Ability Testing and the Cold War Confidence Game:
Vocational assessment, Entrance exams, and the Search for Talent during the rise of a military-industrial complex (1947-1963)

Paul F. Ballantyne

From 1947-1963, American foreign policy, domestic economic growth, and scientific practice (including ability testing) were all dominated by the beginning of the international Cold War between the United States and so-called Communist nations -including the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Cuba, and North Vietnam.  A successively modernized network of ability testing was one aspect of the vast Cold War "Confidence Game" perpetrated by a well meaning federal government on an unsophisticated (but largely willing) middle-class American public. 

Initiated under Truman's Fair Deal politics and under the Marshall plan to rebuild Europe (1948-1953), this confidence game was expanded during the Eisenhower years (1952-1960) when the energies of federal and state governments were directed toward combating the potential spread of international socialism.  The wider context of public belief in convenient fictions (including the survivability of limited nuclear war) is emphasized as a means to indicate why ostensibly great purchase was given to so-called vocational guidance and ability testing results during the period.

Chapter Overview

The five sections of this chapter describe the Cold War context and societal role of ability testing technologies from 1947-1963.  After being mobilized in the name of a fair deal for G.I.s and in the name of humanitarianism toward Europe (section one), the middle-class administrative infrastructure of vocational guidance and higher educational gatekeeping (section two) became successively embedded into the ideology of the Cold War period and its new technopolitical manpower selection requirements (section three).  That is, from 1950 onward, a ubiquitous and influential "military-industrial sorting machine" (section four) was produced and then successively expanded for roles in: (1) the Korean War effort; (2) the U.S. Employment Service, (3) the Educational Test Service run military Deferment Tests; and (4) the National Science Foundation scholarship program (known as Project Talent).  Under the National Defense Education Act (1958), the testing subdiscipline was expanded still further by a patriotic call for maintaining American technological supremacy over the Soviets.  This latter call was couched in somewhat disingenuous subdisciplinary terms such as the "search for talent," and "learning in a free society" (section five).

Section One:

Promises, promises:
Cold War confidence and guidance in an expanding job market (1946-52)

The immediate post-W.W.II years were ones of public optimism and promises of a better life for the average American (Kahl, 1957; Bell, 1988; Halberstam, 1993).  They were also, however, the years in which the American economy was converted to serve possible Cold War contingencies rather than returning to an actual peacetime footing (Haber, 1966, Gardner, 1972; La Faber, 1972; Whittner, 1974).  Together, the US foreign policy initiatives (including the Marshall Plan in which Europe was to be rebuilt by way of with American financing); and domestic policy programs (including the Fair Deal politics of Truman's second term, 1948-1952) brought about near full employment for returning GIs and then for younger workers right up to the end of the Korean war (1950-1953). 

The former foreign policy plan was brought into effect in the interest of promoting the stability of European democracies devastated by the war (Gimbel, 1976; Diefendorf, 1990).  But it was also aimed at warding off possible and de facto incursions of socialist ideology in Western Europe (Kennan, 1957; Romero, 1992).  The latter domestic program was initially a partisan political strategy to sell Truman's own vision of progressive American society to the voting pubic (Graebner, 1962; Hartman, 1971).

President Truman's Fair Deal domestic programs

Harry S. Truman, who succeeded FDR in 1945, sought (between 1946-1948) to both extend prewar progressive domestic social welfare policies and to establish a new bipartisan American foreign policy for the postwar period (Hutmacher; 1972; Hamby, 1973).  With regard to foreign policy, there had been barely a pause following the W.W.II conflict before a frightening series of events began to unfold on the international political scene.  An Iron Curtain now partitioned Western and Eastern Europe with America having becoming either directly or indirectly involved in civil wars in Greece, China, and Korea.  Truman insisted that Americans should remain active on the world stage and contain the spread of communism wherever possible.  This ideological belief would become known as the Truman doctrine.

But Truman's successive attempts at progressive domestic policy are also worthy of mention.  During his first term, Truman presented a twenty-one point domestic program to Congress that included proposals for full employment legislation, a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, an increased minimum wage, comprehensive housing legislation, the creation of a National Science Foundation, an atomic energy program, and assistance to the States to assure equal educational opportunities for minority groups.

But this program set into motion bitter debates over federal aid to education and the meaning of equal educational opportunity (Committee on Civil Rights, 1947; Kandell,1949).  Similar difficulties were encountered in 1948, when Truman was re-elected on a platform that called for an expansion of Social Security, the repeal of the conservative biased Taft-Hartley Labor Relations Act (1947), an increase in the minimum wage, slum clearance, federal housing, federal aid to education, and the containment of Soviet expansionism (Ravitch, 1983; Hartman, 1971).  The latter platform policy achieved support but the other policies ran up against long-standing traditions of racial inequalities.

As it turned out, even support for federal aid to education became again mired in sectarian controversy and no federal aid to education legislation was actually passed during Truman's administration.  Resistance to other aspects of the Fair Deal, though, must also be understood as part of a more nefarious context of Cold War anti-socialism and paranoia (Whittner, 1974; Yergin,1977; Hogan,1998).

In the civil service, for instance, there was already a strong undercurrent of anti-Communism going right back to the post-W.W.I "red scare" including the Palmer Raids of 1919-20 (Cook, 1964).  After all, socialism, not fascism was the traditional pre-W.W.II enemy of American free market ideology.  In 1946, therefore, the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover had began a renewed crusade against Communism in labor unions, newspapers, magazines, book publishing, radio and movies, schools and colleges, government departments, and even in fraternal orders (Caute, 1978; Sorrentino, 1985; Holmes, 1989; Melley, 1999).

Loyalty Laws

The geopolitical realities of the early Cold War era were used by conservative elements in the U.S. to rationalize the need for so-called loyalty laws.  When the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb in the summer of 1949 (prior to the date projected by U.S. Intelligence agencies), concerns over nuclear spies and overall national security arose.  High profile, sensational spy trials (where Americans were convicted of espionage and treason) seemed to indicate a need for heightened domestic ideological and economic vigilance. [133]   This resumed quest for national security resulted in the Internal Security Act of 1950 (a.k.a. the Mundt-Nixon Bill), which was passed over president Truman's veto (Caute,1978).

The Internal Security Act included provisions for: (1) registration with the Attorney General of all so-called Communist-action organizations or Communist-front organizations (including a report with the names of officers, sources of funs, and a membership list); (2) barring of such members from government employment, defense industries employment, and passport approval; (3) denial of tax-exempt status for registered organizations; (4) a labeling requirement on all publications or broadcasts of registered organizations as emanating from a Communist organization; (5) in the event of an internal security emergency (e.g., invasion, war, or insurrection) the detainment of those reasonably expected to engage in conspiracy, acts of espionage or sabotage; (6) barring of entry to aliens who had been members of or affiliated with Communist (or other totalitarian parties) in other countries; and (7) loss of citizenship for naturalized individuals whom had within five years of entry become or remained members of registered organizations (Lewis, 1988, pp. 7-8; see also Lewis, 1975; 1993).

State and local governments followed the federal example.  Between 1947-1954, more than half of the States passed laws designed to prevent "subversives" from holding government employment.  No aspect of life or institutional organization escaped scrutiny.  Labor unions, the church, independent foundations, the schools and universities, the Civil Rights movement, the media, and even the military were soon under investigation for Communist influence or sympathies (AAUP 1956; Caute, 1978; Diamond, 1992).  At least initially, however, thanks to the G.I. Bill (1945) and the Marshall Plan (1948) the rewards for passive compliance with (or complicity toward) these new loyalty laws were fairly high.

G.I.'s use of Higher Education

Upon return from oversees, a surprisingly large amount of veterans began enrolling in junior colleges and other pre-university programs.  Many of these colleges now offered vocational as well as their traditional liberal arts courses (Wilson, 1974).  By 1947, 1.6 million vets were attending college or university, accounting for 49% of total student registration.  Institutional enrollments doubled or even tripled allowing the hiring of permanent faculties and necessitating new building programs.  Prior to the war, universities and colleges were thoroughly and explicitly elitist (Fine, 1946; Schudson, 1972).  But now, a new kind of student (attending all year round, remaining serious and focused on completion) was let loose on the American campus.  This exceptional cohort of students temporarily snuffed out the older gatekeeping function of colleges (Kandell, 1949).

It should be obvious that this demographic change in enrollment contained the potential to revolutionize future views on who could or should become a college student or university graduate.  Veterans of modest depression era backgrounds were now proving capable of becoming as smart (i.e., performing as well in college classes) as those with the more traditional affluent student background. In fact though, this cohort of students only disrupted, but did not derail the prewar gatekeeping initiatives of testing groups such as the College Examination Board (founded 1901). 

After all, the educational aspects of the G.I. Bill were merely designed to give vets a "leg up" into the middle-class (which had traditionally been the backbone of college attendance in the first place).  Once the vets moved out of the immediate college system, the psychometric based testing requirements (such as the SAT and GRE) were brought back into place throughout the country (Dyer & King, 1955; Wilson, 1974; Rehberg & Rosenthal, 1978; Resnick, 1982).  The major administrative body involved in reinstating entrance requirements was the newly formed Educational Testing Service founded 1947(see fig. 45).

Figure 45 Henry Chauncey, First Head of the Educational Testing Service. Chauncey was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1905, the son of the Reverend E.F. Chauncey and the former Edith Lockwood Taft. He attended Groton private school and then Harvard in 1924. Baseball and football activities were his extra-curricular activities. Two years as a teacher and sports coach at Penn Charter, a private school in Philadelphia followed. In 1929, he returned to Harvard as an assistant dean and coach of the freshman baseball team. Chauncey was eventually put in charge of Harvard's scholarship program (under President Conant's direction), which used SAT scores to allocate awards. By the outbreak of W.W.II, Chauncey was devoting virtually all of his time to testing (Owen, 1985). He took a leave from Harvard in 1943 and spent fourteen months helping to administer the College Board's Army-Navy Qualifying Tests. In 1945, he was named director of the Board and two years later, became the first president of the Educational Testing Service (photo from American Psychologist, 1948, p. 112 ).

It is also important to note that 60% of attending veterans majored in either engineering or science.  These were specialties for which there were immediate openings in the expanding Cold War economy (Olsen, 1974).  Two federal acts which helped structure that job market were the 1948 Marshall Plan (for economic and technological aid to Europe), and the 1954 Internal Improvement Act (which created numerous engineering jobs to build the Interstate highway system).

The Marshall Plan: Promoting economic prosperity at home and abroad

In 1945, Europe was in a state of total economic collapse.  More than a third of European industry had been destroyed, 60 million were out of work, and a 100 million went hungry (Diefendorf, 1990).  Rebuilding started immediately after the euphoric summer of 1945.  The newly formed United Nations tried to help by providing emergency food and medical supplies but only an ongoing movement of vast scale would reverse the tide.  To this end, the United States Congress initially authorized $9 billion in emergency loans but two years later it was clear this was not enough (Kindleberger,1987). 

In January of 1947, retired general George G. Marshall was appointed Secretary of State and he was well aware that hunger and unemployment was providing a breeding ground for unrest in Italy, France, and in Greece (where Communist backed rebels were already fighting to topple the government).  Marshall warned Truman that without immediate aid, Greece would fall in weeks and the rest of Europe might soon follow (Sanford, 1987; Hogan, 1987).The Marshall Plan is born (ERP, ECA, and OEEC)

What the Americans hoped to do was to rebuild the Western European economy in five years.  The U.S., largely untouched by the war, was the only country in the world that possessed the economic productivity to finance (and administer) such a global recovery plan.  By rebuilding the infrastructure of democracy, it was hoped that public confidence in democratic ideology and leadership would also be rebuilt in Western Europe (Milward, 1984).  The resulting European Recovery Program (ERP) was unveiled to the public on June 5, 1947 in Marshall's speech to the Harvard graduating class (many of whom were W.W.II veterans).

Despite Marshall's continuing claim that the ERP was in the best interest of humanity and not directed against any political doctrine, part of its political selling point was clearly its potential role as an instrument of Communist containment (Killick, 1997).  During Marshall's tour of the country to promote the plan to business men and to the American public, he addressed this issue:  "It should be...kept in mind that this great project...must be carried to success against the avowed determination of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party to oppose and sabotage it at every turn" (Sanford, 1987; Marshall, 1991).  The ERP was signed into law in April, 1948 and was henceforth referred to as the Marshall Plan.

Prominent American economists, administrators, and publicists were recruited to aid the implementation of the Marshall Plan including the Studebacker auto company executive Paul Hoffman who was sworn in as head of the American run Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA).  The European wing of administration, called the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) was also formed.  Its function was to: (1) coordinate and monitor the recovery program; and (2) recommend the allocation of Marshall Plan funds on a case by case basis to the ECA. 

Early ERP construction projects in Germany were answered by a Soviet blockade of Berlin (Wilson, 1977).  On June 24th, 1948, Soviet tanks and troops barricaded the highways and railway tracks that were Berlin's only link to Western Germany(Tusa, 1988).  The U.S. countered with the Berlin Airlift carrying Marshall Plan supplies into Berlinfor almost a year before the Soviets ended the blockade (Tusa & Tusa, 1988; Pearcy, 1997).  That year, the German Federal Republic was born and West Germany was formally accepted into the OEEC (Griffiths, 1997). [134]

Promoting the American system of business

European industry was so far behind existing American standards that the only way to assure meeting the larger goal of recovery, was to have 25,000 European workers, executives, and trade unionists, visit the United States (Djelic, 1998). What they saw was not only the latest industrial technology but also how Americans lived. For instance, the fact that American autoworkers could buy their own company's products was simply one aspect of the modern system of expansive Fordism by which American industry was managed (Harvey, 1989).

One of the ongoing initiatives between 1948-1950 was the promotion of a better pattern of labor-management relations in European businesses (Romero, 1992). This emphasis on Industrial Human Relations was a direct extension of the 1930s era General Electric Hawthorne Plant research carried out by Harvard School of Business researchers such as Elton Mayo (Baritz, 1960).

American management experts and selected union officials now worked toward replicating this system of industrial relations in ERP funded businesses. Product marketing, and especially design of the product for the marketplace was also stressed (Carew, 1987). It is important to know, however, that the contemporary American system of labor-management relations included the so-called "the right to manage" which was enshrined in the Taft-Harvey Act (1947) and written into all subsequent union contracts. The unions supervised their own agreements but more radical union locals were now forced to abide by "national contracts," and left-wing union activists in all sectors of the American economy were purged during the early Cold War (Caute, 1978; Gillespie, 1991).

Selected, non-Communist, European union leaders were funded to attend three-month training programs at the Harvard Business School, and funds were provided for British academic research on the influence of human relations on productivity. The Hawthorne experiments and human relations ideology (of the 1930s) had been mobilized in a contest that Paul Hoffman, the administrator of the Marshal Plan, liked to call a "contest between the U.S. assembly line and the Communist Party line" (Gillespie, 1991, pp. 238-239).  European Communists mounted a spirited anti-Marshall Plan campaign but the ERP Information Division fought back with their own propaganda and won out.  By 1950, there were unmistakable signs of economic health in Western Europe (Winks, 1960; Maier, 1984; Griffith, 1997). [135]

Section Two:

Initial Post-W.W.II Vocational Guidance and Higher Educational Gatekeeping (1946-1953)

Vocational guidance enjoyed a flurry of expansive activity from 1946-1953.  Contributing aspects to this subdisciplinary expansion include: A growing pool of trained (and government certified) vocational counselors; a renewed inter-agency cooperation (through government funded programs); improved occupational information tools (such as the Dictionary of Occupational Titles, from 1939 onwards); and the adoption by the military of a formal system for the "cross-classification" of civilian to military vocations (which aided in the task of retraining returning W.W.II and Korean veterans).

Vocational guidance for a new middle-class

Before W.W.II, the employment opportunities of immigrant groups were restricted by class and tradition. [136]   After the war, at least for White folk, there was money to be made even with moderate effort.  In this expanding job market, the issues of career choice and appropriate employee selection became important again for individuals, schools, and business.  Government funded back to work initiatives had produced a network of testing facilities and a pool of testing professionals which was soon expanded into private enterprise settings.

In 1944, the War Department had already initiated the Army Separation-Classification and Counseling Program.  This initial back to work step was then coupled over the next few years with both programs within the Veterans Administration and with operations in more than 400 educational guidance centers (under contract to the VA).  These programs were then combined with the testing or placement programs of the U.S. Employment Service (USES) to make up the largest active network of vocational guidance to that date.  Importantly though, both the issue of work for visible minorities and open discussion of pretest socio-economic status of examinees were largely absent (Adams, 1969).

The main concern of Cold War vocational testing was the proper placement of a growing group new middle-class examinees.  Mid-century social scientists were quick to suggest that changes in the structure of work now demanded a redefinition of the term middle-class.  The old middle-class (from 1870 onward) had been made up of farmers, businessmen, and free professionals.  By 1940, however, the new middle-class consisted of managers, salaried professionals, salespeople, and office workers.  Successively fewer persons (in proportion to the total labor force) were needed to manipulate things and more to handle people and symbols.  As Brameld (1955) eventually put it:

"Modern culture may be thought of as having three levels of experience: a bottom foundation level of industrial life, a middle level of liberal attitudes or practices, and a top level of organized eductaion resting upon both" (p. 167).

For a brief period (1946-1949), the exceptional cohort of returning G.I.s were afforded a generous educational entrée into the new middle reaches of this modern occupational hierarchy.  But this opportunity was not intended to be extended for too long.  Instead, an unparalleled, organized, system of merit tests for both vocational placement and for higher educational entrance would soon be established through the rising USES and Educational Test Service bureaucracies.

The fact that the new structure of postwar work was not yet well understood by academic psychologists is nicely exemplified in the following erroneous statement from a biological psychology oriented textbook by Prothro & Teska, (1950) which suggests checking the entrance of youth into middle-class work (see fig. 46).

Figure 46 Out of date vocational hierarchy described by psychologists. "In our present society, job requirements can well be represented as a triangle. That is, we need...a large number of workers in the unskilled and manual trades, fewer in the upper trades, and fewest in the professions. Intelligence, however, is distributed roughly as a diamond... The fact that there are far more jobs requiring little intelligence than there are people of little intelligence means that a large percentage of the population will...be engaged in occupations which are too low to be challenging....The prevailing drive to enter the professional groups needs to be checked-not because there is an oversupply of professional people in such fields as dentistry, medicine, and education-but because under our present system we do not maintain a larger group. The smooth operation of our social order depends upon the services of a large number of relatively unskilled workers for the production and transportation of goods" (Prothro & Teska, 1950, p. 500).

In order to address the requirements of this emerging (de facto diamond shaped) job market, the older (1920s era), psychometric tools of vocational classification had to be updated.  Thus, while the major aim of vocational testing during the first quarter of the century had been the measurement of general mental ability, the subsequent aims of testing (during the second quarter century) shifted toward: (1) the measurement of "special abilities" of a given examinee; and, (2) the characterization of "patterns of special abilities" required for placement and training of workers.  Within vocational guidance circles, it was now argued that the subdisciplinary adjustment toward establishing a multi-trait (read multi-score) pattern or interest profile for each examinee (and for each type of work) would be more useful for administrative predictability and for the successful life adjustment of those seeking work (Borow, 1964).

Despite their better understanding of the emerging job market (relative to academic psychologists), given the long-standing tradition of industrial and vocational guidance councilors as servants of power (Baritz, 1960), it should not be surprising that they too retained a notable conservative standpoint throughout the Cold War era.  After all, both subdisciplinary interests and wider national security agendas prescribed who might become a vocational councilor in the first place.  These same influences also mandated that certified councilors adhere to a cookbook application of standardized tests which were themselves provided by appropriate government sanctioned agencies (Miller, 1964, Tyler, 1962).  The most prominent vocational test battery utilized during this initial period was the GATB.

Misunderstanding the General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB)

In 1945 the modified W.W.II era Army General Classification Test (AGCT) was released for experimental civilian use by USES as the renamed General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB).  This two-and-a-half-hour set of tests was designed to screen applicants for entry-level jobs in 125 blue-collar and lower-level white-collar occupations.  The GATB was made up of 15 subtests combined in various weightings to give ten scores for: "intelligence" (G); verbal aptitude (V); numerical aptitude (N); spatial aptitude (S); form perception (P); clerical perception (Q); aiming (A); motor speed (T); finger dexterity (F); and manual dexterity (M).  Certain subtest scores were considered important for predicting success in given vocations. For instance, G and N scores were considered important for accountants, whereas plumbers needed high scores in NSM aspects of the test battery (Dvorak, 1947).  Minimum cut-off scores for each pattern of scores were successively worked out for each of 1000 occupations.

The particular modifications of the original AGCT into the civilian oriented GATB were informed by: (1) the prior occupational guidance work within the USES Occupational Analysis Division; (2) the prewar work of the Minnesota Employment Stabilization Research Institute on so-called occupational abilities; and (3) the ongoing views of L.L.Thurstone on primary mental abilities and his factorial studies of intelligence (Thurstone, 1938, 1941, 1944, 1947,1955).  Factor Analysis involves the notion of representing correlation coefficients as points in space -as clusters of correlations related by direction and by relative distance (Thomson, 1951).

Thurstone was interested in the way data points cluster and how robust the clusters are when statistical manipulations are performed on the whole distribution of points.  He selected conventional intelligence tests and administered them to groups of people in order to correlate each kind of test with every other kind.  His factor analytic technique yielded seven hypothetical so-called "primary" mental abilities: (1) number facility; (2) word fluency; (3) visualizing; (4) memory; (5) perceptual speed; (6) induction; and (7) verbal reasoning (Thurstone, 1938, 1947).  This view of multiple forms of human intellect was featured in college oriented textbooks of the immediate postwar period (see fig. 47).

Figure 47 Four different kinds of intelligence. Sorenson & Malm's Psychology for Living (1948) described Abstract intelligence, Concrete intelligence, Social intelligence, and Combined intelligence. Full of vivid pictures and short on academic referencing, this text stands well within the new "life adjustment" approach of typical Cold War high school and community college (see Bestor, 1953). Supplemental references on accounting, agriculture, automotive, and aviation careers retail stores, engineering, newspaper, and public relations were made available in the text. In contrast, Boring, Langfeld & Weld (1948) was a contemporary, more academic-oriented textbook. It's successive editions failed to provide any purchase on the rise vocational guidance during the Cold War era.

Although the mathematical procedures of the GATB follow the W.W.II factor analytic pattern of "multiple traits" (read multiple score) line of reasoning, many of the subsequent textbook accounts of the test treat it as if it was literally a "general" aptitude (i.e. one score) intelligence test battery.  That is, they portray the GATB as simply an updated W.W.I Army Alpha test of general intelligence and interpret its results in that fashion. [137]

Thus, despite the limitations of successive generalized batteries in predictive validity for success in actual W.W.II training, the so-called convergent validity (i.e., the correlation) between the mean AGCT scores made by soldiers and their civilian occupations prior to Army service would now become ironically enshrined in textbooks as a selling point for the derivative GATB test.  That is, these texts typically fall back on the older mental-vocational hierarchy argument of post-W.W.I testing by pointing out, for instance, that out of a possible range of 40-160 GATB scores: lumberjacks attained a "mean of 85"; boilermakers, 105; salesmen 115; and accountants, 125 (Stewart, 1947; Cruse, 1951; Burtt, 1957).

This overemphasis upon the means and medians used in the original AGCT validity study (Harrell & Harrell, 1945, 1946) was unfortunate and indicates one of the major limitations of informal, insider, subdisciplinary, history on the practical potential of vocational guidance technologies.  Only rarely did the more socio-historical accounts of the AGCT validity research point out (and attempted to account for) the equally important variability around the means for each so-called occupational level. 

Tyler (1956; 1964) for instance, provided a credible explanation of the variability of scores by appealing not to some unvarying (absolute) mental hierarchy but to the dismal nature of the prewar job market and to the ongoing bias of selection criteria for jobs located in the upper end of the occupational hierarchy.

In the original cross-classification (military test score to civilian vocation) study, Harrell & Harrell (1945) had investigated the correlation between the performance of 19,000 W.W.II enlisted men on the AGCT as compared to their pre-service occupations.  But to consider only the means or medians of each occupational level would be to miss the most significant finding.  Their study revealed a considerable range of scores on the AGCT within each of the occupational groups, particularly at the lower end of the distribution.  Among teamsters (with an average of 88), scores ranged all the way from 46 to 145.  The standard deviation of teamster scores was almost 20 points, suggesting that there was as much variability within that group as in the total validity test sample.  For occupations nearer the top of the list, the variability was less, but still worthy of notice.

Lawyers, for instance, who as a group averaged about 128 on the AGCT, ranged from 96 to 157. Their standard deviation of 11 points allows us to infer that perhaps one-sixth of these men scored below 117, which was approximately the average throughout the country for college students.  Very few prewar lawyers, however, scored below 100, the estimated average for all W.W.II enlisted men.  Much of the correlation between intelligence test scores and occupational level can therefore be accounted for by recognizing that occupations requiring advanced education for entry positions or for promotion had simply not recruited from the ranks of youths who's prior tests scores were low.  However, given the rough economic times of the late 1930s to early 1940s, there was nothing to prevent a person with a high test scoring ability from entering an occupation requiring little or no prior book learning.  "This W.W.II analysis [i.e., Harrell & Harrell (1945)] indicated that many had done so" (Tyler, 1964). [138]

The GATB at least, had the potential to offer an historically situated multi-score approach through a rough matching of test score patterns (on different "aptitude" subtests) with various occupations.  Ironically, though, only a small percentage of those who used this descriptive/ administrative device were at all aware of its socio-historical embeddedness.  Thus, there is considerable irony in the extensive use of cut-off scores (i.e., overall means) for different occupations during the purported "successful" application of the GATB in USES offices.  Being busy with the administrative task of slotting folks into given occupational roles, only seldom did vocational counselors pause to place these changes of opportunities into a broader context of cultural or societal-historical meaning.  Such analysis would be brought in only in the mid-to late-1960s. [139]

Educational Gatekeeping Resumed (The SAT and GRE as obstacles)

Ironically, during the early 1950s, along with the increase in the overall numbers of the public attending post-secondary schooling went an increase in the internal hierarchy of university faculties and of upper educational institutions in general (Trow, 1962; Touraine, 1974).  That is, once the exceptional G.I. cohort moved through the college system, a palpable procedural backlash regarding college entrance was put into place.  The major administrative tool for the resumption of educational gatekeeping was adoption of standardized entrance exams (such as  the SAT and GRE) run by the Educational Test Service.  Despite the Cold War era claims by James B. Conant and the ETS that these tests would democratize college entrance, they in fact functioned as educational barriers to access for students without previous privileged educational opportunity (Dyer & King, 1955; Wilson, 1974; Resnick, 1982; Owen, 1985).

The considerable contradiction between the ostensive rationale and the de facto effect of standardized test is important to note.  For Conant, one of the architects of the modern American educational system, the important thing was to tap the latent talent of many high school students who either did not intend to enter a scientific career or were unable to pursue a college education for financial reasons.  The dilemma Conant described was how to make equal but selective provisions for channeling superior manpower into needed Cold War occupations (Conant, 1953; 1959).  His selection of the prewar SAT and GRE exams to democratize college entrance was unfortunate because the actual history of the development of those tests was in complete contradiction to that egalitarian aim.

Development of the SAT and GRE

The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) was a psychometrically designed college entrance exam produced for the College Entrance Examination Board under the chairmanship of Carl Brigham in 1926.  This was an admissions test administered to high school students wishing to further their education by attending college or university.  The SAT was very similar to the adult-level Stanford-Binet consisting of nine subtests labeled Definitions, Arithmetical Problems, Classification, Artificial Language, Antonyms, Number Series, Analogies, Logical Inference, and Paragraph Reading.  Being a multiple choice rather than short answer or essay type examination, the SAT was a clear departure from, or rather a psychologization of, the past essay style college exams.

Similarly, the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) originated in 1936 under Carnegie Foundation funding and under the direction of Ben D. Wood's (Chicago based) Cooperative Test Service.  Wood was hired by the College Entrance Board to run trial applications of the GRE which was essentially an upward extension of the SAT (i.e., a higher level of difficulty for each question).  Despite later claims to the contrary, both these tests had been originally put in place to increase the reliability of selection of students (that is, to reflect and maintain the societal stratification of those institutions).

In his history of the College Entrance Board, Valentine (1987) attributes part of this rise in popularity of uniform exams to the postwar psychologizing of Board (and later ETS) test production methods (see fig. 48).

Figure 48 IBM test marking technology. The expanded use of tests was accompanied by the rise in the demand for the novel technical paraphernalia of the trade (Photo from Engle, 1957). In those days, the ETS shipped out copies of its 368 different exams (including SAT, LSAT, MCAT, but also Foreign Service exams, ROTC scholarship tests, Coast Guard Academy entrance exams, etc.) accompanied by a consignment of what was referred to as "electrographic pencils." These were mechanical pencils equipped with No.2 lead. The pencils made marks that could be read by the company's twenty automatic scoring machines, crude devices that contained hundreds of tiny, electrified, fine-tuned metal prongs, one for each square on an answer sheet. Young women on staff graded test papers by feeding them into the machines one at a time and lowering the prongs to the surface of the paper. Every time one of the prongs touched a blackened square corresponding to at correct answer, the graphite on the paper completed an electrical circuit. The staff read the number of correct answers from a dial on the front of the machine and recorded it on the paper. Some students tried to improve their chances by marking more than one space on items they weren't sure of. ETS guarded against this by assigning a corps of sharp-eyed Phi Beta Kappas to scan each answer sheet visually and put cellophane tape over double responses (Yahraes, 1951; Owen, 1985).

The older program of written exams was on a downhill slide by 1936 partly because it was now recognized that examination costs could be "cut in half by the use of objective tests" (Valentine, 1987, p. 40).  In addition, there was convenient aspect of unaccountability built into these new production methods.  SAT and GRE scores were disclosed only to the colleges to which student applied.  Due to the possibilities of misinterpretation, it was not considered responsible to release them either to candidates or to secondary school officials or teachers (Turnbull, 1949).  Despite the new rhetoric of equality of access then, the post-G.I. Bill adoption of psychometric entrance tests functioned to fulfill the very role of their pre-war designers.  That is, to deter students without appropriately elitist high school and college experience from enrolling in the nations universities.

Resulting effects on access to higher education

Contrary to Conant's original intent, the nationwide adoption of standardized testing requirements for higher education did not create opportunity or promote equality of access (Owen, 1985; cf. Chauncey & Dobbin, 1963).  Or rather, they promoted opportunity for only a certain segment of the mid-century college age population.  While overall chances of an individual whose father had less than eight years of school went up (from 8 chances out of 100 of entering college in the 1915-1925 generation and 14 chances in the 1945-1955 generation), the chances of college attendance went up significantly more for the middle-class (those who had traditionally scored well on psychometric entrance exams).  That is, an individual who's father went to college had 47 chances out of 100 of entering college in the years 1915-1925 and 78 chances in the years 1945-1955.  As for entrance into graduate school, the son of an elementary school dropout sees his chances of entering graduate school go only from 5 to 6 percent between 1920 and the 1950s, whereas the chances of a son of a college graduate increased form 28 to 52 percent (Jencks & Riesman, 1968; Crane, 1969).

During the late 1950s to mid-1960s, the effect of the original socio-economic background (SES) continued to make itself felt throughout a student's academic career path.  Lower-class students were likelier to obtain a Ph.D. from a low-ranking university.  Similarly, lower class kids who had obtained their BA in a major university also had significantly less chances of getting a graduate position in a major university, especially a private one (Crane, 1969).  In other words, although the overall number of middle-class kids had increased, so had the absolute academic career path gap between those who start from a high level of educational privilege and those who start from a lower level.  In the remaining three sections of this chapter, it is to this initially ignored wider historical realm (of political ideology and cultural meaning systems) that we must turn if we are to understand the considerable weight attributed to (or conversely the lack of critical evaluation directed toward) Cold War ability testing technology.

Section Three:

Ideology and technopolitics of the Korean War and Sputnik era (1950-1961)

While American money was helping to revive democracy in Europe, the American military was concurrently propping up a fundamentally corrupt society in South Korea (Graebner, 1962). [140]  In 1946, U.S. troops removed the colonial Japanese from administrative posts below the 38th parallel but then replacing them with a South Korean Interim Government largely made up of officeholders under the Japanese. A long roll of prominent Korean torturers and anti-Nationalists were now in positions of unprecedented authority. 

During this transition period, policing and Civil Defense functions were also run by those whose main qualifications were that they were anti-Communist. By 1948, for instance, 53 percent of officer and 25 percent of rank and file police were still Japanese trained.Similarly, during the establishment of a Southern Constabulary Force (from which the South Korean Army would grow), the Americans specifically excluded any potential recruit who had been formerly imprisoned by the Japanese; and thus any member of the anti-Japanese resistance (Hastings, 1987, p. 38)

The eventual North Korea military offensive below the 38th parallel (in June 1950) nearly succeeded in overrunning the entire country.  In response, the Americans (led by General MacArthur) spearheaded a United Nations counter-offensive force of 15 nations which repulsed the Communist Forces and continued on well into North Korean territory.  This roused the latest recruits to Communist ideology to retaliate with a force of 300,000 men and when China entered the war the world was brought to the brink of a nuclear conflict. 

MacArthur's initial program for victory sought the proactive isolation and devastation of China.  It included not merely driving UN forces to the Yalu river (bordering China), but destroying the air bases and industrial complex in Manchuria, blockading Communist China's seacoast; demolishing its industrial centers; providing all necessary support for an invasion of the Chinese mainland by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists; and subsequent transportation of Nationalist troops to Korea.  This plan, "entailed the very considerable risk of igniting World War III and the consequent overrunning of Western Europe" (Ridgway, 1967, p. 145). 

MacArthur openly ignored Truman's subsequent order for all Theater Commanders to refrain from foreign policy statements.  His premise was that if they lost a war to Communism in Asia, the fall of Europe was inevitable.  After an official rebuff of his program by Washington, MacArthur switched to a secondary plan which argued for cutting off Korea from China.  This would be done not only through massive conventional air attacks but also through "sowing a no-man's-land with radioactive waste" as an "impassable boundary" between the forces (Hastings,1987, p.199).

Ideological aspects

Fundamental ideological clashes were at work in Korea and are important when considering the spread of the conflict.  The Communists overestimated the prospect for internal disruption in South Korea in part because Marxist ideology led them to expect widespread discontent as the norm in capitalist societies (especially in such quasi-colonial areas).  But complacency and acquiescence was part of the way the general population of Korea had survived since the time of the Japanese takeover in 1910.  The Communists, thus bid a hasty retreat in the face of the UN advance. 

Oversimplified American ideology also led to mistakes.  In particular, the view of world Communism as a monolithic enemy with its tentacles controlled by Moscow proved erroneous.  Contrary to American belief at the time, South Korea did not form part of any Soviet expansion plan involving Europe and ongoing ideological confrontations with the Soviets blinded the U.S. military to the salient Chinese considerations at play in the area.  They simply did not entertain the prospect that the Chinese might act in Korea for their own reasons, quite heedless of Soviet wishes or policy to limit the conflict (Hastings, 1987; Stueck, 1995). [141]

Thus, within five months of Korean war outbreak, there was direct Sino-U.S. confrontation on the peninsula; a U.S. Naval intervention to prevent a PRC assault on Taiwan; and a deeper U.S. involvement on the French side in Indochina (now called Vietnam).  Eventually, however, the possibility of the widening conflict leading to a nuclear holocaust became salient to all the parties involved.  Active American efforts to limit the war were subsequently made (including the abrupt replacement of MacArthur with General Ridgway as Theater Commander).

Less than victory: technopolitical containment of Communism

In 1950-51 it was an unwelcome revelation that America seemed unable to impose her will upon a continent of "tin-pot dictators and cotton-clad Communists" (Hastings, 1987, pp. 198-199).  It seemed intolerable that American boys should be suffering and dying by the thousands in a war with goal post being set by Pyongyang and Peking. [142]  

Truman's great failing at this time was in not finding a way to explain the new realities of world affairs to the American public.  Perhaps W.W.II may have been describable in terms of the triumph of good over evil, but just six years later, such clear-cut portrayals seemed obsolete.  Americans would have to come to terms with a world of constant crises and of problems chronically resistant to quick solutions or decisive intervention.  These foreign policy issues played a large part in Truman's decision not to run for a third term and in his succession by his former W.W.II subordinate General Dwight D. Eisenhower.  In true Republican form, Ike was convinced that Truman's Democratic domestic spending was hurting the American economy.  He also, however, promised to defend them against the crush of their own country's military spending. [143]

Eisenhower, only weeks into his term first presidential term, ended the war by threatening massive nuclear retaliation against the Chinese.  Threat of nuclear weapons would become Eisenhower's primary means of ensuring a Pax Americana for the protection of Western civilization behind a shield of sea and air power, as had been done for two centuries under Pax Britannica (Eisenhower, 1965; Ridgway, 1967). 

As Hastings (1987) has pointed out, the Korean war was thus a replacement for W.W.III in the sense that it remains the only conflict since 1945 in which the armies of two great powers have openly met on the battlefield.  But Communism was only contained and not defeated in Korea.  The ideologically costly lesson of the need for limited war in the nuclear (and looming thermonuclear) age had been learned and the doctrine of technopolitical containment was set for the remainder of the Cold War. [144]

Toward the Post-Korea sorting machine

In accepting less than victory in Korea, Eisenhower had used up a good deal of political capital with powerful Republicans in Congress.  For the remainder of his first term, therefore, he was increasingly active in promoting an administrative sorting machine (Spring, 1988) for the purposes of preparing America for the new technopolitical contingencies of the ongoing Cold War.  It is to these political contingencies, the changing vocational testing infrastructure, and the resulting educational implications of that sorting machine that we now turn.

TechnopoliticalConsiderations (up to 1961).

Publicly, the Korean lesson of limited war would have to be abided to.  Thus, what is known as technopolitics and the NATO alliance (of  mutual aid/mutual reliance) would predominate the initial post-Korea years.  The larger lesson, though (i.e., that technopolitics alone despite its backing by immense military power could not always be translated into effective foreign influence), was wholly "unwelcome message to convey to Middle America" (Hastings, 1987, p. 207).  Thus, after the reliable long-range airborne deliverabilty of nuclear weapons was attained by the Soviets it was Eisenhower who (in contrast to Truman), spelled out the actual humanitarian costs of the thermonuclear era of proliferation in terms that were understandable to the American lay public:

"In this spring of 1953 the free world weighs one question above all others: the chances for a just peace for all peoples....The 8 years that have passed [since 1945] have seen that hope waver, grow dim, and almost die.... Today the hope of free men....shuns not only all [the] crude counsel of despair but also the self-deceit of easy illusion.... This has been the way of life forged by 8 years of fear and force....What can the world, or any nation in it, hope for if no turning is found on this dreadroad?  The worst to be feared and the best to be expected can be simply stated. The worst is atomic war. The best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth....Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.  It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement.  We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.  We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.  This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron" (Eisenhower, April 16, 1953; emphasis added).

The military itself was considerably less candid on the particular issue of survivability of nuclear war in this new (10-15 megaton yield) thermonuclear era. [145]   The ideological embeddedness of the federal government's Cold War confidence game, then, is well evidenced in the absence of accurate information contained in successive Office of Civil Defense exercises and so-called "duck and cover" school drills which continued well into the 1960s (OCD, 1963; Gerard, & Wiecek, 1984). 

Further, one of the main technopolitical foreign policy tools of the age was nuclear saber rattling.  For instance, in 1953, artillery delivered tactical (15-kiloton) nuclear weapons were tested in the Nevada Proving Grounds.  Part of what was being assessed in the Nevada tests was the willingness (and ability) of U.S. serviceman to enter and fight effectively in radioactive war zones (Johnson,1996).  Information on such tests were used in 1954 as a message to China which was then shelling the small islands off Formosa (later called Taiwan) where so-called Chinese Nationalist troops had fled after the 1946 Chinese revolution.

Another important aspect of the ongoing political shell game was the use of covert military aid (or action) and CIA operatives to influence foreign governments. These foreign policy tools overlapped considerably with standard geopolitics of the first part of the twentieth century and were thus kept as secretive as possible.  For instance, in 1954, Eisenhower ostensively avoided being dragged directly into another war in Asia when he publicly refused to send bombers or atomic bombs to help France fight the Communists in Vietnam.  France was forced into a negotiated compromise which allowed for their pull out and a two year exile of Vietcong troops to the North (to be followed by countrywide free elections). 

It is likely that this agreement was simply another of the many convenient fictions of the era.  Eisenhower, for instance, clearly indicated his limited commitment to the fledgling South Vietnam dictatorship by sending Richard Nixon as a presidential envoy and by successively providing American advisors to retrain South Vietnamese troops from 1955 onward.  Involvement in the Korean conflict had certainly made America< less brash about openly pronouncing long-term foreign policy intentions, especially those which might eventually involve traditional geopolitical actions (Yoder, 1986).In his second presidential term, Eisenhower was particularly concerned about a de facto Russian/U.S. missile race and the potential era of terror which was associated with it if the burgeoning military-industrial complex was allowed to grow unchecked (Koistinen, 1980).  In 1957, the Russian satellite Sputnik was launched and this created public outrage regarding possible Soviet predominance of space. Similarly, public concerns over nuclear fallout from atmospheric tests were raised in 1959 when the first U.S. missile airburst (using German V-2 rocket technology) created an unexpected Electro Magnetic Pulse knocking out radio and television transmission for eight hours. 

On the positive side of things, though, with the death of Stalin and the rise of Khrushchev in the USSR, new opportunities for International nuclear agreements were forthcoming.  The Eisenhower/Khrushchev voluntary moratorium on testing between 1959-1961 resulted.  These matters of nuclear terror, however, continued to concern Eisenhower and the American public.  A final warning about the uncontrolled rise of a scientific elite and undue influence of a military-industrial complex in American life was therefore contained in Eisenhower's farewell address to the nation:

"Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well.  But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense, we have been compelled to create a permanent arms industry of vast proportion. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone, more than the net income of all United States corporations. Now, this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence: economic, political, even spiritual -is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government.... We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.... [W]e must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military- industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.... Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together...." (Eisenhower, January 17, 1961).

His comments have been portrayed by historians as both a rationalization about the new economic realities, and as a warning against the dangers of an uncontrolled scientific and military elite (Walker, et al, 1992). [146]   Whatever the immediate intent of the address, however, both its linguistic structure and its rhetoric of preparedness was echoed directly in Vocational Psychology textbooks for some time:

"No longer can we depend upon the chance production of available skills to meet the current requirements of our industrial society. Without denying the right of each individual's choice, we must make systematic plans and provisions for a twentieth-century policy for a continuously available labor supply manned by trained men and women" (Willimason & Griffith, 1965, p. 178).

This overlap of language is certainly more than coincidental.  Rather, as seen in the next two sections, the vocational guidance movement and contemporary ability testing technologies held a central place in the huge post-Korean War Sorting Machine (Spring, 1988).  Recognizing the Cold War vocational testers as servants of military-industrial power (Baritz, 1960) is a crucial step in our overall task of recognizing just how much of our contemporary ideology of human intellectual assessment might still be grounded in the historical forces shaping the testing subdiscipline up to 1963.

Section Four:

Administrative Mechanisms of the Post-Korea Sorting Machine: Military Deferment; Curricular Reform, and U.S. Employment Service Tests

From 1952-1961 an explicit post-Korean War administrative sorting machine was set up to channel manpower into circumscribed military and vocational categories.  This system of persuaders included: (1) the creation of Military Deferment Tests (under the expanded W.W.II era Selective Service Act); (2) consolidation of federal control over the U.S. Employment Service (including its information, testing, and placement functions); and (3) promotion of scientific career paths through pubic school curricular reform (especially under the National Defense Education Act of 1958 but also through National Merit Scholarships administered by the ETS) and through an ambitious longitudinal research study called Project Talent.  The first two aspects of these persuaders will be covered in this section and the third aspect is covered in the last section of this chapter.

To recognize ability testing technology as embedded in the administrative workings of this system of persuaders is to better understand its potent exchange value in the post-Korean War marketplace.  That is, the old psychometric rhetoric of efficient educational or vocational planning found a new level of vicarious respectability during this period of Cold War ideological maintenance.  But such second-hand popularity eventually suffered significant blows between 1961-1963 under a wider liberal Democratic reanalysis of the very administrative structures which had originally promoted its growth.  This latter issue will also be emphasized in the last section of this chapter.

Universal Military Service versus Deferment Testing

Passage of an initially well supported Universal Military Training Act (UMT) was narrowly blocked in Congress for both strategic military and budgetary reasons.  On advice from a new scientific-educational elite (and other private sector interests), however, the failed UMT proposal was succeeded by the implementation of a more discriminating system of National Deferment Tests.  These tests were designed to exclude from Armed Service (and classify for specialized treatment), those individuals who were best able to demonstrate the kinds of mental capital considered most useful in the new military-industrial economic marketplace.

Universal Military Training proposed

The proposed Universal Military Training and Service Act of 1951 (urging four months training for all able bodied young men) was initially supported in Congress but was eventually defeated.  The passing of this Act would have directly affected the immediate career plans of all American youth for the next two decades and it had a clear set of supporters.  The Army and Navy certainly advocated UMT (Eden, 1989).  After all, the large conventional forces UMT entailed would have given both services a central role in strategic defense. 

Both Truman and General Marshall, advocated UMT as did a leading faction of the capitalist class.  In particular, presidential appointees recruited from major Wall Street investment houses and law firms believed that large conventional forces would complement the Marshall Plan and help stabilize Western European trade (Stromberg, 1963).  The Act, however, was defeated partly due to open defection of the USAF representatives who argued that it would be cheaper for the nation to further develop air deliverable nuclear weapons technology (Eden, 1989).

The UMT Act was thus abandoned while expenditures for a much larger Air Force (a Strategic Air Command) were successively authorized.  The economic rational for such a decision was that the immediate budgetary restraints on military spending imposed by Truman effectively put the large conventional force alternative out of reach (Rosenberg, 1979). [147]   This lent momentum to have nuclear weapons act as a fundamental strategic defense and tipped the inter-service debate in favor of the Air Force as a mode of delivery for such weapons (Hunter, 1961).  It was widely believed that nuclear weapons would be less expensive than conventional forces (Hopkins, & Goldberg, 1982). 

To share in the control of air power, the Army subsequently claimed that missiles (ICBMs) represented artillery, and the Navy emphasized the utility of aircraft carriers to deploy both strategic and tactical aircraft.  Thus, with a reinstatement of military spending from 1951, onward, the long-standing parochial inter-service rivalries were transformed into a qualitatively new form of technocratic competition.  This was a competition to: (1) plan Cold War industrial production of nuclear baring weaponry; and (2) shape the activity of private firms through allocation of huge Pentagon controlled Research & Development projects.

This shift away from a mobilization based military and toward an emphasis on maintaining technological superiority was fundamental to the shaping of wider economic relations of the post-Korean domestic economy.  Before and during W.W.II, the American military (and economic) strategy was embodied in the concept of mobilization (Milward, 1977).  That capital-intensive model of war (having itself replaced the labor-intensive model of the previous century) was now being replaced with the scientific-intensive model embodied in the twin doctrines of technological superiority and nuclear deterrence (McLauchlan, 1992). 

The novel pattern of defense production first established by the Manhattan Project (where the war effort was brought to scientists at various U.S. locations) was a distinct departure from even the pattern of the second largest W.W.II research program, Radar, which was centered at MIT alone (Hooks, 1991, Rudy, 1991).  The new pattern of defense contract networks would be followed in post-Korean War military industrical relations.  This emerging technocratic science-centered economy would require an organized supporting system of manpower selection and training far more elaborate than the lottery based or universal draft proposals of the past.

Deferment Tests and Manpower Advisory Committee

According to the long-standing logic of latent mental capacity, it was reasoned that the most efficient way to ensure success in the new science-intensive economy was to recruit and retain the nation's best brains into the colleges and industries tasked with developing the weapons of nuclear deterrence.  Hence, in order to ensure a steady flow of qualified students through these institutions, it was decided that a primarily psychometric criterion for selection and deferment from service would be put in place.  Such testing was clearly intended to maintain a democratic balance between an individual's ability, interests, and career choice with the nation's varying manpower and national security needs.  The results however were far from democratic.  Part of the reason for this lies in the issue of who was behind the proposal, production, and administration of such tests.

Supporting a system for channeling of young men into science and engineering were the leaders of the new scientific establishment (the growing group of scientist who began to move freely between centers of power in government, industry, and the military).  One of these men was Charles A. Thomas, Chairman of the so-called Scientific Manpower Advisory Committee of the National Security Resources Board (and executive vice-president of Monsanto Chemical Corporation).  In other words, membership on the Advisory Committee consisted, in part, of those who had the greatest financial stake in ensuring a steady supply of engineers and scientists. 

Two other representatives of this new advisory elite (Vannevar Bush and James B. Conant), better exemplified the new breed of scientists who were gaining influential positions and exercising administrative power over national science and education policy.  It is telling that both men couched their arguments for science reform in terms of the freeing up of latent scientific ability in the nation's high schools. [148]

The Advisory Committee put forward both proactive and reactive proposals to Congress in 1951.  On the proactive side, they proposed that the National Science Foundation create 6,000 undergraduate scholarships and 300 graduate scholarships each year as a means of maintaining a steady supply of scientists.  Students receiving scholarships were automatically enrolled in the National Science Reserve and would be liable for call up into government service during a time of war or other national emergency (Schaffter, 1969).  On the more far-reaching reactive side, was a plan for the deferment from Armed Service of those already enrolled in such technological training or academic programs.

During the UMT Subcommittee hearings in 1951, then, a plan for deferment on the basis of performance in a national objective tests and on college grades was presented by M.H. Trytten.  The actual implementation of this plan later led to complaints that this new form of selective draft was unfair because the middle-class and affluent went to college while poor youth were shuffled off into the Armed Forces.  As implemented, the system provided regular deferments on the basis of class, social rank, and score achieved on the Selective Service College Qualification Test as administered by the ETS (Spring, 1988, p. 55).

More specifically, despite the attempts to come up with a fair system of deferment, in effect, student deferments tended to systematically discriminate against certain geographical areas and against poor and minority groups.  In the Northeast section of the U.S., 9% of all males of freshman age were deferrable, while in the North Central and West, the figure was a comparable 7%.  The startling fact was that in the South the figure fell to 3 percent (NMC, 1955).  This fact, of course is only startling if one adheres to a latent view of human intelligence.

The National Manpower Council

Given the regional differences in deferment, the so-called National Manpower Council (NMC) decided that in addition to better science teaching, greater emphasis on basic high school skills including the ability to read, communicate, and perform arithmetical processes was also necessary in the nation's public schools.  According to the NMC, these skills were part of the foundation upon which future training and employability could be built.  The other part of this foundation included the work habits which individuals gained through school attendance (NMC, 1954).  In the meantime, considerable levity was to be afforded to local Draft Boards with the assurance that deferment decisions would not be based solely upon the federally established criteria (Bush, 1970).

Again, it is most informative to note who was making these recommendations about public school education and job training programs.  Despite its public sector sounding name, the National Manpower Council, with its establishment in 1951 at Columbia University (under a grant from the Ford Foundation) was not a governmental body.  Nor was its immediate predecessor (the Conservation of Human Resources Project -CHRP). [149]  

The manpower concept itself was basically an engineering concept with society conceived as a great machine, feeding manpower in one end and grinding out maximum quantities of produce toward a single well-defined end.  Boulding's (1953) critique of the concept pointed out the incompatibility of manpower ideology with a genuine democratic ideology (of the kind conceived of during the depression era ideological maintenance efforts).  The term waste of manpower as used by CHRP and the NMC was primarily aimed at the addressing the needs of the military and industry rather than the needs of a democratic society as envisioned by presidents Wilson, Roosevelt, or Truman.

Ironically, the same private sector emphasis and military-industrial priority structure was soon to be brought directly into the U.S. Employment Service –previously established as a public sector institution on the assumption that no worker in American should have to pay for the privilege of getting a job since a job itself determines his opportunity to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.  The de facto assessment approaches used in Cold War schools, USES, and in military deferment tests, however, were not democratic because they implied that every individual has some finite maximum level of brain power which could (for better or worse) be slotted into an existing hierarchical structure of occupations. 

In an economic situation of increased National Security needs and of decreased manpower availability, each examinee was to be helped to assess their own vocational interests and potentials as a means to efficient placement in the Cold War economy.  That is, a brilliant individual achieved his maximum by becoming a scientist or engineer; another individual with less brainpower would be fulfilled by becoming a trade (or Service) technician.  Individuals with "substandard aptitudes" would be guided toward training or placement into less vital areas of the economy (Spring, 1988, p. 60).  Within the context of these post-Korean War manpower sorting requirements, the ability testing subdiscipline had become an entrenched (if somewhat scientifically dicey) part of the Cold War confidence game.

Rhetoric of Calls for Curriculum Revision (1952 to 1957)

The depression and W.W.II era public school system (K-12) had already been reorganized around the assumption that traditional free marketplace individualism was a thing of the past and that public education in a modern democracy would have to be more inclusive.  This had been done, in part, as an NEA reaction to the initial New Deal youth programs (such as the Civilian Conservation Corp) which had left the schools out of the federal funding loop (Reiman, 1992).  But during the initial and post-Korean Cold War period, the successive conflation of federal (social, military, and industrial) planning initiatives meant that the academic curriculum of high schools and on university campuses, in particular, had to be re-modernized.  Such curricular reform would need to address the new conditions of both international economic competition and the technopolitical contingencies of control over nuclear (and then micro-electronic) technology that was underway.

Educating youth to the limits of their talents

Initially, for conservative Republicans, the new technopolitical realities meant that life adjustment education in high schools should be brought directly under the guidance of industry and the military (Bestor, 1953).  The far right, in particular, wanted to train loyal and patriotic American citizens who would fight Communism at home and abroad. [150]   The attainment of a high school diploma would thus symbolize a motivation to learn those things that increased national industrial efficiency and allowed for the proper placement of a students into the Cold War economy (NMC, 1954).

The outward structure of calls for federal revision of the public education curriculum was democratic and harped back to the much more limited ideological maintenance of democratic ideals and war preparedness programs of the New Deal (Reiman, 1992).  Ironically though, in contradistinction to those programs, the linguistic terminology of Cold War reform policy (and especially the psychometric methods of assessment utilized) were a direct outgrowth of the earlier latent intelligence assumptions of the 1920s era. 

For example, most of the educational elite of the period argued, along the lines of Lewis Terman (1922a&b, 1924), that the full education of the academically talented and selection of specialize talent was a matter of national survival (Wolfle, 1954; Conant,1959).  Others, including Carnegie Foundation Trustees associated with the Advancement of Teaching movement and those contributing to the Rockefeller funded Pursuit of Excellence movement, were mobilizing similar arguments (Carnegie Foundation, 1959; Panel Report, 1958).  Cultural conditions such as these were fertile ground for both the ongoing efforts by the ETS to consolidate their control over the public educational testing, and for successive American Psychological Association efforts to work out disciplinary testing standards and guidelines (from 1954 onward). [151]

Despite the ongoing Cold War rhetoric, the preponderance of adjustments actually adopted in education were aimed at the more practical goal of preparing young Americans for their new international role.  During the late-1950s, Social Studies took on a greater importance in the high school and university curriculum.  Contemporary textbooks now included sections on the United Nations and on the various regional military security pacts (Sowards, 1963).  In colleges and universities too, regional Area Studies programs (focusing on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and Latin America) were established to prepare specialists in the history, languages, political, and economies of those regions (Cremin, 1961; Sanford, 1962).

Expansion of Vocational Guidance (1952-1957)

In the rush to capitalize on a rapidly expanding economy, the recent APA recommendations regarding test reliability and validity of ability tests were not forgotten but were conveniently pushed aside in the interest of subdisciplinary marketability and for the purposes of public relations (Super, 1955, 1957).  Vocational guidance programs based on the convenient fiction that such tests would administratively slot individuals into the right kinds of jobs became standard issues in government run USES offices.  This new federal government emphasis on the formal sorting of workers was fortunate for the vocational testing subdiscipline because a large part of their traditional counseling role in industry had now been taken over by organized labor unions through collective bargaining agreements and formal grievance procedures (Gillespie, 1991). 

With the traditional Human Relations role having been expropriated by the unions, the ability testing subdiscipline now attached itself firmly to the expanding, patriotic, military-industrial manpower sorting machine.  Thus whether in vocational or educational settings, assessment and classification became the primary functional utilities of the testing subdiscipline (Borrowman & Burgess, 1969).  Other functions, such as training initiatives, however, would present themselves later (Valcan, 1968).

Psychology of the Employment Office (USES)

The U.S. Employment Service (USES) was a relatively neglected branch of the employment security program during the early 1950s but it did attract considerable attention during: (1) the Korean conflict (when increased demand was present for  technically skilled workers); (2) upon return of Korean war veterans; and (3) toward the end of the decade when unemployment (and juvenile delinquency) became a problem of general concern (Rammers & Radler, 1957; Kruger & Kruger, 1964).  Throughout the 1950s, 75 percent of its efforts were still centered on conventional placement and vocational testing activities (Adams, 1969).  Particular use was made of the GATB (covered above) and self-report vocational interest tests.

The prime example of self-report tests was E.K. Strong's separate Vocational Interest Blanks (1943) "for men" and "for women" which continued to undergo adjustments even after 1962 when their inventor passed away (D. Campbell, 1963; 1966; 1968; J. Campbell, 1968, 1969; 1971).  Examinees simply indicated their "like, indifference, or dislike" of various listed occupations including Actor, Auto Salesman, Civil Engineer, Foreign Correspondent, and Interior Decorator (for men).  The emerging pattern of circled answers from a given examinee was then compared with the pattern of answers obtained from men successfully employed in particular occupational groupings (numbered I-XI) and with "men in general."  Persons scoring high on the psychologist's scale, for instance, tended to have interests more similar to the free professions (artists, architects, physicians, veterinarian) then to those of business or industry personnel who favored structure, sales, and production management (Strong, 1943; Lindgren et. al., 1966). 

The ostensive democratic nature of the self-report technique (i.e., it is "your" pattern of chooses being assessed) is, of course, undercut by the assumption that uniformity and conformity are desirable in the workplace.  Sensitivity to sex role stereotyping and to the realization that it takes all kinds of people to maintain organizational order, vitality, and innovation within a profession (let alone a supportive union to ensure safety and lobby for fair wages) seems to have eluded the purview of early Cold War test providers (see fig. 49).

Figure 49 Women and Vocational Guidance Sessions (1950s). Effective vocational counseling involved not only an assessment of a examinee's "intelligence" or "aptitudes," but also a complimentary account of their interests and attitudes. After all, accepting one's place in an expanding militarized economy was (at the time) the very definition of mental and occupational adjustment (see Herman, 1995). Despite the active role women played in the Allied war economy, they were quickly displaced from their wartime jobs. Separate and unequal versions of the Strong Vocational Blanks (Campbell, 1966), which conformed to the sex-role stereotypes of the day (Holland, 1973), continued until the first so-called "unisex" Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory was presented in 1974. Figure shows a woman being given the Differential Aptitude Test (photo from Munn, 1962).

The Department of Labor, early in the 1950s, produced a Job Guide for Young Workers which received six revisions by 1958.  Another prominent function of the USES organization was to provide job market information in support of self-placement into the economy.  In 1952, placement for returning and injured Korean veterans also became a priority.  Accordingly, USES established liaisons with about 350 military installations and the State Offices expanded upon this program base to supply job information directly to 250 installations by 1958.  Employment in manufacturing reached a postwar high in 1953 which was not attained again until 1965.  For instance, rates of new hires in the industrial groups declined after 1947, but increased briefly during the Korean conflict, and then declined not leveling off until 1964 with the U.S. military build up for Vietnam (Edwards & Richey, 1963).

Between 1955 and 1961 (under conditions of widening unemployment), steps were taken to improve the USES performance as a placement agency.  In 1955, the traditional focus of USES operations were formalized into a six-point program: placement, employment counseling, veteran services, management services, labor market information, and community services (including support of Civil Defense programs).  By 1958 (five years following the end of Korean hostilities), a distinct period of transition for demands on the employment security system was underway with both a self-reflective phase regarding the societal role of an employment service and a successive consolidation of federal administrative control over the entire employment service system in evidence (Yoder, 1959).

Section 5:

Education in a Free Society (1958-1963):The National Defense Education Act, Project Talent, and Reevaluation

Along side the calls for more scientists and social studies specialists, another emphasis for Cold War public education initiatives was the call for renewed ideological maintenance.  That is, the argument that American students (especially at the junior high, high school, and college levels) needed to be educated about the dangers of Communism.  These calls for ideological maintenance preceded (and continued after) the hyperbole extruding from the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee which claimed that Communists had targeted the U.S. educational institutions at every possible level (Hook, 1949; Fine, 1949; Oshinsky, 1983).  Social studies textbooks which covered socialism in a favorable light were purged at this time.  The call for ideological maintenance was also apparent in the language of the so-called National Defense Education Act of 1958 outlined below.

Similarly, the revised edition of Educational Psychology (1958), published by the World Book Company, contains a telling chapter called "Learning in a Free Society -Its nature and conditions" (Cole & Bruce, 1958, pp. 347-373).  Its mention of the context of education in democratic society and its contrast with totalitarian societies (of both Fascist and Socialist stripes) serves nicely to encapsulate the ideological ethos of public education during the period of Sputnik and NDEA (1957 onward).  In historical hindsight, though, their particular definition of a democratic society certainly contrasts with the more elitist workings of the ongoing government sanctioned, ETS produced, deferment tests (described above) and the erroneous assumptions of the so-called merit scholarships of Project Talent (described below):

"The gravity of the [current] situation lies in the nature of teaching and learning in a society, like ours, which aspires to be democratic. In such a society education is universal and compulsory. All are required to learn, to understand the conditions and problems of the people, for all are enfranchised, and thus responsible for those conditions and problems. If the United States is be truly to of all the people, for all the people, and by all the people, then all the people must take part. They must learn how to cope with the complicated problems of mid-twentieth-century industrial society. The staggering problem of teaching and learning given to our schools and colleges, therefore, is nothing less than the creating of a new man, alert to these problems and equipped to deal with them effectively. And the educators in our society cannot consider their task accomplished if they produce only a few of these new men. Our society requires no elite class of leaders with a docile group of followers.  Rather, it demands a whole generation of young builders of democracy" (Cole & Bruce, 1958, p.351).

This extract from Cole & Bruce, therefore, serves nicely to foreshadow the early 1960s reanalysis of the role of education (and teachers) in a truly democratic society:  That is, during the post-Sputnik years, the National Defense Education Act (1958) informally entered the nations schools into the space race and this favored an emphasis on very elite class not favored by Cole & Bruce above.  Eventually, the changing economy and strained international relations necessitated a reanalysis of the priorities of the vocational guidance profession and of the realities of domestic affairs (including labor and race relations).  These considerations brought about a transition of USES from a placement role toward a proactive job training emphasis.  The now enshrined mental testing industry, however, was considerably slower to change.

National Defense Education Act (1958)

The situation that brought immediate calls for action on the educational front was the launch of Sputnik I on October 4, 1957.  This event seemed to corroborate former (erroneous) public domain reports that the U.S. was losing its technological supremacy over the Soviet Union and falling behind in the area of space sciences.  Federal support of a revised curriculum was given through the reorganization of the National Science Foundation under the leadership of Vannervar Bush and James Conant.  The National Defense Education Act of 1958 was essentially an effort to increase American scientific human capital by supporting both basic scientific research and the education of talented students.  New science curriculums for science, mathematics, and foreign languages were drawn up and funded under the Act (Marsh & Gortner, 1963).

Federal support for foreign languages studies came through Title VI of the NDEA.  The Act symbolized the triumph of the scientific establishment over the arguments of concerned professional educational groups like the newly liberalized National Education Association.  Rapid national dissemination of the program was achieved by virtue of Tittle II of the Act which provided money to each State for the purchase of approved equipment (including textbooks, movies) and materials for programs in science, math, and foreign languages. 

Under Title V, the Act provided funds ($15 million for each of four succeeding fiscal years) for testing and guidance programs in public high schools to aid the identification and encouragement of able students, and for State Counseling and Guidance Training Institutes.  Amendments in 1961 also allowed federal support for school testing and guidance program implementation to extend through 1965.  During the first five years of operation under the NDEA (1958-1963), approximately 13,800 counselors received training (Borow, 1964, p. 52).

After the launch of Sputnik I, and Eisenhower's (1958) recommendations to Congress for increased support of the National Science F