In the fall of 1994, the national obsession with the murder trial of a legendary football player was temporarily interrupted by a controversy over a book—not some sensationalized biography of a celebrity but a chart-filled 845-page tome, co-authored by a Harvard research psychologist and a policy wonk at the conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. Despite its more than 100 pages of appendices on logistic regression and other technical, statistical issues, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life became an instantaneous cause célèbre, providing its junior author, Charles Murray—Professor Richard J. Herrnstein having passed away only days before publication—with considerably more than his Warholian 15 minutes of fame and leading a reporter for the New York Times Magazine to designate him “the most dangerous” conservative in the country. Among the many “serious” periodicals to discuss the book at length, The New Republic devoted almost an entire issue to an essay by its authors along with a host of responses, and for some weeks Murray was a ubiquitous presence on television talk shows.1

The appearance of The Bell Curve was a carefully orchestrated political event. Departing from traditional procedure, the book was “embargoed” beforehand: no copies were circulated to potential reviewers or critics, a problem compounded by the fact that it was filled with the kind of statistical analyses normally published first in academic journals. Indeed, one prominent researcher maintained that none of the book’s most important claims concerning a racial difference in IQ “could be published in any respectable peer-reviewed journal.” Unsurprisingly The Bell Curve’s predominantly hereditarian explanation for the relationship between IQ and a host of variables such as income, welfare dependency, health, and quality of parenting elicited polarized reviews. Peter Brimelow—then an editor at the business magazine, Forbes, but soon to become a leader of the white nationalist movement—claimed, in a passive voice conveniently lacking an agent, that the book was being “seriously compared” with Darwin’s Origin of Species, while a New York Times columnist described it as “a scabrous piece of racial pornography masquerading as serious scholarship,” just “a genteel way of calling somebody a n***er” (the word was spelled out in the newspaper), and the award-winning American historian, Jacqueline Jones, called the book “hate literature with footnotes.”2

More than two decades later, Murray’s appearance on a college campus has continued to provoke controversy, and there have been a number of attempts—in the current term coined for the sort of treatment Murray has experienced—to “de-platform” him. His invited talk at Virginia Tech in spring 2016, part of a lecture series sponsored by a bank, elicited protests as well as a “counter-lecture,” in which several professors participated in a teach-in denouncing Murray’s work as “junk pseudoscience” and “racist”; while defending his right to speak, the university’s president nevertheless declared that Murray’s conclusions had been used “to justify fascism, racism and eugenics.” Six months later at Yale, student protesters packed the hall where Murray’s lecture was scheduled, and when he rose to begin, they stood up, announced a concurrent teach-in on the effects of white supremacy, and departed, leaving Murray to deliver his talk to an almost empty room. Before his spring 2017 appearance at Middlebury, one of the nation’s premier liberal arts colleges, a number of faculty members signed a petition requesting that he be disinvited. Then when the talk took place, demonstrators shouted Murray down, chanting “Who is the enemy? White supremacy,” and forcing him to move to another site to live stream his lecture while activists set off fire alarms; after the event, protesters pushed and shoved both Murray and the faculty moderator of the talk, who sustained whiplash and a concussion. And at the University of Michigan in October 2017, protester packed the hall and spent the better part of an hour chanting that Murray was a racist and projecting the words “white supremacist” on the wall, before marching out en masse.3

Also in spring 2017, in response to Murray’s experience at Middlebury, the neuroscientist and outspoken atheist Sam Harris hosted Murray on his own podcast, during which the two men shared their dismay at the failure of so many people to accept what they considered the incontestable facts in The Bell Curve—the book’s “Forbidden Knowledge” according to the conversation’s self-congratulatory title. There was, Harris assured his audience, “virtually no scientific controversy” over Murray’s argument, and as a result critics—not just the rowdy students but also those academics who expressed outrage over his physical harassment at Middlebury and voiced their disagreement in more professionally appropriate ways—could not possibly have acted in “legitimate good-faith” but were necessarily guilty of “dishonesty and hypocrisy and moral cowardice.” Although none of Murray’s critics were ever de-platformed, the accusation of ad hominem responses on their part was becoming little more than a tu quoque between the two sides. When the journalist Ezra Klein, editor of the news and opinion website Vox, subsequently published articles by three prominent research psychologists—two of whom held endowed chairs, one at the University of Virginia, the other at the University of Michigan—describing Murray’s work as “junk science” and calling Harris “the latest to fall for it,” Harris sent Klein a request to “stop publishing libelous articles about me,” implying the possibility of legal action over a scientific dispute.4

