The Orphans of Davenport

by Marilyn Brookwood

  Because Skodak presented striking new knowledge about child development, her work drew challenges. One came from George Speer, a psychologist at a Springfield, Illinois, adoption agency. Determined to prove her wrong, Speer methodically reviewed his department’s child placement records of birth mothers who had a mean IQ score of 50 and found the error was his. Exactly as had Skodak, Speer discovered that children adopted early into middle-class homes developed intelligence in the average range, and many had superior IQ test scores. Speer also found that the longer children lived in deprived conditions, the lower their intelligence.33

  Skodak’s discoveries also aroused the skepticism of Frederick H. Osborn, a New York aristocrat and eugenicist who was a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History and a student of anthropology. According to George Stoddard, Osborn recommended that the Carnegie Foundation in New York dispatch a researcher to Iowa to investigate Skodak’s claims about the children’s natural parents. That was why Neil J. Van Steenberg, a geneticist, psychologist, and statistician, spent a year in Iowa seeking verification of Skodak’s work. He discovered that her reports of the birth families were inaccurate—the families of the children she studied were even more benighted than she had described. Van Steenberg informed Skeels:

  I have found upon examination that . . . her report does not even come near a true description of the lower levels of social strata from which these people, the true mothers and true fathers, were drawn. I was astonished that living conditions in a rural and rather prosperous state like Iowa could reach such a low level.34

  He expressed amazement “at the filth, squalor, and pitiable living conditions” and recommended that Skodak’s descriptions “should be revised downward.” If Skodak’s portrayal of her subjects’ birth families had been more accurate, he speculated, she would not have been believed.35 Van Steenberg’s report was never published.

  Marie Skodak was awarded the PhD from the Iowa station in 1939. She attempted to find an academic position, but perhaps because she had almost no earlier publications, or because her dissertation topic challenged psychology’s mainstream thinking, or because she was a woman, her search was unproductive. Instead, the pragmatic Skodak accepted a clinical position at Michigan’s Flint Child Guidance Clinic, whose director, Orlo Crissey, was a friend from the Iowa station.

  From 1934 through 1937, a period that included the years of Skodak’s research, several other important investigations were afoot at the Iowa station, but the station’s publications were limited. In 1934, Wellman published a study showing that children who left the University of Iowa’s preschool to attend other nursery programs took their IQ gains with them. She also showed that in their new environments, their test scores failed to increase. After comparisons with those who did not transfer, Wellman suggested that the transfer programs may have lacked the stimulation of the university’s preschool.36 Her investigation included precise statistical analyses, but skeptics—that is, most mainstream psychologists—belittled her findings. After all, what advantage could one preschool program have over another?

  In 1936, Harold Skeels published two interim reports that described the investigation he and Skodak had begun about the intelligence of young children from poor-hereditary backgrounds who were adopted into middle-class homes. Skeels confessed surprise at finding that the children’s IQ scores were higher, sometimes much higher, than expected. Neither of these reports, he wrote, reflected “any preconceived ideas as to the effect of environment on the growth of intelligence.”37 In fact, neither report had begun as a study at all. Skeels was just doing his job.

  Also during this period, Skeels and Wellman’s preschool study was in progress, and in 1936, Skeels wrote a preliminary report about its positive findings, but warned, “The study’s conclusions are not clear at this time.”38 He also published a study that found that sixty-five Davenport infants adopted early into the homes of high-achieving fathers had mental test levels “higher than would be expected for children from . . . their true parents.” He found a zero correlation between the children and their birth mothers’ IQ test scores. Yet, here too, Skeels labeled his results “tentative.”39

  The closest Skeels came to publishing unambiguous findings were the results of a 1937 investigation based on a hunch and completed with station graduate student Eva A. Fillmore. Skeels had noticed that in sibling groups removed by the state from inadequate parents, older children had lower intelligence test scores than their younger sisters and brothers. He wondered whether the scores reflected that older children had lived for longer periods in deprived, unstimulating home environments. When Skeels and Fillmore analyzed IQ test scores of 407 children who ranged in age from 1 to 14 years, Skeels’s conjecture proved accurate. The mean IQ test scores of the older children from these families was significantly lower than the mean of their younger siblings.40

  Then, just days before New Year’s Eve, 1937, Wellman and Skeels ended several years of low-keyed station reports when they announced their radical discoveries at an important scientific meeting, captured in an explosive Washington Star headline, “Report on Test Variations Blasts Old Theories on I.Q.” The Star’s readers learned that “Beth Wellman . . . at the University of Iowa . . . had ‘torn to shreds’ ideas of I.Q. constancy,” that she found breathtaking shifts in children’s IQ test scores, and just as amazing, that the effects of preschool stimulation persisted into the college years. Wellman, the Star reported, “made mincemeat” of psychology’s dogma that IQ could not change.41 At the same meeting, Harold Skeels showed that children of low-intelligence parents placed into very good homes had at least normal intelligence and frequently much higher. “There was no relationship whatsoever” the newspaper reported, “between the intelligence of the children and . . . their birth parents.”42

  Wellman and Skeels had brought the Iowa station’s dispatches about IQ test variability to hundreds of psychologists and to journalists at the 101st annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the nation’s premier scientific society. The newspaper’s showcase article would be frequently quoted and widely reprinted under the headline “The Wandering I.Q.”43

  Wellman told the AAAS members that in 160 students who took two different college entrance examinations, those with more years of preschool had higher test scores. These effects of environment on intelligence, Wellman said, “are not exceptional examples.”44 Intelligence, she argued, is not a thing; it is a functional process that requires human interaction and that changes, depending on environment and experience.

