Love at Goon Park

by Deborah Blum

  Harry was unoffended, and, frankly, uninterested. He was far more focused on making it through Stanford than on pursuing high school students. Although his brother Robert used to laugh about the girls that Harry had yearned over in Fairfield, at Stanford he didn’t pursue any serious relationships. He was turning into Harry Harlow, beginning to develop the tunnel vision—not Israel uber alle, but psychology before all—that would also characterize him through much of his life. And he learned, from the ways that Miles tried to help him, that colleagues could also be family.

  Harry’s major professor, Stone, was neither warm nor nurturing nor familial. But he was a scientist through and through. Stone approached his students almost as he did his experiments: with absolute insistence on getting it right. He was a dedicated believer in the animal model. Most of Stone’s research was done in rabbits and rats. He studied the effects of brain damage on the sexual behavior of rabbits. He looked at the influence of diet on the sexual responses of albino rats. He explored the learning abilities of castrated rats, and whether food or water was more likely to inspire a rat to escape. Stone was clinical, systematic, and cautious to his bone marrow. He was widely respected as a meticulous observer who built his scientific cases detail by solid detail.

  He and Harry were a near perfect mismatch of temperaments.

  Stone used to tell his students that good researchers “will push the domain of science forward inch by inch.” Harry hated the thought. He wanted to leap. Never mind inch by inch, Harry used to pun; his professor was going to pursue scientific inquiry stone by stone. Stone expected only orderly science. Another of his Ph.D. students, William Mason, who would later do postgraduate work with Harry, recalls doing a study for Stone and, being in a hurry, hastily scribbling his findings on whatever piece of paper he could find. Stone, frowning, called him aside: “Mason, we do not record data on scraps.”

  Years later, Harry hadn’t forgotten an encounter with Stone when “I was almost bleeding to death from a lab accident and met him in the hall.” Stone promptly began a detailed discussion of an experiment, describing apparatus design and testing plans while Harry “wondered how long it would be before he would notice the blood all over my hand and my gown. Finally, he looked down and said, ‘Oh, bitten by a rat, eh?’ You see, he was methodical; he wasn’t jarred by the fact that a person was bleeding to death.”

  There’s no doubt, anyway, that Stone would never have spun a small rat bite into a near-death injury. Things were what they were. And if he didn’t teach the habit of storytelling out of Harry, he did teach him a lifelong respect for doing the research properly, for lining up facts with precision. Stone’s students agree that even if he was chilly personally, he radiated a love of good science. He did his best to teach that, too. Harry and his professor maintained respectful relations; when Stone retired as editor of the Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, he successfully recommended that Harry take over the job. When Stone died, it was Mason who wrote the professional tribute and Harry who encouraged him to “use some of that Lincolnesque style of yours, Mason,” in praising their former professor. Years later, Harry was still joking about Stone and the rat bite incident, telling a magazine interviewer that his old professor was basically a good man and that “he probably went out and bawled the hell out of the rat.”

  Stone directed Harry’s Ph.D. dissertation, a 170-page exploration of feeding habits in baby rats. The study was classic Stone, completely and obsessively thorough about what infant rodents liked to drink, when, where, and how. Harry was polite in thanking Stone for his “consideration, his suggestions and his consistently stimulating interest in this investigation.” But one of Harry’s fellow students, psychologist Robert Sears, suggested that the dissertation fostered a dislike of rat research that Harry never overcame. It was those hours on a “pedestrian rat problem,” under Stone’s guidance, that “soured [Harry] forever on both rats” and statistical analysis, according to Sears.

  Harry concurred. He used to say that he’d seen enough of rats at Stanford—in Stone’s lab, in Miles’s garage—to last him a lifetime. “Although I am thought of as a monkey psychologist, I’m sure that I have spent more man-hours studying rats than any two living psychologists combined.” He announced that when he took over as journal editor, he was more than ready to resist if “somebody tried to push a rat paper down my throat.” For the rest of his life, he insisted on calling psychological studies with rats “rodentology.”

