The intelligence test was supposed to measure intellectual ability but in fact demanded answers to questions only people of a certain class and culture would know: the author of Robinson Crusoe, the Union commander at Mobile Bay, the product advertised by a character called Velvet Joe, what a first-class batting average was. (One of the test’s administrators, Carl Brigham, went on to develop the first SAT.) Anyone on the margins of mainstream middle-class culture was destined to fail.
