Henry H. Goddard

Henry Herbert Goddard (1866 – 1957) was a prominent American psychologist and eugenicist in the early 20th century. He is known especially for his 1912 work, The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness and for being the first to translate the Binet intelligence test into English in 1908 and distributing an estimated 22,000 copies of the translated test across the United States.

He was also the Director of Research at Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys in New Jersey, which was the first known laboratory established to study mental retardation. While there, he is quoted as stating that "democracy means that the people rule by selecting the wisest, most intelligent and most human to tell them what to do to be happy."

At the May 18 1910 annual meeting of the American Association for the Study of the Feeble-Minded, Goddard proposed definitions for a system for classifying individuals with mental retardation based on intelligence quotient (IQ). Goddard used the terms moron for those with an IQ of 51-70, imbecile for those with an IQ of 26-50, and idiot for those with an IQ of 0-25 for categories of increasing impairment. This nomenclature was the standard of the field for decades.

Goddard was a strong advocate of eugenics. He wanted to prevent the breeding of "feebleminded" people. He hesitated to promote compulsory sterilization, even though he was convinced that it would solve the problem of mental retardation, because he did not think such a plan could gain widespread acceptance. Instead he suggested that colonies should be set up where the feeble-minded could be segregated.

Goddard established an intelligence testing program on Ellis Island in 1913. This program rejected an estimated 80% of immigrants as "feeble-minded", including 83% of Jews, 80% of Hungarians, 79% of Italians, and 87% of the Russians, and resulted in an exponential increase in deportations. The Immigration Act of 1924 was strongly influenced by American eugenics' efforts. It restricted numbers of immigrants from "undesirable" racial groups. Upon signing the bill into law, President Coolidge commented, "America must remain American."

Goddard also publicized purported race-group differences on Army IQ tests (Army Alpha and Beta) during World War I (the results were, even in their day, challenged as scientifically inaccurate, and later resulted in a retraction from the head of the project, Carl Brigham) and claimed that the results showed that Americans were unfit for democracy. He was one of the many scientists (including Francis Galton and Lewis Terman) that inspired the scientific racism movement in Europe and the United States.

Early in his career, Goddard taught at the University of Southern California, and served as the first coach of its USC Trojans football team]].

Publications

 * The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness (1912)
 * Standard method for giving the Binet test (1913)
 * Feeblemindedness: Its Causes and Consequences (1914)
 * The Criminal Imbecile (1915)
 * Psychology of the Normal and Subnormal (1919)
 * Human Efficiency (1920)
 * Juvenile Delinquency (1921)