The Orphans of Davenport

by Marilyn Brookwood

  In 1939, when Wendell was about 4½ years old, he was adopted by Genevieve and Louis Branca, who knew little of his early history, his previously lowered IQ, or his remarkable recovery in Skeels’s study. Now named Louis after his adoptive father, the Brancas settled their son into their comfortable St. Paul home. But although Louis had received better care at Glenwood than at Davenport, the effects of institutional life lingered, and he hoarded food, toys, and personal possessions, a sign he later interpreted as a lack of trust: “I was very quiet and independent. I knew there were different kinds of orphans . . . [and that some] were . . . [like me] motherless and abandoned.”62 Leaving an institution to live in a real home reminded Louis of the children’s story that tells of a jaguar released from a cage, who first scans his environment trying to grasp that it is free. “When I let an insight like that in,” he said, “it goes right to the bone.”63

  That fall Louis began parochial school, and the Brancas hired a tutor to catch him up to the academic levels and behaviors of most middle-class children his age. The next year, when he turned 6, he and his parents traveled to Davenport so that Skeels could test his intelligence to certify his adoption. Louis feared that if he didn’t do well he would be returned to Davenport, but in fact, his score had risen to 92, in the range of most children. During the course of Skeels’s study, Louis’s IQ score rose 7 points. Following the study, it rose 10 points more. Louis and another child whose test scores also rose 7 points made the smallest gains of the thirteen children. However, Louis’s relatively small score changes belie the blossoming of his imaginative alertness and rich interior life, possibly unleashed because of Glenwood’s environmental stimulation. As Skeels had hoped, the Glenwood experience had transformed the lives of Louis and most of the other children in his experiment. These results also call attention to a long-standing question: just what does an IQ test measure? How may individuals’ intelligence be affected by circumstance, relationships, exposure to stimulation, and, as in Louis’s case, to the opportunity to make use of one’s gifts?

  As Harold Skeels concluded his Glenwood study, in Davenport’s records he identified a statistical group—he called this his contrast group—twelve once normally intelligent children, four girls and eight boys, close in age to the children in the Glenwood experimental group, who had either continued to live as usual at Davenport or, because of severe intelligence declines, had been committed to Glenwood as permanent residents. The children in both the experimental and contrast groups had received periodic IQ tests. Most of the contrast group children entered Davenport with normal IQ scores and should have been adopted. They were not placed due to improper state procedures, especially poor family histories, or suspicion of untreated syphilis.

  To the extent possible, Skeels matched the contrast children’s histories with those of his experimental group. Each group contained eight children who had normal births, while three experimental children were born prematurely and one contrast child was premature. In the experimental group, one child appeared to have been cured of syphilis. In the contrast group, there were two who appeared cured. From Skeels’s records, here are some of the contrast children’s histories.

  Case 15, an illegitimate girl, arrived at Davenport when she was 4 days old. Her mother was a psychiatric hospital resident with an IQ of 62. Her father had spent time in jail for forgery. When case 15 was a little over a year, her intelligence tested at 92. However, after she had lived at Davenport for an additional seven months, her IQ test score had fallen to 54 and she had to be committed to Glenwood as a permanent resident. Repeated IQ tests showed that her intelligence continued in that range, and at age 17 Glenwood ordered her sterilization.64

  Case 17, a boy whose mother had an IQ of 47, arrived at Davenport when he was 10 days old. On his first IQ test, at 9 months, his score was 105. Five months later it was 96. Two years after that, it had fallen to 58, and when he was 4 years old, Skeels committed him to Woodward’s ward for low-intelligence children. It was noted that he was very small for his age, that when excited he stuttered badly, and although he wore glasses, he still had visual difficulties. Although case 17’s IQ scores remained in the retarded range, when he was about 16 another type of intelligence test, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, became available.

