The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

Author:Adrian Wooldridge [Wooldridge, Adrian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: political science, Political Economy, Labor & Industrial Relations, Public Policy, Economic Policy
ISBN: 9781510768628
Google: uOU3EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2021-07-13T23:47:26.307815+00:00

PEOPLE OF PLENTY

Post-war America saw many of the same developments as post-war Britain: the growing conviction that, in Churchill’s phrase, ‘the empires of the future will be empires of the mind’; the commitment to an expanded welfare state, albeit a welfare state with American characteristics; and, above all, the quest for a fairer post-war order. The same themes were nevertheless woven together in rather different patterns. America had the benefit of more variety than Britain: meritocratic educational initiatives were sponsored by companies and think tanks as well as governments, meritocratic government reforms were spear-headed by think tanks, particularly the Rand Corporation, as well as government departments. America did not suffer from the same agonies of class guilt as Britain (though it suffered from worse agonies of racial guilt, agonies that were suppressed during the 1950s but transformed politics in the 1960s). In post-war America the meritocratic revolution was all about delivering the promise of American life, as codified in the Declaration of Independence and the constitution, rather than overturning an unjust social order.

The great harbinger of the meritocratic revolution was the GI Bill. More than 1.6 million veterans enrolled in college in 1947 alone, a number equivalent to the total college population in 1940, and more than 60 per cent of them studied science and engineering. Post-war America was much more inclined to romanticize the scientific hot-houses such as Berkeley’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory that had produced the nuclear scientists who had done so much to win the war than it was to look back at F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s Princeton.

Some Americans also began to reject the racial prejudices that had been so open in pre-war America. Harry Truman took a much tougher line on civil rights than his predecessor: the President’s Commission on Civil Rights published the landmark ‘To Secure These Rights’ (1947), which argued that the federal government had a duty to secure rights as well as just to prevent abuses, while the Commission on Higher Education published the equally forthright ‘Higher Education for American Democracy’ (1947), which described quotas directed against Jews and Negroes as ‘un-American’, while Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), a film starring Gregory Peck, won an Oscar for its devastating portrayal of gentlemanly antisemitism. Carey McWilliams’s Mask for Privilege (1948) detailed just how widespread the prejudice remained. By 1952, public opinion polls began to show a marked decline in antisemitism.20

America embraced IQ tests and their various offspring, such as SAT tests, with an even greater enthusiasm than the British, though they preferred to use them to stream children rather than to separate them out into sheep and goats at eleven. The Truman Commission rested its case for expanding college enrolments on the results of the Army General Classification Test (AGCT), which had been administered to 10 million recruits during the Second World War and which revealed a lake of untapped ability in the population at large: 49 per cent of the population had the brains to complete fourteen years of schooling and 32 per cent had the brains to complete college.

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