  Still, Harry Harlow’s future glimmers in that dissertation, once you get beyond the title: “An Experimental Study of the Feeding Reactions and Related Behavior Patterns of the Albino Rat.” The primary discovery is, as Sears pointed out, no real surprise. All those hours of research showed that rats will swallow liquids other than rat milk as long they think the taste half-way decent. If it tastes bad, they’d just as soon spit it out. The rats in Harry’s study would accept whole and diluted cow’s milk and sugar solutions. If nothing else was available, they would reluctantly make do with orange juice and even cod liver oil. The bitter taste of quinine, the sting of a weak acid solution, and the sharpness of salt solutions produced instant rejection—which meant spitting it out and squirming to get away.

  Perhaps more to the point, Harry began to learn that the baby rats needed constant “mothering,” including guidance in how much food they should take. In his first cows’ milk test, he fed the rats every three hours, which turned out to be not nearly enough. One of his little rats died of malnutrition. In dismay, he doubled the feeding schedule. This turned out to be too much. The baby rats happily sucked down all the milk but, by the tenth day, all of them were dead from overfeeding. Being a parent—even the scientific surrogate for a lactating rat mother—clearly required knowledge and experience, including when to say “Enough.” It also raised another question.

  Are there conditions that inhibit feeding, that simply turn off all that natural greed and hunger? Harry tried some simple experiments in temperature. Rat families were placed on a glass floor, which could be alternatively chilled with ice cubes or warmed by an electric heating pad. He discovered that too much cold simply froze the feeding process. If they were chilly, the little rats just wouldn’t eat. It was as if they were numbed to a standstill. Curiously, though, warming the floor didn’t improve their feeding habits, either. The baby rats were likely to just huddle down into the warmth. They needed to be cared for, coaxed by something more than the ambient temperature. Mother rats, as it turns out, squash their infants firmly between their own bodies and the nest while the babies eat. The warmth, the sense of being wedged into a big family pancake of sorts, seems to help stir up the hunger response. Scientists could manipulate eyedroppers and drip milk and juice and sugar-water down the throats of baby rats, but glass instruments weren’t nearly as productive as the simple act of being sat on by a mother rat.

  The next set of experiments was not pedestrian at all, although it’s not clear that anyone involved really appreciated the potential. Neither Harry nor Stone followed up on the results. They were, though, a haunting testament to mother nature. Harry built a device in which mothers and baby rats were separated by a mesh barrier with small holes cut into it, large enough for the newborn rats to squeeze through, but not the mothers. Lost and bewildered, on the wrong side of the mesh, the babies crawled in aimless circles. The mother rats, on the other hand, weren’t aimless at all. They were desperate to get to their pups. They would bite the mesh angrily, try to force their way through the too-small holes; and when the barrier was removed, they immediately began collecting the young. Even if the mothers were hungry, even if food was placed temptingly before them, they would first gather their families to safety. Then they would eat.

  What lay behind the intensity of this response, the imperative riptide pull of mother toward child? Was it a simple sensory reflex? At Stone’s direction, Harry removed ovaries, blinded the female rats, and removed their olfactory bulbs. Sightless, hormone-deprived—it didn’
t matter. The mother rats crawled determinedly toward the baby rats. They were slower, maybe, but the homing instinct was magnetic, needle to the north.

  On the title page of Harry’s dissertation, directly under that stuffy title, is one more, very different clue about the author’s future direction. The paper is credited not to Harry Frederick Israel of Fairfield, Iowa, but to Harry Frederick Harlow of Palo Alto, California. And, to understand that change—the disappearance of Israel uber alle— one needs to appreciate both the strength of Harry’s dreams and the extraordinary presence and influence of Lewis M. Terman.

  Terman was a luminary in the still new field of psychology. He knew it, his colleagues knew it, the university knew it. Let him fall ill and the Stanford administration paid anxious attention. In 1926, when Terman canceled a trip to the East Coast due to influenza, the university president, Ray Lyman Wilbur, responded with a solicitous note: “I am sorry to learn that you have not been entirely well, but am glad that you are taking care of yourself.” At Stanford in the 1920s, Terman wasn’t just a famous and innovative researcher, he was also a powerful one. It was his psychology department and everyone—down to the lowliest student—knew that.

