# Lippmann Intelligence Testing Series In the autumn of 1922, [[Walter Lippmann]] published six consecutive articles in *The New Republic* attacking the claim that the new intelligence tests measured inborn, heritable mental capacity — and warning that if that claim were believed, the tests would be used to sort Americans into a permanent hereditary caste order. It is the most important early demolition of hereditarian IQ in American public argument, and it was written by a journalist, not a psychologist, which is precisely what made it intolerable to the profession. The series ran while Lippmann was finishing *Public Opinion* (1922) — see [[Public Opinion]] — and it belongs to the same project: an inquiry into how a manufactured expert consensus becomes an unexamined public fact. ## The six articles | # | Title | Date | Core argument | |---|---|---|---| | 1 | [[The Mental Age of Americans]] | 25 Oct 1922 | The "average mental age of Americans is about fourteen" claim is not merely wrong but incoherent — a statistical artifact of how the scale was built | | 2 | [[The Mystery of the A Men]] | 1 Nov 1922 | The Army grading curve was constructed, not discovered; the categories produced the distribution | | 3 | [[The Reliability of Intelligence Tests]] | 8 Nov 1922 | Test-retest instability, arbitrary time limits, and a norming sample far too small to bear the weight placed on it | | 4 | [[The Abuse of the Tests]] | 15 Nov 1922 | Tests may have administrative uses in schools; treating a score as a verdict on innate worth is the abuse | | 5 | [[Tests of Hereditary Intelligence]] | 22 Nov 1922 | Nothing in the data separates native capacity from schooling, language, and environment — the hereditarian inference is unearned | | 6 | [[A Future for the Tests]] | 29 Nov 1922 | A legitimate, modest role for testing exists, but only once the claim to measure hereditary intelligence is abandoned | Article 2 appeared under the original typography "The Mystery of the 'A' Men"; the page title here drops the inner quotation marks for link safety. ## What provoked it During [[World War I]] the U.S. Army administered its Alpha and Beta mental tests to roughly 1.7 million men, a program chaired by [[Robert Yerkes]] with [[Lewis Terman]] and [[Henry Goddard]] among the psychologists involved. When the results were published in 1921 and then popularized, the headline number that escaped into general circulation was that the average American adult had the mental age of a young adolescent. Lippmann encountered the figure in the form given it by [[Lothrop Stoddard]], whose *The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man* (1922) used the army data as evidence of civilizational decay. Lippmann's first article opens: "A startling bit of news has recently been unearthed and is now being retailed by the credulous to the gullible." His verdict on the claim itself is the most-quoted line in the series: > "For the statement that the average mental age of Americans is only about fourteen is not inaccurate. It is not incorrect. It is nonsense." The point is technical and devastating. Mental age was defined by reference to a normed population; an average adult scoring at the average is definitionally normal. To announce that the average American is below average is to have misunderstood one own instrument. "Mental age," Lippmann wrote, "is a yard stick invented by a school of psychologists to measure 'intelligence.'" It was not a fact about people. It was a property of the ruler. ## The stratification argument Lippmann's methodological objections are the setup; the political argument is the payload, and it is the reason this series belongs in the KB rather than in a history of psychometrics. His claim was that hereditarian testing, if accepted, would convert a school administrative convenience into a theory of predestination. Educators would stop asking why a child was behind and start recording that he was, permanently, a lesser kind of person. Testing on those premises, he argued, "could not but lead to an intellectual caste system in which the task of education had given way to the doctrine of predestination" — an administrative sorting device hardening into "a basis for hereditary caste." He was especially severe about the effect on the child: stamping a person as a defective type on the strength of an hour of puzzles was "contemptible," and risked laying "a permanent sense of inferiority upon the soul of a child." And he named the epistemic failure precisely. The hereditarian conclusion, he wrote, rested not on evidence but on "a will to believe" — the conclusion had preceded the data. That is the same diagnosis [[Scientific Racism]] earns as an ideology, arrived at seventy years before [[The Bell Curve]] made it necessary to repeat. ## The Terman exchange [[Lewis Terman]] — Stanford psychologist, author of the 1916 Stanford-Binet revision, and president of the American Psychological Association in 1923 — replied in *The New Republic* on 27 December 1922 with "The Great Conspiracy: Or the Impulse Imperious of Intelligence Testers, Psychoanalyzed and Exposed by Mr. Lippmann." The title carries the tone. Terman's substantive defense was largely an appeal to professional authority: the psychologists of America, England, and Germany were behind the tests, and a layman had no standing to adjudicate. Lippmann answered on 3 January 1923 with "The Great Confusion: A Reply to Mr. Terman," followed by a short second reply on 17 January. Terman withdrew the same week with a brief letter. The exchange is a clean specimen of a recurring pattern: a technical priesthood answering a substantive challenge with a credential check rather than an argument. [[Robert Yerkes]] occupied the uncomfortable middle, rebuking Lippmann for lacking psychological training while warning Terman that sarcasm would not play with lay readers. ## Why it matters here **The tests won anyway.** Lippmann had the better argument and lost the decade. [[Carl Brigham]]'s *A Study of American Intelligence* (1923) reworked the army data into an explicitly racial hierarchy of immigrant stocks, and the restrictionist coalition that produced the [[Immigration Act of 1924]] had a scientific-sounding warrant ready to hand. Brigham then adapted the army testing apparatus into the SAT in 1926 — so the instrument Lippmann attacked became, in modified form, the gatekeeping mechanism of American higher education. See [[Eugenics Timeline]]. **The recantations came later, and quietly.** Brigham repudiated his own conclusions in 1930, writing that the study "entire hypothetical superstructure of racial differences collapses completely." [[Henry Goddard]] abandoned the position that feeble-mindedness was hereditary and incurable. Neither retraction traveled anything like as far as the original claim — an asymmetry the KB tracks across every generation of [[Scientific Racism]]. **The argument never ended.** Lippmann's target — the inference from a test score to an innate, heritable, group-differentiated capacity — reappears in *[[The Bell Curve]]*, in [[Human Biodiversity]] discourse, and in the contemporary polygenic-selection industry. The counterargument was fully available in 1922. It has had to be made again roughly every thirty years since. **The [[Meritocracy]] problem.** Lippmann saw earlier than most that a testing regime does not merely describe a hierarchy, it legitimates one. If the sorting is scientific, the sorted have no complaint. This is the mechanism by which [[Social Darwinism]] survives the discrediting of its biology: the metric changes, the moral conclusion does not. ## The tension with Lippmann own position Worth flagging, because it complicates the hero reading. Lippmann was in this same period arguing that ordinary citizens could not evaluate public questions and required expert mediation — the argument [[John Dewey]] contested. He was not a democrat about competence. What he objected to was not elite management as such but the claim that the elite had been identified by a biological instrument, permanently, at birth. He wanted expertise to be earned and provisional. Hereditarian testing offered a caste that could not be appealed. ## Sources - Lippmann's six articles, *The New Republic*, 25 October - 29 November 1922; reprinted in N. J. Block and Gerald Dworkin, eds., *The IQ Controversy* (1976). - "Democracy and Expertise in the Lippmann-Terman Controversy," *Modern Intellectual History* (Cambridge University Press). - Stephen Jay Gould, *The Mismeasure of Man* (1981), ch. 5, on the army tests and the hereditarian reading. ## See Also - [[Walter Lippmann]] - [[Public Opinion]] - [[Eugenics]] - [[Scientific Racism]] - [[Eugenics Timeline]] - [[Immigration Act of 1924]] - [[The Bell Curve]] - [[Meritocracy]]