In his summary, Skeels captured what he believed had fundamentally changed the Davenport orphans:
A close bond of love and affection between a given child and one or two adults assuming a parental role appears to be a dynamic factor of great importance . . . the nine children favored with such a relationship made the greater gains, an average of 33.8 points. . . . The four children who had more general contact made average gains of 14 points.17
Thus, Skeels became one of the first psychologists to suggest that a one-to-one attachment may be a critical factor in the development of intelligence. He argued that because young children’s intelligence was unstable, it required persistent stimulation; that the developmental clock was ticking, and when the youngest children received such stimulation, they made the greatest gains; that inadequate stimulation of the children in his contrast group left once normally intelligent youngsters intellectually challenged. In under an hour, the little-known Iowa psychologist had challenged centuries of traditional belief, along with decades of eugenic assumptions dressed up as science.
After delivering such a provocative paper, a psychologist might expect questions or comments from colleagues seeking to clarify an idea or indicating disagreement, and Skeels would have scanned the audience in search of raised hands. Instead, Skeels’s audience sat in “stony silence,” not even offering the polite applause that routinely followed conference presentations.18 That silence, however, lasted only a moment: as historian of the Iowa station Hamilton Cravens observed, after Skeels gave his report, harsh criticism rained down on him, and he found he had “walked into a hurricane.”19 It is not known whether Goodenough and Simpson were in the hall, but if they were, it’s plausible that they led the assault.
As Skodak later recalled, for Skeels the events at the Chicago meeting were some of the most painful in the controversy over the station’s work. In a 1970 obituary for Skeels, she wrote, “As the one responsible for the most dramatic of these studies . . . Harold Skeels was particularly singled out for attack . . . among the most corrosive . . . at the American Association on Mental Deficiency in Chicago in 1939.”20 Although he did not cite the Chicago meeting, scholar of early development Joseph McVicker Hunt, of the University of Illinois, remembered that the Iowans were subjected to “polemics of a rare height of violence.”21 And almost thirty years later, in a newspaper profile, Harold Skeels himself evoked his memory of the attack as a physical trauma. “They cut me ear to ear,” he said simply.22
Yet for journalists, and therefore for the public, Skeels’s Chicago report quickly became another lightning bolt that environment could alter development. A New York Times headline read, “Put among Morons, Dull Babies Improve,” the story highlighting the “value of affection.”23 The Atlanta Constitution reported that “stimulation and affection . . . bring the desired result.”24 And in what must have seemed like wizardry, Time described that when “feebleminded love [was] lavished upon deficient babies [their] intelligence quotients . . . rose sharply.”25 More than anything else, the magazine wrote, for mental growth “children need adult affection and stimulation, no matter from whom it comes.”26 In the following months, articles telling of Skeels’s report appeared across the nation—for example, in the Arizona Republic, the San Bernardino County Sentinel, the Missoulian, and the Akron Beacon. These many accounts did not mention that Skeels’s discoveries had been greeted by his profession with nothing but contempt.
Perhaps alarmed that he was losing the public debate, a few months before Skeels spoke in Chicago, Terman told wealthy Pasadena eugenicist Eugene S. Gosney, whose book touting the success of California’s sterilization laws had just been translated into German,27 “I am amazed at the propaganda from the Child Research Institute at Iowa . . . [their] preposterous contributions are not backed up by data at all convincing.”28 As Skeels’s report received even more press coverage in the coming months, Terman increased his complaints about the Iowan’s public profile, describing the steady flow of news reports about the work as a “deluge.”29
After the publication of groundbreaking studies, many researchers follow up with work that further extends their conclusions. During the years 1939 to 1942, Beth Wellman produced seven articles about environment and children’s intelligence, some of which were published in the popular press, such as Parents magazine. A more theoretical paper, “The IQ: A Problem in Social Construction,” written with George Stoddard, appeared in a progressive journal of ideas, The Social Frontier. Here, the two suggested that children who enter first grade with higher IQ scores gained in nursery school continue to have an advantage in learning to read, understanding arithmetic, and in other school areas.30 Wellman also made public presentations. Also, during that period, Marie Skodak published her dissertation, and George Stoddard wrote six articles about the influence of environment, among them, “The IQ: Its Ups and Downs,” published in a widely read education journal, School and Society. Stoddard, who continued to promote the idea of establishing universal kindergarten in the United States, frequently addressed national groups on the Iowa station’s work, and he began his next book, The Meaning of Intelligence, to be published in 1943.
