The names "Ben Ishmael Tribe," and "Tribe of Ishmael", were applied to poor, Upland Southern residents of Indianapolis, Indiana during the late 19th and early 20th century because of their supposed association with the Ishmael family. Records of the Ishmael family show that it originally hailed from Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and that its patriarch, Benjamin Ishmael, served in the American Continental Army during the Revolutionary War.
The Ishmaels, known locally for abstaining from the wage labor economy in Indianapolis, received attention from eugenics advocates starting in 1877 with the Reverend Oscar McCulloch, and his assistant James Frank Wright. Following McCulloch’s published report in 1888 regarding the Tribe of Ishmael, eugenicists such as Charles Estabrook and Harry Laughlin used the family to argue for sterilization laws called the Indiana Plan. The family name was also invoked during Congressional hearings that led to the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924.
After mostly slipping out of national consciousness for much of the 20th century, the history of the Ishmael tribe was radically reinvented by Hugo Prosper Leaming in an essay called The Ben Ishmael Tribe: A Fugitive “Nation" of the Old Northwest. Leaming argued that the family was not simply a poor white Christian family, but actually a Muslim tri-racial sect of indigenous peoples Europeans and enslaved Africans. Much of Leaming’s narrative was refuted by the extensively researched 2009 book Inventing America’s Worst Family: Eugenics, Islam and the Fall and Rise of the Tribe of Ishmael by Nathaniel Deutsch, a professor of Literature and History at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
The “Discovery” of the Tribe of Ishmael
In 1877, Oscar McCulloch moved to Indianapolis from Sheboygan, Wisconsin to become the minister of the Protestant Plymouth Church. Due to a surging population and an economic crisis known as the Panic of 1873, McCulloch entered Indianapolis during a period of widespread poverty. Many of the urban poor in Indianapolis at the time were migrants from Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and other regions of the Upland South. Among these migrants were a family with the surname of Ishmael, who became the subject of a decade-long study for McCulloch. McCulloch recorded in his diary that he was aware of Richard Louis Dugdale’s study on “The Jukes,” which helped to form his belief that poverty was a hereditary matter, not simply an environmental one.
In July 1888, McCulloch, the president of the Indianapolis Benevolent Society, went public with his finding on the Tribe of Ishmael in a speech entitled The Tribe of Ishmael: A Study in Social Degradation, at the National Conference of Charities and Corrections in Buffalo, New York. In this speech, McCulloch compared the family to the Sacculina, a crustacean parasite with an “irresistible hereditary tendency...[which is] a type of degradation through parasitism, or pauperism."” These human parasites, McCulloch stated, were draining the city of Indianapolis of its resources and exacerbating their own problems by receiving charity. McCulloch put the number of families in the study at thirty, with the Ishmaels being the “central, the oldest and the most widely ramified family.” It appears likely that McCulloch also chose to publicize the Ishmael family due to the name's association to the Orient, of which McCulloch had studied intensely.
The family was described as “tow-headed” or white blond, aside from a “half-breed” (half Native American) mother. The Ishmaels were explained to have “wandering blood,” causing them to “‘gypsy’, or travel in wagons east or west.” In addition, the Ishmaels were known for “licentiousness which characterizes the men and women,” and their lifestyle was encouraged by “almost unlimited public and private aid.” McCulloch claimed that the Ishamel clan had a criminal record of mostly prostitution, thieving, larceny, and even murder, while making up three-fourths of the hospital cases in Indianapolis.
This grim picture was summed up by McCulloch’s claim that “they underrun society like devil grass. Pick up one, and the whole five thousand would be drawn up.” Due to the “force of heredity,” each generation would likely repeat this life of crime and immorality unless the state intervened. McCulloch’s solution was three-fold. McCulloch recommended that the government of Indianapolis “close up official out-door relief… check private and indiscriminate benevolence, or charity, falsely so called... [and] get hold of the children.” From this case study, McCulloch laid the groundwork for a national obsession with the Ishmael family. Nowhere was the impact of the Ishmael family felt more than in the field of eugenics.