The Two Percent Solution: Eugenic Jurisprudence and the Socialization of American Law, 1900–1930

Law and History Review

Volumn 16, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 63-111

  Willrich, Michael ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84920091000     PISSN: 07382480     EISSN: 19399022     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/744321     Document Type: Article

References (137)

1. Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 161-67.
2. The standard histories of American criminal justice pay little attention to eugenics. Lawrence M. Friedman notes that “The gospel of eugenics affected criminal justice even in its ordinary course,” but he does not say how. Crime and Punishment in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 336. The same tendency is evident in Andrew J. Polsky, The Rise of the Therapeutic State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); David J. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980); and Samuel Walker, Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). Historians who have written about eugenics and crime have focused mainly on criminology and penal institutions, not the courts. See Hamilton Cravens, “Applied Science and Public Policy: The Ohio Bureau of Juvenile Research and the Problem of Juvenile Delinquency, 1913-1930,” in Psychological Testing in American Society, 1890-1930, ed., Michael M. Sokal (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 158-94; David Garland, Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategies (Brookfield, Vt: Gower, 1985); Philip Jenkins, “Eugenics, Crime and Ideology: The Case of Progressive Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania History 51 (1984): 64-79; Alexander W. Pisciotta, Benevolent Repression: Social Control and the American Reformatory-Prison Movement (New York: New York University Press, 1994); and Nicole Hahn Rafter, Partial Justice: Women in State Prisons, 1800-1935 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1985). A particularly interesting exception is Steven Schlossman and Stephanie Wallach, “The Crime of Precocious Sexuality: Female Juvenile Delinquency in the Progressive Era,” Harvard Educational Review 48 (1978): 65-94.
3. The historical and sociological literatures on eugenics have grown rapidly in recent years, owing partly to well-placed concerns about the resurgence of eugenics. For general histories of eugenics as science, social thought, and popular movement, see Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985); Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981); Mark H. Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1963); and Donald K. Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968). The history of the Eugenics Record Office, the institutional nucleus of American eugenics, is well told in Garland E. Allen, “The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, 1910-1940: An Essay in Institutional History,” Osiris, 2d ser., 2 (1986): 225-64. Recently, scholars have examined the relationship between the professionalization of social control and the emergence of eugenics. See especially Garland, Punishment and Welfare; Nicole Hahn Rafter, “Claims-Making and Socio-Cultural Context in the First U.S. Eugenics Campaign,” Social Problems 39 (1992): 17-34, and “Eugenics, Class, and the Professionalization of Social Control,” in Inequality, Crime, and Social Control, ed. George S. Bridges and Martha A. Myers (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994); Steven Noll, Feeble-Minded in Our Midst, Institutions for the Mentally Retarded in the South, 1900-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); and James W. Trent, Jr., Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). On the long-neglected history of eugenics in the American South, see Edward J. Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); and Noll, Feeble-Minded in Our Midst. For a useful comparative perspective, see Mark B. Adams, ed., The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
4. Roscoe Pound was the leading American writer on socialized law in the administration of criminal justice. The best introduction to this theme is his widely influential article, “The Administration of Justice in the Modern City,” Harvard Law Review 26 (1913): 302-28.
5. Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Progressive legal thought grew out of the trans-Atlantic “revolt against formalism” that produced a new social-historical perspective among intellectuals. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890-1930 (New York: Vintage Books, 1958). James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Edward A. Purcell, Jr., The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism & the Problem of Value (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973). Morton White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism (New York: Viking Press, 1949). William J. Novak has recovered a pervasive nineteenth-century vision of the common law that was less concerned with laissez-faire and individual economic rights than with a “well-regulated society.” The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Alan Brinkley traces the decline of progressive legal thought during the late New Deal era. The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).
6. Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1880's (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), 380. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 296-308.
7. Polsky, Rise of the Therapeutic State. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience.
8. The law gives “natural” categories like “race” and “gender” cultural legitimacy and a materiality that renders them operational in state practice. Collette Guillaumin, “Race and Nature: The System of Marks: The Idea of a Natural Group and Social Relationships,” Feminist Issues 8 (1988): 254-3. See also Peggy Pascoe, “Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of ‘Race’ in Twentieth-Century America,” Journal of American History 83 (1996): 44-69.
9. Roscoe Pound, “Organization of Courts,” speech before the Minnesota State Bar Association, 20 August 1914, Journal of the American Judicature Society 11 (1927): 80. The institution and its students left behind a large residue of published and archival sources, including many never before examined. Chief Justice Harry Olson's administrative papers and correspondence reside in two collections: the Municipal Court of Chicago Collection, 1906-1927 (hereafter “MCC”) at the Chicago Historical Society; and the Judge Harry Olson Papers (“JHOP”) at the Northwestern University Archives. The Chicago Historical Society has also recently acquired the newspaper clippings that Olson collected from 1908 to 1916. Several hundred microfilm reels of unindexed criminal case files from the court, which date from 1914 to 1924, have recently been discovered and are held at the Cook County Circuit Court Archives. Particularly useful for this essay, the first historical study of the Municipal Court, were several boxes of previously unexamined feebleminded commitment cases, also housed at the Circuit Court Archives. The Municipal Court's published (and widely disseminated) annual reports contain official statistics, institutional histories, and court propaganda. And, finally, there are the numerous contemporary studies of America's model “socialized” court. See especially Almena Dawley, “A Study of the Social Effects of the Municipal Court of Chicago” (M. A. thesis, University of Chicago, 1915); Hiram T. Gilbert, The Municipal Court of Chicago, 2d ed. (Chicago: By the author, 1928); Weston A. Goodspeed, ed., History of Cook County (Chicago: Goodspeed Historical Association, 1909), 854-64; Herbert Harley, A Modern Experiment in Judicial Administration: The Municipal Court of Chicago, address before the Louisiana Bar Association, 8 May 1915 (Chicago, n.p.); [Ethel R. McDowell], History of the Municipal Court of Chicago and Its Specialized Services (Chicago: Municipal Court of Chicago, n.d.); and Raymond Moley, “The Municipal Court of Chicago,” in The Illinois Crime Survey (Chicago: Illinois Association for Criminal Justice, 1929), 389-419.
