The Orphans of Davenport

by Marilyn Brookwood

  Case 7’s parents would have helped her find her birth parents, but her adoptive mother told Skeels, “They had not kept her and that was enough for her.” She had outstanding musical talent and a successful high school career. Although accepted for stewardess training by an airline, she instead married an airline flight engineer. The couple moved west, where her husband worked for a specialist aviation group. When Skeels located case 7, she was 27, and as Skeels described, “a charming young woman . . . cheerful and attractive . . . who appears a comfortable sort of mother.”75 He suspected her marriage was a happy one. When Skeels tested the IQs of her four children, he found they ranged from 107 to 114.76

  The parents of case 4 were one of four families who, out of privacy concerns, did not wish Skeels to contact their child.77 They said they would have adopted another child, but the state agent refused because “the mother was too wrapt [sic] up in the adopted daughter.” Case 4 had arrived at Davenport as a sickly 3-month infant, and after a year, when her IQ test score was 73, Skeels transferred her to Glenwood. Eight months later her IQ score had risen to 100, and she was adopted. In Skeels’s 1942 follow-up, she had an IQ of 116, in the superior range. Her parents told him she had graduated from high school, had earned an RN degree, and worked as a nursing supervisor.78

  Experimental case 9, the youngest of six siblings, fared the least well of the children in her family. A normal infant, she had been inadvertently poisoned by her incompetent, alcoholic parents and also diagnosed with syphilis. Although her disease had been cured, at Glenwood she never achieved normal intelligence and therefore was unadoptable. When the study ended, she had an IQ test result of 80 and was returned to Davenport, where her intelligence declined and severe visual problems were first diagnosed. By age 10 she had an IQ test score of 60 and, nearly blind in one eye, she reentered Glenwood as a permanent inmate.

  At Glenwood, case 9 received training in childcare and housekeeping and as a teenager left the institution to live with an older sister, although she continued in state supervision. She hired a lawyer to challenge that status and eventually was permitted to live on her own. When Skeels interviewed the older sister, she told him that she had suffered more from her mother’s neglect than her younger sibling and wondered why she had remained intact. “Was there someone in the family” he asked, “with whom you had a close, emotional relationship?” “Oh yes,” the sister told him, “I was much closer to my grandmother than my own mother.”79 Her grandmother’s attention, Skeels suggested, might have made the difference. Case 9 had been removed from the home at 3 months, before her grandmother’s care could have influenced her development.80

  Now 27, case 9 had not seen Skeels since she was 9 years old, but when she heard his voice in the hallway of the home in which she was the housekeeper, she ran to greet him. She was now working for a widower and a “kind of mother” to his two children, and Skeels realized that she had more maturity than most former institutional inmates. She lived with the family, participated in social and religious programs, and did day work for other neighborhood families. She made a point to tell Skeels that Glenwood sterilized young women, often against their will, and that her sister had intervened to prevent that from happening to her.81

  When admitted to Davenport, case 10 had been a normal 8-month-old baby. By age 2 his IQ score was 72 and Skeels transferred him to Glenwood. There, his IQ was unstable—when the study ended it was 79—in the low-average range, and he was returned to Davenport. After five months in Davenport’s new preschool this boy’s IQ score rose to 96 and he was adopted. When Skeels interviewed his adoptive parents, they told of their family’s satisfying life with their child in the small Iowa town where he graduated from high school. He enrolled in a business college, received a real estate license, and earned the equivalent today of about $60,000.82 Later, Skeels interviewed the son, who said he wondered about his birth parents, but worried that if he tried to locate them he would hurt his adoptive parents’ feelings. Skeels tested case 10’s four children and found that their IQ scores ranged from well within the normal range to above average.83

  Case 11, 27-year-old Louis Branca, once Wendell Hoffman, had been a normal 1-year-old whose intelligence declined at Davenport. (Because Branca shared his story with the author, much detail about his life is available.) When he was a little over 2, Skeels transferred him to Glenwood. In 1962, Branca filled Skeels in about the twenty-two years since his adoption by a St. Paul couple, Genevieve Carroll Branca and Louis P. Branca.84

  With his adoption, Branca’s longing to be part of a family had been fulfilled. His adoptive mother—whom he described as a “society woman”—had grown up in a Davenport family that traced their forebears to the Mayflower. Genevieve Branca had cofounded the St. Paul Women’s Club, and Louis reported that from time to time “groups of overdressed women” met for tea in the Brancas’ living room to plan community events. Yet, almost from the beginning, Louis believed he disappointed his mother “because I was not growing up to be the kind of boy she wanted: I was exactly the opposite of high society.” Although Louis and his mother were not close, Louis’s father, a chiropractor whose parents immigrated to the United States from Milan, was a loving, accepting parent.