But in a radical downshift for someone who, in the previous seven years, had directed eight important investigations and published eleven research reports, after Chicago Skeels’s investigations nearly halted. In the next three years, he published only one study, a 1942 follow-up of the post-adoption gains of the Woodward and Glenwood children. Unlike Stoddard, who never let an opportunity to advocate for Iowa’s vision go by, and Wellman, who had been hurt by severe criticism but who did not curtail her work or its defense, Skeels retreated, speaking mostly to sympathetic audiences at small events located close to home. The Chicago attack so unsettled him that he now asked himself if his critics might be correct, that his extraordinary discoveries represented inauthentic growth.31 Skodak recognized that while Skeels had always stayed clear of the spotlight, self-doubt now made him even more retiring.32 He might even have believed that his challenge of those considered the finest minds in psychology may have ended his career.
In this light it is of interest to wonder what prompted Skeels, who must have known that some responses to his research would be critical, to write a paper that disputed his profession and to announce those views at a major conference. One explanation may have been the self-assurance the Iowans felt after the previous year of positive press and public response. Another might have been that Skeels believed that his work’s potential to improve children’s lives was worth the risk of mainstream criticism. Perhaps, too, he thought that if his evidence was powerful enough to change his own view, it might change that of others. And, after all, could anyone have forecast an attack that a later academic observer would label “violent”?33 The record is silent as to whether Skeels considered any of these contingencies. Nor is there any surviving commentary from him about what led to his retreat, although that choice might have reflected a premonition that further attacks lay ahead.
After Skeels’s report had generated much favorable press coverage, it would have been naive not to anticipate further retaliation from Terman, whose principal target now became Iowa’s defender-in-chief, George Stoddard. Yet, the table for future attacks had been set some time before, in 1937, when Stoddard had been named to lead the February 1940 meeting of the National Society for the Study of Education. Along with that honor came the editorship of NSSE’s important Yearbook, which would publish state-of-the-art research on environment versus heredity. The title Stoddard gave that Yearbook was Intelligence: Its Nature and Nurture, and it would include research that psychologists would then present at the meeting. Two previous NSSE Yearbooks, in 1921 and 1928, had addressed the same issue, with Yearbook contributors debating their work at those meetings. The 1928 volume, titled Nature and Nurture: Their Influence upon Intelligence, had been so powerfully shaped by its editor that it was known as “the Terman Yearbook.” It left little doubt that the effect of children’s envir
onment or education on their intelligence was negligible.
But by 1937, views were shifting, and the NSSE recognized that Iowa’s recent discoveries challenged accepted doctrine. Now, a scholar from a little-known university—looking back, Stoddard called himself a “fringe psychologist”34—would appoint the committee that would set the agenda for the gathering and would also shape the contents of NSSE’s milestone compendium.
As the NSSE meeting’s chair, Stoddard organized a planning committee, inviting participation from advocates on all sides of the controversy. For the environmentalist position there were two voices, his own and Beth Wellman’s. Three members supported the hereditarian argument: Stanford’s Lewis Terman, Minnesota’s Florence Goodenough, and Leta Hollingworth, of Columbia University. The last three committee positions went to outstanding scholars who were not aligned with either side: Frank N. Freeman, dean of education at the University of California, Berkeley; Leonard Carmichael, president of Tufts University; and Harold E. Jones, director of Berkeley’s Institute of Child Welfare. Of these, Freeman more often accepted the environmentalists’ point of view, but not always.
