Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (26 page)

Thus we understand what Huxley meant when he spoke of “the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God” in the passage cited by Moon, Mann, and Otto. It is obviously not, as they imply, his profession of Christian faith, but a burning analogy: as the Christian has made his commitment, so have I made mine to science. I cannot do otherwise, despite the immediate comfort that conventional Christianity would supply in my current distress.

Today I sat in the court of Little Rock, listening to the testimony of four splendid men and women who teach science in primary and secondary schools of Arkansas. Their testimony contained moments of humor, as when one teacher described an exercise he uses in the second grade. He stretches a string across the classroom to represent the age of the earth. He then asks students to stand in various positions marking such events as the origin of life, the extinction of dinosaurs, and the evolution of humans. What would you do, asked the assistant attorney general in cross-examination, to provide balanced treatment for the 10,000-year-old earth advocated by creation scientists. “I guess I’d have to get a short string,” replied the teacher. The thought of twenty earnest second graders, all scrunched up along a millimeter of string, created a visual image that set the court rocking with laughter.

But the teachers’ testimony also contained moments of inspiration. As I listened to their reasons for opposing “creation science,” I thought of T. H. Huxley and the courage required by dedicated people who will not, to paraphrase Lillian Hellman, tailor their convictions to fit current fashions. As Huxley would not simplify and debase in order to find immediate comfort, these teachers told the court that mechanical compliance with the “balanced treatment” act, although easy enough to perform, would destroy their integrity as teachers and violate their responsibility to students.

One witness pointed to a passage in his chemistry text that attributed great age to fossil fuels. Since the Arkansas act specifically includes “a relatively recent age of the earth” among the definitions of creation science requiring “balanced treatment,” this passage would have to be changed. The witness claimed that he did not know how to make such an alteration. Why not? retorted the assistant attorney general in his cross-examination. You only need to insert a simple sentence: “Some scientists, however, believe that fossil fuels are relatively young.” Then, in the most impressive statement of the entire trial, the teacher responded. I could, he argued, insert such a sentence in mechanical compliance with the act. But I cannot, as a conscientious teacher, do so. For “balanced treatment” must mean “equal dignity” and I would therefore have to justify the insertion. And this I cannot do, for I have heard no valid arguments that would support such a position.

Another teacher spoke of similar dilemmas in providing balanced treatment in a conscientious rather than a mechanical way. What then, he was asked, would he do if the law were upheld. He looked up and said, in his calm and dignified voice: It would be my tendency not to comply. I am not a revolutionary or a martyr, but I have responsibilities to my students, and I cannot forego them.

God bless the dedicated teachers of this world. We who work in unthreatened private colleges and universities often do not adequately appreciate the plight of our colleagues—or their courage in upholding what should be our common goals. What Moon, Mann, and Otto did to Huxley epitomizes the greatest danger of imposed antirationalism in classrooms—that one must simplify by distortion, and remove both depth and beauty, in order to comply.

In appreciation for the teachers of Arkansas, then, and for all of us, one more statement in conclusion from Huxley’s letter to Kingsley:

Postscript

On January 5, 1982, Federal District Judge William R. Overton declared the Arkansas act unconstitutional because it forces biology teachers to purvey religion in science classrooms.

IN APRIL
1925, C. B. Davenport, one of America’s leading geneticists, wrote to Madison Grant, author of
The Passing of the Great Race
, and the most notorious American racist of the genteel Yankee tradition: “Our ancestors drove Baptists from Massachusetts Bay into Rhode Island, but we have no place to drive the Jews to.” If America had become too full to provide places of insulated storage for undesirables, then they must be kept out. Davenport had written Grant to discuss a pressing political problem of the day: the establishment of quotas for immigration to America.

Jews presented a potential problem to ardent restrictionists. After 1890, the character of American immigration had changed markedly. The congenial Englishmen, Germans, and Scandinavians, who predominated before, had been replaced by hordes of poorer, darker, and more unfamiliar people from southern and eastern Europe. The catalog of national stereotypes proclaimed that all these people—primarily Italians, Greeks, Turks, and Slavs—were innately deficient in both intelligence and morality. Arguments for exclusion could be grounded in the eugenic preservation of a threatened American stock. But Jews presented a dilemma. The same racist catalog attributed a number of undesirable traits to them, including avarice and inability to assimilate, but it did not accuse them of stupidity. If innate dullness was to be the “official” scientific rationale for excluding immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, how could the Jews be kept out?

The most attractive possibility lay in claiming that the old catalog had been too generous and that, contrary to its popular stereotype, Jews were stupid after all. Several “scientific” studies conducted between 1910 and 1930, the heyday of the great immigration debate, reached this devoutly desired conclusion. As examples of distorting facts to match expectations or of blindness to obvious alternatives, they are without parallel. This essay is the story of two famous studies, from different nations and with different impact.

H. H. Goddard was the director of research at the Vineland Institute for Feebleminded Girls and Boys in New Jersey. He viewed himself as a taxonomist of mental deficiency. He concentrated upon “defectives of high grade” who posed special problems because their status just below the borderline of normality rendered their identification more difficult. He invented the term “moron” (from a Greek word for “foolish”) to describe people in this category. He believed at the time, although he changed his mind in 1928, that most morons should be confined to institutions for life, kept happy with tasks apportioned to their ability, and above all, prevented from breeding.

Goddard’s general method for identifying morons was simplicity itself. Once you had enough familiarity with the beast, you simply looked at one, asked a few questions, and drew your evident conclusions. If they were dead, you asked questions of the living who knew them. If they were dead, or even fictitious, you just looked. Goddard once attacked the poet Edwin Markham for suggesting that “The Man with the Hoe,” inspired by Millet’s famous painting of a peasant, “came to his condition as the result of social conditions which held him down and made him like the clods that he turned over.” Couldn’t Markham see that Millet’s man was mentally deficient? “The painting is a perfect picture of an imbecile,” Goddard remarked. Goddard thought he had a pretty good eye himself, but the main task of identifying morons must be given to women because nature had endowed the fair sex with superior intuition:

In 1912, Goddard was invited by the U.S. Public Health Service to try his skill at identifying morons among arriving immigrants on Ellis Island. Perhaps they could be screened out and sent back, thus reducing the “menace of the feebleminded.” But this time, Goddard brought a new method to supplement his identifications by sight—the Binet tests of intelligence, later to become (at the hands of Lewis M. Terman of Stanford University), the Stanford-Binet scale, or the conventional measure of IQ. Binet had just died in France and would never witness the distortion of his device for identifying children who needed special help in school into an instrument for labeling people with a permanent stamp of inferiority.

Goddard was so encouraged by the success of his preliminary trials that he raised some money and sent two of his women back to Ellis Island in 1913 for a more thorough study. In two and a half months, they tested four major groups: thirty-five Jews, twenty-two Hungarians, fifty Italians, and forty-five Russians. The Binet tests produced an astounding result: 83 percent of the Jews, 87 percent of the Russians, 80 percent of the Hungarians, and 79 percent of the Italians were feebleminded—that is, below mental age twelve (the upper limit of moronity by Goddard’s definition). Goddard himself was a bit embarrassed by his own exaggerated success. Weren’t his results too good to be true? Could people be made to believe that four-fifths of any nation were morons? Goddard played with the numbers a bit, and got his figures down to 40 or 50 percent, but he was still perturbed.

The Jewish sample attracted his greatest interest for two reasons. First, it might resolve the dilemma of the supposedly intelligent Jew and provide a rationale for keeping this undesirable group out. Second, Goddard felt that he could not be accused of bias for the Jewish sample. The other groups had been tested via interpreters, but he had a Yiddish-speaking psychologist for the Jews.

In retrospect, Goddard’s conclusions were far more absurd than even he allowed himself to suspect in anxious moments. It became clear, a few years later, that Goddard had constructed a particularly harsh version of the Binet tests. His scores stood well below the rankings produced by all other editions. Fully half the people who scored in the low, but normal, range of the Stanford-Binet scale tested as morons on Goddard’s scales.

But the greater absurdity arose from Goddard’s extraordinary insensitivity to environmental effects, both long-term and immediate, upon test scores. In his view, the Binet tests measured innate intelligence by definition, since they required no reading or writing and made no explicit reference to particular aspects of specific cultures. Caught in this vicious circle of argument, Goddard became blind to the primary reality that surrounded his women on Ellis Island. The redoubtable Ms. Kite approaches a group of frightened men and women—mostly illiterate, few with any knowledge of English, all just off the boat after a grueling journey in steerage—plucks them from the line and asks them to name as many objects as they can, in their own language, within three minutes. Could their poor performance reflect fear, befuddlement, or physical weakness rather than stupidity? Goddard considered the possibility but rejected it:

Could their failure to identify the date, or even the year, be attributed to anything other than moronity?

Goddard wrestled with the issue of this moronic flood. On the one hand, he could see some benefits:

But he feared genetic deterioration even more and eventually rejoiced in the tightening of standards that his program had encouraged. In 1917, he reported with pleasure that deportations for mental deficiency had increased by 350 percent in 1913 and 570 percent in 1914 over the average for five preceding years. Morons could be identified at ports of entry and shipped back, but such an inefficient and expensive procedure could never be instituted as general policy. Would it not be better simply to restrict immigration from nations teeming with morons? Goddard suggested that his conclusions “furnish important considerations for future actions both scientific and social as well as legislative.” Within ten years, restriction based upon national quotas had become a reality.

Meanwhile, in England, Karl Pearson had also decided to study the apparent anomaly of Jewish intelligence. Pearson’s study was as ridiculous as Goddard’s, but we cannot attribute its errors (as we might, being unreasonably charitable, in Goddard’s case) to mathematical naïveté, for Pearson virtually invented the science of statistics. Pearson, the first Galton Professor of Eugenics at University College, London, founded the
Annals of Eugenics
in 1925. He chose to initiate the first issue with his study of Jewish immigration, apparently regarding it as a model of sober science and rational social planning. He stated his purpose forthrightly in the opening lines:

If a group generally regarded as intellectually able could be ranked as inferior, then the basic argument for restriction would be greatly enhanced, for who would then defend the groups that everyone considered as stupid? Pearson, however, loudly decried any attempt to attribute motive or prior prejudice to his study. One can only recall Shakespeare’s line, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

Pearson had invented a statistic so commonly used today that many people probably think it has been available since the dawn of mathematics—the correlation coefficient. This statistic measures the degree of relationship between two features of a set of objects: height versus weight or head circumference versus leg length in a group of humans, for example. Correlation coefficients can range as high as 1.0 (if taller people are invariably heavier to the same degree) or as low as 0.0 for no correlation (if an increase in height provides no information about weight—a taller person may weigh more, the same, or less, and no prediction can be made from the increase in height alone). Correlation coefficients can also be negative if increase in one variable leads to decrease in the other (if taller people generally weigh less, for example). Pearson’s study of Jewish immigration involved the measurement of correlations between a large and motley array of physical and mental characters for children of Jewish immigrants living in London.

Pearson measured everything he imagined might be important in assessing “worthiness.” He established four categories for cleanliness of hair: very clean and tidy, clean on the whole, dirty and untidy, and matted or verminous. He assessed both inner and outer clothing on a similar scale: clean, a little dirty, dirty, and filthy. He then computed correlation coefficients between all measures and was generally disappointed by the low values obtained. He could not understand, for example, why cleanliness of body and hair correlated only .2615 in boys and .2119 in girls, and mused:

Pearson concluded his study of physical measures by proclaiming Jewish children inferior to the native stock in height, weight, susceptibility to disease, nutrition, visual acuity, and cleanliness:

The only possible justification for admitting them lay in a potentially superior intelligence to overbalance their physical shortcomings.

Pearson therefore studied intelligence by the same type of short and subjective scale that had characterized his measures of physical traits. For intelligence, he relied upon teachers’ judgments rated from A to G. Computing the raw averages, he found that Jewish children were not superior to native Gentiles. Jewish boys ranked a bit higher, but the girls scored notably lower than their English classmates. Pearson concluded, with a striking analogy: