At the time this story began, the early 1840s, New York was a city of 313,000 people with no reliable source of drinking water. There was no electricity, of course. Dim gaslights had only recently been installed on its main streets. There were few buildings taller than four stories. Church steeples dominated the low skyline. There was no professional police force and no formal educational system. The top three-quarters of Manhattan was still rural countryside. Trains came in only as far as 27th Street, not into the city proper. There were no cars, of course. Transport within the city was by horse or by foot. There were no bridges or tunnels to the mainland or to Long Island. Brooklyn was a separate city, reachable only by ferry boat. Photography was just beginning to appear—the word itself had only been coined by John Herschel in 1839—but there were no movies, no recorded music, and no telephones. The first telegraph lines were just coming into existence, and there wouldn’t be a line from New York to Washington, DC until 1846. Commerce and trade had begun to concentrate in the city after the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, but New York was still a relatively minor city by international standards. Immigration into the city was a bare trickle compared to the torrent it would soon become.
In 1910—about one lifetime later—the city would have been unrecognizable to the resident of 1840. Trains not only ran into the city, but above the city and beneath the city as well. The streets were clogged with traffic as people, horses, wagons, carriages, streetcars, bicycles, and now, private automobiles pushed their way on to the roadways. The urban landscape extended as far north as the Harlem River, and beyond that into the Bronx. Electric lights lined many streets and filled many buildings. Electric elevators whisked people up and down the tallest towers the world had ever seen.
Instant communication—both near and far—was becoming common: not only were there telegraph lines to every part of the country but, starting in 1858, service across the Atlantic Ocean had become available. In addition, telephones now allowed for direct voice communication not only within the city but, starting in 1892, between New York and far-away Chicago. Publishing was transformed as well. Liberated from the arduous work of manual typesetting by the invention of the Linotype machine in 1886, the New York news industry had grown from just a few daily papers in the 1840s to dozens of them in 1910, catering to every possible class and taste. In addition to the newspapers, publishers now offered hundreds of magazines and thousands of “dime novels” in inexpensive paperback form.
Recorded music at home and moving pictures in theaters were becoming ubiquitous. Public radio broadcasts were just beginning. The impact on the news industry would be profound. Between home radio and public movie houses (which started showing newsreels about 1910), the news industry would undergo its greatest transformation since the emergence of the penny press in the 1830s.
Despite all these groundbreaking technological advances, peace did not come to the massive metropolis. As it had so often been in the past, New York remained the front line for a series of contentious battles between the city’s government and its gigantic, often distrustful, sometimes raucous, population. The city’s seemingly endless explosion of residents made even so basic a function as transportation—especially onto and off of Manhattan Island—a never-ending challenge. The system of elevated trains, the earliest segments of which were only 30 years old in 1910, was already inadequate at the start of the new century. Not only was it dirty and noisy, making further expansion of the system politically problematic, but it occupied a large swath of increasingly valuable land. A wholly new mode of public transit was needed. London had used underground trains as early as the late 1860s. Paris was in the process of building a similar system. Even Boston—ever New York’s rival—had opened a small “subway,” as the underground train systems were coming to be called, in 1897. The road ahead for New York was clear enough, if not easy: in 1900, ground was broken for a system of electric trains to run beneath the streets—even under the East River—connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn by tunnel. The first New York subway opened in 1904.
Nothing could keep up with the surge of demand for fast, cheap transit, though. Capacity remained such a pressing issue that even the new subway would not start to actually displace the old elevated train lines until the 1930s. Above ground, despite the opening of the greatest bridge the world had ever seen not 20 years before, it became necessary to start building an additional link to Brooklyn in 1901. The new Manhattan Bridge—a modern steel structure, contrasting sharply with the heavy masonry of the Brooklyn Bridge—opened in 1909.
The communication and transportation revolutions affected every corner of society, and psychology was no exception. Although putatively national journals and a national association had existed for nearly two decades, the day-to-day communities of psychologists had existed mostly on a local basis: New York psychologists could talk, on a daily basis, mostly with other New York psychologists. Indeed, before the 20th century, psychologists were more likely to be in daily touch with physicians, neurologists, educators, anthropologists, and other scholars from their own university and city than they were to converse with fellow psychologists from elsewhere. Trains and telephones began to change all of this. As with the wider country, psychology began to develop a deeper, more intricately interconnected national culture that was no longer hamstrung by the constraints of the postal service, the quarterly journal, and the once-per-year meeting of the national association.
As always, wider cultural developments conditioned what psychologists saw as their most productive courses of action. The labor question continued to be contentious. In 1905, after many workers had won often-violent battles to legislatively limit the length of the workday, a Supreme Court decision in the case of Lochner v. New York ruled that regulations on work hours violated a clause of the 14th Amendment holding that states shall not “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” It is ironic that this amendment, originally passed in 1868 to secure the rights of former slaves, was used here to restrict the rights of paid laborers, not a few of whom had been those very slaves, or were the children of former slaves. The Lochner ruling would be used to strike down many labor regulations over the next generation-and-a-half, until it was quashed in 1937.1
Rulings like Lochner made it seem to many in the labor movement as though the legislative “game” was rigged against them. This led many to consider more radical solutions to the challenges—often matters of life and death—that they faced. “Big Bill” Haywood, who we met in in connection with Münsterberg’s excursion into the psychology of law, founded the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) the very same year as the Lochner ruling was issued. The IWW organized many industries that had been ignored by the older unions, especially where the workforces were dominated by immigrants and by women. The ultimate aim of the IWW was to create a single union for all workers nationwide, rather than having individual unions according to each “craft,” which could too easily be divided from one another and thereby conquered by business interests. One of the IWW’s most visible battles was the 1912 Textile Strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in which the working conditions revealed were so terrible that Congress saw fit to hold hearings on the matter. The owners quickly settled rather than risk further government intervention.
Government acted erratically in these matters, and so it was not trusted by either side. In 1916, the federal government passed the Adamson Act, which established an eight-hour day for interstate railroad employees, plus additional pay for overtime work. It was the first federal law to regulate the work hours of private companies. Surprisingly for the Lochner era, the Supreme Court upheld Adamson’s constitutionality, citing the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution.2 By contrast, so threatening did the federal government find the power of the IWW that just two years later, in 1918, Woodrow Wilson used the extraordinary measures he had enacted during World War I to have Haywood and 100 other IWW leaders convicted of “espionage.” Haywood was sentenced to 20 years in prison, but he fled to the nascent Soviet Union where he would die in 1928.
Labor strife was hardly limited to the courts. On March 25, 1911, a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory—situated along a street that William James had lived as a child (Washington Place)—led to the deaths of 146 garment workers, mostly young immigrant women between the ages of 16 and 23. Because the factory owners had locked the doors to the stairwells to prevent their employees from leaving the work floor, many of the women were forced to leap eight floors or more to their deaths on the street below rather than be consumed by the rapidly advancing flames. The enormity of the tragedy caused a national outcry and was key in shifting public opinion in favor of labor’s demands. Factory safety legislation soon followed, as did increased membership in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union.
Many psychologists saw business and industry as potentially lucrative arenas in which to ply their own trades. Very often, however, they allied themselves with capital against labor. Frederick Winslow Taylor was not a psychologist but, rather, a mechanical engineer who spent over a decade as a management consultant with several industries. His general aim was to help companies solve production problems that were costing them money. From about 1890 forward, Taylor consulted for a number of companies, most famously Bethlehem Steel, which brought him to the general conclusion that workers often fail to deliver maximum effort and, as a result, saddle their employers with unnecessary labor costs. If only workers could be induced to work as efficiently as possible mechanically (he was a mechanical engineer, after all), labor costs could be substantially reduced. He attacked the perceived problem by closely scrutinizing workers’ actions—timing them with a stopwatch and sometimes photographing them as well, while they did their jobs—a process that came to be known as the “time study.” Then, he would design a precise sequence of actions that, he argued, maximized the worker’s efficiency. In order to enforce the execution of his detailed action scheme, he recommended that workers be paid according to their ability to generate the level of production that he had determined should result from employing his mechanically “ideal” sequence exactly.
In 1911, after more than two decades of this kind work, Taylor published his general outlook in a controversial book titled, Principles of Scientific Management.3 The choice of the term “scientific” was rhetorically shrewd. Almost paradoxically, it simultaneously conveyed an air of both “objectivity” and “normativity”; these schemes are how things are made maximally efficient, therefore one should act in accordance with them. Interestingly, this verbal shrewdness had not been Taylor’s originally. The phrase “scientific management” was coined not by Taylor but by the future Supreme Court Justice, Louis D. Brandeis. In a case before the Interstate Commerce Commission, Brandeis argued against an application by the Eastern Rail Road Company to raise its freight rates. Brandeis contended that Eastern’s financial problems were caused by poor oversight, not by insufficient revenue, and that the public should not have to bear the cost of Eastern’s inefficiency. If only its management took a more “scientific” (i.e., Taylorist) approach, Brandeis continued, the company could easily reduce its operating costs. In the wake of Brandeis’ claim, Taylor was called to testify before the Commission, which brought him and his system enormous publicity. Soon after, Taylor adopted Brandeis’ phrase, “scientific management.”
Taylor’s book became a sensation among the American managerial class, not only because it promised to save them money, but also because it effectively placed blame for inefficiency on the putative ignorance and laziness of workers. Although Taylor claimed to be reconciling management and labor through “science,” there could be little doubt about where his sympathies lay: he once sneered that anyone who is “physically able to handle pig-iron and is sufficiently phlegmatic and stupid to choose this for his occupation is rarely able to comprehend the science of handling pig-iron.”4 Not surprisingly, Taylor and his paternalistic condescension were despised by labor organizations who not only found his interventions degrading to workers but also indifferent to the pace of action that human bodies were actually capable of sustaining over the course of a long workday. “Scientific management” was denounced by the American Federation of Labor and became the primary point of contention in a variety of strikes. Taylorism rapidly became so controversial a political issue that, in 1912, Congress held hearings on the matter. Although Taylor was considered a prophet in the business world, things did not go so well for him in the arena of politics. In 1914, the US government banned Taylorist practices in all government operations, including in the military.5 Taylor died the following year, but his ideas were taken up and developed by others.6
A Massachusetts building contractor named Frank Gilbreth was developing ideas about work efficiency that were superficially similar to Taylor’s. His focus, however, was not so much on increasing the pace of work as it was on eliminating unnecessary movements and redesigning equipment so that work would induce less fatigue (e.g., physically raising the brick supply to the current height of bricklaying work with a multilevel bench, so that workers were not constantly stooping to pick up the next brick to be laid). This attention to the worker’s experience tempered the hostility that Taylor had generated. Gilbreth was also more technically sophisticated than Taylor. Rather than using a stopwatch alongside of photographic stills, Gilbreth exploited the new technology of motion pictures to record the complete sequence of the worker’s actions, often with a clock in the frame to exactly track the passage of time. The films were then taken back to Gilbreth’s offices to be studied, frame by frame, in order to design better work systems. These were called “motion studies,” in contrast to Taylor’s more rudimentary “time studies,” and they may constitute the first time that film was used in a behavioral study of any kind. Starting in 1911, Gilbreth began publishing books on his general approach to work efficiency.7 The growing popularity of his approach led to considerable friction with Taylor and his disciples.8 Gilbreth, however, was talented at drawing favorable publicity. Late in May 1913, for instance, he hauled his motion picture setup out to the Polo Grounds in northern Manhattan and filmed motion studies of a couple of pitchers in front of 20,000 fans who had come to watch the New York Giants play.9 The New York Tribune had organized the event and was there, of course, to spread word of these curious goings-on to its tens of thousands of readers.10
In 1904, Gilbreth married a woman from California named Lillian Moller. She had a Master’s Degree in English from the University of California, but she had also taken some psychology courses with Edward Thorndike at Columbia. Lillian immediately became Frank’s collaborator in the motion studies. She returned to California to pursue a PhD in psychology. The dissertation that she completed in 1911 would eventually be published as The Psychology of Management in 1914.11 Because she did not meet the University of California’s residency requirements while writing her dissertation—working at Frank’s consulting business, and raising the first few of their eventual twelve children—the university would not grant her the degree she had earned. Lillian returned to school once again, this time at Brown University, where she completed another PhD, awarded this time, in 1915. Here she began to extend her and Frank’s findings to realms beyond the industrial: her Brown dissertation was titled, Some Aspects of Eliminating Waste in Teaching.12 Her formal education in psychology enabled her to incorporate more effectively into management studies the mental aspects of workers’ lives, such as the impacts of interest and boredom on the quality of their work.
Credit: National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution Washington, DC.
Frank and Lillian’s collaboration in the new industrial psychology continued apace for another decade, until Frank died suddenly at the age of just 59, in 1924.13 By that time, he had begun lecturing on management at Purdue University. After his death, Purdue asked Lillian to lecture in his place. This continued for another decade until, in 1935, her appointment was converted to a visiting professorship. In 1940, Purdue promoted her to full professor, and she stayed there for another eight years until she retired. Lillian’s work on efficiency in the decades after Frank’s death expanded from the workplace and the school right into the home itself. She designed an “ideally” efficient kitchen to help alleviate the burden of labor for housewives. Her best-known invention from this period is probably the foot-pedal trashcan, which continues to be widely used to this day.14
Figure 10.3 Frank and Lillian Gilbreth.
Credit: Frank and Lillian Gilbreth Collection, Courtesy of Purdue University Libraries, Karnes Archives & Special Collections.
Not all of psychologists’ forays into business and industry were quite so focused on the shop floor as the Gilbreths’ was. A psychologist at Northwestern University named Walter Dill Scott, for instance, built a consulting practice around assisting businesses to identify the best types of people for particular roles they needed to fill. For example, salespeople are most successful when they have certain personal qualities. Those qualities are different from the ones that make for a successful accountant or executive. Businesses need a variety of different types—people with different personal makeups—in order to thrive. Scott tailored evaluation schemes—questionnaires and interview strategies—to help businesses identify the best candidates for their positions. In contrast to the mental tests of the past, and the intelligence tests just then coming into view (more about which to follow), Scott’s focus was on the specific constellation of qualities that is needed for a particular job—e.g., intelligence as well as honesty, persuasiveness, attractive appearance, etc.—rather than studying “general intelligence” and abstract “personality traits,” as we would now call them. This more pragmatic approach to the question would later bring him into conflict with other prominent psychologists of his day but, in the end, it would also lead to the highest accolade of his life.
Scott was effectively inventing a new kind of psychology, and it was not at all the kind for which he had been trained. Like so many others young Americans of his day, he had gone to Leipzig to earn a doctorate, where, like many of Wundt’s students, he had been enlisted in the effort to fractionate simple mental activities into their component processes. Although this prestigious education, which he successfully completed in 1900, won him his professorship at Northwestern, his undergraduate alma mater, it bore only a modest relation to the applied sort of psychology he would help to invent. He admired the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor, but he also wanted to get below the level of explicit rational motivations to which Taylor limited himself (e.g., monetary incentives), down into emotionally driven impulses. And not just for the worker but also for the consumer as well.15
At first, Scott focused on advertising, developing the theory that suggestibility is the key to consumer behavior. By playing on consumers’ emotions—rather than simply presenting the facts about a given product—advertisements could become more persuasive. He wrote a short popular book on the topic in 1903, which was written up in the New York Times.16 The publicity won him a national audience, so he wrote a longer book, published in 1908, which established him as the leading authority on a topic—the psychology of advertising—that had hardly existed before he took it up.17 Always the entrepreneur, Scott was able to parlay that prominence into a lucrative consulting business.
Another psychologist who contributed significantly to the psychology of advertising was Harry Hollingworth. Having graduated from Columbia in 1909, he was just an impoverished instructor at Barnard College when Coca-Cola came calling in 1911. The company was under indictment by the US Government for including in its popular drink an allegedly toxic and addictive substance: caffeine. For the upcoming trial, they needed scientific evidence that caffeine was, in fact, harmless. They had, at first, sought out the prominent James McKeen Cattell, but he had declined, recommending his recent graduate, Hollingworth, instead. Hollingworth agreed to take up the project and did the necessary experiments in just a few weeks’ time. He testified in court that caffeine was a mild stimulant, but that it caused no detectable negative effects.18 Although the event was momentous for the credibility of psychology in courts of law, the charges against Coca-Cola were dismissed by the judge the week after Hollingworth’s testimony, and no decision was ever rendered on the legal value of his experimental conclusions. Nevertheless, the incident made Hollingworth a kind of accidental celebrity in the world of advertising. Two years later, he published a book on the topic.19 Much later, Hollingworth would also conduct landmark research of the effects of chewing gum for the Beech-Nut company.20
As the controversy over Taylorism heated up during the second decade of the 20th century began, a number of psychologists started taking advantage of the sensation by publicly weighing in on the controversy. Walter Dill Scott Scott, for instance, issued his own book on the fraught question of industrial efficiency in 1911.21 Similarly, Hugo Münsterberg, of course, could not allow such an opportunity for self-promotion to slip by unmolested. Just a year after Scott’s major book on advertising had come out, Harvard’s unofficial German “ambassador” published an article on the same topic in the popular McClure’s Magazine. Although he did not mention Scott by name, he deployed his signature tactic of calling for “special laboratories for applied psychology [that] could examine the market demands with careful study of all the principles involved.”22 This strategy enabled him to imply that earlier efforts had been little more than unreliable speculation, and that only he was being truly “scientific” about the matter. In 1913, following the path of publicity again, Münsterberg published his thoughts on industrial efficiency in book form.23 Because of his body of work in the field, it is not uncommon to see Münsterberg declared the “Father of Industrial Psychology,” and that seems to be exactly how he hoped it would play out. His outsized public stature brought into public view ideas which were not yet widely known. On closer examination, however, one can see that, although he made some significant contributions, he was often more of a quick and canny follower than a true originator.24
One of those who was first made aware of industrial psychology by Münsterberg’s 1913 book was the president of the Carnegie Institute for Technology in Pittsburgh, Arthur Hamerschlag. His interest piqued, he decided to attend the meeting of the American Psychological Association, which was in Philadelphia that year. There he met a young Dartmouth psychologist who was working on the questions of business, Walter Van Dyke Bingham. Thinking that it might be interesting to add industrial psychology to the Carnegie Institute curriculum, which was only a decade old at the time, Hamerschlag asked Bingham to write a report about how a psychology department might benefit the school. What Bingham proposed was entirely new on the American academic scene: he outlined a vision for a department devoted solely to applied psychology. The development and application of personnel testing, and other forms of evaluation, would play a large role in its activities. Not only would it align elegantly with Carnegie’s educational mission. It would also be able to attract funding from corporations, both local and national, who would commission the department to conduct research that had real economic consequences for them.
