Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (27 page)

But Pearson realized that he was missing one crucial argument. He had already admitted that Jews lived in relative poverty. Suppose intelligence is more a product of environment than inborn worth? Might not the average scores of Jews reflect their disadvantaged lives? Would they not be superior after all if they lived as well as the native English? Pearson recognized that he had to demonstrate the innateness of intelligence to carry his argument for restricted immigration based on irremediable mediocrity.

He turned again to his correlation coefficients. If low intelligence correlated with measures of misery (disease, squalor, and low income, for example), then an environmental basis might be claimed. But if few or no correlations could be found, then intelligence is not affected by environment and must be innate. Pearson computed his correlation coefficients and, as with the physical measures, found very few high values. But this time he was pleased. The correlations produced little beyond the discovery that intelligent children sleep less and tend to breathe more through their nose! He concluded triumphantly:

But conclusions based upon negative evidence are always suspect. Pearson’s failure to record correlations between “intelligence” and environment might suggest the true absence of any relationship. But it might also simply mean that his measures were as lousy as the hair in his category 4. Maybe a teacher’s assessment doesn’t record anything accurately, and its failure to correlate with measures of environment only demonstrates its inadequacy as an index of intelligence. After all, Pearson had already admitted that correlations between physical measures had been disappointingly small. He was too good a statistician to ignore this possibility. So he faced it and dismissed it with one of the worst arguments I have ever read.

Pearson gave three reasons for sticking to his claim that intelligence is innate. The first two are irrelevant: teachers’ assessments correlate with Binet test scores, and high correlations between siblings and between parents and children also prove the innateness of intelligence. But Pearson had not given Binet tests to the Jewish children and had not measured their parents’ intelligence in any way. These two claims referred to other studies and could not be transferred to the present case. Pearson appreciated this weakness and therefore advanced a third argument based upon internal evidence: intelligence (teachers’ assessment) failed to correlate with environment but it did correlate with other “independent” measures of mental worth.

But what were these other independent measures? Believe it or not, Pearson chose “conscientiousness” (also based on teachers’ assessments and scored as keen, medium, and dull), and rank in class. How else does a teacher assess “intelligence” if not (in large part) by conscientiousness and rank in class? Pearson’s three measures—intelligence, conscientiousness, and rank in class—were redundant assessments of the same thing: the teachers’ opinion of their students’ worth. But we cannot tell whether these opinions record inborn capacities, environmental advantages, or teachers’ prejudices. In any case, Pearson concluded with an appeal to bar all but the most intelligent of foreign Jews:

Goddard’s and Pearson’s studies shared the property of internal contradictions and evident prejudice sufficient to dismiss all claims. But they differed in one important respect: social impact. Britain did not enact laws to restrict immigration by racial or national origin. But in America, Goddard and his colleagues won. Goddard’s work on Ellis Island had already encouraged immigration officials to reject people for supposed moronity. Five years later, the army tested 1.75 million World War I recruits with a set of examinations that Goddard helped write and that were composed by a committee meeting at his Vineland Training School. The tabulations did not identify Jews per se but calculated “innate intelligence” by national averages. These absurd tests, which measured linguistic and cultural familiarity with American ways, (see my book,
The Mismeasure of Man
, W. W. Norton, 1981), ranked recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe well below the English, Germans, and Scandinavians who had arrived long before. The average soldier of most southern and eastern European nations scored as a moron on the army tests. Since most Jewish immigrants arrived from eastern European nations, quotas based on country of origin eliminated Jews as surely as collegiate quotas based on geographical distribution once barred them from elite campuses.

When quotas were set for the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, they were initially calculated at 2 percent of people from each nation present in America at the census of 1890, not at the most recent count of 1920. Since few southern and eastern Europeans had arrived by 1890, these quotas effectively reduced the influx of Slavs, Italians, and Jews to a trickle. Restriction was in the air and would have occurred anyway. But the peculiar character and intent of the 1924 quotas were largely a result of propaganda issued by Goddard and his eugenical colleagues.

What effect did the quotas have in retrospect? Allan Chase, author of
The Legacy of Malthus
, the finest book on the history of scientific racism in America, has estimated that the quotas barred up to six million southern, central, and eastern Europeans between 1924 and the outbreak of World War II (assuming that immigration had continued at its pre-1924 rate). We know what happened to many who wanted to leave but had no place to go. The pathways to destruction are often indirect, but ideas can be agents as surely as guns and bombs.

IN THE CONSTITUTION
of the United States, the same passage that prescribes a census every ten years also includes the infamous statement that slaves shall be counted as three-fifths of a person. Ironically, and however different the setting and motives, black people are still undercounted in the American census because poor people in inner cities are systematically missed.

The census has always been controversial because it was established as a political device, not as an expensive frill to satisfy curiosity and feed academic mills. The constitutional passage that ordained the census begins: “Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers.”

Political use of the census has often extended beyond the allocation of taxation and representation. The sixth census of 1840 engendered a heated controversy based upon the correct contention that certain black people had, for once, been falsely
over
counted. This curious tale illustrates the principle that copious numbers do not guarantee objectivity and that even the most careful and rigorous surveys are only as good as their methods and assumptions. (William Stanton tells the story in
The Leopard’s Spots
, his excellent book on the history of scientific attitudes toward race in America during the first half of the nineteenth century. I have also read the original papers of the major protagonist, Edward Jarvis.)

The 1840 census was the first to include counts of the mentally ill and deficient, enumerated by race and by state. Dr. Edward Jarvis, then a young physician but later to become a national authority on medical statistics, rejoiced that the frustrations of inadequate data would soon be overcome. He wrote in 1844:

Jarvis then praised the marshals of the 1840 census as apostles of the new, quantitative order:

As scholars and ideologues of varying stripes scrutinized the tables, one apparent fact rose to obvious prominence in those troubled times. Among blacks, insanity struck free people in northern states far more often than it afflicted slaves in the South. In fact, one in 162 blacks was insane in free states, but only one in 1,558 in slave states. But freedom and the North posed no mental terror for whites, since their relative sanity did not differ in the North and South.

Moreover, insanity among blacks seemed to decrease in even gradation from the harsh North to the congenial South. One in 14 of Maine’s black population was either insane or idiotic; in New Hampshire, one in 28; in Massachusetts, one in 43; in New Jersey, one in 279. In Delaware, however, the frequency of insanity among blacks suddenly nose-dived. As Stanton writes: “It appeared that Mason and Dixon had surveyed a line not only between Maryland and Pennsylvania but also—surely all unwitting—between Sanity and Bedlam.”

In his first publication on the 1840 census, Jarvis drew the same conclusion that so many other whites would advance: slavery, if not the natural state of black people, must have a remarkably beneficent effect upon them. It must exert “a wonderful influence upon the development of moral faculties and the intellectual powers.” A slave gains equanimity by “refusing many of the hopes and responsibilities which the free, self-thinking and self-acting enjoy and sustain,” for bondage “saves him from some of the liabilities and dangers of active self-direction.”

The basic “fact” of ten times more insanity in freedom than in slavery was widely bruited about in the contemporary press, often in lurid fashion. Stanton quotes a contributor to the
Southern Literary Messenger
(1843) who, concluding that blacks grow “more vicious in a state of freedom,” painted a frightful picture of Virginia should it ever become a free state, with “all sympathy on the part of the master to the slave ended.” He inquired:

But Jarvis was troubled. The disparity between North and South made sense to him, but its extent was puzzling. Could slavery possibly make such an enormous difference? If the information had not been stamped with a governmental imprimatur, who could have believed it? Jarvis wrote:

Jarvis therefore began to examine the tables and was shocked by what he discovered. Somehow, and in a fashion that could scarcely represent a set of random accidents, the number of insane blacks had been absurdly inflated in reported figures for northern states. Jarvis discovered that twenty-five towns in the twelve free states contained not a single black person of sound mind. The figure for “all blacks” had obviously been recopied or misplaced in the column for “insane blacks.” But data for 135 additional towns (including thirty-nine in Ohio and twenty in New York) could not be explained so easily, for these towns actually reported a population of insane blacks greater than the total number of blacks, both sane and unhinged!

