In the winter of 1945, the pioneering research psychologist Henry Herbert Goddard sent

that Christmas letter.

The letter touched on the subject of his life's work, human intelligence.

Intelligence is the degree of availability of one's experiences for the solution of

immediate problems and the anticipation of future ones. Goddard now nearly 80 years old

defined intelligence this way. I have solved some of life's problems, though not always

wisely. I have made many mistakes because I did not have sufficient intelligence to

see the end from the beginning.

Among those who received this letter was Goddard's most famous pupil, Emma Woolverton,

but she was known all over the world by the pseudonym that Goddard gave her, Deborah

Calacac. Decades earlier, Goddard worked as a researcher at the institution where Emma

Woolverton lived, the Vineland's training center in New Jersey. Emma, like the rest of

the inmates, lived there because she was diagnosed as feeble minded. In 1912, Goddard wrote

a book about what he called the Calacac family and concluded that this family's abundance

of criminals and illegitimate children was due to feeble-bindedness, passed down from

generation to generation. Emma Woolverton, after receiving this Christmas letter, boasted

that she grasped Goddard's definition of intelligence. The nicest thing about it is

that he thought I had the brains to understand it, which of course I do.

For years before and after this letter was written, Goddard's story of the Calacacs was

used to justify the widespread oppression of people given the label of idiot, imbicil,

or moron. People were institutionalized and mass. They were considered hopeless by the

educational system. States, one by one, legalized the involuntary sterilization of the feeble

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