Bingham recommended that Hamerschlag hire an applied psychologist then working at the University of Illinois, Guy Montrose Whipple. Hamershlag decided instead to poach Bingham himself.25 Faced with the prospect of chairing an entire Division of Applied Psychology—the first academic unit of its kind in the US—located in America’s industrial heartland, rather than teaching seven courses26 at a small, if elite, New England college, Bingham jumped at the offer. He immediately hired James Burt Miner, then a Minnesota professor who had earned his PhD under Cattell at Columbia,27 and Louis L. Thurstone, just then completing his PhD at Chicago. Miner would later write an influential book on the relationship between intelligence and criminality,28 and he pioneered the assessment of vocational interest in ways that were eventually molded by Edward K. Strong into the widely used Strong Vocational Interest Blank.29 Thurstone, by contrast, would become a legendary psychometrician, developing, among other things, factor analytic techniques that were said to reveal the existence of multiple “primary mental abilities” rather than a singular “general intelligence” as Charles Spearman had claimed.30 It was an extraordinarily good start for a new program.
In 1916, Bingham added to his Carnegie roster Walter Dill Scott, who agreed to relocate from Northwestern, bringing with him his experience in developing business-oriented tests tailored for particular clients. Scott oversaw the “Bureau of Salesmanship Research” within Bingham’s Division of Applied Psychology. Relationships were forged with several of America’s greatest companies, including Carnegie Steel, and dozens of doctoral students were trained, many of whom went on to bring industrial research to psychology departments across the country.
The Carnegie program represented a high point for academic industrial psychology, but it was not to last for long. Less than a decade after it had begun, a new president at Carnegie shifted priorities elsewhere. Miner left for Kentucky, where he remained for the next two decades. Thurstone returned to Chicago, where he worked for nearly 30 years, founding the Psychometric Society in 1936, along with its journal Psychometrika. Scott was elected president of the APA in 1919, and then president of Northwestern University, a post he would hold for nearly 20 years.
Business and industry were, of course, not the only domains in which psychologists attempted to apply their specialized knowledge and skills. The ongoing expansion of universal public education created ever more possibilities for the development and use of new psychological practices. As the historian of psychology Kurt Danziger observed, educational psychology underwent a transformation at this time from a topic that had originally been aimed at assisting teachers in the classroom to one increasingly directed at facilitating the administration of an enormous and ever-growing institution.31
Education continued to be a bone of public contention as well. Culture clashes often became most intense when the issue was children, and the kinds of adults they should be molded into. As urban infrastructures groaned under the weight of vast and rapid population growth, the strains on school systems, in particular, became nearly unsustainable. Budgets never seemed sufficient and some new method was needed to coordinate the ever increasing numbers of students around the often inadequate school buildings and equipment. It was probably inevitable that aspects of the efficiency movement, then sweeping the industrial realm, would be brought into discussions of public education as well, but these ideas were even more controversial when it came to schools than they had been in factories and construction sites.
In 1907, the superintendent of schools in Gary, Indiana, a man named William A. Wirt, hatched a new plan for public schools that would not only use resources more efficiently, but also bring more students into greater contact with the specialized facilities that urban schools were beginning to design. Instead of having secondary students sit in the same room all day while teachers brought different topics to them, Wirt conceived the idea of moving the students in and out of different rooms, each customized for particular purposes: listening to lectures (classrooms), working on projects (workshops, art studios, auditoriums), and being physically active (gymnasiums, sports fields).
To us, in the 21st century, accustomed as we are to the high school system that grew from Wirt’s “Gary Plan,” moving about during the school day seems completely natural. To many people of the early 20th century, though, who were mainly familiar with the old one-room school house, the Gary Plan seemed like an abomination. To immigrants, especially, often uncomfortably crowded in unpleasant urban ghettoes, Wirt’s plan seemed to threaten all the sacrifices they had made so that their children’s lives could be better than theirs had been. The parents may have had to endure the degrading ritual of efficiency “experts” coming to their workplaces and telling them how to “properly” do jobs they had been doing for years, but their children, they fervently hoped, would have educations full of arts and literature and sciences, so that they could go on to become doctors and lawyers and professors. The Gary Plan seemed to many of them to consign their children in advance to dank, dangerous factories and dirty, exhausting construction sites. Its controlling clocks and scheduled shufflings from place to place would turn them into the robotic mechanisms that Taylor and his followers wanted manual laborers to be.
In fact, Wirt was no Taylorist. He was an unabashed “progressive.” He was a disciple of John Dewey. Indeed, the Gary Plan had been publicly praised by Dewey himself.32 But the distrust was often too great, and the implementation of the Plan too often corrupted by politicians who were sympathetic to the business interests that wanted precisely that children be molded by schools into efficient and compliant workers.33
The Gary Plan was controversial in many places across America, but nowhere did it spur as fervent an opposition as in New York City. On New Year’s Day 1914, a new reformist mayor took office in New York City, John Purroy Mitchel. At just 34 years of age, the second youngest mayor New York ever had, Mitchel had beaten back the deeply entrenched power and corruption of Tammany Hall, and he was determined to take the city in a new, modern direction. His first initiative was to clean up the police force, a project he attacked with both vigor and a good measure of success. In April, Mitchel survived an assassination attempt by one Michael Mahoney, who the New York Times described as “a shabbily dressed man of 71 years, who fancied he had a series of grievances against the Mayor for his mode of administering the City Government.”34 Mitchel was not hit by the shots fired at him.
In 1911–1912, Mitchel had been in charge of a massive survey of New York’s public schools that had found deficiencies and failures in nearly every aspect of the system. Thus, his next order of business as mayor was to overhaul how the city delivered education to its children. At the time, New York employed some 20,000 teachers, who oversaw some 800,000 children. More than two-thirds of the students were foreign born, so language was a serious issue. Half of the students left school after the sixth grade; only one in ten completed high school. The education budget was large—$44 million—but, still, buildings were badly overcrowded and many people questioned the quality of the education provided.35
Mitchel believed that shifting New York Schools to the Gary Plan would provide a better educational experience by using the space the school system had more efficiently (thereby reducing overcrowding) and by modernizing the curriculum. For many, however, “modernizing” was a dog whistle for replacing traditional academic topics with ones that were of more immediate vocational value—job training. The two issues, though distinct in principal, were intricately intertwined in the minds of many New Yorkers of the era. After touring Gary’s schools with an entourage of New York’s educational leaders, Mitchel hired Wirt to consult on the conversion of the city’s schools to the new plan.
The New York City School Board was then presided over by a Tammany politician, Thomas Churchill. Churchill was, at first, willing to entertain a changeover to the Gary plan, but he wanted to ensure that he and his Board retained control of the process. The Progressives of Mitchel’s administration, however, believed that such matters were better handled by experts and, in any case, they did not trust the motivations of old Tammany loyalists like Churchill. During 1914 and early 1915, Mitchel had a few schools changed over as a pilot project. In the fall of 1915, he pre-emptively declared that all schools would be converted to the Gary Plan as soon as possible.
Churchill objected that the mayor was illegitimately meddling in school affairs. He claimed that the mayor’s motivations, far from being a concern for student welfare, were primarily budgetary in character. Making matters worse for Mitchel, in 1916, Churchill was replaced as president of the School Board by William Willcox, a man who adamantly opposed the Gary Plan, and who was ready to publicly campaign against it.
The changeover progressed slowly. At the start of 1917, only 30 of New York’s 680 schools had been converted, but the plan was rapidly becoming a public controversy that Tammany and other opposition groups were starting to milk for partisan gain. Some argued that children require the surrogate mother of a single teacher all day long. Others claimed that moving from room to room would displace a large amount of precious learning time from the school day. It was even suggested that the periodic movement from room to room would make children ill.
The opposition campaign worked. By the fall of 1917, large segments of the public were up in arms—particularly the Jewish and Italian communities. On Oct 17, a raucous crowd of several hundred students demonstrated at a school in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, throwing stones at the school. Police had to be called out to disperse the mob and protect the building. The next morning, though, over 1,000 protesters turned out, and this time they were faced by a throng of counter-demonstrators. The ensuing mêlée could not be quelled, and it started spreading to other schools in the area. As the protests grew in size to thousands of people—still mostly students at this point—the police started arresting people. At first they focused mainly on the adults, who were thought to be leading the protests, but eventually children were taken into custody as well, raising an the outcry from parents the city over. Within a couple of days, the protests had spread to the Bronx, where police had to set up guards at every school in the borough. Mayor Mitchel tried to shift blame for the disorder on to Tammany agents provocateurs, but the accusation only seemed to enflame things further.
Next, hundreds of mothers became actively involved in the protests. The New York World reported that many “non-English speaking Yiddish mothers” believed that the Gary system would turn their children into “slaves” of John D. Rockefeller.36 From the Upper East Side and the Bronx, the protests spread to Brooklyn and, finally, to the Lower East Side. What had started as an unruly neighborhood demonstration was rapidly turning into a violent, city-wide riot. The crowds began to turn against the police, throwing bricks, stones, and bottles. The number of arrests multiplied rapidly. Activist students started being expelled, suspended, and fined. Mitchel’s plan to improve the city’s schools had blown up in his face.
Of course, how New York organized its schools was hardly the only pressing issue of the day. Wholly unexpected by Mitchel or anyone else, back when the Gary Plan process had started to take shape in early 1914, was that it would become weirdly entangled with the most horrific war the world had ever seen. As is well known, when, in June 1914, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated by a Serb nationalist, the political fallout rapidly spun out of control, culminating in war among the great European powers. Although many expected the conflict to last only a few months, at first, the conflict soon descended into a bloody stalemate in which hundreds of thousands were killed, month over month, by the most destructive, most technologically sophisticated, most “modern” weapons ever produced.
No military anywhere really understood how to attack successfully under such conditions and, as a result, the battlefield itself became a kind of giant laboratory of war. A whole generation of young men were thrown into a fight that has often been likened to a meatgrinder. In the US, President Woodrow Wilson insisted that America would remain neutral, even when the nation was provoked by the deaths of American passengers on ships that were torpedoed by the German navy. Wilson even premised his 1916 re-election campaign on keeping America out of the increasingly catastrophic conflagration. However, when evidence emerged in January of 1917 that Germany was secretly urging Mexico to attack the US, Wilson swiftly changed course: Congress declared war on Germany in April. The US implemented mandatory military conscription in May. Then, in June, it passed an Espionage Act, making it a crime to “obstruct” military recruitment (meaning the draft), among other things. Although the country would not be on a full war footing for several months yet, national anxiety at the prospect of sending American boys across the ocean to lay down their lives in a European quarrel grew over the course of the year.
These events, momentous as they were, might be expected not to have had much impact on the local issue of how New York’s schools organized their time and space but, because Mayor Mitchel actively supported both US entry into the war and Wilson’s controversial military draft, the two issues became closely connected in the public’s mind. At the very height of the disorder over the city’s public schools, James McKeen Cattell was dismissed by Columbia University, ostensibly for having written a letter to a US Congressman opposing conscription.37 Cattell’s firing launched an uproar over his freedom of speech, and he, in turn, used his moment in the public spotlight to declare that the Gary Plan would bring mandatory military training to the city’s schools, so that the government could more efficiently deliver New York boys into Europe’s “meatgrinder.” What made Cattell’s pronouncement particularly effective at that instant was that it was not merely the opinion of a lone, if notable, intellectual. It was, in fact, the political platform on which the socialist, Jewish lawyer, Morris Hillquit, was running to displace Mitchel as mayor.38 The Gary Plan and the violence that it generated became the major issue of the New York City election of 1917. Mitchel stood by his proposal, but it led to his demise, both political and personal: He was routed by the Tammany candidate for mayor, John F. Hylan, by a 2-to-1 margin. After the humiliating defeat, Mitchel joined the US Air Service and was killed in a flying accident the following year.39
One of the greatest challenges for those facing the gargantuan task of designing a school system that could accommodate hundreds of thousands of children of all ages, language groups, races, and socioeconomic backgrounds was figuring out exactly at what intellectual level to pitch the curriculum such that it could be learned by the vast majority of those in each particular grade. No one wanted children to be left out, but there seemed no getting around the fact that, no matter what one did, some children were going to need extra individualized attention in order to succeed than could be provided by a massive, bureaucratic, institution such as public school.
Rather than waiting for children to fail, then trying to pick them up again, many school systems sought out ways of identifying children who were likely to have trouble in advance, so that the proper educational supports could be brought to bear ahead of time, rather than after the fall. It wasn’t only American schools facing this problem. In Paris, the Ministry of Public Instruction called upon a psychologist at the Sorbonne who had just published a book on the question of intelligence, Alfred Binet.40 In response, Binet developed a series of tests, to be administered by a single tester to a single child, designed to distinguish children who were of normal mental ability from those who were likely to have significantly more trouble learning standardized school material than the bulk of children. Working with a physician named Théodore Simon, Binet’s first test, published in 1905, simply distinguished between those who were “normal” and those who would require special attention. Quickly revising the test in 1908, Binet and Simon developed the idea of an “intellectual level” (niveau intellectuel), and they normed their test on each age in a range from 3 years old to 13 (“mental age” was a term later used by Americans, though it was not a phrase that Binet and Simon used). Children whose intellectual level lagged too far behind their chronological age would either be assigned to a regular class that was more appropriate to their intellectual level, or they would attend special classes for children with similar ability. In 1911, Binet added some adult level items to the test, taking the age range up to 16 years.41
The items that Binet employed in his test were different from those used in the anthropometric tests that had been pioneered by Galton and Cattell earlier. Binet included some of their sensory and motor tasks in his most preliminary tests, but his test also asked children to solve more complex cognitive problems: Name common things shown in pictures. Repeat a list of words. Answer questions about a picture from memory. Draw geometric figures from memory. Create sentences that include particular words. Distinguish the meanings of two closely related words. Binet and Simon normed each problem carefully, determining the age at which most children could solve it, and sometimes the time typically needed to solve it as well.
Educators in the US faced similar challenges and were in need of a similar tool to assess the intellectual levels of school children. One American psychologist in particular, Henry Herbert Goddard, did more than any other to bring the new French intelligence tests to American shores. Back in 1896, Goddard had been the headmaster of a private Quaker academy in Maine when he saw Stanley Hall give one of his famous lectures on educational reform.42 Goddard was so inspired by Hall’s vision that he left his comfortable position to attend Clark and earn a PhD under Hall’s guidance. His dissertation was on the power of mental suggestion in both the “miracle cures” of religious figures and those spontaneous remissions occasionally observed by conventional physicians. In the style of his mentor, Hall, Goddard loosely connected the power of suggestion to the process of evolution. Also like Hall, he was determinedly scientific without wholly abandoning his respect for religion. Indeed, Goddard revered Hall, once writing to him, “I know that mine [my life] is incomparably larger, higher and broader than it would have been had I not come under your instruction and inspiration.”43
For several years after graduation, Goddard taught at the West Chester Normal School, just outside of Philadelphia, where he trained future school teachers. Almost as soon as he arrived, though, he joined a discussion group on the training of the “feeble-minded” (the accepted term of the era). The group was led by one Edward R. Johnstone, the new superintendent of a training school for feeble-minded children that was situated amidst the farm fields of Vineland, New Jersey, about 40 miles south of Philadelphia. Johnstone—born in Ontario but raised in Cincinnati—did not have a college degree, but he had become a devotee of Hall’s “child study” nevertheless. Thus, the arrival in the Philadelphia area of a graduate of Hall’s program, such as Goddard, was immediately interesting to Johnstone. He could see, though, that the kinds of children in his charge would not benefit much from Hall’s efforts to uncover general laws of child development. Specialized research, tailored to the specific challenges that Johnstone faced, would be needed if Vineland were going to avoid sliding into being a merely custodial facility, as did so many “schools” for the feeble-minded in that era. In Goddard, Johnstone found a man who was not only interested in the question of intellectual disability, but who also had the research skills to perhaps do something about it. In 1906, Johnstone created a new position at Vineland, Director of Research, and persuaded Goddard to take it.
Figure 10.5 Henry Herbert Goddard.
Credit: H. H. Goddard Collection. Archives of the History of American Psychology, The Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology, The University of Akron.
Once Goddard was face-to-face with the reality of over 300 children of every age and ability, he realized as never before that feeble-mindedness was, in reality, a grab-bag category that took on a bewildering array of specific forms. Unless he could find a way to elicit or impose some sort of order on the wide range of disabilities before him, any truly productive research program would remain elusive. “Feeble-mindedness” was, at the time, distinct from the category of “retardation” that Lightner Witmer was then working on at his clinic at Penn. The retarded, it was thought, could be treated for the particular learning problem they presented and, once it was corrected, they could be returned to the regular classroom. The feeble-minded, by contrast, were cases in which mental development seemed to have completely stopped at some point. There was little hope of returning these children to regular schools. They needed “special education,” as the fashionable pedagogical phrase of the day had it. Indeed, some of Goddard’s “children” at Vineland were not really children at all, but young adults in their 20s whose intellectual abilities still were those of a child many years younger.
The medical establishment of the US, in whom the power to formally diagnose was typically vested, had not been able to develop a useful taxonomy of these “mental defectives” (another technical term of the age). It was apparent to Goddard, however, that the problem facing him was not really medical but, rather, psychological in character. Of course, there was probably some physiological cause underlying each child’s disability, but Goddard, as the children’s educator, did not really need to categorize them in those terms so much as he needed to know what each was ultimately capable of learning and how each would best learn. Knowledge of that sort would enable Goddard to construct a curriculum appropriate to the abilities of each child. In 1908, Goddard took a summer research excursion to Europe to see how scholars and scientists there were handling the matter.44 It was during this trip that Goddard was more or less accidentally introduced to the Binet-Simon intelligence test.45 Binet’s work was not unknown in America at the time. The problem was, rather, that its significance could only really be fully appreciated by someone in Goddard’s unique position. As his biographer wrote,
two years of frustrating institutional experience had prepared him to see what Janet, Cattell, and even Hall, the most prescient of contemporary psychological entrepreneurs, had missed. Contained within Binet’s articles … was an entirely new psychological approach toward diagnosing and classifying feeble minds.46
Goddard seized upon the Binet-Simon test, translating it into English as soon as he returned home, and publishing it in a local journal before the year was out.47 Goddard also began administering the test to his many charges at Vineland. He quickly found that he was able to sort them into the three categories of intellectual disability that Binet and Simon had distinguished: idiot, imbécile, and débile. The first two of these terms, representing the two greatest degrees of disability, were easily rendered in English as idiot and imbecile. The third one, however, Goddard decided to render not as “debilitated” but as “moron,” a term derived from the Greek term for “dull.”48 “Morons” were people whose intellectual development had stopped at between 8 and 12 years of age. Unlike “idiots” and “imbeciles,” however, “morons” typically looked and acted very much like “normals,” even though they were subtly inferior, intellectually. This made them particularly problematic, in Goddard’s eyes, perhaps even dangerous. Indeed, it was this third category, the “moron,” that would soon become the focus of one of America’s great moral panics.
