The Alpha test was divided into eight sections, testing the examinee’s ability in following directions, arithmetic problems, practical judgment, synonyms and antonyms, disarranged sentences, completion of number series, analogies, and general information. The psychologists’ committee realized, however, that because of its heavy reliance upon literacy and cultural factors, the Alpha test would tell Army examiners little about the intelligence and capacity of recruits whose schooling was limited and whose cultural background was poor. Hence the Beta test was devised, as a nonlanguage test on which all illiterates could compete equally.
The average score of the white soldier on the Alpha test was 59, that of the Northern Negro 39, and that of the Southern Negro 12. The better educational equipment of the whites presumably might account for some of this astonishing difference, without considering any questions of innate ability at all. But this superior equipment did not figure on the Beta test. And on Beta, the whites averaged 43, the Northern Negro 33, and the Southern Negro 20. Analyzing these Beta findings in one study of men tested at Camp Grant, M. R. Trabue concluded that the average Northern Negro recruit had an ability to learn new things about equivalent to that of the average eleven-year-old white boy, and the average Southern Negro recruit a mental capacity at the nine-year-old level.
Notably, the figures on Negro “overlapping” were not significantly different for the two tests. It was found that only 27 per cent of the Negroes exceeded the white average score on Alpha. On Beta, the figure was 29 per cent. As Dr. McGurk has pointed out, if the Negroes’ comparatively poor scores were entirely a consequence of social and economic differences, a lessening of these differences should have produced, in the Beta test, a corresponding increase in the Negro overlap. Put another way: “An improvement in cultural opportunities should result in an improvement in the capacity for education. If cultural opportunities are not important in determining capacity for education, improving the cultural opportunities will have no effect on capacity for education.” And Dr. McGurk, it should be remembered, is a Villanova social scientist who has devoted a lifetime to research in this field.
The massive statistics of the World War I tests have served as grist for the mills of a hundred psychologists and social anthropologists. Those of the equalitarian school have done some curious things with the figures, in a strained effort to prove that significant differences in racial scores are related solely to environment and not at all to heredity. The student who inquires into the literature scarcely can pick up an equalitarian book that does not offer the following table:
| Southern Whites and Northern Negroes, Army Tests, 1918 | |||
| Whites | Negroes | ||
| State | Median score | State | Median score |
| Mississippi | 41.25 | Pennsylvania | 42.00 |
| Kentucky | 41.50 | New York | 45.00 |
| Arkansas | 41.55 | Illinois | 47.35 |
| Georgia | 42.12 | Ohio | 49.50 |
Klineberg, who used this table in his 1944 work, says the comparison shows that Northern Negroes “are superior to the white groups from a number of Southern States.”
Taken at face value, that is certainly one conclusion that might be drawn, at least as to four Southern States, but the figures merit a closer look. What Klineberg did, as Garrett has shown, was to take the four Southern States where the white medians were lowest and compare them with the four Northern States where the Negro medians were highest. Beyond demonstrating that Negroes in some Northern States scored higher than whites in some Southern States, this widely reproduced table tells us little. Moreover, Klineberg—and Montagu, and Benedict, and others who are so fond of this data—do not present the figures from the four Northern States that might truly have significance in terms of local problems of public education. Garrett, whose computations of medians differ slightly from Klineberg’s, puts the data together in this fashion:
| Number Tested | White | Negro | ||
| State | White | Negro | Median | Median |
| Pennsylvania | 3,089 | 498 | 64.6 | 41.5 |
| New York | 2,843 | 850 | 64.0 | 44.5 |
| Illinois | 2,056 | 578 | 63.0 | 46.9 |
| Ohio | 2,318 | 152 | 66.7 | 48.8 |
Garrett then makes the self-evident point that Negroes in these four States scored as far below white soldiers from the same States as they scored below whites in the country as a whole. The student who wants to dig more deeply into these World War I findings will find them fully reported in professional literature. Audrey Shuey’s The Testing of Negro Intelligence summarizes the data and provides an extensive bibliography of work done on the figures.
It is curious that so much labor has been spent on the World War I figures, and relatively so little on the more up-to-date data from World War II and Korea. Yet from one point of view this is not so curious either: In the thirty-six years between 1917 and 1943, the American Negro experienced prodigious gains in educational, cultural, economic, and social opportunities. Surely, it might be thought, these gains would have been reflected in some significant improvement in his military test scores. No such improvement can be detected. Nathaniel Weyl has summed up the facts: