THE HEREDITARIAN THEORY OF IQ
little intelligence the emotions will be uncontrolled and whether they be
strong or weak will result in actions that are unregulated, uncontrolled
and, as experience proves, usually undesirable. Therefore, when we mea-
sure the intelligence of an individual and learn that he has so much less
than normal as to come within the group that we call feeble-minded, we
have ascertained by far the most important fact about him (1919, p. 272).
Many criminals, most alcoholics and prostitutes, and even the
"ne'er do wells" who simply don't fit in, are morons: "We know
what feeble-mindedness is, and we have come to suspect all persons
who are incapable of adapting themselves to their environment
and living up to the conventions of society or acting sensibly, of
being feeble-minded" (1914, p. 571).
At the next level of the merely dull, we find the toiling masses,
doing what comes naturally. "The people who are doing the
drudgery," Goddard writes (1919, p. 246), "are, as a rule, in their
proper places."
We must next learn that there are great groups of men, laborers, who
are but little above the child, who must be told what to do and shown how
to do it; and who, if we would avoid disaster, must not be put into positions
where they will have to act upon their own initiative or their own judg-
ment.... There are only a few leaders, most must be followers (1919, pp.
243-244).
At the upper end, intelligent men rule in comfort and by right.
Speaking before a group of Princeton undergraduates in 1919,
Goddard proclaimed:
Now the fact is, that workmen may have a 10 year intelligence while
you have a 20. To demand for him such a home as you enjoy is as absurd
as it would be to insist that every laborer should receive a graduate fellow-
ship. How can there be such a thing as social equality with this wide range
of mental capacity?
"Democracy," Goddard argued (1919, p. 237), "means that the
people rule by selecting the wisest, most intelligent and most
human to tell them what to do to be happy. Thus Democracy is a
method for arriving at a truly benevolent aristocracy."
BREAKING THE SCALE INTO MENDEL1AN COMPARTMENTS
But if intelligence forms a single and unbroken scale, how can
We solve the social problems that beset us? For at one level, low
'ntelligence generates sociopaths, while at the next grade, indus-