"Childish Unconcern for the Future": Rural Feeblemindedness in the Early Twentieth Century

During the 1910s, as urban reformers invoked idyllic images of rural white America as a counterpoint to racialized urban social decay, a host of social scientists, public officials, and moral crusaders addressed themselves to the dark underbelly of white country life.  Such concern for white rural life had been piqued by the lurid tales of fallen New England towns and Midwestern frontier communities appearing in major newspapers and magazines like Atlantic Monthly since the 1880s, but as Nicole Hahn Rafter suggests, the degeneration of “country life” was most notoriously documented in later eugenic studies like The Kallikak Family (1912) and Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem (1919).  As eugenic pedigree studies chronicled the sprawling families of licentious women, indolent men, and feeble-minded children who populated the rural white and mixed-race North, many states began to prohibit marriage and demand compulsory institutionalization for feebleminded children and for adults deemed mentally or morally incapable of managing their own affairs.
This paper examines how the cultural figure of the child functioned in early twentieth-century social scientific, legislative, and popular discourse about rural white feeblemindedness.  “The child” was central to this discourse in three ways: first, scientists and politicians were concerned with literal children and future generations of the white race; second, through intelligence tests designating “true mental age,” even adults with developmental disabilities were understood to socially and morally function as children; and third, “country life” itself was often figured as child-like through its perceived social backwardness, delayed development, and insufficient focus on the future.  To make these claims, the paper draws upon archival sources about marriage and institutionalization laws in the state of Minnesota, archival materials about feeblemindedness and the family studies from the Eugenic Records Office, and family studies published in books and journals from 1900-1924.