Fitter Families

to believe. Along with the pigs and cows competing for ribbons, there are entire human families being judged. Urine is tested ever broken, any bones, skulls are measured, how often do you bathe? The jewel teeth are evaluated open please. Judges ask questions about childhood diseases. Mothers are giving the judges a list of the meals they give their kids every day. Every family member is observed chewing food, and the judges

are there taking notes down on all of this. There's a written i Q test for children and parents, and for good measure, a syphilis test. Rounds out the experience. This whole thing. It's called a Fitter Family Contest and they have a really specific social purpose for the nine twenties. They're designed to get across a message to the masses that human genetics determines all that is good and evil about modern American society. Put simply, some people shouldn't reproduce,

some people should never be born. And in this podcast, we're gonna be talking about one family from Mrs Hippy who if they had gone before those judges back in that era, they would have been judged defective or low grade, which were terms actually used in those days, and therefore they would have been deemed unworthy of breeding. That's because they had a little boy named Donald who was exhibiting

certain unexpected and inexplicable behaviors. He was different. But the determination of Donald's mom and dad to make sense of his differences and their certainty that he deserved a place in this world, well, it will change not only Donald's life, but all of our lives. For I Heeart Podcasts, I'm John don Van and I'm Karen Zucker. This is Autism's first Child and I heart original podcast and this is

episode one Fitter Families. Twenty years ago, my journalism career took an unexpected turn at the time, I was working as a general assignment reporter at ABC News, and I had spent years covering wars and famine and political upheaval. ABC's John don Van begins our series with the analysis what we saw in last night's presidential debate with John Donvan, ABC eight point nine Magnitude Epicenter of fifteen miles below ground.

One of my colleagues, a producer I worked with a lot, learned that her two year old son, Mickey, had autism. Here's Karen, So. My son, Mickey was in the Special Tiddler program at Barnard College, where kids from eighteen to thirty six months went to school. The very first day we went, my husband and I were sitting in this two way mirror and there are twelve or thirteen kids, you know, they're all playing, and all of a sudden, the teachers said, everybody go sit down and get some

juice and crackers. So eleven of those kids went down and sat at the table to get their juicing crackers, and there was Mickey in the corner with his shoes and off dancing to the music. As soon as you saw him with other children, educators who knew autism could tell that he was different. We thought he was different because he was reading in one and a half and we knew we went to a different drummer, but we

just sort of thought he was brilliant. We didn't know how different he was, and they suggested he get evaluated, and six weeks later he was diagnosed with autism. Mickey's diagnosis turned Karen's life completely upside down. Before that, you know, she was one of the networks up and coming producers, definitely, and she was we thought bound to be one of the people the rest of us would end up working

for it the network. Well not quite. But the very first interview I ever did as a journalist was with Rosa Parks. So in the early days, I thought I was off to a good start. I covered politics, I went overseas to help cover the go for the Barcelona Olympics. It was a good run. So it was a shock to everybody out of nowhere, this incredible journalist that you were known to be. Karen, you know, just stepped off the fast track. You went from working full time to

working part time. Yeah, my boss had offered me a job share because he didn't want to lose me, and he knew that I'd give a hundred. And I was really really fortunate because I was able to keep my

hand in the news business. And I was even more fortunate because I was able to use the skill of journalism as a way to figure out what to do for Mickey and to educate others about autism and share it with the world, because at this time, when people heard the word autism, everybody still thought one thing, and that was rain Man. He's particular case. He's pretty well off. He's very high functionate. Most autistics they can't speak and

they can't communicate, right, Yeah, do you know what autistic is? Yeah? You know that were Yeah? Are you autistic? I don't think so. No. Not getting a network to agree to do a half an hour on a topic that honestly, most people still have never heard of in the um that took a lot of uh, let's say, push, and Karen is a bulldog. She pushed and she convinced Nightline to let us do it. We were the first team in network news to make reporting about autism into an

actual beat. Those first autism stories that we did together put me into a more intimate kind of connection with the people I was reporting on that I was actually used to. You know, you can do war reporting in this kind of big picture way, and most of the time that's how it happens. You're telling this story of a whole city under siege or a whole army of soldiers. But this reporting on autism was always very close up and very intimate and focused on individuals and their families,

and it was very internal. It was about the feelings of people on the spectrum and their parents who often when their kids were first diagnosed, were confused and frightened and having to adjust to this new normal for their kids. I had some experience with autism, my brother in law has autism, but it didn't prepare me for this kind of reporting. That first story, Karen and I told we did it very honestly and it had a big impact

