The Big Test
The Secret History of the American MeritocracyBy Nicholas LemannFarrar Straus Giroux
Copyright ©2000 Nicholas Lemann
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780374527518
Chapter One
Henry Chauncey's Idea
It is February 4, 1945. A man named Henry Chauncey is sittingin an Episcopal church in Cambridge, Massachusetts?an old,gray, simple, graceful building on the Cambridge Common, whereGeorge Washington first took command of troops in the AmericanRevolution. It's the Sunday morning before his fortieth birthday.He is perfectly at home here. Descendant of Puritan clerics, son ofan Episcopal minister, graduate of the country's leading Episcopalboarding school, Chauncey, in his tweeds and flannels, wearinghis gray hair neatly plastered across his forehead, is afull-fledged, born-in member of a distinct American subculture.In the seventeenth-century graveyard next to the church lie hisforefathers.
One of the central tenets of this particular subculture is thatyou don't put on airs. You imagine a kind of ordinary decency to beyour chief quality. Chauncey's life, like the life of everyone else whois in the church this morning, has its good points and its bad points.He is trying without complete success to switch from cigarettes to apipe. Money is a bit of a problem, and so, in all honesty, is his marriage.On the other hand, he is optimistic and he believes in things,which is a great temperamental blessing. He never complains; onedoesn't. He is a respectable man trying to do his best.
Bursting through the tight seams, though, is something granderand more ambitious in Chauncey. First of all, he looks like morethan what he is, which is merely an ill-paid assistant dean at HarvardCollege. He's tall, barrel-chested, big-jawed, and moon-faced,almost simian, with bushy black eyebrows and a commandinglyvigorous physical presence?the kind of person who ought to beput in charge of something. Notwithstanding the appealing modesty,his group, as every one of its members knows very well, occupies a highlyfavored?from today's point of view, almost unimaginably favored?positionin American society. High-Protestant men of the Eastern seaboardoccupy the White House, all the great university presidencies, the captainciesof finance and the professions, and many other leading positions, and eachhas rough access to the others. What any member of the group, includingeven Henry Chauncey, thinks and wants matters a great deal more thanwhat members of other groups think and want.
The Second World War is now drawing to its conclusion, which, it isclear at last, will be a total victory by the Allies. The war has made theUnited States into the greatest power in the world, the central and essentialcivilization that, Americans hope, will serve as a model of how to organize asociety properly. The United States is not only unusually influential at thismoment but also unusually malleable. The war has put the country into flux,and basic arrangements can be altered now in a way that would be impossiblein normal times. For a man of Henry Chauncey's social class, entering theprime of life, with direct experience of the drama and scale of wartime, themind fills practically unbidden with utopian dreams about the shape of thepostwar world and the part one might take in realizing them. Chaunceyknows that big changes in American society are coming, and that they aregoing to be made swiftly, out of public view, by a tight group of men quite anumber of whom he knows personally. The imminent prospect of joining inthis is exhilarating. So, as he prays and listens and sings through thecomfortable and familiar service, Henry Chauncey is thinking expansivelyabout his future and the country's.
After the service he goes home, takes out a diary he has recently begunkeeping (and filling with portentous, idealistic musings about the new agethat is dawning), and writes:
Finally, I decided to take the plunge. From a safe and respected job I am embarking on an opportunity whose development depends very much on what I do.
During Church this morning a thought occurred to me which though not new was amplified in its implications. There will undoubtedly in the near future be a greater emphasis on taking a census of our human resources in terms of capacities for different kinds of employment.... This project requires consideration from a lot of angles but men of vision in the field of testing, vocational guidance, government, economics, education could be consulted individually and eventually in groups and a program eventually developed. Men with whom this might be discussed might even be so high in authority as ... President Roosevelt himself.
This is what Henry Chauncey wants to do in (for, really!) postwar America:he wants to mount a vast scientific project that will categorize, sort,and route the entire population. It will be accomplished by administering aseries of multiple-choice mental tests to everyone, and then by suggesting,on the basis of the scores, what each person's role in society shouldbe?suggestions everyone will surely accept gratefully. The project will becalled the Census of Abilities. It will accomplish something not very differentfrom what Chauncey's Puritan ancestors came to the New World wanting todo?engender systematic moral grace in the place of wrong and disorder?butvia twentieth-century technical means. The vehicle through which hehopes to achieve all this is an aborning organization called the EducationalTesting Service, purveyor of a test called the SAT. You've heard of it? Theresidue of the Census of Abilities is the standardized tests that you took inhigh school and college, that you probably prepared for and sweated overbecause it seemed they would determine your fate in life. Right now,Chauncey is about to become the first president of the Educational TestingService. That's the plunge he's taking.
The way that Henry Chauncey's thoughts were running near the end of theSecond World War is pertinent not just as an example of the tenor of thatmoment, and not just because Chauncey was on the point of founding animportant American institution. American society was, in fact, at acrossroads?Chauncey may have been dreaming, but he wasn't fantasizing. A quietbut intense competition was taking place over the future structure of thecountry. Chauncey had a part in it, generally because he belonged to the groupthat decided things back then, and particularly because he was connected to apowerful patron, James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard University.
Chauncey believed in progress and wanted to be part of it. He was surethat an expansion of mental testing, which seemed to him to be a sciencewith limitless possibilities, was the proper avenue. But he was an agnostic onthe question of what form, exactly, the progress should take. Conant wasnot. He had a plan fully worked out, which he had recently proposed in aseries of righteous, almost inflammatory magazine articles: to depose theexisting, undemocratic American elite and replace it with a new one made upof brainy, elaborately trained, public-spirited people drawn from every sectionand every background. These people (men, actually) would lead thecountry. They would manage the large technical organizations that would bethe backbone of the late-twentieth-century United States and create, for thefirst time ever, an organized system that would provide opportunity to allAmericans. Conant assumed, in fact, that picking a new elite in just the rightway would enhance democracy and justice almost automatically. It was anaudacious plan for engineering a change in the leadership group and socialstructure of the country?a kind of quiet, planned coup d'état.
Chauncey's wishes and Conant's both came true: the United States didembark on the world's largest-scale program of mental testing, and oneconsequence of this (though not the only one) was the establishment of a newnational elite. The machinery that Conant and Chauncey and their allies createdis today so familiar and all-encompassing that it seems almost like anatural phenomenon, or at least an organism that evolved spontaneously inresponse to conditions. It's not. It's man-made. The organized way we haveof deciding who winds up where in American society exists because, in theintense maneuvering of the period before, during, and just after the war, oneparticular system triumphed over other, alternative systems.
Here is what American society looks like today. A thick line runs through thecountry, with people who have been to college on one side of it and peoplewho haven't on the other. This line gets brighter all the time. Whether a personis on one side of the line or the other is now more indicative of income, ofattitudes, and of political behavior than any other line one might draw:region, race, age, religion, sex, class. As people plan their lives and theirchildren's lives, higher education is the main focus of their aspirations (andthe possibility of getting into the elite end of higher education is the focusof their very dearest aspirations). A test of one narrow quality, the abilityto perform well in school, stands firmly athwart the path to success. Those whodon't have that ability will have much less chance than those who do to displaytheir other talents later.
The placing of such a heavy load on higher education has had manyother effects. A whole industry has grown up to help people get into collegeand graduate school. Educational opportunity has become a national obsession.There is a politics of it, a jurisprudence of it, and a philosophy of it?noneof which was the case fifty years ago. To improve it is the fundamentalpromise made by most candidates for public office. It is the fundamentalgood that parents try to get for their children. Preoccupation with it is thechief theme of the first quarter of Americans' lives. It is the object ofelaborate work, hope, scheming, manipulation, and competition.
Those who do best under this system make up a distinct class, with itsown mores and beliefs and tastes and folkways. They don't serve as theunquestioned leadership of the United States, as Conant and Chauncey wouldhave expected; they're at least as much resented as admired. They aren'tperceived by others as people who have earned their position in completely openand fair competition (though that's the way they perceive themselves) or whoare primarily devoted to the public interest. But still, they are Conant's andChauncey's children, precisely the products of the ideas they had and themoves they made after the end of the Second World War.
One way to understand the current shape of American society is as itsbeing the result of Conant's, Chauncey's, and their allies' concerted attackon a specific problem, which was so successful that the problem no longerexists. So much force was marshaled against that one problem, though, thatin addition to its being solved, practically everything else was changed,too?which created new problems. The story of what happened has to begin withthe original problem, or else it doesn't make sense.