10. Many of Chief Justice Harry Olson's speeches and essays on judicial administration and eugenic jurisprudence survive in published form. See especially “Disease and Crime-An Analogy,” speech before the State Conference of Social Agencies, Los Angeles, 2 May 1916 (n.p.); “The Municipal Court of Chicago: A Tribunal of Procedural Reform and Social Service,” speech before the Associated Charities of San Francisco, 10 May 1916, reprint from the San Francisco Recorder, 12 May 1916; “Report of the Psychopathic Laboratory,” in Tenth and Eleventh Annual Reports of the Municipal Court of Chicago: For the Years December 6, 1915, to December 2, 1917, inclusive (Chicago: Municipal Court of Chicago, n.d.), 9-18; “Organization, Procedure and the Psychopathic Laboratory,” speech before the Iowa State Bar Association, 25 June 1920 (n.p.); “The Psychopathic Laboratory of the Municipal Court of Chicago,” Central Law Journal 92 (1921): 102-8; “The Recent History of the Psychopathic Laboratory of the Chicago Municipal Court,” Central Law Journal 93 (1921): 132-0; and “Crime and Heredity,” presidential address before the Eugenics Research Association, 16 June 1923, in Research Studies of Crime as Related to Heredity (Chicago: Municipal Court of Chicago, 1925), 9-29. Several speech drafts can be found in JHOP, Boxes 3 and 4.
11. Olson, “Disease and Crime.” As sociologist James W. Trent, Jr., has shown, estimates of the percentage of “feeble minds” in the American population rose dramatically from 1870 to 1920. In 1880, Frederick Wines, special consultant to the United States Census Bureau, surveyed 100,000 physicians and determined that 153.3 out of every 100,000 Americans were feebleminded. Psychologist Henry H. Goddard first suggested that the feebleminded constituted two percent of the population in 1910, after he invented the category “moron” to describe schoolchildren who “were certainly brighter than children traditionally recognized as feebleminded, but… were still abnormal.” Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, 160, 142, 171.
12. Blackstone explained the common law insanity doctrine as follows: “idiots and lunatics are not chargable for their own acts, if committed when under these incapacities….” Quoted in Friedman, Crime and Punishment, 143.
13. Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Annual Reports of the Municipal Court of Chicago: For the Years December 4, 1921 to November 30, 1924, inclusive (Chicago: Municipal Court of Chicago, n.d.), 13. The court did not publish longterm commitment statistics in its otherwise thorough annual reports-an unconscionable omission given the human stakes involved. In the 1924 report Olson wrote, “Two or three years ago the commitments of such persons had reached a total of as high as one thousand per year. At the present time an ever higher rate is reported.” In the same report, Dr. Hickson claimed that the laboratory had made “over 40,000 complete examinations” since 1914, or roughly 4,000 per year. He also noted that in a group of 1,002 consecutive cases sent from the Municipal Court's criminal branches, 68.25 percent of the men and 87 percent of the women had been “committed to institutions as feebleminded or insane.” These percentages suggest a much higher annual commitment rate than Olson claimed. By comparison, the Municipal Court committed 14,260 defendants to the House of Correction or County Jail for misdemeanors and quasi-crimes from December 1923 to November 1924. Unlike the men and women facing indeterminate sentences in institutions for the “insane” and “feeble-minded,” none of these prisoners could legally be held for more than one year, and most served much shorter terms. Crime and Punishment., 13, 128a, 182, 179, 181. Contemporaries noted Hickson's tendency to recommend commitment for the vast majority of individuals he examined. “Hickson Quits,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 14 September 1929, 1. H. Douglas Singer, “The Deranged or Defective Delinquent,” in Illinois Crime Survey, 733-810.
14. French Strother, “The Cause of Crime: Mental Defect,” “The Cure for Crime,” “Crime and Heredity,” and “Crime and Educated Emotions,” reprinted from World's Work, July, August, September, and November, 1924 (Chicago: Municipal Court of Chicago, 1924). “The Criminal Incompetent,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 10 October 1927, 10.
15. Joseph P. Chamberlain, “Eugenics in Legislatures and Courts,” American Bar Association Journal 15(1929): 165-69. HarrietteM. Dilla, “Some Sociological Aspects of Criminal Law,” Michigan Law Review 13 (1915): 584-89. J. H. Landman, “The History of Human Sterilization in the United States-Theory, Statute, Adjudication,” Illinois Law Review 23 (1929): 463-80. Aubrey E. Strode, “Sterilization of Defectives,” Virginia Law Review 11 (1925): 296-301. An especially rich source is the Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology (later renamed the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology), the leading criminal law journal in the United States. Robert H. Gault, “Prospective Laboratories for the Study of Criminals,” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 3 (1913): 825-27.
16. Gerald N. Grob, Mental Illness and American Society, 1875-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 173.
17. Quoted in Edwin R. Keedy, “Sterilization of Habitual Criminals and Feeble-Minded Persons,” Illinois Law Review 5 (1911): 578.
18. Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 207 (1927).
19. Donald T. Critchlow, “Keeping the Life Stream Pure,” review of The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States, by Philip R. Reilly, Reviews in American History 20 (1992): 343.
