Although Iowa’s 1930s work did not immediately revise psychology’s epistemology, its influence surfaced in a daring study from émigré physician and psychoanalyst René A. Spitz. Born and educated in Vienna, later a professor in Paris, in 1939 Spitz, who was Jewish, escaped the Nazis when he came to the United States. Settling in New York, he practiced and taught psychoanalysis, and to better understand his patients’ adult lives, he began to study early development. Working in an unidentified Western Hemisphere location, Spitz confirmed the Iowans’ discoveries. In 1945, he published “Hospitalism: An Inquiry into the Genesis of Psychiatric Conditions in Early Childhood,” in which he cited each of the Iowa psychologists—the most significant notice they had received from an investigator outside their circle.12 Then and today considered a work of great insight, Spitz’s paper reported on the development of institutionalized children under 1 year of age. He found that, as BD and CD, many grew asocial, became feebleminded, and showed profound developmental declines. Much subsequent literature about the deterioration suffered by institutionalized children confirmed Spitz’s observation of a condition first defined in 1897 as “hospitalism.”13
Accompanying his report was a quotation from a 1760 Spanish bishop translated here: “In the children’s home, many die of sadness.”14 The infants’ deterioration, Spitz suggested, resulted from extreme neglect. Spitz studied two groups of children from similar social backgrounds. One group lived in a nursery located in a penal institution, where their pregnant, incarcerated mothers had given birth and remained. The other group lived in a foundling home. Although each institution provided excellent nutritional and medical care, aspects of the children’s environments differed considerably. For example, the nursery children had many more toys, purchased or made for them by their mothers. Also, from their cribs they had views of the outdoors, and each day their mothers cared for and played with them.
Like the children in Davenport’s nursery, infants in the foundling home lay in cribs wrapped with protective sheeting that created an environment of nearly total seclusion and that Spitz likened to “solitary confinement.”15 Also like the Davenport children, overburdened staff provided little attention or stimulation. Spitz found that the foundling children had poor motor development, failed to gain weight, and suffered from poor health. Some died. Although Iowa’s studies included almost no references to the deaths of Davenport children, Marie Skodak reported that they occurred.16 At the end of one year, the mean developmental score of children cared for by their mothers remained in the average range, but the foundling children became retarded. In 1952, Spitz circulated his films of young institutionalized children who appeared to have significant cognitive deficits. After child development professionals viewed these amateur movies, they successfully lobbied to outlaw nearly all orphanages in the United States.17
Spitz was not alone in his concern about institutional effects on children, and in 1949 additional research appeared from Harry Bakwin, a pediatrician at Bellevue Hospital in New York. Bakwin reported that the illnesses and deaths of infants in hospitals and institutions were not the result of poor nutrition, as had been thought, but of neglect. With exquisite empathy, Bakwin understood that the isolation and loneliness experienced by babies could prove deadly. At Bellevue he replaced a sign that hung outside the hospital’s nursery that said “Wash your hands twice before entering this ward” with one that said “Do not enter this nursery without picking up a baby.”18
In descriptions remarkably similar to Skeels’s discussion of CD and BD, Bakwin reported that young children in hospital wards “failed to gain weight, and show listlessness, emaciation and pallor, relative immobility, quietness, unresponsiveness to stimuli like a smile . . . and [have the] appearance of unhappiness.”19 These conditions, he said, improved within about six months after the infants were placed in homes. While Bakwin did not reference the Iowa discoveries, that time interval closely paralleled the period BD and CD had spent with the Woodward women when changes in their development became obvious.
