2017 Mar 10^th

This morning’s paper carries a column by the right wing’s resident intellectual, George Will.  Will is rightfully upset that some Williams College students—Will calls them a “mob” – protested the appearance of Charles Murray, an author of “The Bell Curve.” Will claims the protestors were protesting their erroneous belief that the book supported the now discredited doctrine of eugenics; it didn’t. It does point out that poor people have more children than do rich people and suggests that this might have long term consequence.

He says, “Eugenics, the controlled breeding to improve heritable traits of human beings was a progressive cause.” Later Will modifies that a trifle by writing, “Between 1875 and 1925 when eugenics had many advocates, not all advocates were progressive, but advocates were disproportionally progressive because eugenics coincided with progressivism’s premises and agendas.” How could Will know that eugenics’ advocates were disproportionately progressive…and if they were, so what? Everybody then was piling on the eugenics bandwagon.

Will tells us that, “Progressives rejected the Founder’s natural rights doctrine and conception of freedom. Progressives said freedom is not the natural capacity of individuals whose rights pre-exist government. Rather, freedom is something achieved at different rates and indifferent degrees by different races.” Will should recognize that the natural rights theory sounds good in theory but the second and third sentences are right in fact. His apparent reverence for the “Founders” is remarkable because the founders allowed no one to vote unless they were white, male property owners; only these had “natural rights.” It was not until 1920 and the passage of the 19^th amendment that women got “the natural right” to vote.

Will writes, “At the urging of Robert Yerkes, president of the American Psychological Association during World War 1 the army did intelligence testing of conscripts so that the nation could inventory its human stock as it does livestock.” Will’s attempt at snarkiness is wrong twice over. The government’s “inventory of its human stock” first occurred with the first government census on August 2, 1790; it was repeated every ten years. It would be interesting to see the evidence, if he has any, that Yerkes urged the army, or that the army urged Yerkes to do intelligence testing. Will, as usual, presents no evidence either way.

 It was important for the army to have some idea about the intelligence of their recruits. There were millions of new soldiers. Some of these would have to design new army camps with running water, sewage disposal fields and paved streets. If you can’t learn simple geometry you can’t be trained to do those things. There were any number of similar jobs which would require very extended training or a very low success rate for less intelligent soldiers.

 The result was a paper and pencil group intelligence test that could be given to hundreds of men at a time; this was, imaginatively, called the Army Alpha. It was quite successful at predicting which recruits should be encouraged to become officers and which were more suited to become teamsters. It was far from perfect but it was better than nothing.

There were also many illiterate recruits and so a non-verbal intelligence test was developed that with reasonable success helped sort out the mentally challenged soldier from the simply uneducated. The Army Alpha later morphed into the Army General Classification Test (AGCT) of WW 2. I know something about both of these tests because I used them as example of primitive intelligence testing in my Introductory Psych Lab when I was teaching college students 50 years ago.