Excerpt from an interview with Nicholas Lemann:
pbs.org
You said Carl Brigham wrote the SAT. Was he a racist?
Brigham was a reformed racist, basically. You have to be careful about how you use words like racist, because one of the difficult things about history is not being anachronistic. That is, not applying the standards of the present to the past. So it must be said that in 1920 virtually every respectable person in the United States was an unacceptable racist by today's standards. Just as an example, remember, you could not find a man who believed that women should occupy positions of authority in 1920.
Anyway, a very popular movement, particularly among establishment types in the teens and twenties was the eugenics movement which held that the kind of breeding stock of humans was worth looking at and that it was endangered. Eugenicists believed in the innate superiority and inferiority of races on a scale. They were very worried--remember that we had no immigration laws then--they were very worried about unimpeded immigration and how that would lead to a dilution of the superior racial stocks in America. This wasn't just a few nuts who thought this. This was Theodore Roosevelt, Oliver Wendell Holmes. All respectable people thought this stuff, or almost all, a few heroic ones did not. And by the way, when you say racist, these people didn't think in terms of whites and people of color. What we would call the white race they divided into a lot of little sub-races in order of superiority and inferiority. In particular there were three white races, according to this theory--Nordics, Alpines and Mediterraneans. So it was a cause for alarm, not just that non-whites were coming to the country, but that too many of the lower class of whites--Mediterraneans--were coming to the country.
Brigham wrote a book in 1923 called A Study of American Intelligence. This was based on his work on the Army Alpha Test. He analyzed the test results by race and found--as people who do that have always found--that people of color, Jews, Mediterraneans, anybody who wasn't a kind of what he would call a Nordic, was inherently intellectually inferior. And that the country was in big trouble because two many of these people were coming into the country. So this book is a kind of very ripe, racist book by today's standards, typical of establishment thinking of the time, although Brigham, you know, bothered to write it down. And it just stands up very well as an offensive piece of writing. Now, Brigham renounced it within about five years. To his great credit, he specifically disowned the book. He changed his mind, he broke with the eugenics movement and by the end of his life, was really one of the leading critics, of the eugenics movement. So he came around and deserves a lot of credit for that.
Is the SAT an IQ test?
According to people in the field--especially if they're sort of letting their hair down--they will say the SAT is essentially an IQ test,particularly the verbal portion is essentially an IQ test. I want to step back a little from the idea that the IQ test is a scientific measurement of intelligence. From the beginning, IQ tests essentially traffic in vocabulary items: antonyms, analogies, reading comprehension, it's a test of vocabulary fluency and accomplishment. So, the premise of an IQ test is that it is the same thing as intelligence. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. It's measuring one specific thing. It's not a magical, mystical test. The SAT grew out of an IQ test and the verbal in particular takes the oldest chestnut IQ testing techniques and applies them to high school seniors. And you know very widely, including in the Bell Curve itself, the SAT verbal score is used as a proxy IQ score, or is used as interchangeable with IQ scores. It's the thing that--to the extent that there's a sort of secret about Educational Testing Service, which administers the SAT, the secret is that at least the test makers there know that what they're doing is administering a mass IQ test but the organization's very invested in denying that.
It's not an accident that the emphasis was put on aptitude instead of achievement and as a matter of fact that Conant pretty much insisted on it?
First of all, Conant himself, although he was never a card-carrying member of the eugenics movement, clearly believed in the basic theory that intelligence is an innate and sort of biological quality and that it's the most important human quality. So that's the starting point. But on a more practical level, when he's starting the system in the 1930s and 40s, American education is highly various--it's a big country, you know, air travel and long distance telephony are in their infancy. Schools are just very different from place to place. There's no national curriculum. So you need a way to perform a straight-up comparison of high school students who have been exposed to very different kinds of education. And to Conant the IQ test or aptitude test is the best way to do that. He was quite insistent on that.
Conant had this kind of idealistic belief in creating a classless society. He was very, very tied to the idea of not favoring people who had been born into a privileged class, which is highly ironic today. So he thought that if you had tests that were achievement tests, or tests of mastery of the high school curriculum, it would be unfair to poor kids because they wouldn't have gone to good high schools. Anything that would help the rich kids who had been to fancy prep schools in the East Conant was against. So in his meetings with Chauncey about the SAT he would say over and over again, according to Chauncey, "Now are you sure this isn't an achievement test? Are you sure this is a pure aptitude test, pure intelligence? That's what I want to measure, because that is the way I think we can give poor boys the best chance and take away the advantage of rich boys."
What Conant wanted was to take an old elite and substitute for it a new elite. Is it fair to say that this is what Chauncey wanted or this is really only what Conant wanted?
The difference between Conant and Chauncey, one of the differences is that Conant was a man with a highly specific social vision. He had a particular idea about America that he wanted to put into place. He wanted to change the structure of the country in a specific way. Chauncey was a guy who was in love with testing. He believed testing is a miracle and it will solve all the problems of the world. He didn't have a particular vision of what he wanted the society to look like. He just believed in the technology totally and he thought, you know, the more you can test the better a country it'll be. If a problem arises with a testing regime, hell, let's just invent more tests and solve the problem that way. So he just believed in the technique of testing.
Conant believed that a narrow constricted group of wealthy descendents of the early settlers of America - people born into money, privately educated, often in New England boarding schools, usually Episcopalian - had formed a kind of club. They weren't especially able, to Conant's mind, and they kind of controlled everything, they had a grip on everything. And they had built a system in which the word meritocracy wasn't around, but they built a sort of fake meritocracy in which the rules were rigged so only they could win.
Conant's primary goal, as far as domestic life in America, was to break the hold of this old elite and put in its place, a new elite that would be made up of people from a national group, people from all over the country, people selected on pure intelligence, not on their background. These would be people who he assumed would have come from very modest backgrounds and would have gone to public school rather than private school--people who would be more liberal, ideologically, than the predecessor group.
He wanted to break the old group's hold, create the new group, and put them in charge of the country. I mean, it's astonishingly ambitious. America's filled with these utopian experiments but they're usually one little town or one house or something. Conant had the ability to do a utopian experiment on the whole country and it worked, in a sense, although it didn't turn out to be a utopia.
What did it turn out to be?
Well, the fundamental irony of the American meritocracy, the system that Conant set up, is this: people will start madly manipulating the system to their favor and to the favor of their children. And the people who have more money and more power and more sophistication will be able to manipulate it more successfully. So, the sort of the tragedy of Conant's system is that some of his ideas just seem laughable today. The idea that America would become a classless society through the use of these tests. The idea that the people who score high on these tests would care only about public service and the good of the country and would be indifferent to money and power. The idea that they would be admired by ordinary people in the country. The idea that they would turn social arrangements completely upside down in the country. The idea that they would be enemies of privilege--they wouldn't want to privilege themselves above others, they would want to wipe out all privilege in America.
I mean, these ideas are appealing but today they just sound impossibly na‹ve. You can't set up a system to distribute rank and privilege and assume it won't be used for that purpose by people and that people won't eventually figure out how to game the system and use it to pass on advantage. Every conceivable meritocracy, degrades over time into an aristocracy. It just has to happen that way.
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