  In her talk, Wellman challenged what she called the “mystical” theories of Lewis Terman,45 who was not present. “The facts,” she said, “demand an entire revision of previous concepts of intelligence. . . . Any theory of intelligence which does not allow for . . . extreme flexibility during childhood . . . must be considered incomplete and . . . misleading.”46 Reports of Wellman’s and Skeels’s remarks appeared in newspapers from Rochester, New York, to Helena, Montana, to Knoxville, Tennessee, and when the Star’s article was circulated, Wellman’s news covered the nation.

  For the Iowa psychologists, the Washington Star’s report launched a year in which they took their discoveries, recently published in academic journals, to the public. On April 16, the New York Herald Tribune and the Miami Herald wrote that the psychologists had “produced results so revolutionary that they have caused discussions in psychological gatherings throughout the country.”47 On June 28, George Stoddard addressed 1,600 delegates gathered for the annual meeting of the National Education Association (NEA) in New York. Across the nation, newspapers reported his claim that intelligence could change with environment. Journalists from the two national wire services, Associated Press and United Press, put Stoddard’s words on their tickers, and the next day they turned up everywhere.48 In the Minneapolis Star Tribune, readers discovered: “Right Environment Can Improve I.Q.” The Daily Capital Journal, in Salem, Oregon, carried the news that “off
spring of feeble-minded parents may become normally bright . . . in good homes.” And the Brooklyn Daily Eagle’s readers learned that “illegitimate children of worthless or feeble-minded parents stand more than an even chance.”

  Two weeks later, on July 11, Time magazine, the nation’s leading news weekly, carried just two sentences about Stoddard’s NEA talk, and like Wellman’s reports, they sent tremors through the public. Later it would be learned that they unsettled academic psychology as well. Under the headline “Bold Talk,” Time described

  a remarkable report on experiments that proved intelligence is affected by environment. . . . 1) illegitimate children of feeble-minded mothers and laboring fathers, after being placed in good homes, turned out to be bright children; 2) apparently normal youngsters, kept in an overcrowded orphanage, “deteriorated.”49

  At the NEA meeting, Stoddard said that when adopted into good homes, babies from “poor stock” developed superior IQs. He also reported that intelligence rose in intellectually challenged young children when mentally limited women provided stimulation and affection. It sounded inconceivable, and the news media wanted to know more.

  That summer, the New York Times asked Wellman for an article about her studies, and on July 17, the Times published her report that stimulation raised children’s IQs. On September 10, the Times wrote that Wellman shocked those gathered for the American Psychological Association’s annual meeting with a “Bombshell”—her explanation that environmental stimulation, or its opposite, neglect, could change IQ test scores in either direction up to 40 points. The Times wrote, “The IQ . . . has been reported by most psychologists . . . as something so nearly fixed by birth that it changes only slightly from babyhood to old age,” but that Wellman had shown environmental stimulation could radically influence IQ results, even causing normal children to lose intelligence.50

  Iowa’s news storm continued on November 7, when Time covered Stoddard’s address to New York’s Educational Records Bureau, publisher of the admissions tests used by nearly all independent schools. In a full-page report under the headline “I.Q. Control,” readers learned,

  Strange and heretical to those orthodox [psychological beliefs] are reports that have come . . . from a little group of psychologists at Iowa’s State University. Last week . . . they laid astounding proofs supporting Iowa’s heresy: that an individual’s IQ can be changed.51

  “Changes in intelligence occur mostly in young children,” Stoddard said. “To improve a child’s intelligence, give him security, encourage [his] . . . experiencing, inquiring, relating, symbolizing.”52 To hundreds of educators and Time’s millions of readers, what the magazine called Iowa’s “heresy” might have suggested that the nature-nurture controversy had finally ended. Intelligence depended, it appeared, on both nature and nurture: In the space of five months, Iowa’s revelations had traveled from academic colloquiums to conversations around kitchen tables.

  Months after Time’s article, in mid-April 1939, eugenicist author Albert E. Wiggam left his Central Park West apartment in New York City and set out for Iowa City, where he would interview the Iowa psychologists. Over two previous decades, Wiggam had written two best sellers and hundreds of articles advocating eugenic policies of sterilization and institutionalization, policies that he said would improve humankind. In The Fruit of the Family Tree, he illustrated “good” genetics with a genealogical chart (including photos) of one prominent family that, he claimed, included Winston Churchill, General Ulysses S. Grant, Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, and Grover Cleveland.53 Wiggam opined, “Heredity is the preponderant factor in the relative character of men, and almost the whole factor in mental capacity.”54 He wrote:

  We cannot have a progressive civilization . . . until the more richly endowed are given both the opportunity and encouragement to reproduce their kin in greater numbers than those of less natural endowments. . . . Without an eugenical policy . . . civilization is self-destructive. It sets going forces that often silently and slowly wreck the race that built it.55

  A disciple of the eugenicist Madison Grant, Wiggam approached his mission the way a cleric approaches the preparation of a sermon, as an act of holy persuasion. On his return from Iowa, he would join with religious leaders from the Congregationalist, Catholic, and Jewish faiths, as well as representatives from the World Council of Churches, for a conference about eugenics.

