The Mismeasure of Man

by Stephen Jay Gould

  What then should be done? Should all these morons be shipped back, or prevented from starting out in the first place? Foreshadowing the restrictions that would be legislated within a decade, Goddard argued that his conclusions “furnish important considerations for future actions both scientific and social as well as legislative” (1917, p. 261). But by this time Goddard had softened his earlier harsh position on the colonization of morons. Perhaps there were not enough merely dull workers to fill the vast number of frankly undesirable jobs. The moron might have to be recruited: “They do a great deal of work that no one else will do.… There is an immense amount of drudgery to be done, an immense amount of work for which we do not wish to pay enough to secure more intelligent workers.… May it be that possibly the moron has his place” (1917, p. 269).

  Nonetheless, Goddard rejoiced in the general tightening of standards for admission. He reports that deportations for mental deficiency increased 350 percent in 1913 and 570 percent in 1914 over the average of the five preceding years:

  This was due to the untiring efforts of the physicians who were inspired by the belief that mental tests could be used for the detection of feeble-minded aliens.… If the American public wishes feeble-minded aliens excluded, it must demand that congress provide the necessary facilities at the ports of entry (1917, p. 271).

  Meanwhile, at home, the feeble-minded must be identified and kept from breeding. In several studies, Goddard exposed the menace of moronity by publishing pedigrees of hundreds of worthless souls, charges upon the state and community, who would never have been born had their feeble-minded forebears been debarred from reproduction. Goddard discovered a stock of paupers and ne’er-do-wells in the pine barrens of New Jersey and traced their ancestry back to the illicit union of an upstanding man with a supposedly feeble-minded tavern wench. The same man later married a worthy Quakeress and started another line composed wholly of upstanding citizens. Since the progenitor had fathered both a good and a bad line, Goddard combined the Greek words for beauty (kallos) and bad (kakos), and awarded him the pseudonym Martin Kallikak. Goddard’s Kallikak family functioned as a primal myth of the eugenics movement for several decades.

  Goddard’s study is little more than guesswork rooted in conclusions set from the start. His method, as always, rested upon the training of intuitive women to recognize the feeble-minded by sight. Goddard did not administer Binet tests in pine-barren shacks. Goddard’s faith in visual identification was virtually unbounded. In 1919 he analyzed Edwin Markham’s poem “The Man With The Hoe”:

  Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans

  Upon his hoe and gazes at the ground,

  The emptiness of ages in his face

  And on his back the burden of the world.…

  Markham’s poem had been inspired by Millet’s famous painting of the same name. The poem, Goddard complained (1919, p. 239), “seems to imply that the man Millet painted came to his condition as the result of social conditions which held him down and made him like the clods that he turned over.” Nonsense, exclaimed Goddard; most poor peasants suffer only from their own feeble-mindedness, and Millet’s painting proves it. Couldn’t Markham see that the peasant is mentally deficient? “Millet’s Man With The Hoe is a man of arrested mental development—the painting is a perfect picture of an imbecile” (1919, pp. 239–240). To Markham’s searing question: “Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?” Goddard replied that mental fire had never been kindled.

  Since Goddard could determine degrees of mental deficiency by examining a painting, he certainly anticipated no trouble with flesh and blood. He dispatched the redoubtable Ms. Kite, soon to see further service on Ellis Island, to the pine barrens and quickly produced the sad pedigree of the kakos line. Goddard describes one of Ms. Kite’s identifications (1912, pp. 77–78):

  Used as she was to the sights of misery and degradation, she was hardly prepared for the spectacle within. The father, a strong, healthy, broad-shouldered man, was sitting helplessly in a corner.… Three children, scantily clad and with shoes that would barely hold together, stood about with drooping jaws and the unmistakable look of the feeble-minded.… The whole family was a living demonstration of the futility of trying to make desirable citizens from defective stock through making and enforcing compulsory education laws.… The father himself, though strong and vigorous, showed by his face that he had only a child’s mentality. The mother in her filth and rags was also a child. In this house of abject poverty, only one sure prospect was ahead, that it would produce more feeble-minded children with which to clog the wheels of human progress.

  If these spot identifications seem a bit hasty or dubious, consider Goddard’s method for inferring the mental state of the departed, or otherwise unavailable (1912, p. 15):

  5.1 An honest picture of Deborah, the Kallikak descendant living in Goddard’s institution.

  After some experience, the field worker becomes expert in inferring the condition of those persons who are not seen, from the similarity of the language used in describing them to that used in describing persons she has seen.

  It may be a small item in the midst of such absurdity, but I discovered a bit of more conscious skulduggery. My colleague Steven Selden and I were examining his copy of Goddard’s volume of the Kallikaks. The frontispiece shows a member of the kakos line, saved from depravity by confinement in Goddard’s institution at Vineland. Deborah, as Goddard calls her, is a beautiful woman (Fig. 5.1). She sits calmly in a white dress, reading a book, a cat lying comfortably on her lap. Three other plates show members of the kakos line, living in poverty in their rural shacks. All have a depraved look about them (Fig. 5.2). Their mouths are sinister in appearance; their eyes are darkened slits. But Goddard’s books are nearly seventy years old, and the ink has faded. It is now clear that all the photos of noninstitutionalized kakos were altered by inserting heavy dark lines to give eyes and mouths their diabolical appearance. The three plates of Deborah are unretouched.

  Selden took his book to Mr. James H. Wallace, Jr., director of Photographic Services at the Smithsonian Institution. Mr. Wallace reports (letter to Selden, 17 March 1980):

  There can be no doubt that the photographs of the Kallikak family members have been retouched. Further, it appears that this retouching was limited to the facial features of the individuals involved—specifically eyes, eyebrows, mouths, nose and hair.

  By contemporary standards, this retouching is extremely crude and obvious. It should be remembered, however, that at the time of the original publication of the book, our society was far less visually sophisticated. The widespread use of photographs was limited, and casual viewers of the time would not have nearly the comparative ability possessed by even pre-teenage children today.…

  The harshness clearly gives the appearance of dark, staring features, sometimes evilness, and sometimes mental retardation. It would be difficult to understand why any of this retouching was done were it not to give the viewer a false impression of the characteristics of those depicted. I believe the fact that no other areas of the photographs, or the individuals have been retouched is significant in this regard also.…

  I find these photographs to be an extremely interesting variety of photographic manipulation.

  Goddard recants

  By 1928 Goddard had changed his mind and become a latter-day supporter of the man whose work he had originally perverted, Alfred Binet. Goddard admitted, first of all, that he had set the upper limit of moronity far too high:

  It was for a time rather carelessly assumed that everybody who tested 12 years or less was feeble-minded.… We now know, of course, that only a small percentage of the people who test 12 are actually feeble-minded—that is, are incapable of managing their affairs with ordinary prudence or of competing in the struggle for existence (1928, p. 220).

  But genuine morons still abound at their redefined level. What shall be done with them? Goddard did not abandon his belief in their inherited mentality, but he now took Bine
t’s line and argued that most, if not all, could be trained to lead useful lives in society:

  The problem of the moron is a problem of education and training.

  …This may surprise you, but frankly when I see what has been made out of the moron by a system of education, which as a rule is only half right, I have no difficulty in concluding that when we get an education that is entirely right there will be no morons who cannot manage themselves and their affairs and compete in the struggle for existence. If we could hope to add to this a social order that would literally give every man a chance, I should be perfectly sure of the result (1928, pp. 223–224).

  But if we let morons live in society, will they not marry and bear children; is this not the greatest danger of all, the source of Goddard’s previous and passionate warnings?

  Some will object that this plan neglects the eugenic aspect of the problem. In the community, these morons will marry and have children. And why not? … It may still be objected that moron parents are likely to have imbecile or idiot children. There is not much evidence that this is the case. The danger is probably negligible. At least it is not likely to occur any oftener than it does in the general population.* I assume that most of you, like myself, will find it difficult to admit that the foregoing may be the true view. We have worked too long under the old concept (1928, pp. 223–224).

  * * *

  5.2 Altered photographs of members of the Kallikak family living in poverty in the New Jersey pine barrens. Note how mouths and eyebrows are accentuated to produce an appearance of evil or stupidity. The effect is much clearer on the original photographs produced in Goddard’s book.

  Goddard concluded (1928, p. 225) in reversing the two bulwarks of his former system:

  1. Feeble-mindedness (the moron) is not incurable [Goddard’s italics].

  2. The feeble-minded do not generally need to be segregated in institutions.

  “As for myself,” Goddard confessed (p. 224), “I think I have gone over to the enemy.”

  Lewis M. Terman and the mass marketing of innate IQ

  Without offering any data on all that occurs between conception and the age of kindergarten, they announce on the basis of what they have got out of a few thousand questionnaires that they are measuring the hereditary mental endowment of human beings. Obviously, this is not a conclusion obtained by research. It is a conclusion planted by the will to believe. It is, I think, for the most part unconsciously planted.… If the impression takes root that these tests really measure intelligence, that they constitute a sort of last judgment on the child’s capacity, that they reveal “scientifically” his predestined ability, then it would be a thousand times better if all the intelligence testers and all their questionnaires were sunk without warning in the Sargasso Sea.

  —WALTER Lippmann, in the course of a debate with Lewis Terman

  Mass testing and the Stanford-Binet

  Lewis M. Terman, the twelfth child in an Indiana farm family of fourteen, traced his interest in the study of intelligence to an itinerant book peddler and phrenologist who visited his home when he was nine or ten and predicted good things after feeling the bumps on his skull. Terman pursued this early interest, never doubting that a measurable mental worth lay inside people’s heads. In his doctoral dissertation of 1906, Terman examined seven “bright” and seven “stupid” boys and defended each of his tests as a measure of intelligence by appealing to the standard catalogue of racial and national stereotypes. Of tests for invention, he wrote: “We have only to compare the negro with the Eskimo or Indian, and the Australian native with the Anglo-Saxon, to be struck by an apparent kinship between general intellectual and inventive ability” (1906, p. 14). Of mathematical ability, he proclaimed (1906, p. 29): “Ethnology shows that racial progress has been closely paralleled by development of the ability to deal with mathematical concepts and relations.”

  Terman concluded his study by committing both of the fallacies identified on p. 185 as foundations of the hereditarian view. He reified average test scores as a “thing” called general intelligence by advocating the first of two possible positions (1906, p. 9): “Is intellectual ability a bank account, on which we can draw for any desired purpose, or is it rather a bundle of separate drafts, each drawn for a specific purpose and inconvertible?” And, while admitting that he could provide no real support for it, he defended the innatist view (1906, p. 68): “While offering little positive data on the subject, the study has strengthened my impression of the relatively greater importance of endowment over training as a determinant of an individual’s intellectual rank among his fellows.”

  Goddard introduced Binet’s scale to America, but Terman was the primary architect of its popularity. Binet’s last version of 1911 included fifty-four tasks, graded from prenursery to mid-teen-age years. Terman’s first revision of 1916 extended the scale to “superior adults” and increased the-number of tasks to ninety. Terman, by then a professor at Stanford University, gave his revision a name that has become part of our century’s vocabulary—the Stanford-Binet, the standard for virtually all “IQ” tests that followed.*

  I offer no detailed analysis of content (see Block and Dworkin, 1976 or Chase, 1977), but present two examples to show how Terman’s tests stressed conformity with expectation and downgraded original response. When expectations are society’s norms, then do the tests measure some abstract property of reasoning, or familiarity with conventional behavior? Terman added the following item to Binet’s list:

  An Indian who had come to town for the first time in his life saw a white man riding along the street. As the white man rode by, the Indian said—’The white man is lazy; he walks sitting down.’ What was the white man riding on that caused the Indian to say, ‘He walks sitting down.’

  Terman accepted “bicycle” as the only correct response—not cars or other vehicles because legs don’t go up and down in them; not horses (the most common “incorrect” answer) because any self-respecting Indian would have known what he was looking at. (I myself answered “horse,” because I saw the Indian as a clever ironist, criticizing an effete city relative.) Such original responses as “a cripple in a wheel chair,” and “a person riding on someone’s back” were also marked wrong.

  Terman also included this item from Binet’s original: “My neighbor has been having queer visitors. First a doctor came to his house, then a lawyer, then a minister. What do you think happened there?” Terman permitted little latitude beyond “a death,” though he did allow “a marriage” from a boy he described as “an enlightened young eugenist” who replied that the doctor came to see if the partners were fit, the lawyer to arrange, and the minister to tie the knot. He did not accept the combination “divorce and remarriage,” though he reports that a colleague in Reno, Nevada, had found the response “very, very common.” He also did not permit plausible but uncomplicated solutions (a dinner, or an entertainment), or such original responses as: “someone is dying and is getting married and making his will before he dies.”

  But Terman’s major influence did not reside in his sharpening or extension of the Binet scale. Binet’s tasks had to be administered by a trained tester working with one child at a time. They could not be used as instruments for general ranking. But Terman wished to test everybody, for he hoped to establish a gradation of innate ability that could sort all children into their proper stations in life:

  What pupils shall be tested? The answer is, all. If only selected children are tested, many of the cases most in need of adjustment will be over-looked. The purpose of the tests is to tell us what we do not already know, and it would be a mistake to test only those pupils who are recognized as obviously below or above average. Some of the biggest surprises are encountered in testing those who have been looked upon as close to average in ability. Universal testing is fully warranted (1923, p. 22).

  The Stanford-Binet, like its parent, remained a test for individuals, but it became the paradigm for virtually all the written versions that followe
d. By careful juggling and elimination,* Terman standardized the scale so that “average” children would score 100 at each age (mental age equal to chronological age). Terman also evened out the variation among children by establishing a standard deviation of 15 or 16 points at each chronological age. With its mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15, the Stanford-Binet became (and in many respects remains to this day) the primary criterion forjudging a plethora of mass-marketed written tests that followed. The invalid argument runs: we know that the Stanford-Binet measures intelligence; therefore, any written test that correlates strongly with Stanford-Binet also measures intelligence. Much of the elaborate statistical work performed by testers during the past fifty years provides no independent confirmation for the proposition that tests measure intelligence, but merely establishes correlation with a preconceived and unquestioned standard.

  Testing soon became a multimillion-dollar industry; marketing companies dared not take a chance with tests not proven by their correlation with Terman’s standard. The Army Alpha (see pp. 222–252) initiated mass testing, but a flood of competitors greeted school administrators within a few years after the war’s end. A quick glance at the advertisements appended to Terman’s later book (1923) illustrates, dramatically and unintentionally, how all Terman’s cautious words about careful and lengthy assessment (1919, p. 299, for example) could evaporate before strictures of cost and time when his desire to test all children became a reality (Fig. 5.3). Thirty minutes and five tests might mark a child for life, if schools adopted the following examination, advertised in Terman 1923, and constructed by a committee that included Thorndike, Yerkes, and Terman himself.