Here is what American society looked like, from the point of view of Conantand Chauncey, at the close of the Second World War.
They took it as a given that the essence of American greatness was aquality that Alexis de Tocqueville had remarked upon early in the nineteenthcentury: social equality, of a kind that would be unthinkable in any othercountry. Because the United States didn't have a rigid class system, it couldtake full advantage of its people's talents and at the same time generateintense social cohesion across a range of physical space and a variety of ethnicorigin that elsewhere would have been considered insuperable.
But during the early twentieth century American society had taken anominous turn. Conant and Chauncey accepted without question the view ofFrederick Jackson Turner, the historian of the American West who was aHarvard professor in their younger days, that what had made the UnitedStates democratic and classless was the availability of open land on theWestern frontier. Now the frontier was closed, the country had becomeindustrial, and the cities were crowded with immigrant workers, many ofwhom were socialists?or who, at the very least, believed that group unity,rather than individual opportunity, was the highest good.
Even worse, a distinct American upper class had emerged. It was verymuch on display at Harvard and other leading universities, where, up to thestart of the Second World War, rich heedless young men with servants,whose lives revolved around parties and sports, not studying, set the tone ofcollege life. The plurality of Harvard students had come from boys' boardingschools in New England, the kind where parents could register their sons atbirth; pretty much anybody who went to one of these schools, and was not "alittle slow," and could pay the tuition, could go to Harvard, or to Princeton,or to Yale. Even the faculty was disproportionately made up of properBostonians, rather than modern academics.
Harvard and institutions like it fed into another series of institutions: lawfirms, Wall Street financial houses, the Foreign Service, research hospitals,and university faculties. These, too, had begun to look like the province of ahereditary upper class. All the good places were reserved for members of acertain group?the all-male, Eastern, high-Protestant, privately educatedgroup to which Henry Chauncey belonged. No Catholics or Jews wereallowed, except in rare cases that required of them a careful extirpation ofany accent or other noticeable expression of their alien culture. Nonwhitesweren't in close enough range of membership in the elite to be excluded. Andeven the fieriest social reformers of the day didn't think to suggest thatwomen ought routinely to participate in running the country. Snobbishness,small-mindedness, and prejudice were the worst aspects of the eliteinstitutions, but even at their best they were preoccupied with a vaguelydefined personal quality called "character," and tended to ignore intelligenceand scientific expertise. But these, precisely, were the traits Conant thoughtmost vitally necessary in postwar America.
What could you do to dethrone this upper class and restore the UnitedStates to its true democratic nature? It was a question without an obviousanswer. Using the educational system to create a fair society, which seemstoday like the way to do the job, looked then like a distant, unrealized,possibly unrealizable dream.
At the close of the Second World War, the United States had been theworld's leader in trying to educate a large part of the citizenry for more thana hundred years. During the nineteenth century Americans created, notwithout a struggle, the free public elementary school as a basic socialinstitution and, during the first half of the twentieth century, the highschool. These institutions weren't well enough established to be taken forgranted as they are now. In 1940 the country still hadn't passed the milestoneof graduating more than half its teenagers from high school. The idea thatthere might be a way of evaluating all American high-school students on asingle national standard and then making sure that they went on to collegessuited to their abilities and ambitions?most people would have regarded thatas a wild, futuristic fantasy, although Chauncey and Conant were among ahandful of people who knew that, technically, it could be done.
Colleges were the same story as public schools. The United States providedfar more people with higher education than any country ever had?aboutone in four young people entered college and one in twenty stayed longenough to get a degree. But these students were the ones whose parents hadenough money to send them to college; American higher education's sizedidn't mean that it was open to everyone. Neither was it established thatprofessors should be respected, well-compensated, formally trained expertsdedicated to advancing the frontiers of knowledge by conducting rigorous,objective research. During the late nineteenth century, hundreds of Americanscholars had gone to Germany to receive strict academic training (becausethat was the only country where it was available) and came back imbuedwith the goal of setting up German-style research universities here. It was anappealing picture, Herr Doktor Professor as scientific figure sitting atop aformal university hierarchy and consulted by government and industry, butby the Second World War it had scarcely been achieved.
