The Orphans of Davenport

by Marilyn Brookwood

  Skeels’s ideas about constancy first began to change in 1934 as he tested the intelligence of residents at the Institution for Feebleminded Children, in Glenwood, on Iowa’s western border. In the mix of about 1,000 children and adolescents with below-average IQ test scores, Skeels was surprised to find that some inmates were intellectually average. Investigating, he discovered that they were delinquents from upper-class homes who had, for example, set fires or even raped other children. According to Stoddard, they had been placed at Glenwood because judges did not want to commit them to Iowa’s homes for delinquents or send them to jail. At Glenwood, a well-resourced institution with enough staff, they did not continue their offending behaviors.

  However, because their intelligence tested in the normal range, as the state psychologist it fell to Skeels to transfer them to Davenport, an institution for normal-intelligence children. What happened next disturbed him. After the children had lived in Davenport’s emotionally and materially impoverished environment for a year or two, their IQ test scores declined. Bewildered, Skeels demanded of Stoddard, “How could this happen?”37 At Davenport Skeels found additional evidence of IQ variability in the scores of siblings from destitute families who arrived there when courts ruled that their parents were not competent to keep them. He discovered that those children’s IQs tracked with the length of time they had been exposed to parents’ deficient care: the oldest children had the lowest intelligence. A study of 407 children from 132 families confirmed those observations.38 Yet another example of IQs that changed with environment occurred when judges sent children of alcoholic parents to live in Davenport for six months while their parents got sober. If parents missed their sobriety deadlines, the court granted them another six months, and then six more. During these extensions, both Skeels and Skodak noticed that the children’s IQ scores drifted downward.39

  Because they were consulted about adoptions, Skeels and Skodak also noticed changes in IQ scores if the adoption of a Davenport child were delayed. If the delay went on long enough, the score could become so low that the child would become unadoptable and would be transferred to a home for the “retarded.”40 Such delays happened for all kinds of reasons. A family that had surrendered a child might not have signed an adoption release and might even have left the state, halting the process until bureaucratic issues were resolved. Delays happened, too, because of illness, such as otitis media, an ear infection today treated with antibiotics, that could sweep through institutions, sicken children for long periods, and even kill.41 Across the road from the Davenport Home is the orphans’ cemetery of the Oakdale Memorial Gardens, where child-sized headstones mark hundreds of graves of those who died in Iowa’s care.42

  Chapter Three

  TRANSPARENT WAIFS, PITIFUL CREATURES

  Until the Depression pulled the lid down on its economy, the small city of Davenport had flourished. Geography provided it with a dream-come-true location for the nation’s first Mississippi River rail crossing, the Rock Island Railroad Bridge to Illinois, completed in 1856. (A conflict between rail interests and riverboat owners about whether to build the bridge went to court with Abraham Lincoln as attorney for the railroads against Jefferson Davis for the riverboat owners.1) In the next two decades, as Iowa’s agricultural bounty rolled west to the Pacific coast, east to Chicago, and then on to New York, the city was transformed into a railway shipping hub and its population shot up by nearly 600 percent. In the two decades before the Depression, the city’s population rose another 50 percent.2 But now, near the Rock Island Bridge and close to the Iowa Soldier’s Orphans’ Home, men, women, and children filled a shantytown. Inside the orphanage, things were a little better, but according to Harold Skeels, “standards of diet, sanitation . . . general care . . . and philosophy” were close to criminal.3

  The Davenport Home had always sheltered infants, children, and teenagers, many of whom remained until they were 21. Older residents labored at jobs that sustained the orphanage, and that included work on its farm. Before and after their schoolday, residents

  dug turnips, milked cows, and shoveled manure. They snapped beans, shelled peas, ironed uniforms or unloaded coal. They washed pots and pans in the kitchen, drove trucks to the field, worked alongside and were supervised by prisoners from the county jail. . . . They scrubbed hospital floors on hands and knees, washed dishes, and worked in the fields.4

  To make room for more residents, during the Depression teenagers were often “placed out” to work as unpaid labor for local families. One former resident recalled that the superintendent sent her to work so that she would have more to eat. He did not realize that each day before school, “this little, skinny sixteen-year-old girl had to get up at dawn to start the fire in the cook stove, then go down to the barn and milk [eight] cows and then come back and eat her own breakfast outside, summer or winter.”5 In exchange for their labor, the state expected the teenagers would receive training for adult employment, but that did not always happen. Working residents, older children and teenagers, had to attend school, but farming and work schedules had priority. When discipline seemed required, in the “typical practice in the era, children were whipped with a leather strap for low grades, misbehaviors, and running away.”6

