The science of modern intelligence tests and the theory that underlies much of the field started with a remarkable upper-class Englishman who liked to count and measure in almost any circumstance in which he found himself. Francis Galton is now a distant, obscure figure, but in the Victorian era he was a famous polymath, a cousin of Charles Darwin on his mother's side and on the other a descendant of a great-grandfather who made money in guns. His penchant for math and measuring in various forms led him to original contributions in geography, weather systems, genetics, statistics, criminology, and anthropometry, the field of measuring humans. Galton was intellectually tremendously fecund, and he contributed, even defined, many of the debates, tools, and constructs of modern psychology. Like a group of flat-Earth advocates in the age of satellite imagery, mental testers were doomed by advances in scienceadvances that Galton himself had put into motion. Wissler, having devastated the field, perhaps wisely opted to become an anthropologist. Cattell, for his part, gave up experimental psychology, relegating himself to administration, editing Science magazine, and running a company he called the Psychological Corporation.

Things would drastically change however when, two weeks after the United States entered the Great War-on April 6, 1917-American psychologists were a bickering and unfocused lot, like small, uncoordinated boys left unchosen on the sidelines of a pickup basketball game. As a profession, they'd been around for only about a quarter of a century, and they looked enviously at other sciences that were focusing their efforts against the kaiser. Chemists, physicists, biologists, and research doctors at university laboratories worked on wireless telephony, submarine detection, airplane construction, poison gas manufacturing, blood transfusion, and more. Psychologists had to do something to help the war effort. But what? Some of them thought they could improve soldiers' ability to aim, or their ability to recover from severe injuries. Others believed they could improve military recreation, select for better fighter pilots, or devise tests for courage and self-mastery under stressful conditions.

On April 21, 1917, seven psychologists met in a room at the Hotel Walton, an imposing twelve-story building in downtown Philadelphia, to address the problem of their relevance. Despite the meeting's obscurity, both then and now, it would be surprisingly important to the field of psychology and, in years, the entire world. Of all the ways psychology could have contributed to the war effort, these men successfully focused the field's attention on a limited, narrow kind of intelligence testing that would catch on after the war. They established Alfred Binet's methods (with some additions and supported by Galtonian theory) and ignored other, more flexible and broader approaches to testing people. We are still feeling the consequences today.

In the late 1880s, Binet began studying his two young daughters, Madeleine and Alice, who were both under age five. He published three papers about them, and while the papers were not recognized as ground breaking at the time, they were in fact signal contributions to child psychology and the future field of intelligence testing. Like many parents, Binet noticed that his two daughters had very different personalities from an early age. When Madeleine "was learning to walk, she did not leave one support until she had discovered another near at hand to which she could direct herself." Alice, "on the other hand, advanced into empty space without any attention to the consequences."

Binet used the psychology of his day, some of it based on Galton and Cattell's work, to measure his children's capabilities and differences.

In 1917, the seven psychologists, all white men ranging from their mid-thirties to late forties, quickly filled their hotel room with cigarette smoke and divisive anger. Robert Mearns Yerkes, president of the American Psychological Association (APA), had convened the late-night meeting at the Walton in the belief that the war could change people's attitudes toward psychology, and intelligence testing in particular. Despite Henry Goddard's success in promoting Binet's intelligence tests in the United States, psychology was still on the fringes of society and academia. Psychologists had so far failed to have their field accepted as a natural science, which is how they wanted to be perceived. Worse, most other psychologists thought intelligence testing was quackery akin to water divination. Laypeople, too, were often confused and hostile toward testing, equating the very act of having their intelligence measured with having its quality questioned.

The psychologists at the Hotel Walton saw the war as an opportunity to change all this. "I hope we can all get together Saturday night in Philadelphia for a good discussion. The prospects are now excellent that we shall have opportunity to do something important, unless perchance the war should suddenly end," wrote Robert Yerkes to America's pioneering applied psychologist Walter Dill Scott.

Yerkes sounded almost fretful that men might cease the slaughter on the fields of France before psychology had been able to prove itself, and it was this attitude, as well as the fixation on a rigid testing scheme, that led to problems at the Walton. Walter Scott felt that his colleagues there-all primarily theoretical researchers were more interested in helping themselves and their nascent field than their country. Their attitude made him feel "utter disgust."

Scott didn't fit in with his theoretically oriented colleagues. He was really a businessman in academic clothing, a practical sort who preferred solving problems to sitting around worrying about the nature of intelligence. He was affable and socially and professionally savvy, while Yerkes, the head of the APA, was stiff, academic, and pompous.

