The Orphans of Davenport

by Marilyn Brookwood

  At his return, in December 1945, Skeels resumed testing Davenport inmates’ intelligence, supervising adoptions at the Davenport Home, and transferring youngsters with low intelligence to other institutions. But Skeels had come back unprepared for a new reality: during his absence, staff changes at Davenport had resulted in even greater deprivation for its residents, creating even worse conditions. Discouraged, by early February Skeels asked Sears to make inquiries for him at the Veterans Administration, where he could work as a psychologist. Then, in mid-March, word came from the Bivin Foundation about funding for Skeels’s next project. The foundation’s president wrote, “We feel unable to respond favorably.” It was a one-sentence letter.35

  Skeels’s close-up exposure to Iowa’s failure to nurture its residents, a failure he had observed for over a decade, now seemed unendurable, perhaps even caused him to feel that he, too, had become an agent of harm. His research had made all too plain that Davenport’s environment erased the futures of many of its residents, condemning them to adult lives in institutions when changes in their environments would have saved them.

  After months of indecision, in August Skeels wrote an explosive letter that spelled out to the Iowa Board of Control how Davenport’s poor management and neglect affected its inmates. In his three-year absence, Skeels said, the state had crowded Davenport’s staff with incompetents hired because of political patronage. Needed rehabilitation services for 4,000 older children in the state’s institutions, he wrote, would require radical staff increases. Skeels criticized the hiring of untrained matrons who worked “fourteen-hour days with two days off per month for a paltry salary of seventy dollars per month” and added, “High caliber teachers seldom accept a position or stay long on a salary of one hundred dollars per month.”36 Skeels attacked the appointment of institutional superintendents who lacked any training and stressed that the Board of Control, supposedly in charge, had been denied any authority. He also emphasized that unqualified state agents charged with helping children make life plans were hired because of their political connections.

  He reported that when older Davenport children left the orphanage, many turned to crime and were sent to the state’s homes for delinquents. Life at Davenport, Skeels said, stole the intelligence of some of the children who lived there. “Of twenty-two older feebleminded children recently transferred from the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home to the Glenwood State School for Feebleminded,” Skeels wrote, “nine, or forty percent, were of normal or low average intelligence” when they entered Davenport four or five years earlier. Skeels observed that the low salaries for psychologists at Iowa’s other institutions meant that more than half of the positions remained unfilled. He declared his “moral obligation to the unfortunate wards of the state to register this protest.”37 And with his unprecedented letter, Skeels resigned his position as Iowa’s director of psychological services.

  Perhaps in a signal to the state, the Board of Control released Skeels’s letter to the Des Moines Register, which, under the front-page banner headline “Expert Says Institution Children Hurt by Politics,”38 quoted much of Skeels’s commentary. But when Harold Skeels turned away, he left Davenport’s children marooned. Following his resignation, and grateful for the station’s past promotion of his work, Skeels told Sears that the station’s “moral support . . . [had] affected child welfare policies throughout the country” and that he “deeply regretted” that he would not be working with Sears.39

  Within two weeks the Veterans Administration offered Skeels his choice of posts in Denver or San Francisco, and he accepted Denver’s offer. But by December, Skeels told Sears of his misgivings. He confessed that he missed the station “gang” and “even the program in the Iowa institutions which seemed so futile.”40 He wished Sears had talked him out of accepting his new position. In responding, Sears told him, “We certainly miss you and don’t know when in the world we are ever going to find a man to replace you. All my efforts have met with utter blanks.”41 Perhaps the most likely candidate to replace Skeels would have been Marie Skodak, but there is no evidence Sears considered offering her the position. None of Skodak’s later interviews or memoirs discuss this, but it is possible that Skodak had not kept her disapproval of Sears’s station leadership to herself. It is also plausible that Sears would have agreed with a University of Michigan academic who had refused to consider Skodak for a position because “unfortunately” she was a woman.

  By March, Iowa’s Board of Control had proposed reforms of Iowa’s institutions based on increased state appropriations and closer work with the Iowa station. Board discussions with Sears that included Skeels’s possible return found some board members cool to that idea, but as one acknowledged, “Well, it was all true.”42 In the end, Skeels remained at the Denver office of the Veterans Administration as chief clinical psychologist. In 1949, he moved to San Francisco as consulting clinical psychologist with the US Public Health Service, an arm of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). In 1951, NIMH promoted him to scientist director and chief of Special Program Development of the Community Services, in Bethesda, Maryland.

  In 1949, Sears resigned his Iowa position, saying he had “become a little tired of the Middle Western atmosphere . . . and very tired of the administrative responsibility.”43 As he left, however, he accepted the presidency of the American Psychological Association. In his next appointment, at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, Sears made use of the good fortune of his Iowa experience. He had gained some mastery in a new field and also inherited the Iowa station’s organizational model in which specialists cross-referenced their expertise to serve a single goal. He said that seemed “the best device I’ve seen yet for creating a genuinely stimulating environment for the study of child development,”44 although he did not credit Stoddard’s leadership for its evolution and application. After Sears left the station, Beth Wellman briefly served as station director, and in 1952, her former student, Boyd McCandless, became the station’s leader. Also in 1952, Sears left Cambridge to return to Stanford to lead the psychology department previously headed by Lewis Terman.