Most leading private universities, like Harvard, drew their students andfaculty from a local or regional pool and had a genteel, belletristic quality.In most cases their students were male. In private higher education, womenusually went to women's colleges whose announced purpose was to preparethem for supporting roles in life. Most African-Americans who went to collegewent to black colleges, which were also segregated by sex. State publicuniversities were, in contrast, open to just about anyone (except those in theSouth), but most were expected by their state legislatures to impart theeducational basics to all comers first, and conduct advanced research second.
Within the inner and higher chambers of American society a strugglewas under way to reform?literally re-form?schooling at all levels. It hadbeen going on all through the Depression and war years, spiritedly, sometimesbitterly, without attracting public notice. All the participants sharedChauncey's and Conant's assumption that education was going to changedramatically and was going to turn into the mainspring of American society,the repository of the country's distinctive greatness.
This book tells, for the first time, the story of the new system thatemerged after the Second World War: where the ideas animating it camefrom, how it was put into effect, what other choices were rejected, whatcompromises were made along the way, and how the new leaders' lives and theirroles in the country's drama turned out.
Whatever Tocqueville thought, the United States has always been a countrywith an elite, or a series of elites, overlapping, competing, and succeedingone another. Henry Chauncey did not share Conant's animus against theAmerican elite of the mid-twentieth century. That was because he was amember of it. Indeed, the story of the Chauncey family makes a good capsulehistory of the progression of elites in America.
The Chauncys (as the name was originally spelled) were never just ordinaryfolks, and they were never holders of a simple unprepossessing idea ofthe world. Originally they were Norman noblemen who came to England inthe conquest of 1066 and wound up as barons in Yorkshire. In the 1400sthey were dispossessed and moved down a notch, into the ministerial class.The Chauncy who moved to America, Charles Chauncy, born in 1592, waseducated at Cambridge and became a professor of Greek there, but he wasmainly a devout and opinionated Puritan minister who spent his life gettinginto disputes with church authorities. In 1629 he was hauled before the highcommission court for publicly criticizing the Church of England's policy ofallowing sports, games, and recreation on Sundays. In 1635 he was throwninto prison for publishing a lengthy treatise protesting the placing of arailing around the communion table. He won his release by writing a weakrecantation?though according to a family history written by one of hisdescendants, he "deeply bewailed his sinful compliance" until his dying day.
In 1637 Chauncy left England for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where,even in a community of fellow Puritans, he stood out as a vehement critic ofwhat he regarded as excessive religious laxness. He created "much trouble,"in the words of Governor John Winthrop, by expressing the view that "thechildren ought to be dipt and not sprinkled" at their baptism. In 1654, worndown by that controversy and other tribulations of American life, Chauncyresolved to return to England, where the Puritans had taken power and thebishop who had tormented him "had given his head to the block." Hechanged his mind, however, when he was made president of Harvard College,on condition "that he forbear to disseminate or publish any tenets concerningimmersion baptism."
Everybody thinks of America as a country where people came to escapeformal social structures?a place with a genius for disorganization. CharlesChauncy represents another strain that has been present in American societyall along. No amount of anachronistic pretzel-twisting can make him into apopulist or a democrat. He was self-consciously a figure at the top of society.He did come here to escape an order that he found oppressive?but onlybecause he hoped to help create a new order that would be stricter and thereforemore virtuous than the old one.
But where Puritans like Chauncy do connect to the modern Americancreed is in their idea that the state of grace was individual and irrespectiveof social rank. This was a radical notion, and it led in the direction of asociety run by people who had earned their places by good works, rather than byan upper class selected by birth. The last controversy of Charles Chauncy'stheologically combative life was over the Halfway Covenant, a Puritan doctrinethat granted the privilege of automatic baptism to the grandchildren ofmembers of the elect. Chauncy was dead set against it. Initiation into thestate of grace, he felt, ought not be conferred by inheritance.
