by Ann Hulbert
Urged on by patrons eager for him to acquire the East Coast imprimatur of rigor, Henry at nineteen set off in the fall for the Institute of Musical Art (later Juilliard) in New York. But he hated the place, with its rich students and “rotten” teachers. “Everyone here composes along the old lines, or merely stupid new ones, using discords without reason,” he wrote to a California friend. Henry yearned for the unconventional company out west. After Clarissa died, he had officially joined the Temple of the People, not swallowing any doctrine, he assured Ellen Veblen, but plainly in need of a larger sense of purpose and a place for himself. John Varian looked to him as the creator of a “music soul” for the group’s often murky, mythic ethos. It was with Varian’s son Russell—left back four times in school and now a budding engineer fascinated by sound—that Henry eagerly shared new notions of rhythmic counterpoint, not with the institute “cads.”
But New York did supply a catalyst outside the classroom. Henry went to a recital by a composer named Leo Ornstein, several years his senior, who was hailed as a “futurist” pianist and “the Keyboard Terror.” Ornstein’s specialty, dissonant clusters much like Henry’s own, was making audiences furious and him famous. Henry described getting worked up to quite a fevered pitch himself about the music. When this “genius,” as Henry rated him, agreed to meet and praised Henry’s work as the most promising that Ornstein had encountered, Henry was ecstatic. At a dinner with Terman not long after, he conveyed his sense of formative developments under way. Terman made sure to record this turning point for his files, but he wasn’t merely being methodical. His notes reveal his own excitement about Henry’s account of creative contagion. Ornstein’s verdict was that Henry’s music was “crude but that the material was there. That H. must learn what to leave out,” Terman jotted down in breathless style. “That altho H. was working in the dark, he needed only to find himself.”
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When Henry set off for New York in 1916, Terman was tooling up for a project that embodied the ambitions and the confusions—and the elusive predictions—that have marked gifted research and education ever since. That year Terman published the Stanford revision of Alfred Binet’s scale for measuring intelligence. He promptly put it to use in identifying the most select group he had yet examined: some sixty children in the Bay Area with IQs of 140 or higher, a cut-off that would have ruled out Henry. (It eliminated the future Nobel Prize–winner William Shockley: singled out for assessment by his elementary school teachers, he went on to score only 129 and then 125, to his and his mother’s disappointment.)
Five years later Terman, like Henry, had bigger plans in mind. The war had given them both a taste of broader influence, Henry as a bandleader in the army, and Terman as a developer of group intelligence tests for military recruitment. Terman emerged a proselytizer of widespread mental testing. His goal was to shake up perceptions, though in a spirit very different from anticonventional Henry’s. While Henry was riling audiences in Europe and at home with his chord clusters and his “string piano”—plucking and banging the instrument’s innards—Terman set out to show that extraordinarily bright children were anything but weird, much less doomed. He aimed to supply data where mere anecdote had prevailed, and to help reorganize education.
Boris Sidis and Leo Wiener urged parents to get busy tutoring their toddlers; Terman soon became a spokesman for school tracking. Armed with generous funding, he embarked in 1921 on an even larger roundup of gifted California schoolchildren to participate in what he titled his Genetic Studies of Genius. He was launching the first youthful-talent search, and one of the earliest longitudinal studies. He was aware that no one knew when or how, or which, precocious signs of brilliance might ultimately lead to mature distinction, though he shared Wiener and Sidis’s bias in favor of early blooming. And as he had done with Henry, Terman eagerly assumed the role of participant-observer, not mere tester. He was poised to record the trajectories of his subjects—which in itself, many Termites later said, gave them a confident sense of specialness—and to offer assistance as they progressed.
The result was not exactly rigorous science. Terman’s helpful interventions inevitably undermined the purity of his predictions. He also ran into selection bias, a problem nearly unavoidable in gifted research. Given his methods, it was not a great surprise when the Termites proved on the whole to be exemplary schoolchildren, not eccentrics at all. Terman’s testing tool was designed to measure general intelligence. It had been devised in and for an academic setting, focusing on verbal and logical and memory skills, which meant scores at the high end that correlated closely with classroom success. His fieldwork further ensured a sample low on idiosyncratic characters. Terman and his assistants couldn’t possibly examine the more than a quarter of a million students in third grade through high school in the California school districts he was using. So he enlisted teachers to help make the first cut. They supplied him with the students they considered the best, a group unlikely to include twitchy, unevenly developed kids—or, obviously, homeschooled anomalies.
Testing this cohort—as well as other batches of bright children he had rounded up earlier—Terman emerged with a sample of roughly fifteen hundred students with IQs above the 135-to-140 range, or about the top 0.6 percent. His methods selected for a conscientious breed of parents as well: lengthy questionnaires about their children were part of the drill. A score from “most rare” to “high average” for their progeny was also part of the reward. Along with that often came decades of counsel from Terman, who remained in touch with an amazingly large percentage of his subjects for years to come. Their loyalty was crucial to his longitudinal project. It was also encouraged by the process. Though Terman’s team hoped to keep the study’s participants as unselfconscious as possible, the selective nature of the enterprise was hard to keep secret. The members of this prodigy club, and their parents, were not the sort to drift off the radar screen of a man who had singled them out for greatness.
The data reviewed in the first volume of findings in 1925 did more than demolish “the widespread opinion that typically the intellectually precocious child is weak, undersized, or nervously unstable.” Terman’s inventories—of physical and personality traits, books read, intellectual and recreational interests, family background—revealed children more muscular, responsible, and mature, never mind much more successful at school (where 85 percent of them had skipped grades), than a nongifted group used for a rough comparison. On the East Coast, the psychologist Leta S. Hollingworth of Teachers College came up with similar findings about the gifted children she studied in two public schools. For the truly rare children with IQs of 170 or higher, the record was somewhat more mixed on the question of social adjustment. Hollingworth focused on difficulties engaging in play at school. But home life in her samples’ comparatively well-off—and small—families seemed enviable. “Fortunately,” Hollingworth agreed with Terman, “the majority of gifted children fall by heredity into the hands of superior parents, who are themselves of fine character and worthy to ‘set example.’ ” Terman went a step further. His winnowed elite disproportionately featured white, native-born, male, middle-class specimens. This clinched for him the hierarchy of racial stocks and genders. By now an outspoken eugenicist, he dismissed the role of environmental forces.
Except for his reading habits, sickly young Henry, a peculiar loner as a child, hadn’t conformed to the hearty image Terman was now broadcasting. And though his northern European heritage fit the prejudices, his parents’ economic and occupational status did not. Nor was a boy who had bumped along without schooling, but with constant if unorthodox learning, much of an advertisement for Terman’s message at the close of the first volume of his study. “The great problems of genius” require urgent educational attention, he announced, by which he had in mind homogeneous grouping in school from the start. Terman’s own data suggested that his sample was also doing quite nicely without more systematic enabling. He was up against a conundrum faced by advocat
es of support for gifted youths down the decades: If they’re such paragons, how much special help do they really need?
Perhaps Terman’s sample was performing all too competently. In a follow-up volume of the study in 1930, the Terman team betrayed a hint of defensiveness that reappeared in the twenty-five- and thirty-five-year follow-ups. Anticipating later critics, he and his associates now entered a caveat about the g-word and cautioned against disproportionate expectations of the cohort. “The title is not meant to imply that the thousand or more subjects who have entered into the investigations described are all potential geniuses in the more common meaning of that term. A few of the group may ultimately achieve that degree of distinction, but not more than a few.” Still, he stuck by his title, even as he acknowledged the possibility of “utter failure” in his flock.
