The Orphans of Davenport

by Marilyn Brookwood

  THE ORPHANS

  OF DAVENPORT

  Eugenics,

  the Great Depression,

  and the

  War over Children’s Intelligence

  MARILYN BROOKWOOD

  The Orphans of Davenport is dedicated to the women with intellectual challenges living at the Woodward State Hospital for Epileptics and Home for the Feebleminded and the Glenwood Institution for Feebleminded Children, who without thought for themselves gave caring attention to Davenport’s orphans and radically changed the lives of so many, even today.

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  Prologue: Nature or Nurture?

  PART I

  Origins

  1How It All Began

  2Starting Over

  3Transparent Waifs, Pitiful Creatures

  4From a Dog You Do Not Get a Cat

  5A Clinical Surprise

  PART II

  Backlash

  6A Revelation and a Mystery

  7Orphan Studies Out in Public

  8The Way the Land Lies

  9“Even If It Didn’t Work, It Was a Good Idea!”

  10A Chill in the Air

  PART III

  Revival

  11Reversal of Fortune

  12The Counter-Argument

  Epilogue: The Miracle of Science

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  America’s eugenics era began at the start of the twentieth century and persisted into the early 1940s. During that period, intelligence tests were used to assess schoolchildren, as well as children and adults committed to institutions, immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, patients confined in mental hospitals, prisoners, those considered to be intellectually challenged, and army recruits. Intelligence test results, known as IQ scores, were reported on a scale in which the average range was between 90 and 109. A score from 110 to 119 was labeled superior, from 120 to 139, very superior, and a score of 140 and above was considered in the genius range. At the lower gradient, scores from 80 to 89 indicated low average or dull intelligence, and scores from 70 to 79 indicated borderline ability. But the IQ designations expressed something more particular for those in the lower IQ ranges when they slid from neutral descriptions to labels that stigmatized persons with those test scores. Those who scored from 50 to 69 were called “morons,” from 20 to 49, “imbeciles,” and those with scores below 20 were known as “idiots.” The umbrella term, feebleminded, identified those with scores of 70 or lower. From highest to lowest, the terminology was standard in medicine, psychology, education, and the law. These identifiers only began to be erased from professional usage in the 1960s, although by then they had entered the vernacular as repugnant slang. They are used in The Orphans of Davenport as they were used during the time the events in the narrative occurred.

  THE ORPHANS OF DAVENPORT

  Prologue

  NATURE OR NURTURE?

  The young woman who presented herself for indigent maternity care at Iowa City’s University Hospital on May 7, 1934, appeared confused and gave the nurses two first names and four last names; because she would not or could not say which were really hers, hospital officials chose for her, and in Iowa’s public records she is Viola Hoffman.1 Hoffman could provide so little information about herself that her file did not include how far she had gone in school or even her age.2 As a matter of routine, the hospital asked women like Hoffman for permission to test their IQs. Because of her unfortunate mental state, it is hard to know whether Hoffman understood what an IQ test was or that if she had a poor result she might be institutionalized and sterilized. Although she consented to the test, she may have realized that with her low social status she was in no position to refuse. This is how it happened that one day for about an hour, Hoffman sat in a sparsely furnished hospital office with a psychologist who asked her question after question, many containing concepts that in her condition she might have had difficulty grasping. For example, she was asked to consider contrasting ideas, the difference between laziness and idleness, between poverty and misery, character and reputation, and evolution and revolution. If she correctly answered three out of four of these, Hoffman’s IQ would have been assessed in the average range. In another part of the test, she had to mentally compute arithmetic problems. In yet another, designed to test attention and memory, she had to repeat a series of seven digits forward and then backward and then do the same with another series and then another.3 Hoffman’s test result of 66 indicated that her IQ was well below the average range of 90–109, and her diagnosis, “moronism,” became part of her official state of Iowa file. During this period, the terms moron, imbecile, and idiot were official identifiers for persons whose IQ test scores numerically fit categories of low intelligence.

  Intelligence tests were first published in America between 1910 and 1916 and soon became tools in a mainstream public policy crusade called eugenics. Eugenicists believed that all human traits were biologically determined and inherited and that problematic traits, such as alcoholism, criminality, a tendency toward poverty, epilepsy, insanity, and promiscuity, among others, resulted from a person’s low intelligence. Those who exhibited such traits could be institutionalized and sterilized, decisions often supported by IQ test score evidence. Designed to rid communities of the unfit, state governments and the educated class believed that the policies promoted a modern ideal—the creation of a society of the able—to be achieved by improving the racial stock. A pioneer in the testing field, Lewis Terman, of Stanford University, called IQ tests “a beacon of light for the eugenics movement.”4 In addition, eugenicists promoted “selective breeding,” which encouraged the socially stable and well educated to have larger families.

