The Orphans of Davenport

by Marilyn Brookwood

  But how did the Iowa psychologists lay the groundwork for their discoveries? Compared with prestigious universities like Stanford, Harvard, and Princeton that had renowned faculties and were located in culturally rich areas of the nation, during the 1930s the University of Iowa was a backwater—only 5 percent of the state’s roads were paved and 90 percent of its homes lacked electricity. Nevertheless, in that decade two conventionally trained young psychologists, Harold Skeels and Marie Skodak, joined the station. They worked along with Beth Wellman, at the station since 1925, who found that preschool increased young children’s intelligence test scores, and George Stoddard, the station’s director, who was certain that intelligence was influenced by environment. Within this harmonious group the Iowa psychologists’ research flourished.

  Their success resulted from Stoddard’s impressive intellect and leadership, daring station investigators who pursued inexplicable or accidental findings, and the station’s uncommon freedom from university bureaucracy. Moreover, Iowa’s isolation allowed its radical studies to move forward, at least for a time, with little attention from psychology’s mainstream. Critical, too, were large grants received from the Laura Spelman Memorial of the Rockefeller Foundation, funds that promoted the study of children’s development. Taken together, the Iowa work developed in a milieu of uncommon intellectual freedom, invaluable in any academic field, but at the time rare in psychology.

  The Iowans’ investigations unfolded in the face of the Midwest’s 1930s extreme misfortunes, when simultaneously national history and events of nature changed the lives of many, including those who lived and worked at the Davenport Home. The Great Depression ruined Iowa’s economy. Dust Bowl winds lifted its topsoil—said to be the finest in the nation—into loamy clouds that blocked the sun as they blew thousands of miles east and south. Historic heat, and a drought recorded as the most severe in 1,000 years, followed numbing ice storms that ravaged farms and killed livestock. With no social safety net in place, poverty-stricken, hopeless parents unable to feed and shelter their children gave them up to the state, and the orphanage at Davenport, already crowded with the children of the socially marginal, now overflowed. Eugenic mandates also filled other institutions with inferior deviates who had been segregated into state facilities in order to “dry up the streams that feed the torrent of defective and degenerate protoplasm.”16

  Against this setting, Iowa’s researchers turned away from the customary paths of most psychologists who studied the intelligence of racial and class groups. A typical report of that time was “Racial Differences in the Intelligence of School Children.”17 Instead, when the Iowa group noticed that children’s IQ test scores fluctuated with environment, they sought to know more. Also, at Iowa, the case study method of exploring individual children’s histories and experience became a research tool,18 along with what today would be called field studies of children in real-world environments such as preschool. At the time rarely used, these techniques allowed the Iowa psychologists to observe changes in children’s intelligence that should not, according to current understanding, have occurred. Finding unconventional results, the Iowans then detoured from accepted explanations and methods. And the psychologists worked collegially, challenging one another’s ideas, yet maintaining an investigatory fellowship that supported their risky research paths.

  Another factor that favored the Iowans’ discoveries was their work in institutions, not only at Davenport but in many Iowa facilities. At the time, few psychologists had familiarity with children’s institutional lives, but the Iowa psychologists had great empathy for children who lived in such materially harsh and emotionally bleak circumstances. Davenport’s overcrowding also played a role when it forced moves of children to less congested facilities where they had exposure to differing environments. And the people of Iowa who adopted children from the home played a part, as most seemed unconcerned with the eugenic doctrine that heredity was fate. Middle-class, educated Iowans with professional standing regularly arrived at Davenport to adopt children born into families with the lowest social and economic status and, according to multiple accounts, never inquired about the children’s heredity or family history. This permitted Skeels and Skodak to initiate studies of adoptees that revealed radical intelligence shifts or that contradicted hereditarian assumptions. And of signal importance was that Stoddard, the station’s director, was an original thinker who earlier had studied with a colleague of the French psychologist, Alfred Binet, someone certain that environment shaped development. In Iowa’s orphans, Stoddard found obvious confirmation of Binet’s concepts.

  The highly productive Iowans discovered environment’s profound effect on children’s development and intelligence in not one, but four populations: in middle-class, and separately, in orphanage children, exposed to preschool; in children born to parents from the lowest levels of society and adopted before 6 months of age into middle-class homes; and most exotically, in children identified as “feebleminded” who were placed in the care of institutionalized women labeled “morons.” Here, in preliminary form, were the contours of the modern understanding that environment and heredity work together in children’s mental development. Never intending a revolution, the Iowa station’s research findings would ignite the overthrow of long accepted racist and classist views of human development. Their contributions were fundamental to psychology’s most important discovery of the twentieth century.

  But it would be a revolution delayed. Psychology’s scholars, who held fast to ideas that human traits were strictly inherited, that environment played no role, relentlessly attacked the station’s discoveries. They misrepresented the work, accused the Iowans of incompetence and dishonesty, and condemned their studies as “dark and devious”19 and based on fantasy. Lewis Terman, who led the onslaught, attacked the Iowans personally, branding Skeels’s study “absurd” and casting the Iowans’ belief in early stimulation as “authoritarian,” even comparing the Iowans to Stalin.20 And the authority of these critics prevailed. Almost no one stepped forward in the Iowans’ defense, and the few who did lacked the professional stature to convince the rest. The next generation of psychologists would pursue professionally safe, less controversial areas—for example, theories of how animals and people learn.

  A well-worn joke among scholars asks, “Why are academic debates so bitter?” The usual cranky reply is, “Because the stakes are so small.” But in the conflict between the Iowa station and its critics, the stakes were anything but small. At issue was not just scholarly prestige, but children’s fates. Convinced that young lives were blighted by the belief that intelligence was fixed at birth, their arguments for early intervention were driven by empathy and moral concern. The hereditarians, for their part, infuriated by the Iowans’ assault on widely accepted doctrine, accused them of peddling intellectual snake oil or, in the words of one critic, “a gold brick.”21

  Far more than an intellectual debate, stark political and ethical consequences followed psychology’s denial of the Iowans’ discoveries. Potential reforms in education, child psychology, medical training in child development, protections of the social safety net, judicial decisions, and parents’ encouragement of their children all lost ground to the persistence of hereditarian ideology. Not until the 1960s would investigators again consider the Iowans’ discoveries and venture into research about environment’s essential role in cognitive development. And when they did, psychology finally entered its modern age.

  PART I

  Origins

  Chapter One

  HOW IT ALL BEGAN

  Marie Skodak expected that her first weeks at Ohio State University in the fall of 1927 would be filled with promise, but instead they were joyless. Not exactly poor, but without a lot of money, her Hungarian immigrant parents had sacrificed to send her to college, and she felt pressure to succeed.1 It didn’t help that she also felt out of place, especially around her well-to-do roommate, a society girl with elegant clothes and refined ways. Then there was Sko
dak’s disappointment in the university itself, which seemed to lack academic rigor. Could her required English course truly be at the college level? The assignments seemed remarkably easy. Skodak had been an honors student in her Ohio high school, taking home prizes and medals and routinely scoring in the 99th percentile. When she expressed disappointment to her English instructor, it was eventually realized that an administrator’s error had placed her in a remedial course. And now weeks had been lost.2

  In another surprise, Skodak’s planned major in chemistry and metallurgy turned out to be far more difficult than she expected, requiring complex math that, to her, was nearly incomprehensible. She had been so certain of her academic plan that she never considered any other. Though bewildered and questioning her own judgment, she became increasingly aware of the background of radio news and newspaper headlines. Always they throbbed with ominous reports of the Midwest’s economic distress: area dust storms and the Dust Bowl’s effects, crops worth less than they cost to grow, plummeting farm values. The region’s precipitous decline followed its World War I industrial and agricultural prosperity, when banks had encouraged farmers to borrow and even overborrow to purchase additional land and machinery. But when prices returned to their prewar levels after the war, the Midwest suffered a “decade of farm tragedy,”3 and even if farmers sold their land, the profits would not cover their debts to the banks. With economies in other areas of the nation booming and the New York Stock Exchange soaring, America’s heartland faced severe financial trouble.4

  Skodak’s anxieties came to a head one day that fall when a letter arrived in her dormitory mailbox that brought terrible news: her father wrote that their home—the family’s financial security—was now worthless. The Midwest’s economic collapse had arrived in her Lake Erie town, industrial Lorain, Ohio.5 For years her parents had carefully saved for her education; now, their financial calculations were useless. Skodak had some small reserves—she could afford one more term—but had no idea how she would pay for her degree.

  On Ohio State’s campus life went on as usual. Autumn days grew shorter and colder; grounds’ crews raked fallen leaves into containers for open-air burning. Pulling their jackets tight against the chill, young women and men walked the trim paths to lecture halls, searched card catalogs at the library, and queued for dining hall meals. But for Skodak and most of her classmates, the ground had shifted. Futures they counted on, their families’ well-being, their plans for their degrees, careers, even for where they would live—everything was about to change. It would be two more years before New York’s stock market crashed and economic catastrophe struck the rest of America, but the Midwest’s early start only deepened its economic pain. In 1932, when the nation’s unemployment rate climbed to 25 percent, Ohio’s rate reached nearly 40 percent.

  Skodak understood that she had to make quick, dramatic adjustments. She had not liked her expensive, fancy dorm anyway, so she found a tiny room in a small red brick “approved” house run by a watchful elderly woman who made certain to lock the front door at curfew. Together with a much older graduate student with an even more limited budget than her own, and whose wardrobe was even less impressive, Skodak cooked frugal meals on a one-burner stove over a gas grate in an improvised basement kitchen. Over dinners of day-old bread, milk, an egg, and some spices, the two settled the world’s problems. They would remain friends for more than sixty years.6

  Harsh times had taught her, she would say later, that “solutions to problems were in one’s own hands, that one could not rely on other people.”7 But she was more prepared for hardship than most. When she had been only three years old, she watched her bitter, homesick mother return to her family in Hungary. Feeling abandoned, she spent lonely days with a nanny while her father sold steamship tickets and insurance. When many months later her mother returned, she found a gloomy, dispirited little girl. The experience of her mother’s absence—later she called it traumatic—taught Skodak resilience and independence. “I just went my own way,” she said. “I watched what adults did, then taught myself.”8 Even before she entered kindergarten, Skodak could crochet and sew, and using a saw, hammer, and screw driver—all adult sized—she built a small boat that floated. She also taught herself to read in Hungarian and to cook breakfast.9

  On her first days in kindergarten, Marie Skodak displayed her independence. Assuming she could not speak any English, her teacher assigned Skodak to the blue table set aside for less advanced children. When Skodak noticed that the books and games at the red table were more intriguing, she moved there. Gently, the teacher coaxed her to move back, but she was not prepared for Skodak’s passionate response, “I stay here!” When she returned to her classroom the next day, under her small arm was a book she brought from home. Seating herself at the red table she proceeded to read a story aloud—in fluent Hungarian. The teacher didn’t understand a word, but she got the message. “I probably had more than the normal load of self-assurance,” Skodak remembered, “and if I was regarded as overbearing, that would not be a surprise.”10

  At Ohio State, Marie Skodak quickly understood that she had to rethink her future. Could she even stay in college? Should she give up her education and find work at home to help her financially hobbled family regain its bearings? Looking around she saw thousands of students, most of whom also faced dismal financial woes, or soon would. At the same time, she assured herself that she was probably as capable as they were, and “if they could figure out a way to the future it must be possible.”11

  To cover expenses, Skodak landed a position as a waitress at the Ohio State Faculty Club, a job that helped her support herself and also pulled back the curtain on professorial civility. She discovered that scholars who lectured about lofty ideas all morning arrived down-to-earth hungry at lunch time, and when their meals didn’t get to their tables quickly enough, some turned irritable. Her salary of 35 cents an hour (today, about $5) along with what were, for her, much needed discounted meals, encouraged her to take their irritation in stride.

  As the newest hire, she was assigned to two sections of the dining room: one reserved for the military (ROTC), from whom the attractive Skodak kept her distance, and the other for the faculty members with the least prestige and known as the most difficult patrons, the psychologists. Unbothered by the psychologists’ foibles, as she served meals and cleared plates, she overheard fascinating conversations.12 Until then, the word psychology was unknown to her. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the discipline was separating from its intellectual parent, philosophy,13 but its direction was unclear and American students found their way to it more by serendipity than design. Psychology had also affiliated with the field of education, and that, too, brought students into its fold.

  Though somewhat unsophisticated when she entered Ohio State, through various part-time jobs Skodak learned much about the world of intellectuals. Serving meals, cleaning faculty homes, and babysitting for faculty children, she glimpsed the lives of academics—a reality, she said, with characteristic irony, “that dusted away reverence and awe of the professionally eminent.”14

  Skodak had planned to study chemistry and metallurgy at Ohio State because she and her father, an adventurous dreamer, hoped one day to prospect for silver in South America. But the collapsing economy ended that hope and she needed to explore other academic possibilities. In search of a new direction, Skodak met with deans from several programs—history, literature, education (she quickly rejected home economics)—to research what their programs could offer. After much study she decided on an education major with the aim to work in a public school, perhaps teaching history, at the time a conventional choice for intellectually talented women. The pragmatic Skodak assumed that even during the Depression, teachers would have jobs, but beyond an economically secure career, the details of her plan were unformed.

  As she continued to serve lunch and dinner to psychologists, Skodak’s curiosity about their discipline increased. Lingering over their water glasses and co
ffee cups, she eavesdropped on debates over theories of human behavior. She especially admired the few psychologists who were women, appreciating their success and finding them “different, more casual in dress and behavior.”15 Her mealtime snooping so absorbed her that she worried she might spill coffee down the patrons’ backs.

  It happened that the study of psychology was required for her education curriculum, and she enrolled in an introductory course with child psychologist Sophie Rogers, the first female full professor in Ohio State’s Department of Medicine. Skodak was impressed that, “without belligerence or unpleasantness,” Rogers had made it in a man’s world.16 Rogers’s class was formative for Skodak when it convinced her to become a psychologist who treated children in need of support. Because the field of psychology would be unfamiliar to her parents, who wanted so much for her to succeed, Skodak struggled with how to explain what psychology was and what its professional application might be. She expected that in the midst of an economic catastrophe, they might be skeptical about her pursuit of a career in an almost unmapped area. But what neither they nor she could have forecast was her newfound passion for the study of human behavior.

  With tremendous energy Skodak overloaded her program, attended two summer sessions, and enrolled in nearly every course the psychology department offered. Most of that work was at the graduate level, and as the youngest student in the department, she often felt out of place. Always in need of money, she continued waitressing and paid for her overextended schedule with a nonexistent social life. Determined to get the highest grades, that isolation did not seem a sacrifice and, she said, never troubled her.

  As Skodak grew familiar with the psychology curriculum, she focused on the area of school psychology, a certification that required dual psychology and education degrees. Typical for such a new field, requirements were flexible, and her department mentors, psychologists Henry H. Goddard and Francis Maxfield, helped her knit together coursework to prepare her. Each had deep knowledge in areas that focused on students with intellectual and physical challenges. Skodak recalled that Goddard showed “a kindliness and warmth toward children, parents, and teachers that contributed to [his] skill as a clinician . . . his Quaker background seemed to give [him] an approach that was both objective and empathic.”17 Skodak did not mention that Goddard, a eugenicist, believed that intelligence was strictly determined by heredity; his viewpoint was so commonplace among American psychologists, and indeed the entire educated class, that it didn’t merit a second thought.