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No Moron Bloc

The political problem raised by six or seven million morons in our population is not necessarily serious. They are too scattered to form a solid bloc and too unreliable to constitute very effective material for corrupt control. The real problem, which is social and industrial rather than political, is met when the high grade moron leaves school at about sixteen. Formerly a large per cent was absorbed by agriculture, but the coming of machinery to the farm has progressively restricted this field of usefulness. Fortunately the same movement has opened a new set of occupations in the city. A large part of the work required by the "Iron Man" calls for only moron intelligence. Indeed because of its monotony, such work is generally best done by one of that level.

As our factories are now organized, to be sure, this work, fit only for the moron, is often tied up with some really responsible job and makes the irksome and irritating part the work for a man of higher intelligence. But work requiring only moron intelligence is being increasingly separated from work requiring more, leaving the energies of the higher grade man free for more satisfying as well more valuable work.

The problem is not entirely solved, of course, when we find a suitable job for the defective. Obviously the foreman who supervises the work of the moron must be quite as different from his present-day prototype as the foreman today is from one of fifty years ago. But the development a new type of foreman is a fundamental problem in industry in any case.

A greater problem is the moron's inability to make social adjustments and it is obvious enough that while special institutional care of all our five million or more morons neither necessary nor wise, some form of social supervision and control will be increasingly necessary as these defectives are more and more huddled together in cities. Thus political problem raised by the feeble-minded is not in the capacity as citizens and voters but as wards, if not of state, at least of society.

The Perpetual Privates

The real problem for democracy is raised by the 22 per cent of men or "D" and "D-" intelligence, the so-called Inferiors. These people are not, most of them, feebleminded. How intelligent are they? The question is almost impossible to answer for lack of adequate objective standards with which to compare them. As has been pointed above, the mental age standard is profoundly misleading unless technically interpreted. Almost the only answer must be in terms of what these men can do.

Their army description may serve as an indication of their industrial capacity: " 'D' men are likely to be fair soldiers, but are usually slow in learning and rarely go above the rank of private. They are short on initiative and so require more than the usual amount of supervision."

In industry also they are the privates. They tend to gravitate to such occupations as laborers, tailors and tailors' assistants, blacksmiths and horseshoers, barbers, teamsters, hostlers, machine tenders, farm laborers, cobblers, general miners, concrete workers, boiler-makers and cooks, and these occupations to the lower grades and less responsible positions. It must be clearly understood that by no means all persons in these occupations are of "D" grade or bellow. On the contrary, in the army the middle score of all these occupations was in "C-," with very many well above. But these are the occupations which absorb most of the "D" men. Given time to learn their trade they make skillful workmen, reasonably rapid and trustworthy so long as they are given substantially no responsibility and are not asked to adapt themselves rapidly to new conditions. If they lack initiative and push, they are not on that account less highly regarded or paid since these qualities are not always deemed necessary in lesser employees.

The differences between "D" men and the majority of the "D-" and "E" men is one of degree. The latter require still more supervision and seldom attain high skill. Yet in the army only 1.75 per cent of the entire draft was officially regarded as unfit for regular service because of low mental level. Probably this is much too low; a number of considerations of a practical and politic sort held the recommendations for discharge to the lowest possible point. It remains true that all but a small per cent of the draft were regarded as possessing at least a bare possibility of some sort of usefulness. (See the official Memoirs, page 101.)

This is to be compared with the reckless statement of Mencken in the Baltimore Sun of January 30: " . . .to be exact, 22 per cent were such numskulls that they were fit only for certain kinds of low grade service. . . . That is to say, twenty-two in every hundred of the white drafted men were so stupid that it was impossible to make effective combatants of them. They could not be trusted to shoot and could not be trusted to run." Perhaps Mr. Mencken should leave statistics to less entertaining and more literal minds.