The History of White People (36 page)

In sum: most of the immigrants currently passing through Ellis Island were mentally defective. With this crucial point made and quantified, intelligence testing took a further step, as the new field of psychology seized wartime opportunities.

By 1917 Goddard had joined a new group of immigration opponents who had no connection to charitable institutions. Based in academia, Robert Yerkes and Lewis Terman did not associate with the poor or feel concern for their well-being. As scholars, they shaped their truths—drawn, they said, from science—toward their preferred results. Not compulsory sterilization this time, but the classification of the American population according to intelligence and race on the basis of quantifiable methodology. Once again, Charles Benedict Davenport of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, supplied the missing link.

In the prewar years, Davenport’s institution had diligently compiled hereditary studies of defective families. His statistics dovetailed nicely with omnibus characteristics Davenport considered Mendelian unit traits: pauperism, low intelligence test scores, epilepsy, criminalism, insanity, height, and sexual immorality. While the First World War interrupted such degenerate-family work and sterilization, wartime conscription presented eugenicists with great new opportunities in mass mental testing. Robert Yerkes (1876–1956), Davenport’s erstwhile student at Harvard, moved to the fore.

Yerkes was no vaunted New Englander. His humble provenance does not get much attention from his biographers, in stark contrast to works by and about proud Yankees like Davenport. Perhaps in an elite environment, his farm-boy background contributed to his early reputation for ordinary intellectual ability, coupled with rigidity, stubbornness, and a tee-totaler’s lack of bonhomie. Indifferent to wealth, power, fame, popularity, and personal beauty, he was not the sort to win popularity polls. Born on a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Yerkes had attended an ungraded rural school, then the State Normal School at West Chester, where Goddard had begun his professional career. With the support of an uncle willing to trade tuition money for chores, Yerkes was able to transfer to Ursinus College, in the greater Philadelphia area, before going on to Harvard, where he took an A.B. in 1898 and a Ph.D. in 1902.
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Once again, the nation’s most prestigious center of learning would play a pivotal role in race theory.

Harvard’s importance in eugenics does not imply some nefarious scheme or even a mean-spirited ambiance. Rather, Harvard’s import in this story attests to the scholarly respectability of eugenic ideas at the time. Yerkes’s most influential teachers at Harvard were the German philosopher Hugo Münsterberg—a great believer in the importance of mental testing, ranking people hierarchically, and letting elites make society’s decisions—and Charles Benedict Davenport, that venerator of Francis Galton.
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Yerkes began teaching at Harvard in 1902 and published his first book in 1907. Entitled
The Dancing Mouse and the Mind of a Gorilla
, it dealt with animal sexuality considered in the light of evolution.
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He also worked half-time at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital alongside the esteemed Elmer Ernest Southard, inventor of “cacogenics,” the clumsily named study of racial deterioration. Yerkes and Southard started administering mental tests in 1913, just when Goddard began testing immigrants on Ellis Island. Yerkes’s rise was rapid—he was elected president of the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1916—but it was also uncertain, since he had been denied tenure at Harvard, which evidently held a low estimate of the new field of psychology.
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An odd situation.

As president of the APA, but still lacking tenure, Yerkes chafed at his field’s lack of scholarly standing. Not that the prejudice lacked merit. Still separating from philosophy in the 1910s, psychology seemed soft and lacking in scholarly rigor. The beautifully quantified results of mental testing, so Yerkes and others realized, offered a promising route to academic respectability. As the United States prepared to enter the First World War, Yerkes sought to extend intelligence testing to millions of servicemen. Such a mass of statistical data, unique in its comprehensiveness, would doubtless command respect in academe.

But gathering a data bank of this magnitude would obviously be a huge undertaking. Yerkes found a route in the National Academy of Sciences, which in 1916 created the National Research Council to bring scientists into the war effort. In May of 1917 Yerkes convened a committee of testers that included Goddard and Lewis Terman of Stanford. Working at Goddard’s Vineland Training School, the team had by July 1917 created three sets of tests for use on Army recruits.
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The Army Alpha was directed toward men who could read; the Army Beta served illiterates; and individual tests filled in where needed in special cases—in theory, at least.

When the project closed down in January of 1919, some 1,750,000 men had been tested, generating a huge body of data and further encouraging wide-scale use of intelligence tests. Before the war, intelligence testing had sometimes inspired ridicule, not infrequently as leading citizens tested out as imbeciles. The patina of science, however, had carried the day, securing the Army tests’ role as science’s last word on intelligence. This prestige was something new. That word contained overweening ambition. Henry Goddard kindly pronounced intelligence testing “the most valuable piece of information which mankind has ever acquired about itself…a unitary mental process [that is] the chief determiner of human conduct.”
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In a 1923
Atlantic Monthly
article Yerkes confidently assumed that intelligence testing could gauge much more than mental capacity. The tests, he maintained, could determine a man’s entire human worth. Yerkes was thinking about the immigrants who, he thought, diminished the effectiveness of the Army and, by extension, the overall health of American society: “Whereas the mental age of the American-born soldier is between thirteen and fourteen years, according to army statistics, that of the soldier of foreign birth serving in our army is less than twelve years….” These numbers would echo loudly in hereditarian circles. Yerkes warned of the recently arrived foreign-born, “Altogether they are markedly inferior in mental alertness to the native-born American.” He explained that differences between the white racial groups were “[a]lmost as great as the intellectual difference between negro and white in the army.”
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Once again, a scientist was speaking of “white racial groups” as a means of classification.

