Wisconsin river town was focus for eugenics campaign

ALMA, Wis. — Alma is a picturesque village on the banks of the Mississippi River not far from La Crosse. Its modest downtown is backed by steep bluffs on one side and its foundations brushed by the river on the other.

It could be any Wisconsin river town.

But for a brief while in the early 1900s, Alma became notorious as the centerpiece for the misguided and now-discredited campaign to better society through eugenics, or the improvement of the human race by encouraging so-called desirable genetic traits.

Research by a University of New Hampshire psychology professor has brought to light an odd and unsettling article in which a well-known scientist of the time labeled nearly a quarter of Alma’s residents “hereditary defectives.”

The new research, published by Benjamin Harris, who is also an affiliate professor of history, brings alive the disturbing time in American history when some of the country’s most progressive thinkers — including highly-respected political and educational leaders in Wisconsin — were calling for such drastic measures as sterilization of those they considered to be mentally lacking.

In the fall of 1913 in what is now a mostly forgotten piece in The American Magazine titled “The Village of a Thousand Souls,” famed child psychologist Arnold Gesell, who was himself from Alma, published what Harris found was a flawed and manipulated study in which he claimed about a quarter of the village’s thousand residents showed “the taint of either insanity or feeblemindedness.”

In the article, of which current residents seem almost entirely unaware, Gesell went on to suggest “a course of supervision and segregation which will prevent the horrible renewal of this defective protoplasm that is contaminating the stream of village life.”

Harris, whose study of Gesell’s article is published in the most recent issue of the journal “History of Psychology,” has long had an interest in Gesell and his relationship to the pseudoscience of eugenics.

Especially after coming across “The Village of a Thousand Souls,” he was puzzled by Gesell’s apparent embrace of eugenic thought, mainly because Gesell is today still thought of as one of the most influential of child psychologists but also because of his reputation as a socialist and progressive.

The more Harris dug into Gesell’s authorship of The American Magazine article and into its historical context, the more he learned about the surprising extent to which social reformers early in the 20th century espoused eugenics as a means of viewing and addressing society’s ills.

Harris found that Gesell even chose photographs that accompanied his article to better fit his eugenics-based theory that the village was degenerate. For example, Gesell, drawing on photos from his father’s Alma photo studio, chose a less-than-flattering photo of an early settler of Alma that had been taken years before.

It showed the man, Abraham Schmocker, in front of what appeared to be a dilapidated shack with rags stuffed in broken windows. Harris, however, found other photos of Schmocker in which the shack is more accurately shown to be a tidy log cabin and Schmocker is portrayed in a much more sympathetic light. Even so, in his article, Gesell labeled the photo of Schmocker “Evidence of a feeble mind.”

Gesell also used a photo that shows residents gathered on the street beneath a tavern with a sign above that reads “saloon.” Because he believed that alcoholism was linked to feeblemindedness, Harris said, Gesell wanted to show a saloon in Alma and labeled the photo “Main Street of the Village of Thousand Souls.” But Harris discovered that the photo wasn’t even taken in Alma; it was from Reads Landing, Minn.

Gesell went so far as to draw a map of the village’s homes along with a key that identified in various houses the number of people he labeled “feeble-minded” — information gleaned at least in part, Harris said, by gossip from Gesell’s mother.

Also identified in various homes are those Gesell labeled insane, alcoholic, epileptic, suicidal, criminal, eccentric and tubercular.

“And so we might continue on our journey through the village,” Gesell wrote, “going from house to house as the local assessor does on his yearly rounds, but not to appraise the material goods and lands; rather to evaluate the grade and quality of the human `stock.”’

As might be expected, Gesell’s article was not well-received in Alma, though little remains of any specific responses to the piece. Harris placed an advertisement in the local newspaper searching for anyone with information about reaction to the article but got little response.

He did hear from two women whose families were in Alma at the time. Both reported that people were apparently more ashamed than angry. They also recalled incidents that might have prompted Gesell to choose his hometown as the subject of the study, such as the time a woman whose husband was having an affair doused herself in kerosene, lit herself on fire, and ran down the middle of the street.

How, Harris wondered, did someone such as Gesell become so enamored of eugenics that he would actually manipulate research? Harris said it is important to place Gesell in the context of the times. Social scientists were as much crusaders for the improvement of the human lot as they were researchers.

And Gesell was a respected scientist. He received a graduate degree from UW-Madison where he studied under Frederick Jackson Turner and a Ph.D. in child psychology from Clark University. Later, he earned a medical degree from Yale and worked there as a professor and researcher doing groundbreaking work, becoming a world authority on child development.

Marcy Guddemi is executive director of the Gesell Institute of Child Development, which bases its work on Gesell’s later groundbreaking research. She said she was disappointed that the news release explaining Harris’ study focused on the photos rather than on the context of Gesell’s early thought and political beliefs.

Gesell’s foray into eugenics, Harris found, has to do with the desire of such progressives in the late 19th and early 20th century to engineer a better society. Gesell’s article, Harris said, reflects “a time in which genetic and environmental reforms seemed complimentary rather than in opposition.”

Harris said the Wisconsin state legislature passed a bill in the early 1900s that allowed sterilization of the so-called mentally unfit.

And even a University of Wisconsin luminary such as Charles Van Hise, as president of the university, gave lectures in which he supported eugenics as a way to conserve human resources. He said that “as a first very moderate step toward the development of the stamina of the human race, defectives should be precluded from continuing the race by some proper method.”

Gesell’s article on Alma assumed national importance in light of the enthusiasm for eugenics, Harris said. It was reproduced in a booklet used by ministers to prepare their sermons and became the subject of many a Sunday morning address from pulpits across the nation.

But by 1930, Harris said, the wave of enthusiasm for eugenics had run its course, at least in the U.S. And even Gesell, over the remaining years of his career, largely abandoned his support of eugenics and tempered his belief in the influence of heredity with greater emphasis on the role of environment in a child’s upbringing.

Alma, meanwhile, survived its brush with notoriety and today, with a population of something less than a thousand souls, again enjoys the quiet and anonymity of any other Mississippi River village.