The Orphans of Davenport
Page 3
By 1931, Skodak had earned a BS in education and an MA in psychology, along with a teaching certificate. She took practicums at a school for the mentally ill, earned a minor in social work, was elected to three academic honor societies, and was Phi Beta Kappa. She had achieved her objective, an outstanding academic record with impeccable credentials. With an honors degree from a prestigious psychology program and recommendations from two of the profession’s leaders, Skodak’s future should have been obvious, her job search straightforward. At any other time, she would have received multiple offers from schools everywhere. But in the depths of the Great Depression, school personnel were being paid in scrip. School boards considered the position of a school psychologist a frill and in cost-saving moves, their jobs were the first to be sacrificed. The few who had those positions were unlikely to leave their posts.
With family connections in Hungary, Skodak decided that her college graduation in 1931 might be the moment to escape from America’s downturn. Awarded grants for travel and room and board, she set off for a university in Budapest. It didn’t take long for her to find that Europe was experiencing its own period of economic hardship, made worse by a winter so severe that her university shut down for want of coal. She found her courses—when they even met—unstimulating. She was also deeply shaken by local reports of a young man in Germany “active in organizing the discontented.” His name was Adolf Hitler. With the Depression unrelieved and US schools still underfunded, Skodak put off her school psychologist plan and from Hungary applied for the PhD program at Ohio State. Unsurprisingly, she won the university’s most prestigious psychology graduate assistantship and would be mentored by her undergraduate adviser, Henry Goddard.18
The authority of an illustrious academic in the intellectual development of a novice scholar cannot be overstated, and Skodak had every reason to rely on Henry Goddard’s counsel. A giant among American psychologists, his prominence first emerged when he became a leader in mental testing of the retarded. As head of the Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys, Goddard understood what anyone who worked with low-intelligence children knew: the “feebleminded” label that defined their status obscured that their mental abilities differed markedly from one to another. In search of a method to accurately measure those levels, in 1908 Goddard toured Europe’s psychology laboratories hoping to discover a test for this purpose. Tucked away in his suitcase when he returned to America was a copy of an assessment used in France, given to him by a Belgian psychologist he met during his travels: the Binet-Simon test of intelligence.19 At the request of the French government, Alfred Binet had created the test to evaluate the ability of schoolchildren who required learning support.
After a skeptical reading, Goddard was not certain the test could help him,20 and for about a year it remained neglected in his files. But with the encouragement of an assistant, he finally experimented with the test and quickly understood that Binet’s method yielded a way to closely evaluate ability. The test did more than answer Goddard’s needs; following his and others’ revisions, it also became the foundational instrument used in the United States for intelligence testing.
Binet, who compared a child’s mind to a field that required cultivation,21 was considered the most powerful thinker of his time in the examination of children’s intelligence. As noted by historian of psychology and Goddard biographer Leila Zenderland, Binet’s test provided what ought to have been intuitive in the diagnosis of retardation, but wasn’t, a means to “sharply distinguish the body from the mind.”22 That is, at a time when most low-intellect children were assessed by medical doctors, Binet advised psychologists to be wary, that lacking a proper evaluation tool, physicians regularly drew “conjectures [about] the mental from the physical.”23 Pointing to Helen Keller, Goddard explained that children’s difficulties of the senses, like blindness or deafness, might mislead physicians about their intelligence. Binet also understood that a doctor who treated children with physical disabilities such as palsy might draw incorrect conclusions about the child’s intelligence. He advised physicians that only children’s test responses revealed their intellects.
In testing children, Binet rejected rote knowledge that might have been learned in school as an indicator of intelligence. Rather, he suggested, there was no one entity of something called intelligence but rather “a hierarchy among diverse intelligences,”24 qualities he identified as comprehension, judgment, reasoning, and invention. He emphasized that of those, he considered only one, judgment, to be fundamental. By judgment Binet meant the quality of the child’s logic.25
To gauge a child’s mental ability, Binet established the chronological age when most French children accurately answered each of his test’s questions. For example, he asked children of different ages, “What is the difference between a fly and a butterfly?” When a 5-year-old child did not know, Binet recognized that children’s judgment may be limited by their experience, and he would inquire about the child’s environment. Some children, he found, had never seen a butterfly. Although all of the children Binet evaluated lived in Paris, some had never seen the Seine.26 Binet was one of the few psychologists of his time to recognize the possible role of environment in development, a factor he discovered by considering children on a case-by-case basis.
In another test of judgment, Binet showed children who were between 7 and 11 years of age five boxes that looked identical but were of different weights. He asked the children to arrange the boxes from lightest to heaviest.27 When, inevitably, there were incorrect answers, Binet responded with sensitivity for the child’s injured pride. He advised other testers that “one must never point out . . . the errors.”28 Here, Binet distinguished between the educator’s desire to teach by correcting students and the psychologist’s goal to evaluate children’s reasoning.
For each examination question, Binet located the age when almost all children responded accurately, what he called that question’s “mental age.” The child’s score was a ratio of his or her chronological age and the averaged mental ages of the questions answered. Binet’s scoring method seemed awkward to Goddard. For example, if a 10-year-old child scored a 10 in mental age on the Binet test, the ratio was 1. To make the numbers easier to handle, Goddard multiplied the ratio by 100, and the child’s test score was described as 100. If a 10-year-old child’s mental age was 8, the score was 80.
There were striking differences in the ways Binet and Goddard understood intelligence in children. Binet never doubted that in a dynamic process a child’s environment influenced their mental development; he saw his test as an indicator of a child’s functioning at that moment and that with support the score could change. Goddard, by contrast, believed that mental ability was an inherited quantity, fixed and unchanging. Despite this difference, each grasped the importance of assessing the abilities of intellectually challenged children, Binet because he developed and tested his method in classrooms and witnessed teachers’ struggles to understand their students’ learning needs, and Goddard because he hoped to classify the intelligence of the children at the school he headed. In the field of psychology these contrasting views of intelligence tests would become momentous.
Both scholars worked apart from traditional academic milieus. Binet’s strong views and abrasive personality kept him from appointment to standard academic positions, while Goddard made his contribution in an institutional population. Most significantly, they both understood that medical doctors who diagnosed low-intellect children had little understanding of how to accomplish their task. Binet, especially, warned against “intuition and subjectivism” and observed that doctors “permit themselves to be guided by a subjective impression which they do not seem to think necessary to analyze.”29
In America, Goddard became the Binet test’s ardent proponent, and by 1912 the test had found approval from the nation’s educators, and even more, from physicians, now better able to assess the intelligence of the disabled children and adults they treated. That year,
Goddard published his own study, one that would become foundational in the literature about the inheritance of intelligence and character: The Kallikak Family. Goddard’s book told the history of an aristocratic Revolutionary War–era family he called the Kallikaks (a pseudonym, based on the Greek words for “good” and “bad”) in which Goddard compared two genealogical family lines that he attributed to one man. One line was the product of an illegitimate child fathered with an “imbecile” tavern maid. Goddard claimed that the descendants of this pair, whom a Goddard assistant discovered living in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, represented multiple generations who were eugenically undesirable, including degenerates, alcoholics, prostitutes, and many who were feebleminded. The same scion later married a righteous Quaker woman, and the ensuing generations of their offspring flourished and maintained the family’s aristocratic tradition.30 Goddard argued that these dissimilar outcomes revealed that heredity determined intelligence and character, which were then passed from generation to generation as single traits. From the turn of the century to the 1930s, when Skodak began her doctoral studies with Goddard, much of the educated class agreed.
Marie Skodak returned from Europe in the spring of 1932 and looked ahead to beginning PhD studies at Ohio State that fall. For the intervening months, she accepted a position in which she would test the intelligence of children at what was—despite its forbidding name, the New York State Custodial Asylum for Un-Teachable Idiots—the most progressive institution in the nation for children of low intelligence. It was located in Rome, New York.
The Rome school was founded in 1827 as a home for the poor and insane, but by 1893 it segregated intellectually limited women, ages 15 to 45, to prevent their bearing children. In 1905, an unconventional physician, Charles Bernstein, once an orphan cared for by a harsh relative, became Rome’s superintendent. Although at first he held severe views of the inmates, Bernstein soon transformed the school into one of the nation’s first institutions to provide education and training for those with low intelligence.31 A humanist, Bernstein established that the feebleminded were capable of more, sometimes far more, than the asylum’s name implied. They were entitled, he insisted, to opportunities equivalent to those available to all other citizens, and he arranged employment for residents in reforestation and on farms and in many other work areas. At the Rome school the residents “virtually ran the institution, producing most of the food, helping to care for other inmates, and producing the inmate newsletter.”32
According to a colleague, Bernstein believed that the motto for the majority of institutions ought to be “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”33 Instead, Bernstein created groups of small homes called colonies where residents lived, worked, and led relatively normal lives. During his administration, from 1905 to 1942, a period when eugenic thinking dominated the nation, Bernstein was “one of the few institutional superintendents to challenge eugenic orthodoxies . . . such as involuntary sterilization and permanent incarceration.”34 Bernstein’s contribution became widely recognized, and in 1908 leaders of institutions for the intellectually challenged elected him president of the American Association for Mental Deficiency (AAMD). The model he created in which low-intelligence adolescents and adults could live and work was copied nationally.
Marie Skodak had arrived at the Rome school confident that the limitations of cognitive inadequacy in those considered mentally deficient were inevitable, that no amount of education or training could alter their effects. But one day that summer she witnessed the arrival of elderly parents who brought their “severely handicapped forty-year-old son to the school in a basket.”35 For the first time, Skodak confronted the suffering of a family for whom no effort had been made to intervene in a needy child’s development. This disturbing experience would stay with her for the rest of her life. It is plausible that it led Skodak to reconsider her view of inevitable outcomes for the mentally deficient, yet it would be some years before her ideas actually shifted.