  Until Wechsler’s test, intelligence had been assessed largely through a child’s verbal abilities. Wechsler transformed mental testing by adding a measurement of nonverbal intelligence, identified as “performance.” Performance abilities are revealed in the context of actions and through spatial intelligence, that is, visualizing and manipulating objects in space. Children and adults with limited expressive and/or receptive language may have good and sometimes superior ability on nonverbal tasks, known as nonverbal abstract reasoning. For example, Wechsler’s performance test asks subjects to arrange a series of pictures into a logical story; arrange blocks to match visual patterns; and to discover important details missing from pictures. Although case 17’s Wechsler verbal score was 46, his performance score was 74. With support from a vocational agency, he left Woodward for a work placement in which he could use his relative nonverbal strengths.65

  Skeels’s report of case 20, a 3-month-old baby given by his biological parents to a passing Syrian-American peddler, reveals ethnic bias that altered the boy’s life. Those parents, a mother crippled by polio who had an IQ score of 36 and a father known in the community as feebleminded, believed that their solution relieved them of the burden of caring for their infant. The peddler, a US citizen who had fought in World War I, and his wife, had lost two babies prematurely and delightedly accepted the child. For about six months case 20 lived with his new family while the couple made heroic efforts, supported by the American Legion and local residents, to legally adopt him. The Davenport superintendent reported, however, that local social service agencies objected to the couple’s adoption of a “fair skinned, white haired, ‘whitsh’ boy.” He added, “It was because it was alleged that they were of Mohammed religion. [The father] declares that he . . . became an American citizen and that he attends the Lutheran Church.”66

  To dissuade the peddler from the adoption, authorities told him that the boy’s family had a history of insanity and feeblemindedness. But the peddler said they loved him and that “only God knew what he would grow to be.” The superintendent continued, “There can be no doubt of the love and affection the couple show toward this baby . . . and the little thing did seem to respond to them. There is a beautiful mother love there . . . and the man seemed equally as affected. . . . The whole objection seems to be because of their racial and religious tendencies.”67

  Rejecting the couple’s pleas, the state did not approve the adoption and kept the boy at Davenport, where his once normal intelligence declined from a high of 91 to 71. When he was 16, he ran away to search for his birth mother, only to discover that she had died months earlier. Once out of the institution, however, he committed some petty crimes. In returning him to Iowa, a probation officer wrote of the importance of being kind to him because “he has been so deprived affectionally all of his lifetime and . . . he has wanted so much, and been without a home so long, it will be a little difficult for him.”68

  Another contrast child, case 19, represented to Skeels the proof of principle that his ideas about environment’s influence were correct.69 The illegitimate son of a divorced mother, case 19 entered Davenport as a healthy, normal, 9-day-old. Like many Davenport children, he then suffered recurrent otitis media, a middle ear infection that, in a time before antibiotics, resisted treatment. When case 19 was a year old, he was adopted but returned for health reasons. At 15 months, his IQ test scored at 87. Seven months later, it had declined to 80. His otitis became chronic, and when he was 2 years old, he had an operation for mastoiditis. Following the surgery, a visiting pediatrician tested the boy and found a slight hearing loss. Because of his diagnosis, case 19 received more attention from teachers and staff than did other children,70 but over four years his
intelligence declined from 87 to 67, a dramatic change, but comparable to the losses of about half the contrast children. At age 5, he entered Davenport’s kindergarten, where Helen Dawe, an Iowa station graduate student studying early language development, found him a more active learner than other children and encouraged him with individualized support and special attention.

  Marie Skodak reported that case 19’s slight hearing loss did not affect his everyday experience. But it did bring something life changing: it qualified him for admission to a special Iowa boarding school, the Iowa School for the Deaf. “He heard so much better than anyone else, [this] was humorous,” she said. But the boy’s slight impairment allowed Skeels to rescue him from Davenport’s “barren affectionless detached childhoods” and place him in an institutional environment that saved him.71 At his new school, a dormitory matron found him especially engaging and informally became his mothering figure, bringing him home each weekend to her family. A year later, when he was 9, his revived IQ tested at 89. At that time the school also administered the Stanford Test of Achievement, a measure of school learning. He scored at grade level 10.6, typical of the average American 15-year-old.