20. On police and policing in nineteenth-century America, see especially Eric Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, 1860-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); David Montgomery, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 52-114; Allen Steinberg, The Transformation of Criminal Justice: Philadelphia, 1800-1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); and Christopher L. Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 35-97.
21. See especially Mark H. Haller, “Urban Crime and Criminal Justice: The Chicago Case,” Journal of American History 57 (1970): 619-35; and Walker, Popular Justice, 127-93.
22. The best source on the commission is Bulletin of the Chicago Crime Commission, est. 1919. David R. Johnson, “Crime Fighting in Chicago: An Analysis of Its Leadership, 1919-1927” (M.A. thesis, University of Chicago, 1966).
23. Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (New York: Macmillan, 1909). Allen F. Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 149-56.
24. The interplay of hereditarian and environmentalist ideologies during the Progressive Era has been noted elsewhere. Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives, 75.
25. Degler, In Search of Human Nature, 59-211. Hereditarianism is now enjoying a renaissance. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994). Russell Jacoby and Naomi Glauberman, eds., The Bell Curve Debate: History, Documents, Opinions (Times Books, 1995). Robert Wright, “Brave New World Dept.: The Biology of Violence,” New Yorker, 13 March 1995, 68.
26. Gilbert, Municipal Court, 15-18. Herbert Harley, “Business Management for the Courts: As Exemplified by the Municipal Court of Chicago,” Virginia Law Review 5(1917): 1-26. Harry Olson, “The Proper Organization and Procedure of a Municipal Court,” reprint from Proceedings of the American Political Science Association (n.p., 1910), 78-96. “Success of Organized Courts,” Journal of the American Judicature Society 1 (1918): 133-51.
27. “For People's Courts of Justice,” Chicago Record-Herald, 2 November 1905, 6. See also “To Abolish Justices,” Chicago Evening Journal, 22 March 1893; and “Rowe's Attack on the Justice Shop,” Chicago Evening Journal, 11 March 1897.
28. On the charter campaign, see Maureen A. Flanagan, Charter Reform in Chicago (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987); and Thomas R. Pegram, Partisans and Progressives: Private Interest and Public Policy in Illinois, 1870-1922 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 87-120.
29. Gilbert, Municipal Court, 13-32.
30. Hays, “Preface, 1969,” in Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), viixiii. As Daniel T. Rodgers has noted, “progressivism” was less a monolithic movement than a diverse group of rhetorics and programs. “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10 (1982): 113-32.
31. Moley, “Municipal Court,” 396. Gilbert, Municipal Court, 257-60. Harley, “Business Management.” “Success of Organized Courts.”
32. Douglas Bukowski, “Big Bill Thompson: The ‘Model’ Politician,” in The Mayors: The Chicago Political Tradition, ed. Paul M. Green and Melvin G. Holli, rev. ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995), 62, 70. Harley, Modern Experiment, 5-9. Edward R. Kantowicz, Polish-American Politics in Chicago, 1888-1940 (Chicago: Universit of Chicago Press, 1975), 137tt). Albert Nelson Marquis, ed., Who's Who in Chicago: The Book of Chicagoans (Chicago: A. N. Marquis, 1926), 660. Olson, “Crime and Heredity.” Harold J. Rust, ed., “Illinois Judicial Who's Who,” Illinois Law Review 14 (1920): 442.
33. Quoted in William Bayard Hale, “A Court That Does Its Job,” World's Work, March 1910, 12695.
34. Harley, “Business Management,” 11, 1-26. Pound, “Organization of Courts.”
35. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Hearings Before the Committee on the Judiciary, January 12, 1910, on the Bill H.R. 14552 to Regulate Judicial Procedure, Etc. (As to Writs of Error and Appeals) (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1910), 33-34. Hale, “A Court That Does Its Job,” 12697. Urban A. Lavery, “Some Tendencies of Social Legislation,” Illinois Law Review 9 (1914): 24-31. John H. Wigmore, “The Most Famous City Court in the World,” Illinois Law Review 6 (1912): 591-92.
36. “Editorial,” Journal of the American Judicature Society 1 (1918): 131-32. Frederic B. Crossley, “Chief Justice Harry Olson and His Court,” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 3 (1912): 346. Pound, “Organization of Courts.” The claims of legal scholars that the Municipal Court of Chicago served as a national model are well substantiated by local press accounts. “Bar Would Abolish All Minor Courts,” St. Louis Republic, 6 February 1909. “Chicago's Municipal Court,” Birmingham Age-Herald, 24 March 1912. “Chicago's Police Court Explained by Judge Olson,” Springfield (Mass.) Daily Republican, 28 April 1910. “A Court That Runs Like a Business Corporation,” New-York Daily Tribune, 16 January 1910. “Courts of the People,” Buffalo Express, 6 February 1909. “Improving Judicial Machinery,” New York Evening Post, 17 March 1909. “Judge Olson Will Speak on Reform,” Atlanta Constitution, 22 March 1912. “Municipal Court Would Eradicate Many Evils,” Cleveland Press, 2 March 1910. “Reform of the Inferior Courts: A Review of the State Commission's Recommendations,” Boston Evening Transcript, 21 February 1912. “Reform of Legal Procedure,” Lewiston (Maine) Daily Sun, 16 October 1909. “Urges Cleveland Municipal Court,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, 20 March 1910. Still more evidence that the court served as a model are the numerous letters written to Olson by reformers from other cities (including Buffalo, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Cleveland, Atlanta, and San Francisco) in MCC, Boxes 2-3, and JHOP, Box 3. See, e.g., John Alan Hamilton (Buffalo) to Olson, 11 May 1909, MCC, Folder 8.
