A Study of American Intelligence

Carl Brigham's study examines the results of the mental testing programme carried out by the United States Army during the First World War, a programme in which Brigham himself had taken part. The book first describes the instruments in use, the Army Alpha, the Army Beta, and the individual examinations, explaining how each was administered and what each was held to measure. Brigham then presents a statistical treatment of the recorded results, sorting the men tested by birthplace and background and comparing the group averages that emerge. From those comparisons he argues that native born Americans of what he calls Nordic descent showed higher measured intelligence than recent immigrants from eastern European and Mediterranean countries, and than African American recruits. He treats the differences he finds as evidence of inherited capacity rather than of schooling, language or circumstance, and reads them as a ranking of the population groups he has distinguished. On that basis he argues that the changing composition of the population was lowering the national average, and that immigration should therefore be deliberately controlled in order to safeguard what he terms American intelligence. The book is offered throughout as a statistical argument drawn from a large body of official test data.

Written from the public record for the book.

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People

• Carl Brigham
• Robert Yerkes