Robert Yerkes

Where the test stopped being a clinic instrument and became a mass institution.¹²

Documented core

As APA president, Yerkes led the committee that built the Army Alpha (written) and Army Beta (nonverbal, for illiterate or non-English recruits) tests. In the First World War roughly 1.75 million men were examined and the results reported in the official 1921 monograph. This is the decisive scale-jump of the whole rail: intelligence testing leaves the individual clinic and becomes a mass instrument of the state, sorting an army.

Asserted intent — attributed and firewalled

Carl Brigham reanalyzed the Army data in A Study of American Intelligence (1923), concluding a racial and national hierarchy of intelligence — a reading that fed the case for the 1924 immigration restriction. That conclusion is Brigham’s, attributed to him by name, not a neutral finding of the test. In 1930 Brigham retracted it, writing that his conclusions “were without foundation” and that the “study with its entire hypothetical superstructure of racial differences collapses completely.” The misuse and the retraction are both kept on the record; neither is picked.

Role in the thesis

Enactment. Yerkes is the moment of scale — the root measured wholesale. The Army test is the documented instrument; the racial verdict read off it is a separate claim, owned by the man who made it and later unmade it.

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1. Robert M. Yerkes (ed.), Psychological Examining in the United States Army, Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 15 (1921) — the official monograph reporting the Army testing ↩︎

2. Carl C. Brigham, A Study of American Intelligence (1923), and his retraction, 'Intelligence Tests of Immigrant Groups' (Psychological Review, 1930) ↩︎

Referenced by. Where this entry is cited in the reading — hover any to read it in place.

• Improving the Stock — “Robert Yerkes took the same instrument to scale: as head of the Army's wartime testing, he examined roughly 1.75 million men.”