Goddard immediately became an evangelist for the Binet-Simon test in America. In 1910, he persuaded a New Jersey public school superintendent who was also a member of Johnstone’s “Feeble-Minded Club” to allow him to test all of the children in his district. Within a year, Goddard and his assistants tested two thousand children. He found that 78% of the children scored within one year of their grade level, but that 15% scored two or three years behind. He assumed these latter children were “retarded” or “backward” and that they would benefit from remedial training of the kind that Witmer’s clinic was providing. A further 3%, though, were more than three years behind their grade level. Goddard concluded that these were “feeble-minded”; their intellectual development was arrested.49 Goddard published his findings in Hall’s Pedagogical Seminary.50 More than anything else, it was this article that first launched the Binet-Simon test in America, as well as an American mania for intelligence testing that would endure into the 1970s. Not everyone embraced either the test or Goddard’s conclusions, but the debate was intense and included several recognized leaders in the field. In that way, it put both the Binet-Simon test and Goddard “on the map” of American educational psychology.
In 1911, Goddard was invited to join the massive survey of New York City public schools that was being headed by future mayor and Gary Plan advocate, John Purroy Mitchel. Using the Binet-Simon test, Goddard discovered both that New York’s special education classes contained many essentially normal students who had been misassigned by teachers, and that there were many undiagnosed “defectives” in the regular classes.51 New York City school officials, of course, took great umbrage at his findings, encouraging even the powerful Witmer to take a public stand against the new test, but the controversy only increased Goddard’s stature among psychologists and educators.
Goddard in particular, and America in general, did not interpret the test and its scores in the way that Binet had intended when he had created it, in the French context just a few years before.52 Binet saw the test merely as a practical tool—a quick way of distinguishing children for whom the standard school curriculum might not be well-suited. The scores, far from being a measure of anything particularly important scientifically, were seen as reflecting an admixture of basic mental ability and whatever knowledge had been acquired by the child, either inside or outside of the classroom, all filtered through difficult-to-isolate issues with respect specific linguistic ability (as distinct from general intellectual ability).53 Goddard and many other Americans, however, saw the tests as having the power to distill a pure form of innate intelligence out of the welter of knowledge, experience, and expectation that every child brought into the testing situation. What is more, it was widely believed that this innate intelligence, whether high or low, was largely hereditary, passing from generation to generation and, to some substantial degree, determining in advance the level of achievement that a person would be able to attain during his or her lifetime. Thus, in America, the results of intelligence tests rapidly took on moral overtones that interacted with a widespread (though by no mean universal) fear of the impact that race, ethnicity, and immigration might be having on the strength and purity of what was regarded by many as the true American character.
The apprehended danger was illustrated most forcefully in a book that Goddard published in 1912 called The Kallikak Family.54 Goddard claimed to have traced the lineage of a feeble-minded woman at Vineland back more than a hundred years to a dalliance that a “normal” 18th-century soldier had indulged in with a feeble-minded woman during the Revolutionary War. The soldier, it was said, had eventually “straightened up” and married a “normal” woman of good morals, and from that “legitimate” side of the family had come nothing but “normal” children. But, from the relationship with the feeble-minded woman, Goddard claimed, hundreds of feeble-minded offspring, grand-offspring, great grand-offspring, etc. had arisen. This was true even though some of them had paired with “normal” spouses along the way; the feeble-mindedness seemed to be “dominant” in a Mendelian sense that was just then coming into scientific fashion. Goddard luridly illustrated the book with photographs that his assistants had been able to take of some descendants of the “Kakos” side of the family.55
Goddard’s dark message was clear: the feeble-minded lurking in society must be somehow discouraged from reproducing even, perhaps especially, with people of “normal” intelligence, otherwise their inferior genetic material would gradually spread throughout the population, eventually bringing it down to their sad level. Of course, Goddard’s methods and conclusions seem hopelessly simplistic and inadequate to us now (e.g., there could be no Binet-testing of long-dead ancestors, so how exactly was their feeble-mindedness determined?). The book was a sensation nevertheless.
Goddard was hardly the first to sound the call for eugenics in America. He initially favored institutionalization to keep the feeble-minded out of the gene pool. He also believed the feeble-minded should not be entitled to vote. Many others proposed more radical “solutions.” As far back as 1897, a bill calling for the compulsory sterilization of feeble-minded persons had been proposed in Michigan. In 1905, a similar bill was passed by the Pennsylvania legislature, only to be vetoed by the governor. Indiana was the first to successfully enact a compulsory sterilization law, in 1907. California and Washington soon followed suit, in 1909. Ultimately, forced sterilizations were performed in two-thirds of US states, mostly on women.56 Two years prior to Goddard’s book on the Kallikaks, in 1910, the Carnegie Institution of Washington began to fund an organization called the Eugenics Records Office (ERO) in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. The ERO was founded by a biologist named Charles Davenport, and its purpose was to conduct research and propose policy that would prevent the feared deterioration of the American genetic pool.57 The ERO was a major proponent of sterilization legislation. In addition to Goddard, several important psychologists were involved with its work, including Adolf Meyer, Edward Thorndike, and Robert Yerkes. Goddard continued to be a leader in the call for eugenic control, as well, publishing more popular books on feeble-mindedness and criminality over the next few years.58
Credit: From Goddard, H. H. (1912). The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness. New York, NY: Macmillan.
Eugenic considerations were also often used as justification for restricting immigration to the US Popular books of the day, such as sociologist E. A. Ross’ The Old World in the New and zoologist Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, warned of the collapse of Western civilization if northern and western Europeans, and their descendants, did not act to protect themselves not only from African and Asians, but also from eastern and southern Europeans.59 Grant, who walked the streets of New York every day—from his home in midtown to his office on Wall Street—seemed to take the matter quite personally:
The man of the old stock [himself, presumably] is being crowded out of many country districts by these foreigners just as he is to-day being literally driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews.60
Although Goddard had mostly refrained from discussing race or immigration in his studies of feeble-mindedness to this point, there were many who saw his work as a valuable tool in advancing the case that the borders should be closed.61
In 1910 Goddard and Johnstone were invited to consult on the screening of would-be immigrants at the famous Ellis Island facility, just off Manhattan. Congress had passed a law in 1907 specifically barring the “feeble-minded,” but the physicians at Ellis Island were uncertain of how to enforce this new requirement. Goddard’s initial report was that there was little reason to expect that immigrants were feeble-minded in any greater numbers than native-born Americans. In 1912, though, Goddard returned to Ellis Island with the Binet test in hand and an experiment in mind. He had his experienced assistants pick people out of line who appeared to them to be mentally deficient. Then, to check the accuracy of their professional judgment, each of those selected was tested. Goddard found that his assistants were much better—ten times better, he claimed—at spotting feeble-minded individuals than the physicians were. Of course, the physicians were scanning for a number of other prohibited medical conditions at the same time, but Goddard’s experiment suggested that the Immigration Commission should hire experts in feeble-mindedness alongside of the physicians. The proposal was not taken up, but the Ellis Island physicians themselves started adopting portions of the Binet test, along with nonverbal performance tests of their own design, such as simple puzzles, to help them make their determinations.
In 1913, Goddard started his most elaborate study yet, focusing on Jewish, Hungarian, Russian, and Italian immigrants. These groups had drawn the most attention from anti-immigration political movements. It was often claimed that people of these “races” did not have the mental qualities needed to become successful American citizens. Although Goddard partially recognized the problems of giving a largely verbal test to people who often spoke no English, he felt that the physicians’ nonverbal tests were too dependent on merely sensory factors to reveal the mental trait that he was truly after—intelligence. He induced physicians who spoke (at least some of) the needed languages to act as translators for him.
Shockingly, Goddard found that 80% or more of each group tested below the criterion for feeble-mindedness. This was true even after he had lowered the threshold from a mental age of 12 to one of just 10. Although these results disturbingly confirmed the worst fears of the anti-immigration lobby, Goddard could not bring himself to wholly believe them. He began to examine the questions closely. Questions that demanded literary facility in any measure (e.g., create a sentence containing certain words), he dropped. He removed the demand that “mature” word definitions go beyond indicating a basic function (e.g., “What is a table?” “For eating on.”). He dropped questions that depended on understanding conventional divisions of time (e.g., What month is it?). There were other deletions, as well. Nevertheless, even after all of his clarifications and simplifications, still about 40% scored as feeble-minded.
Finally, deciding that the best test of an immigrant’s suitability for American life was to see how they actually fared in American society, he decided to track down some of the immigrants who had appeared to be feeble-minded when they first arrived. What had actually become of them on the tough streets of New York? He sent out some of his best assistants to find them, but they were able to find almost no one. Partly, they were met with suspicion when they arrived, as government representatives, in immigrant tenements. Partly people moved frequently and often did not form strong bonds with their neighbors. Taking another tack, Goddard had one assistant visit the institutions where they would have been likely to end up had they failed at “being American”: missions and other charities for the destitute. He did not find any of them there either.62
It appeared that either they had succeeded, at least minimally, or, if they had failed, they were being cared for within their own ethnic communities. At this point, it occurred to Goddard—a lifelong academic and researcher—that there was, in fact, an enormous amount of menial work to do in American society and that, perhaps, even someone who was “feeble-minded,” by the lights of American psychologists, might be able to earn enough sweeping sidewalks or digging ditches or collecting garbage to live a simple but “successful” life in which they could sustain themselves and perhaps their families. It also occurred to him that, perhaps, all the instances of feeble-mindedness that he had happened upon were not, in fact, hereditary in origin, but had been the product of early deprivation in their home countries. If this were true, then the American public had little to worry about with respect to the gene pool being “thinned” by these immigrants’ presence. Such people might well raise better, smarter children in the more enriched American environment, just as they had hoped when they left their places of origin to seek out better lives across the ocean.63
The ambiguities and uncertainties of Goddard’s research notwithstanding, in 1913 Congress passed an immigration bill requiring all potential newcomers to pass a literacy test. The outgoing president, William Howard Taft, recognized that this would effectively shut the borders to those who were then immigrating in the greatest numbers, so he vetoed it. In 1916, Congress passed an even more restrictive immigration bill which excluded from entry into the US:
All idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, epileptics, insane persons; persons who have had one or more attacks of insanity at any time previously; persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority; persons with chronic alcoholism; paupers; professional beggars; vagrants; persons afflicted with tuberculosis in any form or with a loathsome or dangerous contagious disease; persons… [with a] physical defect being of a nature which may affect the ability of such alien to earn a living; persons who have been convicted of or admit having committed a felony or other crime or misdemeanor involving moral turpitude; polygamists, or persons who practice polygamy or believe in or advocate the practice of polygamy; anarchists64
The list was very long indeed. It also barred most Asians. Further, like the 1913 bill, it required all newcomers to pass literacy test. The new president, Woodrow Wilson, vetoed the new bill as promptly as Taft had vetoed the 1913 version. This time, however, in February of 1917, Congress was able to gather the votes needed to override Wilson’s veto, and the bill became the Immigration Act of 1917. As a result, immigration to the US began a rapid decline (see Figure 10.7). After an even more restrictive law was passed in 1924, immigration to the US was choked off almost completely until laws were relaxed somewhat after World War II.
Immigration was by no means the only realm in which the Binet test seemed valuable. Indeed, school teachers took up the test with such enthusiasm that a strong backlash developed among psychologists who felt that only they, as mental health “professionals,” should be permitted to give the tests and interpret its results (much as physicians jealously protected their exclusive right to diagnose medical conditions and prescribe treatments).65 On the far-away west coast, a young psychologist was already working on a revision and extension of the Binet test, this one especially designed to reveal as much about the upper end of the intelligence spectrum as its predecessors already had about the lower end. That psychologist’s name was Lewis Madison Terman.66
Terman was an Indiana farm boy who went teacher’s college in his home state. Ultimately, he made his way to Clark University, where, like Goddard, he became a product of Hall’s vaunted graduate program in psychology and pedagogy. Hall suggested that Terman might study childhood “precocity.” The suggestion turned into a thesis on mental testing but, because Hall was skeptical of the “quasi-exactness of quantitative methods,” Edmund Sanford became his graduate advisor instead.67
After graduation, suffering chronic ill health, Terman declined job offers in Florida and Texas to go to southern California, where he soon caught on at the Los Angeles State Normal School (the precursor to today’s University of California, Los Angeles). It was in 1910 that an old graduate school friend of his, Edmund Huey, told Terman of the Binet test and of Goddard’s increasingly influential work with it. Terman was hired by Stanford University later that year, and began to work seriously with the Binet test immediately upon his arrival there.68
His first publication on the test appeared the following year.69 His first “tentative” revision of the test appeared as a series of journal articles in 1912.70 It was not until 1916 that he published his complete revision of the test, in book form.71 It was quickly dubbed the Stanford-Binet test and became, far and away, the most widely used intelligence test in American schools for several decades afterward. Many of the individual items in the test were taken directly from Binet’s original, but Terman provided an extended justification for intelligence testing as well as a detailed manual for the correct administration, scoring, and interpretation of the scores.
Whereas most psychologists and educators, up to this time, had been interested primarily in testing for feeble-mindedness, Terman’s research focused on highly intelligent people instead. In truth, he had published on this question from the days of his graduate work.72 After World War I he received a major research grant from the Commonwealth Fund, which enabled him to begin an extensive, longitudinal study of hundreds of “geniuses,” the project for which he may be best known today.73
At the start of the 20th century, Functionalism was the ascendant American “school” of psychology. One measure of this is the string of APA presidents who were affiliated with the school in one way or another: Dewey in 1899, Jastrow in 1900, Sanford in 1902, James (for the second time) in 1904, Angell in 1906. Angell’s presidential address was even titled “The Province of Functional Psychology.” This had followed his 1904 textbook, which was the most extensive and detailed statement of functionalism to date.74
Functionalists were an eclectic bunch, to be sure, but they rarely doubted that the core concept of psychology, in all of its multifarious forms, was consciousness. As we saw at the end of the last chapter, though, as early as 1904, James had called into question the scientific character—even the real existence—of individual conscious states. Not many psychologists followed James on his late philosophical excursion into the realm of “pure experience” but many agreed with him that consciousness had become too problematic an entity to ground a discipline that aspired to be scientific.75
The problem was especially acute in the realm of animal psychology. Without language to verbalize their conscious mental states, animal researchers often found themselves in the position of having to impute particular conscious states to their mute subjects. Such guesswork was, of necessity, based on the experience of being a human, and there was no compelling reason to believe that the experience of being a dog or a cat or a rat, much less a fish or an insect, paralleled that of being a human very closely at all.
The English animal researcher, C. Lloyd Morgan, who was squarely in the intellectual tradition of Darwin, had stated the problem all too clearly when he adapted the Medieval principle known as Occam’s Razor to the specific circumstances of the investigator of animal mentality: “In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher mental faculty, if it can be interpreted as the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale.”76 The sentence became widely known as “Morgan’s Canon.”
In the US, a number of psychological researchers were already working with animals. There had, of course, been Edward Thorndike’s dissertation in 1898 (though it was not published in book form until 1911).77 Immediately after Thorndike’s dissertation, as we saw in Chapter 8, Linus Kline and Willard Small of Clark University attempted to conduct more “naturalistic” studies of rat behavior, inventing maze learning as they went.78 In 1903, John B. Watson completed a doctoral dissertation at Chicago, under the supervision of Angell, titled Animal Education.79 He even made an appeal for “Studying the Minds of Animals,” in a popular magazine in 1907.80 That same year, Robert M. Yerkes published a book of his studies under the evocative title, The Dancing Mouse, in 1907.81 Propelled by this research was the landmark article that outlined the famous Yerkes-Dodson Law: Rising physiological arousal can improve behavioral performance up to a certain level, but overarousal beyond the optimal point will increasingly interfere with performance again.82 Yerkes produced a great deal of groundbreaking research on animal behavior during the decade following The Dancing Mouse but, at the time, the topic was regarded as being more or less peripheral to “mainstream” psychology.83 Thus, Yerkes was refused a permanent position at Harvard because his extensive, original work on animals was not regarded by the university’s leaders as being sufficiently valuable. Nevertheless, there were enough animal researchers on the edges of American psychology that, in 1908, Margaret Floy Washburn—a one-time student of the staunch opponent of animal psychology, E. B. Titchener—gathered together enough material to publish a textbook on the topic.84
By the 1910s, another more radical trend began to take hold. A growing cadre of scientists were coming to believe that Morgan’s Canon did not go far enough; that all animal action should be interpreted as being the outcome of a “lower faculty”—a mere association between what the animal perceived and what the animal did in response. This was effectively how Thorndike had interpreted his puzzle box studies of the 1890s, though he had referred to the animal’s “satisfaction” and “discomfort,” which seem to imply the existence of internal mental states. Yerkes had raised new questions about the criteria required to determine consciousness in animals as early as 1905.85 This shift began to gather momentum as word spread among American psychologists of a new research program that was being pursued by the Nobel Prize-winning Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov.86 Pavlov was able to “condition” the involuntary motor responses of dogs to new stimuli with which they had not been previously associated. However, being a physiologist, he never spoke of the animal’s putative conscious states. He simply postulated a kind of speculative neurology by which stimuli and responses that had not previously been associated could become connected if the new stimulus was repeatedly presented in conjunction with a stimulus that “naturally” elicited the desired response. Thus, salivation could become a dog’s response to a certain sound if the sound had previously been frequently paired with something that naturally caused salivation, such as food.
Pavlov’s work gave animal researchers something they desperately needed: a language in which they could describe the relationships between stimuli and responses without invoking intervening mental states. They stimulus and response were just connected “functionally,” as Dewey had said in his famous reflex arc article.87 Consciousness was no longer needed for the explanation of behavior. Only the history of the behavior’s relationship with various stimuli was required. If this new scheme could be made to work over a wide range of behaviors, the long-problematic, but seemingly-indispensible concept of “consciousness” could finally be dispensed with in animal research. And, so the argument rapidly proceeded, if such a replacement could be done for animals, why could it not also be done for the “highest” of the animals: humans? Of course, the instantaneous retort was that humans engage in behaviors so incredibly complex—going to university, falling in love, appreciating art—that they could never be explained by mere connections of stimuli and responses. But now, in the age of Pavlovian conditioning, that was merely an assertion. It would be up to the new “behaviorists” to find out just how far their new system could take them in explaining complex human behavior.