in the autism community. And after that, Karen asked me to do another story, and then another, and we created this series called Still Unexplained Wave of Autism that began in the US in the ninety nine with an estimated five hundred thousand kids in the US with autism. Today, there are we reported on girls with autism, adults with autism, siblings,

how kids with autism, or bully. So we've been covering autism together for television for seven years, and now seven years in we're hard at work on a book about the history of the diagnosis, and the research for that brought us into close contact with the work of a doctor named Leo Connor, a child psychiatrist, and we're going to get deeper into Connor's life in our next episode. But in three Dr Connor published a landmark paper that described a neurological disorder that, as he put it, had

not previously been described. He called it autistic disturbances of effective contact. And in that article he defined what we all today recognized as autism. And he included case studies of eleven children, and here's how he described their symptoms. The disinterest in people, the obsession with objects, the deep need for sameness and routine, the detachment and inaccessibility to other us. Connor also made observations at his clinic at

Johns Hopkins of these kids directly. But from the beginning, Karen and I were drawn to the first case described in this study, literally called case one, Donald, last name initial T, Donald T. We started to wonder if he was still alive. Meeting Donald would be meeting history. In his case studying on Donald T, Connor mentions a birthdate September eight. I turned up a speech that Connor gave one where he mentions that Donald lives in a little

town in Mississippi called Forest. First name, last, initial birthday location. That's more than enough to track a person down. So we did some sleuthing and came up with what we thought was going to be Donald's phone number, and Karen is the one who dialed in an answering machine picked out. Once I heard the message, I knew it was him.

I called John and said I found him. I found Donald T. After the break will investigate a wildly popular turn of the century scientific blue to breed better humans, and how that science led to the institutionalization, sterilization, even the euthanasia of scores of children like Donald. Our quest to understand autisms case number one, and what his life was like and what the world that he grew up and was like it actually begins well before Donald T

is born. I don't think people are that familiar with the fact that from really the early nineteen hundreds up until the beginning of World War two, essentially jendaics was really a big movement to the United States swept the country. As here's Adam Cohen, eugenics historian, author of the book Imbeciles. It was an euro of science and it was a progressive Here also, humans emerged from this evolutionary process. What if we tried to take a more active role in it.

What if he tried to focus on good genes and do that to make better people, sort of like farmers have been doing for millennia by trying to breed better cattle. Even before those Fitter Family contests started popping up at state fairs, there was something called the Better Babies movement that got a hold on American culture around the turn of the twentieth century. Better Babies kicks off with the

contest at the Louisiana State Fair. In night. Tourists are filing through an exhibition hall and watching as nurses and white gowns and cardboard caps weigh and measure and inspect these little, tiny babies, and the baby judged to be the healthiest and the strongest and the most scientifically raised, that baby is awarded a silver trophy. There was oddly some very positive intent behind it, right. I mean, this was the time when medical education wasn't widespread, particularly in

rural areas. People didn't have the information now have about baby Herring. Doctor's Fox book hadn't been written yet, there wasn't Google to search you know, what to do when babies, cology and things like that. So some of this is informational. It's trying to help people with a difficult thing of

raising a child and a roll with information. But because of the Women's Home Companion, which was a really popular magazine, coops this whole idea and forms the Better Babies Bureau and practically no time you can find a Better Baby event. In forty states, thousands of bombs enter their children. There's something really fun about it. It's like the ultimate soap

bucks derby. Winning comes with incredible bragging rights. In Iowa, the contests are run by a woman named Mary T. Watts, matronly present, snowy white hair pulled back in a bun rigid posture. She's perpetually draped in these long pearls that swing to her waist. Shortly after starting Better Babies i a chapter Watch receives a postcard signed by a man named Charles Davenport, who tells her she is missing one important measurement. You should give fifty to hereditary before you

begin to score a baby. Watch doesn't know it just yet, but in the field of eugenics, Davenport is a serious player. Wats forgets all about the postcard until the following year, when Davenport sends another note a prize winner at two, maybe an epileptic at ten, And now Watch is convinced. She decides to insert heredity tests into the contests forget better babies. Now it's fitter Families. It takes six years for Wats to get the fitter Famili's concept off the ground.

Experts doubt that any educated, self respecting adult will submit willingly to physical exams at a county fair. Who on earth would be open to the syphilis test. There was really many attempts to bring the high flutent ideas of eugenics to the people. Measure people's skulls to see like how large they were and how big the brain would be. So they're doing that kind of quote scientific work. The first Fitter Families for Fireside Chats competition is held in

a Kansas agricultural fair. Twenty families compete. Early competitions are such a success that Watts takes the show on the road. The contests are always time to overlap with the main event, the livestock contests. Farmers truck in their best looking cattle, and there are most perfect pigs to compete for the blue ribbons. Better bred animals, when crossed again and again, lead to unending improvement in the stock of the breed.

