White trash : the eugenic family studies, 1877-1919 / edited and with an introduction by Nicole Hahn Rafter.

Date:
[1988]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: White trash : the eugenic family studies, 1877-1919 / edited and with an introduction by Nicole Hahn Rafter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    20 • White Trash schoolteachers and sheriffs; conversations with neighbors and family members themselves. More forthright than his followers about problems inherent in such sources, Dugdale pointed to the migration of families, the difficulty of determining the paternity of illegitimates,... and the ne¬ cessity of depending upon tradition for facts concerning earlier gener¬ ations as drawbacks of his methods (1877a;7)—a list to which we might add the biases of official records, the problems of missing data, memory error, and the unreliability of hearsay. There was, however, a significant change over time in data collection procedures: starting with Two Brothers (Kite 1912b), information was gathered by field workers trained to make rapid assessments of the intel¬ ligence of subjects living and dead.^® Some—most notably Elizabeth S. Kite—were trained by Henry H. Goddard at the Vineland, New Jersey, Training School for the feeble-minded; but far more important in the training of field workers was the summer school run by the Eugenics Rec¬ ord Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, from 1910 to 1924. Designed to provide instruction in human heredity and other eugenical factors and to teach the principles and practice of making first-hand Ьитал pedigree-studies (Alumni Roster 1919:21), the ERO course was taught by two giants in the U.S. eugenics movement, Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin. They trained more than 250 field workers, including fam¬ ily studies authors Arthur H. Estabrook {The Nam Family, The Jukes in 1915, and Mongrel Virginians)- Estabrook's classmate in the 1910 ses¬ sion, Florence Danlelson (The Hill Folk]; Anna Wendt Finlayson (The Dack Family)-. Mina Sessions (The Feeble-Minded in a Rural County of Ohio); and Mary Storer Kostir (The Family of Sam Sixty). Moreover, the ERO funded the research and publication of some family studies pro¬ duced by field workers. Earlier we saw that the American eugenics movement drew much of its energy from members of emerging professions, especially those involved in social control. A roster of students who attended the ERO summer school from 1910 through 1918 supports this claim. Most ERO students were indeed members of helping or regulatory professions: school and college teachers; superintendents of institutions for the blind, prisoners, and wayward children; physicians; employees of child welfare agencies and state boards of charities; social workers; mental testers (Alumni Roster 1919). To these students, clearly, training in eugenics appeared a means of professional advancement. The use of field workers was anticipated by Blackmar's use of two sociology students to assist with the research for The Smoky Pilgrims (1897:64). See note 15.
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