Inventing America's Worst Family: Eugenics, Islam, and the Fall and Rise of the Tribe of Ishmael [Reprint 2019 ed.] 9780520942707

Citation preview

Inventing America's "Worst" Family

Inventing America's "Worst" Family Eugenics, Islam, and the Fall and Rise of the Tribe of Ishmael

Nathaniel Deutsch

tP UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley

• Los Angeles

•

London

University of C a l i f o r n i a Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the U C Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions f r o m individuals and institutions. For more i n f o r m a t i o n , visit w w w . u c p r e s s . e d u . University of C a l i f o r n i a Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, C a l i f o r n i a University of C a l i f o r n i a Press, Ltd. L o n d o n , England © Z009 by T h e Regents of the University of C a l i f o r n i a L i b r a r y of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication D a t a Deutsch, Nathaniel. Inventing America's " w o r s t " f a m i l y : eugenics, Islam, and the fall and rise of the tribe of Ishmael / Nathaniel Deutsch. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 9 7 8 - 0 - 5 2 0 - Z 5 5 Z 3 - 4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 9 7 8 - 0 - 5 2 0 - Z 5 5 2 4 - 1 ( p b k . : alk. paper) 1 . Eugenics—United States—History, z. Marginality, Social—United States—History. 3 . M c C u l l o c h , O s c a r C . (Oscar Carleton), 1 8 4 3 - 1 8 9 1 . I. Title. HQ755.5.U5D66 363.9'z—dczz

Z009 2008017181

M a n u f a c t u r e d in the United States of A m e r i c a 18 17 1 0 9

16 15 8 7 6

14 13 5 4 3

iz Z

11

10

09

I

T h e paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z 3 9 . 4 8 - 1 9 9 Z (R 1 9 9 7 ) (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Foreword by Sudhir Venkatesh

ix

Acknowledgments Introduction

xiii i

i . How Oscar McCulloch Discovered the Ishmaelites

19

z. In Darkest Indianapolis

49

3. How the Other Half Lives

72

4. The Ishmaelites and the Menace of the Feebleminded

102

5. The Tribal Twenties: Ishmaelites, Immigrants, and Asiatic Black Men

130

6. Lost-Found Nation: How the Tribe of Ishmael Became "Muslim"

155

7. The Ishmaels: An American Story

172

Afterword

201

Notes

205

Selected Bibliography

231

Index

243

Illustrations

i. z. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Tribe of Ishmael display, circa 1 9 z i Oscar McCulloch Robert Chism's House, Indianapolis Arthur Estabrook Estabrook's pedigree of the Tribe of Ishmael, circa 192T Harry Laughlin Hugo Learning

3 20 92 103 rio r31 15 S

VII

Foreword

Every so often, a book arrives that fundamentally changes how we think. Marshall Sahlins's Culture and Practical Reason reconfigured our understanding of the role of material forms in cultural life. Saskia Sassen's The Global City effectively redrew the relationships of metropolitan areas by showing that some cities were more intimately tied to cities in other countries than to those in their own nation-states. William Julius Wilson, in The Declining Significance of Race, argued that social class and race were mutually constitutive and that in each historical period, the two had differential import in determining life chances for black Americans; our current thinking regarding the relative import of race versus class in shaping social outcomes has been fundamentally altered by his work. No one would doubt that Sahlins, Wilson, and Sassen have changed the course of anthropology, sociology, and urban geography, respectively. With the arrival of Nathaniel Deutsch's Inventing America's "Worst" Family, we may find ourselves at a similar moment. The book chronicles the topsy-turvy saga of one family—the so-called Tribe of Ishmael—but its impact may be much broader: it could change the way we understand poverty and race relations in the United States. To see why, one must look at the last three decades of research on race and poverty in America. After the civil rights era, there was unprecedented social scientific interest in understanding the causes of social inequality. The question of interest may be framed as follows: If America truly entered the age of affluence in the postwar era—in no ix

