Myth of 'The Jukes' offers cautionary genetics tale

— -- You may not have heard of the Jukes family, but you know them.

They're bad. Each and every one one of them, bad seeds, an inevitable inheritance handed down across generations due to their tainted genes.

"The story is incredibly hateful and lacking in compassion and false," says legal historian Paul Lombardo of Georgia State University in Atlanta. "The story of the Jukes is demonstrably false, and yet people keep repeating it, sometimes knowing it's false."

In the current edition of The Journal of Legal Medicine, Lombardo looks at the modern-day manifestations of the bad idea behind " the infamous Jukes family," as scientist Sir Francis Galton, founder of the "eugenics" movement, described them in 1876.

A historically awful episode of pseudo-science, eugenics aimed at breeding "better" humans, a movement eventually embraced by dozens of states, from Virginia to California, leading to more than 60,000 forced sterilizations by the 1960s. Lombardo worries that in our modern age of genomics, people have forgotten the cautionary tale behind the lies about the Jukes, and the tragedies of the eugenics movement they spawned.

A few states, most recently North Carolina, have repudiated that past, which started with an 1871 public health investigation of the so-called Jukes — a family name that was made up and used to refer to a group of poor white farmers in a "clan" that was mostly not even related. "But a lot of people today seem to have forgotten the lesson," Lombardo says. Forcible sterilizations no longer occur nationwide, but only a few states (North Carolina, South Carolina, Oregon, Georgia, Virginia and Indiana) have acknowledged or apologized for them happening, he notes. In 25 other states they remain unrecognized tragedies.

Where did it start? With a 19th-century "philanthropic physician" named Elisha Harris, a one-time president of the American Public Health Association, who first mentioned the Jukes. He published reports that an impoverished poor woman named Margaret was the "mother of criminals" and gave birth to "a race of criminals, paupers and harlots," in Upstate New York.

His mantle was taken up by a New York Prison Association colleague, Richard Dugdale, who in 1877 published a lengthy study of the clan he pseudonymously described as the "Jukes," noting thieves, rapists and roughnecks among their members filling a local jail. He renamed Margaret, "Ada Jukes," who he claimed was related (dubiously) to some 700 descendants, trapped by a "social Hades" into lives of criminal destitution.

Dugdale died in 1883, and observers quickly forgot the role of poverty he had pointed to in his study of the family, turning it into a "genetic morality tale," Lombardo writes, one that rested on a combination of religious imagery — the Ten Commandments' warning of God "visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and the fourth generations" — and the pseudoscience of eugenics, which saw traits such as poverty or criminality as solely resulting from heredity in the same manner as hair color or height. In his obituary, The New York Times summarized Dugdale's conclusion as "the whole question of crime and pauperism rests strictly upon a physiological basis," an idea endorsed by " the best informed scientists."