THE HEREDITARIAN THEORY OF IQ 195morons to breed and keep foreign ones out. As a contribution to
the second step, Goddard and his associates visited Ellis Island in
1912 "to observe conditions and offer any suggestions as to what
might be done to secure a more thorough examination of immi-
grants for the purpose of detecting mental defectives" (Goddard,
1917, p. 253).
As Goddard described the scene, a fog hung over New York
harbor that day and no immigrants could land. But one hundred
were about ready to leave, when Goddard intervened: "We picked
out one young man whom we suspected was defective, and,
through the interpreter, proceeded to give him the test. The boy
tested 8 by the Binet scale. The interpreter said, 'I could not have
done that when I came to this country,' and seemed to think the
test unfair. We convinced him that the boy was defective" (God-
dard, 1913, p. 105).
Encouraged by this, one of the first applications of the Binet
scale in America, Goddard raised some funds for a more thorough
study and, in the spring of 1913, sent two women to Ellis Island for
two and a half months. They were instructed to pick out the feeble-
minded by sight, a task that Goddard preferred to assign to
women, to whom he granted innately superior intuition:
After a person has had considerable experience in this work, he almost
gets a sense of what a feeble-minded person is so that he can tell one afar
off. The people who are best at this work, and who I believe should do this
work, are women. Women seem to have closer observation than men. It
was quite impossible for others to see how these two young women could
pick out the feeble-minded without the aid of the Binet test at all (1913, p.
106).
Goddard's women tested thirty-five Jews, twenty-two Hungar-
ians, fifty Italians, and forty-five Russians. These groups could not
be regarded as random samples because government officials had
already "culled out those they recognized as defective." To balance
this bias, Goddard and his associates "passed by the obviously nor-
mal. That left us the great mass of 'average immigrants.' " (1917,
p. 244). (I am continually amazed by the unconscious statements of
prejudice that slip into supposedly objective accounts. Note here
that average immigrants are below normal, or at least not obviously
normal—the proposition that Goddard was supposedly testing, not
asserting a priori.)