This brilliant essay, originally titled 'The Brain of the Nation', appeared in Century Magazine in 1904. This was during the 'Progressive Era'. 'Progressive' meant they believed in Progress with a capital P: in other words, newer was better, and we're just getting so good at this science and society thing that we soon won't be able to stand ourselves. In 1904, they were so good as to be nearly unbearable already. Here, they're focusing the laser beam of their superior understanding to the question of 'What makes New Englanders so darn clever?'

One proof of how much more talented New Englanders were than other people was that their books got published and their artwork showed up in galleries more than other people's. The fact that the publishing companies and art galleries were mostly in New England seems to have escaped them.

Yes, we note that they didn't include women in this survey of smarts. They didn't include people of colour, either, and the explanation does them no credit at all. They said the women and the people of colour would drag down the average and be unfair to the states that had so many of them. You get the idea.

The excerpt below contains their reasoning for why all the smart white men lived in New England. Yes, it is amazingly bogus. Yes, it is full of gloriously awful eugenics. Yes, they're a bunch of so-and-sos. And yes, we're republishing this to make mock of the people who were running the US of A back when the Post Editor's granddaddy was a pup.

We're also hoping we can take a lesson from this awfulness of the past. Don't be a nincompoop. Live and learn. And apply your reasoning a bit more…er, rationally than this magazine did.

Brainy Men: Where They Come From, Where They Move To

Editor's Note:   The population of Texas in 1904 was 3,374,000. This yields an estimate of 66 and three-quarters men of talent in the state at that time. One of them must have been a cowboy going to correspondence school.

It is evident that the cause of such differences, as well as that of the imposing intellectual superiority of the poor mountainous regions of New England over the whole East, lies in the men themselves, and not in their surroundings. New York, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri are but the successive stages of the great westward migration which, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, peopled the West at the expense of the East; and the steady decrease in the birth-rate of talent met with when passing from one of those States to its Western neighbor shows, as is the case in every partial migration, that that particular one was highly selective in its
process. Before entering into the detail of this process, let us consider the material to which it was applied.

The immigrants who peopled New England during the seventeenth century may be roughly divided into two categories: those who emigrated because they wished to improve their position through the acquisition of property, and those who wished above all to enjoy religious freedom¹. The latter contained among them an unusual
number of men of talent². Lombroso³ has demonstrated the close connection which exists between exalted religious ideas and ideals and the nervous temperament characteristic of genius…

Yet the arrival in New England of immigrants containing a large percentage of that high-thinking and much-thinking element⁴ was but the first stage of the selective process which has resulted in the distribution of intellectuality shown by our map.

The fertile plains of the West contrasted with the poor soil of New England; a westward current of emigration from New England began. But while the Puritans had made the sacrifice of a part of their earthly possessions in order to satisfy their spiritual needs, the people who left New England for the West willingly sacrificed spiritual and intellectual advantages in order to acquire earthly possessions. The principles which presided over the two migrations were radically different. One of them being an immigration, the other an emigration, both contributed to bring about the same result.

The positive, energetic, enterprising, 'strenuous' people were those who left. The poets, the literati, the artists, the lovers of intellectual culture, are, by virtue of their all-absorbing ideal, less sensitive than other people to the attraction exerted by good and cheap land⁵. Moreover, they needed a cultivated community which might understand and appreciate them⁶. They did not take kindly to the idea of
a life in the wilderness. They remained.

With them remained the neurotic and the weak, who felt that they were ill prepared for the hardships of pioneer life. Between these and the geniuses the line cannot be sharply drawn. The typical man of genius is but rarely endowed with a strong physique. The Italian school of anthropologists considers genius as a neurose, and the fact that but few great men of genius have been altogether free from nervous troubles⁷, in themselves or in their of those who had in them the latent though transmissible germ of talent went West, but in the following generation the selective process operated again⁸. As a result, from New England to Illinois, all the way through, talent lagged behind.

Editor's Conclusion:   When you moan about the nitwits on Twitter, take heart: this magazine was considered high-toned and intellectual.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

06.04.20 Front Page

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