Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection

by Deborah Blum

  In a furious, and later regretted moment, Harry told Clara that he didn’t know whether he loved her anymore. He wasn’t sure that she loved him, either. He wasn’t sure she ever had. He threw the question at her, suddenly angry over the fourteen years of their marriage. He seemed like a stranger to her, she said. The house on the lake was becoming a place that anyone would want to avoid. Harry and Clara were barely speaking to each other; quiet little Bobby was tiptoeing around the house and Rick, now a toddler, was studying his father as if he couldn’t quite remember who he was. Around his friends and colleagues, Harry suddenly became silent about his marriage. His conversations were only about work. His letters were bright and talked only of professional issues and achievements. After a series of such communications, a puzzled Lewis Terman wrote and asked him why he never mentioned Clara in his letters any more. Had she left him? Harry replied with another letter full of psychology news.

  Clara filed for divorce on August 14, 1946. Her pleading with the district court is a litany of bewilderment and grief: Harry was coming home later and later, skipping dinner with the children, even when she begged him to give them some time. He was showing up late for social engagements, embarrassing her. He was impatient with her and impatient with Bobby and Rick. He had “developed a practice of ignoring and rebuffing” inquiries made of him by Clara or by either of the two small boys. She was living in silence and hostility; she was worrying constantly; she couldn’t watch her children being pushed away like this by their father. It wasn’t that she wanted out so much as that she couldn’t stay.

  Harry did not defend himself. It was a rare moment for him—he refused to fight back. Clara won custody of both boys—not unusual in the 1940s or even today—and a less usual uncontested division of property. The lake house was appraised at $20,000 and put on the market, the proceeds to be split equally. After the mortgage was paid off, and closing costs deducted, they each had $7,473.46, to the penny. Take whatever else you want, he told her; and in her anger, her worry and grief, she wanted all of it. She took the furniture and lamps and cushions and rugs and artwork, the stove, refrigerator, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, dishes, glassware, silverware, everything, according to the divorce settlement, except Harry’s clothes and personal effects, such as hairbrushes and handkerchiefs. They owned $1,000 worth of AT&T stock and an $800 war bond; he sold all of it and gave her half the cash. He agreed to take over a $5,000 life insurance policy and to continue paying the premiums on it. He agreed to pay all legal costs. He agreed to pay $150 a month child support for three years and then $100 a month until the boys came of age. He agreed that the children could visit him each year. He agreed to pay the costs of the visit. He agreed to accommodate her schedule in the visit. He agreed to work with her on making the journey safe from parent to parent. The divorce went through in a flat three weeks; it was final on September 6, 1946. Clara left Madison almost immediately and moved to Rhode Island with the boys to stay with her brother, Leon.

  “Dear Abe,” wrote Settlage to Maslow. “Did you know that the Harlows were divorced recently? It was quite a shock—totally unexpected by us but apparently suspected by others for some time. I had the impression that the Harlows were getting along more congenially as time went on. Quite a psychologist, am I not?”

  Harry was alone, for the moment, with psychology as mistress and wife and family. No inconvenient children, no messy marriage cluttering up his life. It didn’t take him long to realize that he hated it. Up close and personal, the field of psychology was a less than rewarding companion. There was nothing in it, especially at the moment, to help a man come to terms with a failed marriage and a silent home. Harry had a small apartment again and plenty of time, in these bright, open, empty days, to pursue his research and to realize just how chilly his profession had become. Perhaps nothing exemplified that better, at the moment, than his own department at the University of Wisconsin.

  It had been a long time since Harry’s department was crammed into the basement of Bascom Hall. The psychologists now occupied a premium place on the shores of Lake Mendota, thus commanding a glittering view and some of the leakiest, dampest facilities on campus. They had rat labs now and those were in a basement that “flooded with every rainstorm, so you had to wade to your equipment. Not that deep but it wasn’t great to be standing in water with all that electrical work,” recalls psychology professor Richard Keesey.