Foreword

X

small part by presumably having removed the final barriers to racial subjugation—why then do we continue to find entrenched enclaves of (largely minority) inner-city poor people, w h o are unable to participate in society in any meaningful way? The answers differ. Some point to the culture of the poor: that is, to the idea that the poor transmit values to their children, such as a lack of respect for the work ethic, in such a way that successive generations reproduce the socioeconomic failure of their predecessors. Others call attention to institutional factors: spatial mismatch patterns and discriminatory labor unions do not fairly or equitably distribute opportunities for w o r k , higher wages, and social mobility. Still others remain convinced that American capital will never integrate black labor in any meaningful way. But, at their core, researchers generally hold in c o m m o n that the 1960s civil rights era was a watershed era for race relations—few dispute that America has become a more racially tolerant society or has sought effective means to help its poor populations. Yet all around us we find the existence of entrenched poverty and the effects of racially discriminatory practices. This would lead us to ask, "Have we simply entered another phase of structured inequity and racial disparity, despite certain social and economic advances that have been made?" Perhaps unwittingly, social science has really just bought into popular folk notions of social progress by refusing to consider more critically the staying power of racial hatred in American consciousness. M a y b e it is even complicit in maintaining the existence of a p o o r class of Americans. If social science is implicated in the reproduction of such inequities—and there is no reason to believe a priori that it is e x e m p t — then it may be worth understanding exactly this price of progress. The contemporary relevance of Inventing America's "Worst"

Family

becomes immediately apparent only a few pages into the text w h e n Deutsch roots the Ishmaels in the efforts of Americans to identify the ideal family and its opposite. A s if to presage the 1980s indictment of the black single m o t h e r — w h o m President Ronald Reagan characterized as a "welfare queen"—Deutsch argues that scholars and activists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turned the white Ishmael family into "the living symbol for all that was w r o n g with A m e r i c a . " T h e Ishmael "tribe" became the repository of hatred, bigotry, and misunderstanding. And in the process, by specifying the dysfunctional variant in this manner, an idealization of the functional American family emerged. The Ishmaels were not natural candidates for this role. For the most part, they were southern farmers w h o until the end of the nineteenth

Foreword

XI

century boasted few remarkable attributes apart from the capacity to work the land. As poverty gripped rural America after the 1870s, such farmers joined European immigrants and emancipated slaves migrating to Midwestern cities in search of opportunity. Those, like the Ishmaels in Indianapolis, w h o were unable to integrate successfully became the urban dispossessed—an impoverished mix of p o o r l y educated, lowskilled, racially subjugated, and otherwise disadvantaged social groups w h o could not find work and w h o had no experience with commerce and city living. Soon after their arrival, eugenicists, polemicists, reformers, social workers and politicians began portraying such people, and in particular the Ishmaels, as shiftless, morally backward, culturally deficient, and so on. They would be tracked, studied, analyzed, and picked apart in order to identify the causes of their marginal existence. In just a few short years, as Deutsch shows in vivid detail, this surveillance helped transform a relatively commonplace extended family network into "a veritable tribe of savages." This process was filled with contradictions, and at all points it was both comedic and tragic, with evidence distorted to fit the needs of scholarly ideologues and political blowhards. The fact that the Ishmaels appeared white stymied reformers, w h o arbitrarily looked for causes of the family's supposed premodern ways wherever they could find them: Perhaps they were nomadic Gypsies, unable to create community and participate in civil society? Perhaps they were Islamic and so at odds with Western mores? These desperate hunches fueled speculation and added to the myth of the Ishmaels, leading eventually to their placement as a public curiosity in the Hall of Science at the World's Fair of 1933. As Deutsch puts it, the Ishmaels had by this point become the "potent symbol for the dangers of unrestricted immigration, the growing epidemic of 'feeblemindedness' and a host of other social problems both real and imagined." In Deutsch's detective-like rendering of the creation of the Ishmael myth, one sees that, at each moment, the intention of involved parties was serious and purposive. Nothing less than the will to keep America safe, pure, and cohesive in an age of tremendous social upheaval was at stake in the critical (and scientific) scrutiny of the Ishmael tribe. We may do well to pay attention to this myth making, as it reveals a great deal of the machinery for documenting and coming to terms with the existence of the poor in an advanced democracy. The current obsession with the black urban p o o r in the United States—arguably a modern-day

