One Lodge, Six Charters / Geba Lodge No. 954
Geba Lodge’s founding-year membership record names David Wechsler as its 27th member. This article explores his possible identification with the psychologist who created the Wechsler intelligence scales.
Research note: The identification of Geba Lodge’s David Wechsler with the psychologist remains provisional. The lodge’s recorded raising date of April 8, 1919 must be reconciled with biographical accounts of his overseas Army service and studies. See the source notes below.
Geba Lodge No. 954 was barely six months old, still working under dispensation and not yet holding its charter, when it raised its twenty-seventh member on April 8, 1919. His name was David Wechsler.
If that member was the psychologist, he was twenty-three, a Romanian-born New Yorker with a master’s degree in psychology and a head full of questions about what intelligence tests actually measured. In the decades that followed, his work would make the Wechsler name familiar in clinics, schools and psychological research. The possible connection places an important figure in the history of psychology on the earliest roll of a young Queens lodge.
From Lespezi to the Lower East Side
David Wechsler was born on January 12, 1896, in Lespezi, a small town in Romania, the youngest of seven children. His father, Moses, was a Hebrew scholar; his mother, Leah, kept a shop. In 1902 the family emigrated to New York, part of the great wave of Eastern European Jews who remade the city in those years.
He was a quick student. He graduated from the City College of New York in 1916 and earned a master’s degree at Columbia University the next year under Robert S. Woodworth, one of the leading experimental psychologists of the day. His master’s research, published in 1917, studied memory loss in patients with Korsakoff psychosis. It was a first sign of the interest in real patients, rather than abstractions, that would mark his whole career.
Testing the Army
When the United States entered the First World War, the Army launched an unprecedented experiment: testing the intelligence of hundreds of thousands of recruits with the new Army Alpha and Army Beta exams. While waiting for his own draft call, Wechsler volunteered to score the tests at Camp Yaphank on Long Island under the psychologist Edwin G. Boring. In uniform, he continued the work with the Psychological Division of the Army’s Sanitary Corps in Texas, giving individual examinations to recruits who had done poorly on the group tests.
The experience stayed with him. He saw men who were plainly capable in the practical business of life score badly on paper, and men who tested well who could hardly manage at all. The tests, he concluded, measured something, but not everything that mattered. After service in France, the Army sent him in 1919 to study at the University of London with Charles Spearman and Karl Pearson, two of the founders of the statistical study of intelligence. A fellowship then took him to the University of Paris from 1920 to 1922, where he researched the skin’s electrical response to emotion.
A Lodge Under Dispensation
Geba Lodge was a young lodge for young men. Proposed by Mizpah Lodge No. 738 of Elmhurst, it received its dispensation in October 1918 and first met in rented rooms in Jackson Heights, a neighborhood then just being built. Its charter came on May 7, 1919, and the lodge was formally instituted that June, with Samuel A. Lando as its first Master.
The recorded raising of David Wechsler on April 8 came in the weeks just before the charter, placing that member among the men whose names stood on the lodge’s books from its beginning. Confirming his identity requires a closer comparison of the membership record with the psychologist’s movements during 1919.
There is a thematic connection worth considering, without mistaking it for evidence of identity or influence. Freemasonry gives its candidates tools of measurement, including the twenty-four-inch gauge and the square, and asks them to apply those instruments to their conduct and character. Wechsler’s professional work concerned a different kind of measurement: how to assess intellectual abilities without confusing a single test result with the whole person.
Bellevue
Back in New York, Wechsler worked as a psychologist for the city’s Bureau of Child Guidance, finished his doctorate at Columbia in 1925, served as acting secretary of the Psychological Corporation and spent five years in private practice. In 1932 he became chief psychologist at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, the great public hospital on First Avenue. He remained in that position until 1967. His 1981 New York Times obituary also records his service as clinical professor of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine from 1942 to 1970.
Bellevue was where his ideas took shape. Its patients were adults of every background: immigrants, laborers, the educated and the barely schooled. The standard test of the day, the Stanford-Binet, had developed from work focused on children and relied on the concept of “mental age,” a measure that presented difficulties when applied to adults. Wechsler set out to build something better suited to the people he examined.
The Wechsler Scales
In 1939 he published the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale and the book that explained it, The Measurement of Adult Intelligence. His approach assessed both verbal abilities and performance abilities, including tasks involving puzzles and pictures. It also compared an individual’s performance with that of people of the same age, rather than relying on the ratio between mental age and chronological age.
This age-based approach became associated with deviation IQ, with an average score of 100. Wechsler described intelligence in terms of the overall capacity to act purposefully, think rationally and deal effectively with one’s environment. He also insisted that personality and motivation mattered in understanding how people functioned.
The scales multiplied. A second Wechsler-Bellevue scale followed in 1942, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children in 1949, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale in 1955 and a preschool scale in 1967. Successive revisions made the Wechsler scales central instruments in clinical and educational assessment.
A 2002 survey of eminent twentieth-century psychologists ranked him fifty-first. The study combined measures including scholarly citations, textbook citations and survey responses; the American Psychological Association’s published ranking lists him alongside the other figures recognized.
These tests expanded the ways psychologists assessed intellectual abilities, but no test score could represent everything about a person. That distinction was consistent with Wechsler’s concern for the broader qualities involved in effective human behavior.
Beyond the Test
Wechsler’s work reached well beyond Bellevue. In 1947 he took part in a mission to Cyprus to help set up mental health services for Holocaust survivors held in the detention camps there. He was closely tied to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he served as Beber Visiting Professor of Clinical Psychology in 1967 and which later awarded him an honorary doctorate.
His connection to the university was substantial. His obituary credited him with helping to found its Department of Psychology and recorded his service on its board of governors from 1965.
His private life held real sorrow. His first wife, Florence Felske, was killed in an automobile accident only weeks after their wedding in the mid-1930s. In 1939 he married Ruth Halpern, with whom he raised a family. He died at his home on Manhattan’s East Side on May 2, 1981, at eighty-five. The New York Times remembered him as the author of widely used intelligence tests, a concise description of a career that had reshaped psychological assessment.
The Measure of a Brother
Geba Lodge raised many men in its long history, and its line now runs into Advance Service Mizpah Lodge No. 586. Its founding-year record preserves the name David Wechsler as its twenty-seventh member.
Whether that entry belongs to the psychologist remains a question for further research. If confirmed, it would connect the lodge’s first months to a man whose work gave psychologists new ways to assess the human mind. Until then, the record deserves the same care that good measurement demands: attention to the evidence, respect for its limits and a willingness to leave a question open.
Endnotes and Sources
Lodge Records
- Geba Lodge No. 954, F. & A.M., membership record of David Wechsler: raised April 8, 1919, 27th member, as examined by Brete Murphy.
- Grand Lodge of New York records: Geba Lodge No. 954, dispensation October 8, 1918; charter May 7, 1919; instituted June 10, 1919; first Master Samuel A. Lando.
Newspapers
- Wolfgang Saxon, “Dr. David Wechsler, 85, Author of Intelligence Tests”, The New York Times, May 3, 1981, Section 1, p. 44. Includes his Bellevue and NYU appointments, intelligence scales, Hebrew University service and surviving family.
Books and Reference Works
- David Wechsler, The Measurement of Adult Intelligence (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1939).
- David Wechsler, The Measurement and Appraisal of Adult Intelligence, 4th ed. (1958).
- John Carson, “Wechsler, David,” in American National Biography, vol. 22 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
- A. J. Edwards, “Wechsler, David (1896–1981),” in R. J. Sternberg, ed., Encyclopedia of Intelligence, vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1994).
- Selected Papers of David Wechsler, introduction by Allen J. Edwards (New York: Academic Press, 1974).
Scholarly Articles
- Steven J. Haggbloom et al., “The 100 Most Eminent Psychologists of the 20th Century”, Review of General Psychology, vol. 6, no. 2 (2002), pp. 139–152.
- American Psychological Association, “Study Ranks the Top 20th Century Psychologists”, Monitor on Psychology, July/August 2002. Explains the study’s ranking method.
- American Psychological Association, “Eminent Psychologists of the 20th Century”, Monitor on Psychology, vol. 33, no. 7 (2002). Lists David Wechsler at number 51.
Online Reference Sources
- “Wechsler, David,” Encyclopedia.com.
- “Wechsler Intelligence Test,” Encyclopedia.com.
- “Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale,” Encyclopedia.com.
- “Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence,” Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Additional References Listed in the Research Notes
- “David Wechsler,” Wikipedia.
- “David Wechsler,” Whonamedit? dictionary of medical eponyms.
- “Wechsler, David (1896–1981),” Encyclopedia of Counseling, SAGE.
- “David Wechsler,” New World Encyclopedia.
A Note on the Sources
- The identification of Geba Lodge’s David Wechsler with the psychologist is provisional. Biographies say that after serving in France, Wechsler was an Army student at the University of London in 1919. His exact movements must be reconciled with the lodge’s recorded raising date of April 8, 1919.
- The original membership entry should be checked for the date, age, occupation, address and any other identifying details. A matching name alone does not establish that the member was the psychologist.
- Accounts give his first marriage as 1933 or 1934, and the research notes supplied for this article name different wives, Roma Goldstine and Gertrude Goldberg. This article follows the published biographies naming Florence Felske and Ruth Halpern.
- The Cyprus mission is dated 1947 in the encyclopedia accounts and 1949 in one secondary summary.
- The 1981 New York Times obituary gives his Bellevue service as 1932–1967 and his service as clinical professor of psychiatry at NYU as 1942–1970. These appointments should not be treated as having identical dates.
- The parallel between Masonic tools of measurement and psychological assessment is an interpretive theme, not evidence that Freemasonry influenced Wechsler’s scientific work.
- Intelligence-test results should not be equated with a person’s worth or treated as a complete measure of character, practical judgment or potential.
Continue the Story
Explore other lives and lodge histories in the One Lodge, Six Charters series.
- Bernard Berkley of Geba Lodge No. 954: The Mason Who Ran Fairyland on Queens Boulevard — Read a documented Geba Lodge story about its 660th member and a children’s outing at an Elmhurst amusement park.
- Mizpah’s Watchtower in Old Newtown: The Story of Mizpah Lodge No. 738 — Explore the lodge that proposed Geba and the community from which it grew.
Read More About David Wechsler
Read his 1981 New York Times obituary
See his place in the APA’s twentieth-century psychologists ranking
