The Orphans of Davenport

by Marilyn Brookwood

  At the time of Skodak’s June 1933 trip, the front page of an Iowa newspaper warned, “Agriculture Reports Forecast Crop Failure Over Most of United States.” The paper told that “drouth, pestilence, dust storms, and burning heat waves have besieged crops in the center of the agricultural belt since planting time.”39 Only a year earlier, Iowa’s National Guard held farmers in an outdoor barbed wire prison because they had dragged a judge from his courtroom and placed a noose around his neck. Furious and desperate when the judge sided with banks that foreclosed on their farms, the farmers wanted retribution.40 From her bus Skodak saw what happened in a rural state when nature turned dangerous and the economy failed. To her, those first views of Iowa seemed forbidding, almost threatening.41

  Waiting at the University of Iowa Student Union when she arrived were Harold Skeels, along with research station graduate student Orlo Crissey, who would coordinate her summer work and that of two other young psychology students, Emalyn Weiss, from the University of Pennsylvania, and Marjorie Page, from the University of Minnesota. Crissey teased that the women were the “brain testers.” But the institutionalized children they met the next day decided they should have a different name, and that summer they became known as the “brain sisters.”42

  No matter what they were called, their assignment was daunting. In six institutions across the state in which Iowa housed hundreds of low-intelligence children and thousands of dependent adults, from 7:30 in the morning to late afternoon, the women administered and graded IQ tests, and to ensure accuracy, regraded the tests of one another. They had no secretarial assistance and maintained testing records themselves. They worked without breaks until lunch and then dinner, and while institutional meals were filling, with a lot of potatoes and corn and chicken on Sundays, not much more could be said for them. At the end of each day, Skodak and her colleagues accompanied child residents outdoors for games or stories, and when darkness drove them inside, the women finished grading and recording the day’s results.43

  Seeking some relief, there were occasional stays with station graduate students in Iowa City who offered congeniality and sleeping accommodations on the floor. Happy to receive Iowa’s warm hospitality, Skodak and her colleagues forgot, almost, about comfort. And then there was the dust. With nighttime temperatures much warmer than usual, air conditioning was an open window. Many, probably including Skodak, slept with damp cloths over their faces. Each morning she found that anything left out at night would be etched in the fine beige-yellow dust that permeated her clothing and got into her eyes and mouth.

  As the end of summer approached, Marie Skodak found that despite harsh conditions and endless workdays, it would not be easy to say goodbye to the children. She and her two colleagues had “learned so much . . . we were aware of their loneliness, and worried about our brief friendships with them.”44 She understood why society thought of them as “institutional children”—throwaway children really—why adults, even most psychologists, expected so little from them. Deprived of adults’ interest or affection, they had a job no child would want: they had to raise themselves. With unmet health needs, meager educations, and detached relationships, their eagerness to spend time with a kind adult often emerged when the psychologists asked to test their intelligence. In that setting, one in which many children grow restless, their yearning for adult attention made them too eager to cooperate. To convince themselves, some children whose parents had left them at the Davenport Home told others that soon their families would return to take them home.45 Skodak feared that when she left at the end of the summer, they would think that she, too, had deserted them.

  Working alongside Harold Skeels, Skodak found that he also cared deeply about the fates of these cast-off children, and the two psychologists grew to respect and trust one another.46 When she shared with him her fears about leaving, he reminded her that the results she gathered would contribute to the research station’s mission to transform the study of child development into a science that would help these and other children like them. Packing up, Skodak thought about the farm families she had met that summer who had suffered crushing threats to their survival. Compared with those concerns, the fine dust that drifted everywhere didn’t seem a problem, and she returned to Ohio State with some regret.

  As the new academic year began, Skodak found that long-simmering rivalries within the Ohio State psychology department might imperil her future. The struggle concerned whether the experimental psychology faculty would prevent candidates who were in the field of clinical psychology, like Skodak, from earning PhDs. Experimental psychologists believed then, as some still do, that psychologists who worked in the clinic were not rigorous, scientific thinkers. Consultation with needy groups and individuals, they reasoned, was more an art than a science, and its academic preparation did not meet the standards of scholarly pursuit and was not worthy of the PhD. The conflict between the two factions was almost a war.

  A rumor that the experimentalists would relentlessly fail clinical candidates when they took their qualifying exams was made real when the department published a devastating exam failure rate. Even Skodak’s illustrious mentor, Henry Goddard, would be unable to protect her. Adding to her distress, the university’s increased hardships meant even deeper cuts in graduate students’ stipends. The self-confidence Skodak felt when she declared she would sit at the red table had carried her far, but now her stellar future might be slipping away. Her situation was grim.

  Anxious about money and struggling with possibly fatal departmental politics, Skodak was surprised to hear again from Harold Skeels. On official state of Iowa stationery, he wrote that in addition to his position as a research psychologist at the Iowa station, he had been appointed Iowa’s first state psychologist and invited her to return to Iowa as his assistant.47 She didn’t know that he had already set up a salary line with her name on it, although her acceptance was a gamble he probably thought he would lose: working for the state of Iowa on a project connected to the little-known research station was no competition for the professional advantages of Ohio State’s distinguished psychology department.

