“Great will be our good fortune,” Robert Yerkes, head of the U. S. Army psychology team, wrote, “if the lesson in human engineering which the war has taught is carried over directly and effectively into our civil institutions and activities.” For psychology and the schools the great experiment of World War I was the construction and standardization of the Alpha and Beta group intelligence test as a technique for differentiating men within disciplined and highly stratified social organizations. The dream shared by psychologists, social reformers, and educators of the time was the creation of an efficiently organized society by the proper allocation of manpower resources. The individual I.Q. test was impractical to use with large numbers of the American population to determine proper occupational niches. Mass testing with a group I.Q. test, it was believed, made human engineering feasible. Efficiency in the human group, claimed army test developer, H. H. Goddard, in a 1920 lecture, “is not so much a question of the absolute numbers of persons of high and low intelligence as it is whether each grade of intelligence is assigned a part, in the whole organization, that is within its capacity.” Goddard went on to suggest that man could learn from the busy bee “the perfect organization of the hive.” “Perhaps,” Goddard stated, “it would be wiser for us to emulate the bee's social organization more and his supposed industry less.”

It is in the social centers of Rochester that I should look for an answer to the question, whether in a great democratic community you were realizing the purposes of society.

In 1884 “A small band of zealous young scholars fresh from German seminars” organized the American Historical Association “to propagate and give new direction to ‘American history and history in America.’” In one sense, these self-conscious professionals institutionalized a fundamental element of nineteenth-century thought; they shared with many Americans a deep commitment to historicism and its two central tenets: the belief that all human life is in a process of continual growth and transformation and the related conviction that facts and events can be explained only by reference to earlier facts and events. In a century in which change and process were bywords, “the historical method” was a highly respected thought tool. “To know a thing properly,” as William Torrey Harris expressed it, “we must study it in its history.” The study of history satisfied an almost compelling psychic need of nineteenth-century Americans to reexperience time, to analyze it, to capture it conceptually, and thereby in a personal way to control it. They found great psychological comfort in tracing a modern institution or trend to its very roots. It should be no surprise, then, that a profound sense of the continuity of human experience, “an historical mindedness,” was a cherished goal in an age so characterized by discontinuity. No surprise, either, that history was the first of the social sciences to be organized on a national scale.

As conflict in American culture increases and the idea of revolution is no longer dismissed as some absurd anarchist dream but increasingly entertained by men of more moderate persuasion, more and more voices can be heard echoing a common warning. The warning is this: The new left must either temper its attacks on the military, corporate, and educational establishment in this country, or we will all suffer the wrath of a fascist nightmare. Put in these terms, the new left is made responsible for the coming American fascism. The usual analysis proceeds with the notion that the attack on the liberal center from both the right and left weakens and eventually destroys democratic institutions. The process begins with the left questioning the mythologies that sustain bourgeois society thus threatening the security of those in power and ends with a repressive fascist order. In this sense, the more the left agitates, the more the fascist right can be expected to grow. There are few political and social analysts in this country who seriously doubt the possibility that given an open confrontation the fascist would win. Virtually every observer seems to predict that a socialism of the right not the left would emerge. It is interesting that in times of severe crisis, most liberals can be relied upon to move to the right rather than to the left of the political spectrum.