FWHTTB The science of eugenics and sex life, the regeneration of the human race (1914) (Z4 Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)
"Moron" is commonly used to describe someone who has made a decision that is perceived as unwise, or to scold oneself over a mistake or slipup. Whichever way the word is flung around, the origins of "moron" are far more sinister.
The term is attributed to psychologist and eugenicist Henry H. Goddard, who used it to describe “feeble-minded” individuals. It is closely tied to the United States’s involvement in eugenics, a scientific term, meaning "well-born," that describes the belief that the human population can be controlled by breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. It focuses on eliminating “undesirable” individuals, singling out unmarried mothers, people of color, the poor, and those with disabilities. In the United States, eugenics influenced much of the immigration and segregation policies in the 20th century. "Moron" and other words like it — such as "idiot" — were used to support racist, classist ideas and to advance white supremacy behind the mask of scientific advancement.
According to a report from NPR's Code Switch, "moron" was born of Goddard’s fascination with intelligence and his desire to measure what it was and what it was not. In the early 20th century, psychologists grouped people who fell behind the ideal measure of intelligence into three categories that we now recognize as casual insults: “imbecile,” “idiot,” and “feeble-minded.” Goddard, unsatisfied with the existing terms, coined "moron" to embody both low intelligence and behavioral deviance. None of these endured as medical terms, but at the time they were enough to institutionalize someone and sterilize them as a means to prevent them from reproducing.
Goddard organized patients by disease, habit, or condition, as laid out in his 1911 work, Heredity of Feeblemindedness. He analyzed and coded families with the following qualities: "A, alcoholic (habitual drunkard); B, blind; C, criminal; D, deaf; Dwf, dwarf; E, epileptic; F, feeble-minded, either black letter, or white letter on black ground (the former when sex is unknown); I, insane; M, migraine; N, normal; Sx, grave sexual offender; Sy, syphilitic; T, tuberculous; W, wanderer, tramp, or truant." Goddard wrote of one family: “The offspring of the feeble-minded woman and this feeble-minded man were three feeble-minded children and two others who died in infancy. An illegitimate child of this woman is feeble-minded and a criminal.”
"The idiot is not our greatest problem. He is indeed loathsome. ... Nevertheless, he lives his life and is done. He does not continue the race with a line of children like himself. ... It is the moron type that makes for us our great problem," Goddard said in 1912.
The volume of immigrants coming into the country during the early 20th century was the highest it had ever been. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, between 1901 and 1910, 8,795,400 people immigrated to the United States, primarily from the area then known as Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Germany. It was essential to Goddard's work to ensure there were no "feeble-minded morons" in the bunch, so he sent assistants to Ellis Island in 1913 to observe and identify "morons" according to his methods. As previously mentioned, one of Goddard's methods included a pseudoscientific coded guide that looked something like a family tree. Goddard would study families, code their behavior by letter, and draw conclusions that the feeble-mindedness or blindness or deafness of the preceding generation would affect the children. According NPR's Code Switch, 40% of Italians, Hungarians, and Jewish people that were tested qualified as "morons" and were deported in 1913. Deportations doubled the following year.
Those labeled "moron" could be institutionalized, deported, or sterilized in order to create a race of humans deemed superior by those in positions of influence and power, according to a New Yorker piece on the history of eugenics. Eugenics was widely embraced in academia and even celebrated at the World's Fair. In the first half of the 20th century, this movement in the U.S. led to the involuntary sterilization of around 60,000 people, mostly women of child-bearing age, who were subjectively deemed unfit to reproduce.
Federally funded sterilization programs were legalized in 32 states. The state of Virginia passed its Eugenical Sterilization Act in 1924, and to test the legality of the law, Carrie Buck, a poor 17-year-old girl from Charlottesville, was sent to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded — an asylum for those deemed so-called "morons" where her mother, Emma, had been admitted just a few years prior. Carrie was pregnant as the result of rape and, after giving birth, was sterilized at the colony with no understanding of what was happening to her. The move was backed by law and further supported by the Supreme Court, as demonstrated in the 1927 Buck v. Bell case, in which the court ruled that the sterilization of the "unfit" — including the intellectually disabled — did not violate the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. After observing Buck, her mother, and her grandmother — all poor white women — Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. delivered the opinion of the court, writing, "three generations of imbeciles was enough." This decision has never been overturned.
If this thought process sounds grossly aligned with ideals promoted in Nazi Germany, that’s because it is — but eugenics and the attempt to discontinue “feeble” bloodlines is American-bred. In the 1930s, Nazi leadership turned to American eugenics as inspiration in developing tactics to ensure the erasure of European Jews. In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hilter wrote, “There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but [the U.S.] …”
Southern black women were sterilized en masse, often without consent, for much of the 20th century. It was a practice so common that it received a nickname: a "Mississippi appendectomy." The sterilization of Native Americans occurred as late as the 1980s. While some states have formally apologized for their role in the practice, the desire to control “undesirable” groups still persists among some in the U.S., leaving vulnerable populations at risk.
In May 2017, Sam Benningfield, a general sessions judge in Tennessee, announced that he would offer shorter prison sentences to inmates — a population largely impacted by the nation's ongoing opioid crisis — who would undergo vasectomies or receive the birth control implant Nexplanon. "I'm trying to help these folks begin to think about taking responsibility for their life and giving them a leg up — you know, when they get out of jail — to perhaps rehabilitate themselves and not be burdened again with unwanted children and all that comes with that," Benningfield told CBS News. In July of that same year, the judge pulled the offer following protest from health officials and civil rights attorneys, according to The Washington Post.
Nine decades after Carrie Buck was sterilized, white nationalists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and the so-called "alt-right" gathered in her hometown for "Unite the Right" rallies on August 11 and 12, 2017. Many of those present called for a "purer" race of human beings and chanted phrases like, "You will not replace us." The weekend ended in violence and the death of Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old woman who was killed when a driver slammed into a crowd of anti-racism counterprotesters.