The Orphans of Davenport

by Marilyn Brookwood

  In 1921, Terman helped found the Psychological Corporation, which became a leading marketer of test materials, later taken over by Harcourt Brace Publishers. Soon after, with World Book Publishers, he launched a lucrative book series, and in 1925 he published the first volume of a multi-year study about the achievement of highly gifted children, Genetic Studies of Genius, its title inspired by the first eugenics study, Sir Francis Galton’s 1869 effort, Hereditary Genius. Terman’s study went on to become a much-admired longitudinal report about the life paths of middle- and upper-middle-class children—many the children of Stanford faculty—who had IQ test scores of at least 140.34

  Once the considerable financial rewards from Terman’s test and many projects washed over the members of his profession, they became difficult to relinquish. Further, the now prominent Terman grew his small Stanford department into the best-endowed graduate psychology program in the nation.35 In 1924, Terman’s vision that eugenicists and mental testers would join forces in support of America’s tightened immigration laws proved accurate when the army test score results were endorsed as scientific evidence of immigrants’ low intelligence. That year saw the passage of restrictive immigration legislation known as the Johnson-Reed Act, which, during the 1930s, barred entry into the United States of Jews fleeing Germany.36

  Mental testing and eugenic ideology remained inseparable during America’s interwar period when, as Terman had predicted, low IQ test scores provided evidence for the institutionalization and sterilization of the unfit. Rarely mentioned was that the tests’ findings were applied largely to those with low economic or social status and to the disabled. Thus, intelligence tests proved useful in reinforcing a caste system in which many who lacked the means, connections, or skin color to become well educated and well employed might pay a steep price. But the tests’ influence went even further: they became a kind of Rorschach indicator for two opposing views of society. For some, IQ results provided proof of biological determinism in human abilities and limitations, while for others the scores exposed society’s failure to provide education and opportunities that promoted social equality. In 1928, twelve years after he published his test, Lewis Terman was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the highest scientific honor the nation bestows.

  This was a time, Marie Skodak noted, when eugenics influenced attitudes about everything.37 Indeed, America’s acceptance of eugenics, with its fantastical ideology of improving society through the segregation and sterilization of those with low intelligence, provided the context in which the Iowa station’s work would eventually be judged. Invented in 1869 by a genius, by about 1940 the adult fairy story of eugenics had become ubiquitous in psychology, public policy, politics, and ordinary American life. But how did that happen?

  As British aristocrat Francis Galton (1822–1911) walked London’s streets during the second half of the nineteenth century, the well-traveled, independently wealthy polymath and scientist-inventor grew concerned. Around him he saw thousands of his rural countrymen, who previously worked in their homes or in small shops, crowding into London in response to the Industrial Revolution’s need for factory labor. Galton’s unease was not out of concern for the workers’ low wages, poor health, and unsafe working conditions or for the extensive use of child labor required for families’ survival, but the workers’ “degeneration . . . into a distinct sub-species.”38 Repelled by their rough manners and squalid living conditions, Galton observed that even those who appeared successful in industrial work paid with a life of fewer opportunities and premature aging, leading him to conclude that “modern industrial civilization deteriorates the breed.” Hence, he claimed, “little distinguishes the lower classes of civilized man from that of barbarians.”39

  Galton’s contributions to science and mathematics reveal a prodigious scope of innovation. For example, based on his attention to the intricate ridges of fingertips, he invented a system for fingerprint recognition; and from his study of the relationship between air pressure and temperature, he created the first maps for weather forecasting. Both innovations remain in use today. And Galton’s facility in numerical reasoning resulted in transformative concepts for statistical analysis, the index of correlation and the law of regression. Further, to analyze factors that marked factory workers as starkly different from his own associates, Galton applied his analytical talents to human heredity and intelligence.40

  Galton made deductions about the laboring class that reflected the radical theory of his cousin, Charles Darwin (1809–1882), who in 1859 had authored On the Origin of Species. Darwin had observed that in natural settings, survival is enhanced when those with certain traits outcompete rivals for resources and mating partners. Galton advanced ideas for the improvement of the human stock by transposing Darwin’s thesis to humans’ competition for superiority. Coining the term eugenics (from the Greek for “good birth”), he called this “the science which deals with all the influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race . . . that develop them to the utmost advantage.”41 Galton did not use the term dominance, although that is what his ideas implied.

  Galton’s defining work, Hereditary Genius, An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (1869), opened with the author’s aim “to show . . . that a man’s natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the whole organic world.”42 To support this idea, he recounted biographical histories of judges, military commanders, men of science, poets, and senior classics professors at Cambridge University, among others, whom he regarded as “eminent.” He then traced the careers of those figures’ descendants and attributed their many successes to qualities they inherited from their forebears. From this analysis, Galton concluded that increases in the numbers of children from the talented class—that is, people like him—would result in a better society.

