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A Whitman's Sampler

Not to go all Forrest Gump on you, but the monthly list of PsycBOOKS new releases is sort of like that fabled box of chocolates he was prone to go on about. This month's in particular had me repeatedly opening tables of contents and chapter PDFs to sample the contents. Some were quickly closed, but some more than lived up to the promise of the title.

Part of the fascination of this monthly list is the intoxicating breadth of topics that fit under the aegis of the Classic Book and the wonderful jumble they come in each month. Though this month psychology bedrock figures like Wilhelm Wundt and William James are represented, so are others who you might not immediately place in psychology but who contribute in some important way to our information on the human condition.

Three such this month are cultural pioneer Jane Addams, inspirational sailor Joshua Slocum, and for a bit of comic relief, sexual behavior expert William Lee Howard.

A New Conscience and An Ancient Evil was Jane Addams's (1912) powerful and disturbing assessment of the evil of prostitution and its causes. Addams — progressive, pacifist, founder of Hull House, and the first American woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize — exposed the horrific economic and social conditions that forced children and girls into prostitution, using her book as a bully pulpit to draw people to her cause with its searing descriptions of their lives. Few people have single-handedly done so much to advance the rights of children and women; a tireless writer, lecturer, and activist, she was gifted in building coalitions and bringing about tangible reforms.

Sailing Alone Around the World is Joshua Slocum's (1900) account of his solo circumnavigation (the first undertaken) in his vessel Spray, the starship Enterprise of its day. The journey and book created a sensation, with one reviewer noting, "Boys who do not like this book ought to be drowned at once." An exploration of the human spirit and our interaction with the natural world, Sailing Alone was a predecessor of works such as Saint-Exupéry's Night Flight or the recent Krakauer Into Thin Air.

Facts for the Married (Howard, 1912) is an interesting analog to Jane Addams's account of the harsh realities of women's lives in the tenements. For all the genuinely useful and open information it contains about human sexuality, this is one of those works that shows starkly how much difference 100 years can make in culture. From our perspective, while it is evident that Mr. Howard had the highest regard for women, it is less evident that he'd ever actually met one. For example, his exhortation to a husband on his wedding night to "remember that what to you is an incident in life, is to your bride all LIFE — everything or nothing" today prompts snorts of derision, as well as a suspicion that our feminine predecessors were engaged in similar eye rolling and peals of laughter.

Swiftboating Research

The last update to the PsycBOOKS Classic Books added one of the true landmark texts of psychology: The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity (Dugdale, 1910). As the Introduction to this, the fourth edition, states:

The Jukes has long been known as one of those important books that exert an influence out of all proportion to their bulk. It is doubtful if any concrete study of moral forces is more widely known, or has provoked more discussion, or has incited a larger number of students to examine for themselves the immensely difficult problems presented by the interaction of "heredity" with "environment." Its achievement, moreover, is attributable to the qualities of the work itself, as much as to the unusual nature of its subject matter. It is not too much to say that when the first edition of "The Jukes" was published, it was the best example of scientific method applied to a sociological investigation.

For a generation of students who may not know the name, the Jukes (a pseudonym that actually encompassed a composite of 42 related families) were a family with an unusually high percentage of "social undesirables" made famous (or infamous) by Dugdale's research. Dugdale was a sociologist and member of the executive committee of the Prison Association of New York. Delegated to investigate jails throughout upstate New York, he came across six related family members at one jail. Thus began a years-long meticulous study of the family.

He created detailed genealogical charts traced back to Max, a frontiersman born between 1720 and 1740. Max begat a line consisting of more than 76 convicted criminals, 18 brothel-keepers, 120 prostitutes, over 200 relief recipients and 2 cases of "feeble-mindedness." Dugdale also assigned a dollar amount to how much the family had cost the taxpayer, coming up with a total of 1.3 million dollars (in late 19th century dollars) over 75 years.

Dugdale was scrupulous in his methodology and record keeping and careful in his conclusions. He summarized the Jukes essential characteristics as "great vitality, ignorance and poverty." And his final analysis was that "environment is the ultimate controlling factor in determining careers, placing heredity itself as an organized result of invariable environment."

Many of those that followed and drew from his research were neither scrupulous nor careful. The environment component received little notice, and for decades, the Jukes were portrayed as a textbook example of heredity shaping human behavior. The Jukes became fodder for some of the uglier movements of the era, fueling support of compulsory sterilization, segregation, lobotomies and even euthanasia of the "unfit."

The Jukes legacy permeated the first half of the 20th century. Arthur Estabrook drew from Dugdale's original research in testimony in the infamous Buck v. Bell Supreme Court case that upheld compulsory sterilization of the "unfit." Even the names in some of (the best) literature of the 20th century, such as Steinbach's Joad and Faulkner's Snopes families, seem suggestive. Whole families, mostly from the rural south, have been smeared with epithet like Jukes and suggesting a family stain.

PsycBOOKS allows students to review original research, to trace the progression of that research through time, adaptation, and manipulation, and to draw their own reasoned conclusions.