Xll

Foreword

Tribe of Ishmael—is eerily similar in scope, substance, and tone to the discursive stigmatization of Benjamin Ishmael's children. Just as the myth of the Ishmael tribe was built through the need to determine who was deserving of government and charitable aid—literally, the "deserving poor"—so too does our modern-day apparatus of bureaucratic beneficence run on the basis of creating a distinct class of ««-deserving. Is it possible to get out of this trap? Must there always be a sacrificial lamb? And, if a family myth could have been created that was so at odds with the available evidence, is it possible that we are committing the same errors—in the name of progress? Inventing America's "Worst" Family offers us a place to begin this inquiry. Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh Columbia University

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I would like to thank the following members of the Ishmael family and their relatives who generously shared their knowledge and genealogical research with me: Ted Cox, Jean Dalrymple, Carl Ishmael, and Nancy Robinson. Without their help, this book would have been greatly impoverished. I would also like to thank Marjorie Newlin Learning, former wife of Hugo Learning, and Dale Chapman, one of his oldest friends, for helping me to understand Learning and his complex motivations for writing about the Tribe of Ishmael. A number of other people helped with different aspects of the book. Thanks to Jack Resch of the University of New Hampshire, for sharing his expertise on the Revolutionary War, in general, and the military pension policy, in particular; Graham Hodges of Colgate University for sharing information about Hugo Learning; and Robert Horton, state archivist of the Minnesota Historical Society, who kindly shared his knowledge of the Tribe of Ishmael with me. Special thanks to Paul Lombardo of the Georgia State University College of Law, who graciously read an earlier version of this book and provided numerous helpful comments. Over the past few years, I have spent many hours in archives, libraries, historical societies, and courthouses around the country. Invariably, the staffs of these institutions have been helpful. I would particularly like to thank Brian Keough, head, and Amy C. Schindler, curator of manuscripts, M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, State University of New York at Albany; Charles B. Greifenstein, manuscripts librarian, American Philosophical Society; Judith May-Sapko, special collections librarian/archivist, Pickler Library, Truman State xiii

XIV

Acknowledgments

University; Alan January, Indiana State Archive; Edie Olson, president, Family Service of Central Indiana; Frances O'Donnell, curator of archives and manuscripts, Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School; Elizabeth Wilkinson, manuscript librarian, and Jesse Lewis, state documents coordinator, Indiana Division, Indiana State Library; Todd Daniels-Howell, director, special collections, and Debra Brookhart, archives specialist, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis Library; Clare Bunce, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives; the staff of the Cumberland County (Pennsylvania) Historical Society; and the staff of the Nicholas County Courthouse, Carlisle, Kentucky. I would also like to give a special thanks to Valerie-Anne Lutz van Ammers, head of manuscripts processing and library registrar, American Philosophical Society, for her help in navigating what is probably the best eugenics archive in the country. As always, I enjoyed the support of family and friends while writing this book. Thanks to my parents, Zvi and Suzanna Deutsch; my sister, Yael; my in-laws, Peter and Suzanne Greenberg; my wife, Miriam; and our daughters, Simona and Tamar. Their support and love especially have been invaluable. I would also like to thank my friends Sudhir Venkatesh, Ethan Michaeli, and Benjamin Wurgaft for encouraging me to finish this project. A number of other people played significant roles in bringing this project to fruition. My brother, David, first gave me a copy of Hugo Learning's essay on the Tribe of Ishmael. Without him, I never would have started the journey that led to this book. Joyce Seltzer read and commented on an earlier draft; without her support in the early stages of this project, I would never have finished it. My colleagues in the Department of Religion at Swarthmore College and in the Department of Religion at Haverford College read and commented on my book during a symposium devoted to it. Swarthmore College granted me a Blanshard Award for Faculty Research that helped support my research trips to Kentucky, Indiana, and Wales. I would like to thank Cordelia Brady for generously allowing me to stay in her cottage in St. Ishmael's, Wales, and for helping me to conduct my research while I was there. I also benefited from my conversations with Jenny Reardon of the University of California, Santa Cruz Sociology Department, who invited me to give a talk on the Ishmaelites. Special thanks to Sudhir Venkatesh for writing the foreword to this book. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous readers who commented on my manuscript and the good people at UC Press for believing in this project, including Kalicia Pivirotto and Reed Malcolm, an editor of rare imagination and dedication to his authors and their books.

Introduction

In 1 9 3 3 , forty years after millions of wide-eyed visitors had crowded the midway to watch the hootchy-kootchy dance in the Street of Cairo exhibition, gawk at a model of the Eiffel Tower, and stroll among Samoan, Javanese, and other ethnological villages, the Century of Progress Exposition brought the world's fair back to Chicago. The Columbian Exposition of 1 8 9 3 had celebrated the achievements of the newly industrialized United States by creating a "living museum of humanity," in which representatives of the world's peoples were literally put on display to illustrate their supposedly hierarchical relationship to one another. For the organizers of the 1 8 9 3 world's fair, contemporary American culture, exemplified by the suggestively named White City exhibition, occupied the pinnacle of this hierarchy. By 1 9 3 3 , the idea that human groups could be ranked along an evolutionary scale had become both more popular and more controversial, attracting supporters such as the racist ideologue Madison Grant and critics such as Franz Boas, the father of cultural anthropology. Like its predecessor, the Century of Progress Exposition of 1 9 3 3 sought to naturalize this hierarchy by juxtaposing displays of "primitive" peoples alongside ones that demonstrated the purported superiority of the white American elite. Thus, for example, the fair organizers erected a quaint "Indian Village" in the looming shadow of the General Motors Tower, a modernist temple dedicated to the ascendant American auto industry.1

1

2

Introduction

The real Native Americans who inhabited the ersatz tepees of the Indian Village served as reminders of an earlier way of life that had been rendered obsolete by the steam engine, the automobile, and other advances produced by white American civilization. N o w vanquished and domesticated on reservations, Native Americans were seen largely as harmless or even ennobled—more deserving of pity than of fear. Elsewhere at the fair, however, in the prominently located Hall of Science building, another supposedly atavistic and far more dangerous "tribe" was being put on display by the eugenics movement. Unlike the Native Americans of the Indian Village, members of this Midwestern tribe were not physically present at the fair. Had it been possible, the organizers of the exhibit undoubtedly would have included some flesh-and-blood individuals in a simulated version of their "natural" environment, either a run-down slum dwelling or a makeshift "gypsy" caravan. 2 Instead, the prominent eugenicist Harry Laughlin and his colleagues had to make do with photographs and explanatory texts. The evocative name of these modern day "savages" was the Tribe of Ishmael, and according to the Hall of Science exhibition, they were " A Degenerate Family . . . which, despite opportunities, never developed a normal life. Shiftless, begging, wanderers, sound enough in body, their hereditary equipment lacked the basic qualities of intelligence and character on which opportunity could work." 3 Accompanying this ominous caption was an elaborate genealogical tree—a staple of all eugenics displays—and a handful of photographs labeled "Typical Ishmael Portraits" that depicted members of the family, their homes (including that of George Ishmael, described as "the most intelligent of the group"), and the Indianapolis city dump, which several generations of Ishmaels had divided "among themselves peaceably." Just as the Indian Village stood next to the General Motors Tower, thereby highlighting the gulf between them, the eugenicists had erected a display devoted to " A Superior Family: The Roosevelt Family-Stock" on panels adjoining those dedicated to the Ishmaels. At the head of the Roosevelt family tree stood Jonathan Edwards, the famous Puritan theologian. Official-looking portraits of Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt framed the genealogical tree, along with photographs of lesser-known members of the clan and the legend "Pedigree showing the distribution of inborn qualities in a family which produced two presidents of the United States." The point of the world's fair eugenics exhibition was crystal clear: if the Roosevelts were America's best family, the Ishmaels were its worst.

À

I d


X o 3 íZ Id

X 145. 148-49, 1 5 1 , 152-; The Fall of America, 148 Muhammad, Fard (W. D. Fard), 142, 149, 153, 169 Muhammad, Warith, 152

