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This chapter describes Howard Andrew Knox’s work as a physician with the U.S. Army from 1908 to 1911. In 1908 Knox applied for a commission in the Medical Reserve Corps, where he got the rank of first lieutenant. Knox was later assigned to active duty as the post surgeon in command of the Hospital Corps Detachment at Fort Michie, New York. Finding a military career congenial, he went on to seek an appointment in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. To proceed from the Medical Reserve Corps to the Army Medical Corps, he had to undertake a year’s training at the Army Medical School in Washington, D.C. Knox reported to Fort Hancock, where he continued his duties as assistant to the surgeon for the next few months. In January 1911 Knox married Gladys Barnett Reed, daughter of James P. Barnett and Helen Foster Barnett. Knox also spent time at the infirmary of the Third Provisional Regiment in Fort Crockett. In May 1911, he opened his general practice in Sheffield, Massachusetts.

This chapter focuses on the series of performance tests developed by Howard Andrew Knox and his colleagues and administered to mentally deficient emigrants at Ellis Island in New York. Knox and Bernard Glueck identified two major flaws in the notion of using the scale devised by Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon to identify mental deficiency among emigrants. To address these flaws, Knox and his colleagues set out to devise performance tests that relied on the measurement of overt performance. This chapter considers the circumstances in which performance tests seemed to be more appropriate than conventional verbal tests. It also describes some of the performance tests developed by Knox at Ellis Island, including the Visual Comparison Test, the Diamond Frame Test, the Cube Imitation Test, the Geographical Puzzle, the Imbecile Test, the Moron Test, the Construction Blocks Test, the Casuist Test, and the Feature Profile Test. Finally, the chapter looks at Knox’s divorce from his wife, Gladys Barnett Reed.

This chapter focuses on Howard Andrew Knox’s life after his departure from Ellis Island in New York in 1916, when he resigned his commission in the Public Health Service. Several factors may have contributed to Knox’s decision; the most immediate circumstance was that at the beginning of May 1916 Knox had remarried. He resigned his post while he and his new wife, Maka Harper, were taking a short honeymoon. He returned to Ashtabula, Ohio, where he had spent the first nine years of his life, and attempted to set up a private general practice there, but this venture proved unsuccessful. Knox also received an invitation from David Fairchild Weeks, the superintendent of the State Village for Epileptics in Skillman, New Jersey, to take up the post of acting clinical director. He made another attempt to set up a private practice, this time in Bayonne, a city in Hudson County, New Jersey. In 1922 he and his wife bought a summer home in New Hampton, also in New Jersey.

This chapter describes Howard Andrew Knox’s childhood, education, and medical training. Knox was born on March 7, 1885, in Romeo, Michigan; he was the only child of Howard Reuben Knox and Jennie Mahaffy Knox. Knox’s parents separated when his father moved to Virginia to set up a business investing in tobacco futures. He had a close relationship with his mother that endured until her own death in 1929. In 1894, when he was just nine years old, Knox acquired a stepfather, Leander Blackwell, who was to have a decisive influence upon his choice of career. In 1899, the family moved to another farm on Babcock Hill outside Willimantic in Windham County, Connecticut. Knox settled in well at his new school, getting grades of either H (honor work) or A (excellent) in most subjects. After high school Knox entered the medical school at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. On March 27, 1908, Knox graduated from Dartmouth Medical School with a degree of Doctor of Medicine.

This chapter focuses on the performance tests developed by Howard Andrew Knox and his colleagues and administered to mentally deficient emigrants at Ellis Island in New York, and how they brought such tests to the attention of a much wider audience. Prodded by the office of the surgeon general, Knox and his colleagues began to popularize their work through articles in newspapers and magazines, presentations at conferences and to local medical associations, and through a manual for the mental examination of emigrants. In one event where he was speaker, Knox described the procedures being used at Ellis Island and emphasized the need for the physicians to be absolutely certain in their diagnoses of mental deficiency. In May 1914, he submitted a paper for presentation at the second annual meeting of the Eugenics Research Association. He also wrote a paper entitled “A Broader View of Mental Deficiency in Aliens,” published in the New York Medical Journal in October 1915, while he was temporarily detailed to work as an assistant physician at the Psychiatric Institute of the New York State Hospitals.

This concluding chapter considers why Howard Andrew Knox’s work at Ellis Island in New York has been neglected and seeks to reinstate him as a key figure in the history of intelligence testing. From May 1912 to May 1916, Knox and his colleagues devided an array of performance tests to estimate mental deficiency among emigrants at Ellis Island. The chapter evaluates Knox’s life and work from a variety of perspectives. In particular, it examines Knox’s involvement in and commitment to the development of intelligence tests, his role in devising the Ellis Island tests, whether he really succeeded in finding a way of differentiating between moronism and ignorance, and whether he was a eugenicist or a racist. Finally, it discusses the neglect and rediscovery of the Ellis Island tests in the second half of the twentieth century, culminating in a reevaluation of the contribution of Knox and his colleagues to intelligence testing.

