In 1929 in Germany, Otto Kankeleit credited Harry Laughlin’s work when he demanded sterilization of “inferior” women.113 In the 1930s, German National Socialism’s sterilizations, institutionalizations, and murders of the mentally ill, the disabled, gypsies, homosexuals, and Jews continued to find support from Davenport, Laughlin, and many civic leaders and mainstream citizens in the United States.114
After Hitler’s 1933 ascendance, Laughlin mobilized the ERO, the Eugenical News, and the Eugenics Research Association to support the Nazi cause. In 1934, when New York State asked for Laughlin’s opinion about whether to admit into the United States persecuted Jews who arrived at Ellis Island, he advised they make “no exceptional admission for Jews who are refugees from . . . Germany.” New York agreed.115 In 1934, Charles Davenport retired and assumed the role of eugenics’ “elder statesman.”116
At the same time that Laughlin was supporting Germany’s attempts to establish sterilization laws, some extreme eugenic ideas had surfaced in Iowa when a state committee that represented a White House Conference on Child Health and Protection met in Des Moines. An item on the meeting’s agenda focused on the plight of Iowa’s low-intelligence children. The committee noted that “public sentiment does not as yet permit the elimination of these unfortunates even when their mere existence is obviously of no value to anyone, including the unfortunates themselves.”117
In 1935, California banker Charles M. Goethe, a member of the Human Betterment Foundation and with Lewis Terman a member of the American Eugenics Society and the Eugenics Research Association, had just returned from Germany when he told fellow eugenics activist financier Ezra S. Gosney, “Your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions [about sterilization] of the . . . intellectuals who are behind Hitler. . . . You have . . . jolted into action a great government of 60,000,000 people.”118 Goethe referenced Gosney’s 1932 report, written with another eugenicist, Paul Popenoe, about the benefits of sterilization to 6,000 persons, which they claimed led to a reduction in sex crimes. In 1933, the report was published in Germany, where the “example of California illustrated the ‘beneficial effects’ of sterilization laws.”119
Also, in 1935, Laughlin requested expanded Carnegie Institution support for the ERO. In the words of journalist-historian Edwin Black, this triggered an exhaustive site review in which Carnegie concluded that “the Eugenics Record Office was a worthless endeavor from top to bottom, yielding no real data, and that eugenics . . . was a social propaganda campaign.”120 Laughlin’s work, however, was so admired in Germany that in 1936 the University of Heidelberg awarded him an honorary degree. As Nazi attacks on Jews accelerated, Laughlin defended German programs—including the Nuremberg Laws legalizing discrimination against Jews, which he called sound science.121
While Carnegie officials never disavowed Laughlin’s anti-Semitism, after a failed attempt to salvage ERO research they gave up on his leadership, and on New Year’s Eve, 1939, they closed the ERO’s doors. The records it had collected, over 1 million index cards and tens of thousands of questionnaires, amounted to a catalog of subjective, often hearsay judgments of supposed family traits, such as, “holding a grudge,” “sense of humor,” and thousands of others, “worthless for genetic study.”122
The 1920s acceleration of scientific studies led most American geneticists and biologists to turn away from eugenics,123 which they had come to view as a pseudoscience mania. However, America’s mental test psychologists were inattentive to biology’s investigations of the mechanisms of development and behavior and remained uninformed or uninterested in cellular-level discoveries of the role of environment in development.124 Lewis Terman’s writings betrayed little awareness of recent discoveries in biology. In a personal communication, Terman biographer Henry Minton confirmed that “hereditarian psychologists were not aware of the 1920s–1930s work on developmental biology.”125 Minton also noted that he had found “no discussions relevant to this work in any of their correspondence or publications.”126
Psychologists’ continued belief in Mendelian unit trait inheritance, along with their insistence that heredity acted without the influence of environment, would persist until about the 1950s, when some began to consider other possibilities. In this context, the brutal 1930s attacks by mental test psychologists on the findings of the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station should not have been a surprise. They were led by Lewis Terman, who would give no quarter.
Chapter Five
A CLINICAL SURPRISE
As the winter storms of 1935 gave way to prematurely springlike weather, Marie Skodak and Harold Skeels began their travels to every corner of Iowa to visit the families of children who, during the previous year, had been conditionally adopted from the Davenport Home. Separately and sometimes together, they would test the children to certify that their intelligence was in the normal range—the last hurdle before Iowa made the adoptions official.1
Most of the children were between 15 and 18 months old and of course were unaware of the reasons for these strangers’ visits. Yet for them and for their parents, the psychologists’ tests were potentially life changing: by state policy, those children who did not have intelligence in the average range would be removed and committed to an institution for the feebleminded. As one parent remarked to Skodak, “We were taking an examination in parenthood. Our success was shown by the results in our child.”2 A mandated requirement of the adoption process, the visits fulfilled a eugenic prescription so embedded in government policy and popular thought that Skeels and Skodak were never asked to explain its reasoning: when those who had low intelligence remained segregated in institutions (where some would also be involuntarily sterilized), society reaped the benefit.
Families were not usually asked to travel to Davenport for the evaluations. For some it would have been an arduous journey, and for others perhaps impossible because of farmers’ planting and harvesting schedules or Depression-limited finances. Also, the psychologists anticipated that testing children in the family’s living room or, as often happened, at the kitchen table would ease the children’s anxieties about the psychologists’ presence and elicit the children’s best performance. Over the next months, Skeels and Skodak made their way to families who lived on farms or in Iowa’s small rural towns and occasionally to the homes of more prosperous families—a school superintendent, a local newspaper editor, or a town doctor.
Before each visit, the psychologists closely read the children’s birth family histories, which to Skodak resembled those of the Kallikaks’ children, whose parents Henry Goddard described as “social incompetents,” dependent on the state for their care. Skodak knew that some of the children’s parents were alcoholics and persons who might be in jail, that many had dropped out of school, and most had not attained the respectable educational levels common in Iowa. Further, nearly all had abandoned society’s accepted social and behavioral norms. She wondered how children born into such deficient families could “measure up to the demands of cultured, educated [adoptive] parents.” Skodak knew that children from families in which “violations of social and legal codes was the rule,” would not have been accepted as potential adoptees by most private adoption agencies. Those officials would have felt that the danger the children would turn out like their birth parents was too great.3
The psychologists’ concern was heightened because the children had been adopted so early—they had been between 2 and 6 months—that no IQ test could have been given to them. Rather, they had been assessed by several specialists, including Skeels, and appeared to have normal development. But now Skeels and Skodak wondered how to respond if children were not in the normal range of intelligence: “What would we say to these prospective parents? How would we explain this and what would we offer to do?”4 Neither doubted that it would be necessary to remove some intellectually challenged toddlers from the only secure family attachments they had known.
Factors in the toddlers’ birth family histories that concerned Skodak and Skee
ls told their own sad tale: at a time when Iowa was the fourth wealthiest state in the nation and one of nine states with the highest high school graduation rates,5 46 percent of the toddlers’ birth mothers had left school at eighth grade. Sixty-five of the children were illegitimate, and many of their mothers were prostitutes. Only 10 percent of the birth mothers had IQs above 100, the mean intelligence test score, and 38 percent had IQs below 80, in the range of low and very low intelligence. In addition, 72 percent of the fathers were known to the mothers, which allowed reasonable estimates of their work status, at the time considered a proxy for male intelligence.6 Just 13 percent of the birth fathers were professionals, while 46 percent had jobs at the lowest employment levels; many were not self-supporting, and some were chronic paupers or criminals.7
There were no IQ test scores for the adopting mothers,8 but their educational attainments were consistently higher than those of the birth mothers. All had completed eighth grade and most had finished eleventh grade. While almost none of the birth parents graduated from high school, over half of the adopting parents had done so. In a period when high school was considered much the way college attendance is today, as training for life, these stark differences between the birth and adoptive parents’ education levels concerned Skeels and Skodak. They also had misgivings about differences in the occupational levels of the birth fathers versus the adoptive fathers. Taken together, the psychologists understood that the adopting fathers had higher attainment and higher occupational status than the birth fathers and therefore better heredity.
Furthermore, Davenport’s random placement of babies was out of step with that era’s accepted adoption practice. Most private and public adoption agencies relied on a process known as selective placement (many still do), in which a child’s background or observed traits are matched to similar qualities in an adopting family. In studies that compare the effects of heredity and environment on adopted children’s development, selective placement becomes a significant confounding factor as adoptive parents’ backgrounds, education, interests, and temperaments, to name but a few possibilities, may affect the stimulative experiences they provide. At Davenport, however, apart from health concerns, the adoption process lacked any social or fitness filters. When he became Iowa’s psychologist in 1934, Skeels had hoped to revise that practice but had not yet succeeded.
In several detailed interviews and memoirs, Marie Skodak described making possibly life-altering visits to unpretentious homes, only 10 percent of which had electricity. Iowa’s citizens’ naivete about bureaucratic process, and their matter-of-fact acceptance of the state’s adoption procedures impressed her.9 Eager to be approved, potential adoptive parents who had been informed at the start that their child could be removed may never have expected it would happen: all the parents consented to surrendering their child if the child did not test in the normal range. Yet the parents-to-be would have made that agreement before the child had come to live with them and the bonds of a loving family unit had formed. Of course, some parents, perhaps even many, may have agreed with Iowa’s policy.
