Declared Defective is the anthropological history of an outcaste
community and a critical reevaluation of The Nam Family, written in
1912 by Arthur Estabrook and Charles Davenport, leaders of the
early twentieth-century eugenics movement. Based on their
investigations of an obscure rural enclave in upstate New York, the
biologists were repulsed by the poverty and behavior of the people
in Nam Hollow. They claimed that their alleged indolence,
feeble-mindedness, licentiousness, alcoholism, and criminality were
biologically inherited.Declared Defective reveals that Nam Hollow
was actually a community of marginalized, mixed-race Native
Americans, the Van Guilders, adapting to scarce resources during an
era of tumultuous political and economic change. Their Mohican
ancestors had lost lands and been displaced from the frontiers of
colonial expansion in western Massachusetts in the late eighteenth
century. Estabrook and Davenport's portrait of innate degeneracy
was a grotesque mischaracterization based on class prejudice and
ignorance of the history and hybridic subculture of the people of
Guilder Hollow. By bringing historical experience, agency, and
cultural process to the forefront of analysis, Declared Defective
illuminates the real lives and struggles of the Mohican Van
Guilders. It also exposes the pseudoscientific zealotry and
fearmongering of Progressive Era eugenics while exploring the
contradictions of race and class in America.