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This chapter argues that the plot and characters of Fitzgerald's famous novel can be illuminated with reference to historical events and figures connected to the mobilization. Gatsby himself, a poor ethnic American (who Anglicizes his Germanic name) is the beneficiary of a new military meritocracy that was extended to ethnic Americans with education or bilingual ability. As such, Gatsby is particularly receptive to the military's propaganda about its “new man,” the “clean” soldier who refrains from sexual activity abroad. Daisy meanwhile resembles the historical figure of the “charity girl,” the woman or girl who fraternized with soldiers at training camps and caused problems for military authorities, especially in terms of spreading venereal disease. (Thousands of such “charity girls” were arrested during the war.) The chapter also discusses Tom Buchanan and Nick Carraway in terms of historical developments during and after the war. Finally, the chapter contains an extended discussion of the army intelligence tests (they have previously been seen almost entirely in terms of their postwar exploitation by immigration restrictionists), considering them as part of a set of military personnel initiatives, which, though biased against immigrants and ethnic Americans overall, nonetheless extended wartime opportunities to educated and talented ethnic Americans.

This chapter examines the validity of using intelligence tests to measure the quality of behavior of human beings. It cites the findings of Lothrop Stoddard's 1922 study on the U.S. Army which concluded that the average mental age of Americans in the U.S. Army was only about fourteen. This conclusion was criticized by Walter Lippmann who argued that the tests were inadequate measures of the quality of human beings. This controversy aroused public and professional interest in intelligence testing.

This chapter takes up Faulkner's famous novel The Sound and the Fury. Again missing a crucial connection to the mobilization, critics have failed to understand Benjy as having been shaped by the extraordinary attention given to the problem of the feebleminded during the war: the army's intelligence testing was initially instituted to eliminate “mental defectives.” Although Fitzgerald and Hemingway's novels focus on ethnic Americans who have experienced nondiscriminatory opportunity (as well as subsequent backlash), Sound switches the focus to Anglos who don't qualify or are losing the competition in the context of a rising meritocracy. (Faulkner was one such real-life Anglo who was rejected by the army.) Idiot Anglo Benjy is the opposite of talented ethnic Gatsby. The chapter also discusses the love triangle among promiscuous Caddy, her lover Dalton Ames (a returning soldier), and her brother Quentin (a romantic, emasculated Anglo figure who is awed by Ames). The chapter finishes with a discussion of the novel's portrayal of African Americans, Jewish Americans, and Italian Americans, and discusses the portrayal of the last group in terms of the postwar exploitation of the intelligence test results by immigration restrictionists.

This chapter lays out the book's argument and is divided into three parts. The first part introduces the literary-historical thesis that American modernist fiction by Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner reflects — in its plot and characters, the history of the mostly meritocratic mobilization for World War I. At the heart of the three 1920s novels by these authors are “love triangles” involving Anglo-male characters bested in love and war and thus compromised in their masculinity; desirable and promiscuous Anglo females whom the Anglo males cannot have; and ethnic or outsider upstart competitors (of the Anglos) who have ties to the military and get the Anglo girls. The second part of the chapter discusses the history of the mobilization, which is today partly forgotten, and it argues with “received ideas” about modernism and the wartime era that are mistaken or misleading. Specifically, it addresses received ideas about intelligence testing during the war and, more generally, treatment of immigrants and ethnic Americans in the period; it also discusses the military's treatment of blacks. The third part addresses the relevant personal histories of these authors: Fitzgerald was denied promotions he expected and never saw action; Hemingway and Faulkner were disqualified from service on physical grounds.

Although the term IQ is widely used in popular culture, the true definition of intelligence and how it is measured is misunderstood. We provide an overview of how the construct of intelligence and its measurement have evolved over the past century. Several of the most popular theories of intelligence as well as the controversy over the genetic basis of intelligence are reviewed. We also discuss some of the historical and contemporary misuses of intelligence test scores including some pseudoscientific applications of those scores. Some of the claims of brain training companies are debunked as are the validity of online IQ tests.

This chapter examines the effect of aging on cognitive abilities and asks whether all cognitive abilities show evidence of decline or whether some abilities are relatively spared. Declines in specific abilities would be lacunae of loss sparing the archipelagos of surviving abilities. This chapter looks at evidence from the perspective of maintenance or loss of consistency of relationships between mental abilities as age advances. Analysis of cross-sectional data from a large elderly sample showed age impaired performance on all tests that individuals were given, with the exception of some vocabulary tests. However, the amounts of total variance in test performance associated with differences in age between forty-nine and ninety-two years were very modest—not exceeding 22%. Further analysis of the data set showed that levels of correlations between scores on intelligence tests and other tests of fluid intelligence, between intelligence tests and other cognitive tests, and between other cognitive tests are consistently higher in a sample aged from seventy to ninety-two years than in a sample aged from forty-nine to sixty-nine years.

