American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [134]
Intelligence tests satisfied the needs of early twentieth-century scientists for greater precision and empiricism. However, the question of whether humans possessed a single, fixed, and discrete entity called intelligence that could be accurately measured would continue to be a highly controversial idea for decades to come.
Goddard set out to define the terms “idiot” and “imbecile.” An idiot was an individual with a mental age below three years, while an imbecile scored between the ages of three and seven years. These were people who suffered from obvious and severe mental retardation. What about those who scored at levels equivalent to a mental age of between eight and twelve? Their supposed infirmity was not readily apparent to the casual observer, but Goddard felt that intelligence tests could weed out these individuals.
There was also the problem of what to call such individuals. Though they were often called feebleminded, this caused confusion, since it was common to refer to all those with below-average intelligence as feebleminded. So Goddard invented the term “moron” to classify individuals with a mental age between eight and twelve years old. Goddard took the term from the Greek word for foolish. The word has so completely seeped into the English vocabulary that it is hard to believe its origin dates only to the first decade of the twentieth century.
If there was some innate quality called intelligence, Goddard believed, then it was to be found on a human gene that could be passed down through generations. If intelligence was a hereditary trait, then society should make sure that mental defectives did not reproduce. Eugenics, a term coined in the mid-1800s and derived from the Greek meaning “well born,” gradually seeped into the public consciousness. In 1910, a biologist named Charles Davenport formed the Eugenics Record Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island to encourage so-called heartier stock to reproduce and discourage the weak from having children. He was already serving as secretary of the American Breeders Association and that same year he came out with Eugenics: The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding.
Though some advocated forced sterilization, Goddard preferred the establishment of institutions like Vineland to care for the feebleminded while making sure they did not reproduce. Though Goddard’s famous study of the hereditary effects of feeblemindedness centered on a native-born, old-stock family pseudonymously named the Kallikaks, it was no surprise that advocates of eugenics would turn their attention to immigrants. “The idea of a ‘melting pot’ belongs to a pre-Mendelian age,” Davenport noted. “Now we recognize that characters are inherited as units and do not readily break up.”
In 1911, Davenport recommended the formation of a committee to study “the hereditary traits that immigrants were bringing into the country.” Later that year, Davenport’s Immigration Committee of the Eugenics Section of the American Breeders Association found that the unfit were not being properly excluded because of inadequate inspection, poor facilities, and too few medical inspectors.
Two members of the committee were Immigration Restriction League (IRL) officials Prescott Hall and Robert DeC. Ward. For the past two decades, these men had tried to convince their fellow Americans of the threat that immigrants posed. Although they never advocated closing the nation’s gates, they continually lobbied for tougher inspection of immigrants and the exclusion of those they deemed undesirable. They had hoped the literacy test would be the vehicle that would keep out many undesirable immigrants, but they