[1] 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.
[2] 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.
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.
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.
[4] The Ishmaels were explained to have “wandering blood,” causing them to “‘gypsy’, or travel in wagons east or west.”[4] 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.”[4] 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.
[7] Estabrook, like McCulloch and Wright, focused his study, called The Tribe of Ishmael, on the supposed licentiousness and immoral behavior of the "Ishmaelite" family, as well as their annual '"gypsying."
We shall have to provide some practical plan for getting rid of this stock.”[12] Testifying before a House of Representatives Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Laughlin explained “degenerate families…so common there much be something wrong with them,” such as the Jukes and the Ishmaels.
In 1933, the story of the Tribe of Ishmael was put on display at the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago as a warning against unfit family breeding and the face of the undeserving poor.
[15] In addition, Leaming claimed that before Noble Drew Ali, Master Wallace Fard Muhammad, Elijah Muhammed and Malcolm X, there was Ben Ishmael, an "earlier Islamic saint or Imam," in America.
[17] Leaming's reinvention of the Ishmael story as a diverse, crypto-Muslim tribe, bridging the gap of "African and American Islam," and comprising a "lost-found nation in the wilderness of North America,"[16] was discredited by Nathaniel Deutsch in the book Inventing America's Worst Family: Eugenics, Islam and the Fall and Rise of the Tribe of Ishmael.
[18] Nevertheless, in terms of race and ethnic origins, Deutsch also concluded that several of the Ishmaels were mixed-race African Americans and that some of the families identified as Ishmaelites may have been Travellers.