The Jukes Family - Estabrook's Study

Estabrook's Study

A follow-up study was published by Arthur H. Estabrook of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York in 1916 as The Jukes in 1915. Estabrook noted that Dugdale's conclusions were that the 1877 study "does not demonstrate the inheritance of criminality, pauperism, or harlotry, but it does show that heredity with certain environmental conditions determines criminality, harlotry, and pauperism". Estabrook reanalyzed Dugdale's data and updated it to include 2,820 persons, adding 2,111 Jukes to the 709 studied by Dugdale. He claimed that the living Jukes were costing the public at least $2 million.

Estabrook's data suggested that the family had actually shown fewer problems over time, but he pronounced that the Jukes family were "unredeemed" and suffering from just as much "feeblemindedness, indolence, licentiousness and dishonesty" as they had been in the past. Strongly emphasizing heredity, Estabrook's conclusions reversed Dugdale's argument about the environment, proposing that such families be prevented from reproducing, since no amount of environmental changes could alter their genetic inheritance towards criminality.

Photographs of members of the Jukes family and their homes as well as family trees of some branches of the Jukes family were displayed at the Second International Congress of Eugenics, held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City in 1921. Historians have noted that Dugdale's conclusions have been misused by subsequent generations: "Estabrook's version is the one that carried the day. After 1915, the Jukes cames to symbolize the futility of social change and the need for eugenic segregations and sterilization". American scientists, doctors, politicians, clergy and the legal profession all embraced the eugenic movement, and the Jukes family research was used as evidence in Buck v. Bell a 1927 US Supreme Court case which made forced sterilizations legal in the United States. In the 1930s eugenics was widely repudiated by geneticists, and after the Nazi World War II eugenics program became known, its influence died out.