Measuring Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing

Edited by:
  • Leila Zenderland
Cambridge University Press: 1998. 448pp. £45, $64.95
The ‘feeble-minded’ underclass: these ‘cases’ of Goddard's were said to have a mental age of seven.

Henry Herbert Goddard won a somewhat dubious immortality by coming up with the term ‘moron’ — meant to identify from among the mass of the ‘feeble-minded’ a “person of attested mental development with an intelligence comparable to that of the normal child between 8 and 12 years inclusive”. From such a coinage, there is much that could be easily — and correctly — predicted about the convictions and career of one of the most influential US psychologists of the first half of this century (he died in 1957 at the ripe old age of 91). Goddard, as one might guess, was one of the vociferous cohort of scientists preoccupied with human ‘degeneration’ and seeking ways of averting the ‘threat’ posed by ‘defectives’ to American society.

But, as Leila Zenderland demonstrates in a well-researched if somewhat hefty biography, Goddard, although a keen eugenist, resists being reduced to the reactionary eugenist villain who looms large in recent historiography. After all, he thought of his politics as being progressive — he even favoured the New Deal — and he was opposed to the more extreme measures (such as the ‘lethal chamber’) being touted to deal with the ‘menace’, and even rather doubtful about the desirability of surgical sterilization.

Goddard, who around the time of the First World War was America's most widely-read psychologist, saw his career in terms of chance and happenstance, and there is an element of truth in that view. Born in 1866 into a typically pious New England Quaker family, he attended a minor college (Haverford) and drifted around for a while on the fringes of higher education until, like so many others of his generation, he was fired by G. Stanley Hall of Clark University in Massachusetts. It was Hall who persuaded Freud to make his one and only trip to the United States. In Hall's inspiring vision, the up-and-coming discipline of evolutionary psychology was destined, in effect, to replace religion. It would bestow on society a body of scientific values suitable for combating the ills of modern times and grant to individuals a means to self-awareness and self-improvement. Goddard was converted.

Convinced that the ‘unfit’ constituted not only a pressing problem but a group on whom he could practise his new-found professional expertise, Goddard took employment in 1906 in a ‘training school’ for the ‘feeble-minded’ — Vineland, in rural New Jersey. Two years later, while travelling in Europe, he had the good fortune to be one of the first to grasp the significance of the intelligence tests newly developed by Alfred Binet, which launched the concept of ‘mental age’ within the framework of a general mental test.

Confusion had long reigned when it came to the tricky matter of classifying the different grades of ‘idiots’, to say nothing of disputes — between doctors, educationists and institutional superintendents — as to the cause and proper treatment of the condition. An energetic member of the ‘Feeble-Minded Club’, Goddard was able to persuade first himself and then his colleagues that the Binet test — that is, a psychological approach — would provide solutions as to what should be done with these problem people.

Like many of his ilk who were, by training, pedagogues rather than physicians, Goddard was initially optimistic about what could be achieved: the ‘feeble-minded’ would prove educable, leading to “a better mind if not a perfect mind”, if only one researched the right way to go about it. But bitter experience seemed to prove the opposite. And so his thinking underwent a sea-change, from a position not unsympathethic to the contribution of the environment (‘nurture’) in producing and rectifying defectives, to one that insisted on the cardinal role played by heredity (‘nature’).

Familiarizing himself with Mendelian genetics, Goddard began to investigate the family backgrounds of institutional populations and professed surprise on finding a vast submerged iceberg of imbecilism. Degeneracy evidently ran in families, and marriages between epileptics, alcoholics, criminals, syphilitics, nymphomaniacs and all other “defectives, dependants and delinquents” only served to make bad worse down the generations. The defectives were not only different; they might even constitute a ‘moron majority’.

These findings were written up in 1912 in a book that became a bestseller: The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness. The name was fictitious (it is a compound of the Greek words for beautiful and bad), but the family was real. Goddard had traced its bifurcated pedigree (some 480 descendants) from its eighteenth-century roots. One branch was thoroughly respectable, while the other (descended from the first Kallikak's illegitimate offspring) engendered a succession of defectives, criminals, prostitutes and so forth. The book entered the culture, and it even achieved a reprint in Nazi Germany. A more conventional statement of his research findings then appeared in Feeble-Mindedness: Its Causes and Consequences, published in 1914.

The rest of Goddard's lengthy career was dedicated to further exposure of such undesirables and to the application of psychometric testing to all walks of life — from immigration controls to the army — in the belief that intelligence differentials were crucial to the understanding and resolution of social problems.

In Goddard's eyes, ‘the facts’ had thus forced him to become a eugenist. Experience equally seemed to suggest what should be done. Sterilization was, he thought, a suspect option — after all, civil liberties were central to American values. The way forward must lie in the institutional segregation of the unfit. Not only would that prevent defectives from breeding and create a supportive and humane environment for them, but it would provide a superb “human laboratory” (Goddard's standard phrase) for researching their mentalities and laying bare the pathology of the human psyche.

It would, as Zenderland persuasively argues, be misleading to cast Goddard simply as some sort of stock bigot. Doubtless he believed there was some kind of underclass, but he was remarkably free of racial and colour prejudice — what he mainly feared were poor whites. He is best seen primarily as a representative of an emergent cadre of experts, scientists and professional administrators, anxious to establish a place in the sun for themselves as the new priesthood serving a secularizing society, preaching the gospel not of laissez-faire capitalism but of informed social responsibility.

Zenderland does not pretend that her protagonist was a very profound or original thinker. Although a passionate champion of ubiquitous intelligence testing, Goddard never seems to have thought deeply about what precisely it was that was being measured. He was a doer, a technician, lucky enough to hold in his hands, in the Binet test, that device utterly appropriate to the needs of classification and control in a mass society.