The Orphans of Davenport

by Marilyn Brookwood

  Skeels now recognized that “the limits within which modifiability is possible are much greater than we had . . . assumed.”18 Because Marie Skodak had tested most of the children, their unexpected outcomes became her research investigation. “The work,” she said, “accumulated under [my] own hands,”19 and she would not consider turning it over to anyone else. To complete an extended study of Davenport children adopted early in their lives into middle-class families, in 1936 Skodak entered the Iowa Child Welfare Station’s PhD program, where an investigation of these adopted children’s intelligence became her dissertation research topic.

  Just as Skeels and Skodak had begun their first adoption visits, the Board of Control asked the state psychologist to take on yet another assignment—to test the intelligence of each child resident and some of the adults in Iowa’s several institutions. Numbering about 5,000, many of the children had very low intelligence, but some were deaf or blind or suffered from serious medical conditions—polio, for example, or cerebral palsy or epilepsy. The board asked for the tests to help institutions plan for the residents’ futures. Skeels, Skodak, and the many graduate students enrolled for advanced degrees at the Iowa station would organize and carry out the work.

  This is how it came about that on the balmy first day of spring in 1935, with the temperature nearly 70ºF, Harold Skeels and Marie Skodak drove along a gravel road through farmland already furrowed for planting to the site of one of those institutions, the Woodward State Hospital for Epileptics and School for the Feebleminded.

  Newly opened in 1917 and set on 1,200 acres, the modern institution appeared nothing like the imposing Civil War–era Davenport Home. Rather, Woodward’s low-key semi colonial architecture resembled an early twentieth-century modest resort hotel. Originally intended only as a home for persons with epilepsy, in 1921 it opened its doors to low-intelligence adults and some medically impaired child residents. As the psychologists arrived that day, off in the distance they saw Woodward’s greenhouses and cattle barns, a hog house, and a hay loft, all, like the main building, constructed by laborers from a local prison.

  A report from Woodward’s superintendent, M. N. Voldeng, told of the school’s educational mission:

  The problem before the educational department is the necessity of bringing out potential mentality by means of concrete stimulation. The child’s happiness and well-being are best served by meaningful experience. At the same time, attention is given to developing interest in the enjoyment of music, games, handicrafts, and the other subjects taught.20

  For approximately 300 medically and intellectually disabled child residents and for several hundred older persons with low intelligence, Woodward created a school program designed to meet their special needs. Students who might chronologically be in their 20s, but whose mental ages were under 3 years and who were called “high-grade idiots” and “younger imbeciles,” attended the school’s lowest-level classes. A kindergarten play group engaged those with mental ages of 3 to 6 years. More advanced “older imbeciles” were taught handwork, music, and games and received speech training. Residents considered more advanced still, called “morons,” and some children and adults who had epilepsy, received academic training in reading, writing, spelling, citizenship, and physical education.

  In a vocational education program, those with epilepsy, who were often more able, learned weaving, rug making, sewing, and other fabric arts as well as woodworking and agricultural skills. Residents also participated in a choir and were taught to play musical instruments. In a 1,000-seat assembly hall the school held weekly concerts attended by the residents’ families and by some of the town’s 900 citizens.21

  Because Skeels regularly tested children in the state’s institutions, he knew many of Iowa’s dependent children by sight. But as the psychologists began their rounds in Woodward’s wards of low-intelligence women that day, they were surprised to find two “outstanding” young children, clearly favorites of the women inmates and of Woodward’s staff. The girls were lively, appealing, and acted just as most toddlers do.22 “With life in their eyes and colorful ribbons braided into their hair,” the girls played happily with the ward’s adult women.23 Since there did not seem to be anything wrong with them, Marie Skodak was not quite sure why they were even there.

  Inquiring, the psychologists were dumbfounded to learn that here were BD and CD, the two forlorn Davenport toddlers who whined and rocked endlessly in their cribs and who, eight months earlier, Skeels found had intelligence at the level of “imbeciles.” There is no indication that after the transfer either psychologist had given the girls any thought, and neither referred to the transfer when they had arrived at Woodward. For Skeels and Skodak, the information that the little girls were the two hopeless cases sent from Davenport was unnerving.24 How could once frail children with limited intelligence have been so transformed when their genetic histories had not changed?25

  Amazed by their transformations, the following day Skeels and Skodak administered a version of the IQ test they had used at Davenport, but adapted to assess slightly older children. On their first tests, added together the girls’ scores had totaled 81, barely in the low normal range of intelligence. Now they found that two children who previously had almost no ability to express or respond to language could recognize about a dozen words and had some ability to construct short sentences.26 They could follow brief commands, such as “Bring me the shoe,” draw something that looked like a circle, thread a large bead onto a string, and put a spoon into a cup and stir it. The test results revealed that CD, now 22 months old, had advanced from an IQ score of 46 to 77, a considerable increase, though still below the average for her age. BD’s score, which had been 35, was now 87, nearly in the range of most 26-month-old children.

