2J 2 THE MISMEASURE OF MAN
As friction and doubt mounted, the secretary of war polled com-
manding officers of all camps to ask their opinion of Yerkes's tests.
He received one hundred replies, nearly all negative. They were,
Yerkes admitted (p. 43), "with a few exceptions, unfavorable to
psychological work, and have led to the conclusion on the part of
various officers of the General Staff that this work has little, if any,
value to the army and should be discontinued." Yerkes fought back
and won a standoff (but not all the promotions, commissions, and
hirings he had been promised); his work proceeded under a cloud
of suspicion.
Minor frustrations never abated. Camp Jackson ran out of
forms and had to improvise on blank paper (p. 78). But a major
and persistent difficulty dogged the entire enterprise and finally,
as I shall demonstrate, deprived the summary statistics of any
meaning. Recruits had to be allocated to their appropriate test.
Men illiterate in English, either by lack of schooling or foreign
birth, should have taken examination Beta, either by direct assign-
ment, or indirectly upon failing Alpha. Yerkes's corps tried heroi-
cally to fulfill this procedure. In at least three camps, they marked
identification tags or even painted letters directly on the bodies of
men who failed—a ready identification guide for further assess-
ment (p. 73, p. 76): "A list of D men was sent within six hours after
the group examination to the clerk at the mustering office. As the
men appeared, this clerk marked on the body of each D man a
letter P" (indicating that the psychiatrist should examine them fur-
ther).
But standards for the division between Alpha and Beta varied
substantially from camp to camp. A survey across camps revealed
that the minimum score on an early version of Alpha varied from
20 to 100 for assignment to further testing (p. 476). Yerkes admit-
ted (p. 354):
This lack of a uniform process of segregation is certainly unfortunate.
On account of the variable facilities for examining and the variable quality
of the groups examined however, it appeared entirely impossible to estab-
lish a standard uniform for all camps.C. C. Brigham, Yerkes's most zealous votary, even complained
(1921):