It absolutely wasn't, you weren't going to find almost any institutional resistance to racialism in the Progressive Era, because the Progressives seized the institutions and were openly promoting it. It's not like the Republicans under Taft or Roosevelt were out and about demanding the ending of Eugenics to save "the negro". It was an intellectual fad of the time to support eradicating them as a race. Same with Native Americans.

Despite this, it made many strides to try and find objective ways to measure intelligence that were not simple "learned to regurgitate public school things" that all other measures used.

Yes, decades later, well into the 50's. Early on, IQ tests actually had questions I would consider pop-culture based, and that was because it was being used as a political justification to limit immigration, rather than understanding it as a scientific tool, and running off of that. (Because you could limit migration using IQ without being an idiot about it)

Ideological corruption or abusive wielding doesn't turn something into completely useless, else we would also discard all laws and government entirely too.

That depends on the government. A free people have an inalienable right to revolution as necessary.

But beyond that my criticism isn't against IQ in general, it's against it's early history specifically when it was pure psuedo-science.