# Lewis Terman **Lewis Terman** (1877–1956) was the Stanford psychologist who made the IQ test American — and who supplied, in his own words, the hereditarian reading of its results that the [[Eugenics]] movement needed. At Stanford from 1910 until his death, he was the discipline's most powerful institution-builder for thirty years. Terman produced the 1916 American revision of the Binet-Simon scale — the Stanford-Binet — and set out its rationale in *The Measurement of Intelligence* (1916). He was one of the psychologists on [[Robert Yerkes]]'s World War I army testing committee, and he launched the longitudinal *Genetic Studies of Genius* (first volume 1925), which followed a cohort of high-scoring California children across their lives. He was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1923. He was also an open eugenicist. Terman belonged to the Human Betterment Foundation, the American Eugenics Society, and the Eugenics Research Association, argued that measured dullness in some ethnic groups was "racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks," and advocated segregated educational tracking on the basis of IQ. No recantation is documented. He is the antagonist of the [[Lippmann Intelligence Testing Series]]: his December 1922 *New Republic* reply, "The Great Conspiracy," answered [[Walter Lippmann]]'s methodological critique chiefly by asserting professional authority. ## What the tests did The Stanford-Binet gave the United States a single number for a child, and Terman gave the number a meaning: the 1916 manual proposed that the "feeble-minded" be identified and segregated early, that testing would show "enormously significant racial differences," and that the children of Mexican, Native and Black families were dull "in the family stocks" and should be tracked into manual work. The Army Alpha and Beta tests of 1917–18, which he helped design under [[Robert Yerkes]], tested 1.75 million men and produced the finding — that the average white draftee had a "mental age" of thirteen — that the Immigration Act of 1924's restrictionists cited in Congress. The *Genetic Studies of Genius* (1925– ), which followed 1,528 high-IQ California children for seven decades, was the counterpart: proof that the gifted were also healthier, taller and better adjusted, and thus that ability was a unitary inherited trait. The study famously screened out two future Nobel laureates and admitted no one who became one. [[Walter Lippmann]]'s 1922 *New Republic* series was the first sustained public critique — that the tests measured schooling, not "intelligence," and that a number treated as heredity would be used to fix a child's place — and Terman's reply, "The Great Conspiracy," answered the argument with contempt for the arguer. The exchange is preserved in the [[Lippmann Intelligence Testing Series]] because it is the template: the technocrat's authority against the journalist's question, and the question was right. **Not to be confused with** [[Frederick Terman]], his son — the Stanford provost and engineer credited as a founding architect of Silicon Valley. See also: [[Eugenics]], [[Scientific Racism]], [[Eugenics Timeline]].