  Yet, grandparents on both sides of Branca’s adoptive family treated him coldly, something he attributed to their unspoken worries about his background. “You know, what kind of blood did I come from?” Branca wanted to know that, too, and from his Iowa records he had learned that when his birth mother entered the maternity ward, she appeared confused and gave authorities several last names. Whenever he met someone with one of those names—Foster or Hoffman or others—he would wonder if that person might be a relative. As an adult, Branca searched unsuccessfully for clues to his father’s identity and eventually questioned whether his birth mother even knew who his father had been.85

  Branca’s Glenwood preschool experiences were poor preparation for the educational program at St. Mark’s, a Catholic school that served advantaged upper-middle-class students, and in kindergarten he felt “shell-shocked” and like “the weird kid.” Sensitive to his needs, his teacher, “a wonderful nun,” taught him basic information that his peers had already learned. “She saved my life,” he remembered. Throughout elementary school the Brancas, who had no books in their home and never took Louis to a library, provided tutors to support his learning. He recognized that his institutional history had resulted in academic gaps, “but as I got older,” he recalled, “I got better and better and better and by the time I was in eighth grade I was competitive . . . I was almost like a normal St. Mark’s kid.”86

  As at Glenwood, at St. Mark’s Branca formed rich friendships, now with classmates who had known one another most of their lives. Much later those school friends would connect him with his first wife, and after a divorce, with his second. While at Davenport and Glenwood, Branca had been one of the children who soothed themselves by rocking back and forth, but as he got older and felt more confident, he found he rocked less.

  In 1949, Branca began high school at St. Thomas Academy in St. Paul, where he did well academically and enjoyed a typical high schooler’s life of academics, sports (including football), and social events. But toward the end of his high school years, his mother, aged 56, died suddenly, which destabilized him for a while. When Branca graduated in 1954, he entered the same chiropractic program his father had attended, but concerned that his degree would not win his peers’ respect, he decided to attend college. With the Korean War recently ended, he enlisted in the army in order to have GI Bill benefits. During his service he worked as a long-distance radio operator on Cold War defense ships located off Greenland and Labrador and also earned his pilot’s license.

  Returning home in 1956, Branca discovered that his father’s health had deteriorated, and Louis Sr. soon died of brain cancer. Again an orphan, he always felt guilty that he had left his father alone. At the time he met with Skeels in 1962, Branca had completed his undergraduate degree in psy
chology at the University of Minnesota, was attending graduate school, and had recently married. His wife, who also had an undergraduate degree, worked in marketing. Skeels discovered that Branca had read some of the literature about the effects of institutional life on children’s development and expressed some anxiety about adjustment problems in those who had experienced early institutionalization.87

  When Skeels interviewed the eleven contrast group subjects (one had died of Gaucher’s disease), most of whom had been normally intelligent when they entered Davenport, he found distinctly different outcomes. Contrast group case 15 seemed a normal infant when she arrived at Davenport only days after her birth. At 1 year, her IQ test score was 92. But by age 3, her score had fallen to 54 and Skeels transferred her to Glenwood for permanent custodial care, where she was later sterilized. Glenwood trained her in housekeeping, and as an older teenager she was discharged to live with a couple who considered her one of the family. They helped her enter a protected work setting, and she became self-supporting as a dishwasher at a nearby restaurant. Her IQ remained in the range of 54, and she did not learn to read or write. Skeels spoke with her when she was 28 years old and found her more competent than he expected. When he accompanied her to pay a bill, he noticed that she seemed quite poised.88

  Contrast case 17 arrived at Davenport’s nursery after a forceps delivery. According to his early record, he made a good recovery, but in 1966 Skeels discovered that during his birth the boy had suffered a brain hemorrhage, which might have led to his retardation. At age 1 his development seemed in the normal range, but by age 3 his IQ test score was 58, where it remained. When the boy was 4, Skeels transferred him to the Woodward School as a permanent inmate, where visual problems, not corrected by glasses, were discovered. As a teenager, case 17 had a verbal intelligence score of 46, but his score on a test that measured performance was 76—an indication of nonverbal ability important for activities at work and in daily living. When he was 21, another test of nonverbal intelligence, the Ravens Progressive Matrices, placed him in the low average range of 82. Because case 17 worked productively without supervision, when he was 26 Woodward discharged him. At the small restaurant where he cooked and washed dishes, his employer said she “had never seen anyone come into a place and win the hearts of all those who work with them so much.” Skeels interviewed him at his rooming house, where the young man told him that after several years of employment he had saved $2,600, today about $22,000. According to Skeels, his functional level and achievement ranked well above most of the contrast children.89

  As a baby, contrast case 20’s very low intelligence parents had given him to a Syrian peddler and his wife, who applied to Iowa for permission to adopt him. The state refused and placed him in Davenport. When he was an adolescent, he ran away but was returned to Davenport by the police. At that time he was identified as mentally ill and committed to an Iowa asylum for the insane. When Skeels visited, case 20 was 31 years old and diagnosed as schizophrenic. Although he executed a daily work assignment in the institution’s laundry, his responses to real-world situations indicated limited contact with reality. When Skeels asked him how old he was, he gave an age ten years younger. Asked if he were married, he said he was and gave his mother’s name as his wife’s. In Harold Skeels’s view, contrast group case 20 was

  an illustration of the devastating effects of institutionalization throughout most of his life. From the day of his birth he has never had a chance. It is interesting to speculate as to what would have happened had he been permitted to stay with the Syrian peddler and his wife who loved him dearly and would probably have given him the advantages of a home and parental love.90

  Skeels’s reflection about case 20’s mental health suggests that the boy’s severe emotional deprivation may have contributed to the development of his schizophrenia. Although many years have passed, the causes of schizophrenia are still not well defined, but today it is thought that the illness is a result of genetic and environmental factors as well as possible imbalances in brain chemistry.

