The Orphans of Davenport

by Marilyn Brookwood

  Mental deficiency of imbecile level, which will probably continue with an increase in age. Prognosis poor. [They] will be unable to make [their] way outside of the care and protection offered by an institution for feebleminded children. Relatives are not in a position to give the continuous care [they] will need.55

  Skeels planned to commit the toddlers, fragile, wretched, defective infants, to a children’s ward in one of Iowa’s institutions for the retarded.56 But despite urgent efforts, he failed to find places for BD and CD—institutions were overcrowded and the girls’ compromised development was too troubling. Skeels began to fear they might be “unplaceable.”57

  That summer a Midwest heat wave broke every record in Iowa’s sixty-two years of weather reporting. In seven days in August, “crop yields declined as fast as the mercury shot up” to 115°F,58 some areas suffered dust storms and the crop-killing chinch bugs they brought, and seventy-two Iowans died of the heat.59 With conditions deteriorating, Skeels feared that Davenport’s crowding would soon become even more extreme. Adding to his burdens, he also needed to find places for older low-intelligence children who should have been transferred from Davenport months and years earlier, a backlog that contributed to the orphanage’s severe overcrowding. An overwhelmed staff continually pressed Skeels for the relief such transfers would bring, reminding him that with fewer children care would improve. Skodak remembered that Skeels made use of every possibility to lessen the crowding.60

  Late in the summer, Skeels finally received an invitation for BD’s and CD’s placement from the Woodward State Hospital for the Epileptic and School for the Feebleminded, located 200 miles west, in Boone County. The institution proposed to place each girl on a ward of older girls and women institutionalized due to their “moron” level of mental ability. To send very young children whose fate was sealed by their extremely low intelligence to live with residents institutionalized because their IQ scores were also very low was unheard of. In fact, the proposal, which came not from an administrator but from Woodward’s institutional workers, led to one of the most unorthodox arrangements for children’s care in the history of psychology. If Skeels agreed, BD and CD would live at Woodward with residents whose chronological ages ranged from 16 to 52 and who had mental ages of 5 to 9 years. The women had been committed to the institution in compliance with Iowa’s eugenic policies, and Skeels knew that some, of course, had children of their own.61

  Immediately, plans were made for the 13- and 16-month-old children, severely underdeveloped and almost skeletal in their frailty, and for whom there seemed no hope,62 who were not deaf but did not turn to the sound of voices, did not visually follow objects or people, who could not sit or crawl, and who had extremely low intelligence, to live with the Woodward Home’s low-intelligence women.

  “At the time,” Skodak and Skeels wrote, “neither the Board, nor the institutional staffs, nor the field workers . . . included a single person who had any formal training.”63 None of the Woodward staff were experienced in child development; some had not graduated from high school. The psychologists also indicated that although Woodward had a children’s ward, it cared for severely disabled hospital patients who required continual medical attention.64 While the psychologists appreciated BD’s and CD’s handicaps, they knew that the girls’ impairments did not reach the level of extreme physical disability. And if Woodward’s superintendent, a seasoned physician, played any role in these events, neither Skeels nor Skodak mentioned him. In fact, he was ill and died about six weeks after the girls arrived. Relieved to have secured a placement for the girls, Skeels quickly agreed to Woodward’s offer, since as he saw it, he had done his job and the arrangement was completed.65 Yet his acceptance may be understood as a decision of last resort.

  On September 8, when temperatures had fallen into the 70s, Iowa station graduate students gathered up the little girls along with some random orphanage clothing and set out for Woodward, a town so remote that even today its county’s website warns visitors of its poor roads and inadequate electrical and telephone service. Only a week after BD and CD arrived, Iowa’s scorching summer gave way to what a Woodward area farmer called “unprecedented frosts,” and soon to an early and severe winter. In his diary entry for Thanksgiving, 1934, the tough, stoic Elmer Powers, who like most of his neighbors had lost his entire year’s harvest, wrote, “Of the many Thanksgivings I remember, this one is outstanding in the few things we have to be thankful for.”66

  Chapter Four

  FROM A DOG YOU DO NOT GET A CAT

  —French proverb

  One of Lewis Terman’s favorite books as a child was The World’s Wonders, a collection of adventurers’ travels in Africa and the Arctic.1 Growing up in an Indiana farm family and attending a one-room school, he easily memorized his textbooks and had a drive to go far in life. Born in 1877, and one of nine surviving children, Terman believed that his early interest in learning and his outstanding school record stemmed not from environmental stimulation but from his own, genetically determined maturation. With financial support from his parents, he entered a small teacher training college, the first in his family to take the step to higher education. He then went on to the University of Indiana, where, although he was uninterested in the traditional sciences, he discovered psychology and said he hoped to contribute to that world.2

  With a loan from his family, in 1903 Terman entered graduate school for doctoral studies at what he called “the American Mecca for aspiring psychologists,” Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts.3 Clark’s founder, G. Stanley Hall, became his mentor. Considered one of psychology’s towering figures, Hall founded the American Psychological Association (APA) and established the Child Study Movement, a turn-of-the-century effort to discover everything that could be learned about children, including their physical characteristics, memory, and attention span, among many other traits. At Clark, Terman experienced intellectual stimulation unlike any he had imagined: a university with a range of erudite scholars, a library so well endowed it could not spend all of its funds, and Hall, who attacked intellectual questions, Terman recalled, with “erudition and fertility of imagination that always amazed us.”4

  When Terman informed Hall that mental testing would be his dissertation’s subject, Hall warned “of the danger of being misled by the quasi-exactness of quantitative methods.”5 Terman selected a new adviser and continued his proposed research. For his 1906 dissertation, Genius and Stupidity, he created an intelligence test to evaluate “bright” and “stupid” boys. Although he later recognized that the study of statistics would have aided him, no statistics courses were offered at Clark. (In his research career, Terman relied for statistical analysis upon his students and colleagues—among them Arthur Otis, Truman Kelley, and Quinn McNemar.6)

  Following his first year at Clark, Terman suffered a serious pulmonary hemorrhage diagnosed as tuberculosis and was advised to seek a warmer climate. When he graduated in 1906, he accepted an appointment as a psychology professor at an obscure California teacher training college. In 1910, Terman’s fellow Clark graduate, Edward Huey, turned down a job at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, recommending Terman in his stead. Stanford first appointed Terman to head its School of Education, but when an opening to lead the psychology department soon arose, the university appointed him to that post. Around that time, Huey gave Terman a copy of Alfred Binet’s recently published intelligence test, in wide use in French schools to discover students in need of remediation, and encouraged his friend to rework the test for American students. As one scholar observed, “Terman never received better advice in his life.”7

  Terman’s support for eugenic principles was unwavering, and like Henry Goddard, he saw great value in applying Binet’s test in educational settings, where it could be used to classify those with low intelligence. As he revised the Binet, in 1913 Terman convened a meeting of educators who had used the test—ten papers were presented—to examine its value in school applications, such as test
ing students’ intelligence and assigning their class levels based on their IQ scores. (Binet, who died in 1911, made no claim that his test measured intelligence, which he had never been able to define, and which he thought of as “a complex phenomenon” that was not inherited.8) In the meeting’s summary, Terman described the Binet’s ability—not mentioned by other attendees—to validate the institutionalization of those with low IQ scores. He wrote:

  The segregation of the feeble-minded, which is sure to follow the further use of intelligence tests, will besides aiding in the elimination of degeneracy, remove a demoralizing and retrograding influence from the lives of many normal children . . . those who are compelled to associate with the feeble-minded either in the home or in the school.9