  Perhaps as important as attention from caring adults, in his new school case 19’s classmates came from normal homes, had caring parents, and became friendly companions. During summer vacations, the boy returned to Davenport but kept his distance from the other children and spent his days with the office staff, who took him on trips to town and provided positive attention. Marie Skodak and Harold Skeels maintained that case 19 had an intellectual revival as significant as any child in the experimental group. “The good fortune of his intellectual recovery,” Skeels said, “can be traced to his affliction.”72

  When Skeels brought his Glenwood experiment to a close in the fall of 1938, he found that BD’s and CD’s recoveries had been replicated in the Glenwood children. The intelligence of nine of the eleven children had risen to the normal range, and they had been adopted. Two children who had experienced especially damaging early lives gained in IQ test scores, but not enough to permit their adoptions. However, the results in his contrast group couldn’t have been clearer: once normally intelligent young children at Davenport who were deprived of reasonable levels of stimulation and attention suffered dramatic intelligence declines that severely limited their lives; four would spend the rest of their lives in institutions. As audacious as the idea had once seemed, a stimulative environment saved one group while its absence doomed the other. Remarkably, the mean IQ score gain for the experimental group, 27.5, almost exactly equaled the 26.2 loss in the other.73

  Chapter Seven

  ORPHAN STUDIES OUT IN PUBLIC

  The Intelligence gains that Harold Skeels found in BD and CD at Woodward and also in the children placed at the Glenwood Home, along with the losses he discovered in the Davenport contrast children, led him to reconsider the earlier work of his station colleague Beth Wellman. In 1925, Wellman had begun collecting IQ test data on children from middle-class homes who attended the University of Iowa’s laboratory preschool. Twice each year, when the children returned to school in the fall and again before they left for summer vacation, Wellman had tested their IQs.

  In 1930, when she analyzed data on 600 children, she found that during the summer period the children’s IQ test scores did not change, but that during the school year their IQ test scores rose—about 10 points over two years of schooling. Her data also showed that children who attended preschool for a full day had higher IQ test scores than those who attended for a half day. Because intelligence was thought to be unaffected by environment or education, and almost no other research had shown that it could change, Wellman mistrusted her findings. She wondered if these results might be random errors that occurred because she had tested children after intervals of several months, when typically children’s IQs were tested at intervals of several years. To evaluate that hypothesis, she rechecked her data, and what she found amazed her: the children’s IQ score changes were not random—they were systematically related to the amount of time the children spent in school, something neither Wellman nor most American psychologists believed possible.1

  In 1932, Wellman published a report that considered the effect of preschool attendance on IQ scores of those 600 children and a more extensive report on nine years of data (including records collected earlier by others) on 3,000 children who were from 2 to 14 years of age.2 In this second study, she found that during a twelve-year period, many children’s IQ scores continued to increase. Wellman’s studies became some of the first in the field of mental test psychology to suggest that environmental stimulation influenced the development of intelligence. Although not every station psychologist accepted her findings—Skeels’s and Skodak’s traditional training led them to have doubts—from that point forward the station psychologists became engaged in a different conversation, one not based on subjective impressions or untested speculation, but on the discovery of new evidence. Only George Stoddard, with his firsthand knowledge of Alfred Binet’s theories, unreservedly accepted Wellman’s reports. He encouraged the psychologists to explore the possibility that IQs could change and ensured they had the resources to support that work.

  After Wellman had published her early data, in 1933 she and Skeels initiated a study to investigate the effects of preschool on the Davenport orphans’ development. At the time, no preschool existed at Davenport, and to establish one Skeels skillfully brought together resources from the Iowa station, the Iowa Board of Control for State Institutions, and the Davenport Home. Ruth Updegraff, a station member with expertise in nursery education, and another psychologist, Harold M. Williams, also joined the study.