On February 24, 1913, Watson gave one of the most influential talks in the history of psychology at Columbia University.88 Titled, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It,” it called for a revolution in psychology in which introspection was completely abandoned as a method, and conscious states were excluded as an explanatory principle.89 Instead, psychologists would seek out pure “laws of behavior” no different, in principle, from those that biologists used to explain the movements of amoebas and other “lower” animals. Indeed, Watson chided, if psychologists truly believe in Darwinian evolutionary theory as much as they said, then they would be forced to concede that the behavior of humans is phylogenetically continuous with the behavior of the lowest animals and, thus, that the principles governing one must also govern the other. Watson published the article in his own journal, Psychological Review, later the same year.90
Watson called his radical position, “behaviorism,” the history of the development of which has been discussed and debated in a thousand different ways over the decades since it was proposed. I will not review those arguments here. The goal of this book is only to bring us up to this point in American psychology’s history. Watson, of course, would write a great deal more on behaviorism. Interestingly, although behaviorism is now often treated as a kind of abstract psychological metatheory, in Watson’s mind, it was not at all separated from the applied aspects of psychology that were discussed previously, but which are often left out of surveys of the discipline’s history. Knowing what we know now about the urban contexts in which Watson was working—first Chicago, then Baltimore—we can make a new kind of sense of a seemingly innocent example he put forth in his 1924 book, Behaviorism:
the behaviorist is primarily interested in the behavior of the whole man. From morning to night he watches him perform his daily round of duties. If it is brick-laying, he would like to measure the number of bricks he can lay under different conditions, how long he can go without dropping from fatigue, how long it takes him to learn his trade, whether we can improve his efficiency or get him to do the same amount of work in a less period of time.91
In direct opposition to Titchener, who proclaimed that scientific psychology was wholly about the pursuit of “pure” knowledge with no obvious application to any practical realm, Watson’s counter was that his version of scientific psychology—behaviorist psychology—was not only going to have immediate practical applications, but it was going to perfect and refine one of the most lucrative forms of applied psychology then in existence.
Watson’s behaviorism was, in effect, Taylor’s “scientific management,” raised to the level of a laboratory science. No longer would university presidents have difficulty justifying the expense of having a Department of Psychology to inquisitive potential donors or skeptical political masters. From now on their reply (or perhaps “response”) would be as easy as asking “Do you want your employees to work faster, more efficiently, and less expensively?” It is hardly any wonder that, within a decade or so of Watson’s announcement, Behaviorism had spread around the country and was well on its way to becoming the dominant approach to psychology in many different fields.
Watson was elected president of the APA for the year 1915. Yerkes would be president in 1917. The era of behaviorism and animal research had begun.
The explosion in applied psychology—whether in business, education, law, therapy, or what have you—led to a number of new pressures on the discipline, considered as a kind of social institution. Reacting to the uncontrolled spread of testing through the education system, in 1915 the American Psychological Association passed a resolution discouraging mental testing by people who had not received advanced training in psychology. This statement constituted the first official position on applied psychology ever issued by the APA, an organization that had clung firm its identity as a purely “scientific” society. Until then, it had more or less disdained the psychological “profession” that was, in effect, its own sibling. The statement on testing was proposed by two educational psychologists: J. E. Wallace Wallin of the University of Pittsburgh and Guy M. Whipple, then at the University of Illinois. Although they may seem to have been too remote from the centers of APA power to have had so great an influence on the organization, both had earned the PhDs in eastern schools—Yale and Cornell, respectively—so were both well acquainted with the APA’s key powerbrokers.
The year after the APA extended its own authority over mental testing, the New York Psychiatrical Society issued its own statement insisting that medical doctors alone should have jurisdiction over the diagnosis and treatment of the ill, including the mentally ill. The new “clinical” psychologists might be useful for carrying out some tests, they sniffed, but it was up to physicians alone to interpret the medical results and recommend subsequent courses of medical action.92 The clinical psychologists, most of whom were not members of the APA at the time, decided they would have to band together themselves if they were to mount a strong defense against the physicians’ assertion of exclusive authority. In 1917, Wallin, along with Leta Hollingworth (who had completed her PhD at Columbia just the year before) and a number of others created a new professional society, the American Association of Clinical Psychologists (AACP). With this new body, clinicians would be able to present a common front for the purposes of persuading the public, the government, and other social institutions of their professional legitimacy. Wallin took up the presidency of the fledgling group and strove to create the kind of licensing and accreditation system that had served medicine so well during the time of its professionalization.93 Such a regimen would serve the goals of creating explicit standards of professional practice, while also excluding those who diluted the “brand” by claiming psychological expertise in the absence of advanced education and training.
The creation of the AACP posed a dilemma for the APA. On the one hand, the older association was committed to advancing psychology as a science, and it had often been downright dismissive when it came to professional issues. On the other hand, the presence of a rival psychological association might prove unmanageable when it came to defending what might be termed “greater psychology” against quacks and cranks, on the one hand, and against skeptical physicians, natural scientists, and politicians on the other. The psychiatrists’ derision of clinical psychology as a mere adjunct to medicine forced the APA to defend the legitimacy and autonomy of the discipline that it claimed to represent. Thus, in 1919, with great trepidation on both sides, a plan was hatched to absorb the AACP into the APA as a special “Section on Clinical Psychology.” From the APA’s point of view, this would unify the psychological “front,” and it might also afford some “scientific” influence over what the clinicians were doing in the name of psychology. From the AACP’s perspective, merging with the APA provided clinicians the “cover” of a better-established and avowedly “scientific” organization, while also representing a step toward expanding the APA’s traditionally narrow mandate to include professional matters as well.
Within just two years, the Clinical Section persuaded the larger APA to endorse a certification scheme for consulting psychologists. As it turned out, however, very few psychologists actually took up the certification process and, after a few years, the Clinical Section became more or less moribund. In the coming years, clinical and other applied psychologists drifted off on their own to create a series of independent associations. Applied psychology would not re-renter the APA until the creation of its modern divisional structure, after merging with the American Association for Applied Psychology, just after World War II.
Associations were hardly the only manifestations of the developing complexity of psychology in the early 20th century. There was also an explosion of specialized journals each addressing an increasingly narrow range of topics. In the last chapter we saw that Cattell’s Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods (launched 1904) and Lightner Witmer’s Psychological Clinic (launched 1907) were added to Hall’s American Journal of Psychology and Baldwin and Cattell’s Psychological Review. In addition, Morton Prince founded the Journal of Abnormal Psychology in 1906. The new decade saw many specialized periodicals come into existence. For instance, 1910 saw the launch of Journal of Educational Psychology. It was the product of four co-editors: J. Carleton Bell of the Brooklyn Training School for Teachers; Guy Whipple, then at Cornell; Carl E. Seashore of Iowa, who would become well known for his work on art and music education; and William C. Bagley, then at Illinois.
In 1911, Robert M. Yerkes, then at Harvard, founded the Journal of Animal Behavior. In 1917, Knight Dunlap would launch his own, related journal, Psychobiology. In 1921, the two would merge into the Journal of Comparative Psychology under the editorship of Dunlap.
In 1916, Journal of Experimental Psychology, was launched John B. Watson of Johns Hopkins, with the assistance of Howard Warren of Princeton, James Rowland Angell of Chicago, Shepherd Ivory Franz, then at the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington, DC, and Madison Bentley, then at Illinois. The following year, as though in response to the experimentalists throwing down a gauntlet, a Journal of Applied Psychology was created by G. Stanley Hall and two junior colleagues of his—John Wallace Baird, who would become the first Canadian president of the APA in 1918, and Ludwig R. Geissler, who was from Germany.94 Both had been trained in Titchener’s laboratory at Cornell.95
The intellectual structure of psychology was no longer a simple, informal matter of the various topics on which individual psychologists chose to write. It was now beginning to be inscribed on the names of the associations to which they belonged and the very titles of the journals that they chose to read. It could now be plainly seen on the shelves of any college library that decided to subscribe to their journals or buy their textbooks, without even having to open a single volume.
While American psychology was embracing intelligence testing, considering the possibilities of behaviorism, and rearranging its bureaucratic structures, much of Europe was collapsing. Germany’s attacks across the Belgian and French borders quickly devolved into a kind entrenched, mechanized conflict for which no country was militarily prepared. The casualty tolls were fantastically high, completely dwarfing those of the last great pan-European conflict, the Napoleonic wars of a century earlier.
