A measure of intelligenc.., p.10
A Measure of Intelligence, page 10
In the face of the feverish spread of IQ testing, some psychologists did voice concern and call for a more coherent picture of intelligence. According to one psychologist, Goddard turned the IQ test “into a fetish to be worshiped and protected from all doubt and attack, particularly in the educational field.” In 1922, journalist Walter Lippmann wrote a six-part series of articles examining the claim, “now widely made and accepted, that the psychologists have invented a method of measuring the inborn intelligence of all people.” Lippmann did not have much respect for the methods of IQ testing. He claimed that psychologists “guess at a stunt which might indicate intelligence” to design an IQ test’s content. He also pointed out that the IQ test favored certain types of abilities. “The type of mind which is very apt in solving Sunday newspaper puzzles, or even in playing chess, may be specially favored by these tests,” he wrote. But he was most concerned with how susceptible results were to misinterpretation. “The real promise and value of the investigation which Binet started,” Lippmann wrote, “is in danger of gross perversion by muddleheaded and prejudiced men.”
In the year after he called for a national registry of feeble-minded children, psychologist J. E. Wallace Wallin had a change of heart about the accuracy of the Binet test. He gave the test to the most American of demographics, a group of Iowa farmers. “Not a single one of these persons could by any stretch of the imagination be considered feeble-minded,” he wrote. But based on their IQ scores, every one of the farmers tested would be considered as such. The results suggested to Wallin that psychologists were playing “fast and loose with such vague and undefined concepts as ‘defective children,’ ‘mental deficiency,’ ‘mental defect,’ ‘defectiveness,’ ‘subnormality,’ ‘feeble-mindedness,’ ‘monornity,’ and ‘criminal imbecility.’” But when new immigrants to the United States were the ones labeled as feeble-minded, Wallin voiced no objection. The intelligence of Iowa farmers was the only kind that counted.
These warnings were not heeded. In 1927, the US Supreme Court ruled that the forced sterilization of those with low IQs did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. In his majority opinion in Buck vs. Bell, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared that those with low IQs “sap the strength of the State” and “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The ruling allowed the eugenic sterilization of Carrie Buck, who had lived at the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded since 1924. Her foster parents left her there when she was seventeen and pregnant. As Adam Cohen explores in his book Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, Holmes’s ruling delivered a “clarion call” to Americans to identify those who were feeble-minded. “It is better for all the world,” Holmes wrote, “if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” As cruel as Holmes’s words may seem to us today, denying the impact of them on social policy for the rest of the twentieth century was not so easy. This Supreme Court decision has yet to be overturned.
The Kallikak Family became a national bestseller. In The Mismeasure of Man, evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould called it “the primal myth of the eugenics movement.” Perhaps The Kallikak Family gained such national attention because of its purported ties to American roots. As a soldier in the American Revolution, Martin Kallikak represented two paths for the future of the new nation, and it was up to all Americans to choose the right path. The Kallikak Family went through multiple editions and was reprinted in Germany in 1933, the same year that the Nazi government passed the “Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Defects Act,” which was modeled on the eugenics laws of Indiana and California.
In 1945, long after he left the Training School and retired from his position as a professor of psychology at Ohio State University, Goddard published an article called “A Suggested Definition of Intelligence.” After the catastrophic damage done to humanity at the hands of eugenics by the end of World War II, Goddard could still only tentatively suggest a definition of intelligence. “No one has produced a definition that satisfies,” he wrote, admitting that the conception of intelligence rests on shaky ground. Nonetheless, Goddard offered the following: “Intelligence is the degree of availability of one’s experiences for the solution of his present problems and the anticipation of future ones.” To demonstrate what he meant, Goddard described Clarence, perhaps the same boy whose screaming was logged in the daily record at the Training School decades earlier, but there is no way to know for sure. Clarence was forced to stay with Goddard in his laboratory one afternoon for reasons not provided. But Clarence wanted to leave. Goddard shut the door to his laboratory and locked it. Clarence, perhaps agitated from his forced containment, tried the door repeatedly but never considered the lock. For Goddard, the anecdote illustrated Clarence’s lack of problem-solving skills. But to me, the scene gets to the cruelest way of defining intelligence—as a form of power, control, and forced submission. Clarence becomes the laboratory experiment, and Goddard sees his uncooperative behavior as a sign of his lack of intelligence. I wonder how long it took Clarence to internalize his own oppression, knowing what punishment might come to him if he kept trying to escape.
When Hitler’s atrocities were discovered at the end of World War II, America’s eugenics fever did not break. The segregation of Americans with intellectual disabilities in institutions became common policy, as the case of Philip Bard’s short life told by his father in The Atlantic demonstrates. Children with disabilities were not guaranteed access to a public education in the United States until 1975, when President Gerald Ford signed the Education for all Handicapped Children Act. Although surgical sterilization would become less common in the 1950s, forced sterilization in the name of eugenics continued for the rest of the twentieth century. Oregon ordered its last forced sterilization in 1981. But the practice continues in other countries around the world.