  Incredulous, the two psychologists realized that in testing the girls they were also assessing themselves. Had their original evaluations been incorrect? Were the behaviors they observed at Davenport a mistaken indication of the children’s true intelligence? They discarded those possibilities because each had evaluated hundreds of young children and trusted their assessment skills. They considered whether they made errors when they administered the intelligence tests or in scoring the girls’ responses, but again, each was well schooled in the evaluation of young children. They asked each other whether some developmental fluctuation had occurred and whether the girls’ gains might indicate a rare genetic blueprint. But BD and CD were genetically unrelated and that explanation could not have been correct.

  Crucially, at Woodward the girls lived in separate wards, yet their intelligence had changed simultaneously and nearly identically. The factors responsible had to be something they shared with each other, but not with anyone else. Months earlier the psychologists expected that BD’s and CD’s extremely low IQs would mean they would be unable to care for themselves or manage in a wider world. Now one of the girls demonstrated close to ordinary intelligence, with the other not far behind.

  With BD’s IQ in the range of normal children, it would have been reasonable, and doubtless better for her, if Skeels had immediately returned her to Davenport to be adopted into a loving home so that she could experience the benefits of life in a family. Although that was his first impulse, Skeels’s Iowa station research training pushed him to dig deeper.27 He recognized that if such dramatic change had occurred in only a single child, he might have thought it represented “some accident in the earlier testing.”28 But, he said, “there were two.”29

  Two instances of such unprecedented changes increased the odds that the girls’ situations were not idiosyncratic, but perhaps responses to some external factor. Thus, Skeels made the decision to keep BD at Woodward with CD in order to collect more data about an unheard-of developmental outcome, which, if seen before, had never been reported. Although Skeels and Skodak thought the girls’ intelligence changes might be precarious and that soon, or eventually, they would revert to their earlier status, Skeels felt compelled to discover what had happened. Alt
hough he does not report George Stoddard’s response to the girls’ changed development, the Iowa director’s confidence that intelligence was not fixed had to have influenced Skeels’s decision to investigate. Later, Stoddard said, “It is strange that persons have ever expected IQs to remain constant or to be unrelated to . . . environmental effects.” The true surprise, Stoddard thought, was that anyone was surprised.30

  Advising no one at Woodward that he planned a formal study, for about a year Skeels observed BD and CD in the context of Woodward’s ordinary activities. The 18- to 52-year-old women had mental ages from 5 to 9 years. Many, Skeels knew, had their own children and had been institutionalized to keep them from bearing any more. Some may also have been involuntarily sterilized. Yet, as a reporter later wrote, here were “two babies . . . unfit for adoption into normal society [who] had literally been adopted [and thrived in] the society of the abnormal.”31

  Skeels discovered that the women easily managed the mothering tasks of bathing, feeding, and diapering the girls. They competently taught them to walk, talk, and feed themselves and trained them in toileting. Yet, following no prescribed plan other than what they had learned in their own lives, they accomplished far more. On the wards of a state institution, the women created their own version of nearly ordinary family life, one that enfolded BD and CD in its warmth. In each case, an inmate who, Skeels said, was brighter than the others “adopted” and mothered one of the toddlers, while the other women played the roles of adoring aunts.32

  Because the residents had the intelligence of children, the wards were stocked with dolls and dollhouses, dress-up clothes, and toys that young children enjoyed. And as the women taught and played with them, Skeels realized that although their language use was simple, they talked to the girls nonstop. “This goes here,” one might say, or “Pretty chair.” They also taught the girls nursery rhymes and children’s songs and sang along with them. Some of the women’s families sent them spending money, and they had Woodward’s staff purchase dresses and hair ribbons for the girls.33

  Placed in the center of the women’s lives, the children and their caregivers spent nearly all of their time in shared activities. The women lavished affection on the toddlers; their delight in caring for them was contagious, and Skeels observed that the wards’ attendants became involved in the girls’ care—sometimes

  borrowing them to take them in cars and on busses to town and into stores where they bought them books that added new experiences to the ward’s environment. . . . All of the waking hours of all of the people in the wards revolve[d] around the two little girls. . . . Here was a ‘home’ setting, rich in wholesome and interesting experiences and geared to a preschool level of development.34

  As in any caring home, the women provided consistent, good-hearted positive attention, a factor that psychologists today understand promotes healthy development. In fact, it has been suggested that in many species, evolution has programmed young members to “expect” and respond to such care.35 And unlike Davenport’s institutional staff, the women’s self-assigned “responsibilities” never overburdened them, none of their “work assignments” changed, none went on “vacation” or vanished from the children’s lives because she quit her “job.” Rather, during the time that they cared for the girls, the women unofficially exchanged their lives as forcibly institutionalized inmates and state dependents for those of reliable and loving nurturers.

  With no hypothesis or experimental research design, and exerting no influence on how the women and the children interacted, Skeels observed that the women provided each child with a one-to-one emotional connection and stimulative experiences, especially in the use of play and language. Their constant chatter enlivened the girls’ attention, their unwavering approval made the toddlers feel special, and, of course, the girls were very young when these ingredients for normal child development became embedded in their lives, exactly as in the lives of children everywhere who are raised in ordinary families.36

  As Harold Skeels patiently watched, he never observed behaviors toward the girls other than good care and healthy encouragement. After about six months, when he next tested the girls’ intelligence, he found even more growth, especially in CD, who was now 33 months. Her IQ score had risen 23 points, from 77 to 100. BD, now 36 months, had a score that had risen only 1 point, to 88. When CD was 40 months old in September, 1936, her score had declined to 95, and BD’s score at 43 months had advanced to 93.

  Although their intelligence scores were somewhat unstable, they had remained in the average range, and Skeels became convinced that neither girl showed signs of soon returning to her intellectual level of two years earlier. In a caring, stimulative environment, both girls had become normal. No changes like these in young children’s intelligence had ever been reported in psychology.

  There was no epiphany, no crystalizing moment, when Harold Skeels could explain how everyday care from the women transformed BD and CD; but as their IQ scores advanced, he began to fear that the girls intelligence would outpace the women’s and they might lose what they had gained.37 He recognized, too, that the girls’ new status had radical consequences: both had become adoptable, and he made plans to return them to Davenport for that purpose. But before he did, with the knowledge of Woodward’s staff, he altered the girls’ records to indicate that at Woodward they had not been residents—that would have officially labeled them as “retarded” and unadoptable—but that due to Davenport’s overcrowding they had lived there as “house guests.”

  Two years after they had left Davenport, in the fall of 1936, the girls returned. In mid-December, CD was adopted, and on Christmas Eve, 1936, BD arrived in her adoptive home. Her adoptive mother had herself been an orphan and was raised in an institution, the Home for the Friendless. As Harold Skeels observed when he first saw them at Woodward, and as their adoptive families, who did not know their histories, must have appreciated, here were two children who seemed to have a sense of security and an expectation they would be treasured and cared about.38 They were thriving. But why?

  Harold Skeels was not by nature an iconoclast, not an academic who pursued research that challenged prevailing ideas, nor someone who would chase opportunities to promote his own renown. If anything, he was the opposite. As a college undergraduate he wrote for a student magazine, the Iowa Agriculturalist, was president of the literary society, joined the Cadet Officers Association, had roles in several student productions, and took photos for the college yearbook, The Bomb. In his one undergraduate psychology course he did outstanding work. His conventional interests profile a student preparing for a career consistent with a rural Iowa background. Nothing predicted his joining the Iowa Child Welfare Station’s psychology PhD program, and even there, Skeels remained a traditional thinker whose college training in livestock genetics informed his ideas of human development.

  Yet in 1932, his station colleague Beth Wellman had found that preschool changed children’s intelligence. Then, in 1935 Skeels and Skodak found unanticipated intelligence outcomes in adopted children that hinted that established ideas about intelligence might need revision. Now, in 1936, Skeels found baffling changes in BD and CD. Collectively, these results suggested a silhouette about children’s intelligence that Skeels and others at the station believed should be further examined. With a radical plan for an investigation, Skeels approached the chairman of Iowa’s Board of Control, Harold E. Felton. A political appointee, the owner of a grain and feed business, and the father of five, Felton later would be elected to Iowa’s legislature. With no idea of what to expect, Skeels posed a strange question to the chairman. Would Felton allow Skeels to shift some young toddlers of low intelligence to live in a state home with women of low intelligence so as to “make them normal”?39 Skeels and the chairman both knew that Davenport’s conditions foreshadowed hopeless futures that included low-intelligence, mental illness, and even death.40 But Skeels also hoped his plan would be approved because, he said later, “here was a goldmine for formal
research, a situation that could not have been set up by choice.”41 Skeels held his breath as the chairman looked at him queerly. But then Felton said, “Sounds crazy, but tell me more.”42

  Skeels reviewed BD and CD’s troubled birth family histories and then told of the girls’ remarkable IQ gains, which, strange as it sounded, might have resulted from the women’s affectionate attention. Although the chairman remained unconvinced, Davenport’s overcrowding provided a strong incentive and he gave the psychologist what he came for: permission to place eleven low-intelligence children with low-intelligence women on the chance that they could become normal. Immediately, Skeels began to search Davenport’s records for children who might enter his peculiar experiment.

  PART II

  Backlash

  Chapter Six

  A REVELATION AND A MYSTERY

  During the fall of 1936, Harold Skeels identified eleven Davenport residents who were between 1 and 2 years old, had no birth defects that might impair their development, and whose low intelligence made them unadoptable. Some had average or superior IQ test scores when they entered the orphanage but now were below average. Others arrived with lower than average development and had declined further. In mid-October, Skeels began to transfer them, two and three at a time, from the Davenport Home, which hugged the Mississippi’s shore, 300 miles west to the Institution for Feeble-Minded Children, in Glenwood, on Iowa’s border with Nebraska. He had no idea what lay ahead.