  To paint Terman as pure autocrat would be misleading. Like Miles, he considered his students an extended family and he paid attention to them. He could be disarmingly affectionate. He and his wife, Anna, visited a graduate student, Jessie Linton, in the hospital after she had given birth to her first child. They both demanded to hold the baby. Linton recalled teasing her professor, saying she thought men didn’t like to be handed small, squirmy infants. “That’s what you think,” Terman replied, cuddling the child to him. He would take students on picnics to celebrate their achievements. He held weekly seminars at his house, open to undergraduate students if they were interested. He charmed and he listened and he prodded and if he saw any promise in you at all, he would push you relentlessly to exceed. “Terman was entirely different from Stone,” Harry said, “He was out to find the creative and he took great pride in that.”

  By the time Harry Israel arrived at Stanford, Terman was in his mid–forties, his red hair flecked with gray, his face wonderfully rumpled, his health uncertain, his vision straight ahead. Terman’s particular research focused on human intelligence. Tests to “measure” intelligence had begun to appear in the late nineteenth century, both in the United States and Europe; many psychologists believed that such examinations were yet another way to demonstrate that their field was growing into a precise, documented, quantifiable branch of science.

  Terman used the intelligence test as a probe, a research tool to assess human potential. He had adapted the test for the purpose. An earlier version, created by French psychologist Alfred Binet, had been more of teacher’s aid. Binet saw his test as a way to pick out children who needed extra tutoring, to better tailor their schooling to their needs. But Terman saw it differently; less compassionately, maybe, and more clinically. Terman refocused the exam into a purer test of analytical talent. The improved version measured such things as one’s ability to think through the angles of a triangle or solve that well-known problem of two trains approaching a station at different speeds. Terman had little interest in judging whether students were being taught properly. He cared about their native intelligence, their innate capability to reason through a challenging problem. He did hope that his test would someday allow society to sort people by their abilities. Perhaps children could then be taught in accordance with their talents. That way, the brightest could be made even brighter. But he didn’t believe that improving teaching was the primary issue because, frankly, he believed people were born smart—or were not.

  His adaptation of Binet’s test would become known as the Stanford-Binet. It is still the granddaddy of all IQ and scholastic aptitude tests used today. Under Terman’s design, the Stanford-Binet sorted a person into one of four categories: gifted, bright, average, or special. There was a range of ability in each of those groups. On the Stanford-Binet scale, if one scored below 30, that indicated a drooling, shuffling kind of mental handicap. A person had to rise into the 70s before the numbers shifted more toward intelligence. A score between 70 and 79 was still considered borderline retardation—what psychologists of the time called the “feebleminded.” In other words, 79 and down put you in the “special” group. Basic competence—being average—emerged in the 80s. At about 100, one started creeping into the “bright” region, and brilliance, or “being gifted,” began at a score of 140 or so.

  Today, IQ testing is regarded by many as a limited probe, a measure primarily of analytical abilities. In retrospect, many psychologists also acknowledge that Terman and his colleagues in the IQ arena could sound elitist—and worse. The word “moron” was coined by another believer in intelligence testing, Henry Goddard, who used it to describe low scorers. Goddard went on to speak virulently against immigration, insisting that Jewish and Eastern European immigrants would dilute good Northern European stock with their “low-intellect” genes. Supporters of intelligence testing argued, successfully, that “feeble-minded” men and women should be sterilized to avoid reproducing additional generations of imbeciles. Terman himself wrote that genetic superiority could be expected to predict social superiority.

  But Terman was also willing to ask hard questions of the so-called elite. For instance, did very smart people naturally rise to the top, the cream floating up over the milky rest of the population? Or did they need extra support to rise? A few years before Harry Israel came to Stanford, Terman began a long-term study of the gifted. He started with exceptional students who were found first by questionnaires sent to elementary school teachers. Then he ran those students and their siblings through IQ tests. All the children that Terman selected scored at least 140 on the Stanford-Binet scale and some as high as 192. His core group—363 boys, 313 girls—had to pass other tests as well.