O
VERALL
, Y
ERKES’S
testing project pegged the average mental age of recruits at least eighteen years old at 13.08 years—accurate, it was claimed, to the second decimal place, though nonsensical as arithmetic: how could the average be below average? No matter. For Yerkes, with his unit-trait-unalterable-inherent-mental-ability concept of intelligence, this meant no further intellectual growth was possible, for the tests revealed
innate
native intelligence. Nothing in life after birth would make any difference whatsoever, not heightened language facility, more effective schooling, or increased familiarity with American culture. Furthermore, mental worth varied by race, as the term was understood in the early twentieth century: as a categorization applicable to peoples from various parts of Europe and its outlying areas. Yerkes and his colleagues drew many lines of race within the American population; one of the deepest separated so-called natives, whose ancestors had immigrated long ago, from recent arrivals.

Not that all was clear sailing. The Army, with war needs uppermost, never supported the testing project, and training procedures aimed at making effective soldiers severely interfered with the tests’ administration. Officers complained that men given the Beta tests’ two lowest grades, D and E, frequently turned into excellent soldiers once taught to read. Another commander dismissed the psychologists as a needless “board of art critics to advise me which of my men were the most handsome or a board of prelates to designate the true Christians.”
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O
UTSIDE THE
Army, however, intelligence testing succeeded spectacularly. After the war, Yerkes stayed on in Washington, D.C., into the mid-1920s, then moved on to his own laboratory at Yale, where he made a brilliant career in primate research. The National Academy of Sciences’ official report of Yerkes’s Army IQ tests, an unreadable, 890-page document featuring many charts and diagrams, reached only a tiny readership of specialists.
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In light of the controversy over immigration then raging, Yerkes encouraged one of the team of Army IQ testers, his protégé Carl Campbell Brigham of Princeton, to publish a readable digest for the general public.

Like many scholars seeking to place intelligence tests, eugenics, and race on a scientific basis, Brigham (1890–1943) sprang from prosperity and lofty New England breeding. He especially savored his descent from a signer of the Mayflower Compact in 1630. “Socially gifted,” according to his admiring biographer, Brigham “retain[ed] throughout his life the poise, bearing, and social graces derived from the environment of an old and esteemed New England family.”
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Toward the end of his undergraduate career, Brigham fell under the spell of the new methodology of mental tests. His well-regarded 1916 Ph.D. dissertation on the use of Binet tests on Princeton schoolchildren earned him an appointment on the Princeton University faculty. In 1917 Robert Yerkes discovered Brigham’s work and enlisted him to help administer intelligence tests to Army recruits.
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After the war Brigham rejoined the Princeton faculty, plunging once more into mental testing. Testing was now quite popular among educators as a means of ranking college applicants, and among nativists as scientific justification for cutting off immigration from southern and eastern Europe. The cause enjoyed prestigious support. Madison Grant and Charles W. Gould, two wealthy lawyers and Yale alumni, friends and eugenic opponents of immigration, underwrote Brigham’s project of putting Yerkes’s findings in accessible form for general readers, including, not least, members of Congress.
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*

Princeton University Press published Brigham’s
A Study of American Intelligence
in 1923. Robert Yerkes wrote the foreword, assuring readers “no one of us as a citizen can afford to ignore the menace of race deterioration or the evident relations of immigration to national progress and welfare.” Brigham, Yerkes contended, was presenting “not theories or opinions but facts.”
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A Study of American Intelligence
displayed an abundance of charts and graphs. Brigham divided the population into nearly a score of categories and illustrated numerous relative mental ages: atop the scale, American officers rated a mental age of 18.84 years; at the bottom, “U.S. (Colored)” came in at only 10.41 years. Native white Americans were roughly halfway between the two, achieving a mental age of 13.77 years, lower than immigrants from England, Scotland, the Netherlands, and Germany.
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Native American Indians and Asians did not count.

A dramatic bar graph arranged according to low scores compared racial and national groups in another way, with A the highest, C the average, and E the lowest score (see figure 20.2, Brigham’s bar graph.) Lumping black men of all backgrounds into a single unit, Brigham was respecting the traditional American black white dichotomy. At the same time, he distributed white people across nineteen overlapping categories reflecting current antagonism toward immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. His four major groups consisted of native-born whites, total whites, foreign-born whites, and Negroes. Within these groups, Brigham differentiated between the above-average foreigners and the below-average foreigners. Turks and Greeks just barely improved on the foreign-born average, while men from Russia, Italy, and Poland ranked at the bottom with the “Negro draft.” Northwestern Europeans topped the chart.
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Among Brigham’s noteworthy illustrations was table 33. (See figure 20.3, Brigham’s “Table No. 33.”) This feat of statistics achieved the seemingly impossible task of reconciling the racial groups (William Z. Ripley’s still influential
Races of Europe
classification of Teutonic, Alpine, and Mediterranean on the basis of cephalic index) with the Immigration Service’s national origins assigned to immigrants.