37. Pound's vision-that the individualistic common law needed to be reformed to serve the “social interest”-covered virtually every area of American law. In private law, for example, he argued that the prevalent late nineteenth-century legal fiction “liberty of contract” was an empty formalism that papered over the real inequalities between employers and workers. Roscoe Pound, “Liberty of Contract,” Yale Law Journal 18 (1909): 454-87. See also id., Criminal Justice in America (New York: Henry Holt, 1930). Thomas A. Green offers an insightful analysis of the implications of Pound's criminal jurisprudence for notions of human freedom and criminal responsibility in “Freedom and Criminal Responsibility in the Age of Pound: An Essay on Criminal Justice,” Michigan Law Review 93 (1995): 1915-2053.
38. Pound, “Administration of Justice in the Modern City,” 311, 310, 302-28. Pound's theory rested on assumptions about “modernization” shared by many of his contemporaries in social science. “Chicago School” sociologists posited that modernization (accelerated industrialization, immigration, and urbanization) fostered social “disorganization” (the breakdown of family and community relationships), which rendered obsolete the traditional social controls of home, church, and community. Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie, The City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925). Paul Boyer uses a similar framework in Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978).
39. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience, 43-235. Greater discretion did not necessarily entail greater leniency. The introduction of indeterminate sentences often resulted in longer prison terms. Walker, Popular Justice, 149-60.
40. Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 280-314.
41. Seventh Annual Report of the Municipal Court of Chicago: For the Year December 2, A.D. 1912 to November 30, A.D. 1913, inclusive (Chicago: Municipal Court of Chicago, n.d.), 87. Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Culture & the City: Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago from the 1880s to 1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). Meyerowitz, Women Adrift.
42. Juvenile Court Committee, 1907-1908 (n.p.). The report can be found in the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago Papers, University of Illinois at Chicago, Manuscript Collections. Useful accounts of the group's work are Paul Gerard Anderson, “The Good to be Done: A History of [the] Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago, 1898-1976,” 2 vols. (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1988); Louise De Koven Bowen, Safeguards for City Youth: At Work and at Play (New York: Macmillan, 1914); and Davis, American Heroine, 149-56. For a range of perspectives on the Cook County Juvenile Court and juvenile justice generally, see Sanford J. Fox, “Juvenile Justice Reform: An Historical Perspective,” Stanford Law Review 22 (1970): 1187-1239; Victoria Lynn Getis, “A Disciplined Society: The Juvenile Court, Reform, and the Social Sciences in Chicago, 1890-1930” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1994); Helen Rankin Jeter, The Chicago Juvenile Court, U.S. Children's Bureau pub. no. 104 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Labor, 1922); Odem, Delinquent Daughters; Anthony M. Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); Douglas R. Rendleman, “Parens Patriae: From Chancery to the Juvenile Court,” South Carolina Law Review 23 (1971): 205-59; Steven L. Schlossman, Love and the American Delinquent: The Theory and Practice of “Progressive” Juvenile Justice, 1825-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); Eric C. Schneider, In the Web of Class: Delinquents and Reformers in Boston, 1810s-1930s (New York: New York University Press, 1992); and David S. Tanenhaus, “Policing the Child: Juvenile Justice in Chicago, 1870-1925” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1997).
43. Bowen, Safeguards for City Youth, 95.
44. Jane Addams, A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (New York: Macmillan, 1913), 130-31.
45. Black's Law Dictionary defines quasi-crimes as “all offenses not crimes and misdemeanors, but that are in the nature of crimes. A class of offenses against the public which have not been declared crimes, but wrongs against the general or local public which it is proper should be repressed or punished by forfeitures and penalties.” Henry Campbell Black, Black's Law Dictionary: Definitions of the Terms and Phrases of American and English Jurisprudence, Ancient and Modern, 6th ed. (St. Paul: West Publishing, 1990), 371. In the shorthand of the Municipal Court, “quasi-crimes” referred specifically to violations of city ordinances: e.g., vagrancy, indecent exposure, carrying a concealed weapon, and the ubiquitous “disorderly conduct.” Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Annual Reports, 108.
46. Addams, Bowen, and JPA superintendent Gertrude Howe Britton all participated in the creation of the Domestic Relations Court, and the JPA maintained a close working relationship with the institution. JPA members assisted Olson in establishing the court's legitimacy, and judges effectively deputized JPA social workers to investigate hundreds of cases per year in the 1910s. In her address at the court's opening day ceremonies, Addams declared: “Many of us who for years have seen children in poverty and degradation welcome the opening of this court in a manner we can hardly express. In fact it seems to me that since the Municipal courts were started and placed under the direction of Judge Olson there has been one thing after another added to their efficiency, until they are approaching a state where they are the best in the land.” “Heart Court in First Act Unites Broken Family,” Chicago Evening American, 3 April 1911. Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago, Fourteenth Annual Report: Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago, 1914-1915 (n.p.), 14, 23, in JPA Papers.
47. Dawley, “Social Effects,” 1-67. Olson, “Municipal Court,” 8-10. Judges of specialized branches regularly published short histories of their courts. See especially Nineteenth, Twentieth, Twenty-First and Twenty-Second Annual Reports of the Municipal Court of Chicago: For the Years December 1, 1924 to December 2, 1928, inclusive (Chicago: Municipal Court of Chicago, n.d.), 101-16. A. P. Drucker, “A Study of One Hundrer [sic] Juvenile-Adult Offenders in the Cook County Jail, Chicago, Illinois,” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal IMW and Criminology 4(1913): 47-57. Murray Howard Leiffer, “The Boys’ Court of Chicago” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1928). Claude Willard Sprouse, “The Boys’ Court of Chicago” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1916).
48. Alice Greenacre, A Handbook for the Women Voters of Illinois, ed. Sophonisba P. Breckinridge (Chicago: Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, 1913), 46. Kunzel, Fallen Women. Lunbeck, Psychiatric Persuasion, 23-45. Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of Women's Political Culture, 1830-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 69-90. For a classic account of the rise of “the social,” see Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley, paperback ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
49. John J. Lupe, “Domestic Relations Branch,” in Nineteenth, Twentieth, Twenty-First and Twenty-Second Annual Reports, 101.
50. Until 1919, these inspections were voluntary. Harley, “Business Management,” 12. Under an Illinois statute enacted in 1919 (as part of the wartime panic over venereal disease), local judges were required to send to a hospital, sanitarium, or clinic for an examination any defendant brought before them who appeared “from the evidence or otherwise” to be “suffering from a communicable venereal disease.” If a defendant tested positive, the statute declared that “he or she may by order of the court be sent for treatment to a hospital, sanitarium or clinic… and if necessary, be segregated for such terms as the court may impose.” Quoted in George E. Worthington and Ruth Topping, Specialized Courts Dealing with Sex Delinquency, reprint (Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, 1925, 1969), 11.
51. Edgar A. Jones, “The Boys’ Court,” in Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Annual Reports, 102.
52. Quoted in A. L. Jacoby, “The Psychopathic Clinic in a Criminal Court: Its Uses and Possibilities,” Journal of the American Judicature Society 7 (1923): 22, 21-25.
53. Municipal Court of Chicago, Report of the Psychopathic Laboratory of the Municipal Court of Chicago, 1 May 1914-30 April 1917 (Chicago: Municipal Court of Chicago, n.d.), 15. V. V. Anderson, “The Immoral Woman as Seen in Court: A Preliminary Report,” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 8 (1918): 902-10. Gault, “Prospective Laboratories for the Study of Criminals.” Eugene A. Gilmore, “The Need of a Scientific Study of Crime, Criminal Law, and Procedure-The American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology,” Michigan Law Review 11 (1912): 50-55. Jacoby, “The Psychopathic Clinic.” Edward Lindsey, “The Bill to Establish a Criminological Laboratory at Washington,” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 1 (1910): 103-17. J. H. Murray and Sydney Kuh, “A Psychiatric Clinic at the Chicago House of Correction,” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 8 (1918): 837-43. Many local reformers wrote Olson seeking information on the court's laboratory. See, e.g., Mrs. William H. Mayhew, Milwaukee County League of Women Voters, to Olson, 18 October 1924, MCC, Folder 39.
54. Healy to Lathrop, 4 April 1908, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Ethel Sturges Dummer Papers, Folder 578.
55. Lombroso quoted in Gould, Mismeasure of Man, 124. Healy to Lathrop., 122-45. Historians locate the origins of criminology in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when European and American thinkers rejected theological conceptions of criminals as sinners, and humanitarian reformers led campaigns for the abolition of torture and public executions. The central figures of “classical” criminology were Cesare Bonesana, Marchese di Beccaria, and Jeremy Bentham. Harry E. Barnes, “Criminology,” in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 4, ed. Edwin R. A. Seligman (New York: Macmillan, 1931), 584-92. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault challenged the interpretation of these developments as a humanitarian triumph over barbarism, calling critical attention to the essentialization of criminality and the creation of new disciplinary techniques that accompanied the emergence of the prison. For a range of perspectives, see Adam Jay Hirsch, The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishment in Early America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); and Martin J. Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
56. Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, 131-224.
57. Richard L. Dugdale, The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity (New York: Putnam, 1877). Haller, Eugenics, 21-25. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 70-84.
58. Quoted in Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, 161. Degler, In Search of Human Nature, 3-55.
59. Olson, “Crime and Heredity,” 11-12. Biologist Herbert S. Jennings noted in 1931 that “Feebleminded, insane, deformed or other markedly defective individuals are clearly less desirable than normal ones, and there is little dissent from the view that the propagation of such groups is not to be encouraged if the defects are congenital. Beyond this the common assumptions of eugenicists are that vigor and health are more desirable than weakness and proneness to disease and that higher degrees of efficiency, adaptability and intelligence are more desirable than lower degrees. It is mainly in deciding concretely what individuals fall within the preferred groups that question and dissension arise.” Id., “Eugenics,” in Encylopaedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 5, 620-21.
60. [William Healy], “A System for Recording Data Concerning Criminals,” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 1 (1910): 84-97. “Sins of Father Save Son,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 23 December 1909.
61. Grob, Mental Illness in American Society, 145. See also Abbott, System of Professions, 297-98.
62. Lunbeck, Psychiatric Persuasion, 23.
63. Sokal, ed., Psychological Testing.
64. Grob, Mental Illness, 120, 108-78. Lunbeck, Psychiatric Persuasion, 117-20.
65. Sheldon Glueck, “Psychiatry and the Criminal Law,” Virginia Law Review 14 (1928): 155-81.
66. Barnes, “Criminology.” Davis, American Heroine, 171. Id., Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1967, 1984), 56.
67. William Healy, The Individual Delinquent: A Text-Book of Diagnosis and Prognosis for All Concerned in Understanding Offenders (Boston: Little, Brown, 1915), 4, 781. See also William Healy and Augusta F. Bronner, “Report of the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute-December 1, 1916,” in Cook County, Illinois, Juvenile Court and Juvenile Detention Home, Annual Reports of the Chief Probation Officer, Director Psychopathic Institute, Superintendent Juvenile Detention Home, Attending Physician at Home, 1916 (n.p.). Patrick Almond Curtis, “Eugenic Reformers, Cultural Perceptions of Dependent Populations, and the Care of the Feebleminded in Illinois, 1909-1920” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Chicago, 1983), 79. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience, 54-56.
68. “Fire and Police Bonds Favored By Committee,” unidentified newspaper clipping, Harry Olson Disassembled Scrapbooks, Box 1, “Political 1914” file. The Psychopathic Laboratory operated on an annual appropriation from the Chicago City Council; by 1921, the appropriation had reached only $15,000, though the Municipal Court judges bolstered the laboratory's budget by placing several of Hickson's employees on the regular payroll as clerks of the court. Harry Olson to Alroy S. Phillips, 21 January 1921, JHOP, Box 5. Municipal Court of Chicago General Orders, vol. 16 (1921-1930), Cook County Circuit Court Archives.
69. Harry Olson, “A Constructive Policy Whereby the Social Evil May be Reduced,” address before the Seventh Annual International Purity Congress, Minneapolis, 9 November 1913 (n.p.). Id., “Organization, Procedure, and the Psychopathic Laboratory,” address before the Iowa State Bar Association, 25 June 1920 (n.p.), 9-10.
70. Cravens, “Applied Science,” 158-94. Henry H. Goddard, The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-mindedness (New York: Macmillan, 1912). Id., The Criminal Imbecile: An Analysis of Three Remarkable Murder Cases (New York: Macmillan, 1915). Edward S. Scheffler, “The History of the Psychiatric Institute of the Municipal Court of Chicago,” in A Dynamic Era of Court Psychiatry, 1914-1944, ed. Agnes Sharp (Chicago: Municipal Court of Chicago, 1944), 9.
71. Olson in Report of the Psychopathic Laboratory, 14. Curtis, “Eugenic Reformers,” 90. Haller, Eugenics, 24-25. Nathan William MacChesney, “Race Development by Legislation,” reprinted from Institution Quarterly 4 (Springfield, 111., 1913).
72. Quoted in Curtis, “Eugenic Reformers,” 71.
73. Quoted in Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, 165.
74. Noll, Feeble-Minded in Our Midst, 3.
75. Curtis, “Eugenic Reformers,” 112. Gould, Mismeasure of Man, 158-74. Haller, Eugenics, 12543. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 76-80. Rock Slyster, “The Physical Bases of Crime as Observed by a Prison Physician,” reprinted from Bulletin of Academy of Medicine 14 (1913). Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, 131-224.
76. Ochsner to Olson, 15 March 1915, MCC, Folder 27.
77. Ochsner to Olson, 29 March 1915, MCC, Folder 27. Ochsner to Olson, 13 April 1915, Folder 28. Ochsner to Olson, 19 April 1915, Folder 28. Olson to Ochsner, 20 April 1915, Folder 28. Ochsner to Olson, 6 May 1915, Folder 28. Harry Olson, “Objection to the So-Called Schofield Bill,” Folder 29. Curtis, “Eugenic Reformers,” 146-58.
78. “An Act to Better Provide for the Care and Detention of Feeble-Minded Persons,” Illinois Revised Statutes, 1925, ch. 23, sec. 346. Curtis, “Eugenic Reformers,” 155-58.
79. Bowen, Safeguards for City Youth, 124-25.
80. John E. Ransom, “A Study of Mentally Defective Children in Chicago,” Institution Quarterly 6 (1915): 49-50, quoted in Curtis, “Eugenic Reformers,” 101. The full report is Ransom, A Study of Mentally Defective Children in Chicago, an Investigation Made by the Juvenile Protective Association (Chicago: Hale-Crossley Printing, 1915).
81. Chicago City Council, Report of the City Council Committee on Crime, 22 March 1915, 12, 15.
82. Hickson, “Socio-Economics of Crime and Criminals,” in Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Annual Reports, 178. Report of the Psychopathic Laboratory, 19-21.
83. Hickson, Report of the Psychopathic Laboratory, 21. Hickson made his influences clear in a characteristically self-congratulatory fashion: “On the subject of the Psychopathic Constitution we have followed in substance Ziehen; on that of Dementia Praecox, Bleuler. [sic] and in the remaining psychoses and classifications, Kraepelin. In feeble-mindedness we have relied on various American, English, French and other continental writers and authorities. A writer's status in this field can be estimated from the discrimination he uses in his quotation of authors and authorities.” “Socio-Economics of Crime and Criminals,”., 32-33.
84. Gilbert, Municipal Court, 94-95. Hickson, Report of the Psychopathic Laboratory, 31, 288. Curtis, “Eugenic Reformers,” 126.
85. Limbeck, Psychiatric Persuasion, 127-30.
86. Singer, “Deranged or Defective Delinquent,” 794-95.
87. Healy, Individual Delinquent, 594.
88. Hickson, Report of the Psychopathic Laboratory, iX-lil.
89. Gould, Mismeasure of Man, 146-233. Sokal, ed., Psychological Testing. For a brilliant contemporary critique of intelligence testing, see Walter Lippmann, “The Mental Age of Americans,” New Republic, 25 October 1922, in Bell Curve Debate, eds. Jacoby and Glauberman, 561-65.
90. Gould, Mismeasure of Man, 151, 146-74.
91. Report of the Psychopathic Laboratory, 170.
92. Report of the Psychopathic Laboratory, 13. Singer, “Deranged or Defective Delinquent,” 797-98. In addition to the 1915 feebleminded commitment act, judges could commit defendants under Illinois's 1893 “lunatic” act, “An Act to Revise the Law in Relation to the Commitment and Detention of Lunatics…” Illinois Revised Statutes, 1925, ch. 85, sec. 1-38.
93. Olson in Report of the Psychopathic Laboratory, 9-10. Tenth and Eleventh Annual Reports, 46-51. On Chicago's national reputation as a crime center, see “Crime in Chicago,” New Republic, 6 November 1915, 7; and Lawrence Howe, “Crime and the Courts in Chicago,” Nation, 24 September 1930, 315.
94. In the 1920s, the criminal branches accounted for a larger percentage of Hickson's caseload, but even then most of the defendants examined in the laboratory had been charged with disorderly conduct and other minor offenses against public order. Singer, “Deranged or Defective Delinquent,” 798-803.
95. Hickson, “Socio-Economics,” 183, 178-82. “Adult Probation,” in Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Annual Reports, 117. A comparable occupational breakdown is not available for cases sent to the laboratory from other branches. However, case histories included in Report of the Psychopathic Laboratory, which Hickson claimed were “typical,” reveal a similar preponderance of working-class people. Of thirty-seven Boys’ Court cases, thirteen had fathers who were laborers; the other fathers included a machinist, an expressman, a printer, a “chronic thief,” and a “gambler.” The mothers, only three of whose occupations were mentioned, included two factory workers and a laundry worker. Report of the Psychopathic Laboratory, 367-80.
96. Meyerowitz, Women Adrift.
97. By the end of World War I, more than fifteen studies of mental defect among American prostitutes had reported that 30 to 98 percent were feebleminded. Mark Thomas Connelly, The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 41. Steven Schlossman and Stephanie Wallach have argued that the treatment of female juvenile delinquents in the Progressive Era was part of a larger reaction to a cultural revolution in sexuality and gender roles. Young women, they found, were far more likely than young men to be arrested on public morals charges and were disproportionately incarcerated. Schlossman and Wallach, “The Crime of Precocious Sexuality.”
98. “A Constructive Policy,” 15.
99. Report of the Psychopathic Laboratory, 92, 93-106. Hickson did not provide information on the other women sent to the laboratory by the Morals Court in those years.
100. Tenth and Eleventh Annual Reports, 90.
101. Nineteenth, Twentieth, Twenty-First and Twenty-Second Annual Reports, 17-18. Olson, Disease and Crime. Sheila Faith Weiss, Race Hygiene and National Efficiency: The Eugenics of William Schallmayer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
102. Harry H. Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization in the United States: A Report of the Psychopathic Laboratory of the Municipal Court of Chicago (Chicago: Municipal Court of Chicago, 1922), 296. Allen, “The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor.” Haller, Eugenics, 131-34, 138-39, 155-57.
103. Even in the American South, eugenicists and sympathetic state politicians did not use eugenic measures to enact large-scale institutionalization or sterilization of African-Americans. In fact, the southern story is one of neglect rather than race hygiene. Tight welfare budgets and rigid policies of racial segregation in state institutions meant that most southern states made no provision at all for the institutionalization of feebleminded blacks. Since southern sterilization statutes reserved the measure for inmates of state institutions, African-Americans were underrepresented among southerners sterilized under eugenics laws. The southern situation points up the extraordinary complexity of eugenics policy: the contradictory aims of care and control, and the effects of fiscal constraints and local political cultures. It seems that southern legislators and reformers trusted in other legal measures of segregation-Jim Crow and antimiscegenation laws-to control African-Americans and keep the “races” apart. Noll, Feeble-Minded in Our Midst, 89-103.
104. In a collection of thirty-seven case histories of Boys’ Court defendants, for example, six were identified as “American,” four as “colored,” twelve as children of immigrants, and fifteen were not identified by nationality or race. Report of the Psychopathic Laboratory, 367-80. The form Hickson filled out as a commissioner in feebleminded commitment cases asked him to identify the race and nationality of defendants and their parents. Of thirty-four consecutive surviving cases, from November 1915 to September 1917, the breakdown of defendants’ nationality and race is as follows: eight native-born, parents unknown; one native-born, parents native; three “Negroes”; three first-or second-generation Italians; two first-or second-generation Germans; two first-or second-generation Polish; one Russian Jew; one “Jew”; and thirteen unidentified (though most of the latter defendants had surnames suggesting eastern or southern European descent). Feeble-Minded Commitment Cases, Cook County Circuit Court Archives, Box 1. Haller, Eugenics, 144-57.
105. “Demented People,” Chicago Defender, 12 August 1916.
106. Hickson in Report of the Psychopathic Laboratory, 367. Olson in Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Annual Reports, 14.
107. Haller, Eugenics, 101.
108. Nineteenth, Twentieth, Twenty-First and Twenty-Second Annual Reports, 109. For an example of judges’ approval of laboratory staffing, see Order No. 518, Municipal Court of Chicago General Orders, vol. 16 (1921-1930).
109. “Goodnow Urges Eugenics Law To Save Race,” Chicago Examiner, 23 June 1916. “Goodnow Tells Why Girls Fall,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 9 November 1916.
110. Singer, “Deranged or Defective Delinquent,” 801. Evidence from the feebleminded commitment case files supports this observation. In the thirty-four consecutive surviving cases from 1915-1917, all but six defendants were committed. Feeble-Minded Cases, Box 1.
111. Singer, “Deranged or Defective Delinquent,” 801, 799-801. The Judge Baker Foundation figure has led David Rothman mistakenly to conclude that the role of the psychiatric clinics in juvenile justice was “inconsequential.” Conscience and Convenience, 245, 247.
112. Feeble-Minded Commitment Case Files, Boxes 1-10, 1915-1919. Of the thirty-four consecutive cases from 1915 to 1917, petitioners were as follows: fourteen mothers, five fathers, two aunts, one brother-in-law, three social workers, one police officer, one court official, one nurse, one caretaker, and five unrelated parties who identified themselves as “interested” in the defendant's welfare. Box 1. Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives. Odem, Delinquent Daughters.
113. “An anxious Mother” to Harry Olson, 2 February 1920, JHOP, Box 3.
