![]() The new law imposed “national origin quotas” on future immigration. The Army data were cited repeatedly in Congressional debates that ended in the passage of a racist immigration law in 1924. Popular support for a new and restrictive immigration law was widespread. In 1923 Carl Brigham published a re-analysis of the Army data, concluding that the tests had demonstrated “a genuine intellectual superiority of the Nordic group” over “Alpine and Mediterranean blood.” Yerkes, in a preface to Brigham’s book, stressed the relevance of the Army data to “the practical problems of immigration.” At the time, a flood of “New Immigration” from the “Alpine and Mediterranean” countries of southern and eastern Europe was replacing the earlier stream of immigrants from English-speaking and “Nordic” countries. The Army findings were supported in a 1923 textbook by Rudolf Pintner, who indicated that the median IQ found in six studies of Italian children in America was only 84-as low as the average of American blacks. The lowest scorers were immigrants from Russia, Italy, and Poland, whose average IQs were not perceptibly higher than that of native-born blacks. The Yerkes report indicated that the immigrants with the highest scores came from England, Scandinavia, and Germany. The data with immediate political impact were the IQ scores of foreign-born draftees. Given the stereotypes that prevailed at the time, however, that finding occasioned little surprise. This was the first large-scale demonstration that American blacks scored lower on IQ tests than whites. Instructions for Beta were given in pantomime to groups of soldiers.Īfter the war, in 1921, the National Academy of Sciences published an analysis, edited by Yerkes, of the data collected during the army’s testing program. “Beta” was a “nonverbal” test designed for men either unfamiliar with English or illiterate. “Alpha” was a written test that could be administered to large groups. Yerkes and a committee of psychologists devised two “group tests” of intelligence. Many of the draftees were foreign-born and either unfamiliar with the English language or illiterate in English. Robert Yerkes had been head of a massive program to administer specially developed IQ tests to draftees into the United States Army during World War I. 91–92).Ī claim was soon made that Terman’s prediction of racial differences had been verified. The writer predicts that … there will be discovered enormously significant racial differences which cannot be wiped out” (1916, pp. He reported that 83 percent of Jews, 80 percent of Hungarians, 79 percent of Italians, and 87 percent of Russians were “feeble-minded.” Lewis Terman, who introduced the Stanford-Binet test to the United States, wrote that IQs in the 70–80 range, indicating borderline mental deficiency, were “very common among Spanish-Indian and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among negroes. In 1912 Henry Goddard administered supplemented Binet tests to European immigrants arriving at Ellis Island in New York harbor. In addition, racial differences in average IQ were erroneously seized upon as evidence of genetic superiority and inferiority. Familial resemblance in IQ scores was claimed to be evidence of the role of heredity. ![]() ![]() The pioneers of the American mental testing movement (Henry Goddard, Lewis Terman, and Robert Yerkes ) all asserted that intelligence tests did measure a fixed, unchangeable capacity, largely determined by an individual’s heredity. Within a decade of Binet’s original work, adaptations of his test, including some designed for use with adults, were in use in the United States. ![]() Binet did not regard the test as measuring some fixed, unchangeable capacity, however, and he railed against the “brutal pessimism” of those who might think otherwise. The test was thus to be used as a diagnostic instrument, indicating a possible need for corrective treatment. Binet prescribed courses of “mental orthopedics” for those who did poorly on his test. If children did as well as other children of the same age, they were labeled “normal.” If children did as well as older children, they were “bright.” If the child could only do as well as younger children, Binet concluded that their intelligence was not developing properly and they should receive remedial education. The child’s performance was compared to the typical performance of children of various ages. The test, designed for schoolchildren, assessed both the child’s fund of acquired knowledge and academic skills. The first intelligence test was devised by French psychologist Alfred Binet (1857–1911) in Paris in 1905. ![]()
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