Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection
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Harry was at his laboratory so much that people started to wonder whether he ever went home. “I mean this kindly; Harry had idiosyncrasies,” said Richard Wolf, a professor of physiology at the University of Wisconsin medical school at the time. Wolf collaborated with Harry on several projects. “Harry believed that you had to be at the lab seven days a week. One Monday morning he came by my lab, and said, ‘I didn’t see you yesterday.’”
Harry took pride in being the man who was always there. He could even be competitive about putting in more time than anyone else. Gene “Jim” Sackett, one of Harry’s most valued postdoctoral researchers, used to set his alarm so that he would be the first one at the building. “Harry and I vied for who would open the primate lab. We were both early birds. I would sometimes come in at 5 or 5:30 A.M., and he would come in at 5 or 5:30 A.M., and it would be almost a game, without talking about it, who’s going to open the door; because whoever got there first opened the door.”
“You’re there at night, he’s there at night,” Gluck once wrote in a testimonial to his former professor.
He’d roam the halls at night leaving love poetry on graduate students’ desks, checking doors, looking for someone to talk to. He’d invite any comers for a cup of the jet black coffee smoking in the urn by the surgery prep room. He’d invite you in to read a manuscript, where inserted sentences meandered like ant trails around margins and corners. If you couldn’t keep up, if he lost interest, he’d just put his head down on his desk, pillowed by his crossed hands.
Questions raced across the mind. Was he asleep? Did I say something that stupid? Do I go on talking? Should I poke him gently to see that he is all right? After a while, you got used to Harry’s head going down. It was a message. It meant I’m done with this—go back to work.
If that didn’t work, he could be even more direct. He’d stick his head into the student break room and interrupt a card game, with a single question. “Making headway?” his tone just sarcastic enough to empty the room. “Do you have an office?” he snapped to one student, who nodded dumbly. “Then go use it.”
Mostly, though, Harry Harlow would just be there, talking to students, the coffee cooling at his elbow and the cigarettes, burning, unnoticed between his fingers, smoke coiling like dreams, the ash glowing redder and redder as it neared his skin. His grad students used to stare, mesmerized, at the imminent collision of hot ash and bare fingers. As with his unfashionable and battered car, his forgotten hats and scarves, he was simply more interested in the conversation or the idea than whatever was in his hand at the moment. Helen LeRoy once tracked Harry down at a scientific meeting by following a trail of partially smoked and smoldering cigarettes. At least he always dropped them into ashtrays and wastebaskets. One morning, he did that at the lab and the basket burst into flames. LeRoy simply poured her coffee into the fire and put it out. Harry was so busy talking that he never noticed the blaze.
He seemed to exist on coffee, smoke, and alcohol. He was drinking more than ever by now, not just when he went home but with friends, with students, at local bars and professional meetings. Often, he brought a bottle of liquor—bourbon or scotch—to stock his hotel rooms when he traveled. Of course, in academic psychology, in those days, liquor flowed the way wine does today, only more so. “People don’t party now the way they used to,” says William Verplanck, the former Hullian scholar, sadly. “Until the early 1960s, the professional meetings were awash with alcohol. Now if there’s a meeting of psychologists, there’s a room reserved where people go up to a cash bar.” His voice crackles with disgust and regret for lost times.
“During the thirties, forties, fifties, a university would have a hotel room where people would gather and bring their own bottles or steal somebody else’s. There’d be lots of people sitting on the floor in the hall drinking, and talking, and occasionally going back in. Everyone spent some time loaded. Now it’s so bloody formal, it’s like a meeting of CPAs. We drink less and we communicate less.” Plenty of old colleagues share Verplanck’s sense of leaving behind a more exciting time in psychology. “One of my friends insists that it’s a waste to die with all your organs intact,” says an old friend of Harry Harlow’s, his voice also rich with nostalgia. “We’re all so cautious now about what we say and think and do. It used to be a lot more interesting—and more fun. It was a spicier time.”
