Knowledge And Decisions

What was the compelling evidence that led the early test experts to conclude that southern and eastern Europeans — including Jews¹²³ — were innately intellectually inferior to other European “races”? They scored lower on mental tests — averaging I.Q.’s of about 85, the same as blacks today nationally, and slightly lower than northern blacks.¹²⁴ What was controlled or held constant in these statistical comparisons? Practically nothing. The new immigrants (Jews, Italians, Slovaks, etc.) almost by definition averaged fewer years in the United States than most of the older immigrant groups (Germans, Irish, Britons, etc.), spoke correspondingly less English, and lived in commensurably lower socioeconomic conditions. When years of residence in the United States were held constant, the mental test differences disappeared.¹²⁵ In the massive World War I testing program, the results on many subsets of the tests showed the modal number of correct answers to be zero — indicating little understanding of the instructions.¹²⁶ On those subsections where special efforts were made to elaborate instructions or to demonstrate what was expected, zero scores were less common, even when the questions themselves were more complex (the same was true of black soldiers).¹²⁷ Some “intelligence” test questions dealt with such peculiarly American phenomena as the name of the Brooklyn National League baseball team, Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, and the author of Huckleberry Finn.¹²⁸ As for controlled samples, the methods of selecting which soldiers would take which test “varied from camp to camp, and sometimes from week to week at the same camp.”¹²⁹

These defects in testing were known to the “experts” who sweepingly labeled great portions of the human race as innately inferior. One rationale for accepting the results was offered by Carl Brigham:

The adjustment to test conditions is a part of the intelligence test. ... If the tests used included some mysterious type of situation that was “typically American,” we are indeed fortunate, for this is America, and the purpose of our inquiry is that of obtaining a measure of the character of our immigration. Inability to respond to a “typically American” situation is obviously an undesirable trait.¹³⁰

Whatever merit this kind of reasoning might have as a justification of the purely empirical predictive validity of a test, that is wholly different from reaching conclusions about genetic mental capacity as it must unfold in subsequent generations of American-born offspring — especially in the context of draconian proposals to forcibly control the reproduction of these groups. As for the correlation between immigrants’ mental test scores and their years of residence in the United States, this was dismissed by showing that immigrants with five years of residence taking the nonverbal test still did not reach native American test score levels¹³¹ — five years being presumably sufficient to change life-long cultural patterns, and a nonverbal test being presumed to be culturally unbiased. The ominous prediction of a declining national I.Q. — a prediction common in the literature in the United States and in other countries — had no empirical evidence, and as evidence accumulated over the years, it showed the national I.Q.’s in the United States and elsewhere either remaining constant or drifting upward, forcing later upward revisions of I.Q. standards.¹³²

The point here is not that particular results in a particular field during a particular era were wrong. The point rather is that a certain general pattern of behavior appeared that has been far more general, a pattern later reappearing when psychological fashions changed and equality of the races was now deemed to be proven by “evidence” equally as shaky. Moreover, it is a pattern apparent in many other areas having nothing to do with I.Q. or race.