The committee’s early decisions went smoothly enough and their invitations to scholars from a range of specialties were accepted. For example, the committee invited Franz Boas, of Columbia University, an anthropologist and environmentalist who planned to explain, “In so far as intellect is dependent upon structure, it is heritable; in so far as . . . it is expressed in behavior, it is variable. The same individual in different situations . . . will show differences in intelligence.”35 Another was Frederick Osborn, the eugenicist who had recently critiqued the orthodoxy of fixed IQ. Osborn would remind the meeting that the 1928 Yearbook “was of major importance to the advance of eugenics,” but that current work in psychology recognized “organic and social factors” in intelligence, although some “fail to recognize . . . that neither factor can be said to be more important than the other.”36 Also invited was E. W. Burgess, head of the sociology department at the University of Chicago, who planned to assert that studies of nature and nurture “without doubt . . . give support to a program of eugenics.”37
Papers for the Yearbook on every side of the controversy poured in—they would fill two volumes. Among the star contributors were Arnold Gesell from Yale, Jane Loevinger from Berkeley, and Donald B. Lindsley from Brown University. But the rancor of the IQ debate seeped into the Yearbook’s editing process. Following about a year of planning, and shortly after the positive press coverage generated by Skeels’s Chicago paper, in early June Terman wrote to Benjamin Simpson that a recent committee meeting had been “a continuous headache” and that Stoddard had attempted to rule out contributions from researchers who supported the “nature” position.38 Goodenough later made the same assertion to Guy Whipple, NSSE’s executive secretary. No evidence exists to support those claims, and Stoddard emphatically denied them.39 If, in fact, Stoddard had wanted to exclude “nature” proponents, he would hardly have invited them to outnumber him and Wellman on the committee.
But at that same committee session, Terman revealed that he would withhold from the Yearbook a paper written by his colleague, Stanford psychometrician Quinn McNemar, one the committee had already approved for Yearbook publication. To Stoddard’s surprise, Terman revealed that he and McNemar had circulated the paper among their Stanford colleagues and submitted it for publication to the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin, where it had been accepted, making it unavailable for Yearbook publication. For someone of Terman’s stature to withhold an important, even essential paper from a publication whose raison d’être was to present the most cutting-edge research in the field was a slap in Stoddard’s face.
Terman’s obstruction blindsided Stoddard and Wellman. Having read McNemar’s paper, they knew it represented the most significant criticism of the Iowa work to date. Published in the Yearbook, it would have delivered a matchless opportunity at the February conference for the Iowans to engage in head-on-debate with their chief critic, whom all knew to be a proxy for Terman. Now that possibility had been abruptly confounded. Never one to be outflanked, Stoddard quickly arranged for an Iowa rejoinder to McNemar to appear in the same Psychological Bulletin issue.
As Stoddard might have expected, further hostilities soon broke out. On July 4, in San Francisco, before hundreds of delegates to a meeting of the National Education Association, Terman launched a broadside against the Iowa group. With Stoddard sitting a few feet away, Terman used sarcasm, mockery, and misrepresentation to malign Beth Wellman’s discoveries:
If the Iowa claims can be substantiated we have here the most important scientific discovery in the last thousand years. Well-nigh unlimited control over the IQ. . . . Either the educational program provided by other investigators are less stimulating than those provided at Iowa or the Iowa effects are in some way spurious.40
But Terman was not finished. On July 7, Stoddard drove 40 miles from Berkeley, where he was teaching in a summer program, across a bridge spanning San Francisco Bay, and as the sun began to set, continued south to Stanford, in Palo Alto. At Terman’s invitation, the two would appear at a national meeting of educators and psychologists. Following Terman’s recent attack, Stoddard may have anticipated another onslaught, and as he entered the university auditorium and scanned the event’s program, he found a mute signal that he was right: his name had been omitted from the list of the evening’s participants.
