The Manufacture of Intelligence

Abstract

In 1867 Horatio Alger published his first book Ragged Dick, which was aimed at teaching the virtues of enterprise, responsibility, patience, hard work, honesty and ambition to juveniles who would shape the American nation. The main characters in Alger’s books, and there were many, all achieve success through the victory of character over social circumstances. In Ragged Dick, the wealthy benefactor Mr Whitney tells the dishevelled Dick ‘I hope, my lad, you will prosper and rise in the world. You know in this free country poverty in early life is no bar to a man’s advancement … Remember that your future position depends mainly on yourself and that it will be as high or low as you choose to make it.’¹ Less sanguine observers of American life such as Alex de Tocqueville also reported that America, as the ‘first new nation’, lacked the rigid class barriers that he had observed throughout Europe. Personified in the experience of American presidents such as Abraham Lincoln’s social sojourn from a Kentucky log cabin and Benjamin Franklin’s elevation from an apprentice printer and tenth son of a Boston candle-maker, equal opportunities for all had become ‘America’s promise’. As Lloyd Warner and his colleagues observed in the 1940s, ‘It was on the lips of every humble fireside. Every business man, industrialist, and politician proclaimed it and believed it.’² In Britain, in the aftermath of the devastating destruction of war, there was also common agreement that the reconstruction of society must include new opportunities for all in a ‘land fit for heroes’.

He … gave us not that capability and godlike reason to fust in us unused.

William Shakespeare

In the progress of the division of labour… the man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations… generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.

Adam Smith