  The idea for Wiggam’s Iowa visit came from his editors at the Ladies Home Journal, who suggested he write about the station’s discoveries now filling the pages of the nation’s press. In the small world of 1930s New York City publications, the editors may have known that a competitor, Parents magazine, would soon publish Beth Wellman’s article “Can an I.Q. Change?” Wiggam would have been an obvious choice to write an opposing piece and could perhaps generate a controversy that would benefit both magazines.

  Before accepting the assignment, Wiggam alerted Lewis Terman, with whom he had a decades-long association, that he intended to consider the assignment. Terman argued that the Iowa work was fraudulent and that Wiggam should not dignify it with any report. Tempted to let the project go, Wiggam also consulted with Barbara Burks, Terman’s student, who told him that Iowa’s ideas were wrong but were “exactly what everyone wants to believe.”56 Still, Wiggam decided to meet with the station psychologists and on April 21, 1939, Skeels, Wellman, and Stoddard, along with a stenographer, sat down with him. Marie Skodak had left Iowa to work in Flint and did not participate.

  For the Iowans this was exactly the right moment for such a conversation. They had recently published all but one of their seminal papers, and two weeks later, in Chicago, Skeels would offer the last, his report on the remarkable changes in the Woodward and Glenwood children. Meeting with Wiggam allowed the Iowans to offer their evidence to an influential skeptic, although considering his background and his connection to Terman, they had no idea what to expect. But Wiggam arrived well prepared and questioned them with unfeigned curiosity. Discovery by discovery he had the psychologists review their findings, a discussion that generated a transcript of seventeen single-spaced pages.

  Skeels stepped up to take the lead, answering Wiggam’s first inquiry about how the Iowa group understood the importance of intelligence test scores. Skeels explained that in cases in which a child’s environment does not change, IQ tests are accurate measures of ability. Wiggam wondered whether functional ability would change with stimulation, and Skeels explained that it would. He added, “Psychologists are . . . much to blame [for assuming] that intelligence was fixed at birth and little could be done . . . that it is a measure of innate capacity, which it is not.” What seemed like consistency in IQ test scores, Skeels stressed, “may have come from the constancy of other factors.”57

  Citing example after example of remarkable intelligence changes that Wiggam might previously have dismissed, Skeels told of adopted children from inadequate backgrounds whose intelligence had reached levels that were appropriate to the levels of the homes into which they had been placed. He also reported on intellectually challenged Davenport orphans sent to live with low-intelligence women who gained a mean of 27 IQ points, while a matched group of once normal children who remained at the institution lost 26 points. “Nobody . . . is arguing that there are not hereditary differences . . . there are ceilings,” Skeels said, but he emphasized that the possibility for intelligence gains “are wider than we knew.”58 He illustrated with a study of 407 Davenport children in groups of their siblings in which about a third of the mothers had been institutionalized because of mental illness or low intelligence and all of the fathers worked in the lowest occupational categories. Forty-five children from 1 to 7 years, who had lived in their families for the shortest period of time, had a mean IQ test result of 92.6. The mean for twenty-six of their siblings, from 12 to 13 years, was 78.9. Skeels’s message could not have been clearer: long exposure to deprivation lowers intelligence.

  Turning to Wellman, Wiggam wondered whether she agreed with Binet, who f
ought the idea of IQ constancy. Although she did not mention Lewis Terman, Wellman explained that some American psychologists had promoted the idea that because IQ test scores measured innate ability they could not change with environment. Wellman said that the children who showed such constant IQs lived in environments that were constant, and explained, “To get . . . shifts you have to subject children to marked differences in environmental conditions.” His curiosity energized, Wiggam responded, “Tell me more on the human side of this,” and wondered about children “where the whole environmental stimulus is very poor.”59

  Wellman challenged, “What do you mean by poor environment? . . . Even a home of low socio-economic status may have a mother [who] is very alert to the needs of the child and who has the relationships that are good for mental development.” Echoing observations that Stoddard, Skeels, and Skodak had made, she emphasized that what young children need from adults was not just mental stimulation, but “the right kind of personal bond between them—a sense of security, mental security, emotional security. This is the background on which the more strictly intellectual sorts of things have to be built.”60

  Continuing to probe the issue of heritability, Wiggam wondered why Wellman’s studies showed that children who came from the homes of college professors had not gained even higher IQs. She clarified, “A child who comes [to school] with a 140 IQ may already have a very good environment. The home may have done much that the preschool could do. My objection is to the labeling of the child either superior or inferior—if he is inferior . . . teachers [may] not have a philosophy of hope that you can do something for the child.”61