Henry H. Goddard

Henry Herbert Goddard (1866 to 1957) was an American psychologist, eugenicist and segregationist of the early twentieth century, best known for his 1912 book The Kallikak Family, which he himself later came to regard as flawed, and for translating the Binet-Simon Intelligence Test into English in 1908 and distributing an estimated 22,000 copies of it across the United States. Born in Vassalboro, Maine, to Quaker parents, he graduated from Haverford College in 1887 and received his doctorate in psychology from Clark University in 1899. From 1906 to 1918 he was Director of Research at the Vineland Training School in New Jersey, the first known laboratory established to study intellectual disability, where he introduced the term moron for clinical use. He advocated intelligence testing in hospitals, schools, courts and the military, helped write the first United States law requiring special education for blind, deaf and intellectually disabled children in public schools in 1911, and in 1914 became the first American psychologist to testify that subnormal intelligence should limit the criminal responsibility of defendants.