Charles Chauncy died in 1671, having well established his family in NewEngland. The best-known Chauncy of the 1700s was one of his great-grandsons,also named Charles Chauncy, who for decades was minister of thePresbyterian First Church of Boston. This Charles Chauncy was the leadingopponent of the Great Awakening, the ecstatic revival movement that wasled by the young, charismatic, showy Congregational minister JonathanEdwards out on the wild frontier surrounding Northampton, Massachusetts.In 1742 Edwards published his credo, Some Thoughts Concerning the PresentRevival of Religion in New England. The next year Chauncy published acensorious rebuttal, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in NewEngland, which lengthily disapproved of preachers like Edwards who, indealing with their flock, "aimed at putting their Passions into a Ferment."
The Chauncy sternness is unmistakable. The family remained in its traditionalposition of being as ambitiously idealistic as anybody about thenational enterprise, about the quest for the good, but in believing that therehad to be a disciplined, orderly, restrained means to that end. JonathanEdwards represented a trust in the good instincts of all people, howeverunruly that mass might be; Charles Chauncy, belief in a trained, systematicelite. By this time, though, most of the descendants of the original Puritans,including Chauncy, were bound up in the prosperous commercial culture ofNew England's cities and towns. They were migrating from their originalCongregationalism into more conventional Protestant denominations, andfrom the ministry into trade.
In the nineteenth century the Chaunceys (as they now spelled it), withoutlosing their moralism, became rich. They were early exemplars of what one oftheir twentieth-century relatives, Joseph Alsop, the Washington columnist,called "the WASP ascendancy." The first family member named HenryChauncey, who was born in 1795, went into foreign trade. During the 1830she moved to Chile. As if to provide evidence for Max Weber's future theoriesabout the connection between Puritanism and capitalism, he took pains topersuade his family back home that his main concern in business was withvirtue, not money. He wrote his father-in-law in 1835: "Be assured that Ihave not been influenced by a desire of great wealth, no part of my ambitionis to be thought rich, if I have enough to give my children a good education, tocarry us through and a few dollars to help those that are in need is all Irequire." Nonetheless, Chauncey returned to America with a substantial fortune.He lived in a mansion on Washington Square in New York City.
Henry Chauncey left his money to his children, which ruined them. Theylived splendidly in New York, whiled away days at their clubs, and pursuedexpensive hobbies. His son Frederick, the grandfather of our HenryChauncey, created a series of beautifully illustrated little notebooks about hisrecreations?Birds Shot, Fish Caught?and worked as a merchant. In 1884his business failed because Frederick's partner had secretly and disastrouslyspeculated with its funds. Frederick soon caught pneumonia following agame of racquets and died at the age of forty-seven. His wife and four childrenfell into a pathetic existence that sounds like the subplot of an EdithWharton novel. Socially impeccable but broke, they lived in a modest apartmenton the Upper East Side, supported by subventions from relatives. Mrs.Chauncey took the position that because of their misfortunes, none of thechildren should ever marry or leave home.
The only one who disobeyed her was Henry's father, Egisto FabbriChauncey (named, before the terrible truth came out, after FrederickChauncey's dishonest partner). He entered the ancestral family profession,the ministry, although as an Episcopalian he was affiliated with the Americanbranch of the Church of England, the very institution the Puritans hadcome here to escape. His son Henry Chauncey was born in 1905. In his babybook, carefully preserved, there was a place to write down what "people arereading"; Mrs. Chauncey listed Thomas Dixon's The Clansman (one of thebooks on which the movie Birth of a Nation was based), Edith Wharton'sThe House of Mirth, and Jack London's War of the Classes,indicating a country that was still, despite the best improving efforts of twoand a half centuries of Chaunceys, in a state of upheaval over matters of race,class, and social exclusion.
The Chaunceys, however, were not in the slightest daunted in their questfor a perfected, orderly America. The year after Henry's birth Egisto Chaunceyreceived a call to become rector of St. Mark's Church in Mount Kisco, NewYork, a bosky country retreat for the rich. This was where Henry Chaunceyspent his early childhood, impecunious compared to everybody else, butrighteous. The Reverend Chauncey built a new home for St. Mark's?a substantial(but not luxurious) bluestone structure in the Gothic style, designed by thefirm of Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson, the leading church architects of theday. Over one of the doorways he had painted a motto, taken from the Book ofProverbs: "Where there is no vision the people perish."
Continues...
Excerpted from The Big Testby Nicholas Lemann Copyright ©2000 by Nicholas Lemann. Excerpted by permission.
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