  In interpreting Binet test results, Terman employed the term mental age, borrowed from Wilhelm Stern, a German psychologist of the era, and also used Stern’s term intelligence quotient (IQ). Binet had considered intelligence too complex for numerical measurement and preferred the more circumspect mental level.10 Terman had no such qualms. Like Goddard, Terman multiplied Stern’s ratios by 100, avoiding the need for decimals, so a normal IQ became 100 rather than 1. He claimed that the IQ number indicated an innate, unmodifiable entity, “an amount of quantifiable brain stuff.”11 By 1919, Terman’s Stanford-Binet Revised had become a multiple-choice test of discrete facts—for example, definitions of vocabulary words and answers to mentally computed arithmetic problems—questions Terman claimed could be used to test every sort of child, from the intellectually challenged to those he identified as “wonder children.”12

  Terman wrote reverentially of Alfred Binet as a “creative thinker” and “unpretentious scholar,” and although his test conflicted with Binet’s philosophy, he used Binet’s name in its title and dedicated his book about the test to him. The late Steve McNutt, of the University of Iowa, characterized Terman’s dedication as “an inspired move towards co-opting Binet’s . . . reputation.”13 Further, Binet’s research partner, Theodore Simon, branded Terman’s use of numerical scales for the measurement of intelligence a “betrayal” of Binet’s work.14 Reductive as it was, the simplicity of capturing the measurement of intelligence in a single number made the IQ test an irresistible tool for any profession or institution concerned with mental capacities. By 1924, and for decades after, Terman’s Stanford-Binet became the most utilized IQ test in the nation, recognized by psychologists and by the public as a reliable and authentic measure of intelligence. A clash between Binet’s few American followers and Terman’s ubiquitous American supporters would become inevitable.

  When published in 1916, Terman’s monograph, The Measurement of Intelligence, along with his 1919 monograph, The Intelligence of School Children, captured the imagination of American psychologists and launched his career. He predicted that the Stanford-Binet test would reveal “significant racial differences in general intelligence . . . which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture.”15 His aim for his test was the identification of low-intelligence children and adults who would be involuntarily institutionalized and sterilized, measures he advocated for the improvement of society. “The struggle of civilization,” Terman wrote in 1922, “will be, not to advance, but to hold its own against a relatively increasing spawn of inferior mentality.”16 He labeled those who disagreed “dogmatic deniers of biology’s influence.”17

  With publication of the Stanford-Binet, Terman joined America’s small, informal mental test circle. Some of his fellow members were Henry Goddard, who in addition to his use of the test at the Vineland School also applied it to assess immigrants’ intelligence when they debarked at Ellis Island, and Robert M. Yerkes, of Harvard University, who had written his own intelligence test although it was little used. Goddard had demonstrated the test’s value for understanding differing levels of ability in low-intellect children and adults. Yerkes brought to the group his eminence as president of the American Psychological Association and leadership of the Eugenics Section of the American Breeders’ Association’s Committee on the Inheritance of Mental Traits, a prestigious eugenics group that advocated institutional segregation and sterilization for persons with low intelligence.

  World War I had just begun when, led by Yerkes, the psychologists proposed to the United States Army that mental tests could assist the assignment of recruits to their proper duties. As one psychologist argued, the tests could be used to prevent a low-intelligence recruit “from giving away the whole unit to the enemy.” The army agreed, and in just six weeks the psychologists devised the army test.18 During America’s participation in World War I, from April 1917 to November 1918, the army tested the intelligence of 1,726,966 recruits, a rate of about 3,200 per day. Harvard paleontologist, biologist, and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould reported that to achieve this result, Yerkes hired about 200 examiners who faced hostility “from the brass at several camps . . . and were rarely able to carry out more than a caricature of their own . . . procedure.”19

  In groups of up to 200, with some seated on the floor, literate recruits took the Army Alpha test, and immigrants with limited English facility and African Americans took the Army Beta. In the second group, instructions were given with the use of hand signals, and test questions were asked in the form of pictographs or with pantomime, which the tests’ authors called “gesture language.”20 The possibility that unfamiliarity with English or inadequate educational backgrounds might influence recruits’ test performance was not considered.

