The Orphans of Davenport

by Marilyn Brookwood

  At about this time, President John F. Kennedy read of Hunt’s work, which triggered his campaign trail memory of impoverished West Virginia children who lacked decent schooling, housing, nutrition, and health care. Kennedy told a Hunt associate: “If there’s this much plasticity in early development and if there are these differences in classes, then the ethic of equal opportunity applies not only to the adult and the school age child, but it applies to the child before he goes to school.”46 Kennedy’s initiatives for government programs in early education aligned with Hunt’s thinking, but were cut short by his death in 1963. Soon, President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs took up Kennedy’s efforts.47 Johnson called attention to the developmental effects of growing up in poverty that “contributed to the scientific justification for the Head Start program,” a federally funded early learning program for children up to the age of 5. During Johnson’s administration, Hunt chaired a presidential advisory committee on preschool education related to Head Start.48

  In his monograph Intelligence and Experience, Hunt addressed the decades-long rejection of the Iowa station’s discoveries and suggested that the profession’s response had impeded psychology’s progress. He pointed, especially, to Florence Goodenough’s oft-cited ridicule of Iowa’s investigations. Such hereditarian dominance, Hunt said, meant “most investigators withdrew from the field.”49 After decades of neglect, Hunt’s attention and prestige provided support for the Iowa view from a scholar willing to take psychology to task for its earlier contempt.

  In a 1962 address at Columbia University’s Arden House, Hunt told an audience of educators, child specialists, social workers, and psychologists of Iowa’s discoveries that early stimulation preserved and raised institutionalized children’s intelligence, that development required stimulation. Scathingly, he described what had kept the work in the shadows, but assured his audience that this was a new day:

  Their work was picked to pieces by critics and lost much of the suggestive value it was justified in having. Many of you will recall the ridicule that was heaped upon the “wandering I. Q.” [in 1939, by Benjamin Simpson] and the way . . . Florence Goodenough derided . . . the idea of “feeble-minded” infants being brought . . . to normal mentality by moron nursemaids. . . . The fact that just such a use of preschool experience is now being seriously planned by sensible people with widespread approval means that something has changed.50

  Moreover, based on Iowa’s discoveries, Hunt became a champion for an even more penetrating anti-racist, anti-classist vision: “So long as these fictions of fixed intelligence and predetermined development prevailed, the observed characteristics of races, classes, and individuals were considered . . . inevitable.”51 Finally, through Hunt’s advocacy, the Iowa psychologists had been transformed from outcasts in their own profession to inspired theorists who were ahead of their time.

  Early 1960s reports from the American Psychological Association endorse Hunt’s claim that psychology had begun to accept the evidence that heredity worked together with environment. A 2004 APA review of that period cited Hunt’s 1964 declaration that “any laws concerning the rate of intellectual growth must take into account the . . . environmental encounters which constitute the conditions of that growth.”52 The APA also recognized the role of Martin Deutsch, whose 1960s work, supported by the Ford Foundation, examined the causes of learning difficulties among children from lower social economic status homes in the African American community.53 Deutsch understood that the children he studied suffered from “a poverty of experience . . . some had never even seen themselves in a mirror.”54 He became one of the most important contributors to Head Start’s theoretical framework. Considered, too, was the work of pediatrician Julius Richmond, who, at the start of his career in the 1930s, recognized that young children who lived in poverty suffered developmental declines. In the 1940s, Richmond lost a battle—he described himself as “bloodied”—in which he sought to introduce a child development curriculum at the University of Illinois’s medical school.55 In the 1960s, Richmond became a leader in Head Start’s development. Later he served as the nation’s Surgeon General.

  In his 1961 book, and now in his 1962 Arden House talk, Hunt told of Canadian neuroscientist Donald O. Hebb’s discoveries that the brain changes itself when it interacts with experience. In the 1920s and 1930s, Bird Baldwin and George Stoddard had speculated that this was how development worked, but they lacked proof—Hebb had not yet begun to publish. Hunt now called attention to Hebb’s 1940s discoveries.56 A Canadian who had studied at McGill University, Hebb earned a Harvard PhD, then worked in brain science at the Montreal Neurological Institute, Queens College, in Ontario, and the Yerkes Laboratory, in Orange Park, Florida. While at Yerkes, he wrote his 1949 monograph, The Organization of Intelligence, long recognized as a trailblazing work that married neuroscience and psychology. Soon after the book’s publication, Hebb returned to McGill, where he remained.

  Hebb pursued the radical idea that in a dynamic process stimulative experience changed the developing brain and therefore changed intelligence. Neither Skeels nor Skodak, both still active in the 1960s, reference Hebb’s studies, but to Hunt it seemed clear that understanding Hebb was essential to understanding the transformations of the Davenport children. In 1949 Hebb wrote: “There is in fact an overwhelming body of evidence to show that experience is essential to development. . . . Why then should we object to the idea that enriching an inadequate environment will raise the IQ, as Stoddard and Wellman and others have urged?”57 Where the Iowans had failed to convince, Hebb met with great success. His work challenged eugenic dogma and offered an evidence-based scientific explanation of the neuroscience of cognitive development. His conclusions were inescapable, and eventually, they were decisive.58

  Hebb suggested that when neural cells worked together—he called them “cell assemblies”—they stimulated one another. “The general idea,” Hebb explained, “is an old one, that any two cells or systems of cells that are repeatedly active at the same time will tend to become ‘associated,’ that activity in one promotes activity in the other.”59 To study whether experience altered these neural networks, Hebb housed half of a rat litter in standard laboratory cages and set the other rats free in his home, where they explored, searched for food, and received affection from Hebb’s two young daughters. The girls provided “enthusiastic” attention, Hebb wrote, because, after all, the rats had become the family pets.60

  Hebb found that the explorer rats scored higher on maze tests of rat intelligence than the caged rats, and, surprisingly, during the last ten days of their adventure their intelligence accelerated still further. Hebb explained that just as with humans, as they became smarter, they became “better able to profit from new experiences.” Hebb showed that stimulation drove brain development and explained how “cognition, emotion, thought, and consciousness” worked.61 His impact on the understanding of the development of intelligence has been likened to Charles Darwin’s contribution to the understanding of evolution.62

  During this period, original contributions about environment also came from another scholar, Urie Bronfenbrenner, of Cornell University. Born in Russia in 1917, when Bronfenbrenner was 6 years old his family emigrated to the United States. Once arrived, they lived on the grounds of Letchworth Village, a New York State institution for developmentally disabled children and adults, where his physician father was employed. Occasionally, Dr. Bronfenbrenner treated institutional patients whose intelligence appeared normal, but he noticed that the longer they lived as inmates, the more their behaviors resembled those of the impaired residents.

  When Dr. Bronfenbrenner arranged for one of those possibly normal patients to work in the family’s home, he found that “gradually she resumed a ‘normal’ life.” Without his intervention, it seemed likely that the young woman would have spent many years, perhaps her entire life, in an institution. Observing these events, the young Bronfenbrenner became impressed with the power of others’ expectations to i
nfluence an individual’s behaviors.63 “I offer a new theoretical perspective for research in human development,” Bronfenbrenner wrote in 1979, “the evolving interaction of the developing person and the environment.”64 When he was at Harvard, one of Bronfenbrenner’s professors, Walter Fenno Dearborn, advised, “If you want to understand something, try to change it.”65 Even if Harold Skeels never heard those words, he had lived them.

  Havighurst and Gladwin’s persuasion achieved what they hoped, and Skeels agreed to investigate the adult outcomes of the Woodward and Glenwood children he had studied decades earlier. He also arranged NIMH approval for Marie Skodak’s follow-up of her earlier research of Davenport children adopted when they were under 6 months and a small group who had been adopted when they were between 2 and 5 years. During the 1940s, when they were adolescents still living with their families, Skodak had done some follow-up investigations of their progress. By 1961, most of the research subjects of both psychologists were in their late 20s.

