The Orphans of Davenport

by Marilyn Brookwood

  If Terman and McNemar thought that withholding McNemar’s critique of the Iowa work from the Yearbook would keep Stoddard from pursuing the opportunity to debate McNemar at the NSSE meeting, they had the wrong George Stoddard. In fact, Terman’s July attacks only intensified Stoddard’s resolve to use the February meeting to bring his case and McNemar’s critical paper to the attention of the full NSSE membership. On July 12, Stoddard wrote to Terman, reminding him that “the decision not to offer the McNemar manuscript was your own” and urging him to reverse course and allow the paper to appear in the Yearbook.47 Terman’s dodgy reply omitted any reference to his own role, and in what may have been but a charade of agreement, he wrote, “I personally feel . . . that it ought to appear in the Yearbook.”48 Perhaps disingenuously, Terman wrote that because McNemar could not be budged, he had “decided to let the matter drop.”49 It is also worth considering that Terman’s reluctance to pressure McNemar might not have been a result of McNemar’s stubborn insistence, but rather related to the power balance between the two. That Terman relied on McNemar to interpret statistical material for him was no secret, certainly not to Stoddard. It may also explain why the Iowans’ chief accuser, an iconic figure in mental test psychology, published no technical analyses of the Iowa research. Thus, the decision to place the paper in a large-circulation journal might well have been McNemar’s and one that Terman was in no position to challenge.

  Later that summer, Beth Wellman and her Iowa station colleague, Kurt Lewin, a founder of the field of social psychology, traveled to San Francisco to attend a meeting of the American Psychological Association. Lewin, a much admired and highly gregarious figure, in 1933 had fled Nazi Germany and briefly held a position under Terman at Stanford. When Terman could not get funding to keep him, Lewin accepted an offer from Stoddard and moved to the Iowa station. (Soon he would move again, to head a research institute at MIT.) Lewin well knew of McNemar’s writings against the Iowans, but hoping that Wellman and McNemar might establish a less contentious relationship, Lewin arranged a dinner where they would be his guests. In his autobiography, McNemar recalled that for most of the evening, Wellman maintained her composure, but finally, in exasperation, she turned to McNemar and told him, “Dr. McNemar, you should realize that Lewis Terman has poisoned your mind.”50

  In a score of letters, that fall Terman and Goodenough consulted about papers for the Yearbook and gossiped about the Iowans. On September 26, Goodenough reported that in October she would give a talk at Columbia University about the Iowans’ incompetence—an opportunity that Terman had arranged—in which she planned to “point out their shortcomings without too much attempt at politeness.”51 “Don’t mince words,” Terman replied, “You know I was none too polite in my address July 7. . . . Polite methods simply don’t accomplish the job.”52 Goodenough also told Terman that her colleague John Anderson would present a paper at the NSSE meeting that might anger Stoddard and suggested, should that occur, “[Anderson] will . . . take Master George’s pants down and smack his bottom with a large Swedish hand.”53 Then, in November, she criticized the public’s acceptance of Iowa’s theories, because “teachers, social workers, and others . . . are less well qualified to judge the caliber of the evidence.” Those who accepted Iowa’s work, she said, were as “credulous as those who fled from Orson Welles’ Martians.”54 Welles had recently directed a CBS radio drama, The War of the Worlds, so convincing it caused some listeners to believe that Martian space ships had landed in rural New Jersey.

  No further combat erupted that fall and in December Wellman wrote to her friend, William Line, a psychologist at the University of Toronto: “There will appear shortly . . . a long criticism prepared by Quinn McNemar at the instigation of Dr. Terman . . . with a reply prepared by Dr. Skeels, Dr. Skodak, and myself. . . . The whole controversy has been brought to a head by the preparation of the 1940 Yearbook.”55 As the February meeting approached, McNemar’s absent paper would become even more significant.

