DIFFERENTIAL MINDS: MASS INTELLIGENCE TESTING AND RACE SCIENCE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY by Kate E. Sohasky A dissertation submitted to the Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Baltimore, Maryland May 9, 2017 © Kate E. Sohasky All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT Historians have argued that race science and eugenics retreated following their discrediting in the wake of the Second World War. Yet if race science and eugenics disappeared, how does one explain their sudden and unexpected reemergence in the form of the neohereditarian work of Arthur Jensen, Richard Herrnstein, and Charles Murray? This dissertation argues that race science and eugenics did not retreat following their discrediting. Rather, race science and eugenics adapted to changing political and social climes, at times entering into states of latency, throughout the twentieth century. The transnational history of mass intelligence testing in the twentieth century demonstrates the longevity of race science and eugenics long after their discrediting. Indeed, the tropes of race science and eugenics persist today in the modern I.Q. controversy, as the dissertation shows. By examining the history of mass intelligence testing in multiple nations, this dissertation presents narrative of the continuity of race science and eugenics throughout the twentieth century. Dissertation Committee: Advisors: Angus Burgin and Ronald G. Walters Readers: Louis Galambos, Nathaniel Comfort, and Adam Sheingate Alternates: François Furstenberg and Sharon Kingsland ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………ii Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………iii List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………….iv Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….1 Chapter One……………………………………………………………………………...25 Chapter Two……………………………………………………………………………...70 Chapter Three…………………………………………………………………………..126 Chapter Four……………………………………………………………………………173 Chapter Five…………………………………………………………………………….221 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...276 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………283 Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………….302 Curriculum Vitae……………………………………………………………………….304 iii LIST OF FIGURES Group Examinations in a Hospital Ward, Camp Lee, October 1917…………………….32 Group Examination Alpha being taken by Black Recruits………………………………32 Eleven-year old Scottish School Children from the 1947 Scottish Mental Survey…….109 iv INTRODUCTION On March 2, 2017, protesters at Middlebury College in Vermont carrying signs that read “No Eugenics” interrupted an on-campus lecture given by Charles Murray, co- author of The Bell Curve. The protesters hurled accusations that Murray was a white nationalist, chanting, “racist, sexist, anti-gay, Charles Murray go away!” The protest forced the cancellation of the lecture, eliciting strong reactions from right-wing groups. Objectors to the protests decried the death of freedom of speech and the “intolerance” of the left. In an open letter, students protested that the matter was not one of free speech, but of scholarly integrity. The letter, which read, “in this case, there’s not really any ‘other side,’ only deceptive statistics masking unfounded bigotry,” argued that Murray’s research was pseudoscientific and therefore had no place on a university campus. Murray was forced to flee the campus and at least one individual sustained injuries as the protest turned riotous.1 The I.Q. controversy consists of the heated debates surrounding several key issues in intelligence testing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the definition and measurement of intelligence, the factors that determine intelligence, intellectual differences between groups, and the relation of intelligence to differential fertility. This recent incident underscores the urgency and relevance of the I.Q. controversy in modern times. More than twenty years after its initial publication, The Bell Curve continues to stand as representative of the enduring influence of race science and eugenics within this broader controversy. The Middlebury protests reveal critical and enduring themes of the I.Q. controversy, including condemnations of racist science, often from the left; accusations of the oppressive consensus and intellectual fraudulence of the academic 1 Katharine Q. Seelye, “Protesters Disrupt Speech by ‘Bell Curve’ Author at Vermont College,” New York Times, March 2, 2017. 1 establishment, generally from the right; and the persistence of race science despite its discrediting by mainstream science. The Bell Curve, published in 1994 and authored by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, revived the I.Q. controversy of the 1970s when it reintroduced the polemical claim that differences in black and white students’ I.Q. test scores had a genetic basis. Reflecting on The Bell Curve twenty years after its first publication, Murray claimed in a 2014 interview conducted by the conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, “the reaction to ‘The Bell Curve’ exposed a profound corruption of the social sciences that has prevailed since the 1960s. ‘The Bell Curve’ is a relentlessly moderate book – both in its use of evidence and in its tone – and yet it was excoriated in remarkably personal and vicious ways, sometimes by eminent academicians who knew very well they were lying.” He argued, “the social sciences have been in the grip of a political orthodoxy that has had only the most tenuous connection with empirical reality, and too many social scientists think that threats to the orthodoxy should be suppressed by any means necessary. Corruption is the only word for it.” In Murray’s view, corruption, however, was not solely responsible for the mainstream scientific community’s outspoken defamation of The Bell Curve. Murray continued, “now that I’ve said that, I’m also thinking of all the other social scientists who have come up to me over the years and told me what a wonderful book ‘The Bell Curve’ is. But they never said it publicly. So corruption is one thing that ails the social sciences. Cowardice is another.”2 Murray denied that The Bell Curve was ever about race or the genetic basis of I.Q.: their work had been misconstrued and misrepresented by its critics who exaggerated 2 Natalie Goodnow, “‘The Bell Curve’ 20 years later: A Q&A with Charles Murray,” AEIdeas, October 16, 2014, http://www.aei.org/publication/bell-curve-20-years-later-qa-charles-murray/. 2 the book’s emphasis on race and twisted their words on the influence of genetics in the development of group and individual intelligence.3 He attributed this libel to the corruption and cowardice of the establishment, stating that “fifty years from now, I bet those claims about ‘The Bell Curve’ will be used as a textbook case of the hysteria that has surrounded the possibility that black-white differences in IQ are genetic.” Recounting the passage from the book that concluded, “it seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences,” he stated, “that’s it. The whole thing. The entire hateful Herrnstein-Murray pseudoscientific racist diatribe about the role of genes in creating the black-white IQ difference.” Murray thus portrayed himself and Herrnstein as the victims of the oppressive political orthodoxy of the scientific establishment, explaining, “if you say it is likely that there is any genetic component to the black-white difference in test scores, the roof crashes in on you.” Yet, Murray countered, “on this score, the roof is about to crash in on those who insist on a purely environmental explanation of all sorts of ethnic differences, not just intelligence. Since the decoding of the genome, it has been securely established that race is not a social construct, evolution continued long after humans left Africa along different paths in different parts of the world, and recent evolution involves cognitive as well as physiological functioning.”4 This revealing claim casts doubt on Murray’s assertion that The Bell Curve was never about race or the genetic basis of intellectual differences between groups. In a subsequent interview with the American Enterprise Institute, Murray asserted, “the dirty little secret about ‘The Bell Curve’ is that it did not push the scientific envelope 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 3 at all. We were in the scientific mainstream. Every single significant statement we made – scientific statement we made – has not only not been refuted; they have been confirmed by subsequent research.”5 Murray’s representation of mainstream science on I.Q. recalls the claims of neohereditarians of the 1970s, including Richard Herrnstein, William Shockley, and Arthur Jensen, who accused the liberal establishment of covering up unpleasant scientific truths about race and class differences in intelligence, and of placing a gag on dissenters by defaming them publicly. The corruption Murray describes similarly resonates with the claims of hereditarian experts of the 1990s who accused the liberal political orthodoxy of silencing researchers for voicing politically incorrect scientific truths. Such accusations of Lyseknoism, so-named after the Soviet program in genetics run by Trofim Lysenko that actively promoted disproven scientific theories about heredity for political ends, had abounded in the United States since the 1950s and served as powerful tools in the hands of hereditarians eager to demonstrate the scientific invalidity of their opposition. Murray elaborated further that I.Q. had significant policy implications that were