Mrs Watts has the same goal for humans. While the judges are testing the Holstein's jerseys and white faces, we are testing the Joneses, Smith's and the Johnson's. When Mrs Watts found a winner like the Kelly family of Isle of Hope, Georgia, which she referred to as being of the highest type, she meant that the Kelly's were the

sort of Americans who should be encouraged, exhorted even to reproduce. Meantime, all the information that we collect on your family is going to be stored at the Eugenics Record Office in cold Spring Harbor. That's Dr Laura Lovett, historian, professor and author, and it's going to allow for a kind of what they imagined would be a control of the entire population

around genetic predispositions. This was actually quite widespread In the nineteen tens and nine twenties, The New York Times ran a favorable feature about the Eugenics Record Office and how people could take eugenics into account in deciding who to marry. Back at the state fair, a sign at the competition booth carries an urgent warning every forty eight seconds of person is born in the United States who will never grow up mentally beyond that stage of a normal eight

year old boy or girl. A second sign adds perspective every fifteen seconds, a hundred dollars if your money goes for the care of persons with bad heredits, such as the insane, a feeble mind, criminals, and other defectives. And the third sign offers hope. Every seven and a half minutes, a high grade person is born. Good heredity is falling behind at an alarming rate. They warn small town newspaper editors decide the fittest families make for great copy, and

they spread the word about eugenics. Now in the broader eugenics movement, Mrs Watts is really just a bit player. She's not a scientist, she's not an academic, she's not a statesman. Her operation really is the extreme retail end of eugenics, a scientific, political, and philosophical movement that dedicated itself as one adherent put it to iron up the springs that feed the torrent of defective and degenerate protoplasm.

But scientists, academics, and statesman are well represented in the eugenics movement at Harvard and at Yale, in the pages of Scientific American, and in the New York Times. Powerful people like Alexander Graham Bell embraced this brand new so called science, and John D. Rockefeller eugenic starts to creep into public schools. President Teddy Roosevelt is a big fan of this book, called the Passing of the Great Race, a rigid system of selection through the elimination of those

who are a weak or unfit. In other words, social failures would solve the whole question in one hundred years. The book's author is a man named Madison Grant, who is widely respected at the time. He's the founder of the American Museum of Natural History. He's a really major conservationist and a very high ranking member of polite New York Society. He gets a lot of fan letters from all over the place. One of them came from Austria, from a young man who wrote to Grant that the

book is now his Bible. This young Austrian man's name Half Help. And we know what the Nazis did with these ideas. They set up the Rice Committee for the Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses. It sounds very bureaucratic, but it's basically a child killing organization. Under this program, children three and under with any number of

congenital disorders are condemned to be euthanized. Years before the Nazis, eugenics had crept into American society in some very dark ways. There are already institutions across the country where epileptic and the intellectually disabled or kept separated from society. But now more than half the states began to allow forced sterilization of these individuals. Here's Dr Lovett. Often in those asylums where sterilization, without any any information, any conversation takes place,

and those depend on the states. Indiana is one of the first ones to introduce the sterilization law. Eight is going to focus predominantly on mail inmates. California, for example, and part of this has to do with that First World War decides that, in fact, it's going to sterilize as many women as men, and it sterilizes women who

wind up in what we're called feeble minded institutions. A false assumption has now taken hold that there's a meaningful relationship between somebody's i Q and that person's ability to be a contributing and law abid fighting and moral member of society. Lower i Q was thought to define an undesirable sort of person, and so they imagine then that the way to prevent further reproduction of lower i Q

or people minded individuals was to sterilize them. And so California, for example, winds up sterilizing as many women as men were as in Indiana. Partics predominant emails in Margaret Sanger tells a Vasster College audience, this is the founder of planned parenthood, right right, This is what she tells an audience of young women. The American public is taxed, heavily taxed to maintain an increasing race of morons, which threatens

the very foundations of our civilization. The very next year, the United States Supreme Court, here's a case called Buck versus Bell addressing the constitutionality of Virginia's eugenical Sterilization Act. Carrie Books story could be a podcast all its own. The state decides to sterilize Carrie Buck, even though there's nothing wrong with her. She doesn't suffer from any sort of malady. She's just a poor teenage mother with a sixth grade education. Eugenics depends heavily on i Q tests.

