| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Leila Zenderland. Measuring Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing. (Cambridge Studies in the History of Psychology.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1998. Pp. ix, 466. $64.95.

Three-time killer Clarence Victor was recently taken off death row in Nebraska, his life spared by a state law prohibiting the execution of anyone with an IQ below 70. Henry Herbert Goddard would have cheered. Remembered chiefly for bringing Alfred Binet's scale to the United States and for making the name Kallikak synonymous with unchecked, defective heredity, Goddard was also the first American psychologist to testify in court that mental subnormality ought to limit criminal responsibility. In the 1914 murder trial of Jean Giannini, Goddard employed mental tests to prove that the defendant was an imbecile. Eighty-five years before Victor, Giannini was also sentenced to life instead of death. It mattered that these two men both deviated from the mental norm by falling substantially below it. But what mattered most was that they did so during a century when new technologies subjected ancient moral dilemmas to the reassuringly modern scrutiny of factual measurement. 1

In both of these murder cases, a vengeful public was disgusted by the outcome, demonstrating one curious parallel between Goddard's time and our own. Policies championed by professionals in the name of enlightenment often violate everyday notions of justice and morality. Leila Zenderland's impressive book concentrates not primarily on continuities but on the chasm separating Goddard's early twentieth-century world from the one forged later on, in the aftermath of Nazism and in the crucible of the civil rights revolution that followed World War II. Like the term "moron," which Goddard proudly coined as an example of refinement in mental classification, virtually everything associated with Goddard has become a retroactive insult. . . .

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