By the end of 2021, three states had voted to pay financial reparations to the living victims of forced eugenic sterilization: North Carolina, Virginia, and California. More than 60,000 people were sterilized in thirty-two states during the twentieth century under legislation that permitted the practice in the name of the improvement of the human race. Only a handful of those who underwent forced sterilization are still alive. In Virginia, eleven survivors were known when the legislation passed in 2015.
Despite these efforts to address the history of eugenic sterilization, the profession of psychology also played a significant role in the use of IQ testing to turn the segregation and discrimination of people with intellectual differences into a justified practice. On October 29, 2021, the American Psychology Association issued an apology to people of color for its role in promoting and perpetuating racism and human hierarchy in the United States. But it has never issued a similar apology to people with intellectual disabilities for the field’s role in eugenics and the use of IQ tests to perpetuate such a deeply immoral approach to psychological research.
It was the end of my second day, and the reading room was about to close. I put the folders and envelopes back into their sturdy boxes and arranged them in their correct order on the cart next to my desk. Louisa’s experiences at school, the attitudes of her teachers and the psychologists that we have worked with, were different from what I saw and read about in the archive. The national policies on the education of people with intellectual disabilities have changed dramatically too. But as I packed up my things, I thought about Amal. I thought about ways in which people with intellectual differences are still segregated today.
I got in my car and headed across Ohio, leaving behind the industrial northeast for the rural southwest. Both seemed equally stuck, clinging to a vision of America that was rooted in the past and that I wanted to escape. As I reached the outskirts of Akron, I passed a tall, white van filled with passengers leaning against the windows. At that moment, the segregation and cruelty of Vineland seemed present, spilling out of the archive and into highway traffic, like ghosts rising up from the past. I pressed on the gas pedal. Louisa would be getting home from school soon and heading off to gymnastics class, where she jumps and tumbles and does her best side by side with other kids her age. I couldn’t wait to hold her close and see her glowing smile. As I passed the van, I screamed in sadness, alone in my car.
Functioning
The trip to the Cummings Center in Akron rattled me. I was shaken by the history I had confronted and I feared how my daughter’s life could be shaped by it. I wanted to leave it alone, but I kept noticing ways in which our understanding of intelligence in the twenty-first century still held on to the ideas of the past.
I began to recall earlier conversations about Louisa that now seemed casually informed by IQ tests. When Louisa was about two, I was talking to a student in my office about a paper assignment when I noticed her glancing at Louisa’s picture taped to my file cabinet. It had been given to me by one of her caretakers at her daycare, Mr. Paul. In the photograph, Louisa is about one year old. She sits on a brightly decorated rug with a toy car at her feet, hands resting on her chubby thighs, her tuft of baby hair combed forward. Mr. Paul took the photograph to celebrate Louisa’s latest accomplishment, sitting up independently. He must have been on the floor with her and managed to get low enough for the camera to meet my daughter’s curious gaze straight on. She is a chubby, Buddha-like mound with one sock on and one off, studying the camera in front of her. It is still one of my favorite photographs, not only because of the baby face it preserves. It also reminds me of the care and support of the nurturing Mr. Paul.
Louisa is dressed in one of her best outfits, a pair of green cotton pants dotted with flowers and a matching top. I loved buying baby clothes for Louisa. It was an implicit way in which I asserted my desire for belonging to those who saw her. Look how well-groomed this baby is, I wanted people to think. Clearly, she has good parents. This child has a bright future ahead of her. I hated it when Louisa’s diaper leaked at daycare and she would come home in other clothes. Their laundered smell, different from the scent of our family’s clothes, irritated me. The borrowed pants were often too big, feeling like a betrayal of how I wanted Louisa to be seen.
“Your daughter has Down syndrome,” the student gasped. “My brother does too. He’s grown-up now.” Thrown by the personal connection, I managed to say something about how well Louisa was doing, how she was born with a small hole in her heart. No surgery was necessary; the cardiologist determined that the hole would heal on its own. Fifty percent of babies with Down syndrome are born with congenital heart defects, I told the student, trying to maintain some sense of professorial command. But she didn’t seem interested in this statistic. “My brother has to have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch every day or he will flip out,” the student replied. “Is your daughter high functioning or low functioning?”
Two years into motherhood, I didn’t really know. Her heart was functioning, which was what mattered the most. Describing my daughter in terms of functioning felt like acquiescing to the values of the modern world. Progress and development are valued above all else, even in babyhood. I tried to think of Louisa as simply being, learning how to be in this world. But would she be able to talk? When would she be able to walk down stairs by herself? Would she be potty trained by the age of five? I wasn’t really sure.
