The Orphans of Davenport

by Marilyn Brookwood

  Skeels realized that Zerwekh did not seem aware that for over twenty years mental tests had saturated the nation’s understanding of children’s abilities. In 1920 Lewis Terman had advocated “a mental test for every child,” and by 1924 2 million children had taken IQ tests.26 By 1933, psychology journals had published hundreds of analyses of young children’s intelligence test results, including a few from the Iowa station. Also, the teaching staff at Davenport’s on-site elementary school must have had knowledge of intelligence testing—it was almost a national craze. And the Iowa station itself published dozens of informational pamphlets and also broadcast radio programs about child development and intelligence, although Zerwekh, who had no children, did not seem familiar with those reports. Skeels also knew that the intelligence test results of the mothers of many Davenport residents were at that very moment filed in the institutional records not far from where he and Zerwekh sat talking.

  While the intelligence of babies was not measurable with the kinds of tests used on even very young children, Davenport’s nursing staff, as well as a pediatrician who regularly visited, probably gauged babies’ motor responses as indicators of their development. Yet when Skeels informed the superintendent that measures existed to estimate the intelligence of infants and very young children, Zerwekh was incredulous. Skeels might as well have told him that men had walked on the moon. Hoping the superintendent would appreciate that mental tests might improve Davenport’s adoption process, Skeels became his tutor.

  Zerwickh quickly understood that the use of what he called “these funny tests” could prevent the adoption of low-intelligence children and so keep the state out of court by preventing the adoption of low-intelligence children, and he immediately suggested that the Board of Control hire Skeels to test the intelligence of every Davenport resident. The board agreed and went even further, naming Skeels as the state’s first psychologist. Superintendent Zerwekh may have hoped that this deus ex machina would restore the board’s confidence in his leadership. That did not happen, and in February 1934, due to “ill health,” he resigned. H. A. Mitchell replaced him, and during his tenure, and in collaboration with Harold Skeels, the modernization of Iowa’s adoption and orphanage services got underway.

  Like Zerwekh, Mitchell lacked professional preparation for his position. But he did run an informal child development laboratory in his own home—he was the father of five—and he proved sensitive to the realities of children’s lives. Shortly after he arrived, in April 1934, Mitchell reminded the Board of Control that “an institution can provide the necessities of life, care for and educate a child, but it cannot give it the individual attention to which it is rightfully entitled.”27

  Although the lawsuit that alarmed the board had concluded, officials feared that this genie would not go back into its bottle, so it was no surprise that during the spring of 1934, the board asked Skeels to reform Davenport’s adoption procedures. Thus, in under a year, the young Iowa station professor and researcher became Iowa’s first state psychologist, initiated the first working partnership between the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station and the Davenport Home, and became the liaison from those institutions to Iowa’s Board of Control. Skeels’s professional adroitness would be instrumental in the Iowa station’s research into institutional populations and would pave the way for radical studies of children’s intelligence related to their family histories, their mothers’ intelligence, their fathers’ occupations, and their adoptions into middle-class homes.

  Working with the Board of Control, Skeels amended Iowa’s casual adoptions into a formal two-stage procedure. In the first stage, a team consisting of Superintendent Mitchell, a pediatrician, a Davenport nurse, Iowa’s state adoption agent, and Skeels himself assessed whether a child matching the adopting family’s request was healthy and appeared to be in the normal range of intelligence. Skeels excluded formal intelligence tests for babies who were under 6 months because he lacked confidence that those measures could be reliable. Rather, he depended on his own experience in noting children’s attainment of developmental milestones. Although he did not cite a source for these, at the time few formal milestone evaluations were available. In 1935, Arnold Gesell, head of Yale University’s Clinic of Child Development and the most widely known pediatrician of that time, would write that from birth infants have “a mental make-up [and] behavioral equipment” and that “the reactions of the infant assume visible and ascertainable patterns.” By 24 weeks, Gesell reported, the infant’s hands become “unfisted,” and its fingers “curl over every object they touch.”28 While neither Skeels nor Skodak referenced Gesell, it is reasonable that they were familiar with his ideas about normal infant development. Skodak, trained by Henry Goddard in the evaluation of infants, also contributed to the assessments. The standardization of certain milestones as landmarks of babies’ sensorimotor developmental status, while commonplace today, did not formally become part of the evaluation of young children until the 1950s, when Gesell published his recommendations for the use of milestones in assessment.