In a few cases, Jarvis was able to track down the source of error. Worcester, Massachusetts, for example, reported 133 insane in a total black population of 151. Jarvis inquired and discovered that these 133 people were white patients living in the state mental hospital located there. With this single correction, the first among many, black insanity in Massachusetts dropped from one in 43 to one in 129. Jarvis, demoralized and angry, began a decade of unsuccessful campaigning to win an official retraction or correction of the 1840 census. He began:

This debate was destined for a more significant fate than persistent bickering in literary and scholarly journals. For Jarvis’s disclosures caught the ear of a formidable man: John Quincy Adams, then near eighty, and capping a distinguished career as leader of antislavery forces in the House of Representatives. But Adams’s opponent was equally formidable. At that time, the census fell under the jurisdiction of the Department of State, and its newly appointed secretary was none other than John C. Calhoun, the cleverest and most vigorous defender of slavery in America.

Calhoun, in one of his first acts in office, used the incorrect but official census figures in responding to the expressed hope of the British foreign secretary, Lord Aberdeen, that slavery would not be permitted in the new republic (soon to be state) of Texas. The census proved, Calhoun wrote to Aberdeen, that northern blacks had “invariably sunk into vice and pauperism, accompanied by the bodily and mental afflictions incident thereto,” while states that had retained what Calhoun called, in genteel euphemism, “the ancient relation” between races, contained a black population that had “improved greatly in every respect—in number, comfort, intelligence, and morals.”

Calhoun then proceeded to evade the official request from the House, passed on Adams’s motion, that the secretary of state report on errors in the census and steps that would be taken to correct them. Adams then accosted Calhoun in his office and recorded the secretary’s response in his diary:

Jarvis, meanwhile, had enlisted the support of the Massachusetts Medical Society and the American Statistical Association. Armed with new data and support, Adams again persuaded the House to ask Calhoun for an official explanation. And again Calhoun wriggled out, finally delivering a report full of obfuscation and rhetoric, and still citing the 1840 figures on insanity as proof that freedom would be “a curse instead of a blessing” for black slaves. Jarvis lived until 1884 and assisted in the censuses of 1850, 1860, and 1870. But he never won official rectification of the errors he had uncovered in the 1840 census; the finagled, if not out-rightly fraudulent, data on insanity among blacks continued to be cited as an argument for slavery as the Civil War approached.

There is a world of difference between the overcount of insane blacks in 1840 and the undercount of poor blacks (and other groups) in central cities in 1980. First, although the source of error in the 1840 census has never been determined, we may strongly suspect some systematic, perhaps conscious manipulation by those charged with putting the raw data in tabular form. I think we can be reasonably confident that, with automated procedures and more deliberate care, the systematic errors of the 1980 census are at least honest ones. Second, the politics of 1840 left few channels open to critics, and Calhoun’s evasive stubbornness finally prevailed. Today, nearly every census is subjected to legal scrutiny and challenge.

Yet behind these legal struggles stands the fact that we still do not know how to count people accurately. Voluminous numbers and extensive tabulation do not guarantee objectivity. If you can’t find people, you can’t count them —and the American census is, by law, an attempt at exhaustive counting, not a statistical operation based on sampling.

If it were possible (however expensive) to count everyone with confidence, then no valid complaint could be raised. But it is not, and the very attempt to do so engenders a systematic error that guarantees failure. For some people are much harder to find than others, either by their direct resistance to being counted (illegal aliens, for example) or by the complex of unfortunate circumstances that renders the poor more anonymous than other Americans.

Regions with a concentration of poor people will be systematically undercounted, and such regions are not spread across America at random. They are located in the heart of our major cities. A census that assesses population by direct counting will be a source of endless contention so long as federal money and representation in Congress reach cities as rewards for greater numbers.

Censusing has always been controversial, especially since its historical purpose has usually involved taxation or conscription. When David, inveigled by Satan himself, had the chutzpah to “number” Israel (I Chronicles, chapter 21), the Lord punished him by offering some unpleasant alternatives: three years of famine, three months of devastation by enemy armies, or three days of pestilence (all reducing the population, perhaps to countable levels). The legacy of each American census seems to be ten years of contention.