250

Index

Owens family, 61, 95-96

Pennsylvania: Ben Ishmael in, 1 7 4 - 8 1 , 182; militias and, 1 7 7 , 1 7 8 - 7 9 ; Welsh immigration and, 173-74 The People (Indianapolis newspaper), 38-39 pioneering spirit, 119. See also authority, suspicion of; itinerant lifestyle Plymouth Institute, 41 polygamy, 33, 9 1 - 9 2 , 146 Poole, Elijah. See Muhammad, Elijah poor of Indianapolis. See Ishmaelites of Indiana poor whites: Orientalist stereotypes and, 55-56; as social threat, 55-56, 1 1 2 ; Upland Southern migrants as, 22-23. See also Ishmaelites of Indiana; poverty in America; "undeserving poor" Potter, Jack, 97 poverty in America: American Dream mythology and, 18; "deserving" vs. "undeserving" distinction and, 15, 36, 182-83; Horatio Alger myth and, 6 - 7 , 181-82; How the Other Half Lives (Riis) and, 46-48; relief programs and, 1 0 0 - 1 0 1 , 188-92; revolutionary period and, 1 7 7 - 7 8 , 181-82; shifts in representation of, 1 5 - 1 8 ; working poor and, 195-96. See also Charity Organization Society (COS) Prashad, Vijay, 13 progress, in human society, 47 property ownership: Ben Ishmael and, 180, 185-87; Ishmaels in Nicholas County, Kentucky, 192-93 prostitution, 87-88, 123 public charity: "deserving" vs. "undeserving" poor distinction and, 6, 78, 182, 189; in eighteenth century, 182-83; Estabrook's views on, 1 2 1 - 2 3 ; Ishmaelites' independence from, 64-65, 7 6 - 7 8 , 100; McCulloch's views on, 36-42, 59-60, 64; relief programs and, 1 0 0 - 1 0 1 , 188-92; Wright's views on, 98. See also Charity Organization Society (COS); Indianapolis Benevolent Society Purcell, Sarah, 94

Paine, Thomas, 18, 175, 182, 2o8n36 Panic of 1873, Z I Parker, Kate, 49, 106-7 patronymics, 173 pauperism. See degeneracy; "undeserving poor" (paupers)

racial classifications: American Orientalism and, 138-40; immigration restriction and, 135-38; nineteenth century taxonomy and, 7 4 - 7 5 ; "one-drop rule" and, 9, 129; Teutonism and, 37-38;

mulatto, 74, 75, 91 Muslim slaves, 13, 164-66, 1 7 2 Nakane, Naka. See Takahashi, Satokata " N a m " family, 104 Nash, Gary, 181, 182. National Conference of Social Work (National Conference of Charities and Corrections), 49, 107 National Social Science Association conference, Saratoga, New York, 42 Nation of Islam: black racial purity and, 1 5 1 - 5 4 ; founding of, 142-44, 147; Message to the Blackman in America, 143, 144, 1 5 1 . See also African American Islam Native Americans: Century of Progress Exposition (1933) and, 1-2.; in Indianapolis, 199; Ishmaelites and, 80-81; in Kentucky, 183; "Orientals" and, 32 Nazi regime, 10, 155 "The Negro Number," Birth Control Review, 1 4 9 - 5 1 , 153 Negro World, 146 Nicholas County, Kentucky, 183-93 Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. See Shriners nomadism. See kinship ties; wandering impulse Nordau, M a x , 47 Nordic hegemony, threats to, 134-38, 148-49. See also Asiatic threat octoroon, 74, 75, 81 Oliver, John, 93 Oriental Exclusion Act of 1 9 1 7 , 138 Orientalism. See American Orientalism orphans, 197-98 Orr, James, 197-99 Osborn, Frederick, 156 "the Other America," 160, 1 6 1 , 170 Otis, Bridget, 87-88 Owens, Brook (son of patriarch), 96 Owens, Elijah (family patriarch), 95 Owens, Elijah (son of William), 96 Owens, John, 74 Owens, John (son of Brook), 96 Owens, William (son of patriarch), 95 Owens, William Walker (son of William), 95-96

