International Eugenics Congresses took place between 1912 and 1932 and were the global venue for scientists, politicians, and social leaders to plan and discuss the application of programs to improve human heredity in the early twentieth century.
Heredity in Relation to Eugenics is a book by American eugenicist Charles Benedict Davenport, published in 1911. It argued that many human traits were genetically inherited, and that it would therefore be possible to selectively breed people for desirable traits to improve the human race. It was printed and published with money and support of the Carnegie Institution. The book was widely used as a text for medical schools in the United States and abroad.
Eugenics, the set of beliefs and practices which aims at improving the genetic quality of the human population, played a significant role in the history and culture of the United States from the late 19th century into the mid-20th century. The cause became increasingly promoted by intellectuals of the Progressive Era.
The names "Ben Ishmael Tribe," and "Tribe of Ishmael", were applied to poor, Upland Southern residents of Indianapolis, Indiana during the late 19th and early 20th century because of their supposed association with the Ishmael family. Records of the Ishmael family show that it originally hailed from Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and that its patriarch, Benjamin Ishmael, served in the American Continental Army during the Revolutionary War.
The history of eugenics is the study of development and advocacy of ideas related to eugenics around the world. Early eugenic ideas were discussed in Ancient Greece and Rome. The height of the modern eugenics movement came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Gertrude Anna Davenport, was an American zoologist who worked as both a researcher and an instructor at established research centers such as the University of Kansas and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory where she studied embryology, development, and heredity. The wife of Charles Benedict Davenport, a prominent eugenicist, she co-authored several works with her husband. Together, they were highly influential in the United States eugenics movement during the progressive era.
Following the Mexican Revolution, the eugenics movement gained prominence in Mexico. Seeking to change the genetic make-up of the country's population, proponents of eugenics in Mexico focused primarily on rebuilding the population, creating healthy citizens, and ameliorating the effects of perceived social ills such as alcoholism, prostitution, and venereal diseases. Mexican eugenics, at its height in the 1930s, influenced the state's health, education, and welfare policies.
Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf are two African-American sisters who were involuntarily sterilized by tubal ligation by a federally funded family planning clinic in Montgomery, Alabama in 1973. News coverage of a class-action lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center brought U.S. government-funded sterilization abuse to the national spotlight.
Margaret Anne Wilson Thompson C.M. Ph.D. LL.D B.A., was a prominent researcher in the field of genetics in Canada. She was a member of the Alberta Eugenics Board from 1960 to 1963, before joining the University of Toronto and the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto to complete research on genetics and pediatrics. Thompson's work earned her the Order of Canada in 1988, although her appointment remains controversial due to her role in the eugenics movement. Thompson testified about her involvement in the Eugenics Board during the Muir v. Alberta case in 1996 and was also interviewed in a documentary about the lawsuit.
Arthur Howard Estabrook was an American researcher and eugenist.
Marian Stephenson Olden (1881–1981) was an American eugenics activist and an influential figure in the sterilization movement. She founded the Sterilization League of New Jersey in 1937, which unsuccessfully lobbied for New Jersey to pass a law enabling the compulsory sterilization of those considered unfit to procreate. In the years following World War II, the sterilization movement distanced itself from Olden, whose increasingly unpopular views on compulsory sterilization, and abrasive, uncompromising personality were seen as liabilities. The Sterilization League, then known as Birthright Inc., formally severed ties with Olden in 1948.
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