With “deep foreboding,” the psychologists steeled themselves for heartbreaking scenes when they presented terrible news: this child’s IQ was lower than the state required and she or he would have to be returned to Davenport.10 To prepare, Skodak and Skeels arrived at their visits equipped with a mental script: almost as if the toddlers were off-the-shelf commodities, they would offer to exchange the child for one who was more promising.11 Hoping for good results, the Iowans entered modest farmhouses where furniture and floors sparkled and child and parents had dressed in their Sunday best. In some homes, Skodak remembered, “You could hardly get through the toys, and the baby was dressed up fit to kill and the house was shining. The father had stayed home from work. It was a big day.”12
In rural Iowa, farm responsibilities, great distances between homesteads, unpredictable weather, and often impassible roads isolated neighbor from neighbor. Conversations after church and casual encounters with friends on weekly trips into town did not always include gossipy exchanges from a family’s informal treasury of child-rearing. Rarer still was advice on the private, even intimate, subject of adoption. And no Dr. Spock or other manual of how to raise a child even existed. Sensing the parents’ eagerness for a dialogue, the psychologists invited just that. They listened to mothers and fathers report how extraordinary their child was, and many craved advice. “When should you start to read to a child?” they asked. “Is it all right to take a child with you to the local bar?” Inevitably, questions about adoption arose. “Should you tell a child that he or she was adopted? If you do, how do you explain?” Skeels and Skodak’s skill in establishing trusting exchanges with concerned parents created a warm rapport with the families. At the time the psychologists could not have realized that these relationships would become central to their later research.
To put the children at ease, Skeels and Skodak typically began their sessions by singing songs and playing games. Now and again a child might scan the room in search of a reassuring smile from parents who, from their vantage point in the doorway—they leaned forward so intently that Skodak feared they would tumble right into the room—tried to catch the child’s eye. Sometimes the tests had to be interrupted when a toddler insisted on taking the psychologist to visit a pet pony or when a parent brought in a plate filled with warm cookies.
In their first visits the psychologists found it puzzling that infants from inadequate backgrounds who had seemed normal when adopted had not declined to the levels of their birth families. Not only had the children retained the appearance of normality, they were consistently scoring in the average or above-average range on the IQ tests. As they tested more children the psychologists’ puzzlement became incredulity: despite their poor heredity, every child had at least normal intelligence, with the scores of some even higher. After many months, when all of the first year’s tests had been completed, Skeels and Skodak could not believe their results: the mean IQ of the children’s test scores was 116, considered in the superior range. As Skeels later told an interviewer, “These were the IQ scores of the children of university professors.”13
As they continued testing, the results almost never varied: after four years, during which they tested 600 children, they had to remove only two. Such outcomes challenged the fundamental theory of America’s psychology establishment that intelligence was hereditary, and they challenged eugenic certainties that mental ability reflected family history, nationality, class, and race and could not be modified by experience. They challenged what Skeels, Skodak, and every American psychologist had been taught. The Iowans’ results seemed unthinkable. Heretical. Or wrong.
The prospective adoptees’ higher-than-anticipated test results raised questions. Were the test scores the product of examiner bias? Did they reflect the inadequacy of tests of young children? The psychologists also wondered, “Were the scores temporarily inflated from some environmental cause analogous to coaching?”14 Because they had been afraid that their scoring would be too permissive, Skeels and Skodak had overcompensated by scoring rigidly. Bewildered, they now considered whether they had made test assessment errors and questioned one another as they checked and rechecked the children’s performances. Although they had been overly careful, they understood that slight inflections in an examiner’s tone or body language might inadvertently cue a child’s response. Yet they found no reason to doubt their methods. Because they had largely worked separately, they could compare the mean scores of the children each had tested. Skeels’s mean test score was 116. Skodak’s was less than a point lower.
The psychologists also questioned whether the test they used, normed for infants and toddlers, was suitable for these children who had briefly been institutionalized and whose family histories differed radically from those of most adopted children.15 They had no comparative investigations against which to check their results because other than in Iowa, very young children with problematic heredity had rar
ely been adopted by middle-class parents and subsequently studied.
Skeels also wondered whether a factor not much considered in psychology, the parent-child relationship, might have affected the children’s development, especially, he hypothesized, in homes “where parents went to great effort to bring all this about . . . and may [have taken] greater cognizance of the need for play equipment [and] books . . . than true parents. . . . They may be more willing to answer [children’s] questions and encourage the quest for knowledge. . . .”16 Although Skeels had not referenced Binet, his thinking borrowed from Binet’s observations that environmental stimulation influenced intellectual development. Further, because Binet recognized that intelligence was difficult to measure, any test performance might be only an estimate. The Iowa psychologists proceeded nonetheless because despite the risk of possibly arbitrary results, the tests were the only tool available to discriminate lower from higher mental ability. In subsequent decades, other test instruments with wider applications have been developed, but the tests remain controversial because structural differences in children’s experience have been found to influence test outcomes and because, even now, no definitive definition of intelligence exists.
When the adopted children’s test results suggested that heredity might not tell development’s entire story, Skeels and Skodak faced a revelation and a mystery: if heredity was not determinative, what was? The two psychologists recognized that unraveling why the children’s intelligence did not fit any known pattern could become the subject of a remarkable investigation, one Davenport’s superintendent, Roscoe Zerwekh, had, by sheer chance, made possible. Beth Wellman, another Iowa station psychologist, later confirmed that Skeels and Skodak’s results occurred only because the superintendent “followed his own unique policy of placement of children in foster homes, without any regard to the teachings of best social service practice.”17
The Orphans of Davenport Page 11