This chapter focuses on subsequent attempts to develop performance scales, many of which incorporated tests originally developed by Howard Andrew Knox and his colleagues to estimate mental deficiency among emigrants at Ellis Island in New York. From May 1912 to May 1916, Knox and his colleagues produced an array of psychological tests. These tests were made available just as interest in the measurement of intelligence and appreciation of the limitations of strictly verbal tests were increasing. It is therefore not surprising that Knox’s tests were widely borrowed and adapted in the test batteries subsequently devised to measure intelligence during the next three decades. Before discussing how Knox’s tests were borrowed and adapted, the chapter considers certain technical developments in intelligence testing that had occurred during Knox’s time at Ellis Island. In particular, it looks at Lewis Madison Terman’s proposed “intelligence quotient” or “IQ” as a measure of intelligence, along with the work of Rudolf Pintner and Donald Gildersleeve Paterson, Frances Isabel Gaw, William Healy and Augusta Fox Bronner, and Paul Chatham Squires.

This chapter focuses on Howard Andrew Knox’s first year at Ellis Island in New York and how the physicians there dealt with the increasing concern about mentally deficient emigrants. By 1910, there was widespread concern in the United States that the immigration authorities were failing to prevent mentally defective people from entering the country. To address this concern, Ellis Island’s immigration officials invited Edward Johnstone, the superintendent of the New Jersey Training School, and his director of research, Henry Herbert Goddard, to visit the immigration station and advise them on current practices. In April 1912, Knox was appointed to the Public Health and Marine Hospital Service (renamed Public Health Service). He published an article in which he shared the views held by politicians, professionals, and the public about intelligence and mental deficiency. He would later devise a series of “performance tests” that could be administered to mentally deficient emigrants on the island.

This chapter explores the various practical issues in intelligence testing that Howard Andrew Knox and his colleagues encountered while they were administering performance tests to mentally deficient emigrants at Ellis Island in New York. These issues were described by Knox and his colleagues in their various publications, offering many useful and very human insights concerning the limitations of psychological testing, particularly with regard to the mental and physical state of the many emigrants they examined. The primary issue was the validity of the process of line inspection. In his diagnosis of mental deficiency among emigrants, Assistant Surgeon Carlisle Knight had observed (as others had before him) that the identification of feebleminded people was “the hardest problem with which we have to deal.” Other issues that arose during intelligence testing of mentally deficient emigrants at Ellis Island had to do with language, culture, and education. The chapter also considers the decline of Ellis Island as a key location for the development of mental tests.

This chapter focuses on the wider use of intelligence tests throughout the 1920s and 1930s until they were generally superseded by David Wechsler’s scales from 1939 onward. From May 1912 to May 1916, Howard Andrew Knox and his colleagues produced an array of psychological tests to estimate mental deficiency among emigrants at Ellis Island in New York. These tests were later borrowed and adapted in the test batteries that were devised to measure intelligence. The publication of Rudolf Pintner and Donald Gildersleeve Paterson’s A Scale of Performance Tests (1917) and of Clarence Stone Yoakum and Robert Mearns Yerkes’ manual, Army Mental Tests (1920) brought many of Knox’s tests to the attention of psychologists. This chapter considers James Drever and Mary Collins’s “series of non-linguistic tests”, Harriet Babcock’s test of mental efficiency, and other performance scales of the 1930s, along with tests that measured race, ethnicity, and performance. It also describes the Wechsler Intelligence Scales and the many variants of the Cube Imitation Test before concluding with an assessment of the demise of performance scales.

This chapter considers what performance tests actually measure in light of current psychological research. It was Howard Andrew Knox who first used the term “performance test” in his own writings in September 1913, but at that point it seems already to have been in common use in discourse about intelligence and intelligence testing. Since Knox’s work at Ellis Island in New York there have been different views about what performance tests actually measure. This chapter first examines the ways in which the phrase “performance test” has been used before discussing three kinds of contemporary evidence to suggest that the distinction between verbal and performance tests may not be straightforward. It also describes the structure of the Wechsler Intelligence Scales and concludes by assessing the role of linguistic processing, education, and language in performance tests.

This chapter examines the issues of immigration and intelligence that had arisen in the United States between 1880 and 1912, a period of increasing public clamor and concern that mentally deficient emigrants, particularly from countries in southern and eastern Europe, were gaining admission to the United States. The most important point of arrival in the United States was the Port of New York. In October 1911, Howard Andrew Knox, a physician, sought an appointment in the Public Health and Marine Hospital Service in New York City. The following year, he was assigned to work under the direction of Senior Surgeon George W. Stoner in the immigration station at Ellis Island. This placed him at the center of the controversy about whether the island’s physicians were capable of identifying emigrants suffering from mental deficiency.