Working as a psychologist since the beginning of the twentieth century, Scott had spent a good deal of his professional life with businessmen, catering to their needs. He became the first person to write about the psychology of advertising and public speaking and, in the years just before the war, he had worked on a range of applied problems, from employee motivation and the persuasion of consumers to vocational selection and business management.

Robert Yerkes described himself as a "moody, strong-willed, unsuggestible child, difficult to control," a self-assessment directly relevant to his vision for wartime psychology. If it weren't for a mother he was devoted to, he would have left home early out of fear of and hatred for his father, who was an unhappy, unsuccessful man who never understood Yerkes' intellectual proclivities. Yerkes was often alone as a child, a situation exacerbated when a younger, beloved sister died of scarlet fever. Yerkes contracted it as well, but was brought back to health by a doctor who "made lasting impressions and deeply stirred [his] admiration and vocational hero-worship. "

After the childhood bout of scarlet fever, Yerkes daydreamed of being a "physician, surgeon, or, in other guise, alleviator of human suffering," but he hadn't become a doctor because his parents couldn't afford to send him to medical school. In contrast to Scott, Robert Yerkes was a doctor in academic garb and craved the respect of medicine. For years Yerkes had worked part-time at Harvard as a lofty and theoretical scientist and part-time at Boston Psychopathic Hospital, learning the ways of doctors.

At the Hotel Walton in April 1917, Yerkes wanted to play out his childhood fantasy and make psychologists part of the Army Medical Corps, under the direction of doctors and psychiatrists. For Yerkes, the medical model and the prestige that went with it was the future of psychology, the field's ticket out of the intellectual ghetto. Scott bristled at the idea, believing that psychologists should be equal to and independent of doctors.

But they differed also on theory and testing styles. Like most psychologists of the era, Yerkes tested people one-on-one, to measure as precisely as possible their general intelligence-that central and singular trait discovered by Charles Spearman during the Boer War. Before the war, Yerkes had investigated the evolutionary development of intelligence by studying organisms from the simple, such as frogs and worms, up the intelligence hierarchy to orangutans, insane people, and the mentally retarded. As a result, he was neither practiced nor focused on the practical matter of sorting people for organizations, which is ultimately what working for the military needed to be about.

Scott, by contrast, wasn't much interested in g. He had spent the previous years creating tests for groups, which was a fairly radical notion at the time. These were tests not just of intelligence but also of other traits, such as character, designed to help businesses sort through large numbers of job applicants. Scott wanted to isolate and test whatever characteristics would help businesses, and now the military, to hire the right person for the job and to get the work done more efficiently. Not surprisingly, Scott thought Yerkes' work on the evolutionary distribution of intelligence was theoretical blather.

Yerkes thought intelligence tests should be used during the war primarily as a tool for weeding out the feebleminded, much as the doctors on Ellis Island had used them, whereas Scott wasn't convinced that men should be sorted solely by their intelligence or that psychology's main focus should be so narrow. Scott had spent years devising rating systems for companies to use when evaluating applicants for managerial positions, and he thought psychology could do much more than just stand sentry against, in a phrase that had become popular, "the menace of the feebleminded." He thought his rating scales, which had examiners subjectively rank applicants in terms of characteristics such as appearance, manner, tact, loyalty, and honesty, could easily be adapted to the rating of military officer candidates. It wasn't that Scott thought intelligence tests were a waste of time. He, too, had developed such tests, and like everyone else, his were based in part on Binet's scales. But when working with businesses, Scott would often customize his exams based on the client's particular needs, and his definition of intelligence was loose. Unlike his more academic colleagues, he never thought he was testing anything as theoretical as general intelligence, some mystical physical force that hadn't been found but could nonetheless be measured precisely. Instead, Scott took a holistic, flexible approach to evaluating human beings; had he won the argument in the Hotel Walton, people might thereafter have taken fundamentally very different exams.

For the most part, the other psychologists at the Walton believed that intelligence was the only personal and mental trait worth testing and that it had to be measured with scientific precision. Nothing would make the military more efficient, Yerkes in particular thought, than freeing it from the feebleminded, those hidden human defectives that only intelligence tests could reveal.

Scott, proud and practical, could not tolerate such narrowness, the idea that psychologists would be commissioned in the military (and would work for doctors), his colleagues' self-promoting trusting schemes, or the limited focus on the feebleminded. Sometime after midnight in that smoky Walton room, Scott huffily realized that Robert Yerkes' vision would hold the day.