  On the chilly morning of December 31, 1939, in Columbus, Ohio, Marie Skodak walked across the campus of her undergraduate alma mater, Ohio State, to attend the psychology session of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A decade earlier she had covered her college expenses by serving meals to the faculty of OSU’s psychology department. When she learned that the AAAS would hold their annual meeting on campus, for old times’ sake Skodak wanted to attend. That day marked just two years since Beth Wellman and Harold Skeels had first presented their discoveries at an annual AAAS meeting.

  While it had not been their intention, since then Iowa’s reports about nature and nurture had raised the temperature of the dispute to boiling, and the Iowans had been met with a backlash from other psychologists about their findings. At every professional meeting—the American Psychological Association, the Society for Research in Child Development, other AAAS meetings—mainstream psychologists would attack the Iowa discoveries and assert heredity’s role in fixed intelligence. Although Skodak had published her dissertation in 1939, she had largely been spared the notoriety of her station colleagues. Unable to find an academic position, she now worked in a child guidance clinic in Flint, Michigan.

  Only a few days earlier, Stoddard and Wellman had addressed this same meeting, and Skodak knew that many of the speakers, as well as those in the audience, would be critics of the Iowans. Attending only to observe the debate, the little-known Skodak was the sole Iowa psychologist in the hall. Relieved when no one in the crowd appeared to notice her, she quickly made her way to the auditorium’s back row, where she listened to noted psychologists deliver censorious accusations against Iowa’s discoveries. A 1967 report of the meeting chronicles that one of those speakers, Florence Goodenough, said, “The [Iowa] facts couldn’t be true, because they violated what all psychologists knew to be true—intelligence cannot be changed.”56

  Neither Skodak’s work, nor any of the Iowans’ discoveries, directly connected the use of IQ tests to the nation’s eugenically driven biases against immigrants. Nevertheless, from her own experience, she recognized that discrimination against orphanage children and against immigrants had striking similarities: both assumed that an individual’s intellectual and social status had been inherited and could not change. As a child of immigrants, when Skodak had been assigned to sit with less proficient children, she understood that her teacher presumed her to be less intelligent. She told a later interviewer that in her community, immigrants were referred to as “nitwits.”57 Yet she recognized that her family models and experiences were a source of her self-confidence. During the 1917–1918 influenza epidemic, for example, along with her father, who spoke six languages and had been an intelligence officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army, Skodak had helped translate for local doctors. She was 7 years old.

  Thus, when the AAAS moderator asked for audience questions and comments, the bias expressed that morning propelled Skodak to her feet:

  I could take it no longer. I rose . . . with all my youth and all my inexperience for that kind of debate among important professionals. [I] held forth . . . about [the Iowa studies] and why [they] had happened, and why we were convinced that certain kinds of retardation were preventable. . . . I [told] of people . . . from peasant backgrounds in Central Europe who had children who were now professionals [and, she emphasized,] this was not unusual. . . . To this day, some people still remember me for that speech.58

  Chapter Nine

  “EVEN IF IT DIDN’T WORK, IT WAS A GOOD IDEA!”

  With the NSSE’s February 1940 meeting only one week away, Barbara Burks, Lewis Terman’s student and the lone psychologist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC, read Quinn McNemar’s paper with misgivings. Although firmly in the hereditarian camp, Burks had a fine grasp of statistics and was careful to consider research from a perspective of fairness. She told her mentor, “I do have a feeling shared by a good many others that his work contains certain biases that weaken its effect. Couldn’t
you have this out with Quinn so that his unique qualifications for . . . a high-class critical job can function most advantageously?”1 Terman sent a snappish reply; she may have already irritated him by introducing her own article for the Yearbook with a reference to Lawrence K. Frank, a Rockefeller Foundation social scientist supportive of the Iowans’ ideas. Terman vented his annoyance by forwarding her letter to McNemar with a sarcastic comment. In his reply he told Burks that although he would have preferred that McNemar eliminate some of his rough language, “the truth is at least 95% toward Quinn’s side.”2

  When it opened in 1928, St. Louis’s Jefferson Hotel regularly welcomed to its elegant Gold Room the city’s bluebloods who dined and danced, enjoyed Dixieland jazz straight up from New Orleans, and sometimes viewed Hollywood’s newest film sensation, the “talkies.” But the Gold Room also hosted professional meetings, and in 1940 it was the site of the NSSE’s Yearbook gathering about nature and nurture, a meeting many believed might bring a historic showdown between psychology’s mainstream and Iowa’s visionaries. Concerned that Midwest winter weather might trigger an episode of tuberculosis, Lewis Terman would not be among them.

