us about the Vineland Training School and the haunting case of Deborah Kallikak.

In southern New Jersey there was a school built in the late 1800s called the Vineland Training School—originally called the New Jersey Home for the Education and Care of Feebleminded Children. In 1906, a psychologist named Henry Goddard was hired. He wanted to find a scientific way to measure the intellect of students there. He was also discovering genetics. People had just rediscovered Gregor Mendel’s research, and many American geneticists, in particular, felt that this was the explanation for why some people were intelligent and some were not or why some people committed crimes and others did not.

The thinking emerged in the U.S. that you needed to keep people with these bad genes from having children.Henry Goddard used the children at the school as “evidence” for this policy. He investigated their genealogy and claimed he could see these genes being passed down from generation to generation, and that this was proof positive that eugenics was the right thing to do.

Goddard published a book called The Kallikak Family, about a student at the school named Emma Wolverton, whom he called Deborah Kallikak. The book claimed to show how criminality and feeblemindedness travelled through the generations. The implication was that you have to keep these people from reproducing or it would be terrible for the U.S. He also advocated sterilizing women to keep them from reproducing if they were deemed unfit. As the Nazis grew more powerful they grabbed onto American eugenics, and the Kallikak