In 1952, John Bowlby, a pediatrician and psychologist and the director for child guidance at London’s Tavistock Clinic, published Maternal Care and Mental Health, a comprehensive report for the World Health Organization and the United Nations, which confirmed what Spitz and Bakwin had found:
When deprived of maternal care the child’s development is almost always retarded . . . and that symptoms of physical and mental illness may appear. . . . This is a somber conclusion which may now be regarded as established. . . . [The evidence] leaves no room for doubt that the development of the institution infant deviates from the norm at a very early age.20
Bowlby did not reference the Iowa studies, but he cited the important work of William Goldfarb, a psychologist with the Foster Home Bureau of the New York Association for Jewish Children. Goldfarb found that by age 3, children who lived in an institution had a mean IQ score of 68, while those who had been adopted had a mean IQ score of 96, a differential similar to what Skeels had reported in his experimental and contrast groups in 1939. Both psychologists had used the Stanford-Binet IQ test.21 Like the Iowans, Goldfarb found that the “most significant group for psychological consideration is the infant.”22 His research notwithstanding, a critic told him, “The supposed love of the foster mother for the foster child, is frequently fiction.”23 Further, his employer added a disclaimer to the published version of Goldfarb’s paper, which said, “Judgments . . . do not necessarily reflect the views of the N. Y. Association for Jewish Children.”24 Spitz, Bakwin, Bowlby, and Goldfarb might have expected their work to move psychologists and the public closer to the environmental view. However, unlike the exhilarating 1938–1939 period when word of Iowa’s discoveries led to intense media coverage, postwar newspaper and magazine journalists paid little attention to these ideas.
Yet, the research may have persuaded Wayne Dennis, a psychologist at Brooklyn College, to reconsider his 1941 study in which he had found that children’s maturation developed “without encouragement or instruction, without reward or example,” that what children learned from adults was “relatively unimportant.”25 Like much research, Dennis’s ideas were a work in progress, and in the 1950s, along with Pergrouhi Najarian, of the American University in Beirut, Dennis studied children cared for in a Beirut foundling home that they called the Crèche. In 1957, the two psychologists published “Infant Development under Environmental Handicap.” The authors warned, however, that readers might find their results confusing because of “the many divergent opinions concerning the effect of early environment.”26 Although they did not reference Skeels’s studies, the Crèche and the Davenport Home had significant similarities: both suffered from inadequate funds, limited staff, and brusque caretakers and provided almost no opportunities for children’s learning. Infants at each institution were fed with bottles propped beside their mouths, and their visual stimulation was restricted by sheets that wrapped the sides of their cribs.
Dennis and Najarian compared 12-month-old infants at the Crèche with infants of the same age from impoverished families who received regular health care at American University’s Beirut Hospital.27 Until they were 2 months, both groups had similar development. But after one year, the mean IQ test score of the Crèche children had declined from 100 to 63. The mean test score of the hospital infants had not declined.28 Yet when the Crèche children were retested at age 5, the psychologists found they “approximated the performance of children in normal environments.”29 This may reflect that after the Crèche children reached 1 year, each matron cared for a group of ten children and so provided greater attention and stimulation than was possible at Davenport, where from ages 2 to 6, one matron cared for about 35 children. The authors concluded that the “doctrine of the permanency of early environmental effects” could not be correct.30 Dennis’s use of the phrase “doctrine of permanency” is unusual: at that time, little about environment’s role in development had been formalized as a “doctrine.”
Then, in
1958, Samuel A. Kirk, head of the Institute for Research on Exceptional Children at the University of Illinois and a harsh critic of the Iowa studies, published an investigation that confirmed Iowa’s work. Kirk’s turnaround came after he reviewed Iowa’s studies referenced in the 1946 work of a young psychologist, Bernadine Schmidt. Schmidt had investigated a group of 322 adolescents who were from economically impoverished backgrounds and had IQ test scores below 70. When those students entered high school, half were placed in highly individualized classes where every effort was made to improve their functioning. If they required glasses or hearing aids, they received them; if they had difficulty reading or writing exams, including IQ tests, readers or writers were provided, accommodations that are routine today. After five years, the mean IQ test score gain for those in the individualized program was 25.2 points, nearly identical to the gains for Skeels’s Woodward and Glenwood children. But Schmidt found that students who had remained in a regular program lost a mean of 4 IQ points, and all continued to have low IQs.31
Kirk’s criticism of Schmidt’s research methods virtually ended her career. But for reasons that are not clear, in the 1950s Kirk reconsidered the Iowa studies and in his own investigation examined ideas similar to the Iowans’. Kirk reported on 81 retarded children whose IQ test scores ranged from 45 to 80 and who did or did not attend preschool. Half the children lived in the community and half in institutions. He found that compared with the control group, 70 percent of the preschool children showed significantly accelerated intellectual and social growth, which they retained during a one-year follow-up.32 Ten percent of Kirk’s references were from the Iowa group. Of special importance, in his conclusion Kirk quoted George Stoddard: “To regard all changes in mental status as an artifact [of heredity] is to shut one’s eyes to the most significant and dramatic phenomenon in human growth.”33 Later, Skeels said that Kirk’s recognition of the Iowa studies encouraged others in the field to “sit up and take notice.”34 In the 1960s, Kirk became widely known for strategies that helped students with learning differences and as the popularizer of the term learning disabilities. Today he is regarded as ‘the Father of Special Education.”35
Yet despite these few but persuasive studies, by 1960 the tide still had not turned, and Iowa’s discoveries were rarely cited. An important factor in that neglect was hidden in plain sight: the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station had lost its essential core, the ensemble of researchers focused on studies of environment’s effect on intelligence. For a decade their research had been just about the only light in that room, and when it was extinguished, few mental test psychologists or psychologists in related fields attempted to replicate or extend Iowa’s contributions.
By 1960, Harold Skeels, who for many years had been chief of Special Program Development in NIMH’s Community Research and Services, was the sole Iowa group psychologist with access to research facilities, yet he made no effort to rekindle interest in child study investigations. It is unclear what stopped him. Was it that the field had taken other directions? Or that Skeels wished to avoid further belittling of his work and of himself? Did he want to keep knowledge of his past humiliation from contaminating his NIMH status?
“Skeels was his own person” was the way Simon Auster explained it. During the early 1960s, Skeels and Auster, an NIMH child psychiatrist whom Skeels supervised, met twice weekly. The two shared a deep concern about children’s well-being, and Auster’s easygoing nature might have led to exchanges about their lives and professional experiences. But Auster reported that in years of discussions, the two talked only about Auster’s projects, and Skeels never spoke of his past work or of any aspect of his life outside the office. As Auster described, “Harold was a very private individual, very circumspect. There was no lack of warmth, but he didn’t in any way pick up on the personal.”36 During the time the two worked together, Auster remained unaware that Skeels had made important discoveries, and Auster’s NIMH colleagues never mentioned them.37
One of the few people with whom Skeels discussed the Iowa work, Marie Skodak, visited Washington now and then to attend professional meetings. On those occasions, the friends of nearly thirty years would recall their Iowa adventures and struggles, and they were often in touch by letter and telephone. Skodak and Skeels were closer to one another than to any of their past Iowa associates. Knowing him so well, Skodak said she viewed his life as “lonely and restricted,” but respected his reticence.38
One January morning in 1961, when Robert J. Havighurst, of the University of Chicago, arrived at NIMH to attend a professional meeting, he noticed that Skeels’s office was right down the hall. Remembering Skeels’s pioneering Woodward and Glenwood research, it suddenly occurred to him that the children who had lived with low-intellect women would now be in their late 20s. Havighurst, who had a special interest in longitudinal studies, wondered if their changed intelligence had persisted? What were their educational, social, and economic outcomes? Their adult status, he believed, might reveal much about their environments. And if they had children of their own, what was their intelligence? Havighurst and Skeels had never met, but he knocked, walked in, and introduced himself.
Born in 1900, Havighurst was a polymath who trained in chemistry at Ohio State, then in physics at Harvard. Since the 1930s, he had been at the University of Chicago, where he focused on experimental education. He had not taken a side during the Iowans’ 1940 battle and might have been one of the few attending his NIMH meeting who would have given Skeels’s discoveries much thought. But with some intensity that morning Havighurst suggested that Skeels undertake a study to learn the fates of his original twenty-five Davenport subjects. He told him this was “urgent.”39 The Iowa psychologist was taken aback by Havighurst’s emphasis, and although Skeels politely heard him out, he opposed the idea.
Yet Skeels could not let go of Havighurst’s argument about the importance of his research and sought advice from one of the few at NIMH who knew of his discoveries, Thomas Gladwin. An anthropologist and researcher of mental development, Gladwin had recently coauthored Mental Subnormality, an influential summary of current knowledge in the area. Gladwin, who had hoped Skeels would write a book about his discoveries, agreed with Havighurst about the follow-up’s importance. To support the projected study, he sent a memorandum to NIMH administrators about its potential significance.
Gladwin explained that his conversations with Skeels about child development were “wiser [and] more mature than [those] he had with many alleged experts.” He said it would be “tragic” if Skeels did not share his ideas beyond the few he had spoken to at NIMH. The prospect of a longitudinal follow-up, Gladwin wrote, thrilled everyone who heard of it. Moreover, Gladwin unconditionally endorsed Iowa’s 1939 conclusions. He reframed the station’s maligned statistical methods as an “extremely conservative approach [that] permitted [the work] to survive a succession of violent attacks.”40 Moreover, Gladwin asserted that decades ahead of their time, Skeels and Skodak were “in a unique position as elder statesmen. . . . The time [is] now or never to communicate the wisdom of Skodak and Skeels to a large audience and . . . change the direction of child development . . . to a degree I believe will be large and lasting.”41 After decades of neglect, Skeels now had what every pioneering researcher hopes for: recognition of their work’s importance from an erudite leader in their own field.
Skeels would, of course, have known of René Spitz’s 1945 study of institutionalized infants and of the few after Spitz whose findings also supported environment, although he also would have recognized that postwar research had not softened psychology’s hereditarian bias. Yet, Havighurst’s and Gladwin’s passionate encouragement signaled possible revisions in psychology, perhaps happening in slow motion, but happening nonetheless.
At about this time, other evidence emerged for such a possibility. In 1958, Joseph McVicker Hunt, a psychologist previously at Brown University and now at the University of Illinois, was someone who had known little about child development but
recently had begun to consider its importance. Hunt’s earlier research in abnormal and psychoanalytic psychology had led to his acclaimed 1944 work Personality and the Behavioral Disorders. It was at an impasse in writing about intelligence and motivation in adults—his ideas would not jell was how he put it—that he recognized his ignorance in the area of early intelligence and began a review of Iowa’s research and that of others. Later he said that this reconsideration forced “a dramatic change” in his thinking.42
Hunt never did anything by halves, and by 1961 he had published a landmark work, Intelligence and Experience, considered “one of the most important contributions of twentieth century psychology.”43 Although new to the early development field, Hunt’s reputation as a scholar, along with the book’s novel insights, brought him wide recognition. The work, he said, “got me tagged as an environmentalist,” an identification he rejected because he defined himself as an “interactionist,” like the Iowans, someone who recognized that heredity and environment acted together.44 (The Iowans did not use this term to describe their perspective, nor did others at that time. Today, it is most often found in the scholarly work of sociologists.) Hunt knew of the 1930s hereditarian versus environmentalist struggle, but had done no work in that field and played no role in those events. However, his new work addressed the current status of hereditarian thought, ideas he wrote that might be “weakening [but were] still widely accepted.”45 Importantly, his 1961 monograph reshaped his career, turning Hunt into a leader in early childhood education. While Hunt acknowledged the methodological limitations of the Iowa studies, he emphasized their provocative evidence for the relation between stimulation and intelligence.
The Orphans of Davenport Page 25