Alerted by reports of Terman’s earlier attack on Stoddard, newspaper reporters who typically might not have turned out on a Friday evening to cover a university conference on “Educational Frontiers” decided to attend. They would not be disappointed. Seated side by side on the stage, Stoddard found that as the featured speaker Terman had double Stoddard’s allotted presentation time. Addressing an audience of 1,200, many of whom had heard the Stanford psychologist’s criticism of the Iowa work at the NEA meeting, Terman lost no time before pouring scorn on Stoddard and his colleagues, what one newspaper called an “unrestrained . . . denunciation” of the Iowa station’s discoveries.41 Insinuating that the Iowa work had deceived the public, Terman attacked “a deluge of monographs, magazine articles, newspaper stories and radio addresses . . . alleged . . . proof that feebleminded children can become normal.”42
Especially singling out Skeels’s study of the Woodward and Glenwood children, Terman misstated the children’s ages and distorted the reasons for placing them with the women. As if the children’s orphanage environment had not been a factor in the experiment, he omitted Skeels’s account of Davenport’s institutional neglect. He questioned, rightly, as had Skeels, that an IQ test could accurately measure the intelligence of children under 18 months, but ignored that nursing and pediatric specialists had confirmed the children’s intellectual development. He did not acknowledge the Iowans’ alerts about the tentative nature of their earlier findings; he failed to note that the children’s IQ gains emerged slowly; and he cast aside the information that from age 2, the children’s IQ test score changes had been regularly verified, a process that continued until they reached 3 or 4, and after their adoptions, confirmed again.
In a remarkable falsehood, Terman told the audience that other than the Iowa studies there were no reports of IQ changes in children in which psychologists or investigators had confidence. He did not share with his audience what might have been the most significant outcome of Skeels’s research: eleven children who otherwise would have been committed as inmates to state institutions instead would grow up in caring, adoptive families. As if his misrepresentations did not go far enough, Terman then further targeted Skeels, sniping that the Iowa psychologist had brought his study to “its most absurd limits . . . and found . . . a more stimulating environment than the orphanage . . . in an institution for the feebleminded! [where] . . . the cure was carried out by moron nursemaids.”43
According to newspaper accounts, Stoddard heatedly defended the Iowa work, but none elaborated o
n what that meant. The Los Angeles Times wrote that Stoddard was confident and quick on his feet, that he “flatly said he could not agree with Dr. Terman [and began] a discussion so technical the chair of the meeting deflected [it] to other channels.”44 Journalists hoping for a battle royale may have been disappointed when Stoddard chose not to respond in kind to Terman’s tactics. However, Stoddard, whose Iowa mentor had studied under Terman, likely knew of Terman’s statistical inadequacy. Plausibly, Stoddard may have turned the discussion to technical issues to trap his adversary in a web of data that only the two of them would have recognized for what it was: the authority of Stoddard’s wit over Terman’s wrath.
“Psychology War Rages: Theory of Increasing Child Intelligence Scored at Conference” was the headline in the next day’s Los Angeles Times. The Oakland Tribune told of Terman’s “sharp language,” and similar posts, many from the Associated Press Wire Service, spread word of the battle nationwide. An editorial in the Daily Iowan, the University of Iowa’s award-winning student newspaper—during the 1920s George Gallup had been its editor-in-chief—immediately struck back at Terman, reminding him that the Iowans had published skeptical reports of their own work, that they had only published their conclusions when their “new truths could be believed. Dr. Terman certainly knows . . . that Iowa research has met every challenge placed before it . . . that Dr. Stoddard has gone to every meeting in recent years equipped for battle.”45 On July 11, Stanford’s student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, sandwiched a one-paragraph article about the meeting between two movie reviews. The paper described a heated debate in which Terman declared that his studies revealed that changes in environment did not change IQs.46
The Orphans of Davenport Page 19