Army Intelligence Tests and Racism

1921

Robert Yerkes (1876–1956)

Beginning in the nineteenth century, new theories were deployed to argue that some races were more evolved than others. In the early twentieth century, a new tool—the intelligence test—emerged, and though sorting races was not its creator’s intent, it soon was used to “prove” that some groups were intellectually superior. This was also the time when the word race became more directly associated with skin color rather than place of origin.

One prominent example of scientific racism was the large intelligence testing program for the US Army in World War I, in which psychologists tested nearly two million soldiers. According to psychologist Robert Yerkes, leader of the testing effort, the most intelligent soldiers were those of northern European or Anglo-Saxon descent, while recent immigrants or their offspring from Italy, Greece, or eastern Europe were not as smart.

The army psychologists extended their interpretation of the results to indicate that African Americans were the least intelligent, with scores on average equivalent to an eleven-year-old’s. Psychologists went further with the African American results by checking scores based on skin color to determine if being of partial European descent made a difference in scores. Those African Americans with the lightest skin color had the highest scores. Here is an excerpt from the official 1921 report (page 531): “Two battalions were classified as lighter or darker on the basis of offhand inspection. Two other battalions were classified as black, brown, and yellow on the basis of skin color. The median score of the ‘black’ Negroes was 39, that of the ‘yellow’ was 59; while that of the ‘brown’ Negroes fell between these values.”

These were the beliefs of the dominant social group; but within a few years a new cohort of African American psychologists and educators would successfully challenge these results. Beginning in the 1920s with the work of both African American and Latino/a psychologists, as well as the work of such psychologists as Otto Klineberg and Thomas Russell Garth, the notion of intellectual racial superiority was shown to be without basis.

SEE ALSO Psychological Tests (1890), Eugenics and Intelligence (1912)

US Army conducting group intelligence testing of African American World War I recruits. Report to the Surgeon General, National Academy of Sciences, 1921.