Early in the war, the impact upon Americans came mostly on the naval front. On May 7, 1915, a British ocean liner named the Lusitania, making its regular run from Liverpool to New York, was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland by a German U-boat. The ship sunk in less than 20 minutes, killing 1,198 and leaving 761 survivors floating on the surface. The number of US citizens among the victims, 138, was fairly small proportionally, but the targeting of a passenger vessel outraged the American public, and it turned what had been a relatively mixed view of the war decisively against the German side. Morton Prince, the Boston neurologist who had founded the Journal of Abnormal Psychology a decade earlier, quickly composed a short speculative book in which he declared Kaiser Wilhelm II’s aggressive actions to be the result of a “subconscious phobia” of losing power to democrats.96
Less than year later, on March 24, 1916, another British passenger vessel—a Channel ferry named the Sussex—was torpedoed by the Germans as well. This ship did not sink, but the damage was extensive and more than 50 of 379 passengers and crew were killed. For American psychologists, this incident hit close to home because James Mark Baldwin and his family had been on board at the time. They all survived, though one of his daughters was injured. Baldwin had been exiled from the discipline for several years by that time, but he was still well known to his former colleagues, of course, and he was active in France, writing books that urged the US to enter the war against the Germans. Another survivor of the attack on the Sussex, although he was mostly unknown at the time, was Wilder Penfield, then just an American student of the prominent English neurologist, Charles Scott Sherrington, at Oxford. Penfield would go on to a celebrated career as a neurologist at McGill University in Montréal.
Back in the US, Hugo Münsterberg, who had long presented himself a kind of unofficial emissary of German Kultur, strove mightily to defend the German case in the war to an increasingly hostile American public. It was to no avail. He rapidly turned himself into one of the most despised public figures in the US His Harvard colleagues abandoned him. There was a rumor that some wealthy magnate had offered Harvard a million dollars to fire him, though the truth of this claim has never been established. There were even death threats. It is hard to know what would have become of him after the US entered the war, but it never came to that because, in December of 1916, he collapsed and died while lecturing at Radcliffe College, the victim of a stroke.
Perhaps a more immediate American concern than the war across the Atlantic, was the Mexican Revolution, which had been raging across the southern border since 1910. Occasionally, hostilities spilled over the border, as in March 1916 when Mexican rebels attacked the town of Columbus, New Mexico. Under pressure from conservatives, Wilson agreed to send several thousand troops into northern Mexico in search of Pancho Villa, who was thought to have been responsible. They located and defeated the group of men who had attacked Columbus, but Villa escaped.
Soon after the end of this military incursion, in January 1917, British intelligence announced that it had intercepted a coded message sent by the newly appointed German Foreign Secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, to the Mexican government, proposing a military alliance in which Mexico would attack the US in order to distract the American army, keeping it out of the European war. Zimmermann also held out the lure of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas being returned to Mexican sovereignty after the war was successfully concluded. At first, many in the American government thought that the telegram must be a British forgery. The British had good reason to provoke the US in to action. After many months of relative calm, the German navy had resumed the torpedoing of British civilian ships in February of 1917. Britain lost 105 ships that month alone and, after two and a half years of the most intense warfare it had ever seen, the island nation was finally beginning to experience food and equipment shortages. Without American intervention, the Kingdom might soon be forced to sue Germany for peace.
In March, however, Zimmermann himself confirmed that the message was authentic, so it seemed clear that the German government was actively working against US interests.97 In addition, in March of 1917, the Czar of Russia was deposed by a revolution led by the moderate socialist Alexander Kerensky.98 Although this development raised the hope of a democratic government being established in Russia, it also meant that the Eastern Front was about to collapse, and the German military would be free to move masses of men and materiel to the Western Front where they might well determine the outcome of the war.
All of these factors led Wilson to have Congress declare war in April of 1917. When he did so, Robert M. Yerkes, then president of the APA, saw an opportunity to advance both the government’s and the public’s perception of psychology to an entirely new level. As we have seen, up to about 1900, American psychology consisted of a fairly small circle of people. Much energy was put into convincing college administrators and politicians that it was a “real science” with real value to deliver, at least within the academic fold. A great deal of this effort was devoted to distinguishing the “new” psychology from various other more or less established institutions—e.g., philosophy, physiology, religion, medicine, spiritualism. Succeeding at this narrow task enabled psychology to forge an independent reputation based upon its own intellectual accomplishments.
Over the first decade and a half of the 20th century, however, psychology began to venture beyond the boundaries of the college campus and offer services to various individuals and institutions in society at large. Many of these encounters went well, enhancing psychology’s reputation, and some of them went abominably off course, resulting in the kind of sideshow antics that many skeptics anticipated. On balance, however, the trend was toward greater and wider acceptance of psychology as a new and legitimate presence on the American cultural scene.
When the US entered World War I, it opened up an entirely new and much larger stage for psychology to perform upon. It was not inevitable that the war would serve psychology in this way. The emergence of psychology into so prominent a position required the actions of particular individuals who happened to have the right set of intellectual and political skills to successfully negotiate the discipline’s participation within much larger and more powerful institutions, such as the army. When it was done, though, psychology had fully integrated itself into American civilization.
In 1917, Yerkes was probably best known for his pioneering work on animal behavior, but he had also tried to capitalize on the growing vogue for intelligence testing with an entry of his own, the Point Scale, created with a Canadian psychologist, James W. Bridges, and a Boston educator, Rose S. Hardwick.99 When Yerkes heard, early in 1917, that the US was about to conscript millions of young men into the military, he conceived an audacious plan that would constitute the largest psychological research project ever attempted, as well as announcing psychology’s readiness to put its considerable abilities at the service of the wartime nation. He declared that psychology, collectively, should offer to test the intelligence of the millions of recruits so that the military could more efficiently select those most appropriate for officer training and other high-skill positions.
Yerkes called together the APA Council to consider the ways in which psychology might be of use to the military.100 The Council created 12 different committees. Yerkes himself chaired the Committee on Psychological Examination of Recruits. The Committee quickly recognized that it would need a new kind of test that could be given to masses of men simultaneously—a pencil-and-paper intelligence test that could be administered to whole rooms full of men, rather than the one-on-one tests that had been used thus far. Fortunately, Terman, who had joined the Committee with Yerkes, had a student, Arthur Otis, who was already working on such a test. The project came together amazingly quickly. A draft test was ready by July. In fact, there were two: Test a for literates and Test b for illiterates. The latter contained pictorial problems of various kinds. What was needed was a body of men on which to pilot and perfect the tests.
Through a network of government connections, Yerkes was able to make his way to the Army’s Surgeon General, William Gorgas, who recognized the value that a one-hour test might have for the quick assignment of the millions of men who were already beginning to enter training camps around the country. There were many in the army who were suspicious not only of the practical usefulness of the tests, but also of the psychologists’ true motives. Would their test really help the Army, or were they just taking advantage of the mass of drafted men for their own research purposes? In the end, most decided that the test scores would be helpful alongside of other more traditional means of assessment. The US had never before fought a war on this scale, and it could use all the help it could get.
By November, Yerkes’ team of 40 psychologists had tested 80,000 men. On the basis of those results, they revised the two initial tests and gave them the names by which they are better known today, the Alpha and Beta. In December, Yerkes received approval for a full-scale testing program of all recruits, and the promise of a military school in which to train the hundreds of testers who would be needed, in Olglethorpe, Georgia.
Two key members of the APA Council had not come on board with Yerkes. They were Walter V. Bingham and Walter Dill Scott of the Carnegie Institute who, as personnel assessors for business, disagreed that intelligence tests were the best means of evaluating potential soldiers. They found their way to the Secretary of War, with whom they concocted a separate testing program which involved much more than mere intelligence. Yerkes was worried about the impact they might have on his much larger program, and ultimately persuaded them to work through his Committee, even if not on his project.101
Once Yerkes’ Oglethorpe school began producing testers—400 in all—the number of men tested quickly ramped up to 200,000 every month. In the end, more than 1.7 million men were tested. There was ongoing controversy over the value of the tests. Traditionalist officers were rankled by the sense that their judgment and authority were being questioned or even usurped. Other officers, however, liked the fact that the test scores were used to assign to army units a balance of intellectually superior, average, and inferior men.102
At the war’s end, with a new Army Surgeon General in place who was not as sympathetic to the project as Gorgas had been, Yerkes’ testing program was ended and dismantled. This was not what Yerkes had hoped for but, by participating so prominently in the war effort, Yerkes had succeeded in transforming psychological testing from a practice that was surrounded by controversy and suspicion into a respectable and legitimate procedure for use in social institutions of all kinds.
After the war was complete, Yerkes’ issued a final report on his Army intelligence testing project.103 It presented a shocking picture of intelligence in America. For the first time, the intelligence of a broad cross-section of men from all parts of the country—all major ethnic groups and races—had been tested with the best instruments then available. Before the war, the widespread assumption—based on small samples of mostly middle- and upper-class men, using individual tests—had been that the mental age of the “average” (White) man was about 16 years. By contrast, Yerkes, testing hundreds of thousands of ordinary men, found that the average mental age of White men of northern and western European heritage was only 13 years. Given that a mental age of 12 years was the upper limit of Goddard’s category of “moron,” this finding seemed to imply that the nation as a whole was already teetering on the edge of feeble-mindedness. The figures for other ethnic and racial groups were even more alarming: Russian, Italians, and Poles were said to have an average mental age of about 11 years. For African Americans, the number was reported to be closer to 10 years.
These “findings,” of course, confirmed the worst that had been feared by those who opposed continued immigration to the US and those who supported aggressive eugenic policies to keep America’s genetic heritage “strong” and “pure.” Yerkes’ report was placed in evidence at many hearings and debates on the topic in the coming years. The history of American intelligence testing’s deep entanglements with eugenics has been told many places, and I do not propose to repeat it here.104 It is no exaggeration, though, to say that, after the war, businesses, schools, and government agencies flocked to Yerkes and his coworkers for assistance in setting up testing programs of their own. He had succeeded in his aim of raising the image of “scientific” psychology to new heights of authority and prestige.