Index whiteness as social category and, 5; Yakub myth and, 149, 1 5 1 - 5 4 . See also African American Islam; whiteness Racial Integrity Act of 1924 (Virginia), 8-9, 129 Rafter, Nicole Hahn: White Trash, 107, 2,131195 Rai, Lajpat, 145 Rannels, John, 1 7 5 , 1 9 2 Rashi (French rabbi), 28 recycling. See junkmen; trash collecting religion: Ishmaelites and, 61, 73-74; Upland Southern migrants and, 23 repressed memory, theory of, 1 6 1 Revolutionary War: Ben Ishmael in, 1 7 5 - 7 9 ; pensions for veterans of, 188-92 Rice, Thurman, 1 5 6 - 5 7 ; Racial Hygiene, 106 Riis, Jacob: How the Other Half Lives, 6, 4^-47, 55» 56 Riley, James Whitcomb: "Little Orphan Annie" (story), 198 Ripley, William: The Races of Europe, 135 Rogers, Berry, 73 Roosevelt family, 2 Ross, Priscilla, 98 rural to urban migration, 2 1 - 2 6 , 67-69, 196, 199-200. See also Upland Southern migrants Russo-Turkish War, 3 3 - 3 4 Rydell, Robert, 205n2 Sacculina (crustacean), 50, 51 Sadiq, Mufti Muhammad, 1 4 6 - 4 7 Said, Edward, 56 Said, Nicholas. See Ben Said, Muhammad Ali Sanger, Margaret, 44, 1 5 0 Sapelo Island, 164, 165 Schwartz, Lizzie, 88 "scientific charity," 37, 40-41 scientific racism, rise of, 1 3 4 "scraping the ponds," 97 settlement laws, 3 6 sexual licentiousness, 27, 1 2 3 . See also degeneracy; mixed-race marriages; polygamy; prostitution Sharp, Harry, 106 Sharpe, Henry, 93 Shoemaker, Isaac, 195 Shriners, 5 2 - 5 3 , 162, 1 6 7 Smith, Abraham, 1 7 5 Smith, Billy G., 2 2 7 ^ 9 Smith, "blind Henry," 90 Smith, George, 43

Smith, Jehu, 83 Smith, Joseph, 3 3 Smith, Mary Alice ("Little Orphan Annie"), 198 Smith, Mary Ann (first wife of Fred Ishmael), 83, 194 Smith, Richard ("Dick"), 9 1 , 93 Smith, Sarah (wife of Henry Ishmael), 194 Smith, Susan ("Tribe" matriarch; wife of James Ishmael), 83-84, 93, 194, 196 Social Darwinism, 50 Social Gospel, 4, 39 social independence. See itinerant lifestyle social policy in U.S.: culture of poverty and, 160; eugenics movement and, 7 - 1 0 , 156; Revolutionary War Pension Act (1818), 188-92 Society for the Study of Social Biology, 156 socioeconomic conditions, 196; in 1870s Indianapolis, 2 1 - 2 6 ; Upland Southern migration and, 2 1 - 2 2 , 68-69, i 9 6 - 9 7 , 199. See also environmental factors Solomon, Job Ben. See Ben Solomon, Job Spencer, Herbert, 50, 5 1 Stanford-Binet intelligence test, 1 1 3 Stanley, Henry Morton: In Darkest Africa, 46-47 State University of New York at Albany, 116, 125 Station for Experimental Evolution, 102 Stoddard, Lothrop, 8, 1 5 0 - 5 1 ; The New World of Islam, 1 3 6 - 3 7 ; The Rising Tide of Color, 1 3 4 , 1 3 5 - 3 6 , 1 4 5 , 148, 149 "street Arabs," 6, 55, 70, 1 6 2 Strode, Arthur, 1 2 7 "strolling poor," 182, 200 substance abuse. See alcohol abuse; blue stone water Sufi tradition, 52-53 Sulgrove, Berry, 2 2 - 2 3 , z4> 74 Sun Yat-Sen, 145 Takahashi, Satokata (born Naka Nakane), 145 tenant farming, 180, 182, 186, 194 Termin, Lewis, 1 1 3 , 1 1 5 Terpenning, Walter, 1 5 0 Teutonism, 37-38 Thacker, Delilah, 88 Thompson, Grace, 159 Thornton, Kate (wife of Fred Ishmael), 82-83, 86, 89, 94, 98, 199

