REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION 29
Twentieth-century America has experienced three major epi-
sodes, each so correlated. The first constitutes one of the saddest
ironies of American history, and sets the longest chapter in The
Mismeasure of Man. We like to think of America as a land with gener-
ally egalitarian traditions, a nation "conceived in liberty and dedi-
cated to the proposition that all men are created equal." We
recognize, au contraire, that many European nations, with their long
histories of monarchy, feudal order, and social stratification, have
been less committed to ideals of socialjustice or equality of opportu-
nity. Since the IQ test originated in France, we might naturally as-
sume that the false hereditarian interpretation, so commonly and so
harmfuly imposed upon the tests, arose in Europe. Ironically, this
reasonable assumption is entirely false. As documented in Chapter
6, Alfred Binet, the French inventor, not only avoided a heredi-
tarian interpretation of his test, but explicitly (and fervently) warned
against such a reading as a perversion of his desire to use the tests
for identifying children who needed special help. (Binet argued that
an innatist interpretation would only stigmatize children as unteach-
able, thus producing a result opposite to his intent—a fear entirely
and tragically justified by later history.)*
The hereditarian interpretation of IQ arose in America, largely
through prosetylization of the three psychologists—H. H. Goddard,
L. M. Terman, and R. M. Yerkes—who translated and popularized
the tests in this country. If we ask how such a perversion could occur
in our land of liberty and justice for all, we must remember that the
years just following World War I, the time of peak activity for these
scientists, featured a narrow, parochial, jingoistic, isolationist "nativ-
ist" (WASP, not Indian), rally-round-the-flag, tinhorn patriotism
unmatched by any other period during our century, even in the
heyday of McCarthyism during the early 1950s. This was the age
of restriction upon immigration, the spread of Jewish quotas, the
execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the height of lynchings in the
Southern states. Interestingly, most of the men who built biodeter-
minism in the ig2os recanted their own conclusions during the lib-
eral swing of the 1930s, when Ph.D.'s walked depression breadlines
and poverty could no longer be explained by innate stupidity.
The two most recent episodes also correlate with political swings.
The first inspired me to write The Mismeasure of Man as a positive
reaction with an alternative vision (not, I trust, as a negativistic