The urge to predict drives research on childhood giftedness, yet precocity can be misleading. Early feats of learning needn’t be an augury of future disaster, as Terman joined the Cambridge fathers in proclaiming. But precocity, especially as measured on a scale like Terman’s, doesn’t turn out to be a very reliable precursor of outstanding mature performance either—particularly of a mold-breaking variety. Terman did his best to keep at bay that disappointing realization, which crept up on him. While he was waiting for his Termites to grow up, he encouraged a colleague, Catharine Cox, in a peculiar effort to link great achievements to early supersmartness. She set out to compute, retrospectively, the youthful IQs of three hundred adult eminences from the past by a curious method. She delved into their biographies for examples of childhood accomplishments—Voltaire writing verses “from his cradle,” Coleridge reading a Bible chapter at three, Balzac flubbing exams but making “remarks or answers of singular penetration and meditative wisdom” when very young—and then aligned them with mental-test standards.
The available evidence of youthful capacities varied wildly, and the calculations were at best wobbly, but that did not trouble Terman and his team. The numbers Cox came up with were mostly high. (Eight-year-old Goethe’s literary work, for example, was judged of “adult superiority,” and his IQ was estimated to be 200, which was “probably too low.”) She took some care to stress the importance of qualities other than intelligence, especially “persistence of motive and effort, confidence in their abilities, and great strength or force of character,” which biographical stories could capture more vividly than any numerical score. Cox presciently warned that “the tests…cannot measure spontaneity of intellectual activity; perhaps, too, they do not sufficiently differentiate between high ability and unique ability, between the able individual and the extraordinary genius.” But in her conclusion, she italicized to match the Termanite line. “The extraordinary genius who achieves the highest eminence is also the gifted individual whom intelligence tests may discover in childhood.” Cox’s big caveat—“the converse of this proposition is yet to be proved”—did not receive any emphasis.
Proof that high-testing children routinely go on to become extraordinary geniuses was not so easy to come by. Might good IQ-test-takers (not least those hovered over by academic psychologists) turn out to tend toward conformity? Might creative types prove to be lousy test-takers? The Stanford research, and the studies it inspired, did not address such unwelcome possibilities head-on, but various findings hinted at them. Hollingworth’s case studies, focusing on a small cohort of children with IQs above 180, raised some questions. The high scorers excelled at winning prizes and honors for academic and intellectual work as they matured. But she wasn’t sure what to conclude about creativity and originality, plainly disappointed that her sample didn’t display more of either—perhaps partly due, she speculated, to their nurture: “so harnessed to the organized pursuit of degrees,” in one child’s case, and subjected to an “education…so scrupulously supervised and so sedulously recorded that he had little time for original projects” in another.
When Terman reflected on Henry, even he had to acknowledge similar reservations about test-based solicitous advancement of unusual youths. In his 1930 volume, he saluted Henry’s “rapid rise to international fame, despite the handicap of the most crushing poverty, and despite the utter lack of formal schooling”—and, he might have added, despite the lack of a superhigh IQ. Terman then paused. “It is interesting, however, that Henry himself is thankful for these ‘handicaps’ and believes that he owes to them whatever originality he possesses. It is his opinion that an orthodox musical training would have hindered rather than fostered his creative ability.” Ever so tentatively, Terman all but concurred: “We are inclined to suspect that there is ground for this opinion.” To be sure, Terman wasn’t about to second-guess the goal of test-driven meritocratic streamlining as he devised and revised yet more assessments of achievement and ability to help sort the rapid influx of schoolchildren. He firmly believed that school efficiency—and social stability and national greatness—was at stake. Still, he couldn’t shake his interest in creative outliers.
The appeal of the IQ measurement lay in its broad relevance, and the “globally gifted” child with school smarts was the figure he and his team fixed on. Yet with Henry’s example to inspire him, Terman also paid attention to “special abilities” when they were spotted in the high-IQ mix—only to be flummoxed. Nonacademic talents weren’t what the Stanford-Binet tested for, and they proved volatile, hard for systematizing researchers to handle. Fewer than half of the children who had shown distinctive abilities stuck with those interests, though musicians were more likely to. (Even in music, the field best known for spawning prodigies, the yield of distinguished mature artists is low. Out of an unusually big batch of seventy young musical marvels in the San Francisco area in the 1920s and ’30s—all too young to be tapped by Terman—six went on to notable adult careers: Leon Fleisher, Ruth Slenczynska, and Hephzibah Menuhin on the piano, and Isaac Stern, Ruggiero Ricci, and Yehudi Menuhin on the violin.)
A female colleague of Terman’s focused on a batch of precocious literary girls, whose works she set out to compare with the juvenilia of eminent writers of the past, in hopes of gauging the predictive value of early creative output. But quality and development tended to be highly uneven. That was obvious, for example, in a sampling of the one hundred poems produced between ages six and eight by the prolific Betty Ford (a pseudonym), an engaging girl with an IQ of 188 who was said to skip and dance as she dictated her poetry, if she wasn’t feverishly typing it out by herself, often appending morals to her verses. Nor did the juvenilia of great poets provide a steady standard. A panel of judges composed of Stanford seniors rated poems by the young Longfellow and Shelley below those of Betty and various Stanford students when they perused them without knowing the authors. Terman joined his associate in concluding, “One would hardly be justified in attempting to devise methods for predicting adult literary accomplishment. Too many factors other than natural ability go to determine the amount and merit of achievement.” Spontaneous Betty certainly did not betray high poetic ambitions, according to an anecdote her mother liked to relate: “ ‘Mother,’ she said one day, ‘I am not proud because I can write verses; they just come themselves. But if I could only learn to control my temper, then I would be proud.’ ”
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In 1936, half a decade after Terman’s first follow-up volume, Henry’s own trajectory suddenly seemed in doubt. The musician who had emerged as an ultramodern pioneer, championing Charles Ives and other unorthodox composers, was arrested in his Menlo Park cabin on charges of oral sex with a seventeen-year-old. The issue was the act, not the age; fellatio was illegal, but by law the youth was a consenting adult. Instead of hiring a lawyer, Henry promptly confessed, then appealed for leniency with a tale of tangled bisexuality. Terman loyally lent his voice to Henry’s cause, eager as ever to smooth a protégé’s path to normalcy. But Terman’s expertise—he had lately shifted his focus from mental traits to sexual tendencies—was of no immediate avail. At the age of thirty-nine, Henry went to San Quentin and
a year later received a maximum sentence of fifteen years.
Henry was hardly thankful for the “handicap” of prison, but he proved as undaunted as ever in the face of deprivation. He was assigned to help the prison’s bandmaster in the education division and for the next four years was a whirlwind of musical productivity. He wrote music. He wrote about music. He taught music to prisoners. He taught himself to play new instruments. In 1940 Cowell’s model record and the lobbying of friends (and getting labeled as a likely candidate for “heterosexual adjustment”) won him parole. The following year he married the ethnomusicologist Sidney Robertson, a woman whom he had first met years earlier in Menlo Park. Henry continued to compose, and helped out the wartime effort of “cultural defense” by encouraging musical exchanges with Latin America. He secured a pardon and went to work in the music division of the Office of War Information, becoming the senior music editor. Henry, a solitary child who had thrived on eclectic company during a highly unusual adolescence, never ceased to be a catalytic anomaly—not a joiner, but an outsider who could galvanize groups.
When Terman’s twenty-five-year follow-up volume appeared in 1947, its most interesting finding was one largely borne out by Henry, although his story wasn’t included in it. The Termites, contrary to early high hopes, had not yet proved to be across-the-board successes, never mind geniuses. There had, of course, been a depression and a war, but the Terman team didn’t put much stock in larger social influences. Instead the researchers undertook a comparison between the most and least successful of the Termites, aiming to identify the source of their different fortunes. It definitely wasn’t IQ. Extra points did not account for more accomplishment. What made the clearest difference was, not surprisingly, family background. The children of better-educated, more successful parents clustered in the top group of those with the best jobs, the most extensive schooling, and the highest incomes. Yet the researchers also singled out several individual qualities shared by those who had thrived: perseverance, self-confidence, and the well-adjusted sense of purpose they referred to as “integration toward goals.”