"I became so enraged by these points of view, that I expressed myself very clearly and left," Scott later wrote. Out went Scott, and with him his broad and flexible testing style and his business-oriented approach. But while Scott might have walked out of the Walton, he didn't give up on helping the war effort. As a result, the army ended up with two groups of psychologists working separately on personnel classification problems. Scott would focus mainly on the selection of officers, while Yerkes and his posse would measure the intelligence of incoming recruits.

The army responded much more positively to Scott and his rating methods than it did to Yerkes, his theoretically oriented colleagues, and their intelligence tests. ~cott was able to network his way right up to the secretary of war and persuade him to use his Rating Scale for Captains, which was based on a test he had devised for hiring salesmen. Yerkes, on the other hand, ·tried to enter the military through the surgeon general but initially couldn't because he didn't understand the military mind-set. With Scott gone, Yerkes pitched impractical ideas in a report titled Plan for the Psychological Examination of Recruits to Eliminate the Mentally Unfit. In it, he posited that psychologists be commissioned as officers in the Medical Reserve Corps. (Scott, like a good business consultant, thought psychologists should be civilian advisers to the army; unlike Yerkes, he would never put on a uniform.) Worst of all, Yerkes proposed that psychologists test recruits one at a time. To an army receiving, processing, and training thousands of recruits a day, it was an abysmal proposition.

In hindsight, with the ubiquity of nationwide standardized tests, the idea of testing huge numbers of army recruits one by one is a laughably inefficient idea, but for Yerkes it made sense. Doctors and psychiatrists at Boston Hospital, where he worked before the war, hadn't diagnosed patients in groups, and at the time the vast majority of intelligence tests around the world were administered one on one. Doctors pulled immigrants at Ellis Island out of line if they looked or seemed dim; psychologists pulled individual kids out of class to evaluate their mental states. Group testing was a new way of thinking for most psychologists, and initially they thought it unscientific.

Yerkes hadn't yet made the mental shift to large institutional needs, and as a result the army took no interest in his report and he got no funding to develop tests. Under Yerkes' leadership, if psychologists wanted to develop tests for processing recruits, they would have to make do on their own and on a very small budget. Henry Goddard yet again came to the rescue. He brought together at Vineland a group of seven psychologists from prestigious universities and institutions around the country who-starting on the afternoon of May 28, 1917, unpaid and on a total budget of $800 for two two-week sessions-hammered out the world's first large-scale intelligence tests.

With the conflagration at the Walton Hotel still fresh in his mind, Yerkes did not invite Walter Scott, a man with rare experience in creating group tests. Thus it was eugenics theoreticians who created the model for the first large-scale intelligence test. Ironically, many of Yerkes' own ideas didn't survive the meetings at Vineland either, and he immediately ignited intense debate by arguing that the tests should be used "to identify 'intellectually incompetent recruits,' 'the psychotic,' 'incorrigibles,' and 'men for special tasks.'''

By now, though, as with Scott, the others didn't want to focus only on the "misfits"; they also thought his idea of one-on-one testing was untenable. They wanted to test the entire set of new recruits, from the dumbest inductee to the smartest, and this meant group testing. Lewis Terman, a Stanford psychologist in attendance, argued that the German army needed only to assemble the human "parts of the machine ... in order to begin work," while the U.S. Army, by comparison, was simply "an assembled horde." America had too much ethnic diversity, he thought, which was antithetical to efficiency, and intelligence tests could help. By the end of the first day the group had persuaded Yerkes of the narrowness of his vision and that one-on-one testing, in the face of universal conscription, simply was not feasible.

Walter Scott could have helped the Vineland group tremendously, since he had been creating and administering group tests for years, but the task would fall to Terman, a more academic-minded man with fixed theoretical ideas about intelligence, race, and class and with a background in teaching rather than business.

Like Henry Goddard, who also attended the Vineland meetings, Lewis Terman was a successful promoter and reviser of European ideas. Terman would become far more famous than Goddard, due to Terman's publication of the "Stanford-Binet" in 1916, which was a more sophisticated revision of Binet's tests. Terman's exam would quickly become the gold standard in intelligence testing and include the now-famous Intelligence Quotient, which was based on a German psychologist's idea of dividing the subject's mental age by his chronological age. Terman decided to multiply the ratio by 100, thereafter endowing intelligence test results with accessibly round numbers. For instance, a ten-year-old student who scored like an average fifteen-year-old would end up with a score of ISO-in words, a genius. Inevitably, the quotient and even intelligence tests in general became known by a handy moniker the IQ-and Terman's IQ test would become the standard by which future intelligence tests would be measured.