  In the service of eugenic goals, medical doctors diagnosed those who might have problematic conditions such as epilepsy or alcoholism, and court officials had responsibility for diagnoses of criminality and sexual perversions, including prostitution. Claiming that IQ tests were scientific, mental test psychologists became America’s acknowledged experts in the evaluation of the intelligence of persons accused of crimes, recruits in the United States Army, those confined to institutions, and hospital patients like Hoffman.

  By the end of the 1920s, nearly all states had passed laws permitting the involuntary sterilization of those with low intelligence, most of them poor, most of them women.5 For some, sterilization may have been a choice freely made, but for others—particularly women of low social status—the power distance between those designated for the procedure and medical or court officials made refusal difficult.

  Before her baby’s birth, doctors informed Hoffman that her delivery would be by cesarean section. Although the reasons for this are not included in her case history, when she learned of that decision she asked to be sterilized. Because she was now considered “feebleminded,” a state guardian was appointed to sign her sterilization consent. (Iowa was one of the few states that required consent.) It is impossible to know whether sterilization was coercively suggested to Hoffman or whether she directly requested it. Either way, for her doctor it would have been a routine procedure. From the perspective of most ordinary people, “human ability and success were determined by genetics and not environment” and accounted for “the superiority of middle-class and upper-class whites.”6 Therefore, Hoffman’s sterilization would have been viewed as beneficial to society and to Hoffman herself: it would free her from the burden of raising a child whose dysgenic traits and unfortunate heredity would lead to a hopeless life. Better to prune the withering branch of the genetic tree.

  In July, after Hoffman delivered a normal baby boy, whom she named
Wendell, her mental status deteriorated further. Although she took care of her newborn son, she was unaware that she was his mother. Her hallucinations increased and she stopped keeping herself clean. Six weeks later doctors diagnosed her as “insane” and committed her to Clarinda, an Iowa state hospital for the mentally ill. Not considered by authorities who evaluated her were the traumatic events that occurred during her pregnancy when her husband—who had already been married three times—divorced and abandoned her.7 Hoffman’s appearance of mental illness may have been related to antepartum depression, that is, depression that occurs during pregnancy. Along with postpartum depression, both conditions are recognized today as treatable with psychotherapeutic and medical interventions.

  With his mother institutionalized, Wendell spent his first year in a Des Moines juvenile center. In the summer of 1935, when her son was 1 year old, Iowa declared Viola Hoffman cured of mental illness and released her to the care of a sister in Chicago. The state would have permitted Hoffman to resume custody of her son, but instead she chose to relinquish her parental rights. During the Great Depression, a divorced mother with a history of mental illness would have faced nearly insurmountable economic and social barriers to finding work and successfully caring for herself and a young child. Officials therefore transferred Wendell, now a ward of the state, 170 miles east, to the nursery at the Davenport Home, Iowa’s principal state-run orphanage.

  The first orphans arrived at the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home in Davenport one mild Indian summer morning in mid-November, 1865, aboard the Mississippi River steamboat Keithburg. To cheers from the town’s residents, 130 children whose fathers had died fighting in the Civil War walked down the gangway to begin their new lives. “It was a blessed idea . . . to bring the little ones of the brave soldiers of Iowa who fell victims to bloody war in defense of their country,” one community leader told the Quad City Times. Townsfolk from the Orphans’ Aid Society served the children breakfast and then in horse-drawn carriages bought them to a refurbished army camp, once Camp Kinsman, where some of their fathers may have trained for the war. “The children seemed delighted with the pleasant spot,” one town member told the newspaper. Entering the Davenport Home’s cottages—former army barracks in which they would live—each child found their bed covered with a colorful patchwork quilt hand embroidered by a local citizen.8

  Within a few years, the Davenport Home accepted not only war orphans but any normal dependent child “older than two years, and mentally and physically sound.”9 Recognizing the need to modernize, by 1901 the state had transformed the Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home by replacing its wood-framed buildings with modern brick structures and constructing several new ones. Its superintendent boasted that its location was “one of the most beautiful and healthful in the vicinity, with grounds made attractive by shade trees, flowers, and shrubbery.”10

  In that first decade of the twentieth century, Iowa took great pride in Davenport’s care of its residents, advertising that its school, the only regular public school in Iowa connected to an institution, had a music teacher who taught singing and musical sight reading and that children were “supplied with everything in the line of recreational amusements [including] balls, bats, footballs, . . . swings . . . croquet, and other customary playthings.”11 During that same period, the institution began to encourage children’s adoptions, and by the 1920s, the Davenport Home had become Iowa’s central adoption facility, a residence where infants and toddlers lived until a family embraced them. Davenport children who were not adopted remained until they were 21.

  But by the summer of 1935, when Wendell Hoffman arrived at the Davenport Home, Great Depression hardships had transformed it into an institution crammed with infants and older babies, many, like him, born in the University Hospital’s indigent ward. The catalog of reasons that babies and children entered Davenport reads like a biblical description for the punishment of the innocent: some had been given up when Depression-battered families lost their farms or jobs and could not feed the children they already had. Others were the children of mothers left penniless when their husbands deserted them. Many of their mothers were prostitutes unable to sustain themselves and a child. Then there were infants removed by the courts because of parental neglect, alcoholism, mental or physical illness or abuse. Some mothers, like Viola Hoffman, were of low intelligence and were also mentally ill.

  Increased numbers of babies and toddlers meant that Davenport’s overburdened nurses were only able to deliver utilitarian care, propping bottles beside babies’ mouths and efficiently changing diapers with little time left to show affection. Ordinary caring attention that babies received in families was unknown. The most fortunate, babies between 2 and 6 months who appeared normal and were healthy, soon were adopted into the comfortable homes of financially secure middle-class parents, while their Davenport cribs quickly filled with more babies. Adopted, too, although less frequently, were older babies, toddlers, and even nursery school–aged children.

  Because of a recent mandate to test the IQ of every Davenport Home resident, Wendell was tested when he arrived at the institution, and it was found that his IQ score was in the range of most normal children his age. However, not the pediatrician who examined him, not the nurses who diapered and fed him, and certainly not the psychologist who administered the IQ test expected his mental ability to remain average for long. As the child of a low-intelligence, mentally ill mother, eventually those same traits would emerge in Wendell. His earliest Davenport records indicate that he was an “inactive, lethargic child” who rocked back and forth in his crib.12 Young children’s perseverative rocking, a form of self-soothing, is understood today as symptomatic of severe neglect and childhood depression.

  When Wendall was about 2 years old, his IQ was tested again. During the year he had lived at Davenport, his test score had declined and he had become feebleminded, an outcome that made him ineligible for adoption. Because Davenport was designated for the care of normal children, Wendell would now be transferred to an institution for children like him, where he would probably live for the rest of his life.

  Harold Skeels, the psychologist responsible for Wendell’s IQ assessment, was a professor at the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, a quasi-independent research group at the University of Iowa, in Iowa City. He was assisted by his colleague, Marie Skodak. Both Skeels and Skodak were especially compassionate clinicians with a keen interest in children’s family histories and circumstances.

  Just at the time that Wendell’s test confirmed his lost intelligence, Skeels was beginning an unorthodox study prompted partly by Davenport’s extreme overcrowding. Eleven “retarded” children would be sent from the orphanage to become residents in a home for the feebleminded where they would live with adult women identified as “morons.” The outplaced children would be tracked against a control group who remained at Davenport. The results were startling, even to the researchers who designed the study. After one to two years of consistent, attentive care from the women, the orphans’ intelligence improved; all but two attained IQ scores in the normal range. Meanwhile, the intelligence of a control group living in Davenport’s usual conditions declined to “retarded levels.”13

  Wendell had become one of the experimental eleven. The infant whose life had seemed hopeless, whose mother had been sterilized to prevent any further offspring from entering the world, would eventually experience an IQ increase of 17 points—among the smallest gains of Skeels’s experimental children—but something never dreamed of when he languished at Davenport. Wendell would find a loving family, a new name, and a new life; later, he would attend college and graduate school and become a university administrator. He was only one of the children whose progress would amaze the researchers at the Iowa station and help to change the history of psychology.

  Because none of the children in either group suffered from any organic brain disorder, Harold Skeels realized that the members of one group could have changed places with those in the other and l
ed completely different lives, simply as a result of the strikingly different environments in which they developed. Skeels’s study, together with several others conducted by the station’s psychologists, provided evidence essential to the modern understanding of early development and inequality: heredity and environment act together. Decades later, when neuroscientists began to penetrate the workings of the brain and its development, their work would be confirmed.

  Hamilton Cravens, renowned scholar of social science, later described the Iowa station as a “singularity”—there wasn’t another research group like it in the nation, possibly in the world.14 It had an all-embracing mission to investigate the requirements for raising normal children, which until then had been a process governed by homespun advice, recycled hearsay, unchallenged custom, and assumption. Never intending a revolution, the Iowa psychologists’ investigations defied universally held beliefs and theories and ushered the way to the modern field of child development.

  From the 1930s into the early 1940s, Cravens noted, the station became “the only secure dissenting fiefdom in the realm.” Its research, he said, had “national significance and meaning.”15 But no one, not even the Iowans themselves, would have predicted that the study of institutionalized children from society’s lowest social and economic strata would launch the unknown Iowa group into a revolution. Their discoveries that the interaction of heredity and experience determines much of children’s development, including their intelligence, were assailed by their profession’s leaders, most of whom were eugenicists convinced that environment played no role. Soon, those relentless attacks and the public’s response to the positive implications of the Iowans’ work became a frontline drama followed in newspapers and magazines throughout the nation.