  Because the developmental path of contrast case 19 differed significantly from that of other contrast group subjects, Skeels viewed him as “the ultimate surprise.”91 Skeels said that this boy’s outcome was so different, he shouldn’t be considered a member of that group.92 Surrendered to Davenport by his mother when he was 9 days old, at about age 1 case 19 had normal intelligence. As a child he lost some hearing due to bouts of otitis media. Each year his test scores declined, and when he was 4 his IQ score was 67. At age 8 he was only minimally hard of hearing, but Skeels transferred him to a school for the deaf. There he received a good education and had much attention from a dormitory matron who each weekend brought him home to her family. At the school his IQ tests rose into the normal range, and when he was a teenager the school trained him as a linotype operator. Although he was accepted at a college for the deaf, after one semester he was asked to leave because he wasn’t sufficiently hard of hearing.93

  Over the course of this boy’s education, his intelligence test results tracked closely with the levels of his environmental stimulation, a factor that, Skeels believed, made case 19 the most consequential for psychology of any in his study. When Skeels met with him in 1962, case 19 was an accomplished linotype operator and active in his state’s deaf association. He had married a college-educated hearing woman, and their four children had normal hearing. Two of the children had intelligence in the average range, and the other two were in the superior range. As a young man, case 19 located his birth mother, who was thrilled that her son had found her. They established a close relationship.94

  In her 1960s follow-ups, Marie Skodak located one hundred Davenport children who had been placed into middle-class homes before the age of 6 months and a few placed at ages 2 to 5 years. She interviewed those subjects’ parents and the subjects themselves. For reasons she did not describe, Skodak did not fully analyze and write up her follow-up results. In 1996, in her last memoir, she wrote, “The boxes of data, the sheets of incomplete evaluations, continue to induce guilt and determination to get at the unfinished business.”95 It might not be surprising that Skodak, overcommitted in her work, delayed writing up her data. During the years when she had searched for her adult subjects, she also served as the director of psychological services for the Dearborn, Michigan, public schools (a 150-mile round-trip commute from her home), served as a consulting psychologist in Flint, Michigan, led several professional organizations, and was soon to be married. It may also be relevant that after she earned her PhD, she worked almost exclusively in public school and clinical environments, settings in which academic research could not have been her first priority.

  However, in those one hundred sets of parents and subjects, Skodak remarked that she found “tremendous cooperation from everyone.” She had previously done some follow-ups in the 1940s, so those later visits felt like “old friends getting together.” She summarized the 1960s meetings positively; they usually lasted a few hours and showed that the children exceeded not only the educational attainments of their birth parents, but to her surprise, also had surpassed their adoptive parents as well.96

  Skodak suggested that her subjects’ accomplishments represented outcomes from good schooling, but also a generational shift in priorities. Many of them had earned graduate degrees, and at least twenty were in some kind of social service; especially interesting was that four of the subjects had entered the field of psychology. She attributed their career choices in part to her 1940s follow-up testing, which perhaps made them more familiar with psychology. Skodak found it especially thought-provoking that most in the group were less motivated by money than by careers in which their work improved the well-being of others—and they were quite successful in these altruistic fields.97

  Unlike Skeels, whose reports tended to be somewhat formulaic, Skodak had a gift for entering the emotional lives of her subjects. In one rich case study, she reports on a boy of about 11 who had taken her out to the barn to show o
ff his calf, and asked if she knew about him. She reminded him that she’d known him for a long time. But, he told her, that wasn’t what he was asking.

  “Do you know that I am adopted?”

  “I know that,” she told him.

  “Well, don’t tell my parents that you know,” he said. She promised, but he continued, “They don’t think I know, but I know.”

  Later, she asked the parents if they had told their son that he was adopted.

  “Nobody knows,” they answered.

  She told them that in any community there may always be someone who guesses the truth, or that their son may even suspect, and suggested that it might be a good idea to tell him. That was all she felt she could say at the time.98

  When Skodak next visited the family during her 1960s follow-up, they described their son as “rebellious.” When he was in high school, he had been picked up by the police for some joyriding and car thefts. Angry, the family failed to hire a lawyer to defend him, and he was sent to a boys’ training school. When Skodak interviewed his high school counselor, she learned that the school felt sympathetically toward the boy because his parents’ excessive strictness had led them to want authorities to penalize him. From the parents’ report about his behavior after his release Skodak understood that the boy now had become alienated from his family, and during her visit she observed that he did not feel welcome in his own home.99 He was not involved with the law again. Skodak speculated that his adoptive parents attributed his teenage lawbreaking and defiance to his “bad blood.”