The Role of Race

From the beginning of the controversy to the present, Murray has expressed surprise that The Bell Curve provoked such virulent opposition; like Captain Renault in Casablanca he has been shocked—shocked!—that his critics focused on the book’s treatment of race. (After burning a cross as a high school student, he acknowledged being similarly “oblivious” to the possibility that the act had “any larger significance,” though in retrospect he called his behavior “incredibly dumb.”) Shortly after its publication, Murray attributed the reaction to “the American preoccupation with race.” The book that his critics were discussing, he insisted, had precious little in common with the book he had actually written, one in which race played “a very small part … tucked away in the middle.” “In all,” Murray pointed out, ethnic differences in intelligence only constituted “a major topic in four of the 22 chapters” and was alluded to peripherally in one of the two concluding chapters. More than 20 years later, he was making the same point in response to the statement by the Virginia Tech President. Charging that the President was “unfamiliar … with the actual content of The Bell Curve,” the topic of which was not race but class, Murray actually provided a count of the number of pages discussing genes, race, and IQ.5 Yes, he seemed to be arguing, there was a turd in the punchbowl, but it was a really small one; why make such a big deal out of it?

Yet Murray himself had not been immune from the fixation he saw in others; indeed, he had a history of exploiting race to promote his publications. Murray’s earlier book, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980, a highly controversial work that first brought him to public attention, urged the elimination of all federal antipoverty programs on the grounds that they had only exacerbated the problem of poverty by encouraging the poor to be lazy and irresponsible—again, an argument focused on class, in which race supposedly played but a marginal role. In his proposal to the publisher for Losing Ground, however, Murray pitched the work’s sales potential in words that could also have applied to The Bell Curve: the book should sell well, he told the publisher, “because a huge number of well-meaning Whites fear that they are closet racists. And this book tells them that they are not. It’s going to make them feel better about things they already think but do not know how to say.” And in the earlier book itself Murray declared that “Real reform of American social policy is out of the question until we settle the race issue.” In particular, he argued, the desire of white elites to make restitution for past sins of discrimination had led them to overlook or cover up numerous personal deficiencies on the part of poor Blacks that never would have been tolerated in Whites.6

Besides, notwithstanding the minor role he later claimed that race had played in The Bell Curve, at the time of its publication Murray did not hesitate to emphasize the book’s discussion of race, once again as a way to generate publicity. Thus, when The New Republic, a nationally influential monthly focusing on politics and the arts, devoted its complete September 1994 issue to The Bell Curve, then on the verge of publication, Murray voiced no reservation over the magazine’s cover, on which the word “RACE” occupied the entire top half of the page and the words “& I.Q.” a substantial portion of the bottom half—an act guaranteeing that that topic would be the focus of attention. Indeed, Murray contributed the issue’s featured 10,000-word essay, titled “Race, Genes and I.Q.–An Apologia,” which began with the following candid statement:

The private dialogue about race in America is far different from the public one, and we are not referring just to discussions among white rednecks. Our impression is that the private attitudes of white elites toward blacks is strained far beyond public acknowledgment, that hostility is not uncommon and that a key part of the strain is a growing suspicion that fundamental racial differences are implicated in the social and economic gap that continues to separate blacks and whites, especially alleged differences in intelligence.7

Only in hindsight did Murray apparently realize how insignificant a role race had played in the book.

In addition to dismissing the importance of race in The Bell Curve, Murray also emphasized the anodyne nature of the book’s conclusion to its discussion of genes and racial differences in IQ, regularly quoting in full the “crucial” paragraph from the book:

If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate.8

That is, Murray thought it “highly likely” that genes were one reason Blacks were less intelligent than Whites, though he was “resolutely agnostic” on the extent—whether their disadvantage was large or small. Although naturally such a conclusion allowed for the latter possibility, The Bell Curve’s style, which the Harvard Professor of Education Howard Gardner termed “scholarly brinkmanship,” strongly implied the former; as Gardner accurately characterized it, the book’s “authors come dangerously close to embracing the most extreme positions, yet in the end shy away from doing so,” thus encouraging “the reader to draw the strongest conclusion, while allowing the authors to disavow this intention.”9

Nevertheless, up to the present the “agnostic” paragraph has been offered ad nauseam by both Murray and his supporters as an indication of the inoffensiveness of the book’s conclusion about racial differences in intelligence. As Sam Harris put it in 2018, Murray was not claiming that the differences were substantially genetic, only that “genes and environment both play a part”; this was a truism, bordering on the banal, Harris argued, “as safe an assumption in behavior genetics as can be made.” At the same time, Andrew Sullivan—who as editor of The New Republic when The Bell Curve appeared, had presided over the magazine’s edition focusing on the book—also insisted that Murray has “remained resolutely ‘agnostic’” about racial differences, just as he had been when the book was published. Murray himself, in his 2016 response to the President of Virginia Tech, again reproduced the concluding paragraph as a supposed indication of his thinking. In fact, more than a decade earlier the pretense of agnosticism had been dropped in an article by Murray in the neoconservative magazine, Commentary. While the print version omitted footnotes, the online “fully annotated version” included a citation to evidence that Murray judged “consistent” with the conclusion that 50–80 percent of the difference in IQ between Blacks and Whites—that is, from 7.5 to 12 points of the 15-point difference—was genetic.10 Although he rarely acknowledged it in print, Murray was more of a true believer on racial differences than an agnostic.

Indeed, Murray’s next major publication, nine years after The Bell Curve, offered additional reason to doubt his claims of agnosticism. Though it hardly became the cause célèbre of his previous work, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 BC to 1950 provided a statistical demonstration of the overwhelming superiority of Western culture. Using as an operational definition of eminence a combination of frequency of an individual’s appearance in reference books—encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries—together with the amount of space in column inches devoted to his or her entry, Murray calculated an “index score” allowing him to identify 3869 “persons that matter” overall from a number of categories: six specific sciences, mathematics, medicine, technology, Western music, art, literature, and philosophy. Although there were separate inventories for some ethnicities for the last three categories—for example, Arabic, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and Western literature—Murray emphasized that, with rare exception, the index scores across these ethnic groups were not comparable because the pools for the non-Western groups were so much smaller; the number of “significant figures” in Western literature, for example, was almost triple the number in the other four groups combined. This methodology led him to conclude that white males from “a few places in Europe” had been responsible for “far more intense levels of human accomplishment” than any other people. And if one added to this “European core” the contributions of white men from North America, this small group accounted for almost every meaningful accomplishment by the human species. Exactly one black person qualified for inclusion on one of these lists: Duke Ellington received an index score of 2 on a scale 1–100, ranking him tied for 269th (along with 110 other persons) in the category Western music. Of course, it was not until the latter half of the twentieth century that Blacks enjoyed any access to the cultural mainstream, which did not prevent them, under systematically oppressive conditions and with no institutional support, from developing gospel, blues, jazz, reggae, and soul among other genres, not to mention their contributions to contemporary literature. However, Murray finessed the issue by “cutting off the inventories at 1950” on the grounds that even “expert opinion” may be “mostly a matter of fashion and … quite different a hundred years from now.” Besides, Murray insisted, citing as an example Toni Morrison—recipient of, among others, the Pulitzer Prize, the American Book Award, the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction—“women and black writers” were now being recognized “out of all proportion to their merit, in order to promote equality.”11 Not only did Blacks have a lower average IQ, but, according to Murray, in comparison with Whites they had produced almost nothing of enduring cultural significance.

Of course, whatever the length of The Bell Curve’s discussion of racial differences and whatever its conclusion, it was guaranteed to provoke a firestorm given the book’s larger argument: if, as Herrnstein and Murray contended, socioeconomic status was in large part an (appropriate) reflection of genetically based intelligence, then their claim that Blacks were to some degree genetically disadvantaged could easily be exploited to justify the effects of discrimination as merely the inevitable consequence of biological differences. As Herrnstein had argued a few years before publication of The Bell Curve, there were “two fundamentally different models” to account for differences between Blacks and Whites in income and other variables related to the quality of life: the “discrimination” model, which attributed such differences largely to institutional policies that systematically disadvantaged Blacks; and the “distribution” model, which explained them as “the product of differing average endowments of people in the two races.” In the latter view Blacks’ economic status reflected, not their lack of opportunity but their lack of ability, making their lesser resources the economic reflection of their genetic merit. Indeed, according to The Bell Curve, after controlling for IQ the difference in annual wages between black and white workers almost entirely disappeared. If Blacks were thus clustered at the economic nadir largely because of their genes, then the society could not only ignore all those unfounded complaints about discriminatory laws and inequitable treatment but also evade any accountability for the lengthy history of practices that, for more than a century, had steadily converted black work into white wealth: convict labor, which helped to build the new South through the slave labor of prisoners incarcerated for crimes only charged against Blacks; home buying on contract, in which, much like purchase of a car, after a substantial down payment a single missed monthly payment entitled the seller to immediate repossession, depriving the owner of any equity and allowing the same house to be sold multiple times; FHA redlining, which prevented Blacks from borrowing money to buy a house; the exclusion of most Blacks from the benefits of the New Deal; the use of legal chicanery to swindle Blacks out of land ownership; and numerous other discriminatory practices designed to enrich Whites while keeping Blacks in economic servitude.12 And if the massive gap between Blacks and Whites in both income and wealth had little to do with this history of racial oppression but rather resulted from certain characteristics of Blacks that were innate and immutable, then there was no reason to waste resources on social or economic programs senselessly intended to alter outcomes rooted in biology.

Yet another reason that Murray’s disavowal of the significance of race lacked credibility had to do with what one critic called The Bell Curve’s “tainted sources.” The book’s authors acknowledged the assistance and cited the published works of numerous people associated with the Mankind Quarterly and the Pioneer Fund: the former an obscure journal founded in 1961 by a combination of European social scientists sympathetic to Nazi “Rassenhygiene” and American academics supportive of segregation, who sought to oppose the Brown decision on the basis of Blacks’ genetic inferiority; the latter the source of financial support for the Quarterly as well as for every other scientist in the last half century intent on proving Blacks intellectually deficient, and whose board of directors had planned and executed a series of campaigns during the 1960s to block the civil rights movement. At the time The Bell Curve was published, the Mankind Quarterly was under the control of a British anthropologist and recipient of generous support from the Pioneer Fund, who had earlier, under a pseudonym, edited a journal dedicated to the view that World War II had resulted from an attempt by the Jews to exterminate the German nation and then, again under various pseudonyms, published an argument five times in the Mankind Quarterly (and another four in other journals under his control), insisting in almost identical language each time that racial prejudice was a biological necessity, essential “to maintain the integrity of the gene pool” and that interracial relationships, especially among “heavily urbanized and intellectually distorted human beings” constituted a “perversion” of natural instincts, similar to caged animals attempting “to mate with animals of other breeds.”13

Although The Bell Curve made no mention of the Pioneer Fund, in its brief summary of the history of immigration and intelligence testing in the early twentieth century, the book referred coyly to a “biologist who was especially concerned about keeping up the American level of intelligence by suitable immigration policies.” In fact, as the context made clear, this unnamed scientist was H. H. Laughlin, Pioneer’s first president and an ardent admirer of the Third Reich, who had supported a program to deport all Blacks to Africa, calling their presence “the worst thing that had ever happened to the … United States,” and rejected a similar policy for Jews only because he recognized the practical difficulties in its implementation; as the next best step he hoped at least “to prevent more of them from coming.”14

The Bell Curve relied on one Pioneer-funded scientist in particular for expertise on IQ testing. Herrnstein and Murray acknowledged having “benefited especially from the advice of Richard Lynn,” whom they then describe as “a leading scholar of racial and ethnic differences.” Indeed, as the Wellesley College historian Quinn Slobodian has discovered, Herrnstein’s recently opened archives reveal that while working on the book the Harvard psychologist and his co-author had been sending drafts of chapters to Lynn for comment. At the time Lynn was an associate editor of the Mankind Quarterly, in which he had argued that, as a result of evolutionary selection, “Negroids” were considerably less intelligent than other races; indeed, according to Lynn, as low as their intelligence was, American Negroids still ranked considerably higher than their African counterparts, who had lacked the genetic benefits of “hybridization” with “Caucasoids.” Lynn went on to become the leading scientific authority for white supremacists: editor of the Mankind Quarterly as well as, first a member of Pioneer’s board of directors and then president of the fund; much of his work in the last two decades has appeared under the imprint of Washington Summit Publishers, owned and directed by Richard Spencer, arguably the most prominent neo-Nazi in the United States.15

Another long-time recipient of financial support from the Pioneer Fund at the time of The Bell Curve’s appearance, J. Philippe Rushton—also later to become its president—proposed the application of an established biological theory concerning differences in reproductive strategy across species to differences between races. Some species produce large numbers of offspring per individual but invest little parental time or attention in their development, while other species produce few offspring but invest substantial effort in raising them. According to Rushton, human races could be placed on the same spectrum, with Blacks at the former end and Whites and Asians at the latter—a result of evolutionary differences that were also correlated with a constellation of variables including intelligence, brain size, social cohesion, infant mortality, altruism, law abidingness, mental health, and impulse control; Blacks in each case tended to score at the less advantageous end of the scale. Seemingly obsessed with sexuality, Rushton also claimed to find that Blacks had larger sexual characteristics: breasts and buttocks in women; penis size, both length and circumference, in men, who also ejaculated a greater distance than other races, according to questionnaire responses from participants at a local mall. As a result, he concluded, “It’s a trade-off: more brains or more penis. You can’t have everything.” Thus the image of Blacks, or “Negroids,” as Rushton called them: systematically less intelligent, more criminal, and sexually licentious, producing more offspring, whom they then tended to neglect. Though The Bell Curve conceded that this theory had not yet been fully confirmed, Herrnstein and Murray assured readers that Rushton, a frequent speaker at the convention of the white supremacist American Renaissance—itself a Pioneer grantee—was not “a crackpot or a bigot”; he had made a strong case, offering “increasingly detailed and convincing empirical reports of the race differences in some of the traits on his list” and citing “preeminent biological authority for his use of the concept of reproductive strategies.”16

The point here is not to focus on The Bell Curve’s regard for Lynn’s conclusions or Rushton’s odious theory, but rather on Murray’s bizarre puzzlement that, after citing such sources and pronouncements, others should not understand how little his book had to do with race. Indeed, his comment to an interviewer shortly after publication that “Some of the things we read to do this work, we literally hide when we’re on planes and trains”17 suggested that his dismay was disingenuous; there was little reason to hide studies of the relation between cognitive ability and socioeconomic success for the population in general.

The Bell Curve’s authors themselves did not seek support from Pioneer, although while they were working on the book, Herrnstein suggested to Murray that they could “in a pinch, ask the Pioneer Fund for help”—an indication that they were aware of Pioneer’s focus and considered their own project a suitable fit. It turned out that they were right: after the book’s appearance Harry Weyher, the fund’s president, at the time, expressed his regret at not having had the opportunity to contribute; had Herrnstein requested support from the fund, Weyher would have provided it “at the drop of a hat.”18

Nor was it only the book’s critics who found racial differences to be a significant theme; a number of readers acknowledged its effect in their own political evolution toward far-right extremism. Profiled innocuously in the New York Times as “the Nazi sympathizer next door” who had gone from “leftist rock musician … to fascist activist,” one of the founders of the Traditionalist Worker Party attributed his “political awakening” to books by Pat Buchanan and Murray; a participant in the Charlottesville torchlight rally, the TWP calls for “an independent White ethno-state in North America,” its citizenship “limited to White persons and White persons alone” under a “National Socialist government.” An even more prominent activist, Nathan Damigo, who spent five years in prison for armed robbery before founding the white supremacist group Identity Evropa, cited The Bell Curve along with writing by David Duke and Jared Taylor, the founder and editor of American Renaissance—works he had read while incarcerated—as the major influences on his thinking.19

A final reason that The Bell Curve’s treatment of racial differences, however brief, became such a flashpoint had to do with the explicit, practical purpose for the topic’s inclusion: to set the stage for a ferocious tirade against “the system of affirmative action, in education and the workplace alike,” which was “leaking poison into the American soul.” Murray stated frankly that so much space in the book had been devoted to this policy issue—more than for any other—because affirmative action was predicated on the explicit assumption that “all [ethnic] groups have equal distributions of cognitive abilities”; by disproving this supposed underlying assumption, Murray sought to make a persuasive case for abolishing the policy. Indeed, The Bell Curve candidly acknowledged that, since exact knowledge about the genetics of racial differences would have no effect on any decision about the treatment of individuals, no reason existed for pursuing the issue other than its implications for affirmative action.20

Much of The Bell Curve’s evidence for the detrimental effect of affirmative action, especially in employment, came from anecdotes and newspaper stories; as the authors noted, “Private complaints about the incompetent affirmative-action hire are much more common than scholarly examination of the issue.” One detailed example of such egregious incompetence due to minority preference in hiring, supposedly compromising the performance of the Washington, DC Police Department, relied on two sources: a report by the journalist, Tucker Carlson, writing in Policy Review—at the time the flagship publication of the conservative Heritage Foundation—and a four-part investigative series in the Washington Post. Carlson’s entire article mentioned the word “race” exactly once—only in order to report that the Washington Police Department “officially denies the use of affirmative action on the basis of race” and a number of other categories. However, he also noted that, according to the recruiting office, applicants “can obtain additional points” for claiming residency in the district, an advantage likely to “severely restrict the pool of white applicants,” in Murray’s view, since the white population in the capitol was concentrated in professional areas, “with no significant white working-class neighborhoods”; presumably only in the latter communities were parents likely to raise children with the desire to protect and serve.21

In any event, as evidence for the harmfulness of affirmative action, The Bell Curve’s summary of Carlson’s article quoted its few second- or third-hand and particularly lurid, anecdotal observations: according to Carlson, the president of the police lodge had heard from an instructor at the academy that some recruits “could not read or write,” and another instructor claimed to have seen “people diagnosed as borderline-retarded graduate from the police academy.” Murray felt no need to mention any of the other factors also described by Carlson, especially the department’s lack of mechanical and technological support. At any given moment more than half the patrol cars were out of service, and at the time of Carlson’s article, 12 of 19 cars in one of the most violent districts in the city were inoperable. In 1993, when electronic recordkeeping had become standard in most public facilities, only a few of the city’s police offices had computers, and many even lacked typewriters, so that reports had to be handwritten, a method that often creates problems even (especially?) when the writer has a high IQ. Almost all the phones in police stations were rotary, and as a consequence unable to be equipped with voice mail, meaning that calls went unanswered after 5 PM when the clerical staff ended its work day.22 Most people would probably believe that such primitive levels of support, along with a number of other organizational problems noted by Carlson, might have had some relevance to the decline in police effectiveness. But by not even acknowledging their existence, Murray thus created the impression that any such decline was attributable entirely to the intellectual shortcomings of officers who would never have been hired absent the benefit of racial preference. No modern phones, no computers, not enough vehicles—not worth noting; affirmative action illiterates were the whole problem. Though also unmentioned in The Bell Curve, Carlson’s article ended by describing the praise for the performance of Washington police in middle-class neighborhoods with organized anti-crime groups; apparently the same affirmative action recruits functioned quite effectively with citizen cooperation.

Murray’s other source for the substandard intelligence of recent recruits as the cause of deterioration of police performance, a four-part investigative series in the Washington Post, examined in depth the criminal justice system’s low rate of arrest, trial, and conviction in homicide cases—i.e., not just the role of the police department but the prosecutor’s office and the court system as well. That part of the series concerned with the police concentrated almost exclusively on the department’s elite homicide detective squad, a group hardly composed of the putatively illiterate recent hires. And the major problem within this squad, according to the report, was the crushing caseload, resulting in night shifts that, after completion of the necessary paperwork, would end only a few hours before the next one was scheduled to begin; one of the top detectives had requested a three-month sick leave for stress after his assignment had increased from ten cases a year to ten a month. The prosecutor’s office was similarly overwhelmed, frequently forced to seek postponements due to scheduling conflicts from having to handle multiple cases at the same time; occasionally, a case would even be dismissed by a judge when the prosecution was still not ready to proceed after the defendant had spent more than a year in jail awaiting trial. Finally, the investigative series also noted the external factors contributing both to the homicide increase and the difficulty in prosecuting such offenses: the “proliferation of guns” and the ease of their availability, as well as the increase in gang- and drug-related crime and the consequent reluctance of witnesses to come forward.23 If Murray’s references to Carlson’s article were deceptively selective, his assertion that the Washington Post series “confirmed” Murray’s version of Carlson’s account, implying as it did that the newspaper too had found the substandard intelligence of affirmative action hires the cause of the poor record, had no justification whatsoever; not a single sentence in the four days of multiple daily stories suggested such a conclusion.

However, merely on a quantitative basis—i.e., by the proportion of the book devoted to the topic—Murray was correct: The Bell Curve concentrated primarily on the relation of IQ to class, not race, though its conclusions were no less inflammatory. In fact, much of the book constituted an arranged and not always compatible marriage between Herrnstein’s insistence that genetically based intelligence was the strongest single predictor of socioeconomic success and Murray’s contention that the state should do as little as possible to assist the disadvantaged—a goal he has advocated in three other books, not to mention numerous articles.24 But what contributed to the outrage over The Bell Curve, distinguishing it from these previous publications, all of which had emphasized cultural and environmental factors to justify the abolition of all types of official assistance to the poor, was its prediction of dystopian consequences for the society, should its policies fail to take biological differences in intelligence into account. Quite apart from any racial implications, the book offered ample reason for controversy. Indeed, its underlying rationale represented an extension of a similar argument made by Herrnstein two decades earlier in an article that itself had caused an uproar.

Notes

  1. 1.

    R.J. Herrnstein and C. Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994). J. DeParle, “Daring Research or ‘Social Science Pornography’?: Charles Murray,” New York Times Magazine (October 9, 1994): 50. See New Republic (October 31, 1994).

  2. 2.

    On withholding the book beforehand, see N. Lemann, “The Bell Curve Flattened,” Slate, January 18, 1997, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/1997/01/the-bell-curve-flattened.html. R. Nisbett, “Race, IQ, and Scientism,” in The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence and the Future of America, ed. S. Fraser (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 54. P. Brimelow, “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” Forbes (October 24, 1994): 153. B. Herbert, “Throwing a Curve,” New York Times, October 26, 1994, A27. J. Jones, “Back to the Future with The Bell Curve,” in The Bell Curve Wars, ed. S. Fraser (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 93.

  3. 3.

    R. Korth, “Controversial Author Draws Protesters at Virginia Tech,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, March 26, 2016. W. Bloom, W. Hilke, B. Hill, A. Jain, A. Lopez-Delgado, M. Menlo, and J. Meyers, “No, Law School Didn’t Teach Us to ‘Engage’ with Racists,” Nation, August 1, 2017. S. Saul, “Dozens of Middlebury Students Are Disciplined for Charles Murray Protest,” New York Times, May 24, 2017. A. Stanger, “Understanding the Angry Mob at Middlebury That Gave Me a Concussion,” New York Times, March 13, 2017. J. Arm, “We Brought Charles Murray to Campus. Guess What Happened,” New York Times, October 12, 2017.

  4. 4.

    “Forbidden Knowledge—A Conversation with Charles Murray” can be accessed at https://samharris.org/podcasts/forbidden-knowledge/. E. Turkeimer, K.P. Harden and R.E. Nisbett, “Charles Murray Is Once Again Peddling Junk Science about Race and IQ: Podcaster and Author Sam Harris Is the Latest to Fall for It,” Vox, May 18, 2017, https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/5/18/15655638/charles-murray-race-iq-sam-harris-science-free-speech. The “libelous” quote appears in an email from Harris to Klein, published on the former’s blog at https://samharris.org/ezra-klein-editor-chief/.

  5. 5.

    J. DeParle, “Daring Research or ‘Social Science Pornography’?” 51–52. C. Murray, “The Real ‘Bell Curve’,” Wall Street Journal, December 2, 1994, A14. C. Murray, Booknotes Transcript (C-SPAN), December 4, 1994, 16. C. Murray, “An Open Letter to the Virginia Tech Community,” American Enterprise Institute, March 17, 2016.

  6. 6.

    DeParle, “Daring Research or ‘Social Science Pornography’?” 50. C. Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 221–223.

  7. 7.

    C. Murray and R.J. Herrnstein, “Race, Genes and I.Q.—An Apologia,” New Republic (October 31, 1994): 27.

  8. 8.

    Herrnstein and Murray, The Bell Curve, 311.

  9. 9.

    H. Gardner, “Cracking Open the IQ Box,” The American Prospect (Winter, 1995): 73.

  10. 10.

    See “The Sam Harris Debate” between Klein and Harris on Vox, April 9, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/4/9/17210248/sam-harris-ezra-klein-charles-murray-transcript-podcast. A. Sullivan, “Denying Genetics Isn’t Shutting Down Racism, It’s Fueling It,” New York Magazine, March 30, 2018, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/denying-genetics-isnt-shutting-down-racism-its-fueling-it.html. C. Murray, “The Inequality Taboo,” Commentary (September 2005): 13–22. See footnote 44 of the online version at https://www.commentarymagazine.com/production/files/murray0905.html.

  11. 11.

    C. Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 (New York: HarperCollins, 2003): 81, 114, 295. Totaling up the “significant figures” in each category actually produces 4,002; the lower number is explained by people listed in more than one inventory. Murray’s observation about women and black writers occurred in an interview with a British journalist about the book; see J. Coman, “White, Male, and Proud of It,” Telegraph, January 31, 2004, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/donotmigrate/3611273/White-male-and-proud-of-it.html.

  12. 12.

    R.J. Herrnstein, “Still an America Dilemma,” Public Interest 98 (1990): 6. Herrnstein and Murray, The Bell Curve, 323. On convict labor: D.A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2008). On contract buying: B. Satter, Family Properties: How the Struggle Over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America (New York: Henry Holt, 2009). On Redlining: R. Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Norton, 2017). On the New Deal: I. Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Norton, 2005). On being cheated out of land: L. Presser, “The Dispossessed,” New Yorker 95 (July 22, 2019): 28–35 and K. Holloway, “The Century-Long Fight,” Nation (June 14–21, 2021): 8–9.

  13. 13.

    C. Lane, “The Tainted Sources of ‘The Bell Curve’,” New York Review of Books (December 1, 1994): 14–19. On the Pioneer Fund and The Mankind Quarterly, see W.H. Tucker, The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), especially 90–101, 159–179.

  14. 14.

    Herrnstein and Murray, The Bell Curve, 5. On Laughlin, see Tucker, The Funding of Scientific Racism, 44–48.

  15. 15.

    Herrnstein and Murray, The Bell Curve, xxv, 272. R. Lynn, “The Evolution of Racial Differences in Intelligence,” Mankind Quarterly 32 (1991): 99–121. R. Lynn, “Race Differences in Intelligence: A Global Perspective,” Mankind Quarterly 31 (1991): 255–296. Q. Slobodian, “Racial Science Against the Welfare State,” unpublished paper presented at the History of Political Economy Workshop, Duke University, February 16, 2018. R. Lynn, Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis (Augusta, GA: Washington Summit, 2006/2015); R. Lynn, The Global Bell Curve: Race, IQ and Inequality Worldwide (Augusta, GA: Washington Summit, 2008); R. Lynn, The Chosen People: A Study of Jewish Intelligence and Achievement (Augusta, GA: Washington Summit, 2011); R. Lynn and T. Vanhanen, IQ and Global Inequality (Augusta, GA: Washington Summit, 2006).

  16. 16.

    J.P. Rushton, Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1994). Rushton is quoted in A. Miller, “Professors of Hate: Academia’s Dirty Secret,” Rolling Stone (October 20, 1994): 110. Herrnstein and Murray, The Bell Curve, 642–643.

  17. 17.

    DeParle, “Daring Research or ‘Social Science Pornography’?” 51.

  18. 18.

    Quoted in Slobodian, “Racial Science Against the Welfare State.” Weyher is quoted in J. Sedgwick, “The Mentality Bunker,” GQ (November 1994): 230.

  19. 19.

    R. Fausset, “In America’s Heartland: the Voice of Hate Next Door,” New York Times, November 26, 2017, A16. A. Beale and S. Kehrt, “Behind Berkeley’s Semester of Hate,” New York Times, August 4, 2017.

  20. 20.

    Herrnstein and Murray, The Bell Curve, 312–315, 479, 508.

  21. 21.

    Ibid., 492, 495–496.

  22. 22.

    T. Carlson, “D.C. Blues: The Rap Sheet on the Washington Police,” Policy Review (Winter 1993): 26–73.

  23. 23.

    See A. Knight, “Of 1,286 Slaying Cases, 1 in 4 Ends in Conviction,” Washington Post, October 24, 1993 A1, A19; A. Knight, “Deadly Hours,” Washington Post, October 25, 1993, A1, A8; A. Knight, “When Clogged Courts Fail to Speed Justice,” Washington Post, October 26, 1993, A1, A10; A. Knight, “Strategies to End the Carnage,” Washington Post, October 27, 1993, A1, A16.

  24. 24.

    Murray, Losing Ground; C. Murray, In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 2006); C. Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York: Crown, 2012).