  Once Davenport’s team approved the adoption, a state agent, and sometimes Skeels himself, brought the child to the parents’ home, where they were “joyfully and uncritically welcomed.”29 The adoption’s second stage arrived about a year later, when Skeels or Skodak would visit the family to assess the now 15- to 18-month-old child’s intelligence. Using a test developed for young children—the Kuhlman-Binet—they would measure coordination, imitation, word recognition, and other developmental landmarks. If the child tested in the range of average intelligence, the adoption would be approved. Should the test reveal that the child was not in the average range, they would be removed and placed in an institution for the feebleminded, probably to live there for the rest of their life. There would be no appeal.30 No reports address how the state might have responded if the family asked to keep a child found to have low intelligence, but Marie Skodak’s summary of Iowa’s policy offers a clue: the state aimed to short circuit the adoption “early in the . . . relationship to prevent . . . [the] disastrous consequences of placing a retarded child with a normal family.”31 Many parents, as well as Skeels and Skodak, who were hereditarians, may have agreed.

  In June 1933, at the University Hospital in Iowa City, a baby known as CD had been born to a prostitute. CD weighed 6.5 pounds, and in every way appeared to be a robust, healthy infant. Soon after CD’s birth, her mother’s intelligence was assessed at 56, in the range of morons, and her mental age was found to be 9 years, scores that became part of CD’s Iowa records.32 Given her illegitimacy and her mother’s low intelligence, CD matched the profile of a baby assumed to have inherited poor character, inadequate mental ability, and a tendency toward social undesirability.

  Almost no information about CD’s father could be found, except that he may have attended high school. Although CD’s mother told hospital officials that she completed eighth grade when she was 16, this may not have been true. Parents’ accounts of their family histories and educational accomplishments could be unreliable, and in Iowa, as in other states, school policy promoted students “regardless of attainments.”33 But it may also have been the case that when low-intellect parents felt intimidated by the power distance between themselves and officials, they sometimes falsified their family backgrounds or exaggerated their educational performance.

  Such dissembling might have been motivated by fear. It is likely they knew that Iowa’s Board of Eugenics, established in 1929, sometimes institutionalized those who seemed deviant or had trouble caring for themselves or their children, and once detained, some were sterilized. Although the board claimed it limited sterilization to inmates it considered “a menace to society,”34 others might have feared this possibility. Then again, as Iowa historian of eugenics Amy Vogel suggested, when they faced a hearing before the board, “patients may have been persuaded to believe in their own deviancy, backwardness or incompetence and [saw] no viable alternative to sterilization.”35

  Until t
he 1940s, compared with other states, such as Virginia and California, Iowa sterilized very few citizens—in 1933 only 94.36 However, institutions did not always report the operations, or camouflaged them as other medical procedures—appendectomies, for example. In the late 1940s, advocacy for sterilization in Iowa increased, and in 1963 the state performed nearly 2,000. More than two-thirds of those surgeries were performed on girls and women.37

  For three months, CD’s mother and other family members attempted to care for her, but in September 1933, the state ruled the family inadequate, severed her mother’s parental rights, and brought CD to the Davenport nursery. Skodak recalled that when the state discovered a family wasn’t able to care for its children it did not hesitate to remove them.38