Harry’s habits suited that time of smoke and drink and rapid-fire conversation perfectly. In some ways, he surpassed it. Alcohol was becoming an integral part of his life. He even wrote odes to it: Clover club’s a nice girl / Vodka is a shrew / Corn whiskey is the old love / Scotch whiskey is the new. When he was burned out at the lab, he liked to take an early evening walk down to a nearby tavern. “You knew you’d arrived when Harry asked you to go for a walk,” Zimmermann said. “Harry’d come in, pick someone out, and say, ‘Let’s go for a walk.’ You’d usually go for a beer, sit down, and sometimes he’d talk and sometimes he’d never say a word. I remember I got there in July and September was my first walk. That was a thrill. We went to this bar, and ordered a beer, and he said, ‘Got a dollar?’”
It still makes Zimmermann laugh.
“He called me Jim, which surprised me because he mostly called people by their last names,” recalls Jim Sackett, now a professor of psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle. Sackett occasionally worried that Harry Harlow would just burn up on alcohol fumes and psychology dreams. “He’d say, ‘Jim, let’s go to the corner.’ So we’d go the bar on the corner. By the time we’d left, he’d had three, four drinks. I’d had one. And I’d drive him home and think, ‘God, he’s gonna die, he’s just out of it. He’s gonna be dead.’ The next morning he’d be there at 5 A.M. He’d be there and he’d be writing.”
And it was during those hyperactive, free-form, sleep-deprived, alcohol-inspired days that Harry Harlow first started thinking about the nature of love. That he got there at all can seem improbable. You could make a case that this was the least likely laboratory to take on the cause of love, this outpost of Wisconsin psychology where work came first and family last. You could argue that Harry would be the most unlikely of champions, a man whose world turned on monkeys and primate labs and graduate students arguing their theories over coffee and cards and nights at the corner bar. He was a father who left the house before his children were awake, a man trailing a failed marriage behind him. He was sarcastic, edgy, and completely opposed to sentiment.
You could also make the case that Harry Harlow was absolutely perfect for the job—a man objective enough about love to see it as the stuff of science. A psychologist who still allowed for all the possibilities. He was a scientist with a love of the creative, a professor willing to give his students every chance to let their ideas take flight; a man who still wrote poetry in the night, who supported young researchers who didn’t agree with him. He was a man who could laugh at his own mistakes. The hard times had helped make him a psychologist who didn’t worry about fitting in or making the right impression. They hadn’t stopped him from being a dreamer, though, or a lover of lost causes or a man who could look at a lab full of burly, quarrelsome rhesus macaques and start thinking about the importance of mothers and the needs of children.
Psychologist B.F. Skinner of Harvard University, perhaps the most famous advocate of conditioned behavior in both animals and humans. Photo courtesy of the Archives of the History of American Psychology
John B. Watson, shortly after the publication of his best-selling book, The Psychological Care of the Child and Infant, which warned parents not to treat their children with obvious affection. Photo courtesy of the Archives of the History of American Psychology
Clara Mears and Harry Harlow in 1931, in the happy year before their first marriage to each other. Photo courtesy of Robert Israel
Clara and Harry Harlow, and their sons, Robert, age 5, and Richard, age 2, in 1944, two years before the couple divorced and Clara and the boys left Madison. Photo courtesy of Robert Israel
The former Wisconsin psychology department building—now demolished—which was given the nickname Goon Park because of its street address. Photo courtesy of the University of Wisconsin Archives
Peggy and Harry Harlow, shortly after their 1948 marriage, visiting with Harry’s first son, Robert. Photo courtesy of the Harlow Primate Laboratory, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Harry Harlow’s first primate laboratory, which he converted out of an abandoned box factory building. Photo courtesy of the Harlow Primate Laboratory, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Three young rhesus macaques puzzle their way toward opening a lock during a curiosity experiment at the Harlow laboratory. Photo courtesy of the Harlow Primate Laboratory, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Robert Zimmermann, a Harlow graduate student who worked closely with the mother-love studies, takes a moment to relax at the laboratory. Photo courtesy of Robert Zimmermann