  In 1940, Marie Skodak became assistant director of the Flint, Michigan Child Guidance Clinic, a social service agency that provided therapy for children suffering psychological adjustment problems. With her male colleagues serving in World War II, in 1942 she became the agency’s director, the only woman in the United States to hold such a position.45 When the war ended and the men returned, Skodak left to open her own practice, becoming one of only two psychologists practicing privately in Michigan. Also during the 1940s, Skodak became a part-time lecturer at the University of Michigan, where she trained social workers.

  Skodak’s 1930s Iowa sojourn had delayed her plan to become a school psychologist, but in 1949 the Dearborn public schools hired her in that position. Once the turf of Henry Ford and other Detroit-area industrialists, by the time Skodak arrived, Dearborn had a professional class and also a diverse immigrant population. In her public school work, Skodak supported the roles of social workers and teachers in understanding the needs of all students, especially those with disabilities.46

  From 1943 to 1950, Skodak published four investigations that followed up on her earlier Iowa work, two of them with Skeels. In these she confirmed the persistence of intelligence gains in children she had previously studied, who at 2 years of age had a mean IQ score of 116. In the later work she found that at age 4, the mean IQ was 112, and at age 7, it was 113. To Skodak, these longitudinal results confirmed that an innate aristocracy of intelligence simply did not exist. On one of Skodak’s Iowa research visits, she learned that priceless records belonging to her and to Skeels were “destroyed in a ‘housecleaning operation’ during or shortly after Dr. Sears’ administration.”47 Although she had rushed to save what she could, irreplaceable historic research files and notes were gone, including Skeels’s 1938 8mm home movies of Glenwood children who recovered their intelligence, and of the women who cared for them. Skeels’s dis
covery of the discarding of his research materials only seemed to revive his feelings of disgrace.48

  In 1942, Lewis Terman retired as head of Stanford’s psychology department. In three decades he had grown a little-known department at a young university—Stanford had been founded in 1885—to a position of national and professional recognition. During that period five psychologists from the department, including Terman, were elected as presidents of the American Psychological Association. Those psychologists were also elected to the National Academy of Sciences, one-third of the psychologists elected during that period.

  Shortly after he retired, Terman suffered extensive burns from a fire when he fell asleep while smoking in bed. (In a time before the dangers of smoking were known, Terman had been a heavy smoker.) His recovery, including many skin grafts, extended over three years. From that point he limited his research to follow-up reports related to his longitudinal study of genius, such as his 1947 “Factors in the Adult Achievement of Gifted Men” and “Psychological Approaches to the Biography of Genius.” Because Terman believed that very intelligent people produced their best work in their 20s, he also devoted himself to promoting early identification of gifted children and encouraged their acceleration in school.

  In 1949, psychologist Nicholas Pastore, of Teachers College at Columbia University, published The Nature-Nurture Controversy, a collection of essays analyzing the work of twenty-four social scientists who had “expressed themselves on nature-nurture issues and controversial social and political questions.”49 Eleven of these were psychologists. Based on the analyses of others, Pastore classified each as a hereditarian or environmentalist, and to accurately represent their views, he also studied the writings of the scientists themselves. Pastore showed that in nearly all cases, those who held conservative social ideologies supported the hereditarian position, while those favoring ideas considered progressive leaned toward the environmentalist view. Learning that Pastore would describe him as a conservative, Terman wrote the author to dispute that characterization.

  In a detailed letter that Pastore’s book quoted at length, Terman described his consistently progressive voting record, emphasizing, “I hate every form of national totalitarianism. . . . Our failure to insure [the Bill of Rights] to minority groups I consider a national disgrace.”50 Pastore noted that in Terman’s 1930 autobiography, he had written “the major differences in the intelligence test scores of certain races, Negroes and Whites, will never be fully accounted for on the environmentalist hypothesis.”51 However, to Pastore, Terman also wrote, “I am now inclined to think that [the differences] may be less than I formerly believed them to be.”52 This private comment was as close as the typically unrestrained Terman came to amending the record of his hereditarian views.

  In 1956, while at work on the fifth volume of Genetic Studies of Genius, Terman died. He was 79 years old. In his 1957 remembrance of Lewis Terman, Robert Sears wrote:

  In a science that seems . . . to orient itself too often toward the care and understanding of the weak and inept, Terman turned resolutely toward the positive side of man’s existence. As a student of the intellect, his interest in feeblemindedness was perfunctory, his zeal for the study of genius, burning.53

  Another recollection came from Stanford psychologist Ernest Hilgard, who had twice moderated as Terman and Stoddard did battle. In it, Hilgard reported that in Terman’s personal copy of his autobiography, next to his comments that racial differences drove intelligence levels, he had written two notations. The first, from 1951, said, “I am less sure of this now.” And in 1953, “Still less sure.”54

  PART III

  Revival

  Chapter Eleven

  REVERSAL OF FORTUNE

  On April 7, 1945, the Baltimore Sun’s World War II correspondent, Lee McCardell, arrived at Ohrdruf, a small subcamp of Buchenwald and the first concentration camp liberated from Nazi control. McCardell wrote:

  Good God! . . . in a wooden shed, piled up like so much cordwood, were the naked bodies. . . . You had heard of such things in Nazi Germany. You had heard creditable witnesses describe just such scenes. But now that you were actually confronted with the horror . . . you almost doubted your own eyes.1

  As Lieutenant General George Patton’s 4th Armored Division fast approached, panicked guards murdered the camp’s nearly 2,000 mostly Jewish prisoners, although a few escaped into the surrounding forest, only emerging when the Americans arrived. McCardell had heard about the camps but had dismissed them as “just another atrocity story, probably true.”2 A few days later, America’s best-known radio journalist, Edward R. Murrow, reported from Buchenwald:

  Dead men are plentiful in war, but the living dead, more than 20,000 of them in one camp. . . . In another part of the camp they showed me children, hundreds of them. . . . One rolled up his sleeve, showed me his number. . . . I could see their ribs through their thin shirts. . . . The children clung to my hands and stared.3

  From 1933, when Adolf Hitler was elected Germany’s chancellor, until the nation’s defeat in 1945, the American public had nearly daily access to newspaper and radio reports documenting Nazi efforts to eradicate degenerates from German society.4 News of Nazi race laws, the forced removal of Jews and other minorities to ghettos, then to concentration camps to be tortured and murdered, all of this information was widely available. Although concerned organizations attempted to aid those trying to escape, for many reasons, including America’s eugenically based immigration laws, their efforts were almost entirely unsuccessful.

  But according to Daniel Kevles, after World War II knowledge of Nazi war crimes radically altered the nation’s thinking: “The revelations of the Holocaust had all but buried the eugenic ideal. . . . Eugenics . . . became virtually a dirty word in the United States.”5 Historian Allan Chase also reported that “the word ‘eugenics’ was . . . no longer even whispered on America’s campuses, in America’s laboratories.”6 But how would this retreat from eugenics influence the postwar priorities of mental test psychologists, the powerful group that had invoked eugenic explanations for human development longer and more vigorously than almost any other? Would it undermine psychology’s confidence that heredity alone decided human traits?

  Perhaps due to public distaste, postwar those psychologists retreated from the measurement of children’s intelligence, which had dominated their studies of child development, and took up research about adults, especially, as the war ended, related to millions of returning GIs. According to Marie Skodak, postwar research emphasized “clinical and adult needs . . . [and] adoption studies were totally abandoned.”7 A similar report came from Harold Anderson, a Michigan State University scholar who during the 1930s had studied children’s learning and motivation at the Iowa station. Anderson told a historian of child development that following World War II, “as a culture we [were] not interested in children.” Organizations in which child development had once been paramount, such as the National Research Council, the Social Science Research Council, and the Society for Research in Child Development, now treated it with indifference. “Anybody,” Anderson said, “could have done more to support child development research.”8 The field of psychology that only recently had been a battleground for hereditarian versus environmental dominance became quiet as an empty library.

  A review of four research journals that had previously published studies related to the influence of environment in the development of children’s intelligence suggests that between 1940 and 1960, the majority of reports about child development focused on personality types and social behaviors, as well as teaching and learning. Research into child development emphasized nutrition and children’s physical characteristics, including their health and growth. Some investigations examined academic programs and teacher training. During these decades, for example, the Journal of Experimental Education published 105 articles in the areas of teaching methods, teacher personality, and teacher-student relationships, but just 4 studies that related to environmental stimulatio
n and intelligence. Similarly, during this period the Journal of Child Development published 497 papers, of which only 7 examined environment and intelligence. In the American Journal of Mental Deficiency, only 10 of 1,115 articles addressed this area. In the Journal of Genetic Psychology, 5 of 791 articles examined environmental stimulation and intelligence in children. Of a total of 26 articles, 6 were from Iowa station psychologists.

  Psychology’s postwar turn from the study of child development had many causes, among them the loss to research of Stoddard, Skeels, and Skodak and, due to her illness, of Wellman. But a further explanation may be found in a 1956 essay from Iowa station leaders Boyd R. McCandless and Charles C. Spiker. In “Experimental Research in Child Psychology,” they addressed the postwar absence of new research and theoretical models and a preoccupation, instead, “with the application of available knowledge.”9 They attributed this decline to a profession that had failed to train students in statistical techniques, research methods, and the construction of theory. Additionally, they suggested that psychologists were now perceived as clinicians expected to teach and apply their training to practical concerns rather than theoretical constructs.10 The failures McCandless and Spiker described were less present at the Iowa station, and with its fiftieth anniversary in 1967, the station (now renamed the Institute for Child Behavior and Development) published an index of its over 2,000 scholarly publications in child development. This is especially remarkable because during the station’s first two decades, there were never more than six faculty on its staff, and later, never more than a dozen.11