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Journal of the History of ihe Behavioral Sciences

13 (1977): 274-282.

WORLD WAR I INTELLIGENCE TESTING AND


THE DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY*
FRANZ SAMELSON

The participation of psychologists in World War I, especially through the mental


testing of the Army, brought national publicity and recognition to the struggling
young discipline. But while the war had contributed significantly to psychology, the
practical contributions of psychologists to the fightin efficiency of the Army, as well
as the scientific results emerging from the mountain of test data, turn out on closer ex-
amination to be rather equivocal.

Psychologists have always been quite concerned about the scientific status of their
discipline. Scientific theories (and their experimental base) have occupied a positiofl of
high prestige in the field. It is therefore not surprising that the traditional history of psy-
chology is largely a doxography of theoretical systems, and to a lesser extent a descrip-
tion of theoretical controversies. With little exaggeration, it can be characterized as a
predominantly internalist, as well as - in Herbert Butterfield’s terms - a rather
“whiggish,” history.’ The present essay attempts to broaden this perspective by looking
at an episode in which external events interacted markedly with developments in, and of,
psychology.
When Lewis M. Terman, of future Stanford-Binet-test fame, published his Ph.D.
thesis in 1906, it opened on a somewhat plaintive note: “One of the most serious
problems confronting psychology is that of connecting itself with life,” a task in which it
had been less successful than other sciences.2 The “New Psychology,” imported from
Europe in the 1880s and 1890s, and transformed in the process, had seen some respec-
table growth in America by that time. University laboratories had been founded, a
number of journals had been established, a growing association represented the scientific
interests of psychologists, and graduate training and research were expanding. Some
problems remained, however. While psychologists tried to present a united front to the
outside, internal rifts were fairly deep. They disagreed over the very definition of their
subject matter (mind, consciousness, behavior); over the proper methods (introspection
or “objective” procedures); over the goal of the new science (understanding mind or con-
trol of behavior). Partly due to this lack of consensus, the growth of psychology seemed
to slow down: the attempt to gain acceptance as a real science both in universities and
from the public was not altogether successful.
As Thomas M. Camfield showed in a recent paper on the professionalization of psy-
chology, the years before the First World War saw psychologists quite concerned about
their status. Several surveys and committees collected information about their discipline,
its growth in numbers, journal publications, students, course offerings, and other indices
*This pa r was presented at the eighth annual meeting of the Midwest Junto of the History of Science
Societ A riE975. My indebtedness to prior work on the topic by two historians, Thomas M. Camfield and
Danierj. Zevles, is gratefully acknowledged. I am also indebted to the Harvard Universit Archives, the Stan-
ford University Archives, and the Historical Library of the Yale Medical Library for t b r coo ration and
assistance in the archival research, as well as for their permission to quote from previously unpubEhed source
material. Finally, thanks are due to my colleague Leon Rappoport for his help with the revision of the paper.

FRANZSAMELSON social psychologist, is Professor of Psycholog at Kansas State University, Manhat-


P
tan. Ks. 66502. His earlier work was on social in uence and autioritarianism. In the last we years, he
has been trying to develop an approach to prob ems of the social psychological history o h developing
academic discipline, one episode of which is considered in the present paper.

