Benevolent though he may have been, McCullough believed that pauperism was a moral failing, one that could be corrected through social engineering. Over the next decade, he built up the Indianapolis organized charity system and fashioned it after his own vision. His programs sought to encourage charitable giving and to discourage begging, striving for a perfect equilibrium. “While the poor we will always have with us,” he said, “it is our fault and our disgrace if we have the pauper.”

All the while, he kept a close eye on the Ishmaels and wrote about them extensively, with the goal of demonstrating a worst-case-scenario of pauperism run amok. The blindness, he determined, was caused in some cases by syphilis, and in other cases by blue vitriol, a substance that allowed people to feign sight loss and made begging more profitable. In both cases, the disability was a sign of poor virtue: sexual licentiousness on the one hand and being a beggar on the other.

McCullough exaggerated the family’s criminal activities, stating that the Ishmaels were responsible for the first murder in Indianapolis (placing them in the city three decades before they actually arrived). “Like any group of poor people,” says Deutsch, “you’ll see some who are receiving aid of some kind, some who are engaging in various kinds of informal economic activities, and some who were petty criminals.” McCullough emphasized the latter, at times seeming to conflate criminality in Indianapolis with being an Ishmael, describing the family as a “pauper ganglion” that was five thousand people strong.

The eugenics movement was barely underway, but McCullough’s study of the Ishmaels contained a strain of early eugenic thought. He believed that Anglo-Saxon people were inherently superior, but he also believed that poor breeding could cause hereditary deficiencies, even within the Anglo-Saxon demographic.

The Ishmaels, in his opinion, were the worst of the best. Through poor breeding they had devolved to a more primitive state — “an animal reversion,” he wrote. He speculated that their ancestors were damaged on arrival, “from the old convict stock England threw into this country in the seventeenth century.”

In 1907, Indiana became the first state to pass a law permitting the sterilization of “confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists.” (Wikimedia)

As time went on, McCullough sought a larger audience for his theories. Nationwide, people were rapt. Eventually, the story of the Ishmaels was out of McCullough’s hands. In the early 20th century, the Ishmael family became an object of fascination for actual eugenicists, scientists who spoke of germ plasm and cacogenics (corrupt genes) and believed that itinerancy was a “sex-linked, recessive, mono-hybrid trait.”

Poor whites were a major preoccupation of early 20th century American eugenicists. They were the exception that proved the rule — that is, the “fact” that even Anglo-Saxons were susceptible to hereditary degradation proved the importance of keeping the gene pool clean.

McCullough’s milder proposals included being mindful of how charity was administered. His most extreme proposal was that children be taken from the Ishmaels and raised elsewhere, so they could be reformed, against their inborn tendencies. But unlike McCullough, the eugenicists of the early 20th century didn’t believe that improved home environments would benefit the children of the white underclass. They believed these children were predestined by permanently damaged genetic material. Therefore, they proposed sterilization.

In 1907, Indiana became the first state to pass a law permitting the sterilization of “confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists.” The Ishmaels were invoked in the drafting of the legislation, under which over 2,300 people were sterilized. The Committee on Mental Defectives, which oversaw the identification of “idiots” and “imbeciles,” was founded by Amos Butler, the secretary of McCullough’s charities. Indiana had become, in Deutsch’s words, “a veritable eugenics laboratory.”

Dr. Amos Butler in 1900. (Library of Congress)

The Ishmaels were invoked again in the 1920s, this time on the national stage. Congress was considering the Immigration Restriction Act, which would limit the number of new immigrants by ethnic quota. “The Ishmael family was brought into congressional testimony as an example from the colonial period of what could go wrong if you allowed immigrants to come into the U.S. in an unregulated fashion,” says Deutsch. “The argument was, ‘Look, if even a great place like Great Britain could produce these people, imagine what a place like Poland or Italy could do.’”

Senator Ellison DuRant Smith also argued in favor of the Immigration Act, declaring during the senate debate, “Thank God we have in America perhaps the largest percentage of any country in the world of the pure, unadulterated Anglo-Saxon stock; certainly the greatest of any nation in the Nordic breed.” The legislation was approved by both houses, and signed into law by Calvin Coolidge in 1924.

The World’s Fair in Chicago was nearly the last time the Ishmael name was broadcast to the greater American public. World War II rendered eugenics unfashionable — or, as Deutsch suggests, in some cases simply drove it underground. Family studies like the Jukes and the Tribe of Ishmael looked a bit uglier in the afterglow of the Holocaust.

For half a century, the Ishmaels were in the eye of the beholder. But all the while they were real people, weathering the indignities of poverty the best way they knew how.

Nowadays, their descendants live throughout the Midwest, and the stigma of being an Ishmael is erased. “Rather than a cacogenic clan,” Deutsch writes, the contemporary Ishmaels are mostly “comfortable middle-class Americans.”

They, and thousands of other descendants of poor Upland Southerners stigmatized at the turn of the century, are living proof that heredity is not predestination—no matter how badly eugenicists wanted to believe in the myth of the worst family in America.