The Smart Culture

Society, Intelligence, and Law

Robert L. Hayman Jr.

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9780814773178
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Legal History
• Index: Law

What exactly is intelligence? Is it social achievement? Professional success? Is it common sense? Or the number on an IQ test?

Interweaving engaging narratives with dramatic case studies, Robert L. Hayman, Jr., has written a history of intelligence that will forever change the way we think about who is smart and who is not. To give weight to his assertion that intelligence is not simply an inherent characteristic but rather one which reflects the interests and predispositions of those doing the measuring, Hayman traces numerous campaigns to classify human intelligence. His tour takes us through the early craniometric movement, eugenics, the development of the IQ, Spearman's "general" intelligence, and more recent works claiming a genetic basis for intelligence differences.

What Hayman uncovers is the maddening irony of intelligence: that "scientific" efforts to reduce intelligence to a single, ordinal quantity have persisted--and at times captured our cultural imagination--not because of their scientific legitimacy, but because of their longstanding political appeal. The belief in a natural intellectual order was pervasive in "scientific" and "political" thought both at the founding of the Republic and throughout its nineteenth-century Reconstruction. And while we are today formally committed to the notion of equality under the law, our culture retains its central belief in the natural inequality of its members. Consequently, Hayman argues, the promise of a genuine equality can be realized only when the mythology of "intelligence" is debunked--only, that is, when we recognize the decisive role of culture in defining intelligence and creating intelligence differences. Only culture can give meaning to the statement that one person-- or one group--is smarter than another. And only culture can provide our motivation for saying it.

With a keen wit and a sharp eye, Hayman highlights the inescapable contradictions that arise in a society committed both to liberty and to equality and traces how the resulting tensions manifest themselves in the ways we conceive of identity, community, and merit.

1
Introduction
Smart People

I’m not sure when I found out that some kids had high IQs. When I did find out, I’m not sure I much cared. When we were kids, we had our own ideas about “smart,” and they had very little to do with IQs. The third-grade boys, for example, had developed their own distinct intellectual hierarchy: it consisted in small part of baseball trivia, in small part of the aptitude for petty crime, and in very substantial part of the skills—cognitive and otherwise—needed for insulting our peers (and, of course, their families). The girls, meanwhile, probably had their own hierarchy, but in the third grade, that was a mystery we boys had no interest in solving.

In the three-part hierarchy in which the boys subsisted, the ability to insult was undeniably the most important branch of intellect. It was also the most elaborate, itself consisting of three developmental stages: the first came with the recognition that curse words could be used as insults; the second was marked by the ability to use some curse words (one in particular) as participles to modify other curse words; and the third arrived with the realization that almost any curse word could be made doubly insulting by adding -face, -head, or -breath as a suffix. Progress through these stages, it seems to me now, was as much art as science: I remember one poor kid whose social fate was sealed the day he called me a “f—ing ass-head.”

There was one insult we used quite a bit, and it was about the only time we showed any interest in the IQ concept. For no specific reason, or at least not for reasons having anything to do with perceptions of intelligence, we found it immensely gratifying to call one another “retards.” We had, of course, no idea who or what a “retard” was, and we were fairly liberal in constructing synonyms: “reject” was thought to convey the same message, as were the more elaborate “mental retard,” “mental reject,” or, less elaborately, “mental.” All we knew about any of these terms was that they had all the ingredients for a good insult: they were apparently somehow demeaning; they had quite a funny sound to them; and no one, as far as we knew, would ever confront us with the embarrassing revelation that what we intended as an insult was in fact an accurate description.

All of this changed sometime in the third grade, when we discovered Mrs. Sweeney’s “special” class. We had wondered for some time why the window in Mrs. Sweeney’s door was covered with cardboard, wondered specifically why we kids weren’t supposed to look in. I suppose it never occurred to us that the cardboard also kept the kids inside from looking out, but then, lots of that kind of stuff never occurred to us. What did occur to us was that Mrs. Sweeney’s kids had to be “special” in some very strange way, strange enough that we had to be prevented from seeing them. Our imaginations ran wild with the possibilities, and we were not at all disappointed the day Dicky Hollins told us that he knew the secret to those kids, that his mom knew the mother of some kid in Mrs. Sweeney’s class, and the kid was, honest-to-god, a retard.

Just what that meant remained a mystery. For all we knew, “retards” were circus freaks or juvenile delinquents or some barely imaginable combination of the two. We deduced that they must be somehow pathetic and perhaps somehow frightening; we knew for sure that they were different from other kids, and that the difference was wildly fascinating.

For months, our school days were preoccupied with the effort to catch a glimpse of the retards. We’d linger outside Mrs. Sweeney’s door at lunch time, knock on her door and hide just around the corner, we’d come to school early in the hopes of seeing the retards arrive and stay late to catch them leaving, and through it all, we never saw more than Mrs. Sweeney’s disapproving frown. And then Mrs. Sweeney failed to show up for school one morning, and we were sure it was because the retards had killed her, and we anxiously awaited the showdown, the cops versus the retards. But she only had a cold, and she was back early the next day, with the cardboard over her window, preserving the great mystery inside.

The spell was broken on a spring morning. We had a substitute teacher that day, and he was either more gullible or more lazy than most, so when we told him that it was physical fitness week, and that instead of geography we were having extended recess in the morning, he dutifully took us outside to play kickball at 10:30 in the morning, a full ninety minutes before our scheduled break. It did not occur to him, nor did it occur to us, that 10:30 might have been the time set aside for some other kids’ recess, and that some other kids might have been on the playground, playing kickball, when we arrived.

But 10:30 was Mrs. Sweeney’s time, and she was there when we got to the playground. So too was her class.

“It’s them.” Dicky Hollins, now our resident authority, made the matter-of-fact pronouncement, and all the boys knew exactly what he meant. We all stood there, transfixed, and watched them play. I recall thinking that some of them looked a little different, but I’m not quite sure how. And that some of them moved a little differently, though again, I could not explain how.

On they played, oblivious, it seemed, to our presence.

We stood silently and watched.

They kicked the ball. They ran. They laughed. They celebrated.

One kid dropped a ball kicked right at him.

We all heard him when he cussed.

And it occurs to me now, as I think about it for the first time, that no other kid called him a name.

Our substitute said something to Mrs. Sweeney, and then, with a very serious look on his face, he said something to our class. The kids in our class started to file back into school, but some of us boys lagged behind, and somebody grabbed me by the arm, and dragged me up the walk to the school, and I kept turning around, just looking. When we all got back to our classroom, the substitute handed out maps of the United States, and he told us to color in the Middle Atlantic states, and when we complained that we didn’t have crayons, he told us to use our pencils. He gave us an hour and a half to finish the exercise, and I spent the last eighty-five minutes drawing pictures of Frankenstein, and football players, and World War II fighter planes. And all the time I was thinking about Mrs. Sweeney’s kids, and I looked around the room at the other boys in the class, and I knew they were thinking about the same thing too.

I don’t remember ever seeing any of Mrs. Sweeney’s kids again. Nor do I remember ever saying a word about them to any of my friends, or hearing a word about them from anybody. It was as if the whole day never happened. Except for one thing: after that day, for some reason, none of us ever called any kid a “retard” again.

Carrie Buck was a retard. That, at least, was the prevailing opinion of her in 1924, when the director of the Virginia Colony for the Feebleminded concluded that the eighteen-year-old resident of the Colony was “feebleminded of the . . . moron class.” Carrie’s mother was also of limited intellect, a moron as well, according to the director. Carrie was born out of wedlock and, it was assumed, had inherited both her mother’s intellectual disabilities and her moral defects: Carrie too, after all, had conceived an illegitimate daughter. For her mental and moral failings, Carrie’s foster family arranged to have the young mother institutionalized in the Virginia Colony in January 1924. That September, the Colony, acting under the authority of a Virginia state law, sought to sterilize Carrie Buck.