  Because the orphanage lacked a suitable space to house a preschool, the undertaking required ground-up construction financed by the Iowa station at a cost of $7,280 (in current dollars, about $136,000) and built with Iowa state workers’ labor. Soon, a picture-postcard cottage in a style suited to the English countryside took shape in an attractive area at the edge of the orphanage property. To spare children reminders of their institutional lives,3 Skeels arranged for the preschool to look out over the Iowa hills.

  While Davenport’s children had been rescued from destitution and abuse, at the Home they faced other hazards: indifference and neglect. Thirty to thirty-five children lived crowded into each of eighteen small cottages, little changed since they lodged wounded Civil War soldiers. In each, a single caregiver, untrained in child development, was responsible for every aspect of the children’s lives as well as all cottage maintenance. Overwhelmed, they applied firm, often stifling, discipline. At the sound of a matron’s whistle, children walked in lines to meals and ate silently from battered tin plates. Small children spent their daytime hours seated on chairs placed against the walls of a room 15 feet square.4 Further, the institutional environment isolated children from everyday experience—even related to what they wore—as matrons dressed them each day in random, shabby clothing that always needed washing. Clothing for outdoor play in cold or damp weather was inadequate or nonexistent.5 Personal hygiene in adult bathrooms not adapted for children made cleanliness, especially toilet training, difficult. Questions took too much of the matron’s time and went unanswered. Personal attention came only with punishment.6 To receive approval meant to accept things as they were.

  Learning that objects had names, mastering language, expressing curiosity, hearing a favorite story, playing games, singing, and affectionate interactions with adults, all routine in ordinary children’s lives, were unknown to these children. They had no idea what distances meant, they had never seen a town, they knew nothing about stores, banks, restaurants, or traffic lights. If they learned anything it was that there was nothing to learn. Of course, such conditions were not unique to Davenport. They defined the lives of children in most of America’s state institutions.7

  Considering Iowa’s Great Depression hardships, it might have been out of the question for a university, a state a
gency, and a state institution to join in a three-year investigation that required construction of a school, the commitment of four psychologists, and the hiring of one half-time and two full-time preschool teachers, all to study children no one previously thought worth the trouble. But a new Davenport superintendent, Syl McCauley, recognized that Davenport had neglected its young residents’ development. It’s plausible, too, that Stoddard’s ideas impressed McCauley and contributed to his support. Responding to a suggestion from Skeels, the superintendent proposed building a preschool and conducting a trial to study its effect.8 Embracing this opportunity, Skeels and Wellman planned to investigate whether preschool experience would affect children’s cognitive and social development. Although Stoddard felt confident that the findings would be positive, in 1934 when the study began, only a few scattered investigations about preschool had been published, and his hope awaited confirmation.

  The Iowans’ research design for what would be their Study of Environmental Stimulation: An Orphanage Preschool Project would strike today’s cognitive psychologists as primitive. But for their time, its radical research structure was uncommon in psychology. There would be an experimental and a control group, each with twenty-one subjects matched for chronological age, mental age, intelligence, sex, nutritional status, and length of orphanage residence. Moreover, the psychologists arranged an immersion-style experience in which the experimental group would attend preschool for a full day, five days a week; and based on Wellman’s findings that children did not gain in intelligence during summer vacations, they would attend school twelve months each year. To minimize exposure to orphanage conditions, the children were awakened at 5:30 a.m. for breakfast and arrived at the school by 7:00 a.m., although after a year the schedule was adjusted to somewhat later hours. To tighten the immersion protocol, instead of having children return to Davenport’s dining hall for lunch, the noon meal was brought to the school. At 5:00 p.m. the children left for dinner in Davenport’s dining hall, followed by an early bedtime. The control group children would follow their usual orphanage schedule as if no study were in progress. The intelligence, language achievement, social maturity, and motor achievement in both groups would be regularly evaluated.9