  In 1921, when Yerkes published the report of the tests’ results, they stunned the nation. The average white American soldier, Yerkes found, had the mental age of a 13-year-old, and the average African American soldier had the mental age of a 10-year-old.21 Until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, a subjugated African American who was discovered to know how to read or write faced certain death. Many of the young men who took the army test were the grandchildren of those formerly enslaved persons. If they had any education—few schools had been established in areas where those populations had settled—they were likely taught by inadequately trained teachers in impoverished, segregated classrooms stocked with cast-off books and supplies. Commonly, African Americans seeking to study independently were not permitted to use public libraries.22 (In 1868, an African American Iowa businessman won the first school desegregation suit in the nation. By 1920, Blacks made up about half a percent of Iowa’s population.23)

  A credulous public expressed horror at the army test’s findings. On April 1, 1921, the Baltimore Sun headlined “VAST ARMY OF ADULTS MENTALLY DEFICIENT”; on November 24, 1921, a Seattle Star headline blasted “THIRD OF ARMY WAS ILLITERATE”; and on December 7, 1923, Davenport’s Daily Times reported that “the mental tests of the army, though laughed at and ridiculed at the time . . . are nevertheless being accepted now. . . . They eliminated the feeble minded from our army.”

  Among the reasons the test results received abundant press coverage was an aggressive campaign waged by Yerkes himself. In one effort, he urged the dean of the University of Chicago “to properly inform interested individuals . . . concerning psychological service in the Army.”24 Yerkes’s efforts were richly rewarded. “Wartime publicity,” he said, “accomplished what decades of academic research and teaching could not have equaled.”25

  Yerkes’s report also included a chart of the gradient of recruits’ mean intelligence scores listed by their nationalities.26 Those who had the highest IQ scores had come from English-speaking nations like Scotland and Canada. The gradient of IQs for more recent immigrants, those from the Mediterranean “races,” were far lower. Lower still were scores among African Americans. Some of the test subjects had never been to school, and the day they took the army test was the first time they held a pencil.27

  In the coming years, Yerkes and his colleagues enjoyed increasing status as the army tests reshaped the field of mental test psychology from a vocation that owned almost no intellectual acreage into a recognized profession of landholders with
a claim to precious turf.28 The scholar who gained the most was Lewis Terman. His 1916 test and his work on the army test, as one historian observed, made mental testing the most prestigious area of psychology.29 In 1923, Terman rode this new prominence to his election as president of the American Psychological Association. At his installation, he dazzled the membership as he reminded them that psychology

  transformed the “science of trivialities” into the “science of human engineering.” The psychologist of the pre-test era was . . . just a harmless crank, but now psychology has . . . classified nearly two million soldiers; has grad[ed] several million school children; is used everywhere in our institutions for the feeble-minded, delinquent, criminal and insane; . . . is appealed to . . . in the reshaping of national policy on immigration.30

  While IQ tests were administered in courts, hospitals, prisons, and some institutions, their primary application became the classification of elementary and high school students by levels of ability. Terman, however, intended far more. “What Terman wanted,” his biographer Henry Minton observed, “was to achieve a meritocratic society in which each individual was functioning and contributing according to their native potential. Those who were the most intellectually gifted would provide the leadership necessary for social progress.”31 To this end, according to Harvard psychologist and Terman friend Edwin Boring, as Terman’s mental test continued to grow in stature, it came to be understood as “the operational definition of intelligence. . . . That he profited from the sale of the tests,” Boring wrote, “is incidental.”32 And for psychologists trained in test administration, IQ tests became a full-employment guarantee. Most significantly, as APA president, Terman came to be the standard-bearer for the mental test movement. Predictably, psychology’s newfound status and financial incentives encouraged students to enroll in graduate programs, and from 1928 to 1938, the number of students earning PhDs in psychology increased 133 percent.33