  Keenly interested in the relationships between adoptive parents and their children, they would first interview the parents and request permission to talk with their now-adult children. Their investigation would continue for about two years and include nearly 250 interviews; they would conduct IQ tests on the children of those subjects but not on the subjects themselves—a choice their planning notes left unexplained. Hoping to prevent the parents or their adult children from “rehearsing” for these meetings, the psychologists would arrive in each home unannounced. Including travel, the study would cost $50,000 to $75,000—today, about $400,000 to $600,000.66 NIMH agreed to fund the work.

  Although the follow-up occurred before privacy laws protected the rights of research subjects, the Iowans anticipated that some of the subjects or their parents might not wish to be interviewed. They assured authorities of their “careful, tactful, and diplomatic handling of the children, and of any contacts . . . necessary to locate a family.”67 There is no record that this informal pledge had been requested, but in the early 1960s there were no standards for ethical research that involved human subjects. (To ensure that no harm would come to human research subjects, since 1983, institutional review boards have overseen such investigations.)

  As their research got underway, Skodak and Skeels refitted their cars as mobile offices, stocking them with decades of Davenport’s medical and IQ test reports, files filled with family names and addresses, and years of progress notes and referrals. They also brought along state and local maps, local residential telephone directories, specialized business directories, and, to locate information that might not be found anywhere else, Polk’s directories to American cities. And those were only their print resources. In small towns they copied residents’ telephone numbers from what often were the only telephone directories—lists thumbtacked to the walls of local filling stations—or made notes of conversations with chatty neighbors or telephone operators. Skeels tracked down one family by asking a woman mailing a letter at a small-town Iowa post office if she knew them. He located another whose last address was now in the path of a six-lane freeway. With some luck, Skeels found every subject and family from his 1939 study, and Skodak located every subject and family from the 1949 final adoption study. They became so adept at searching for people that they advised the public to put away the illusion that someone could seem to vanish and leave no trail.68

  In their searches, the psychologists identified themselves to neighbors or shopkeepers as old Iowa friends trying to reconnect. In a sense that was true, as over years of visiting children’s homes to test their intelligence, they had established comfortable relationships with the children and their parents. Because of the difficulty finding accurate addresses, they rejected searching for subjects and families by mail, but they also made that choice because they believed that only through direct contact would they hear the parents’ and subjects’ true responses to their adoption experience.

  From the beginning, the two psychologists were alert to how a subject’s early history and later environment might have influenced their adult outcomes. During the 1940s, Skodak had done four follow-up investigations of the adopted children she had studied and found that her subjects’ IQs, most of them in the superior range, had remained stable. This suggested that as adults those subjects’ IQs would probably continue to be stable. But Skeels’s subjects had lived at Davenport for one to two years, where their IQ test scores had declined, but then risen when they experienced intensive stimulation from the women at Woodward or Glenwood. As Skeels had found in 1942, after their adoptions, the scores of all but one subject increased still further.

  Now he considered whether those subjects’ early IQ instabilities—the fact that led to his study in the first place—might have resurfaced in their adulthoods. Although Skeels would not test the IQs of his adult subjects, he planned to make rough calculations based on how they managed their jobs, homes, and children. He also feared that their intelligence might have declined to the point that they would have been returned to an institution. If he found that the adult IQs of his experimental group subjects had fallen back to lower levels, would that mean that the hereditarian dictum “blood will tell” was accurate?69 Or could some other factor have caused the decline? He also wondered whether the contrast group subjects, each of whom had early IQ test score declines, had remained at low levels into their adult lives. Here is some of what Skeels discovered.

  Skeels made one of his first visits to the adoptive parents of CD. In 1934, CD had been placed at the Woodward Home, where her IQ test score climbed from 46, at the imbecile level, to 95, comfortably in the normal range. But about the time that CD was adopted in 1936, Skeels had completed a study indicating that children’s IQ test scores tracked with the professional status of their adoptive fathers: the higher the father’s professional level, the higher the child’s IQ test score.70 In 1942, when Skeels had tested CD for his follow-up, he found her IQ score had declined to 90, still in the average range, but lower than it had been. This concerned him because he thought that her adoptive home might not have been sufficiently stimulative and that her IQ test score might have fallen still more.

  Knocking at the door of what had been her parents’ home, CD’s aunt greeted Skeels and told him that during CD’s adolescence, both of CD’s parents had died. He discovered that because of a chronic illness, CD had dropped out of school after ninth grade. Following an early marriage, CD, her husband, and their two young children had moved to the far west, but CD’s aunt did not have their address.

  Eventually, Skeels located the family in a “tar paper shingle” rental home in an impoverished neighborhood. Now 29, CD told him that her husband had steady landscaping work and the family’s finances were stable. Skeels felt reassured when he saw that her children and her home were well taken care of. But as CD walked Skeels back to his car, with some emotion she asked if he could help her find her birth parents. Realizing she believed that her birth mother had abandoned her, he provided some resources. He told her that when mothers gave up their babies, “it did not mean they didn’t love them, but that the mother thought adoptive parents could do better by her child than she could.” Now aware of her struggles, Skeels’s asked himself,

  had I really done [CD] a favor by getting her out of the Woodward State Hospital. However, I guess, everything considered, it is a rather commendable record. She is still living with her husband, they are eating and have two nice [children], and at least at no time has she been returned to a state institution.71

  Because CD seemed well able to manage her home and children, Skeels felt reassured that her intelligence had probably not fallen further. But he also noted: “It seems probable that this will be the lowest level of the 13 [subjects].” When Skeels tested the IQs of CD’s children, her 8-year-old, who had been premature, had a lower test score than her older son, but both were within the normal range.

  A few months later, Skeels interviewed the adoptive mother of BD, the other Davenport toddler plac
ed at Woodward, whose IQ during the earlier study had climbed from 35 to 93. Her 58-point gain was the largest made by any subject in his experiment. By his 1942 follow-up, her IQ had risen to 96. With obvious affection, BD’s mother told Skeels that in high school BD had academic difficulties, earning mostly Cs, but had graduated and held low-paying jobs in the community. BD’s adoptive mother had also grown up in an orphanage, the Home for the Friendless, one of many such institutions then located in eastern and midwestern states. “If I was thirty years younger,” she told Skeels, “I would adopt another child. My love for BD is a different kind of love.”

  When Skeels located BD, now 29, she and her family were living in a small midwestern town where her husband worked for the railroad. They were a close-knit, financially secure household in which both parents also felt close to their own families. Skeels tested the intelligence of two of BD’s children and found that one had an average IQ and the other’s was above average. He noted that BD’s intelligence seemed to have remained stable. “The marvel in all this” he wrote, “is that she is not in an institution and able to assume her role in life.”72 Although BD had information about her birth family, she expressed no interest in contacting them. However, Skeels noted,

  BD inquired with much feeling about CD. . . . While at Woodward State Hospital they lived on the same wards and later were transferred back to Davenport together. In the interview with CD she also inquired about BD. This close relationship has never been forgotten by either of them. BD remarked that it might be possible for her to meet CD on the street . . . and not know.73

  Following his interviews, Skeels provided each young woman with the identity and location of the other. He did not report that he knew of any subsequent contact between them.

  Skeels next visited the adoptive parents of experimental group case 7, whose intelligence, when she entered Davenport at 9 months, was in the same range as the infant CD’s had been. Born prematurely, she spent two months in an incubator, and when she arrived at Glenwood at 17 months, she was extremely frail. At Glenwood she made spectacular gains and was adopted. By the time of Skeels’s 1942 follow-up, her IQ score was 109. Her adoptive parents, both of whom graduated from college, reported that “they only wished they had adopted two.”74