# The Mental Age of Americans **Status: stub.** Article 1 of six in [[Lippmann Intelligence Testing Series]], published in *The New Republic* on 25 October 1922. The opening salvo, and the most widely reprinted of the six. [[Walter Lippmann]] takes up the claim — then circulating through [[Lothrop Stoddard]]'s *The Revolt Against Civilization* (1922) — that the World War I army mental tests had shown the average American adult to possess "the mental age of about fourteen." His demolition is definitional rather than empirical: mental age is calibrated *against* a normed population, so a finding that the average adult falls below the adult average is not a discovery about Americans but a confession that the scale was mis-built. Hence the line the essay is remembered for: the claim "is not inaccurate. It is not incorrect. It is nonsense." The essay opens: "A startling bit of news has recently been unearthed and is now being retailed by the credulous to the gullible." It establishes the frame for the whole series — that a technical artifact had been laundered into a fact about the national character, and that the laundering, not the arithmetic, was the story. *Stub — expand with: the full text argument in sequence, verbatim passages, and the specific psychometric claims rebutted.* See also: [[Lippmann Intelligence Testing Series]], [[Walter Lippmann]], [[Eugenics]].