PRETEND INTELLIGENCE 79
test into En glish in 1910. Goddard was director of the Vineland Training
School for Feebleminded Boys and Girls, in New Jersey. He was convinced
that ability and potential were biologically determined and that the test
would mea sure that potential and so suggest the disposal of testees.
In a ghastly tragicomedy, Goddard and associates targeted the waves
of immigrants pouring into the United States at that time. Amid distress-
ing scenes at the infamous reception center on Ellis Island, he managed
to ensure that all immigrants— men, women, and children of all ages—
were given the IQ test as soon as they landed. Th at was aft er long and try-
ing journeys, using the tests in En glish through interpreters. By these
means, the country came to be told that 83 percent of Jews, 80 percent of
Hungarians, 79 percent of Italians, and 87 percent of Rus sians were
feebleminded. Almost as bad were the Irish, Italians, and Poles and, bot-
tom of the list, the blacks. Only the Scandinavians and Anglo- Saxons
escaped such extremes of labeling.
Th ere seems little doubt that such fi ndings contributed to the xenopho-
bia that swept Amer i ca in the de cade of the 1920s and led to the 1924
Immigration Act that introduced an immigration quota system. More-
over, the amount of feeble- mindedness thus enumerated soon had these
psychologists pressing ardently for eugenic mea sures, which eventually
became law. Tens of thousands of surgical sterilizations followed. As
many historians of science have pointed out, the subsequent growth of
the use of IQ testing was that of a blatantly racist tool. Binet was later to
protest about the “brutal pessimism” in this subversion of his test, as if
the results indicated some fi xed quantity of the individual.
Writing in popu lar journals and magazines, Anglo- American psychol-
ogists thus came to pres ent the IQ test as a test of the actual ge ne tic worth
of people. Th en, as now, enormous benefi ts to individuals and society
were foreseen. In 1916, Lewis Terman, the author of the most famous IQ
test, claimed that testing “ will ultimately result in curtailing the produc-
tion of feeblemindedness and in the elimination of an enormous amount
of crime, pauperism, and industrial ineffi ciency.” And as a useful side-
eff ect, he said we could also “preserve our state for a class of people wor-
thy to posses it.”^6
So much from a few simple questions and puzzles. Th ese, of course,
were chosen because they refl ected learning that was more typical in
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