Elizabeth Kite’s 1913 “Pineys” report and the stigma it created

The fieldworker

In 1913 Elizabeth S. Kite worked at the Training School in Vineland, the institution for “feeble-minded” children run with psychologist Henry H. Goddard as its research director. Goddard’s 1912 book The Kallikak Family says Kite did the fieldwork on the family at the center of that study. Goddard claimed the book showed that “feeble-mindedness” was passed down through families. That argument depended on genealogy gathered by fieldworkers like Kite. Later scholarship has discredited this kind of hereditarian research.

The article

The reform magazine The Survey published Kite’s article on October 4, 1913 (volume 31, starting on page 7). Its title was “The ‘Pineys,’” and its subtitle read “Today morons; yesterday colonial outcasts, ‘disowned’ Friends, land pirates, Hessians, Tory refugees, revellers from Joseph Bonaparte’s court at Bordentown, and other sowers of wild oats.” Kite wrote that people in scattered huts in the heart of the region were locally called “Pineys” or “Pine Rats.” She traced their ancestry to the social outcasts named in her subtitle. She then presented family after family as hereditarily defective, repeatedly using the clinical label “moron.” In one passage she calls the typical Piney “a degenerate creature.”

The same issue ran a short news item. It said the Vineland Training School planned to set up a “colony settlement” in the Pines as part of its extension work.

The governor’s response

A historical overview by Rutgers University’s Eagleton Center on the American Governor says the article set off a public outcry. According to that overview, Governor James Fielder then inspected the conditions personally. The overview quotes a statement it credits to Fielder, in which he calls the population a menace to the state and describes it as inbred and defective. For this entry, that statement could not be matched to a 1913 newspaper or government record. It is summarized here, not quoted, and rests on that one modern source. The overview misprints the governor’s middle initial.

An enduring label

Kite did not invent the word. Her article describes “Pineys” and “Pine Rats” as names already used by neighboring communities, and an 1859 Atlantic Monthly sketch had already called Pine Barrens families “Pine Rats.” What her article did was attach those labels to a scientific-sounding claim of hereditary defect, in a national reform magazine.