Terman had developed his IQ tests for Galtonian, eugenics purposes: to reveal the most and least intelligent in society. In 1916 he was confident that he had developed the right tool for identifying the feebleminded.

"It is safe to predict," Terman wrote, "that in the near future intelligence tests will bring tens of thousands of these high-grade defectives under the surveillance and protection of society. This will ultimately result in curtailing the reproduction of feeblemindedness and in the elimination of an enormous amount of crime, pauperism, and industrial inefficiency."

In his initial Stanford-Binet revision of Binet's tests, Terman introduced ninety more questions that tested school-related knowledge such as vocabulary, reading comprehension, and word definition. He threw test questions at thousands of (mainly urban, middle-class) students in California and Nevada, discovering that questions such as "Can you tell me, who was Genghis Khan?" and "What is the boiling point of water?" differentiated between children of different grade levels. That is, the average third-grader could answer some questions, for instance, but not others. The average fourth-grader could answer more than the third-grader, but not as many as the fifth-grader, and so on.

Despite the scholastic content of his questions, Terman didn't believe that his Stanford-Binet tested students' educational and cultural background. He claimed that his test was able to isolate and measure innate intelligence-a fixed, inheritable trait. It was a supposition that had clear political and social implications, as revealed in his description of two low-scoring Portuguese boys who "represent the level of intelligence which is very, very common among Spanish-Indian and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they come. The fact that one meets this type with such extraordinary frequency among Indians, Mexicans and negroes suggests quite forcibly that the whole question of racial differences in mental traits will have to be taken up anew and by experimental methods."

These I Q tests allowed Terman and others to believe they were precisely assessing "high grade defectives," like the young Deborah Kallikak at Goddard's Vineland School in New Jersey. Morons had IQs between 50 and 70, Terman believed, while imbeciles scored "between 20 or 25 and 50," and idiots dwelled below even these scores. Applying numbers had a scientific appeal to it, but, like the Kallikak study, numerical test results could be put aside or supplemented by other data, such as reputation and social standing.

The slippery use of IQ tests came in handy when certain people who behaved like the feebleminded, such as unwed mothers and prostitutes, didn't perform as poorly on intelligence tests as it was thought they should. This happened in California when the state hired Terman and two fellow academics to survey "Mental Deviation in Prisons, Public Schools and Orphanages." Confusingly, some of these unworthy types scored above moron and occasionally even above average. Such results could cause unease among the experts. Thus, when California's Sonoma State Hospital learned that some of its feebleminded inmates scored better on Terman's IQ test than it was thought they should have, the hospital hired a psychologist to "explain the fact that there are certain high grade morons who test normal but yet are feebleminded."

Rather than question the assumption that social behavior reflects mental ability, or that the IQ was a useful tool, one of Terman's colleagues working on the California survey claimed to have discovered five different "Social-Intelligence Groups" among orphans and unwed mothers. Social intelligence, which he defined as "the extent to which the subject is mentally capable of 'managing himself and his affairs with ordinary prudence,'" was handily more malleable than intelligence test scores. It allowed him "to classify persons as feeble-minded whether or not the test results show them to fall within the usual LQ. limits of that group."

Terman, earlier than most other psychologists, also saw the potential uses for group intelligence tests in schools, rather than the one-on-one versions, and he lobbied hard at the World War I Vineland meetings to offer the army a group version of his Stanford Binet. While he hadn't yet refined his group exams by the time of America's involvement in the war, his graduate student, Arthur Otis, had been working on the problem, so Terman simply took Otis's tests with him to Vineland to use as a model. Apparently, it pays to arrive with documents in hand at a negotiation, which is what the Vineland meetings were in part. After just two weeks in Goddard's laboratory, with the sound of feebleminded children playing outside in the muggy New Jersey summer, the group of seven had largely signed on to Terman's tests. A couple of years after the war's end, Terman was able to brag in a letter that the resulting tests at Vineland "include[d] five tests practically in the form in which Otis had used them in his own scale [test]."

One reason for Terman's success at Vineland was a curious, ingenious, and novel testing method employed by Otis, which he, in turn, had picked up from a man named Frederick Kelly, dean of education at the University of Kansas. Kelly had wanted to improve upon the efficiency and objectivity of reading comprehension tests, and the result was an exam called the Kansas Silent Reading Test. The simple thirty-seven-page test included the following sample question that the teacher was to read to her class: "Below are given the names of four animals. Draw a line around the name of each animal that is useful on the farm: cow tiger rat wolf."