Index

Tillberry, Joel, 9 4 - 9 5 , 125 Tillberry, Matthew, 94 Time magazine, 1 6 - 1 7 Tinkers (Travellers), 65-67, 119, 2 . 1 4 ^ 9 trash collecting, 22, 63, 65, 97 Travellers (Tinkers), 65-67, 119 Tribal Twenties: African American Islam and, 140-49; Asiatic threat and, 134-40; black progressives in, 149-51 Tribe of Ishmael. See Ishmaelites of Indiana triracial communities: Ishmaelites and, 1 1 - 1 5 . 3°. 61, 81, 91, 95-96, 99, 172-73; Learning's research on, 159-60, 170; Win tribe and, 128-29 Trotsky, Leon, 136 Twain, Mark. See Clemens, Samuel Ullman, Daniel, 3 8 "undeserving poor" (paupers): biological model of, 15; cultural model of, 1 5 - 1 6 ; Ishmaelites as representative of, 8-11; as legitimate culture, 1 6 - 1 7 , 159-60; link between wandering and, 118-20; McCulloch's view of, 15, 36, 37-40; negative influence of poor relief on, 121-23; pauper classification and, 189; shifts in representation of, 1 5 - 1 8 . See also "deserving" vs. "undeserving" poor distinction; Ishmaelites of Indiana; Jukes; "strolling poor" Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), 146, 148 Upland Southern migrants: folk beliefs of, 74; Indianapolis culture in 1870s and, 21-26; Ishmael family among, 193, 199; McCulloch's view of Ishmaelites and, 61-63, 67; mixedrace marriages and, 75-76; stereotypes about, 67-69; traditions of, 4, 61-65, 67-69, 98-99, 199, 200 (see also kinship ties) Urban League, 149, 150 Valentino, Rudolph, 138 vasectomy, 106. See also compulsory sterilization Venkatesh, Sudhir, 18, 2o8n3 5 wage-labor economy: in Indianapolis, 200; Ishmaelites as part of, 109; Upland Southern migrants and, 63-64 Wales, 173-74

Wallace, Lew, 53 Wallace, Mike, 163 wandering impulse: annual migrations, 94, 99; dispersion of Ishmaelites and, 109; Estabrook's claims about, 118-20; evidence against claims about, 109; Ishmael family patriarchs and, 80-81, 184, 185; Ishmaelites and, 62-63, 79> 99> 199; McCulloch's claims about, 27, 118, 119-20; search for work and, 120-21; winter vs. summer "gypsies" and, 1 1 8 - 1 9 . See also kinship ties War on Poverty (1960s), 160 Wayne, Anthony, 176, 178-79 Webb, Mohammed Alexander Russell, 53-54 Web sites: Ishmael family and, 201-2; "tri-racial" communities and, 12 "welfare queen," 97 whiteness: African American Islam and, 146, 147-49; Asiatic threat and, 1 3 4 - 3 8 ; cacogenic immigrants and, 130-34; as social category, 5; threats to purity and, 9-10; wage labor and, 64-65; Yakub myth and, 149, 1 5 1 - 5 4 . See also racial classifications Wiggam, Albert Edward, 8 Williams, George, 85-86, 88-90, 124 Williams, Sarah ("Sallie"; wife of Andy Williams), 85 Williams, Thomas, 85-86, 124 Williams family, 85-86 Win tribe, 128-29 Wishard, Wiliam, 80 women: as eugenics fieldworkers, 107, 109; Wright's sympathy for, 86-88, 91 Women's Christian Temperance Union, 59 working poor: early Ishmaels as, 193-96; Estabrook's work on Ishmaelites and, 122; McCulloch's activism and, 44-45. See also "deserving" vs. "undeserving" poor distinction World's Fair (Chicago, 1893), 53 - 54> 162, 167 World's Fair (Chicago, 1933), 1-3, 155 Wright, James Frank: background of, 72; differences between McCulloch and, 7 3 - 7 6 , 98-100; errors and contradictions in, 84, 94; Estabrook's work and, 1 1 7 - 1 8 ;

Index John Ishmael and, 8 0 - 8 1 , 196; McCulloch's work and, 49, 59, 7 2 - 7 3 ; portrayal of Ishmaels by, 78-96; sketches of other Indianapolis poor by, 96-99; sympathy for women and, 86-8: 9 1 ; Thomas Ishmael and, 1 9 5

2

"Yaks" family (Minnesota), 1 2 7 Yakub myth, 149, 1 5 1 - 5 4 Yearbook of Charities, 1888-1889, Yerkes, Robert, 1 1 4 Young, Brigham, 33 Zelig, 1 7

40

53

Text: Display: Compositor: Indexer: Printer and binder:

1 0 / 1 3 Sabon Sabon International Typesetting and Composition Marcia Carlson Sheridan Books, Inc.