THE HEREDITARIAN THEORY OF IQ 26 /that advocated, contrary to Binet's wishes, the testing and ranking
of all children.
Other propagandists used the army results to defend racial
segregation and limited access of blacks to higher education. Cor-
nelia James Cannon, writing in the Atlantic Monthly in 1922, noted
that 89 percent of blacks had tested as morons and argued (quoted
in Chase, 1977, p. 263):
Emphasis must necessarily be laid on the development of the primary
schools, on the training in activities, habits, occupations which do not
demand the more evolved faculties. In the South particularly... the
education of the whites and colored in separate schools may have justifi-
cation other than that created by race prejudice. ... A public school sys-
tem, preparing for life young people of a race, 50 percent of whom never
reach a mental age of 10, is a system yet to be perfected.
But the army data had their most immediate and profound im-
pact upon the great immigration debate, then a major political issue
in America. Restriction was in the air, and would have occurred
without scientific backing. (Consider the wide spectrum of support
that limitationists could muster—from traditional craft unions fear-
ing multitudes of low-paid laborers, to jingoists and America firsters
who regarded most immigrants as bomb-throwing anarchists and
who helped make martyrs of Sacco and Vanzetti.) But the timing,
and especially the peculiar character, of the 1924 Restriction Act
clearly reflected the lobbying of scientists and eugenicists, and the
army data formed their most powerful battering ram (see Chase,
1977; Kamin, 1974; and Ludmerer, 1972).
Henry Fairfield Osborn, trustee of Columbia University and
president of the American Museum of Natural History, wrote in
1923, in a statement that I cannot read without a shudder when I
recall the gruesome statistics of mortality for World War I:
I believe those tests were worth what the war cost, even in human life,
if they served to show clearly to our people the lack of intelligence in our
country, and the degrees of intelligence in different races who are coming
to us, in a way which no one can say is the result of prejudice.... We have
learned once and for all that the negro is not like us. So in regard to many
races and subraces in Europe we learned that some which we had believed
possessed of an order of intelligence perhaps superior to ours [read Jews]
were far inferior.