The eighth chapter evaluates Davis’s work on intelligence-testing, which marked the culmination of his social thought and the height of his social influence. In 1948, Harvard invited Davis to give its prestigious Inglis Lecture in education, which Davis then did and had published as Social-Class Influences upon Learning (1948). This rich, compact volume synthesized Davis’s research from the previous two decades, but it emphasized his latest findings from the project on intelligence testing that he spearheaded at the University of Chicago. Davis and colleagues such as Robert Havighurst developed the first quantitative studies of the cultural biases within intelligence tests, which they showed to be discriminatory against lower-class people. Davis’s findings faced stiff resistance from psychologists such as eugenicist Henry E. Garrett and testing companies like the Educational Testing Service. Yet Davis’s iconoclastic work nevertheless galvanized educators and school boards all across the country to revise or abolish their use of the traditional tests. Even more, Davis’s work helped initiate a national debate regarding issues of social class, ability, fairness, and opportunity within the United States, which helped to foment major changes during the social movements of the 1960s.

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 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 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 attempts to measure intelligence during the late nineteenth century. Developments in the measurement of intelligence came at a time when researchers were seeking to demonstrate the heritability of intelligence and practitioners were seeking to classify people as mentally normal or deficient. Francis Galton was one of the first to implement practical methods of measuring intelligence. Galton’s research encouraged James McKeen Cattell, an American student, to use the same techniques to investigate variations in performance across different people. Aside from the research carried out by Galton and Cattell, this chapter considers the work of Victor Henri, Henry Herbert Goddard, Lewis Madison Terman, and Edmund Burke Huey. It also looks at the introduction of Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon’s intelligence tests to the United States.

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 discusses how a substantial number of studies have shown that working memory capacity (WMC) is the best single predictor identified so far of reasoning ability as measured by intelligence tests. This finding is an important step toward understanding psychometric intelligence in terms of theories from cognitive psychology. The factor-analytic approach to individual differences provides a tool to identify associations and dissociations between indicators of cognitive functions. The approach is to model the correlational structure of a large set of indicators by theoretically specified structural equation models. WMC is found to be related to measures of processing speed. One explanation is that many working memory tasks are complex span tasks that involve a processing component, and the speed of performing this component is one source of variance in complex span tasks. Currently the most successful theory of deductive reasoning is the theory of mental models.

Burt's major theoretical contribution to psychology was surely his work on the development of factor analysis. Unquestionably, it was Burt who was the first to see that the actual pattern of correlations observed between a large battery of intelligence tests could not be explained simply in terms of Spearman's general factor, but implied the existence of other ‘group’ factors. Of course, the whole issue of social class differences in IQ has been a contentious one, and many critics have denounced IQ tests, and those who devise them, as biased precisely because they appear to reveal differences between the average scores obtained by different social, cultural, or ethnic groups. Burt's paper was widely cited, however, not because it was the first to provide evidence on this topic, but because at first sight the data he presented seemed unusually clear and elegant, and the argument he developed particularly persuasive.

Chapter 2 focuses on the reforms and designs national leaders devised to improve both public schools and municipal governance, and it offers depth and detail on the specific innovations that elites urged cities to adopt. The chapter describes three of the main educational initiatives undertaken by urban school leaders: administrative reorganization of school districts, classification of children into different ability groups, and reform and revision of the school curriculum. Despite the seeming inconsistencies scholars have described across these reforms, Gamson argues that several common tenets provided the conceptual backbone for these reforms. District progressives saw their mission as instilling an understanding of “true democracy;” they believed that not all Americans were intellectually equal, asserting that they could democratically differentiate elements of society; and they argued that reforms could be unified when implemented together on a district-wide scale. The chapter also posits that the narrow slice of time between, roughly, 1913 and 1918 constituted quite possibly the most productive period in twentieth-century educational thought and identifies concepts offered by reformers such as John Dewey, Ellwood Cubberley, and Lewis Terman. During these same years, civic-minded leaders poured forth a host of vibrant ideas and plans for reforming and strengthening American municipal governments.

A historical overview of the psychometric tradition is first discussed in this chapter. The author asserts that the psychometric industry has had a considerable amount of practical success in predicting educational and occupational achievement. However, this approach has had considerably less success in generating a theoretical understanding of the processes underlying high or low performance on intelligence tests. The problems of applying the psychometric approach to the analysis of cognition in ageing are demonstrated in this chapter. Individual differences in working memory are then assessed including the working memory span, and whether it is language specific and what it measures. The author claims that this offers a series of brief tests that do not rely heavily on prior knowledge, and is beginning to influence more traditional psychometric approaches. Further, he contends that unlike the classic approach to intelligence, it has a much closer link to current cognitive psychology.

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.