The Bell Curve, Then and Now

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.