  At the worst of the Depression, from 1933 to 1935, wave upon wave of children arrived at Davenport, nearly doubling the institution’s census to about 800.7 New Deal social programs had not yet arrived, and although Marie Skodak and Harold Skeels described orphanage conditions as “Dickensian,” overworked staff appreciated having jobs at all. Recognizing Iowa’s crisis, in 1935 the state planning commission advised “better care in institutions by having more adults in contact with children, shorter hours, better provisions for education and recreation.”8 No staff increases were considered. Davenport’s deficiencies, Skeels and Skodak explained, resulted from the effects on the institution of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, but also from the state’s “prevailing simplicity of life” which, as was common knowledge, had long kept the finances of its agencies and all public institutions tightly controlled.9

  Public and private charity funds were penniless, and no social safety nets existed to aid impoverished families. “The usual community support systems,” Skodak could see, “were . . . exhausted,” and at Davenport she watched as “disintegrated families . . . unable to feed and shelter their children, released them—five or six or more”—to the orphanage.10 Bereft, heartbroken parents assured their children that they would soon return for them, but few were able to. An adult who, as a child, had briefly lived at Davenport reported that when children were “dropped off,” some at first treated the experience as an exciting adventure, as if they had arrived at summer camp. But as they began to fear that their parents had abandoned them, they resembled “lost souls” and became sad, angry, and hostile to the adults charged with their care.11

  Some of Davenport’s children had not been abandoned but had been removed from abusive families by the state, an increasingly common outcome as Depression hardships grew more extreme. Also, maltreated children who were found living on the streets or in shantytowns were brought to Davenport. Others were placed there because of parental alcohol or drug abuse or because their parents were found to have low intelligence or were mentally ill, syphilitic, tubercular, or unwell in some other way.12 When resources at other state and private social service programs became exhausted, Davenport became the option of last resort.13 No other shelter existed for neglected children, and some expressed joy at their new institutional lives. “I didn’t know that you were supposed to eat three times a day,” a child, now an adult, who was one of nine abandoned siblings told an interviewer for a Davenport oral history project. Another, who said that before Davenport he “probably got one meal every three days or two days” felt that the institution saved him. “All of a sudden,” he said, “you’ve got clean clothes, a bed, clean bedding . . . and kids to play with. I think I must have been born to live in an institution. I fell right in.”14r />
  For Marie Skodak, Davenport’s condition that winter and spring of 1934 was not a surprise—she had worked there the previous summer—although since then the institution had further deteriorated. However, her new responsibilities included an uncommon assignment: in every kind of weather, over terrible roads, in her 1930s car with its uncertain heater, she conveyed newborn infants from the University Hospital in Iowa City to the Davenport Home’s nursery, a distance of about 65 miles. As she navigated this rough passage, a days-old baby tucked into a wicker basket beside her, Skodak had little hope for the child’s future. She was conveying her helpless charge to a destitute, overcrowded orphanage in which the state would provide inadequate nutrition, poor health care, no stimulation, and affectionless attention. Often the child of a prostitute and believed to have inherited low intelligence, the baby would be treated by Davenport’s staff like the dependent, institutional inmate they assumed the infant was fated to become.

  To feed her hungry, fussy passenger, Skodak carried the infant into the only travelers’ rest stops available, roadside bars. Warming the baby’s bottle on a coal stove in a saloon lit by kerosene lanterns—electrification did not arrive in rural Iowa for another decade—the bar’s rural Iowa patrons of mostly farmers and other workers gathered around, relishing the presence of such uncommon visitors and learning that Skodak and the newborn were headed to the Davenport Home. During her work at the Iowa station Skodak made many of these trips and remembered there would always be someone who would ask, “Is that baby available for adoption?”15

  After she tucked the tiny infant back into their nursery basket, Skodak drove the last miles to the Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home, not only a residence for abandoned children, but also the state of Iowa’s central adoption facility. Taking the baby from the car, perhaps as she walked the path to Davenport’s baby nursery she even sang a lullaby to the infant, whom she knew might only rarely again experience such gentle, unhurried attention. She might even have cuddled the baby a little longer, describing the mature ash trees to her right and the distant rolling hills, a scene of an infant in a woman’s arms that any onlooker would have thought unremarkable. But Skodak knew better: unless Davenport babies were adopted, they rarely again experienced such ordinary care.

  The Davenport Home served as the hub for Iowa’s adoptions, and even during the Depression hundreds of couples applied to adopt children. The brief application asked the characteristics of the child they would like—its sex, coloring, age, religion—and couples provided records of their occupational and financial status. They also provided three references, usually from a local clergyman, a banker, and a community leader. From Skodak’s many detailed reports about the process, it is clear that parents did not request information about a child’s family history or its intelligence.16

  The state hoped to place infants into loving homes, and its agents and field workers—politically connected, well-meaning young women who might have graduated from high school—conscientiously reviewed applications, interviewed references, and made detailed pre-adoption home inspections. The numbers of requests to adopt infants far exceeded the supply, and the agents knew they could be selective. Occasionally, agents had to screen out couples who might be seeking a child whom they could eventually put to work.

  Yet with Davenport’s meager resources and its constant need to make room for more infants, its own adoption process ignored the agents’ pre-adoptive reports and went forward as rapidly as possible—placing children almost at random. The process also disregarded Skeels and Skodak’s efforts to match children with families.17 Without any consideration for the infant’s birth family history, babies who were usually 10 to 16 weeks old were randomly placed. One psychologist at Iowa, Boyd McCandless, later a leader in child development research, remembered, “The mother might be retarded, might be schizophrenic, might be whatever . . . as long as the baby was found by a pediatrician to be healthy, he was placed in any ‘respectable’ home,” most of them middle and upper middle class.18

  Private adoption agencies often refused to accept for adoption a child whose parents had limited intelligence or other problematic traits. In one of many such cases, when the Christian Home Orphanage in Council Bluffs, Iowa, refused a child because the mother’s IQ score was 69, the court sent him to Davenport.19 Such agencies, where babies of the well-to-do were available for other well-to-do families to adopt, looked askance at Davenport’s placements of very young infants. Fearing a baby might have inherited “bad blood,”20 those agencies routinely kept infants for observation for about a year.

  At Davenport, adopting couples generally requested infants, but occasionally toddlers or even 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children were adopted with no effort made to keep siblings together. A former resident remembered, “I happened to see my younger sister (who was about three years old) . . . dressed in a little red snowsuit with white shoes and I saw her get into a car and I knew that she was gone.”21

  Davenport’s adoptions were administered by its superintendent, Roscoe Zerwekh, who had led the Home since 1927. The state’s specialized institutions that housed feebleminded residents or those with psychiatric illnesses or health infirmities such as epilepsy were generally headed by medical doctors. But orphanage superintendent positions were typically filled by untrained political appointees. Although Superintendent Zerwekh directly managed all adoptions, he lacked experience in the assessment of children’s IQs or knowledge of psychology or sociology or any aspect of childcare. Moreover, he had no experience in institutional administration, had limited understanding of nutrition or child health and development, and was isolated by Davenport’s distance from any large city and therefore from new ideas about institutional management or about children’s well-being. Zerwekh maintained the official records of Davenport’s residents in a dairy farmer’s ledger that he referred to as the “Herd Book.”

  Davenport was an institution designated for the care of children with normal intelligence. The state considered those who had lower than normal intelligence unadoptable and required their transfer to specialized facilities. But because Superintendent Zerwekh lacked the training to assess children’s intelligence, many were not transferred and had accumulated in Davenport’s wards.

  In 1933, the superintendent’s deficient administration was exposed when a family that had adopted a baby boy discovered the intelligence of their now 6-year-old was below normal. When local school officials informed them that their son could not be educated, the family feared he would be unable to manage the valuable farm they planned to pass on to him. Claiming that Davenport had “misrepresented” the child and that they had been “shortchanged,” they threatened legal action and challenged Iowa’s policy that adoptions were “irrevocable.”22 The couple received a settlement, the first of its kind, in which Iowa broke its own rule and terminated the adoption, thus returning the boy to the state’s care.23

  Harold Skeels knew nothing of this unfolding catastrophe when he arrived at Davenport one day that summer to renew his acquaintance with Superintendent Zerwekh. Although both the orphanage and the Iowa station focused on the lives of children, at the time the two institutions had no official connection. However, years earlier, while earning his PhD at the station, Skeels’s research had included the study of young children’s intelligence and he had done some of that research at Davenport. Skeels now supervised the station’s graduate training and planned to propose to the superintendent that Davenport might be a site where students could practice the administration of intelligence tests. He reasoned that this would be helpful to the institution because it would supply information about its residents, but Skeels may also have hoped to establish a foothold at Davenport for the station’s research. As Skodak reported, Skeels had talents that promoted the station’s work with Iowa’s political boards and state appointees like Zerwekh. He had “skill in opening doors for research [that] made the studies possible.”24 During this visit, Skeels also planned to suggest that Zerwekh house some of the
station’s cash-strapped students on Davenport’s campus.

  Skeels had great compassion for the loneliness of Davenport children, and when he arrived that day he walked over to their playground to visit them. What he did not know was that Superintendent Zerwekh’s medical staff had allowed children who were ill—the institution was in the midst of a chicken pox epidemic—to play outdoors, and during his visit Skeels fell ill with the same malady. Embarrassed, apologetic, and fearful of being perceived as an inadequate manager, Zerwekh took great pains to make the university professor comfortable and each day chatted with him nervously. This is how Skeels learned that as a result of an adoption that Zerwekh himself had arranged, Iowa’s Board of Control faced a potentially momentous lawsuit. Defending the decision that had permitted the adoption of a retarded child, the superintendent asked Skeels, “Was there anybody who could have predicted this?”25