Carrie Buck is classified as quote middle grade moron, a technical classification that they actually used based on the intelligence scale, but still put her above the levels of idiot and imbecile, which were also terms that they actually used. Morons again, that's how Carrie was rated. Are considered dangerous people. They're smart enough to pass undetected and even to breed with

their so called superiors. Carrie, who is an unmarried teenager, has a child, which to the experts back then, indicated heightened sexuality and fertility, both said to be common among the so called mentally deficient. It was really a nightmare tangle of measurements, classifications, assumptions, and prejudices. The Supreme Court rules eight to one that the statute doesn't violate the

due process cause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This decision clears the way for the forced sterilization of some seventy thousand Americans. Some people want to go beyond for sterilizations. They want to actually euthanize intellectually disabled children. That means kill them. It's an idea that's actually proposed in the American Journal of Psychiatry by a neurologist named Robert Foster Kennedy July. Kennedy argues that death is sometimes the most appropriate prescription

for children he called nature's mistakes. This defective child has no future nor hope of one, then it is a merciful and kindly thing to relieve that defective often tortured and convulse, gro task and observed useless and fullish and entirely undesirable of the agony of living. Basically execute them. Shocking right, not to everybody. Back then the previous year, in a poll of thousands of doctors in New York, of the respondents said they favored legalizing euthanasia for severely

disabled kids. And back in ninety three, this was the world that Donald T was born into. When we returned Mary and Beamon triplet wrestle with the scientific communities insistence that the best course of action is locking their baby boy away forever. H grandfather mccravy j R. McCravey was born in Titan County, Mississippi, in eighteen sixty six, and he grew up on a farm in really abject power, but had a mind for banking. That's Donald Triplet's brother Oliver.

Their family founded and are still part owners of the Bank of Forest. Their mother, Mary had a college degree, which was very rare for a woman in the middle of Mississippi in that time. She married the former mayor's son, Oliver Beamon Triplet Jr. Known to most people as Mr Beamon. Beamon had a degree from Yale Law School, also rare for the middle of Mississippi, and he practiced law and Forest.

My father was interested in law early on, and when he graduated from il SAPs in the early twenties, the state had lost its accreditation and he had a cousin that lived in Valdosta, Georgia that had connections with the University of Florida. He got him and rolled down there in the law school and he went for two years, but decided he wanted a more prestigious law degree and opted to go to Yale, and so he went to New Haven as a one year wonder and he told me, said,

the professor's up there. You know. Su A resented the fact I was going up there, but he said I was very diligent and graduated with honors. So as as how at all came down. In three, Mary gave birth to Donald. When Donald was three, his parents brought him to Sanatorium, Mississippi, to a facility known as the preventorium. But he wouldn't be making the return trip. Now that's kind of a strange word, preventorium, but there actually used

to be a lot of them around the country. Children, especially poor children, were thought to be at high risk of tuberculosis, and doctors would send kids away to these places called preventoriums to keep them safe by keeping them out of society where the germs were. But Donald wasn't really at risk of catching TV. That's not why he was sent away. It was because he was different. And this was a thing that sometimes wealthy families dead. It was a way to institutionalize a child without having to

connect it to any sort of mental condition. It was a way to dodge the stigma. And perhaps for that reason, or perhaps they just didn't know what else to do. That's what Donald's parents did in seven, and we wondered what would the separation have been like for Donald's parents to go through. Oh I, it was extremely difficult, John, you could imagine, I mean this, this was her firstborn child. Here's another member of the Triplet family. My name is

Obe Triplet, and Don is my uncle. Maman Triplet was Don's father, and my granddad. He was a lawyer here in town and settled here and wound up Mary and my grandmother, her name was Mary mccrayev and Don was born and everything's good, and then things started, you know, changing. She realized that something wouldn't quite right. There's the way you know, a picture of this. Of course, the at the time, autism wasn't even a word that I'm aware of.

