The Mismeasure of Man

by Stephen Jay Gould

  Can the plethora of causes and phenomena grouped under the rubric of mental deficiency possibly be ordered usefully on a single scale, with its implication that each person owes his rank to the relative amount of a single substance—and that mental deficiency means having less than most? Consider some phenomena mixed up in the common numbers once assigned to defectives of high grade: general low-level mental retardation, specific learning disabilities caused by local neurological damage, environmental disadvantages, cultural differences, hostility to testers. Consider some of the potential causes: inherited patterns of function, genetic pathologies arising accidentally and not passed in family lines, congenital brain damage caused by maternal illness during pregnancy, birth traumas, poor nutrition of fetuses and babies, a variety of environmental disadvantages in early and later life. Yet, to Goddard, all people with mental ages between eight and twelve were morons, all to be treated in roughly the same way: institutionalized or carefully regulated, made happy by catering to their limits, and, above all, prevented from breeding.

  Goddard may have been the most unsubtle hereditarian of all. He used his unilinear scale of mental deficiency to identify intelligence as a single entity, and he assumed that everything important about it was inborn and inherited in family lines. He wrote in 1920 (quoted in Tuddenham, 1962, p. 491):

  Stated in its boldest form, our thesis is that the chief determiner of human conduct is a unitary mental process which we call intelligence: that this process is conditioned by a nervous mechanism which is inborn: that the degree of efficiency to be attained by that nervous mechanism and the consequent grade of intellectual or mental level for each individual is determined by the kind of chromosomes that come together with the union of the germ cells: that it is but little affected by any later influences except such serious accidents as may destroy part of the mechanism.

  Goddard extended the range of social phenomena caused by differences in innate intelligence until it encompassed almost everything that concerns us about human behavior. Beginning with morons, and working up the scale, he attributed most undesirable behavior to inherited mental deficiency of the offenders. Their problems are caused not only by stupidity per se, but by the link between deficient intelligence and immorality.* High intelligence not only permits us to do our sums; it also engenders the good judgment that underlies all moral behavior.

  The intelligence controls the emotions and the emotions are controlled in proportion to the degree of intelligence.… It follows that if there is little intelligence the emotions will be uncontrolled and whether they be strong or weak will result in actions that are unregulated, uncontrolled and, as experience proves, usually undesirable. Therefore, when we measure the intelligence of an individual and learn that he has so much less than normal as to come within the group that we call feeble-minded, we have ascertained by far the most important fact about him (1919, p. 272).

  Many criminals, most alcoholics and prostitutes, and even the “ne’er do wells” who simply don’t fit in, are morons: “We know what feeble-mindedness is, and we have come to suspect all persons who are incapable of adapting themselves to their environment and living up to the conventions of society or acting sensibly, of being feeble-minded” (1914, p. 571).

  At the next level of the merely dull, we find the toiling masses, doing what comes naturally. “The people who are doing the drudgery,” Goddard writes (1919, p. 246), “are, as a rule, in their proper places.”

  We must next learn that there are great groups of men, laborers, who are but little above the child, who must be told what to do and shown how to do it; and who, if we would avoid disaster, must not be put into positions where they will have to act upon their own initiative or their own judgment.… There are only a few leaders, most must be followers (1919, pp. 243–244).

  At the upper end, intelligent men rule in comfort and by right. Speaking before a group of Princeton undergraduates in 1919, Goddard proclaimed:

  Now the fact is, that workmen may have a 10 year intelligence while you have a 20. To demand for him such a home as you enjoy is as absurd as it would be to insist that every laborer should receive a graduate fellowship. How can there be such a thing as social equality with this wide range of mental capacity?

  “Democracy,” Goddard argued (1919, p. 237), “means that the people rule by selecting the wisest, most intelligent and most human to tell them what to do to be happy. Thus Democracy is a method for arriving at a truly benevolent aristocracy.”

  BREAKING THE SCALE INTO MENDELIAN COMPARTMENTS

  But if intelligence forms a single and unbroken scale, how can we solve the social problems that beset us? For at one level, low intelligence generates sociopaths, while at the next grade, industrial society needs docile and dull workers to run its machinery and accept low recompence. How can we convert the unbroken scale into two categories at this crucial point, and still maintain the idea that intelligence is a single, inherited entity? We can now understand why Goddard lavished so much attention upon the moron. The moron threatens racial health because he ranks highest among the undesirable and might, if not identified, be allowed to flourish and propagate. We all recognize the idiot and imbecile and know what must be done; the scale must be broken just above the level of the moron.

  The idiot is not our greatest problem. He is indeed loathsome.… Nevertheless, he lives his life and is done. He does not continue the race with a line of children like himself.… It is the moron type that makes for us our great problem (1912, pp. 101–102).

  Goddard worked in the first flourish of excitement that greeted the rediscovery of Mendel’s work and the basic deciphering of heredity. We now know that virtually every major feature of our body is built by the interaction of many genes with each other and with an external environment. But in these early days, many biologists naïvely assumed that all human traits would behave like the color, size, or wrinkling of Mendel’s peas: they believed, in short, that even the most complex parts of a body might be built by single genes, and that variation in anatomy or behavior would record the different dominant and recessive forms of these genes. Eugenicists seized upon this foolish notion with avidity, for it allowed them to assert that all undesirable traits might be traced to single genes and eliminated with proper strictures upon breeding. The early literature of eugenics is filled with speculations, and pedigrees laboriously compiled and fudged, about the gene for Wanderlust traced through the family lines of naval captains, or the gene for temperament that makes some of us placid and others domineering. We must not be misled by how silly such ideas seem today; they represented orthodox genetics for a brief time, and had a major social impact in America.

  Goddard joined the transient bandwagon with a hypothesis that must represent an ultimate in the attempted reification of intelligence. He tried to trace the pedigrees of mental defectives in his Vineland School and concluded that “feeble-mindedness” obeyed Mendelian rules of inheritance. Mental deficiency must therefore be a definite thing, and it must be governed by a single gene, undoubtedly recessive to normal intelligence (1914, p. 539). “Normal intelligence,” Goddard concluded, “seems to be a unit character and transmitted in true Mendelian fashion” (1914, p. ix).

  Goddard claimed that he had been compelled to make this unlikely conclusion by the press of evidence, not by any prior hope or prejudice.

  Any theories or hypotheses that have been presented have been merely those that were suggested by the data themselves, and have been worked out in an effort to understand what the data seem to comprise. Some of the conclusions are as surprising to the writer and as difficult for him to accept as they are likely to be to many readers (1914, p. viii).

  Can we seriously view Goddard as a forced and reluctant convert to a hypothesis that fit his general scheme so well and solved his most pressing problem so neatly? A single gene for normal intelligence removed the potential contradiction between a unilinear scale that marked intelligence as a single, measurable entity, and a desire to separat
e and identify the mentally deficient as a category apart. Goddard had broken his scale into two sections at just the right place: morons carried a double dose of the bad recessive; dull laborers had at least one copy of the normal gene and could be set before their machines. Moreover, the scourge of feeble-mindedness might now be eliminated by schemes of breeding easily planned. One gene can be traced, located, and bred out. If one hundred genes regulate intelligence, eugenic breeding must fail or proceed with hopeless sloth.

  THE PROPER CARE AND FEEDING (BUT NOT BREEDING) OF MORONS

  If mental deficiency is the effect of a single gene, the path to its eventual elimination lies evidently before us: do not allow such people to bear children:

  If both parents are feeble-minded all the children will be feebleminded. It is obvious that such matings should not be allowed. It is perfectly clear that no feeble-minded person should ever be allowed to marry or to become a parent. It is obvious that if this rule is to be carried out the intelligent part of society must enforce it (1914, p. 561).

  If morons could control their own sexual urges and desist for the good of mankind, we might permit them to live freely among us. But they cannot, because immorality and stupidity are inexorably linked. The wise man can control his sexuality in a rational manner: “Consider for a moment the sex emotion, supposed to be the most uncontrollable of all human instincts; yet it is notorious that the intelligent man controls even this” (1919, p. 273). The moron cannot behave in so exemplary and abstemious a fashion:

  They are not only lacking in control but they are lacking often in the perception of moral qualities; if they are not allowed to marry they are nevertheless not hindered from becoming parents. So that if we are absolutely to prevent a feeble-minded person from becoming a parent, something must be done other than merely prohibiting the marrying. To this end there are two proposals: the first is colonization, the second is sterilization (1914, p. 566).

  Goddard did not oppose sterilization, but he regarded it as impractical because traditional sensibilities of a society not yet wholly rational would prevent such widespread mayhem. Colonization in exemplary institutions like his own at Vineland, New Jersey, must be our preferred solution. Only here could the reproduction of morons be curtailed. If the public balked at the great expense of building so many new centers for confinement, the cost could easily be recouped by its own savings:

  If such colonies were provided in sufficient number to take care of all the distinctly feeble-minded cases in the community, they would very largely take the place of our present almshouses and prisons, and they would greatly decrease the numbers in our insane hospitals. Such colonies would save an annual loss in property and life, due to the action of these irresponsible people, sufficient to nearly, or quite, offset the expense of the new plant (1912, pp. 105–106).

  Inside these institutions, morons could operate in contentment at their biologically appointed level, denied only the basic biology of their own sexuality. Goddard ended his book on the causes of mental deficiency with this plea for the care of institutionalized morons: “Treat them as children according to their mental age, constantly encourage and praise, never discourage or scold; and keep them happy” (1919, p. 327).

  Preventing the immigration and propagation of morons

  Once Goddard had identified the cause of feeble-mindedness in a single gene, the cure seemed simple enough: don’t allow native morons to breed and keep foreign ones out. As a contribution to the second step, Goddard and his associates visited Ellis Island in 1912 “to observe conditions and offer any suggestions as to what might be done to secure a more thorough examination of immigrants for the purpose of detecting mental defectives” (Goddard, 1917, p. 253).

  As Goddard described the scene, a fog hung over New York harbor that day and no immigrants could land. But one hundred were about ready to leave, when Goddard intervened: “We picked out one young man whom we suspected was defective, and, through the interpreter, proceeded to give him the test. The boy tested 8 by the Binet scale. The interpreter said, ‘I could not have done that when I came to this country,’ and seemed to think the test unfair. We convinced him that the boy was defective” (Goddard, 1913, p. 105).

  Encouraged by this, one of the first applications of the Binet scale in America, Goddard raised some funds for a more thorough study and, in the spring of 1913, sent two women to Ellis Island for two and a half months. They were instructed to pick out the feebleminded by sight, a task that Goddard preferred to assign to women, to whom he granted innately superior intuition:

  After a person has had considerable experience in this work, he almost gets a sense of what a feeble-minded person is so that he can tell one afar off. The people who are best at this work, and who I believe should do this work, are women. Women seem to have closer observation than men. It was quite impossible for others to see how these two young women could pick out the feeble-minded without the aid of the Binet test at all (1913, p. 106).

  Goddard’s women tested thirty-five Jews, twenty-two Hungarians, fifty Italians, and forty-five Russians. These groups could not be regarded as random samples because government officials had already “culled out those they recognized as defective.” To balance this bias, Goddard and his associates “passed by the obviously normal. That left us the great mass of ‘average immigrants.’ ” (1917, p. 244). (I am continually amazed by the unconscious statements of prejudice that slip into supposedly objective accounts. Note here that average immigrants are below normal, or at least not obviously normal—the proposition that Goddard was supposedly testing, not asserting a priori.)

  Binet tests on the four groups led to an astounding result: 83 percent of the Jews, 80 percent of the Hungarians, 79 percent of the Italians, and 87 percent of the Russians were feeble-minded—that is, below age twelve on the Binet scale. Goddard himself was flabbergasted: could anyone be made to believe that four-fifths of any nation were morons? “The results obtained by the foregoing evaluation of the data are so surprising and difficult of acceptance that they can hardly stand by themselves as valid” (1917, p. 247). Perhaps the tests had not been adequately explained by interpreters? But the Jews had been tested by a Yiddish-speaking psychologist, and they ranked no higher than the other groups. Eventually, Goddard monkied about with the tests, tossed several out, and got his figures down to 40 to 50 percent, but still he was disturbed.

  Goddard’s figures were even more absurd than he imagined for two reasons, one obvious, the other less so. As a nonevident reason, Goddard’s original translation of the Binet scale scored people harshly and made morons out of subjects usually regarded as normal. When Terman devised the Stanford-Binet scale in 1916, he found that Goddard’s version ranked people well below his own. Terman reports (1916, p. 62) that of 104 adults tested by him as between twelve and fourteen years mental age (low, but normal intelligence), 50 percent were morons on the Goddard scale.

  For the evident reason, consider a group of frightened men and women who speak no English and who have just endured an oceanic voyage in steerage. Most are poor and have never gone to school; many have never held a pencil or pen in their hand. They march off the boat; one of Goddard’s intuitive women takes them aside shortly thereafter, sits them down, hands them a pencil, and asks them to reproduce on paper a figure shown to them a moment ago, but now withdrawn from their sight. Could their failure be a result of testing conditions, of weakness, fear, or confusion, rather than of innate stupidity? Goddard considered the possibility, but rejected it:

  The next question is ‘drawing a design from memory,’ which is passed by only 50 percent. To the uninitiated this will not seem surprising since it looks hard, and even those who are familiar with the fact that normal children of 10 pass it without difficulty may admit that persons who have never had a pen or pencil in their hands, as was true of many of the immigrants, may find it impossible to draw the design (1917, p. 250).

  Permitting a charitable view of this failure, what but stupidity could explain an
inability to state more than sixty words, any words, in one’s own language during three minutes?

  What shall we say of the fact that only 45 percent can give 60 words in three minutes, when normal children of 11 years sometimes give 200 words in that time! It is hard to find an explanation except lack of intelligence or lack of vocabulary, and such a lack of vocabulary in an adult would probably mean lack of intelligence. How could a person live even 15 years in any environment without learning hundreds of names of which he could certainly think of 60 in three minutes? (1917, p. 251)

  Or ignorance of the date, or even the month or year?

  Must we again conclude that the European peasant of the type that immigrates to America pays no attention to the passage of time? That the drudgery of life is so severe that he cares not whether it is January or July, whether it is 1912 or 1906? Is it possible that the person may be of considerable intelligence and yet, because of the peculiarity of his environment, not have acquired this ordinary bit of knowledge, even though the calendar is not in general use on the continent, or is somewhat complicated as in Russia? If so what an environment it must have been! (1917, p. 250)

  Since environment, either European or immediate, could not explain such abject failure, Goddard stated: “We cannot escape the general conclusion that these immigrants were of surprisingly low intelligence” (1917, p. 251). The high proportion of morons still bothered Goddard, but he finally attributed it to the changing character of immigration: “It should be noted that the immigration of recent years is of a decidedly different character from the early immigration.… We are now getting the poorest of each race” (1917, p. 266). “The intelligence of the average ‘third class’ immigrant is low, perhaps of moron grade” (1917, p. 243). Perhaps, Goddard hoped out loud, things were better on the upper decks, but he did not test these wealthier customers.