American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [142]
The questions that Codger Nutt and others faced were only the beginning of the testing. Doctors went beyond testing math or memory skills and tried to measure the creative powers and imagination of immigrants. “Some of us having gazed into the smoke of a choice cigar or into an open fireplace,” wrote Knox, “may have seen, perhaps, the sweetheart of other days, or the vision of a farmhouse away off in some old country town.” With that in mind, Knox set out to use inkblots of various shapes. Each figure vaguely resembled some object, such as a house, a strawberry, a snake, a leaf.
Knox conducted a small study using these inkblots among twentyfive Italian immigrants deemed normal and twenty-five deemed mentally defective. The answers from the mental defectives were often accompanied by a “negative tongue noise” or “I don’t know.” Knox also recorded his impression of each individual, which ranged from “stupid and indifferent” to “stupid, emotional, high tempered, and willful.” He concluded that “there are no Jules Vernes” among the group. The reaction time for those deemed mentally defective was nearly twice as slow as the normal group and the mental defectives possessed more asymmetrical heads and faces, harkening back to Goddard’s belief that observation alone could weed out mental defectives.
Immigrants were also given pictures to describe. One of them, entitled “Last Honors to Bunny,” depicted three young children mourning their dead pet rabbit. Immigrants were asked six questions, including what was going on, what the boy and girl were doing, and why one of the boys was digging a hole.
Ellis Island doctor E. H. Mullan found that most of the immigrants poorly described the picture, but that should have come as no surprise. Hard as it may be to believe, some immigrants had little familiarity with pictures. More importantly, many immigrants were puzzled by what they saw in the drawing. They had rarely seen pets treated well and were not used to seeing rabbits as pets. Some were unfamiliar with the custom of placing flowers on graves. Mullan concluded that pictures were unhelpful in judging the mental capacity of immigrants unless they depicted scenes easily recognizable to European peasants.
Ellis Island doctors were increasingly bothered by the subjectivity of their intelligence tests. One manual admitted that testing the knowledge and intelligence of immigrants was a difficult, perhaps impossible, task. “What are likely to be considered matters of universal knowledge may be absolutely unknown to them on account of the extreme limitations of their surroundings,” it stated. The average American, these doctors were informed, could not grasp how narrow were the lives of most European peasants arriving at Ellis Island. These men and women lived lives of “sordidness and hard-working monotony almost beyond belief, resulting in a mental equipment which is correspondingly limited and stunted.”
With this in mind, Ellis Island doctors made use of nonverbal performance tests, many of which they created themselves. Most were little more than glorified jigsaw puzzles. Wooden boards had shapes of different sizes cut out, and immigrants had to put the pieces back in their proper place. Some of the figures were abstract, while others portrayed a face in profile or a horse.
Howard Knox created another test, referred to as the Knox Imitation Cube Test. It consisted of four one-inch cubes placed