Seemingly obvious and insipid to us now, Kelly's question was actually hugely innovative. It was probably the first published multiple-choice question and the rest of the instructions sound amazingly familiar despite the passage of time.

"This exercise tells us to draw a line around the word cow," teachers were to explain to their class. "No other answer is right ... study each answer carefully ... do [the questions] as fast as you can, being sure to do them right. Stop at once when time is called. Do not open the papers until told."

The students in Kansas couldn't have realized that they were at the beginning of countless tests with bubbles to be filled out with number two pencils. With the invention of multiple-choice testing, institutions made a quantum leap forward; students no longer had to write, and teachers no longer had to read long student answers, or make subjective decisions. There was one correct answer, and teachers could skim their eyes down the page quickly and correct an exam in just moments, thus satisfying the goals of efficiency, fairness, and objectivity in an era when school populations were exploding.

Considering how many standardized multiple-choice tests now exist, Kelly deserves to be much more famous, or infamous, than he is. Within the next decade, this test method, as well as its weaker cousin the true-false question, would change American schools forever. From the get-go, multiple-choice questions allowed for no ambiguity or shades of gray, as evidenced when Kelly asked Kansas school superintendents to suggest additional test questions, which should "(1) ... be subject to only one interpretation (2) ... call for but one thing ... wholly right or wholly wrong, and not partly right and partly wrong."

In the words of the historian Franz Samelson, "This piece of educational technology is as American as the assembly line, and perhaps as alienating." People have complained about multiple choice questions ever since: often that they reward compartmentalized learning and not critical thinking skills. But, outside of schools, institutional efficiency can rightly be more of a priority than understanding individuals, especially in times of war and universal conscription. These circumstances and the need to test hundreds of thousands of men quickly pushed the Vineland group to create in just two weeks an intelligence test very different in form from those of the past, and Lewis Terman's newfangled educational method allowed them to do so.

The men at Vineland also had to create two kinds of tests, because many of the army recruits couldn't read, or were foreigners who didn't speak English. They called the exam for literates the "Alpha," and a picture-based performance test called the "Beta" was for the illiterate and non-English-speakers. (Young adult men, of course, were different from schoolchildren, so the exams had to be tweaked. The test creators didn't care what facts examinees knew at a certain age, but rather whether they knew what they thought every intelligent adult should know.)

This new ability to test many people efficiently and simultaneously meant that psychologists were no longer forced to focus solely on the feebleminded. That everyone could be tested made this a pivotal moment in the history of intelligence tests. Ever after, psychologists such as Henry Goddard, who had made his reputation on the menace of the feebleminded, would recede in prominence, making way for the next generation, most notably Lewis Terman, to take his place. Of wider importance, psychology's power, through its ability to help institutions sort groups quickly, was about to grow immensely.

To prevent cheating, the Vineland psychologists banged out five different versions of the Alpha and Beta exams, as well as a guide for examiners. The exams could be administered in less th~n an hour and consisted of eight sections, each with eight to forty questions that ascended in difficulty.

"It was agreed," wrote Robert Yerkes, "that the aim should be to test native ability rather than the results of school training," but that wouldn't be apparent from reading the questions. They asked recruits to unscramble sentences, memorize number sequences, and do arithmetic. The Vineland group tested vocabulary by asking if words had the same or opposite meaning ("empty-full," "vesper-matin"). Recruits had to know the color of chlorine gas, where silk came from, and who commanded Union troops at Mobile Bay.

They tested "Practical Judgment" with multiple-choice questions such as "Why should food be chewed before swallowing?" "Why is tennis good exercise?" and the wonderful: Why ought every man to be educated? Because: Roosevelt was educated It makes a man more useful It costs money Some educated people are wise

The Beta exam, on the other hand, required no writing. There were maze tests and form-matching questions, which asked examinees to find a matching shape, such as a particular triangle. Beta examinees had to finish pictures that were missing one key element-a lady's arm in her reflection in the mirror, or stearn coming out of a teakettle, for instance. They had to number a series of out of-order pictures to make an intelligible story: for instance, pictures of a horse-drawn hearse, a doctor ringing the front doorbell, a priest ringing the doorbell, and a coffin, should have been numbered to reflect a sick patient visited by a doctor; then a priest; the coffin (presumably with the dead patient inside); and finally the hearse.

