As he often did, George Stoddard reframed the conversation, describing Sherman and Key’s investigation of children who lived in mountain hollows, and the studies of Otto Kleinberg, who in 1935 found that African Americans who had migrated North and attended better schools had higher intelligence than those who remained in the South. Questioning the theory of IQ constancy, Stoddard pointed out that in every area of animal development, science had found that external environments changed outcomes, yet eugenicists insisted that “nothing external could change the rate of mental growth.”62 Because so much is unknown, he said, the Iowans could not account for each environmental effect. But Stoddard emphasized that the station’s research showed that significant intelligence test score changes were not rare and that they demonstrated biology’s ability to improve intelligence based on continuing stimulation. He expressed incredulity that anyone still believed that IQ could be constant. Echoing the 1928 thinking of his Iowa predecessor, Bird Baldwin, that environment changed development in almost all living creatures, Stoddard advanced an argument that most psychologists would not accept for decades:63
Back of all change, either for the worse or for the better, there is organic change within the individual. We feel that if physiologists and neurologists could get far enough along in their work they would be able to examine cases and find out what is happening when mental growth shows: constancy; acceleration; or deceleration. . . . The mental growth and behavior of the organism is in part dependent upon what happens to it. . . . The nervous system of the organism is in constant organic change. We think a child who is growing at a faster rate does not have the same . . . mechanism he had previously.64
Although what Wiggam heard that day may have shaken his eugenic certainties, he made no effort to stir the pot for controversial effect. Soon after, he wrote Terman that although he was reluctant to accept the Iowan’s positions, he felt “humble compared to those who create new knowledge” and he had a responsibility to the public to report current science. He continued, “If I waited for what is called ‘science’ . . . [to be] confirmed I would have very little to report.” Wiggam said that he and his editors felt a duty “to be responsible agents.”65
Furious, Lewis Terman responded with an implicit threat:
I can assure you now most emphatically that if your report to the Ladies Home Journal has to be satisfactory to the Iowa people, it will be a d——poor job of reporting. I have never run across any scientist or any group of scientists as unduly impervious to unanswerable criticism.66
Eight months later, in March 1940, the Ladies Home Journal published Albert Wiggam’s article, “Are Dummies Born or Made?” In it, Wiggam wrote sympathetically of the Iowa station’s discoveries that showed unexpected intellectual development, and he encouraged parents to make every effort to develop their children’s abilities. In his closing sentences, Wiggam had advice for adopting parents and offered a revelation:
Those excellent people who have adopted children or plan to adopt them, [should have] a greater faith in the influence of a good home in determining human destiny. On this last point, I speak with profound personal feeling, because I myself was an adopted child.67
Neither Wiggam’s article nor his correspondence contained an explicit rejection of eugenic beliefs. Following its publication, he suggested to Terman that the editors had altered text in his article that was critical of the Iowans, and he threatened to sue. However, Wiggam never again took up the eugenic cause. Subsequently, he wrote a syndicated personal advice column, “Let’s Explore Your Mind,” in which he quoted psychologists’ answers to questions about relationships, children, and family life. To one question, “Does the fact that you struggle to secure a good environment indicate that you have good heredity?” Wiggam responded: “Yes, environment acts either to develop or suppress your heredity. It is the people with good heredity who make good environments.”68
With Iowa’s arsenal of fresh ideas gaining public traction, but mainstream psychology’s opposition seeming to harden, in the fall of 1953 an endorsement of IQ flexibility arrived from an unexpected source. Writing in the Scientific Monthly, a journal of the hard sciences and occasionally of psychology, Frederick H. Osborn, who recently had arranged for the Carnegie Foundation’s study of Skodak’s Iowa reports, published an essay that wondered, “Is a Science of Man Possible?”