  Rebuffed, discouraged, and remembering the warmth of the Iowa station and Iowa’s people, Skodak decided to flee a situation that many seeking a prestigious degree might have endured. She considered Skeels’s job offer “her salvation” and immediately resigned her assistantship, left Henry Goddard’s mentorship, and settled in for another bus ride from Columbus to Iowa City. Her salary would be $100 per month (today, about $1,900), plus room and board at the institutions, and a car, necessary to visit institutions around the state. Marie Skodak was on her way.

  Chapter Two

  STARTING OVER

  Trading her life as an Ohio State doctoral scholar to become the state of Iowa’s assistant psychologist in January 1934 propelled the high-energy Marie Skodak on a completely new path. Alongside Harold Skeels, Skodak tested the intelligence of children in the overcrowded, understaffed Davenport Home and traveled the state to test children in other institutions as well. Absorbed in her work, Iowa’s winter ice storms and then its fierce summer heat and dust seemed small inconveniences—she was too fascinated by her work to let anything stop her.

  To prepare for each test session, Skodak read a child’s record, often including a report from the indigent care ward of University Hospital in Iowa City about the child’s mother and the mother’s and (if known) the father’s family. Typically, the hospital psychologist had tested the mother’s intelligence, and those scores were included in her child’s file. To Skodak and Skeels, and to most people of that period, children’s IQ scores were like crystal balls—they predicted the child’s future mental ability. If Skodak knew before her arrival that some Iowa station psychologists questioned those forecasts, she did not mention that in her later writing about this time.

  Skodak had returned to Iowa to work with Skeels, but in addition to his Davenport assignment, he was a faculty member and researcher at the Iowa station. This connecte
d her to the station’s professors and graduate students who now became her social and intellectual base. At the station she met experts in children’s language development, learning, social development, nutrition, and parent education, among other specialties. She never expected, however, that station members would challenge an idea she had no reason to question: that heredity determined children’s intelligence. Skodak’s certainty about heredity’s role was shared by her own family, the academics and her fellow students at Ohio State, and by most ordinary people. The aphorisms “like begets like” and “blood will tell” summed it up—those who came from genetically inferior parents would also be genetically inferior.

  To her surprise, Skodak’s new Iowa station associates viewed her not only as a talented psychologist who assisted Harold Skeels and who held conventional hereditarian beliefs about child development, but as an unofficial emissary from one of eugenics’ leaders, her former mentor Henry Goddard. When asked by some station members to defend Goddard’s theories that intelligence was fixed, that “intellectual deficiencies” ran in families, Skodak was caught short. Behind those questions, she discovered, was a competing idea, that perhaps environment and stimulation played a role in the development of children’s intelligence. Station research had begun to suggest an idea Skodak had never considered, that like physical growth, a child’s cognitive capacities could be influenced by their environment.1

  Despite Iowa’s grim Depression conditions, dangerous weather, and raging Dust Bowl windstorms, during the 1930s more graduate students arrived to study at the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station than at any other psychology program in the nation.2 This suggests that since the station’s founding in 1917, word of its child development explorations had reached a new audience. That was precisely what the station’s founder, a Des Moines matron and mother with no formal academic training, had hoped.

  Born in 1858, Cora Bussey Hillis was in her early 20s when her mother died and she assumed the care of her disabled younger sister, who could not walk and was shut out of participation in many activities. Although doctors had little hope for her sister’s recovery, Hillis searched for therapies to support her return to health and eventually helped her attend college and enjoy a productive life.3 From this lesson, Hillis, the daughter of a Civil War brigadier general and now married and with her own family, became deeply interested in child welfare and development. When she tragically lost three of her five young children to accident and illness, Hillis recognized that, as with her sister, not even doctors had the necessary information to keep young children healthy and safe. From that terrible awareness, Hillis defined her life’s mission: the establishment of a center that would “give the normal child the same scientific study by research methods that we [in Iowa] give to crops and cattle.”4

  To support her goal, Hillis began a search for scientific theories of child development. She was amazed not by what she found, but that there was nothing to find: “I waded through oceans of stale theory written by bachelor professors or elderly teachers. I discovered there was no well-defined science of child rearing, there were no standards. All the knowledge was theoretical with no research basis.”5 Hillis became convinced that what was needed was the replication of a model already ubiquitous in Iowa—the United States’ agricultural scientific laboratories, called stations, where research about crops and livestock helped propel the nation to agricultural dominance. To strengthen her trees and shrubs, Hillis knew she could get direction from the local station about how to “make them luxuriant.” If she needed to protect her chicks from the cold, the experimental station could tell her how to do that as well.

  From the last decade of the nineteenth century into the second decade of the twentieth, Hillis pursued her mission to advance research about children’s healthy development. In 1901, she sought state funds to establish a vital statistics registry for the study of infant mortality. When that money went instead to rural farm projects, the strong-willed Hillis established Iowa’s first hospital-based children’s ward, served on President Theodore Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission, and eventually became a leader in the National Congress of Mothers.

  As she gained expertise and contacts, Hillis’s mission became widely known, but when asked about her idea’s origins she would say, “Oh, it’s in the air.” She feared that if it were known that the concept came from a woman, what she called “humble origins,” it would not be seriously considered. But Hillis was an innovator—she had an idea that no one before had considered—one she believed was “God’s work.”6 In an effort to enlist advocates, she approached the University of Iowa, where four of its presidents barely heard her out before turning her down. One suggested that she apply herself to raising money for the campus carillon. Hillis also attempted to find support from the state’s legislature, but in nearly twenty years just six legislators agreed to speak with her.

  To generate a lobbying force, Hillis gave talks on “Corn Culture vs. Child Culture” at the Farmers’ Institute. She organized a conference that brought together university leaders with representatives of the leading Iowa women’s organizations. Later, she convened a meeting of over thirty state organizations, including officials from Iowa’s eleven congressional districts. Eventually, Hillis developed contacts with newspaper reporters, won endorsements from superintendents of all of Iowa’s public schools, the state’s labor unions, its Federation of Women’s Clubs, parent teacher associations, medical societies, Sunday schools, and from the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.7

  In 1915, her plan moved toward fulfillment when Carl E. Seashore, a psychologist and the dean of the University of Iowa’s Graduate College, agreed that child development required rigorous, scientific study. He predicted that the establishment of a research station would support “experiments on children under the most favorable conditions. . . . This,” he said, “is the psychological moment.”8 About that time, Hillis persuasively argued before the legislature that in just nine years Iowa spent $18 million maintaining inmates in institutions. If four children per county per year avoided delinquency or other “defects,” the money saved would easily recover the costs for the station.9 Her blueprint included the study of the orphans at the Davenport Home, although that did not get underway until Harold Skeels began his work a decade later.

  By 1917, just as Hillis’s proposal had reached the brink of approval from the Iowa legislature, the United States entered World War I. Anticipating that the state’s funds would now go to the war effort, at the last minute her campaign was rescued when local newspapers headlined that “only forty-one of two hundred and fifty Iowa young men were sound enough to go to war.”10 Hillis immediately took to those same newspapers to suggest that the rejected recruits had been brought up by mothers who relied on “inherited tradition and the leadings of instinct” because they lacked scientific information about how to raise fit children. Then Hillis placed a cartoon in the Des Moines Register advertising that Iowa spent more money on goats and hogs than on its own offspring. In response to that pressure, Hillis’s bill finally was passed. Importantly, but without a lot of fuss, Hillis, Seashore, University of Iowa president William H. Jessup, Iowa’s state legislators, and Iowa’s governor, along with 500,000 women’s group supporters, had taken a stand on the side of environment’s influence on development. Now chartered by the state, the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station finally opened for business.

  Under its director, Harvard-trained Bird Baldwin, the Iowa station hired nurses, doctors, nutritionists, teachers, and psychologists who began studies of children’s height, weight, strength, health, and eventually, intelligence. These were some of the first such studies in the nation—they reflected Baldwin’s understanding that children developed in an environment of “interactions and contingencies of . . . interrelated factors that went into making the normal child,”11 and they established his national reputation. But it was Baldwin’s own groundbreaking 1920s investigation of public school achievement in two rural communities, anonym
ized as “Homeland” and “Cedar Creek,” that foretold the station’s future.

  To a casual observer, the one-room schoolhouses in each small town would have seemed indistinguishable. But Baldwin explored further, examining variables of cultural and religious backgrounds, parents’ educational attainment and employment, parental attitudes toward education, the amount of time children spent in school, and, notable for the time, contrasting backgrounds of individual children. He discovered that the mean IQ test score of children in one community was nearly one standard deviation higher than in the other and that those in the higher-scoring group were more than twice as likely to attend college.12 With this investigation Baldwin launched Iowa station research into unexplored territory, one of the first indications that its work would reconsider long-accepted ideas about fixed intelligence. According to historian of social science Hamilton Cravens, Baldwin’s work suggested that in the “ideology of the Iowa Station in the late 1920s . . . there was no controversy about how development worked: nature and nurture interacted.”13

  Refining that lens, Baldwin also embedded the case study method into the station’s research. Although used by Binet and by Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist who studied children’s development, in the 1920s and 1930s, case studies were rarely incorporated into American psychologists’ reports. With the use of this method, however, Baldwin conveyed that empathic exploration of an individual child’s life circumstances might help psychologists avoid errors in interpreting the child’s intelligence status. It was an unconventional approach, a kind of fieldwork, and would surface in station psychologists’ later studies.