  Because Terman thought gifted children should perform well in real life as well as on paper, he screened against handicaps such as shyness and disabilities such as limping or stuttering. His questionnaire asked about “prudence, forethought, willpower, humor, cheerfulness, fondness of large groups, popularity, generosity, truthfulness, commonsense, and energy.” He looked for children who had a desire to excel. And just in case those filling out the form were unsure what such a desire was, Terman provided a definition: “Does his utmost to stand first.”

  There was no doubt that self-confidence was the order of the day when Harry was at Stanford. Terman expected his chosen students to damn well be smart. And act it. He selected carefully. One favorite was Nancy Bayley, who would become one of UC Berkeley’s best-known child psychologists and whose own work on cognitive development would eventually directly contradict Terman’s. (Bayley showed that parenting styles did seem to affect IQ. Little boys raised by unaffectionate mothers showed steady erosion in test scores. Little girls also faltered, especially if they were harshly restricted and disciplined.) Terman did not expect his students to agree with him on everything. He did expect them to be good scientists, and really good if they wanted to win their arguments. Bayley credited Terman for teaching her to be a perfectionist. He was, she said, meticulous in his own work, always ready to praise students when they did well, and “very critical of sloppy work.”

  Another graduate student recalled spending a year working on his dissertation, only to be told by Terman that it was substandard and he would have to begin again. Terman insisted that real scientists never took time off. Even at this exalted stage of his career, he often worked late into the night: “He was always working near the limits of knowledge,” said psychologist Robert Bernreuter, another of Terman’s protegés. And Terman wanted his students to venture over those limits, too. “Usually Terman would point out two or three times each seminar something that needed additional research. This caused us to develop both a profound respect for research, and the feeling that we should do something about it,” Bernreuter said.

  Terman’s st
udents wanted desperately to “do something about it” in a way that would gain his approval. Perhaps more than some of the other students, Harry doubted his ability to impress the master. He knew he was smart, creative—even funny on occasion—but could he demonstrate that while he was at Stanford? The school brought out all the tentativeness and shyness you might expect from the son of a failed doctor in rural Iowa. His description of himself at that time was of “a shy, retiring youth with a rather poetic outlook on life. I tended to apologize to doors before opening them.” And when he did apologize, there was a slight speech defect that would have undoubtedly stricken him from Terman’s study of exceptional students. Pronouncing the letter “r” had caused Harry trouble since his childhood and sometimes gave his conversation a cartoonish quality, in the “silly wabbit” style of Elmer Fudd. Embarrassed, he often chose to say nothing rather than to sound goofy. On the grounds of shyness, on the grounds of his speech defect, he could not have entered Terman’s gifted study. And Terman made that almost painfully clear to him.

  When Harry started on his master’s degree, “Dr. Terman called me into his office and told me he thought I was a bright young man but that I was so timid that I would never be able to speak in public.” The “r’s” only made that problem worse. Terman “recommended strongly that my future lay in teaching in a junior college as I would never be able to speak effectively before really large audiences.” Terman even had his secretary check into the requirements for such a job. It turned out that teaching at a junior college required education courses that Harry didn’t have. “As a result, I was condemned to get a Ph.D.”

  Upon Harry’s graduation in 1930, Terman called him back. He was still worrying about Harry’s future. This time it had do with the negative consequences of his last name. “He said that since my name was Israel, they had found it impossible to place me in an adequate academic position because of anti-Jewish prejudice.” Walter Miles had been talking Harry up at other universities and had been asked constantly about his student’s religious background. The dean of a large state university told Miles that he didn’t care how good the young psychologist was, he was not going to hire anyone with the last name of Israel. Harry often looked back with real disbelief at the depth of discrimination in the 1930s, even on supposedly enlightened university campuses. “I don’t want to imply that I was persecuted, because I wasn’t; but with the name Israel, and because I was a timid boy, I certainly had seen discrimination.” The Israels were not Jewish: “Gentile for generations. An aunt traced the name back to 1753, and found an ancestor who had been buried in a Jewish cemetery.” Harry had no patience with anti-Semitism; when he told the story of the name change, he tried to make that perfectly clear, even proposing that the faint Jewish ancestry was responsible for any intelligence in the Israel line: “I often wondered where the family got any brains.”