The Orphans of Davenport

by Marilyn Brookwood

  Baldwin’s accounts are especially remarkable for his refusal to apply eugenic assumptions in interpreting children’s behaviors and abilities. For example, in his book, Baldwin narrates a case study interview with a girl whose mother had died and left ten young children to be cared for by their blacksmith father. When the father’s job was no longer needed in the community and the family was left destitute, the conduct of the girl and her siblings changed. The school then labeled two of the siblings “morons” and suspected the girl, now 14, should also be so labeled. Baldwin wrote:

  She was extremely dirty, poorly dressed and unattractive in her manner, a lonely figure among the other pupils who, with the teacher, shared the belief that the family was “no account.” Her reactions to the psychologist were armed with the hostility with which all of her family intrenched [sic] themselves against strangers. Her attitude gradually changed under sympathetic questioning, and the interview established that she was not mentally deficient, but bewildered and resentful about a situation for which she was not responsible.14

  In addition to the case study approach, Baldwin’s commitment to quantitative research methods set him apart from his peers. Moreover, he was also ahead of his colleagues in recognizing the importance of current biological studies that suggested that environment shaped development.

  In a 1924 paper published in the American Naturalist, at the time a descriptive and theoretical journal with popular as well as scientific appeal, Thomas Hunt Morgan, a biologist and geneticist then at Columbia University, had proposed that environment influenced genetic outcomes in animals and humans.15 Morgan had made this suggestion in other papers as well, and it is likely that Baldwin recognized the idea’s significance for psychology. Although the science that supported Morgan’s discoveries was not obscure, the Iowa station was the only research group to draw on those findings. At the time, graduate study in psychology rarely included biology, the scientific method, or statistics.

  In 1928, Baldwin sharply criticized psychology’s decadal compilation of its latest findings published in the Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Nature and Nurture, edited by Lewis Terman. Baldwin wrote, “Education [and psychology] have not grasped the fundamental concepts of scientific research. . . . That maturation is influenced, accelerated, retarded, and modified by environmental factors is accepted by most of the leading biologists of today.”16 Tragically, that year, after an accidental nick from a barber’s razor, Baldwin died of erysipelas. Another University of Iowa psychologist, 31-year-old George Stoddard, was named Baldwin’s successor.

  Born in Carbondale, Pennsylvania—he called it “a little anthracite town”—Stoddard’s older sister encouraged him, he said, with “ambition honeyed over with love.”17 As an undergraduate at Pennsylvania State University, Stoddard began in engineering, then tried mathematics, but was uninterested until he discovered education, at the time a close cousin to the fledgling discipline of psychology. “Now I was hungry,” he said, “for the intellectual life that chemical engineering had denied me.”18 Stoddard then made the unusual choice among American psychologists to take some of his graduate training in Europe. Speaking almost no French, in 1922 he presented himself at the Sorbonne and was accepted for study under a group of psychologists that included Theodore Simon, the research partner of the recently deceased Alfred Binet. Simon’s area of expertise—mental testing—informed his lectures. In addition, Simon allowed Stoddard free run of Binet’s former laboratory, including access to all of his papers. For a year Stoddard steeped himself in journals and research that revealed Binet’s core ideas about the development of children’s thinking, his idea that “any abstract psychological variable—including intelligence—was neither unitary nor simple of measurement,” but had to include both its complexity and diverse forms of expression.19 That year Stoddard earned a master’s degree with honors.

  When he returned to the United States in 1923, at the suggestion of a Penn State dean Stoddard entered the University of Iowa to earn a PhD in psychology. From the window of the train taking him to Iowa City, Stoddard looked out upon “acres of rich dark . . . farmland—corn, wheat, oats, alfalfa, soybeans” and wondered where in the world there could be enough people to consume those oceans of produce. His Iowa mentor would be G. M. Ruch, a demanding perfectionist in tests and measurements who had been a star pupil of Lewis Terman.

  Terman and Stoddard had not met, but because of his connection to Ruch, Terman later offered Stoddard a “richly endowed fellowship at Stanford . . . mine for the asking.”20 Stoddard turned him down. In 1916 Terman had authored a widely accepted revision of Binet’s test which lifted him, and all of mental test psychology, to professional dominance. Accepting Terman’s offer would have assured Stoddard a prestigious career and secure future. However, neither Stoddard nor Ruch, both test measurement specialists, endorsed Terman’s revision of Binet. They believed that Terman had misinterpreted or even misappropriated Binet’s understanding of the dynamic nature of intelligence as related to children’s judgment and experience. Binet, who never felt confident that he could define intelligence, had created an individualized assessment to identify areas in which children’s learning needed support and remediation. His test did not produce a score, but rather an evaluation. On the other hand, Terman’s revision of Binet’s test contrasted sharply with Binet’s. It was typically administered to groups of schoolchildren, with results called the intelligence quotient (IQ) computed numerically—a score used to rank students into appropriate school placements. Terman’s test was also used to evaluate the intelligence of individuals in hospitals, institutions, and prisons.

  To define a child’s intellectual level, Terman placed their IQ score on a gradient that ranged from “idiot” to “genius.” For example, a score between 50 and 69 positioned the child at the “moron” level; an average score was between 90 and 109; and a score between 120 and 139 rated the child as “very superior.”21 Ruch labeled Terman’s approach to intelligence testing “web spinning”; that is, he suggested it offered a mistaken—even impossible—precision about an individual’s intellectual ability, a precision Binet had rejected. (While the terms idiot, imbecile, and genius had been around for centuries, and moron was suggested by Goddard, Binet never attached them to definitive score ranges.) “Binet’s brilliant hypotheses about the [complex] nature of intelligence,” Stoddard said, “were lost on Terman. . . . The Stanford group [of Terman supporters] was highly successful . . . without so much as a nod to Binet’s theories.”22 But Terman’s many admirers may not have recognized the sharp contrasts between his and Binet’s approaches.

  Stoddard may also have rejected Terman’s invitation because he found Iowa’s intellectual and artistic milieu appealing—he prized its creativity in theater, writing, and its art programs as well as in psychology—and in 1927 he accepted Iowa’s offer to become an assistant professor in the psychology department. Stoddard had already published a book on achievement tests and looked ahead to a conventional teaching and research career. But when Baldwin died a year later, he accepted the university’s offer to become director of the Iowa station. Unusually curious, a reader of Freud, Bertrand Russell, and William James, as well as Thomas Hunt Morgan and other biologists and geneticists, as station director Stoddard would have the freedom to explore Binet’s vision of environment’s role in development, obvious to the French, but to most Americans unknown or unacceptable.

  Stoddard had been station director for about six years when Marie Skodak arrived in Iowa in 1934. Recalling her first impression of him, she noted that Stoddard had assembled a committed staff of unusually curious, perceptive, self-directed psychologists, for whom he was the “guiding spirit.” With meticulous questions he demanded they search for explanations, always asking how they knew something, what evidence they had, how certain they were.23 Stoddard’s demands for exacting revisions of graduate students’ research, often due the next day, made them fear showing him their drafts. But if those ar
ound him found him intimidating, they were also in awe of his quick grasp of station discoveries that soon would lead to radical investigations of a question in which American psychologists had shown little interest: did environment influence the development of intelligence in young children?

  Psychology’s inattention to young children may have reflected the certainty that heredity determined intelligence and that even as children got older, intelligence seldom changed. This belief in fixed IQ, labeled “IQ constancy,” had the support of almost all psychologists, including Lewis Terman, and was rarely questioned. If the IQ score at age 4 remained the IQ score at age 40, then experience played almost no role, so why investigate it? But Stoddard considered constancy “the diet upon which most American psychologists had been raised” and thought it open to challenge.24

  After Iowa’s first doubts about constancy had appeared in Bird Baldwin’s 1928 study of farm children, research from station psychologist Beth Wellman, published in 1932, questioned it further. Wellman, born in Iowa in 1895, arrived at the Iowa station in 1920 to study psychology. She brought with her a degree in elementary education and traditional ideas about children’s intelligence. During her doctoral studies, she also worked as Baldwin’s secretary, a period when Baldwin became widowed. Eventually, he and Wellman became engaged. After she earned her PhD in 1925, Wellman did postdoctoral work at Yale and Columbia, where each offered her a faculty appointment. But in 1928, Wellman returned to Iowa to marry Baldwin, who died just weeks before their wedding. Wellman became the guardian of Baldwin’s three young children.

  In 1932, Wellman published findings that middle-class children who attended the University of Iowa’s laboratory preschool and upper school—many from the homes of university faculty—gained in intelligence. To test the children, Wellman had used Terman’s well-regarded 1916 Stanford-Binet and a similar test for preschool children, the 1928 Kuhlman-Binet. Wellman tested children from ages 2 to 14 (5-year-old Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was one) and found that some children’s IQ scores showed remarkable increases. Wellman found children with below-average preschool test results who, over time, had risen to the superior range, and some with average scores had advanced to the very superior range.25 A few children Wellman studied made even greater gains. One, for example, advanced from an IQ of 89, in the low average range at age 3, to an IQ of 149 at age 10 and down to 132 at age 13. Over ten years, another child moved from an IQ of 98 to an IQ of 153.

  Wellman discovered that gains in preschool children were related to the amount of time they spent in school and that children limited to half-day sessions did not gain as much as those who attended for a full day. She also found that preschool children’s IQ scores plateaued or declined during summer vacations. But Wellman’s bombshell finding was that children who entered preschool with lower IQs made greater gains than children who entered with higher IQs.26 Wellman explained this counterintuitive finding by suggesting that while heredity did not determine intelligence, it might place limits on the individual’s response to experience. She also thought it plausible that children who received much home stimulation might gain less from additional stimulation in school, and children with less early stimulation might experience greater benefits.

  Wellman and her station colleagues did not know what to make of her peculiar results. How definitive were they? Was the reliability of the tests she had used as well established as they had thought? One thing the Iowa psychologists were sure about was that some earlier investigations of preschool children—none done at Iowa—had produced what another psychologist, Northwestern University’s Paul Witty, labeled “the IQ dogma” of constant, fixed intelligence. While Witty questioned Wellman’s discoveries, he suggested that if Iowa’s results were uncertain, results from other investigators might be, too. After all, everyone used the same tests. Witty also suggested possible bias in those who reported the constant IQ. As an example, Witty looked to a study from Lewis Terman’s graduate student, Barbara Burks, who dismissed declines of intelligence due to lack of stimulation because such decreases “occur only once or twice in a thousand times in American communities.”27 Marie Skodak recalled that Wellman’s discovery of IQ score changes “rocked conventional beliefs, not only for education and psychology, but for much of society.”28 These unexpected results would set the table at the Iowa station for its next decade of research.

  As a graduate student, Wellman had briefly assisted Lewis Terman at Stanford with one of his studies, and for a while she had been influenced by his racial and nationalistic bias toward an innately determined intellectual meritocracy. Now, her unanticipated results triggered disagreements at the station that were not, Marie Skodak said, “congenial” for the research team, yet everyone agreed her findings demanded further investigation. Because she was the first of the Iowa psychologists to challenge the orthodox view, the brilliant, shy, conscientious Wellman became a lightning rod for criticism from her profession, the most severe from Terman and his associates.29 Eventually, under Stoddard’s leadership, Wellman’s studies and those of her colleagues Harold Skeels and Marie Skodak extended the station’s evidence that environment might influence developmental outcomes.

  Skeels, a young station psychologist with a special interest in early development, was skeptical of Wellman’s conclusions. Born in 1901 into a family with traditional views—his father was a well-known evangelical preacher and his mother was the church organist—Skeels’s early education was in a rural Iowa one-room schoolhouse, then in a high school for about 200 students, where he won debate contests and was first in his class. Not obviously ambitious, after graduating from high school Skeels taught agricultural methods to 4-H groups. As an undergraduate he studied animal husbandry and agricultural education at Iowa State, in Ames. His college training provided a platform for him to become a livestock manager, where he could apply his knowledge of the genetic basis of trait inheritance. After earning his degree, he worked in a dairy as an analyst of the butterfat content in milk produced by various breeds of cattle, a factor that assisted farmers in selective breeding.30

  Skeels left almost no paper trail about his life events, so it isn’t clear what led to his turn from an area of expertise that assured his future in Iowa’s agriculture economy to a career in the little-known profession of psychology. But in a move more radical than his background predicted, in 1928 he began doctoral studies at the Iowa station. It is plausible that the station’s outreach to farm families through radio broadcasts and pamphlets, a mission written into its charter, made the field highly visible. Awarded the PhD in 1932, Skeels had developed expertise in tests of the intelligence of young children and so had a special interest in Wellman’s discoveries.

