Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin by Calvin Trillin

I was ahead of the Curve.
    On the other hand, I lacked a political impetus for writing a book. One of
The Bell Curve
co-authors, a political scientist named Charles Murray, manages to come to the same conclusion no matter what he studies—that the government should quit trying to help out poor people. I didn’t burn to write
The Tweed Curve
in order to argue that, say, confiscatory inheritance taxes should be applied as a means of keeping some of our more important institutions out of the hands of ditz-brains. To the extent that I considered the project at all, my motive was simply to make a bundle.
    I knew I could hire research assistants to run up a few charts for me—distribution of Groton graduates in the academic ranking of the Harvard class of 1959, say, or the average IQ of people who regularly play court tennis compared with the average IQ of people who regularly play handball, or the number of Junior Assemblies debutantes who have submitted winning entries to the Westinghouse Science Talent Search.
    The study that I considered particularly elegant in its construction would have compared median SAT scores of students with at least one grandparent in Hobe Sound with the median SAT scores of students with at least one grandparent in North Miami Beach. I called it “The Florida Index.” I also tossed around some ideas for quizzes I might use to break up the statistics while furthering my argument. (Name a distinguished American novelist who is a high-caste WASP and not named Louis Auchincloss. Gotcha!)
    So what stopped me from cashing in? I’d like to think that some moral qualms were involved—a concern, say, that some oversensitiveHotchkiss lad who has just been cut from the junior varsity lacrosse team might be crushed by learning that he is probably genetically fated to rise no higher than the Palm Beach office of a white-shoe stockbrokerage.
    Also, I have observed the way
The Bell Curve
got taken apart by reviewers who have some background in the field of human intelligence. The unkindest cuts came from people who dismissed Murray as the ideologue who didn’t quite understand the theories of his co-author—the late Richard Herrnstein, who was, in fact, a psychologist. Reading those reviews provided some idea of what would have happened in Stalin’s time if the mechanical-engineer half of the team assigned to do the book on farm implements had been sent to the gulag just before publication day, leaving the political-commissar half to explain to confused readers precisely how a tractor works.
    I was obviously vulnerable to such treatment. I know some would claim that Yale in the fifties presented a flawed sample, partly because the admissions office was fussy about the grades of public high school boys but dipped far enough into the class at certain boarding schools to pick up the slow but socially acceptable father of that Hotchkiss lacrosse player. I know some would dismiss as unscientific my hypothesis on why intelligence deficits seem to accompany old money. (“I guess the blood sort of runs out, or something.”) I know someone would discover that my academic background in this field amounts to one year of Human Science, a yard-sale version of biology that was taught at Southwest High School by a man who told us, among other things, that colored people and white people smelled different.
    So I decided against publishing
The Tweed Curve
. I realize that this decision could have also been influenced by a lingering feeling, brought on by early association with Thatcher Baxter Hatcher, that there is something crude about suddenly making a bundle. Of course, the intervening decades, with their economic ups and downs, could have changed Hatcher’s views on whether the age of one’s money is terribly important—compared with, say, the amount of it. He may see my decision as an indication that I’ve become dumb as dirt.
    1995
The 401st
    The minute I saw
Forbes
magazine’s list of the four hundred richest