Osborn reviewed psychology’s previous answers—he labeled them subjective observations—and charged that some biologists and psychologists had inadequate training and that much research about IQ testing had been poorly conducted. Osborn left little doubt that he had Lewis Terman and the mental test movement in his crosshairs when he described, but did not name, Iowa’s recent work:
We know now that a stimulating environment in the home, in pre-school, in College and in later life tend to raise the I.Q. . . . In a stimulating environment, able individuals show a capacity for response which takes them . . . out of the class of those of average ability.69
While Osborn’s paper also advocated eugenically driven ideas, he wrote that if hereditary factors in intelligence were somewhat limited, then educational systems “should not be permitted to become a class affair” and that the characteristics attributed to race do not represent genetic inheritance but are the result of social factors.70 The Iowa psychologists could not have hoped for better support, but Osborn did not directly cite their papers. (The inconsistent use of citation was a shortcoming of scientific writing during this era.) And while Osborn cannily wondered what Hitler would have thought about race if he had this new knowledge, he had not surrendered his eugenicist beliefs. He continued to support Hitler’s sterilizations and almost all American eugenic polices, and throughout a long life he enthusiastically promoted eugenic causes and publications.
Lewis Terman, however, appeared rattled by Osborn’s article. In a November, 2, 1939, letter to Florence Goodenough, he briefly referred to Osborn’s paper, mentioning that Osborn would soon address the decade’s most important gathering of psychology’s researchers—the NSSE meeting set for February 1940. It seemed that George Stoddard, the meeting’s chair, had invited Osborn to give an opening address. Faced with potential opposition to his eugenic positions from two highly regarded hereditarian supporters, Wiggam and Osborn, Lewis Terman found the stakes for the February meeting had now been raised.
Chapter Eight
THE WAY THE LAND LIES
The Iowa station’s 1938 surge of publications intensified discussions among psychologists and educators about the development of intelligence and through press coverage excited the public. The new thinking had even made an impact on eugenicists like Albert Wiggam and Frederick Osborn. This made it inevitable that the forces of orthodoxy would mount a fierce backlash. Since the early 1930s, Lewis Terman and others had occasionally critiqued Iowa’s work, but their retaliation began in earnest in January 1939, with a jeering review by Benjamin R. Simpson, of Case Western Reserve University, titled “The Wandering IQ: Is It Time for It to Settle Down?”
Here, Simpson targeted Beth Wellman, labeling her a “psychological spiritualist” and an incompetent “under the influence of wishful thinking.” Her research, he said, was “dark and devious . . . and her work shoddy.”1 He also pummeled Skeels for his report on the improved intelligence of Davenport orphans adopted into middle-class homes. Suspicious of the findings that environment could stimulate children’s intelligence, Simpson wrote that if Iowa’s work were accurate, “such improvement would . . . receive front page presentation in the newspapers of the nation.”2
As if he were lecturing a hapless student, citing no evidence Simpson advised the Iowans that “the level of learning and the absolute amount of learning are lowest in early infancy and highest as adulthood is approached or reached. . . . It is the rate of physical maturation that is rapid in infancy, not the rate of . . . learning.”3 He also labeled Skeels’s preschool report “deceitful,” suggesting, with no evidence, that the IQ scores of nursery school students had
improved because their teachers had trained them to take IQ tests. Simpson concluded that the Iowans’ errors stemmed not from their “quackery,” but from their “statistical incompetence.”4
In 1936, Simpson had published an article assailing another environmentalist researcher, John B. Watson, of Johns Hopkins, but that paper did not discuss the station’s work, little of which was yet in print, and it went uncited by anyone except Simpson himself. By 1939, his timing had improved. The level of interest in Iowa’s new work meant that Simpson’s assault attracted attention—notably from Lewis Terman, who until then knew nothing about him. Now, Terman sent him a letter praising his analysis as “a little masterpiece” and decrying the Iowa studies as “the most appalling mess I have ever worked over.”5