I'm not an expert or anything, but nobody knew, you know, about it or anything. He was under the impression that perhaps he was insane. Donald was not insane, but the state of psychiatry was stunning lee primitive back in the nineteen thirties, especially child psychiatry. That's another topic we'll be delving into more deeply in our next episode. There was no one in the professional ranks who could make sense

of Donald's behaviors. I asked Donald's brother Oliver, what he thought the early signs were that his mom had noticed I was ready before my time, So I told you My earliest memory of him wasn't forty three, but from what I'm told in a secure hearsay, he he was unrest positive. He didn't like to cook stuff like that. That's nothing but hearsay. I went a round for that. Donald never ran to his father when he came home from work. He never pried for his mother. They often

felt he was looking right through them. But at the same time, he had this attachment to objects. He especially love to spin things, but if he was interrupted while doing that or anything else, he would have intense tantrums. It became clear that Donald was protecting something really important to him, and that was sameness, pure, unadulterated predictability. The triplets through everything they had at trying to find an

answer for their son. They had money, they had access to the best technological tools of the day, a car and a telephone. They got Donald seen by top docters, but nobody had an explanation for Donald's differences. And along the way we're guessing. His parents heard some terms that were extremely painful to hear. Defective, demented, deranged, feeble minded. And when kids got these kinds of labels, there were so often the really depressing prescription for what should be done.

Put this child away. So when there are parents who wanted simply to keep their child at home, to make them part of their family, doctors said don't. So this is the kind of message we think Donald's parents were getting. Sending him away was not their idea, it was the doctor's. In fact, a doctor told Mary she was part of the problem. You have overstimulated him. And the doctor told them to send Donald away. That's what they were told to do. That's what that's what was expected for them

to do, that's what was accepted at that time. And they went layer and got nnny. This preventatorium looked like a Greek temple with huge white columns out on the front porch. And one day Donald's parents brought him there and walked him in between the columns and they checked him in. Mary and Beamon Triplet watched the nurse take three year old Donald's hand and lead him down the hall. Then they turned away and left. I can't imagine. There was much conversation on the drive back home. Being in

the preventatorium was not good for Donald. There had been a light in his eyes before he got to this place. He had been a noisy and active kid, and curious and creative. But all of that went dead at the preventorium, and almost all at once. We found a photograph of Donald from this period where we never expected to. It wasn't a report on the preventatorium wished in. On page thirty three, there's Donald. He's sitting on the front steps

surrounded by a dozen other kids. The other kids are clearly reacting to something they're they're smiling, and they're giggling like the photographer had just made a joke to get them to laugh for the picture. But not Donald. He's just staring at the camera, not looking happy at all. And we underaged some medical notes on his time there, and they said he basically went silent. He wasn't healthy

at all. The quote in the notes is that he faded away physically and he sat motionless, not paying attention to anything. All the things Donald used to like to pick up and examine and spin, like blocks and books and toy trucks, and pots and pans. He stopped reaching for them or for anything. The examining doctor later concluded, it seems that he had his worst phase. Donald's mom and dad really missed their son, and they were not

giving up on helping him. Somehow. One day Beamon sat down with his secretary, Katherine Robertson, and he started to dictate a letter, which she typed up pages and pages of its single space thirty three pages long of observations of Donald's behaviors. In time, the words Beamon spoke and that Ms. Robertson typed up would travel far and wide.

They would be quoted in scholarly research, discussed in university classrooms, translated into multiple languages, words that still paint a vivid portrait and helped to define the diagnosis that we call autism. Simply put this letter, this cry for help. It opened

a door to a new way of understanding. Coming up on Autism's first child, older Donald T. Sive years old, Din was victim I cleaned from Forest, Mississippi, and made me aware for the first time of the behavior pattern noth neon to meet or anyone else debt to four. Even though I was diagnosed at the age of eleven, where autism didn't really mean anything at that point. Um, I only knew that I was different and the different was bad. You're cruel. Kids can be particularly young, right.

You don't keep secrets in small pounds, you know. I think the combination of the bank of the respect that his family had earned went a long way towards the community realizing that here's this family with a great deal of stature in the community who have a son that's causing them a great deal of struggle. I think something to be considered about Donald Triplet is that he's in a homachiness space, which means that the family had means

and access and power. The framework for doing that. Some diagnostic test itself is based on how white people understand behavior and language. I'm John don Vent. I'm Karen Zucker. Autism's First Child is a production of School of Humans and I Heart Podcasts and based on our book and documentary film in a Different Key. The podcast is produced by Alexander Ritchie. Our story editors are Matt Riddle and Alex French, senior staff writer at I Heart Originals. Original

score composed and mixed by Alice McCoy. Scoring mixing and mastering by Ryan Peoples. Voiceovers by Zoe Wert, Michael Coscarelli, David Perry, Christopher Paul Stelling, and Louis Carloso. The Rainman clip courtesy of MGM Media Licensing Archival sound thanks to Craig Smith at freesound dot org. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, Elsie Crowley and Jason English. Special thanks to Ray Conley, Ernie Intra Doot and Will Pearson School of Humans