The director of the Colony, Albert Priddy, had been the chief architect and sponsor of Virginia’s sterilization law. The law found its scientific support in eugenics theory, still in vogue in 1920s America, but compulsory sterilization depended upon more than the mere belief in the genetic perfectibility of humanity. For that drastic measure, some odd combination of moral and political values was necessary: a bit of social Darwinism, a bit of political Progressivism, some economic conservatism, a little thinly disguised racism, and, for men like Priddy, a certain priggish disdain for the sexual habits of the poor. Armed with this intellectual grab bag, Priddy had won the near unanimous approval of the Virginia legislature for his sterilization law in March 1924.

But his advocacy was not ended. Similar laws had been struck down by courts in other states, some because they did not afford sufficient procedural protection for their subjects, others because they unfairly targeted only the residents of state institutions. But with his counsel and friend, Aubrey Strode, Priddy had carefully drafted the Virginia law to meet these objections; now, they were determined to find the test case that would secure judicial approval. The case they settled on was Carrie Buck’s.

The Virginia law provided for the sterilization of inmates of state institutions where four conditions were met. First, it had to appear that the “inmate is insane, idiotic, imbecile, feeble-minded or epileptic” and, second, that the inmate “by the laws of heredity is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring likewise afflicted.” Third, sterilization must not harm “the general health” of the inmate, but rather, as the fourth and final requirement, must promote “the welfare of the inmate and of society.” Carrie Buck, the young unwed mother, provided an easy case under the terms of this statute, particularly the way the deck was stacked.

Priddy’s petition for the sterilization of Carrie Buck was approved by the Special Board of Directors of the Colony; under the Virginia law, Carrie was entitled to appeal that decision to the Virginia state courts. Her trial was held on November 18, 1924. Aubrey Strode called eight lay witnesses to testify that Carrie was feebleminded and immoral and that her mother and daughter were “below the normal mentally”; he called two physicians to testify to the medical advantages of sterilizing the feebleminded; he called a eugenicist to testify by deposition as to the value of eugenic sterilization as “a force for the mitigation of race degeneracy”; and he called Priddy himself to testify that, for Carrie and society at large, compulsory sterilization “would be a blessing.”

Irving Whitehead, Carrie’s appointed attorney, called no rebuttal witnesses.

The court approved the sterilization order, and the highest court in Virginia affirmed this decision. Carrie’s attorney dutifully appealed to the United States Supreme Court. On May 2, 1927, the Supreme Court, by a vote of eight justices to one, approved the involuntary sterilization of Carrie Buck.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the opinion for the Court. Holmes had already served on the Supreme Court for a quarter century; for twenty years before that, he had been a justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the last three years as chief justice. He had been educated in private schools, at Harvard College, and at Harvard Law School. He was, by common consensus, a very smart man.

He was able to dispose of Carrie Buck’s claim in a few pithy sentences.

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

Carrie Buck was sterilized on October 19, 1927. Not long after, she was “paroled” from the Colony into the care of a family in Bland, Virginia, for whom she worked as a domestic servant. She married; she and her husband had, of course, no children. Her husband died after twenty-four years of marriage. Carrie eventually remarried and in 1970 moved back to her hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia. For ten years, she and her husband lived there in a one-room, cinder block shed. In 1980 Carrie was hospitalized for exposure and malnutrition; later, she and her husband were taken to a nursing home where, on January 28, 1983, Carrie Buck died at the age of seventy-six.

Not long before her death, Carrie Buck was interviewed by Professor Paul Lombardo of the University of Virginia. He writes:

Throughout Carrie’s adult life she regularly displayed intelligence and kindness that belied the “feeblemindedness” and “immorality” that were used as an excuse to sterilize her. She was an avid reader, and even in her last weeks was able to converse lucidly, recalling events from her childhood. Branded by Holmes as a second generation imbecile, Carrie provided no support for his glib epithet throughout her life.

Carrie Buck, it appears, was no “imbecile” at all. She was poor, she was uneducated, and these no doubt contributed to her “diagnosis.” But even under the crude categories of the day, under which “imbeciles” ranked below the various grades of “morons” in the grand hierarchy of “feeblemindedness,” Carrie was no “imbecile” and probably was not “feebleminded” at all.