  Perhaps the chronic damp affected the mood at 600 N. Park, the department’s slightly unfortunate address. If a sender had scrawled the direction at all, the address on the envelope tended to look like GOON Park. It seemed to the occupants that the mistake happened frequently. “The mailman always knew right where to deliver it though,” Keesey says, raising an eyebrow with deliberate irony. Goon Park became the department’s unofficial nickname, partly because it seemed to reflect the uneasy politics of the place. There were faculty members who didn’t speak to each other, faculty members who accused their colleagues of academic theft, faculty members who spent their days making sure that everyone else knew their places in the hierarchy, who made sure that only those on the approved list could even have coffee in the department lounge.

  The famed psychologist Carl Rogers is still remembered, decades later, as one of the unhappiest members of the old Wisconsin department. Rogers created the idea of client-centered therapy. His point was straightforward: Psychologists don’t always know more than their clients; therefore, therapists should actually listen to their clients. Widely accepted now, it was initially a strange and unwelcome idea. Many psychologists resisted Roger’s call for open-minded counseling. They were the ones who had trained as experts in human behavior, after all. At Wisconsin, a department of dedicated experts, Rogers sinned further by aligning himself with the humanist psychology movement. By the 1960s, Rogers and Harry’s former graduate student, Abraham Maslow, would both be leaders in that movement, arguing that in psychology the emphasis should always be on human potential rather than negative emotions and neuroses.

  In retrospect, it seems obvious that Rogers was a poor fit for the Wisconsin psychology department at mid-twentieth century. He was talking about compassion and decency at a time when the department was still following the Hullian model of mathematical behavior. Those who weren’t math-minded were often treated as substandard. Rogers complained that the department conspired to make people such as himself—and most of the students—live under a sense of perpetual threat. Instead of attending faculty meetings, Rogers started leaving a tape-recorder that was set to play his comments in his absence. In a 1964 memo to the department, shortly before he ended his seven-year stay, Rogers assured his fellow faculty members that he could no longer stand the place. He accused the Wisconsin psychology professors of being obsessed with methodology and finding fault with others, “both of which constitute further insurance that no significantly original ideas will develop.”

  Even before then, others were beginning to worry that Wisconsin’s approach to behavior had dried out. People began referring to the department as “the dustbowl of empiricism,” and they were only halfjoking. To graduate, students ran a gauntlet of extreme mathematical calculations. University of Oregon psychologist Michael Posner, a former assistant professor in Madison, recalls: “Each student had a methodology examination that was required for the degree. I was assigned to grade these exams. One year when I saw the exam in advance, it included a very complex Graeco-Latin square experimental design that I had never heard of or seen talked about in the literature. I remember searching desperately for a reference and finding a single obscure paper by the department chair. So I was able to grade the papers but the students, of course, did not have the advantage of seeing the questions in advance ... I guess they were just supposed to know these things. Needless to say, exams were rather tense situations.”

  Harry found the department’s mathematical obsession not just wrongheaded but boring. Of course, Harry literally had nightmares about numbers. He told friends that
he suffered from a recurring dream that Stanford had called him to tell him that he’d never really gotten that Ph.D. because he’d failed the department’s statistics exam. He rejoiced in his experiments that used only four monkeys at a time. Simple statistics, the kind anyone can understand, he liked to argue, “are almost as powerful as common sense.” Common sense happened to be one of Harry Harlow’s standards for good science.

  “At Wisconsin, when you developed a dissertation, it was supposed be very systematic,” says Michigan psychologist Bob Zimmermann who earned his Ph.D. in Harlow’s lab. “So I decided, okay, I’m going to do a systematic study of brightness discrimination in the monkeys. I came up with this beautiful plan. Black and white squares, dark gray squares, light gray squares, very systematic, very statistical, very Wisconsin. And Harry looked at it, and said, ‘That’s the fastest way to obscurity, obviously.’”