A baby monkey keeps a possessive grip on his beloved cloth mother while reaching over to wire mother to be fed. Photo courtesy of the Harlow Primate Laboratory, University of Wisconsin-Madison
A young rhesus monkey scoots back to his mother as a scientist approaches. Photo courtesy of the Harlow Primate Laboratory, University of Wisconsin-Madison
A baby monkey, startled during an experiment, leaps for his cloth mother, who represents security and comfort. Photo courtesy of the Harlow Primate Laboratory, University of Wisconsin-Madison
The cloth and wire mothers, side by side, from the original Harlow tests of the importance of contact comfort. Photo courtesy of the Harlow Primate Laboratory, University of Wisconsin-Madison
A baby rhesus macaque, in a new and strange room, with no mother nearby, gives way to fear and loneliness. Photo courtesy of the Harlow Primate Laboratory, University of Wisconsin-Madison
A wind-up toy drummer bear was one of the devices used to test the fear in young monkeys and whether a mother provided a sense of security. Photo courtesy of the Harlow Primate Laboratory, University of Wisconsin-Madison
In this 1958 publicity photo, Harry surveys one of his most famous results, the union of cloth mother and a baby monkey in her care. Photo courtesy of the University of Wisconsin Archives
A baby monkey, in the comforting presence of his cloth mother, decides to tackle a previously frightening toy insect. Photo courtesy of the Harlow Primate Laboratory, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Harry, taking a rare moment to relax, during the late 1960s. Photo courtesy of the Harlow Primate Laboratory, University of Wisconsin-Madison
A young boy evaluates an angry face during a recent study of children’s emotional relationships at the University of Wisconsin Department of Psychology. Photo courtesy of University of Wisconsin News and Services
SIX
The Perfect Mother
One cannot ever really give back to a child the love and attention he needed and did not receive when he was small.
John Bowlby,
Can I Leave My Baby?, 1958
STILL, HARRY DID NOT STEP directly into love; there was no triumphant flourish of research trumpets. In 1955, he had to tackle a different problem, more pragmatic, more urgent. It had to do with importing monkeys: He was beginning to hate that process. The animals were hard to find. They were expensive. They were often in terrible shape. Monkeys routinely turned up starving, battered in passage, seething with “ghastly diseases.” The hot-tempered, tropical viruses spread easily. The incoming macaques infected their cage mates. Playmates sickened alongside monkey playmates. Macaque mothers passed diseases to their infants. A laboratory with a new shipment of monkeys could more easily resemble a hospital than a research laboratory.
Harry began to ponder raising his own animals. It was this decision that would, indirectly, lead him into the science of affection. When it did—when he first started wondering whether you can raise a healthy child, even a monkey child, without love—the people working with him would think he’d gone crazy. Of course, they were used to Harry Harlow’s crazy ideas. Starting a breeding colony in Madison, Wisconsin, struck plenty of people as evidence enough of lunacy. The Midwestern climate, almost the polar opposite of the balmy seasons of India, seemed an unlikely place to start raising tropical species. But Harry had been accommodating monkeys for many winters. He figured that they’d just continue bundling the monkeys inside. That would keep the colony small, only what he could house indoors. He could live with that.
There was another, bigger, challenge. No one really knew how to do what he wanted. There were no self-sustaining colonies of monkeys in the United States. The domestic breeding of primates was a brand new, barely simmering idea. Other people were talking about it; indeed, researchers from California to Connecticut were equally frustrated. But no one had any experience at breeding monkeys on the scale Harry imagined. Only a few American scientists had even tried hand-raising the animals in any systematic way and that had been on a monkey-by-monkey kind of scale. Did this faze Harry? Not really. Once you’ve built a laboratory out of a box factory, starting a breeding colony from scratch just isn’t that big a deal.
Still, he first consulted with his friends at Wisconsin. Harry and his university colleagues decided to approach the problem like the scientists they were. What does one feed a baby monkey? William Stone, from the university’s biochemistry department, spent countless hours testing formulas. As he remarked years later, “I can still smell the monkeys as I recall sleeping at the primate lab on a four-hour schedule” to try out different recipes on the baby monkeys. Stone eventually had so much data that he published a paper on the immune effects of feeding cattle serum to newborn monkeys. He began with a baby formula of sugar, evaporated milk, and water. He recruited students to hold doll-sized bottles to feed the monkeys. Every bottle was sterilized. The monkeys received vitamins every day. Their daily doses included iron extracts, penicillin and other antibiotics, glucose, and “constant, tender, loving care.” The baby monkeys were washed, weighed, and watched over constantly. As the monkeys grew older, lab caretakers mixed fresh fruit and bread into their diet. And always, always, the caretakers kept the animals apart from each other. Every monkey in a separate cage. Every baby taken from his mother, which is why someone needed to hold those baby bottles. Harry wanted no chances taken on the spread of those ghastly diseases. Everything was polished and cleaned and disinfected and wiped to a glittering cleanliness.
There was a model for such practices in human medicine, in the frantic efforts of early pediatricians to control disease in orphanages and hospitals. The Wisconsin researchers mimicked perfectly, had they realized it, the very hospital policies that Harry Bakwin had been so furiously trying to undo in the 1940s. Harlow and his colleagues were inadvertently recreating those isolationist pediatric wards.
By the end of 1956, the lab managers had taken more than sixty baby monkeys away from their mothers, tucked them into a neatly kept nursery, usually within six to twelve hours after a monkey’s birth. Lab staffers fed the infant animals meticulously, every two hours, with the carefully researched formula from the tiny dolls’ bottles. And the monkeys looked good. The little animals gained weight on that formula. They were bigger than usual, heftier and healthier looking. And they were purified of infection, “disease-free without any doubt,” wrote Harry. But their appearance, he added, turned out to be deceptive: “In many other ways they were not free at all.”
The monkeys seemed dumbfounded by loneliness. They would sit and rock, stare into space, suck their thumbs. When the monkeys were older and the scientists tried to bring them together for breeding, the animals backed away. They might stare at each other. They might even make a few tentative gestures, as if each primate vaguely wished to encourage something. But the nursery-raised monkeys had no idea what to do with eac
h other. They seemed startled by the appearance of other animals, intimidated by the sight of such odd, furry strangers. The monkeys were so unnerved by each other that many of them would simply stare at the floor of the cage, refusing to look up. “We had created a brooding, not a breeding colony,” Harry once commented.
How could the monkeys look so healthy and yet be so completely unhealthy in their behavior? The researchers had a growing colony of sturdy, bright-eyed, bizarre animals in their cages. Not all the animals were so unstable. But enough were to keep the researchers up at night. Harry was driven to making lists of possibilities. What was he doing wrong? Could it be the light cycle—was the lab not dark enough at night? The antibiotics? Perhaps the medicines were skewing normal development. The formula? It might be that evaporated milk wasn’t such a good thing. Maybe the baby monkeys were being given too much sugar—or not enough.
Harry and his students and colleagues talked it over as the coffee steamed, the bridge cards shuffled, and the nights burned away in the lab. Harry’s research crew was still growing and, on the recommendation of his old professor, Calvin Stone, he’d brought another Stanford graduate into his lab. The latest young psychologist to venture into the box factory was named William Mason. His Stanford Ph.D. barely off the presses, Mason found himself immediately plunged into the problem of the not-quite-right baby monkeys.
Shortly after arriving, Bill Mason was put in charge of raising six newborn animals. These were all lab-made orphans: taken away from their mothers some two hours after birth. In Harry’s lab, the monkeys were often given names instead of the numbers that are standard in primate labs today. The oldest of Mason’s orphans was Millstone, named by a lab tech because the little monkey was such a noisy, clingy pest. The other five infants also joined the Stone family: Grindstone, Rhinestone, Loadstone, Brimstone, and Earthstone. A research assistant at the lab, Nancy Blazek, had feeding duties. Exhausted by the two-hour schedule, she took to bringing the little monkeys home with her for their nighttime bottles.