# Carl Brigham **Carl Campbell Brigham** (1890–1943) was a Princeton psychologist and the pioneer of psychometrics who created the SAT. During World War I he worked on [[Robert Yerkes]]'s army mental-testing program. Brigham reworked [[Robert Yerkes]]'s army test data into *A Study of American Intelligence* (1923), which argued that the results demonstrated a hereditary intelligence hierarchy among European stocks, with "Nordic" immigrants at the top and southern and eastern Europeans below them. The book arrived in the middle of the restrictionist push that produced the [[Immigration Act of 1924]] and supplied it with scientific-sounding cover, alongside the work of [[Madison Grant]] and [[Lothrop Stoddard]]. In 1926 he adapted the army testing apparatus for the College Board as the Scholastic Aptitude Test. The instrument [[Walter Lippmann]] had attacked in 1922 thereby became, in modified form, the gatekeeping mechanism of American higher education. Brigham then did what almost none of his colleagues did: he recanted. In "Intelligence Tests of Immigrant Groups" (*Psychological Review*, 1930) he wrote that his earlier study, with its entire hypothetical superstructure of racial differences, "collapses completely," and acknowledged that test scores reflected schooling, family background, and familiarity with English rather than innate capacity. The retraction never approached the reach of the original claim. ## Why he matters Brigham is the cleanest case in the eugenics record of an expert correcting himself, and of the correction failing. The 1923 book arrived in the middle of the restrictionist debate and was taken up by restrictionists. Historians dispute how much the test data actually moved Congress. The 1930 retraction went into a psychology journal after the quotas were law, and the quotas stood until 1965. The SAT he built outlived both. That asymmetry, where the error travels and the correction stays in the journals, is the pattern the [[Lippmann Intelligence Testing Series]] documents from the other side. See also [[Henry Goddard]], whose recantation traveled just as poorly. See also: [[Eugenics]], [[Scientific Racism]], [[Eugenics Timeline]].