The Cape stereotype
By Ward Peck

We are wealthy because we are good. We know we are good because we are wealthy. This argument used to be fairly well accepted in American life. Indeed some form of it was something of a tenet in some sects of American Protestantism. While relatively few people would make so naked a claim, the underlying sentiment still informs much of American culture and social life: the idea of keeping up with the Joneses or even what is commonly accepted as “the American Dream,” rely on us all understanding that happiness and goodness are linked to our material wealth. We fetishize commodities not for what they do for us, but what they say about us. We are forever seduced by advertisements that promise our completeness is one purchase away.
    The idea that wealth equal goodness or signals intelligence led to the concept of Social Darwinism: people who are poor because not because of social circumstance but because of a personal defect and any progressive policy that seeks to address poverty is at best, doomed to failure and at worst threatens to drag the rest of us down.
    For the most part, Social Darwinism as social policy has been dismissed in our society (although that is certainly arguable), and nowhere do we pay more lip service to its progressive opposite than in the area of public education. From phrases such as “No Child Left Behind” to our enormous spending on special needs to the mandate contained in many state constitutions that all children are entitled to a quality education, modern public education rests on the principal that all children can be improved by education and all of society is improved when children are educated.
    It was something of a surprise then, when last week I picked up a copy of the Portland Forecaster and read about how “some folks in Cape Elizabeth,” think that wealth begets brains. (For those who might need to check the dictionary like me, beget means to produce).
    As evidence of these “folks,” the author of the piece, Steve Mistler first mentions “a Cape Elizabeth High School staff member,” who looked for a correlation between income and test scores. Mistler then goes on to point out what we all knew already: Cape Elizabeth is wealthy and its children test well. Left out of the piece was information on any attempt, either by the CEHS staff member or Mistler himself, about how the two facts correlate. Finding that two phenomena correlate is usually where scientists begin an investigation, finding out why is the tricky part.
    It has been studied and debated by many scientists and those less-scientifically minded that on average, black students don’t test as well as white students. This correlation is an established fact. What is debated is the why.
    We don’t know if the CEHS staff member even attempted to find out the underlying reasons. For Mistler the reasons are so clear, they need not be repeated: some folks in Cape Elizabeth think wealth begets brains. If you’re keeping score, the number of folks he demonstrates actually believes this so far into he article are zero.
    But that soon changes.
    “The data was enough to convince Town Councilor Sara Lennon,” Mistler informs readers, going on to quote Lennon during a recent budget workshop meeting. The problem is, Mistler wasn’t at that meeting. I was. A different Forecaster reporter was there who is attributed at the bottom of the piece (perhaps a more fitting title for the column should be “Another Reporter’s Notebook”). How Mistler got from “the data” to Lennon’s beliefs is not clear. Perhaps that is because there never was any connection.
    To demonstrate that Lennon is one of these Cape Elizabeth folks who believe that wealth begets brains, he takes something she said completely out of context.
    In the middle of an exchange with several other councilors about the utility of using test scores to measure the quality of education– Lennon, by the way, was arguing that test scores are not the best way to measure education quality– she said the quotation, “we have parents with high IQ’s and a wealthy town.” (Point of clarification: I’m not even sure that is what she said exactly, but I do recall her saying something along those lines).
In the context Lennon was speaking she was not saying that one begot the other. The two observations were independent of each other. As mentioned, no one disputes Cape Elizabeth is a wealthy town and with a relatively high proportion of successful business people, doctors and lawyers, the idea that there are parents with high IQ's doesn’t strike me as all that controversial. It does not preclude that there are poorer folks with high IQ's or that there are dumb parents in town who married well (or begotten well). What Lennon’s point seemed to be is not that wealth begets brains, but wealth begets opportunity and resources that help children succeed.
The context given by Mistler for the remark was that Lennon was arguing for increased budget expenditures. That is only true in a much more general sense. But even twisting the context of Lennon’s remark to fit the argument about folks in Cape Elizabeth, causes the logic to fall apart. Why would a person who believes that “wealth begets brains,” argue that more money should be spent on public education. Wouldn’t such a person argue for less spending?
I am sure that Steve Mistler is right. My sense is that there are people in Cape Elizabeth who view wealth as a virtue; who look down on others as inferior, but I’m sure that the people in town have not cornered the market for this perspective. If the point of the article was to demonstrate this phenomenon is especially pervasive in Cape Elizabeth, it would have been nice to find an actual person who believes it.