Today's excerpt continues the story from a few weeks ago. One of the psychologists who worked on the Army Alpha and Beta tests - the first-ever standardized tests administered on a mass scale - has gone on to create the SAT. I'd like you to meet Carl Brigham, the man behind the test.
The year is 1926. World War One is a faint echo, lost in the din of the Roaring '20s. Our psychologists have moved on from the army because there are no-longer millions of fresh-faced recruits to test. Where can they possibly find a large group of young people to do science on? Why—in school, of course.
Carl Brigham is a dashing young Princeton-educated psychologist who helped to administer the Alpha and Beta tests and then wrote a popular book about them. He is determined to give his own updated version of the Alpha test to high-school students, in order to see whether he can predict anything useful about those students' performance in college. On June 23, 1926, eight thousand students take the very first Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT.
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| Young Brigham: handsome, racist |
Eugenics: a Fancy Way to Say “Racism”
Carl Brigham holds some beliefs that, today, might seem a little odd. He was positive that Alpha and Beta really do measure “intelligence”, an innate quality unrelated to education. This claim, as we've just seen, is rather silly. Brigham is also sure that intelligence is hereditary: smarter parents have smarter kids, and dumber parents have dumber kids. A debatable point, perhaps, but not a crazy one. Brigham, however, takes it to the next level: he is certain that some races are smarter than others. Specifically, he thinks that white people are smarter than non-white people, and whites from northern Europe (i.e. Scandanavians and the English) are smarter than whites from southern Europe (i.e. Italians and Jews). He worries that if the smarter races mix with the dumber races, Americans will become mediocre en masse. In Brigham's own words: “American intelligence is declining, and will proceed with an accelerating rate as the racial admixture becomes more and more extensive.”
Carl Brigham holds some beliefs that, today, might seem a little odd. He was positive that Alpha and Beta really do measure “intelligence”, an innate quality unrelated to education. This claim, as we've just seen, is rather silly. Brigham is also sure that intelligence is hereditary: smarter parents have smarter kids, and dumber parents have dumber kids. A debatable point, perhaps, but not a crazy one. Brigham, however, takes it to the next level: he is certain that some races are smarter than others. Specifically, he thinks that white people are smarter than non-white people, and whites from northern Europe (i.e. Scandanavians and the English) are smarter than whites from southern Europe (i.e. Italians and Jews). He worries that if the smarter races mix with the dumber races, Americans will become mediocre en masse. In Brigham's own words: “American intelligence is declining, and will proceed with an accelerating rate as the racial admixture becomes more and more extensive.”
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| What's Wrong with America (according to Carl) |
Brigham isn't some fringe nutcase, either. Eugenics – the idea that society can be improved by the segregation or elimination of those who are genetically “inferior” – is all the rage. In 1921 and 1924, Congress passed laws strictly limiting the number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe (who, according to Brigham, are stupid), while still permitting immigrants from northern Europe (who, according to Brigham, are smart). Theodore Roosevelt went even farther when he said:
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. took ol' Teddy at his word. In Buck vs. Bell, an infamous Supreme Court decision, Holmes and his fellow justices made it legal to sterilize men and women who got low scores on IQ tests and had other signs of “feeblemindedness”. Let that fact sink in for a moment: the United States Supreme Court gave the green light to the spaying and neutering of human beings, just as if they were dogs or cats. As a result, about 60,000 low-IQ Americans were sterilized over the next few decades. The Nazis approvingly cited this practice in justifying their own policies of enforced sterilization and murder, especially of Jews—many of whom might have escaped, were it not for America's restrictive immigration laws.
Brigham's interpretation of IQ testing – his insistence that IQ was an innate quality, and that some populations had more of it – paved the way for the horrifying policies implemented by his contemporaries. As Stephen Jay Gould sadly noted, “the paths to destruction are often indirect, but ideas can be agents as sure as guns and bombs.”
I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding; and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done. … Feebleminded persons [should be] forbidden to leave offspring behind them...
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. took ol' Teddy at his word. In Buck vs. Bell, an infamous Supreme Court decision, Holmes and his fellow justices made it legal to sterilize men and women who got low scores on IQ tests and had other signs of “feeblemindedness”. Let that fact sink in for a moment: the United States Supreme Court gave the green light to the spaying and neutering of human beings, just as if they were dogs or cats. As a result, about 60,000 low-IQ Americans were sterilized over the next few decades. The Nazis approvingly cited this practice in justifying their own policies of enforced sterilization and murder, especially of Jews—many of whom might have escaped, were it not for America's restrictive immigration laws.
Brigham's interpretation of IQ testing – his insistence that IQ was an innate quality, and that some populations had more of it – paved the way for the horrifying policies implemented by his contemporaries. As Stephen Jay Gould sadly noted, “the paths to destruction are often indirect, but ideas can be agents as sure as guns and bombs.”
Next time: we see how Brigham's beliefs influenced the design of the first SAT and how those long-discredited ideas affect students even today.
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