  As station psychologists questioned, debated, and analyzed their findings in meetings Stoddard called soirées, he nurtured their curiosity and intellectual camaraderie. In her plain-spoken way, Skodak later explained to historian of child development Milton Senn that she and her colleagues were not sharing breakthroughs, but simply talking.31 And to Lewis Terman’s biographer, Henry L. Minton, she related:

  There was an air of freedom at Iowa, you could pursue an area of research that made sense and people would support you. . . . If you needed subjects or facilities, somehow they were made available. There was something there that was more important than your own personal pleasure or personal comfort.32

  “[Stoddard] was the intellectual light of the time,” another station member remembered. And Skodak was clear about Stoddard’s leadership: “Under him, the station had its finest hour.”33

  Psychologists studied child development at Stanford, Columbia, Berkeley, Minnesota, Chicago, and other schools, but none matched what became one of the most stimulating and productive research milieus in the history of psychology. At the Iowa station, an ensemble of scholars made landmark contributions that created new knowledge about children’s intellectual development and that became known as “the Iowa point of view.”34 In little more than a decade, station researchers p
ublished over seventy studies. Of its core investigators—Bird Baldwin, George Stoddard, Harold Skeels, Marie Skodak, and Beth Wellman—Wellman was the most prolific and the most dauntless. Despite personal tragedy that overnight made her the guardian of three young children, then a diagnosis of ultimately fatal breast cancer, from 1932 to 1949 she published twenty-five investigations in research journals and countless articles in the popular press. Taken together, the station’s body of work signaled Iowa’s arrival at the gateway of modern cognitive science, although for decades that would not be recognized.

  Bird Baldwin’s audacious thinking about the role of environment in children’s development, followed by George Stoddard’s research leadership and very likely Wellman’ investigations, attracted the interest of a young intellectual, polymath psychologist—Beardsley Ruml, director of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Foundation, with its mission to support research in child development. An Iowan himself, two years after he graduated from Dartmouth College Ruml had earned a PhD in psychology and education at the University of Chicago. He was 23 years old.

  Ruml and his associate director of the Memorial, economist and social scientist Lawrence K. Frank, combed the nation for research that had the potential to improve the welfare of mothers and children. Together, they steadied a foundation whose goals were out of focus when they quickly assessed what had been holding it back, the inadequacy of current social science research. Ruml wrote a paradigm-altering memorandum to the Rockefeller board, a paper still referenced in the field, in which he insisted that research in social science needed to reform its approach; one commentator said that at the time social science research “was like a physician who practiced in the absence of medical science.”35

  Stoddard’s outlier ideas appealed to Ruml, and at the station he found rich soil for the Memorial’s investment. Iowa was awarded about $1 million (today, about $14 million) to pursue its research, far more than any other institution and a sum that put the unknown station on the map. Stoddard’s intellectual independence supported the Spelman Memorial’s hope for innovations in the field. That the station had remarkable self-determination can be attributed partly to Stoddard’s gifts as an administrator and visionary and to a university that harnessed his talents. Concurrently he served as director of the Iowa station, head of the University of Iowa’s Graduate School, and head of the psychology department, a fusion his colleagues referred to as “The Holy Trinity.” At other university research sites for child development, such as Berkeley and the University of Minnesota, turf competition interfered in access to the Memorial’s grants. Although those centers were awarded some resources, Ruml and the Memorial, concerned that those rivalries would get in the way of productive collaboration, found the infighting discouraging.36 The Spelman Memorial had supported Baldwin’s 1928 study of farm children and made possible many of the studies that would be completed in the 1930s by Wellman and Skeels. (Skodak began her work later in the decade, after most of that money had been disbursed.) Yet, at the station there was no ideological “party line” that suggested IQ constancy was incorrect, only endless discussions and each researcher had to find their own way.