Cities, Crime, and Mental Illness
A particular area of concern for Progressives that brought together these new areas of expertise and the public health movement were the problems associated with the country’s growing urban areas. And just as immigrants began to swell the population of American’s urban centers, some experts began to claim cities contributed to an increase in cases of insanity. Henry H. Goddard, a prominent American psychologist who advocated for the use of intelligence tests and was widely known for his (flawed) study, The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness, argued "the persons who constitute our social problems are of a type that in the past and under simpler environments have seemed responsible and able to function normally, but for whom the present environment has become too complex so that they are no longer responsible for their actions.”[1] Urbanization presented an unprecedented social and cultural challenge and this was where so many of the nation’s newest arrivals resided. Robert DeCourcy Ward, a co-founder of the Immigration Restriction League argued that the “more skilled and the more intelligent the alien, the less he tends to crowd into our cities; the less liable he is to become insane or mentally unstable from the strain and stress of the life in our congested city districts.”[2] To some it seemed likely that “that the families that are now living in our large cities will, with few exceptions, die out in the course of two or three generations,” due to the unhealthful living conditions.[3]
Jacob Riis, “Bandit’s Roost,” 1890.
The supposed rise in mental illness caused by living in cities was only the start or source of the problems for many critics. A belief that mental illness and urban crime were interdependent was usually never far from the arguments made by those disturbed by the rapidity with which the U.S. was becoming urbanized and those wishing to curtail immigration. In his 1904 treatise on the history, treatment, and training of “mental defectives,” Martin W. Barr, Chief Physician at the Pennsylvania Training School for Feeble-Minded Children, connected feeble-mindedness to a “natural predisposition to crime.”[4] In his annual report for Ellis Island in 1911, William Williams, U.S. Commissioner of Immigration, felt knowledgeable enough to claim that the “feeble-minded contribute largely to the criminal class and are often the cause of incendiary fires.”[5] The following year, at an address before a Mental Hygiene Conference, he made a connection between the criminality of immigrants to the rise of the violent class-based strife between labor and capital by claiming “It is from these [mentally defective immigrants] and their descendants that the criminal classes are largely recruited; they crowd the insane asylums, they furnish the Guiteaus, the Czolgoszes, and the Schranks, the Lefty Louies, and the Gyp the Bloods, and they start vicious strains leading to incalculable misery, pauperism, and criminality in future generations.”[6] And speaking of Czolgosz, President Roosevelt’s message to Congress in December 1901 following McKinley’s assassination recommended stricter inspection procedures and the need to keep out the mentally inferior who were more prone to anarchist’s arguments.[7] It was this point about future generations and the hereditability of mental deficiencies (and its attendant problems) that concerned Howard Knox. Knox, one of the leading psychologists at Ellis Island in the early twentieth century who developed many of the tests for immigrants arriving at Ellis Island (discussed in more detail below), argued that because the intelligence men and women possess “is largely determined by heredity…habitual crime is really an inherited disease.”[8]
The featured photograph is taken from Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, Studies Among the Tenements of New York, published in 1890. Titled, “Bandit’s Roost,” Riis described it as an alley in an area of New York City “notorious for years as the vilest and worst to be found anywhere.”
[1] Henry Herbert Goddard, Feeble-Mindedness: Its Causes and Consequences (New York: Macmillan Company, 1914), 2-3; Joel H. Spring, “Psychologists and the War: The Meaning of Intelligence in the Alpha and Beta Tests,” History of Education Quarterly 12, n. 1 (Spring 1972): 7.
[2] Robert DeC. Ward, “The Crisis in Our Immigration Policy,” Publications of the Immigration Restriction League n. 61 (1913), 24. See also Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum, 112-3.
[3] Albert Allemann, “Immigration and the Future American Race,” Popular Science Monthly, December 1909, 595.
[4] Martin W. Barr, Mental Defectives: Their History, Treatment and Training (Philadelphia: P. Blakiston’s Son & Co., 1904), 68.
[5] Annual Report of the Commissioner of Immigration for the Port of New York with Reference to Ellis Island Affairs for the Year Ended June 30, 1911, Senate Doc. 124, 62nd Cong., 2nd sess., 1911, 7.
[6] “The Invasion of the Unfit,” Medical Record: A Weekly Journal of Medicine and Surgery 82, n. 24 (December 14, 1912): 1080. Charles Guiteau was executed for the assassination of President James A. Garfield in 1881; Leon Czolgosz was executed for the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901; John Schrank was arrested after a failed assassination attempt on Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 and found by the courts to be legally insane; Louis Rosenberg, aka “Lefty Louis,” was one of four men convicted and then executed for the murder of a New York bookmaker in 1912. The irony, of course, is that Guiteau and Czolgosz were both born in the U.S. and Schrank had lived in the U.S. from the age of thirteen. Rosenberg’s nationality is unclear; Harry Horowitz, aka “Gyp the Blood” was the notorious and violent leader of Harlem’s Lenox Avenue Gang who was executed along with Rosenberg for the same crime, and also born in the U.S.
[7] Edward P. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 1798-1965. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 129.
[8] Howard A. Knox, “Measuring Human Intelligence,” Scientific American 112, n. 2 (January 9, 1915): 52.