114. Lunbeck, Psychiatric Persuasion, 83.
115. Curtis, “Eugenic Reformers,” 160-61.
116. Singer, “Deranged or Defective Delinquent,” 802.
117. Quoted in Critchlow, “Keeping the Life Stream Pure,” 348.
118. Clarence Darrow, “The Eugenics Cult,” American Mercury, June 1926, 137.
119. Critchlow, “Keeping the Life Stream Pure,” 346. Degler, In Search of Human Nature, 59-211. Kunzel, Fallen Women, 44. Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, 198-206.
120. Dummer to Olson, 11 December 1923, Dummer papers, Folder 694.
121. Dummer to Olson, 18 December 1923, Dummer Papers, Folder 694.
122. The anniversary's organizers published a volume of papers in conjunction with the event. The Child, The Clinic and the Court (New York: New Republic, 1925).
123. Dummer to Julia Lathrop, 7 December 1924, Dummer Papers, Folder 636.
124. Lathrop to Dummer, 13 December 1924, Dummer Papers, Folder 636.
125. Olson to Dummer, 31 December 1923. Olson to Dummer, 7 January 1924. Dummer Papers, Folder 694.
126. The demand for copies of Eugenical Sterilization in the United States, which immediately became the authoritative treatise on American sterilization legislation, was enormous. Olson and his clerks received hundreds of requests for the report from university libraries, law professors, sociologists, political scientists, zoologists, attorneys, bar associations, judges, congressmen, state departments of education and welfare, public school teachers, sanitarium superintendents, foundations, social hygiene organizations, ministers, and, of course, committed eugenicists in the United States and Europe. Princeton biologist E. G. Conklin praised the volume in a letter to Olson, saying “I am confident that it will be of the very greatest service in promoting eugenical education and practice in the United States.” Conklin to Olson, 27 January 1923, JHOP, Box 8. Correspondence concerning Olson's speaking engagements can be found in MCC, Folders 37-42, and JHOP, Boxes 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8.
127. H.B. 231 (1925), “An Act to provide for the sterilization or asexualization of inmates of any of the State institutions afflicted with insanity, idiocy, epilepsy, imbecility and feeble-mindedness,” Journal of the House of Representatives of the General Assembly of the State of Illinois, vol. 54 (Springfield: State Printers), 115. H.B. 69 (1929), “An Act to provide for the sexual sterilization of inmates of State institutions for the insane, feeble-minded or mentally defective, in certain cases,” The demand for copies of Eugenical Sterilization in the United States., vol. 56, 141. H.B. 251 (1929), “An Act to provide for the sexual sterilization of inmates of State institutions in certain cases,” The demand for copies of Eugenical Sterilization in the United States., vol. 56, 208. H.B. 768 (1933), “An Act to provide for the sexual sterilization of inmates of State institutions in certain cases,” The demand for copies of Eugenical Sterilization in the United States., vol. 58, 738. In 1927, the Illinois Senate passed a sterilization bill, which was tabled in the House. S.B. 403 (1927), “An Act to provide for the sexual sterilization of inmates of State institutions in certain cases,” Journal of the Senate of the General Assembly of the State of Illinois, vol. 55 (Springfield: State Printers), 845.
128. Twenty-Third Annual Report, 14. Curtis, “Eugenic Reformers,” 4.
129. Nineteenth, Twentieth, Twenty-First and Twenty-Second Annual Reports, 17-18.
130. “In Crime Conference,” Bulletin of the Chicago Crime Commission, 10 December 1924, 1-20.
131. Walker, Popular Justice, 161-93.
132. Edwin W. Sims, “On Crime Conditions in Chicago,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 13 (1922): 105.
133. In contrast to both the environmentalist and eugenicist conceptions of criminal causation, Crime Commission members insisted that criminals were eminently rational-even worse, they were professionals. “The business of crime is being more expertly conducted,” a commission leader once explained. “Ours is a business nation. Our criminals apply business methods. They are the hardest criminals in the world to combat.” Henry Barrett Chamberlin, “Crime as a Business in Chicago,” Bulletin of the Chicago Crime Commission, 1 October 1919, 1.
134. City of Chicago, Department of Health, Report of the Department of Health of the City of Chicago for the Years 1926 to 1930 Inclusive (Chicago: Chicago Printers, 1931), 345-57. Scheffler, “History of the Psychiatric Institute,” 9-10. Twenty-Third Annual Report, 13. On Goddard in the late twenties, see Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, 166.
135. Meyer Solomon, “Municipal Psychopathic Laboratory,” Twenty-Third Annual Report, 98, 96-105. Polsky, Therapeutic State.
136. Twenty-Third Annual Report, 13. Dwight G. McCarty, “Mental Defectives and the Criminal Law,” in “Municipal Psychopathic Laboratory,”., 106-16. Curtis, “Eugenics Reformers,” 129.
137. Scheffler, “History of the Psychiatric Institute,” 10. Sarah Schaar, “The Institute as I Know It,” in Dynamic Era, 13, 15. It is particularly appropriate that Schaar made this comment. In 1919, while a social worker with the Associated Jewish Charities, Schaar had eagerly accepted an invitation from Olson to serve on a committee to assess the need for more legislation for the insane and feebleminded in Illinois. “Your letter, relative to a Committee for the study of psychopathic work in connection with the criminal, has been received,” Schaar wrote. “I shall be happy to serve in any way on this group, because I am thoroughly committed to the need of intensive work along these lines.” Schaar to Olson, 16 December 1919, JHOP, Box 5. Documents pertaining to the anniversary event are contained in the Emily Washburn Dean Papers, Chicago Historical Society, Folder 3. The writings of Meyer Solomon's successor are collected in David B. Rotman, Addresses and Papers, 1934-1948 (Chicago: Psychiatric Institute of the Municipal Court of Chicago, 1948).