  At Davenport, CD was placed in a nursery crib that had muslin sheets wrapped around its sides. Wrapping cribs in this fashion—a practice ubiquitous in institutions into the 1950s—was intended to shield infants from drafts that might carry airborne diseases such as whooping cough or diphtheria or that caused diarrhea.39 Whether the sheets were effective is not clear, as studies of the practice are almost entirely absent from the literature, but institutional infant mortality in the United States of 30 to 90 percent may have incentivized their use.40 Most childcare staff of that time did not consider that the well-intentioned safeguard isolated babies from their surroundings. Today, neuroscience studies suggest that prolonged limitation of young children’s visual stimulation—Davenport’s babies remained in the cribs until they were about 6 months old—may have harmful consequences for later social awareness, including the ability to read facial expressions.41 There are no reports of sheets placed around babies’ cribs in family settings.

  A baby of CD’s age who lived in a family would be frequently held, helped to sit, and have colorful toys to reach for. They would have affectionate engagement with parents or caregivers who spoke to them in the distinctive, high-pitched, repetitive “language,” called “motherese” or “parentese,” that adults use to mirror “baby talk” back to infants. Although babies do not understand the words spoken to them, they recognize caretakers’ attentiveness and answer with their own noises and body movements. Reflecting babies’ sounds and motions back to them encourages a social exchange—a “conversation” that cues the infant to the adult’s responsiveness. Today this “serve and return” interaction, defined in the last decade by Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child,42 has been found to support the growth of neural networks considered essential to cognitive development. Of course, had she lived in a family, CD’s needs would have been met with much affection as well. It is now known that caressing babies stimulates the production of growth hormones, essential for physical, mental, and emotional development.43

  Cocooned in her crib, CD would have seen light stream each day through the nursery’s large windows, and in the evening the moon’s glow may have washed over her. Light to shadows to darkness and then light again would have been everything she learned about the world. Really, she might as well have been blind. CD was scarcely touched, never held, rarely spoken to; no one approached her crib warm with love. If the bottle propped beside her mouth slipped away, or if she became cold, or wet, or ill, or cried from loneliness or fear, an overburdened nurse responsible for too many babies would rarely respond.44 Even if she did not know it, CD may have lost all hope of being mothered.45

  Most babies arrived at Davenport when they were only days old, but some, like CD, began life in inadequate homes and had endured every sort of neglect. Neil J. Van Steenberg, a 1930s researcher sent to Iowa by the Carnegie Foundation in New York, characterized some of the birth parents of Davenport orphans as having “abandoned any attempts to attain normal social status,”46 a description that might well have fit CD’s family. But despite her mother’s background and low intelligence, nothing in CD’s record indicated that at her admission to the Davenport Home she was not a normal baby. This suggests she had achieved some of the milestones typical for 3-month-old infants: she probably made eye contact, visually followed objects, and responded to voices. Had such age benchmarks not been met, Davenport’s nurses and its psychologist would have suspected possible developmental anomalies.

  In January of 1934, when CD was 7 months old, Davenport transferred her to the nursery for older babies up to 2 years of age. That month another baby, 11-month-old BD, entered Davenport and was also placed in that nursery. The child of a mother with deficient intelligence who was an inmate in an institution for the insane, BD had experienced extreme early deprivation, and when she arrived at Davenport, she was checked for possible contamination from her mother’s syphilis and gonorrhea.

  Typically, Iowa sterilized institutionalized women who had this array of social, cognitive, and medical histories, and it is unclear why BD’s mother had escaped the procedure. BD’s father, said to have been an “inebriate,” had run off from the same institution. Despite her parents’ diagnoses, BD was born after a full-term pregnancy, had no birth injuries, and showed no evidence of her mother’s sexually transmitted illnesses.47

  BD’s history told of a mother who had been slow to sit, to walk, and to talk. An uncle had died in a state hospital of “paralysis of the insane.” An aunt had died of epilepsy, at the time considered a brain condition related to feeblemindedness or mental illness. When she was an infant, BD’s mother’s family attempted to care for her, but by the time she was 11 months old, the courts removed her and brought her to Davenport, where, on entry, she was assessed as retarded. A baby of about 1 year should sit without help, crawl, use the “pincer” grasp necessary to pick up small objects and food, and attempt some words, such as “da” and “ma.”48 BD may have appeared retarded because she was unable to accomplish these tasks.

  BD and CD’s nursery had four or five cribs in each of several small rooms, one of which was the matron’s home. No sheets wrapped those cribs, and for 2 hours a day the babies played alongside one another on the floor—in CD’s case, her first close contact with anyone in three months—half of her lifetime. A few toys were available, but if one rolled out of reach or broke, no one retrieved or fixed it.49 The matron’s responsibilities included dressing and feeding the children, washing and mending their clothes, caring for them when they were ill, maintaining the nursery equipment, and all other housekeeping and hygiene duties, such as toilet training, chores Skodak and Skeels called “endless.”50

  At the developmental stage when most babies grasp the sides of their cribs or furniture and pull themselves up, adults encourage them to practice standing and take their first steps. At Davenport, if these milestone achievements happened at all, it was by accident and they went unnoticed. Talking, object naming, self-feeding, or learning to walk came much later than for children who lived in families. But the toddlers’ slow development did not surprise Davenport’s matrons and administrators. It was what they expected from infants of degenerate heredity.

  When they were 2 years old, CD and BD would graduate to small, Civil War–era cottages—once barracks—that housed thirty to thirty-five children up to 6 years of age. The caregivers for each cottage were a single matron and a few resentful teenage residents. Now referred to as inmates, the children were dressed each day from random clothing piled on the floor. They went nowhere, owned nothing, and if they learned something on their own, they had no one to tell. Adult attention and affection were unknown. Davenport’s institutional regimentation meant they walked to meals and everywhere else, even to use bathroom facilities, in two straight lines.51 Noise was not tolerated and the matrons discouraged talking or questions. Treating institutionalized children harshly was thought to prepare them for the harsh lives they could expect after they left Davenport’s shelter. When they were alone, the children amused themselves with a game they invented, dressing and undressing one another.52 Skodak recalled that life at Davenport deprived these children of even ordinary interactions with adults, that the institution’s emotionally bleak environment and excessively strict routine
s were nothing like the experience of children who lived in ordinary families. When Davenport children did receive special attention, it was as physical punishment for some perceived transgression—stepping out of line, not finishing a meal, losing something, not being mindful of a rule. Their overburdened caretakers, saddled in the congested institution with the care of too many children, were short-tempered, poorly supervised (or not supervised at all), and greatly underpaid. When Skeels and Skodak visited, the children’s neediness was easy to observe in their joyful responses to a gentle pat on the head, or to being picked up and talked to a little.53

  In the spring of 1934, Marie Skodak joined Harold Skeels and some Iowa station graduate students in assessing the intelligence of Davenport’s nearly 800 residents, and on July 14 Skeels tested BD and CD. When BD had entered Davenport at 11 months, her intake record described her as “retarded.” Now, 6 months later, her IQ test score was 35 on the Kuhlman-Binet test, but Skeels had no baseline score and no way to measure her lost intelligence, if any. He recognized, however, that he would have to commit her to an institution for persons with very low intelligence, where he knew she would spend the rest of her life.54

  However, as Skeels studied CD’s record, he found that her case was quite different. When she had arrived at the Davenport nursery, CD appeared to be a normal 3-month-old. Until she was 6 months, she had lived in an environment barren of ordinary human contact and also experienced restricted visual stimulation. Now, Skeels found, her IQ test score was 46. With his traditional training, Skeels never doubted that both girls’ low intelligence reflected their poor heredity. While he considered Davenport’s treatment of its young children indefensible, he also had to know that CD’s decline was extreme, although he made no comment about this in her file. In each child’s official record, Skeels wrote the same diagnosis: