For psychologists, the claims of racial differences in intelligence were imbedded in the larger debates in psychology over heredity and environment and the concept of “intelligence.”

they believed that school integration would inevitably lead to miscegenation and the downfall of the White race

Henry Garrett (1894–1973), 1946 APA president and Psychology Department executive officer at Columbia University from 1941 to 1955, played a major role in organizing scientific opposition to the growing Civil Rights Movement in the postwar years. Using his credentials and expertise as a psychologist, Garrett worked with and supported racial extremists and neo- Nazi groups in these aims (Tucker, 1994, 2002; Winston, 1998). As a young faculty member at Columbia University, where he had received his PhD, Garrett had an early interest in racial and ethnic differences, but his hereditarian position was often presented in moderate terms, and he was willing to supervise the doctoral dissertation of a Black graduate student, Mamie Phips Clark, who had studied under Sumner at Howard. By 1945, Garrett began to attack arguments from Ashley Montagu and Irving Lorge that racial differences in IQ test scores could have an environmental interpretation or that education and environment could increase IQ. Using a strategy that would become a staple, he argued that Montagu’s position was based on ideology and “personal emotions,” a coded reference to Montagu’s Jewish background, whereas Garrett’s own conclusion of ineluctable racial differences was presented as detached, scientific thinking. Garret testified in the 1952 Davis v. County School Board case that preceded Brown v. Board of Education, and testified that not only would “equal” separate schools cause no damage but that Negroes needed their own schools to develop what Garret alleged were their “special talents” in music and athletics, a trope that played to widely held

Henry Goddard was not concerned with race, but with explaining how feeble-mindedness was hereditary and how pauperism, criminality, and immorality resulted from lack of foresight and planning in those of low intelligence.

By the early 1900s, the use of reaction time to index intelligence or make racial comparisons had not fared well,

In the Psychological Review, R. Meade Bache (1895) argued from the work of Herbert Spencer that faster reaction times or “automatic movements” should characterize the “lower races.” Although Bache was not a psychologist, he used data obtained through psychologist Lightner Witmer, to compare “Whites,” Africans,” and “Indians” in the first empirical paper on race differences in a psychology journal. Bache claimed that Whites were indeed slowest, and explained the faster reaction times of Native Americans than Africans as due to the mixture of “white blood” in the “negroes.”

For example, he speculates that de-gree of self-esteem is the ratio of people’s successes to their pre-tensions (aspirations).

James avoids a definition of mindaltogether, although he is willing to define psychological scienceas concerned with ‘‘thoughts . . . and their relations to theirobjects, to the brain and to the rest of the world’’

practically all influential psychologists at the turn of the centurywere students of Wundt’s or were students of his students.

The contrast was between an experimental, tightlyreasoned, mathematical psychology and a historical, observa-tional attitude toward those elaborate products of the mind thatgenerate language and culture but that are beyond measurementand beyond experiments.

Starting around 1860, Wundt had been concerned with the‘‘higher’’ psychological functions—the social aspects of humanthought and behavior—and this preoccupied him, particularlyin the last twenty years of his life. The multivolume Vo ̈lkerpsy-chologie illustrated Wundt’s commitment to the notion that theonly source of insight into the development of human thoughtcan be found in its social and historical development. Hismethod was an extensive use of existing ethnographic and an-thropological writing, as well as the most widely used extrapola-tions on language, the family, and other human institutions.

He believed, however, that our physical bodies are gov-erned by the laws of nature. Thus, whereas purpose is a mentalphenomenon, it is physically realized in the systems of naturalphenomena and laws.