There is no record that when Skodak began her studies at Ohio State that fall she and her mentor, Henry Goddard, discussed her Rome experience. There is evidence, however, that around this time Goddard’s own ideas about intelligence were evolving. He had recently begun to recognize the potential for change in those who were classified as “morons,”—those with IQs between 50 and 69—a term he himself had originated.36
This was also a time when some in the United States were reconsidering hard-edged eugenic prescriptions for the control of human reproduction, and it is likely that Skodak’s graduate coursework exposed her to a complexity of views. On the side of strict eugenic control, she probably read The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding, the 1910 work of Charles Benedict Davenport, head of Cold Spring Harbor’s Eugenics Record Office. She might also have found a more moderate view in Heredity and Environment in the Development of Men, a classic textbook by Edwin Grant Conklin, of Princeton University. Nevertheless, as she began graduate training in the early 1930s, it was Goddard’s eugenic ideas that most influenced her.
In 1933, with no relief in sight from the effects of the Depression, in downtown Columbus men sold apples on the street, and Marie Skodak completed her first year of doctoral studies. To keep the university running and faculty employed, salaries at Ohio State were reduced by 30 percent. Skodak’s own stipend for the next year would be drastically cut by 50 percent. Anxious about her finances, she studied the psychology department’s postings of summer jobs, but nothing paid very much. Then she spotted a notice of a position in Iowa.
The first thing Skodak checked was the salary. She no longer waited tables in the Faculty Club, but when she had, she made about $14 a month (in current dollars, about $300). The advertised job—a position invented by Harold Skeels—would pay $50 a month for three months (today, about $1,000 a month) and provide room and board. To Skodak—in fact, to most people at the time—this was a royal sum. The position required IQ testing of low-intelligence children and adults in several Iowa institutions, one of which was the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home at Davenport. The notice was signed by Harold M. Skeels, PhD, Director of Graduate Training at the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. An expert in testing children’s intelligence, Skeels had recently been asked by the state’s Board of Control for Institutions to assess the abilities of residents in Iowa’s institutional facilities.
Skodak raced to her typewriter. In a letter to Skeels, she reviewed her experience, which in every detail matched the job he described. She told of her Ohio State training in testing intelligence in young children and of her experience testing institutionalized children at the Rome school. But what Skodak could not have known was that to a child who lived at the Davenport Home, the Rome school would have been paradise. Rome was a well-managed and well-funded residential setting where highly trained responsive staff treated residents kindly and provided educational stimulation and real-world experiences. While some of Iowa’s institutions provided caring environments for the state’s low-intellect children, the full-to-bursting, destitute Davenport Home crowded over 700 normal-intelligence residents into a facility designed for about 400, with many children housed in small “cottages” that once served as Civil War barracks. Untrained, overwhelmed cottage matrons were too busy to supply the children with attention or affection or even to satisfy their ordinary needs for clean clothing or adequate hygiene, everyday care that most families provide.37
Skeels offered her the position, but also warned of what lay ahead. As he would discover, Skodak was not easily discouraged, but once in Iowa she would find that Iowa station researchers joked darkly about the Davenport Home: that it was barely in Iowa (they were right, it was on the banks of the Mississippi River, about a mile from Illinois); no soldiers’ orphans lived there (right again, most children were there because their parents could not support them or had abandoned them, or the children were sent by the courts because of their parents’ mental or social incompetence); and as Skeels had w
arned, it was anything but a “home” (again, exactly right).
Skodak had limited experience traveling in the United States. She had been to Hungary, and from there visited Germany and Austria, but “anything west of Toledo,” she admitted, “was a mystery.” In 1933’s record-breaking heat, Skodak’s bus from Columbus, Ohio, to Iowa City, with stops in Indianapolis and Peoria, traveled 550 miles of Iowa’s primitive roads. In the entire state only 139 miles of nearly 8,000 miles were asphalt covered with an additional 3,000 miles considered paved, but those surfaces were gravel.38 During her journey, which probably took about 20 hours, passengers had no choice but to close their windows to keep out the road dust.
As her bus crossed the Mississippi River into Iowa, Skodak anticipated a pastoral landscape of picturesque farmhouses surrounded by rolling fields of rich dark soil, rows of thriving corn and golden wheat, and herds of grazing livestock, all set against the bluest of blue skies. But the parched landscape that unfolded outside the bus windows was almost a photonegative of what Skodak envisioned: dry corn stalks rustling like stiff paper; Iowa’s famed wheat desiccated from drought and fierce heat; occasional shabby farmhouses, their paint peeling from dust storms.