  Goon Park wasn’t all statistics obsession and unfriendly behavior, of course. The psychologists were a social community. They hosted dinners for colleagues, picnics, cocktail parties. There was enough friction that hosts had to exercise some caution in invitations. One of the Wisconsin psychologists lived in certainty that his colleagues were stealing his best work. “Academic bandits,” he would shout, his accusations echoing in the halls. Faculty wives of the time remember planning their invitation lists to avoid meetings of the different factions. Harry partied—he could drink with the best of them—but he was beginning to see himself as an outsider yet again. He didn’t leave tape-recorded messages, but he became less visible at faculty meetings. And less visible in general. “He wasn’t unfriendly,” says one former colleague. “Just not friendly.” He attended parties, but not all of them and not with memorable enthusiasm. One of Posner’s memories of Harry Harlow is of the eminent psychologist snapping at him at a party, asking for another drink, and obviously not enjoying himself. “I wasn’t as unhappy with him for asking,” Posner says, “as I was with myself for getting the drink.”

  Harry was increasingly on his own, at his now-empty home and in his notably tense department. You wonder whether emotional isolation can change the child, rearrange the brain a little? It can also change the adult scientist. That period of intense loneliness and of disconnection would make Harry tougher and sharper. He would never again be as visibly sweet as Clara Mears had found him. He would turn more to sarcasm as a defense. He had fewer drinking buddies and he would compensate, over time, by drinking more alone. And sometimes he would feel alone enough to be downright hostile about it. When colleagues in the psychology department complained that Harry’s battered laboratory was too much of a private empire—and they did complain—he responded diplomatically by putting a sign on the building that read: “Department of Psychology Primate Laboratory.” But he was less diplomatic when asked about the sign. “He said he did it ‘to make the bastards happy,’” says long-time administrative assistant, editor, and friend, Helen LeRoy.

  If he was going to have a support system, it was clear, more than clear, that Harry Harlow would have to rebuild his private life. He was learning a lesson that he would later prove experimentally in haunting detail: We aren’t meant to be alone. Isolation is only a punishment. Social species—and we are undeniably that—thrive only in a garden bed of relationships and connections. Not all of us need large gardens, not all of us need traditional families. Most of us—and this comes right out of attachment theory—need at least one good bedrock relationship.

  What Harry missed most was marriage as partnership. By now, he knew that he needed someone—as Clara had been at first—who could be a partner inside psychology as well as outside of it. When he’d married Clara, that shared interest had illuminated their relationship. He was a man “who woke up thinking about his work,” says a long-time friend. He needed to be with someone who accepted that, even appreciated it. He didn’t have to look far. His fellow researcher, Peggy Kuenne, was right there. And she, too, was looking for a smart partner.

  Peggy was a pretty woman, shining dark hair and clear blue eyes in an elegant face. She had pale skin, fine, high cheekbones, and a generous mouth that she liked to paint with bright red lipstick. “I recall a lot of men who tried to date Margaret,” her brother Robert Kuenne says. They were attracted by her good looks and quick mind. She was rarely attracted in return, though. “She worshipped one thing and that was intelligence. Her turndowns of men were brutal; she never could tolerate a fool.” He remembers how impressed his sister was with Harry Harlow. She told her brother that when Harry gave a lecture, intelligence gleamed right through the words.

  The oldest of three children, Peggy was raised in a working-class family in St. Louis. Their father was a compositor for the local paper; their mother was a milliner. Both parents expected their children to achieve far greater things. The Kuennes pushed the children and they watched over their schoolwork. It was easy for the parents to watch. The family lived in a tiny bungalow built by the father. Later, their middle child, Robert Kuenne, would wonder whether that enforced intimacy had turned them all into people who craved distance from others: “There was very little privacy and we were all very private people. Independent and inner driven.”

  The Kuenne children became a trio of high achievers. Robert went to Harvard, earned a Ph.D. in economics, and was recruited to Princeton, where he spent his career as an economics professor. Dorothy, the youngest, became an atomic physicist at Washington University in St. Louis. And Peggy blitzed through her master’s degree at Washington University and then went to the University of Iowa to study Hull’s theories of conditioning in children under Kenneth Spence. “She was very interested in rigorous data, in showing that psychology was scientific,” her brother recalled. Peggy graduated in 1944, became an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota. Two years later, she took a job at the University of Wisconsin and joined Harry Harlow’s research team. They were natural collaborators, and after Harry’s first marriage fell apart, their relationship shifted almost effortlessly into something more intimate.

  A year and a half after his divorce, Harry Harlow married Margaret Kuenne. The ceremony took place on February 3,1948, in the tiny town of Anamosa, Iowa. The out-of-state wedding was a strategic move. “I guess you would say they eloped,” Helen LeRoy says. Iowa was the place for quick weddings then—it didn’t require the blood tests and waiting period that Wisconsin demanded. A couple could just slip across the border almost invisibly; Harry didn’t invite his Iowa family to witness the marriage pact. There were strategic reasons for that secretive ceremony and they all had to do with the University of Wisconsin. The school still enforced its rigid nepotism policy, the same one that had forced Clara out of her graduate program and into a department-store job. By eloping to Iowa, Harry and Margaret Harlow hoped to slip undetected under the university’s radar.

  They returned, continued to work together. They published together. At work, they treated each other with cool professional courtesy. They didn’t go so far as to pretend they weren’t living together. The newlyweds rented a small apartment near campus. Neighbors still remember being invited by Harry to have a drink and listen to his research ideas. It was inevitable that the news of their marriage would eventually filter out; when it did, the university’s reaction was exactly what they expected and feared. It didn’t matter that Peggy was already a fully trained psychologist and had been hired on her own merits. The administration insisted that one of them must leave the psychology department. Neither Harry nor Peggy considered that the person to quit would be him. “They both wanted Harry to be famous,” Robert Kuenne says. Once again, a wife of Harry Harlow stepped down at the University of Wisconsin.

  Peggy had professional advantages, though, that Clara had lacked. There was that Ph.D. in psychology and that reputation as a very smart scientist. Peggy thought of herself as a psychologist still. So did Harry. He thought she was too good a scientist to waste. This time, at least, he was prepared to end run his employer. He gave Peggy an office in t
he primate laboratory and she became the lab’s unofficial editor. She spent hours polishing Harry’s papers and those of his students. When Harry’s old professor, Calvin Stone, retired as editor of the Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology (JCPP), he named Harry as his successor. Harry took over the journal in 1951, two years after his second marriage, and promptly recruited his second wife to help him edit it. Harry always said that Peggy was the more ruthless editor. He told his students that it sometimes took him weeks to persuade her to approve what even he had written. Once, he hid a paper that she had rejected; when he showed it to her again a month later, he said that he had rewritten it. She liked it the second time around. This proved, Harry said, that the occasional memory failure could be a good thing.

  Harry’s students remember the contrast the Harlows presented when they walked down the hall together: Harry, slight and a little scruffy, Peggy, straight and slim and neat, her head topping his. Mostly they worked in their separate offices. When he’d annoyed her, though, her voice carried sharply through the hallways. “She’d sort of screech out his name when he’d done some editing work she didn’t like,” says Bob Zimmermann, trying to imitate her call. Zimmermann’s voice rises into a sharp falsetto. “H-a-a-a-r-r-y! ... I wish you could have heard it.”

  The students and staffers at the lab found Peggy very different from Clara, who used to pack picnic lunches for Harry’s grad students. Friendly informality was not her style. It hadn’t really been her family’s style. Harry called her Peggy. Her parents and siblings called her Margaret (and when she was a child, “little Margaret,” after her mother). Her style at the lab was cool and formal, sometimes to the point of brusqueness. Some of the young scientists, used to a warmer welcome at the lab, were both hurt and put off by her manner. “An ice bitch,” recalled a former student flatly.