After two weeks at Vineland, the seven psychologists dispersed to try out their new exams around the country. Terman tested high school kids and inmates in California. Yerkes examined feebleminded students and patients at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital. Others tested U.S. Marines and civilian men at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Back at Vineland on June 25, 1917, the psychologists analyzed the results and satisfied themselves that their new tests were quite good. Yerkes, in an 890-page report published after the war entitled Psychological Examining in the United States Army, concluded that "the correlations which the tests gave were therefore in the main satisfactory. They were [correlated] high with outside measures of known value; they were high enough with one another to indicate that all were reasonably good tests of general intelligence."

By "outside measures of known value," Yerkes and his colleagues meant that performance on the Vineland tests correlated with previous intelligence tests, such as the Binet-Simon and the Stanford-Binet. It's not as if they had a physical measurement of intelligence with which to compare their results, though you could be forgiven for thinking that they did, with all their talk of general intelligence. From the beginning of intelligence testing in the United States, psychologists measured the worth of new exams, in large part, by correlating them with previous exams. That new exams measured intelligence relied (sometimes tacitly) on the assumption that old exams measured intelligence.

The completed and vetted exams allowed Yerkes to procure a grant for a private trial. Psychologists traveled down to Georgia and gave, without the official imprimatur of the military, four thousand soldiers the new exams. After the tests were administered, Yerkes sought to prove their validity again by asking officers to rank their men in terms of intelligence-"avoid being too much influenced by his rank," their instructions read. (Apparently it was okay to be influenced by rank just a bit.) Just as previous test results had been compared to teacher evaluations, now the army exams were corroborated by officer opinions. Yerkes calculated that officer rankings correlated between 0.5 and 0.7 with intelligence scores, depending on the camp.

"The results suggest," Yerkes concluded, "that intelligence is likely to prove the most important single factor in determining a man's value in the military service." The psychologists were relying on a social barometer-in this case, officer opinion-to validate their intelligence tests, which would have been fine had Yerkes not claimed that the decent correlations proved that they had tested innate intelligence. Yerkes' tautology went as follows: because officer opinion correlated fairly well with test results, his exams tested general intelligence. Therefore, intelligence was of primary importance when classifying men.
What was good enough for the social sciences was good enough for the army, and it also helped that in 1917 the U.S. Army was hopelessly underprepared for the war and that it needed help processing all the incoming recruits. In its own words, before World War I, the army was "scarcely more than a national constabulary," and it knew that a large police force would simply not suffice for the gruesome, complicated warfare that was taking place in Europe. In March 1917, the U.S. Army totaled only 190,000 men. In less than two years it would process and train roughly 3.5 million men, swelling its ranks to 3.665 million, by November 1918. In the end, psychologists would test almost half of them.

The army needed not only vast numbers of men, but also men with specialized skills demanded by a war between industrialized nations. In March 1917, the army had 22,000 men in its cavalry, zero soldiers in its air service and chemical warfare bureau, and no tank and motor transport units. Even at the end of the war, a history of the World War I army personnel system written by the adjutant general's office stated that "among three and a half million American soldiers there are plenty of barbers, tailors, and lawyers for all military needs, but there are not anywhere near enough experienced men to meet the demands of the Army for soldiers who can drive a truck, send a wireless message, or supervise the training of a dispatch dog."

The army signed on to Yerkes' testing program in August 1917, and he received a commission as a major, along with the promise of commissions for forty to fifty psychologists to test recruits around the country. Unfortunately for Yerkes, he and his intelligence testers would be commissioned in the comical-sounding Sanitary Corps, which did not even require its officers to hold professional degrees. He had desperately wished for commissions in the more prestigious Medical Corps, but had been refused.

Once these Sanitary Corps officers got in full swing they would administer up to 200,000 Alpha and Beta tests to recruits monthly. By war's end the psychologists had tested 1.7 million men. The recruits represented all ethnicities in America: Choctaw Indians, Asians, "Hebrews" (as the army referred to Jewish men), African Americans, immigrants from all parts of Europe, and young white men from every American state. The rich, the poor, the middle class, the educated, and the unlettered were all represented; the psychologists, measuring tapes in hand, had access to American male minds.

Psychologists have shown that IQ test results correlate to some degree with certain important aspects of life, such as socioeconomic standing and even longevity. Intelligence remains, however, a trait that we struggle to define, let alone test. We do not really know what IQ tests tell us about individuals, and yet for a century we have relied on them to sort people in circumstances that are frequently life-defining and sometimes fearsomely dangerous.

 

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