Carrie Buck’s attorney might have known better, might have known that Carrie was no imbecile, was no moron, and was perhaps not feebleminded at all. He might have explained all this to the reviewing courts. But Carrie Buck’s attorney apparently had other plans. Irving Whitehead, it evolves, was a former member of the Board of Directors of the Virginia Colony for the Feeble-minded and a long time associate of Strode and Priddy’s. Indeed, a building at the Colony named in Irving Whitehead’s honor was opened just two months before the arrival of a young mother named Carrie Buck.

Irving Whitehead might also have known the truth behind Carrie’s moral failings. Carrie’s illegitimate daughter was conceived in neither a moral lapse nor an imbecile’s folly; she was conceived when Carrie was raped by the nephew of her foster parents. Carrie Buck was institutionalized not to protect her welfare, but to preserve her foster family’s good name.

In the end, Carrie Buck was a victim not of nature, but of the people around her. The eventual debunking of the sham that was eugenics merely confirmed what should have been obvious all along: the “science” that dictated Carrie’s unwelcome trip to the Colony infirmary was in reality only politics, the cruel politics of inequality.

There is, finally, the matter of Carrie’s daughter, the third of the three generations of imbeciles. Relatively little is known of her life, save this: Vivian Buck attended regular public schools for all of her life, before dying of an infectious disease at the age of eight. And in the next to last year of her short life, Carrie Buck’s daughter earned a spot on the Honor Roll.¹

There are no more imbeciles in America, no more morons, no more feebleminded of any type or degree. We eliminated them all, installing in their place people with varying degrees of mental retardation: at first, some were educable or trainable; now their retardation is mild or moderate or severe or profound. And when we determined that we had too many people with mental retardation, we tightened the general definition of the class, eliminating half the mentally retarded population in a single bold stroke that would have made the eugenicists proud.

But some things have not changed. In contemporary America, we still sterilize people with low IQs. When they escape sterilization, we routinely deny them the right to raise their own children. Systematically, too, we deny them the right to marry, to vote, to choose their residence, to live on their own. We have made a history for people with mental retardation that is replete with the normal horrors of discrimination—stigmatization, segregation, disenfranchisement—but we have added to their lot the unique horrors of involuntary sterilizations and psychosurgery. In our words and in our deeds we have been relentless in our efforts to diminish them, to make them lesser people. All of this, because they are not sufficiently smart.²

The remarkable furor that followed the publication of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s book The Bell Curve tended to obscure the altogether unremarkable thesis of that text. Simply put, its thesis was this: in American society today, smart folks get ahead, and not-so-smart folks don’t. As their critics pointed out, Herrnstein and Murray relied on a whole lot of questionable material to make this point, and stretched the bounds of science to posit a slew of weak correlations among various “biological” traits, “intelligence,” and assorted indicia of “success.” Still, the basic empirical proposition of the text has survived most critical scrutiny: if you are smart, then indeed, you get ahead; if you are not, chances are, you won’t.

This, of course, came as good news to smart people throughout the country, and they were not reluctant to express their satisfaction. For them, it was not merely that the inevitable equation of smartness and success ensured their fortunes; what was more important, rather, was that they could feel downright good about their prospects.

There was, after all, a subtext to The Bell Curve’s simple story that is almost of moral dimensions. The people who have made it have done so because they are smart; they, in a very clear sense, deserve their success. Conversely, the people who have not made it have failed because they are not-so-smart; they, in an equally clear sense, deserve their failure.

Understandably, then, The Bell Curve was not perceived as bringing very good news for the not-so-smart people, who to the extent that they could understand the text’s rather simple message, had to be forgiven for finding it just a bit depressing. For these people, after all, there were to be no smiling fortunes; destiny promised them less wealth, less status, less comfort. The Bell Curve offered to the not-so-smart people little more than a single lesson in civics: hereafter, they should no longer labor under the illusion that smart people were to blame for their misfortunes.

Indeed, the worst news for the not-so-smart people came in the political subtext of the book, and it was this reading that generated some of the most heated debate. For Herrnstein and Murray, there were clear policy implications to their findings. If smart people get ahead, almost no matter what, and if not-...