  In 1873, Galton offered his “scheme for [society’s] improvement whose seeds would be planted almost without knowing it, and would slowly . . . grow, until [they] had transformed the nation.”43 He linked individuals’ perceived superiority to their inherited intellectual ability, but his investigation preceded intelligence tests by about thirty years. Later Galton wrote:

  What nature does blindly, slowly and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly and kindly. . . . It becomes his duty to work in that direction, just as it is his duty to be charitable to those in misfortune. The improvement of our stock seems one of the highest objects that can be . . . attempted.44

  Galton, who had no children, encouraged the fittest to increase their numbers in order to raise the “miserably low standard of the human race” and tip society toward “the best stock,”45 an idea of the time called “positive eugenics.” Although this thinking characterized Britain’s eugenics philosophy, close to the end of his life Galton also advocated “negative eugenics . . . the prevention of conception in the unfit.”46

  Unexpected support for Galton’s eugenic theories would arrive in 1900 when nearly forgotten botany investigations from 1866 resurfaced and demonstrated in what way traits might be inherited. In an experiment that no one had tried in the 10,000-year history of agriculture, a modest Augustinian friar from Brno, Moravia (today in the Czech Republic), had used simple garden plants to investigate patterns of trait inheritance. The monk, Gregor Mendel (1822–1884), crossed purebred purple and white garden pea plants and found that their colors were transmitted as single units of heredity and not, as Darwin and others had suggested, in the blending of traits from each parent.47 In his experiments, Mendel repeatedly crossed purebred plants having one characteristic with purebred plants having another. He discovered that one “dominant” trait could mask a “recessive,” producing a hybrid. While in the hybrid generation the recessive trait might seem to vanish, it would reappear in later offspring. Mendel established stable ratios for the appearance of dominant and recessive traits, something that could only happen if traits were inherited separately, one of science’s most significan
t discoveries.

  Unit trait inheritance supported Darwin’s theory of natural selection: those individuals survived who inherited traits that made them more robust and attractive to potential mates. A member of a religious order, Mendel knew of the rancor within the church concerning Darwin’s theories. According to Mario Livio, an astrophysicist who studies the history of scientific discoveries, Mendel recognized that Darwin would appreciate the significance of his discovery, but “probably did not think it prudent to express any explicit support for Darwin’s ideas.”48 Subsequently, Mendel’s studies faded from view.

  But when the work was rediscovered in 1900, the concept of unit trait inheritance transformed eugenics “almost with the power of a revelation,”49 as adherents understood that traits could be classified as dominant or recessive Mendelian unit characters. From that point, Mendelism became foundational to eugenicists’ explanations for each human quirk or attribute—recklessness, perhaps, or being a gossip, even thalassophilia, or “love of the sea,” a male trait said to be common in sea captains. Scientists also invoked Mendel’s discoveries to warn of lurking genetic dangers. For example, historian Daniel Kevles writes that eugenicists “blithely extended Mendel’s discoveries to account for social phenomena, such as alcoholism, prostitution, criminality, shiftlessness, and even poverty.”50 In a 1908 analysis, A. F. Tredgold, a British authority on mental deficiency, calculated:

  In 90 percent of patients suffering from mental defect, the condition is the result of a morbid state of the ancestors . . . which so impairs the vital powers of the embryo that full and perfect development cannot take place . . . mental deficiency is the result not of chance, but of law . . . the ancestors usually being insane, epileptic, or sufferers from some other marked mental abnormality.51

  Extending this scrutiny, British eugenicists feared that the numbers of births from those with undesirable heredity, which they claimed was predominant in the lower classes, would surpass births from the middle and upper classes, a phenomenon labeled the “differential birth rate.” The birth rate problem was “associated almost exclusively with the working class . . . and the excessive fecundity of the poor. Social problems were primarily manifestations of individual inadequacies,” which could be controlled if only the number of those with good heredity increased.52

  Eugenicists predicted that the growth of dysgenic traits like feeblemindedness in future generations would doom society. Under Galton’s advocacy for positive eugenics, the British entreated those in the upper classes to have more children, an effort that met with no success. Britain’s attempt to apply coercive negative eugenic methods such as compulsory sterilization never got through Parliament. Although Galton’s efforts to transform society went unfulfilled, his remarkable mathematical and scientific discoveries brought recognition, and in 1909 he was knighted by King Edward VII. By the time of his death two years later, his eugenic ideas had taken root in the United States.

  Like their British counterparts, early twentieth-century American eugenicists feared that traits of low intelligence and moral degeneracy would be passed from parent to offspring and overwhelm the population. Among those who spread this alarm was Samuel J. Holmes, a zoologist at the University of California at Berkeley, who, in 1921, explained:

  We are losing the elements of our population that have achieved success financially, socially, or in the field of intellectual achievement . . . none of these classes is reproducing itself . . . [which] constitutes a very serious menace to our present social welfare. . . . The elements of the population that are of subnormal mentality exhibit at present the highest degree of fecundity.53

  To control this risk, American eugenicists encouraged marriage and reproduction of those with family histories of good intelligence and good health and without signs of problematic traits such as mental illness or alcoholism.54 Organizations sponsored contests for sermons that preached positive eugenic messages, as well as contests for “Fittest Families” and “Better Babies.”55 Around this time some states began to require a medical examination before marriage. But America’s eugenic direction soon took a darker path than its British sister’s when it became a mainstream, classist, widely agreed upon, scientifically erroneous master plan for social improvement that promoted coercive sterilization and the institutionalization of the unfit. According to Lewis Terman, such policies were needed to prevent a “biological cataclysm,”56 and eventually they became legal in every state.

  A remarkable document of early twentieth-century American eugenic thought comes from Yale University’s psychologist and developmental pediatrician Arnold Gesell (1880–1961), whose reputation rests today on his insights into normal maturational patterns in young children’s development. Although not much recalled as a eugenicist, in October 1913, while head of Yale’s child development clinic and also a medical student at Yale, Gesell published The Village of a Thousand Souls, Illustrated with Photographs and Diagrams, a study of Alma, the small Wisconsin town in which he grew up and where his family continued to live. Gesell’s earlier background as a young socialist—in New York City he lived and worked in an immigrant settlement house—left no question of his concern about “saving the individual from corrupting and oppressive environments.”57 Yet, lacking in empirical evidence and partially based on his mother’s observations of her neighbors, his article contained descriptions, photographs, and graphics that might have seemed a cruel rebuke to families he had known since childhood.

  Gesell wrote that in Alma there were “37 families . . . in which feeblemindedness appears in one, two, three or four individuals” and explained that “about 80 percent of all cases of feeblemindedness are due to an undefined neuropathic heredity.”58 Further, from his hand-drawn map, readers learned the locations of the town’s thirteen saloons as well as the homes of “36 families in which there is alcoholism.” He tied alcoholism to feeblemindedness in which “alcohol operates as a contributing, if not as an initiating cause in the production of defects and deficiency of the nervous system.”59 Gesell informed readers that including those who were epileptic, 10 percent of the village’s families contained members who were insane. He went on to report on the eccentrics, of whom he said there were 34 in the village: “[some] give the world sparkle and spice. . . . Another kind . . . undoubtedly constitute potential or incipient insanities.” An additional group, “the mediocre,” included half of the town’s 110 normal families. “Mediocrity and mental health often go together,” he wrote, associating mediocrity with “those homely virtues of ‘sturdy commonplaceness,’ the ballast of civilized life: sympathy, neighborliness, self-sacrifice, industry, respect for law, love of children, and a moderate fund of common sense.”60

  But why would Gesell, a talented academic and psychologist soon to become a physician, and surely aware of science’s demands for empirical verification, publish so subjective an analysis? According to Ben Harris, professor of the history of psychology at the University of New Hampshire, at the time Gesell wrote his article, he was attempting to establish himself as an authority in the area of children’s health, and Harris suggests that Gesell may have been seeking to become more widely known. Harris also reports that Gesell’s ideas about eugenics fluctuated and that similar inconsistencies characterized many eugenicists’ thinking.61 An appreciation for environment may be found, for example, in a 1910 paper by outspoken eugenicist H. J. Laski, who wrote, “Man cannot be separated from his environment and . . . we should render it as healthy as we can.”62 And eugenics’ progenitor, Francis Galton, told a 1905 group at the London School of Economics that while his goal was to improve man’s inborn qualities, he also wanted to “develop them to the utmost advantage.”63 Further, during the period in which Gesell wrote his article, he was studying with eugenicist Henry H. Goddard, who later became Marie Skodak’s Ohio State mentor.64 While Gesell and Goddard became lifelong friends, following his article’s publication Gesell did not again write in support of eugenics.

  Though Gesell’s article never
referenced immigration, it appeared during an interval of time, from 1880 to 1920, when 20 million immigrants had entered the United States. Their arrival generated fears—some called it a race panic—about the unregulated reproduction of those from “inferior” nations and classes and recast Americans’ attention to immigration from a local to a national movement. About this time, what had been small groups of eugenicists coalesced into what historian of eugenics Jonathan Spiro termed an “interlocking directorate” of much larger societies dedicated to immigration restriction and control of reproduction. These included the American Eugenics Society, the Eugenics Research Association, the Race Betterment Foundation, the Immigration Restriction League, and the Galton Society.65 Members of the Galton Society, the most exclusive and extreme of the groups, led other eugenics organizations, notably the larger, less selective American Eugenics Society. The Galton Society also became home to two of America’s trailblazing eugenicists, Charles B. Davenport (1866–1944) and Madison Grant (1865–1937).

  Trained at Harvard University, Davenport made his life’s mission “the science of human improvement through better breeding.”66 One of his Harvard students, Herbert Spencer Jennings, later a Johns Hopkins University biologist, wrote in 1895 that Davenport “is too strongly set in one way . . . to attach enough importance to facts that go against his theory.” Davenport’s conclusions, Jennings observed, “are just about as far from correct as you can get.”67