Terman’s comment is of interest because no published or archival evidence exists that Terman analyzed, or even read, the Iowans’ reports of the children’s orphanage experience. Terman asked Simpson for copies of his paper to send to all of the members of the American Psychological Association and to America’s leading pediatricians. Terman, who edited a widely read and lucrative book series, Measurement and Adjustment (“adjustment” referred to adjusting school curricula according to IQ score ranges), also offered Simpson a higher royalty than most of his series’ authors for a volume that would expose the Iowans as charlatans.6
Although Simpson had been withering about Wellman’s statistical work, in a discussion with Terman he confessed his own technical insecurity in the analysis of complex statistics.7 Further, reports from two sources, one of them Terman’s former student, Mae Seagoe, and the other, Terman himself, suggest that Terman, too, lacked statistical expertise. In her biography of Terman, Seagoe described his unfamiliarity with statistics and said he relied on his former student Quinn McNemar and others to interpret and review his data.8 Later, Terman told Raymond Cattell, a psychologist at Duke University who sought his help with a statistical problem, “I am not myself competent” to discuss a statistical analysis, and directed Cattell to McNemar.9 When Terman later labeled the Iowans’ reports statistical atrocities, that judgment might not have reflected his own analysis.
Additional concerns for the Iowans soon arrived. In April, Florence Goodenough, whose place in Terman’s circle could not have been more secure, wrote to her friend, psychologist Leta Hollingworth, at Columbia University, that her patience with the “Iowan people” had reached its endpoint. Her letter does not disguise her biliousness toward the Iowans, and especially her contempt for Wellman—once her friend—whom she described with false charity:
I am really quite concerned about Beth Wellman. . . . Terman thinks she has deliberately attempted to . . . deceive the reader. . . . I am entirely convinced of her sincerity. She has deceived herself . . . like a religious fanatic who hears the wings of angels in every rustle of the dishtowels on the family clothes line.10
Goodenough was dismissing Wellman unfairly, but her sense of “where the land lies” was accurate. The Iowans were still fighting a tough enemy, and an onrush of even more severe criticism was about to strike them.
If Harold Skeels had the traits of a visionary—audacity, say, or reckless self-confidence—those might have served him well as he stepped to the podium that Saturday afternoon, May 6, 1939, in Chicago. But the matter-of-fact psychologist could not even have been labeled an ambitious scholar seeking to promote remarkable findings in order to lift his reputation. Instead, by chance Skeels had pushed open a door that no one else had noticed and confronted evidence about development that challenged everything he thought he knew. If it took daring not to look away, he never said.
Skeels had come to this sixty-third annual meeting of the American Association for Mental Deficiency to set before his professional colleagues a most remarkable discovery: intellectually challenged young children labeled “imbeciles” who had been cared for by women with low intellect, labeled “morons,” had become normal. A few years earlier, Skeels himself would have dismissed such a report as ridiculous. But what he had seen at Glenwood, others had, too—the children’s teachers, institutional staff, the women, and Harold Dye, Glenwood’s superintendent. A physician, but not an academic, Dye coauthored Skeels’s report, suggesting the two shared its observations and conclusions about what had begun as a “clinical surprise.”11 But as Skodak described, Skeels had concerns that the children’s intelligence gains might be precarious. Even after he documented the children’s gained intelligence, he worried that the gains would not persist. He feared the intellectual advances he witnessed might be as fleeting as the blooming of a flower, some transient phase doomed to end when the child’s heredity came to resemble their parents’ low intelligence.12 The Iowans had produced other controversial studies of changes in children’s IQ test scores, but Skeels’s carefully documented case histories of two children at Woodward and eleven at Glenwood were the most challenging to the orthodoxy and so the most suspect.
Skeels’s revelations resulted from the interlock of terrible and fortuitous events. Had the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and extreme weather not overwhelmed Iowa’s families and filled the Davenport home with abandoned children; had the state not been sued by adoptive parents and so never hired Skeels to test Davenport children’s intelligence; had Woodward not inexplicably placed BD and CD in wards with low-intelligence women, allowing Skeels to find their IQ scores dramatically altered; had Skeels not cultivated connections with state officials who permitted Iowa’s research to go forward; had Director George Stoddard not encouraged the Iowans to dig for explanations; had state eugenics boards not mandated the institutionalization of women with low intelligence in the first place; if even some of this had not happened, probably the Iowans would not have chanced upon their radical discoveries. Like researchers who worked alone or who dismissed data that did not fit the conventional model as faulty test standardization, the Iowans might not have searched for explanations. More likely, they would have looked no further because, really, no one thought there was anything to find.
Early in 1939, before Skeels’s report about the Woodward and Glenwood children had been presented or published, details of his discoveries had begun to circulate in psychology departments around the nation, and many skeptical colleagues singled Skeels out for mockery.13 Who could blame them? His findings were Iowa’s most sensational. It’s likely that in the hotel corridors and meeting rooms of the Chicago conference, mental test psychologists had already casually ridiculed Skeels’s investigation and Skeels himself, describing his paper, “A Study of the Effects of Differential Stimulation on Mentally Retarded Children,” as the “Moron Nursemaid Study.”
Conference attendees almost certainly included Florence Goodenough and Benjamin Simpson, two scholars who had openly expressed their disdain for Iowa’s work, and John Anderson, director of Minnesota’s Institute for Child Development, another of Iowa’s harsh critics. Lewis Terman’s former student, now his Stanford colleague, Quinn McNemar, may have been there as well. Skeels’s paper was one of the final presentations of the four-day meeting; no doubt over those days Skeels, Skodak, and Harold Dye overheard sneering remarks about the work Skeels would present. Yet he might have hoped that by sharing the evidence that had changed his mind, he might change the minds of others.
Unseasonably warm weather arrived in the Midwest that first week of May, and by Saturday afternoon, temperatures in Chicago had climbed to 88°F. In the stuffy hotel ballroom, electric fans attempted to cool an audience of several hundred that included some reporters, one from Time magazine. Over the fans’ low hum, Skeels laid down the core issue that he and Dye considered: if intelligence were static, then no environmental shifts would alter it; but if it changed under differing conditions, as Wellman suggested, its definition required revision. So far, Skeels’s argument seemed reasonable. But in the next moments he turned to a quotation from Alfred Binet that told of surprise “at the prejudice against [intelligence] . . . modifiability.”14
In drafting his paper, Skee
ls might easily have omitted Binet’s ideas, limiting his remarks to a more typical report of unexpected findings. Such a paper, though still provocative, might have been less confrontational of mainstream beliefs. What, then, motivated the reserved Skeels to excerpt the words of the eloquent French psychologist? Skeels was a clear, if workmanlike, writer, so one might wonder whether he reached for Binet to inject into his remarks some of the Frenchman’s eloquence. Yet the specific Binet passage that Skeels quoted directly challenged many in his audience:
Some recent philosophers appear to have given their moral support to the deplorable verdict that the intelligence of an individual is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be augmented. We must protest and act against this brutal pessimism. We shall endeavor to show that it has no foundation whatsoever.15
Binet, and now Skeels, may have been implicitly censuring Henry Goddard, who in 1910 had begun to use Binet’s test to demonstrate that feeblemindedness was inherited.16 Thus, Skeels, who had been reluctant to fully embrace environmentalist thinking, now announced that like the children in his report, he, too, had been changed. But the elephant in the room was not Henry Goddard. Everyone in attendance that day knew that in 1916, five years after Binet’s death, then novice psychologist Lewis Terman had recast Binet’s test into his own. Skeels, in short, was challenging Lewis Terman and the entire intelligence measurement paradigm he represented—and doing it with the words of the very scholar on whose shoulders Terman had attained giant stature.
The Orphans of Davenport Page 18