214
WORLD WAR I INTELLIGENCE TESTING 275

of their standing.* While usually pointing to their discipline’s successes, these reports
seem a bit defensive and show an undercurrent of doubt and frustration. Thus a survey of
psychologists led Christian A. Ruckmich to conclude in 1912 that “psychology, after 25
years of growth, does not stand very high on the honor roll among other academic sub-
jects” (including some of equal age).‘ In his behaviorist manifesto of 1913, John B. Wat-
son argued that psychology had “failed signally, I believe, during the fifty-odd years of
its existence as an experimental discipline to make its place in the world as an undisputed
natural science.”6 And at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the APA in 1916, James
McKeen Cattell complained that “we are doing a larger quantity of work than any other
nation and work of equal value. But our accomplishment falls far below what it might be
and should be.”6 His explanation was the lack of financial support for psychological
research and the consequent failure to attract enough able men into the field. Even in
1919, a master’s thesis on its status bewailed the confusion and fractionation of the dis-
cipline. “The beginner in psychology must be confused by all the conflicting attitudes
with which he meets. The field seems to him to have no unity and no agreement. It shows
no approved method; no one acknowledged aim. . . . Psychology is at present like a rope,
the different strands of which have become unraveled and disentwined. . . . There is,
however, a brighter side to the modern situation,” the report continued.?
Indeed, psychology’s status was changing. In the same year, 1919, a psychologist,
James R. Angell, replaced the noted astronomer G. E. Hale as chairman of the new
government organization of natural scientists, the National Research Council. Another
psychologist, Robert M. Yerkes, was appointed chairman of an important NRC Divi-
sion, the Research Information Service, a post which kept Yerkes in Washington for five
years. A separate NRC Division was set up for psychologists (in conjunction with
anthropologists) who for two years had functioned as a committee in the Division of
Medical and Related Sciences. And soon afterward, the National Academy of Sciences
published in their series of Memoirs a huge volume devoted exclusively to recent psy-
chological work? At least in Washington, the psychologists had arrived; they had finally
been accepted as scientific equals by their colleagues in the natural sciences.
The general public, too, was changing its attitude toward the new science. While still
pushing for more financial support, Cattell declared in 1922 that the recent developments
had put psychology “on the map of the United States.”“ Edwin G. Boring at Harvard
concurred, saying that the advertising that psychology had recently received in America
“reached into the remotest corner of the laboratory and swelled college classes, creating
a great demand for Ph.D. instructors.”’O Yerkes in Washington and other psychologists
were flooded with requests for information from individuals, school systems, business
firms, and industrial enterprises all over the country. In the judgment of one psychologist
in 1923, psychology had been rescued “from an indifferent public and lack of support, es-
sential to its continued existence in a democracy.”” And Terman declared in his
presidential address to the APA in 1923 that their discipline had been transformed from
“the ‘science of trivialities’ into ‘the science of human engineering.’ The psychologist of
the [earlier] era was, to the average layman, just a harmless crank. . . . no psychologist of
today can complain that his science is not taken seriously enough.”’2
While it might be wise to approach such claims with a bit of skepticism, they are
supported by some objective data, A statistical analysis of popular magazines between
1900 and 1930 was carried out by Hornell Hart for President Hoover’s Commission on
Recent Social Trends. It shows that after a brief flurry in the first decade, articles on
laboratory psychology appeared at a rather low rate in popular magazines. But the new
276 FRANZ SAMELSON

psychological topics show an impressive rate of articles in the early twenties, a rate
higher in fact than any other topic in the pure and applied sciences tabulated by Hart
(and exceeded only by what he called commercial applications of science: movies, radio,
and automobiles).18
What had produced the dramatic change in the position of psychologists vis-A-vis
the natural scientists and the public at large? World War’I and the war activities of the
psychologiits, especially the intelligence testing of the U.S. Army in this war, had given
Terman and his colleagues the chance to connect scientific psychology to life, to bring
“psychology down from the clouds and [make] it useful to men.”“
In rough outline, these activities took the following course. Practically on the day
war was declared, psychologists went to work, forming a dozen committees on war-
related topics. While some of these committees never got off the ground, and others
engaged in useful but limited experimental work for the Army and the Navy, the Com-
mittee on Methods of Psychological Examining of Recruits quickly organized for a ma-
jor effort under the prodding of Robert Yerkes. Yerkes, a Harvard psychologist,
happened to be in a strategic place as President of the APA in 1917. While known
primarily as an animal psychologist, especially for his pioneering work with the great
apes, he had become involved in intelligence testing. A few years before the war, he had
constructed the Yerkes-Bridges Point Scale of Intelligence, an instrument intended as an
improvement over Binet-type tests.16 By May 1917, Yerkes had assembled a group of
specialists in test construction, among them Lewis Terman, who had recently published
the Stanford Revision of the Binet test. Their goal was to produce a test which would be
useful to the Army, primarily through eliminating feeble-minded recruits. Realizing
quickly that individual testing would be too time-consuming, the committee developed a
novel instrument, the group intelligence test A, supplemented by a group skill test for il-
literates, both tests designed to measure “native ability rather than the results of school
training.” Through the NRC, the proposals were submitted to the Army, which
proceeded to establish a Division of Psychology under the Surgeon General (though the
commissions were in the Sanitary Corps rather than in the Medical Corps, to the chagrin
of Yerkes and his crew).IB
After some trial runs in the Army and additional research in universities, the tests
were modified into what became famous as the Army Alpha and Beta examinations.
Working his way through the bureaucracy of the Army, Major Yerkes recruited psy-
chological personnel, organized a training school for psychological examiners at Fort
Oglethorpe, and eventually convinced the Army of the feasibility of the testing plan. In a
staggering effort, considering the novelty of the task, the limited resources, and the
organizational difficulties, eventually over two million intelligence tests were given in
order “a) To aid in segregating and eliminating the mentally incompetent, b) To classify
men according to their mental ability, c) To assist in selecting competent men for respon-
sible positions.””
Stories about this novel procedure soon reached the public through newspapers and
magazines and aroused its curiosity, interest, and admiration. Actually, the publicity was
not unwanted. Indeed, in June of 1918, before the really large-scale testing had begun,
one of the discussion topics of a Washington meeting of the examining committee had
been “the desirability of publicity concerning psychological military service and feasible
ways of educating psychologists, educators and others concerning the work of psy-
chologists in connection with the Army and Navy.”18 After the war, Colonel Yerkes, by
then chairman of the NRC‘s Research Information Service, was in a good position to do
WORLD WAR I INTELLIGENCE TESTING 277

just that. In a number of speeches, articles, and books, he and others publicized their war
work, its methods, and results.’*
Close to 2 million men had been tested. Some 8,000 men had been recommended
for immediate discharge because of mental inferiority; for similar reasons, 19,000 men
had been assigned to either labor or development battalions; considerable variation in the
intelligence level of different Army units had been found, resulting in inefficient outfits
that could be improved by more systematic assignments; the outcome of officers*train-
ing was predictable from intelligence test scores. Altogether, it had been shown that the
application of large-scale psychological testing could result in a huge increase in the ef-
ficiency of an organization like the Army and produce savings of millions of dollars to
the government.
As one consequence of this success, the General Education Fund gave a grant of
$25,000 of Rockefeller money to the NRC for the construction of a group intelligence
test for school children. The National Intelligence Test, as it was called, was eventually
given to perhaps 7 million children in the United States during the twenties.20Industrial
and business firms moved quickly and eagerly to adapt these new methods of scientific
management to their purposes. As one of the psychological test specialists described it
later: “Before the World War, the average intelligent layman probably had little con-
fidence in the value or the use of mental tests. After the War, he believed that psy-
chologists had devised a simple and relatively perfect method of measuring in-
telligence.”21
After the increases in efficiency had shown applied psychological science to be a
practical success, discussion shifted to the scientific findings contained in the Army data.
All through the war activities, there runs a slender thread indicating some conflict about
whether the focus of the work should be practical-applied or basic scientific research. On
occasion, the testers were accused both by Army personnel and by some of .their
colleagues of being more concerned with the collection of scientific data than with help-
ing the Army. For example, the fact that they asked the recruit to indicate his home town
and state or country of birth - information irrelevant to the task of mental classification
- seemed to indicate to the Army that its interests and those of the psychologists were at
heart different.22Indeed, both Terman and Yerkes had, before the war, seen the need for
large-scale normative data for the intelligence tests they were developing; both had
applied, independently, to the General Education Fund for a large grant in order to test
an entire large school system.29While the war had interfered with these plans, it had
succeeded in providing them with larger samples than they had ever dreamt of. After the
armistice, results began to emerge from this mass of data.
The first one, that the average mental age of the American soldier was only thirteen
years*‘ (while twelve years had been considered the upper limit of feeble-mindedness)
startled and shocked the public, and it was fed into the postwar debate about eugenics,
race deterioration, democracy, and public education. Another result was to provide the
scientific evidence for what everybody except a few sentimentalists had known before:
that the mental ability of Negro soldiers was vastly inferior to that of white soldiers.
Among whites, there was a clear relation between intelligence and occupation, indicating
that by and large the occupational and class structure of the country was not arbitrary
but was based on merit and inborn worth.z6And finally, analysis of the country-of-origin
data showed a systematic relationship of intelligence to nationality: the mental ability of
foreign-born soldiers decreased progressively from northern Europe to southern and
eastern European countries - a result fitting particularly well into the postwar efforts to
278 FRANZ SAMELSON

restrict the “new” immigration from southeastern Europe. The capstone of this inter-
pretation was a book by Princeton psychologist Carl C. Brigham, which took the data to
demonstrate the thesis of Nordic superiority as proclaimed by Madison Grant and others
in the eugenics movement and the Immigration Restriction League.16
It needs to be emphasized that such interpretations of the Army data were not made
only by publicists and politicians taking information out of context and exploiting it for
their own purposes. These results were reported as scientific findings by the psychologists
themselves (although usually with some qualifications and calls for further research -
which, after all, was their career). When the first round of the postwar immigration
restriction debate in Congress got under way in 1921, Yerkes wrote letters to the
chairmen of the immigration committees in both houses, calling their attention to the of-
ficial report on the Army tests, and especially the chapters on foreign-born soldiers, since
these data seemed relevant to the immigration question.5’ Yerkes also promoted the
Brigham book, which called for selective immigration restriction since the Army data
had shown the inferiority of the Alpine and Mediterranean races to the Nordic race.
Indeed, Yerkes wrote the introduction for the book, in which he said: “The author
presents not theories or opinions but facts. . . . no one of us as a citizen can afford to ig-
nore the menace of race deterioration or the evident relations of immigration to national
progress and welfare.”26
These scientific “facts,” which aroused considerable interest in the public, did not
remain unchallenged and were eventually abandoned one by one, except perhaps as pre-
judices. The first one to go was the thirteen-year-old mentality of the average American,
which turned out to be based on misunderstandings and somewhat arbitrary definitions.
The second one to fall (but not until after passage of the discriminatory immigration act
of 1924) was the “fact” of intelligence differences between white races or nationalities.
By 1927, Brigham refused to participate on a panel about the nature-nurture issue
because he no longer knew what to believe, and in 1930 he called his earlier work “one of
the most pretentious of these comparative racial studies , . . [which] was without foun-
* this shift was produced not so much by new data, but rather a loss of in-
d a t i ~ n . ” ~Yet
terest in this issue (together with the realization that the original conclusions had
overinterpreted the data). The belief in the innate inferiority of Negroes and the lower
classes lingered longer. It took the horrors of Nazi racism to shift the center of scientific
opinion to the liberal-environmental position on group differences in intelligence.
While these scientific findings from the Army testing gradually dropped out of sight
- and out of the books on the history of psychology - the Army Alpha and Beta as
prototypes of group intelligence tests, and the Army testing as an example of the
successful large-scale application of psychological science to a practical problem, per-
sisted in such books considerably But was at least this practical part of the
Army testing really a success? Did it in fact help make the Army more efficient, help end
the war earlier, and save the government millions of dollars? There is no doubt that the
Army psychologists achieved a spectacular organizational feat in the face of great
obstacles. Against the prejudices of the Army leadership and of their colleagues in the
Medical Corps, they managed with limited support and manpower to develop a new in-
strument and to administer it, under often preposterous conditions, to 1.7 million more
or less willing men.
But when one starts looking for concrete evidence of the practical usefulness of the
testing, one comes up short. A careful reading of the reports by Yerkes, Boring, and
others shows that even they admit to less than overwhelming results. In Boring’s History
WORLD WAR I INTELLIGENCE TESTING 279

of Experimental Psychology, the statement about the huge publicity the Army operation
produced for psychology is preceded by the comment that “the Armistice of 1918 came
too soon to get much use out of the results” (p. 575). And in an unpublished manuscript
of 1923, he summed up the Army experience in the following way:
It is usual to say now that the American Army, in adopting the intelligence tests, ex-
emplified the American capacity to profit by scientific discovery; whereas, as a
matter of fact, the American Army, before the armistice, never thoroughly, as a
practical working matter, adopted the intelligence tests. Even when the tests were
given to all recruits the results were not always recorded where they could be used,
and when they were recorded they were not always put to use. The fate of the tests
depended upon fortuitous circumstances. . . . Seldom were the tests taken for what
they were worth; almost always were they taken for more than they were worth or
rejected for less than they were worth.81
Yerkes, in his published statements, tried hard to give examples of the demonstrated
usefulness of the mental tests, and he reproduced at length favorable testimonials from
high-ranking officers to that effect. But a careful reading of his arguments shows that
more often than not he was really saying that the test data could have increased the ef-
ficiency of the Army and could have saved the government millions of dollars - ifthe in-
formation had been used.82
The Army was not convinced of even that much. In any case, the new peacetime
Army quickly dropped the intelligence testing of its soldiers. According to Kevles, the
War Plans Division, concerned with the well-being and usefulness of recruits, did not
want men of low mentality to be officially identified by test scores, since such a practice
would probably “result in their becoming objects of public ridicule and the butt of prac-
tical jokes, a situation not tending toward military efficiency.”s8 For use with illiterate
volunteers, it requested a simple device, not an intelligence scale, for “separating the in-
apt candidates” from those who “with proper training and thorough instruction in
English [would] meet the requirements of the Army.”a4 And when psychologists set out
to produce the new Army General Classification Tests at the outbreak of World War 11,
one of their first decisions was not to label these tests as I Q tests, to make no reference to
mental age, grade levels, or innate mental abilitie~.~’
Were these difficulties and delays a result of the resistance of the rigid military mind
to scientific innovation? To a large extent, this may be true. But the Army was not alone
to blame, One of the root problems was the belief of the psychologists that they were
scientifically measuring essentially “native ability rather than the results of school
training,” a belief for which they had no real grounds except their awareness that this was
what they had set out to do, and of course, their prior assumptions about the nature of in-
telligence. When they found that Alpha and Beta scores correlated highly with amount of
education, they took this to demonstrate that “native intelligence is one of the most im-
portant conditioning factors in continuance in school”, rather than the other way
around.adSurely they knew that, at least for many Negroes in the South, continuance in
school was impossible no matter what the student’s intelligence, since the schools did not
exist.
In order to provide safeguards for the individual, the official testing policy had
prescribed that any recruit failing the group tests would be given an individual ex-
amination.” But it is quite clear that the vast majority of Negroes who failed the Beta
test were not examined individually. Presumably, under time pressure and lacking in
manpower, the testers thought it unnecessary, since the outcome of such examinations
280 FRANZ SAMELSON

was obvious anyway - even though there is some evidence that when individual ex-
aminations were given to Negroes, the results showed a noticeable improvement over the
Beta scores.ss Furthermore, there is the criticism of Beta in an internal memorandum by
one of the psychologists:
The Beta tests are rather erratic in their re ression weightings. . . . It is believed that
the indications for these Beta tests woul(k have been much better if the Army ex-
aminers had not been forced by superior authority to make the tests as incom-
prehensible to the subjects examined as possible. For the sake of making results
from the various camps comparable, the examiners were ordered to follow a certain
detailed and specific series of ballet antics, which had not only the merit of being
perfectly incom rehensible and unrelated to mental testing, but also lent a hi hly
confusing and istracting mystical atmos here to the whole performance, e fec-
B
tually preventing all ap roach to the attitu e in which a subject should be while hav-
P
P
ing his soul tested. Fair y good results were obtained whenever these orders were dis-
obeyed?@
There is even some indication that Negro recruits, capable of understanding English
even if not capable of reading it, were so mystified by the nonverbal pantomime instruc-
tions for the Beta test, that they dozed off en masse.‘O Yet the summary reports, often
repeated later, gave only the cold scientific fact that with an average mental age of ten,
“the intellectual status of the Negro [was] greatly inferior to that of the white.“ And as
for Army Alpha, another in-house statistical analysis (by psychologist Carl Brown) con-
cluded: “The results of a very exhaustive study of all of the available data on the relation
of the test to usefulness in the army and to officer’s estimates of a single phase of
usefulness, that is, intelligence, are proportionately very meagre.”42
So much for some of the details. To conclude briefly: The Army psychologists were
not con men fabricating data. They worked hard and arduously collecting their scientific
observations. The 500 pages of tables, correlations, etc. in the National Academy of
Science Memoirs were genuine. An internalist history would conclude that the Army
work, while not producing any conceptual breakthroughs, contributed significantly to
the development of the methodology and the theory of psychological testing. The sub-
stantive results of the research turned out to be questionable, if not falsified; but those are
the ways of empirical science.
From a more externalist point of view, Camfield describes the outcome well: “. . . if
psychology had not in fact contributed significantly to the war, the war had contributed
significantly to psych~logy.”‘~“Wartime publicity accomplished what decades of
academic research and teaching could not have equaled.”“ Psychology had indeed been
“put on the map.”
On the other hand, the price for this success was paid in part by some of the psy-
chologists’ subjects: immigrants, blacks, the lower classes, and others labeled mentally
inferior. One can argue, however, that this was only a codification of conventional
wisdom and really did not make much differen~e.‘~ The major impact of the testers’
success was probably on the educational system; but we do not even know the dimensions
of this effect, to say nothing about its consequences.
What, then, is this piece of history about: an episode in the success story of empirical
science, or a horror story of scientific ideology?
WORLD WAR I INTELLIGENCE TESTING 28 1

FOOTNOTES
1. See Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Inter retation of History (New York: Scribners, 1951). See also
Franz Samelson, “History, Origin Myth, and pdeology: Comte’s ‘Discovery’ of Social Psychology,” Journal
for the Theory of Social Behaviour 4(1974): 217-231.
2. Lewis M. Terman, “Genius and Stupidity,” Pedagogical Seminary 13 (1906): 307.
3. Thomas M. Camfield “The Professionalization of American Psychology,” Journal of the History ofthe
Behavioral Sciences 9(1973): 66-75.
4. Christian A. Ruckmich, “The Last Decade of Psychology in Review,” Psychological Bulletin 13(1916):
I10 n.6. See also American Psychological Association, Report of the Committee on the Academic Status of
Psychology (Printed by the Committee, December 1914).
5. John B. Watson, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It,” Psychological Review 20(1913): 164.
6. James M. Cattell, “Our Psychological Association and Research,” Science 45(1917): 280.
7. John A. McGeoch, The Present Statur ofPsychology (Colorado Springs: Colorado College Publications,
General Series No. 103, 1919), pp. 40, 52.
8. Robert M. Yerkes, ed., Psychological Examining in the United States Army, Memoirs of the National
Academy of Science, Vol. 15 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1921).
9. James M. Cattell. “The First Year of the Psychological Corporation,” report at annual meeting of the
Psychological Corporation, I December 1922 (mimeographed), p. 5. Box 15, Lewis M. Terman Papers, Stan-
ford University Archives (hereafter cited as Terman Papers).
10. Edwin G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology (2nd ed., New York: Appleton-Century, 1950).
p. 575.
11. Frederick Kuhlmann, reply to L. M. Terman’s survey on tests for his presidential address, 1923 (n.d.).
Box 20, Terman Papers.
12. Lewis M. Terman, “The Mental Test as a Psychological Method,” Psychological Review 31 (1924): 106.
13. Hornell Hart, “Changing Social Attitudes and Interests,” in Recent Social Trends, Re ort of the
President’s Research Committee on Social Trends (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933), Chap. 8, Tabg 3, p. 393.
14. Terman, “The Mental Test,” pp. 105-106.
15. Robert M. Yerkes, James W. Bridges, and Rose S . Hardwick, A Point Scale for Measuring Mental
Ability (Baltimore: Warwick and York, 1915).
16. Yerkes, ed., Psychological Examining. pp. 300, 98.
17. Ibid, p. 19.
18. Minutes of Conference of Sub-committee on Methods of Examining Recruits (Psychology Committee,
National Research Council, 17-21 June 1918), p. 6. Box 20, Terman Papers.
19. Clarence S. Yoakum and Robert M. Yerkes, Army Mental Tests (New York: Holt, 1920); Robert M.
Yerkes, ed., The New World ofscience (New York: Century, 1920); Robert M. Yerkes, “Testing the Human
Mind,” Atlantic Monthly 131(1923): 358-370.
20. Fourth Annual Report o the National Research Council (Washington: Government Printing Office,
1920), p. 6; Thomas M. Cam ffield, Psychologists at War: The History of American Psychology and the First
World War (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas, 1969 [University Microfilms, 1970, No. 70-
107661). p, 285.
21. Frank N. Freeman, Mental Tests (rev. ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939), p. 14.
22. Daniel J. Kevles, “Testing the Army’s Intelligence: Psychologists and the Military in World War I,”
Journal of American History 55(1968): 574.
23. Terman correspondence tiles: General Education Fund. Box 2, Terman Papers.
24. Yerkes, ed., Psychological Examining. p. 785.
25. Lewis M. Terman, “Were We Born that Way?’ World‘s Work 44(1922): 649-660.
26. Carl C. Brigham, A Study of American Intelligence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1923).
27. Robert M. Yerkes to Congressman Albert Johnson and Senator LeBaron B. Colt, 11 February 1921.
Robert M. Yerkes Papers, Historical Library, Yale Medical Library.
28. Brigham, A Study of American Intelligence, pp. vii-viii.
29. Brigham to Terman, 27 December 1927, Box 3, Terman Papers; Carl C. Brigham, “Intelligence Tests of
Immigrant Groups,” Psychological Review 37(1930): 165.
30. See, e.g., Freeman, Mental Tests. pp. 3, 113f.
3 I . Edwin G. Boring, “Intelligence as the Tests Test It,” p. 2. Edwin G. Boring Papers, Harvard University
Archives.
32. See, e.g., Yerkes, “Testing the Human Mind,” pp. 362,365. See also Camfield, Psychologistsat War, pp.
199, 214.
33. Kevles, Testing the Army’s Intelligence, pp. 578, 519.
34. War Department, Annual Report. 1919 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1919), pp. 2790,2791.
35. Walter V. Bingham, “Psychological Services in the United States Army,” Journal of Consulting
Psychology 5(1941): 223.
282 FRANZ SAMELSON

36. Yerkes, ed., Psychological Examining, p. 780.


37. War Department, Annual Report, 1919. p. 2790.
38. Yerkes, ed., Psychological Examining, pp 74-76, 85, 736.
39. Ben Wood, in Truman E. Kelley’s Statistical Report (typed, n.d., cover letter dated 16 September 1919),
p. 34. Box 12, Terman Papers.
40. Francis P. Donnelly, “Have You an American Intelligence?” America, July 14, 1923, p. 295; Yerkes, ed.,
Psychological Examining, p. 705.
41. Yerkes, “Testing the Human Mind,” p. 364.
42. Carl Brown, “Facts and Opinions about Army Alpha and Beta,” (typed, n.d.) p. 1. Box 12, Terman
Papers.
43. Camfield, Psychologists at War, p. 257. It has been claimed by a reviewer that screening out the unfit men
alone made the testing “not only a success but vital.” But the facts appear to be as follows: Some five million
men received a physical examination for the Army, of whom 800,000 were rejected for many reasons, 42,000 of
these for mental or educational deficiency. Another 35,000 were separated from the Arm for mental or
emotional reasons. See Eli Ginzber The Lost Divisions (New York: Columbia University Jress, 1959), p
142-145. Yerkes reported that psyckologists recommended the discharge of fewer than 8,000 mentally u n k
men. Furthermore, psychologists only recommended discharge. Dischar e boards were composed of line and
medical officers; occasionall , a psychologist was placed on the board. t h e r e is no clear evidence indicating
whether all, some, or none ofYthe psychologists’ recommendations were accepted by the boards. Circumstantial
evidence, as some of Yerkes’s and Boring s comments, seems to indicate that the recommendations were not
always accepted. Finally, there is no hard evidence indicatin how many of the 8,000 men recommended for
discharge by the testers were or, would have been, in fact, usekss to the Army, or worse. The correlation coef-
ficients presented in the Memoir volume are clearly not enough to demonstrate this point. See, e.g., the com-
ment about test results from consultants with the Allied Expeditionary Force, War Department, Annual
Report, 1919, p. 3101; also Eli Ginzberg and Douglas W. Bray, The Uneducated (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1953) for the complexities of this problem. Altogether the testing at best screened out 1/6 of
1% of the total manpower pool, 1% of all rejects, or 10% of those rejected/dischar ed as mentally unfit; it may
have screened out practical1 none while at worst, it eliminated a relatively smafi number of men whom the
Army could in fact have uselsuccessfull . Thus, elimination of unfit recruits may have been of some use; but it
was hardly a vital contribution. Yerkes Kimself never claimed as much. (The figures on assignment of recruits
to development battalions indicate a similar situation.)
44. Robert M. Yerkes, “Testament,” unpublished manuscript (ca. 1949), p. 201. Robert M. Yerkes Papers,
Historical Library,
- . Yale Medical Library.
45. Regarding immigration restriction, see Franz Samelson, “On the Science and Politics of the IQ,”Social
Research 42 (1975): 467-488.

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