The student mentioned her brother’s sandwich preference casually, but the detail stung. In my mind, I jumped to the conclusion that this student assumed a daily peanut butter and jelly sandwich was in Louisa’s future too. It seemed circuitous, non-progressive, as if Louisa would never learn to try new things. The student’s comparison of my daughter to her brother annoyed me, even though I had never met him. Was she implying that Louisa’s fate was sealed? Was my daughter’s future filled with nothing but simple routines? For me, the eternal return of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich meant a lack of development, change, and exploration. Perhaps this routine suited my student’s brother, but I had to believe that more was possible for Louisa.
Louisa has never really cared much for peanut butter sandwiches. She likes chocolate, eggs prepared in all ways, and almost all varieties of fruits and vegetables, though not squash or sweet potatoes. She also thrives on routine, but no more than Andy and I do. There is a common belief that all people with Down syndrome are alike, or at least have the same kinds of differences from normal. High or low functioning classifies people in monolithic categories and overlooks a person’s uniqueness for the sake of a quick and efficient description. I bristled at the idea that Louisa and my student’s brother were the same. They are two distinct people who may or may not have anything in common.
As I stumbled to try to answer her question, “Yes! Very high functioning! She’s sitting up and everything!” I recognized a need to subtly claim a prognosis. In other words, what I think the student meant was how my daughter was expected to function later in life. Whether or not it was accurate, claiming that Louisa was high functioning put the present on stable ground, anticipating that everything in the future would be okay.
People with intellectual disabilities are evaluated in terms of their independence and productivity. Although anyone might struggle to set goals, hold a job, meet appointments, and pay their bills, people with intellectual disabilities are under particular scrutiny to demonstrate how well they function, to show that their lives are meaningful. Even when Louisa was a baby, I noticed my own need to prove to the world that she was on a promising trajectory. When someone asked me, “How is Louisa?” I was on high alert to respond with a checklist of developmental milestones. Saying three-word phrases? Check! Stringing a series of beads together? Check! I eventually realized that I was sharing more information than the innocent question meant to solicit. The truth was that my overcompensation was meant to defend against pity. It was also motivated by fear that Louisa would not be able to function as our world expected her to. To function is to belong. If she can’t function, I feared the lonely consequences she will suffer in a world that often seems so demanding and inflexible.
IQ tests attempt to quantify and predict functioning. Those who take them are scored, rated, and judged on efficiency and processing speed. A degree of functioning, high or low, typically corresponds to a person’s IQ score. Yet functioning translates an abstract number into a socially pragmatic shorthand. It describes how values like speed, productivity, and planning—assessed in theory on an IQ test—become meaningful in various real-life scenarios. Functioning is both a term of psychological classification and an obsession of our capitalist world. It is the assessment of how well a person meets the expectations of our society. High or low functioning often precedes diagnoses like Down syndrome, autism, alcoholism, and depression. It describes a person’s ability to fit in, to pass for normal, and to mask their differences in order not to disrupt the routines and flow of the everyday lives of the rest of us. High functioning suggests self-sufficiency, but also that a person’s need for support and care doesn’t get in our way.
In the early twentieth century, Henry Goddard considered what IQ scores could tell him about functioning. As part of his hierarchy of intelligence, Goddard identified the moron, a high functioning person with a relatively high IQ, as the most dangerous. “Society is facing a tremendous problem in this high-grade feeble-minded child,” he wrote in 1910. Those with lower IQs and lower functioning were easily separable from society, but “high-grade” children were the real threat to society because they could function well enough. These children who sat beside others in public school classrooms were “exactly like the high grades in institutions,” Goddard wrote. These were the children who could pass for normal and elude separation into segregated classes.
Functioning was eventually tested in ways that augmented the assessment of IQ. The Vineland Social Maturity Scale was developed in 1936 by Edgar Doll, who trained with Goddard and eventually took his place as Director of Research at Vineland. In line with his mentor’s pursuits, Doll sought to better articulate the difference between “feeble-minded subjects of high intelligence and normal subjects of low intelligence.” Social inadequacy—disruptive behavior in the form of anything considered not normal—was often the first indication of mental deficiency, Doll believed, and could be evaluated even before an official IQ test might be possible. Like Goddard, Doll claimed that feeble-mindedness was previously determined by vague concepts and subjective evaluation. The standardization and quantification of social behavior would put such inconsistencies to rest.
A person’s score on the Vineland Social Maturity Scale was determined in a method much like Binet’s IQ test. Certain tasks were normed to a particular age-group and sequenced in order of difficulty. A total of 117 tasks were grouped by the age in which a person was expected to accomplish them and standardized on a scale for normal subjects. By two years old, a child should eat with a spoon and pull off her socks. By four, a child should button her coat and wash hands unaided. Eight-year-olds should comb their own hair and should have disavowed Santa Claus. As a person gets older, the criteria for sufficiency become vaguer. Adults in their twenty-fifth year should be performing skilled work, promoting civic progress, and creating their own opportunities. When test-takers reached the limit of tasks that they could complete, their proficiency was identified as their “social age” in a way that was nearly identical to “mental age” determined by an IQ test.