  That evening, NSSE members climbed the hotel’s grand marble stairway to its glittering ballroom, perhaps the Midwest’s most elegant. Against this dazzling setting, the mood of NSSE attendees “with blood in their eyes” gave dark warning as George Stoddard approached the podium to gavel the membership to order.3 Expecting fresh attacks from Terman allies Goodenough, Simpson, and McNemar, Stoddard held high the two orange-jacketed volumes of the Yearbook and seized the advantage by opening the meeting with unexpected advice:

  May heaven reward the scholar who starts at page one and reads through to the bitter end. . . . For busier and less conscientious persons I have invented a little formula—a cure for complacency. . . . If you lean strongly toward environmentalism, read Terman, Goodenough and Hollingworth; if strongly toward hereditarianism read Stoddard and Wellman. They will all be good for what ails you. If you are neutral, or just bored, read Jones, Freeman and Carmichael.4

  Stoddard then acknowledged what the attendees already guessed: “Only a confirmed Pollyanna would say that we have performed our task in a spirit of loving kindness.”5 Alluding to his struggle to have McNemar’s paper included, Stoddard told the membership that when his committee began to gather research for the Yearbook, agreement on its contents seemed possible, but, he said, “now your committee can only reflect, like the disillusioned proponents of the league of Nations: ‘even if it didn’t work, it was a good idea!’ Underscoring the absence of McNemar’s paper, Stoddard said, “What is deposited in the yearbook is a pale residue.”6

  Time magazine’s reporter noted that Stoddard’s audience “looked at each other [and] wondered when the fireworks would start,”7 but true to NSSE’s tradition of courteous discussion, Stoddard managed to keep the peace. Perhaps Stoddard’s equanimity also reflected that the station’s views had lately won adherents. George Speer, a former skeptic whose own study had confirmed Skodak’s, was in the hall. Stoddard also knew that Paul Witty, of Northwestern University, had prepared a full-throated endorsement that would quote John Rockwell, Minnesota’s commissioner of education: “An atomistic, predetermined, rigidly stable intelligence may fit the current theories of psychology. It is out of place in the rest of the biological world.”8

  Stoddard might have been encouraged, too, because Albert Wiggam’s article in support of the Iowa studies was about to be published in the nation’s most popular women’s magazine, the Ladies Home Journal. If a forthright discussion with the Iowans had shifted the views of an extreme eugenicist and Terman ally, others might be ripe for convincing. While Stoddard’s wish for a direct debate at the meeting had been obstructed, it’s plausible that he believed that the Iowans’ arguments—they would each present papers—would win attention.

  Environmental and hereditarian views received balanced hearings at the meeting. A notable contribution, a review of nearly one hundred studies from both sides of the argument, came from Berkeley psychologist Jane Loevinger. In “Intelligence as Related to Socio-Economic Factors,” Loevinger included noteworthy data from Otto Kleinberg, of Columbia University, that the verbal test scores of African American students from the South who had migrated to New York increased with the length of their New York residence. Loevinger also included papers from hereditarians Lewis Terman and Robert Yerkes and from authors whose findings she found inconclusive. In the end, Loevinger could not judge any reports convincing. Instead, she observed that research in the field had expanded, but because many contributions failed to define terms such as “social-economic,” and “intelligence,” she judged that in most of the studies “conclusion is one word too often profaned.”9

  Supportive of the environmental argument was Newell C. Kephart, of the Wayne County Training School in Northville, Michigan, who showed that increased mental stimulation raised the IQ scores of a startling 50 percent of “mentally deficient boys.” And a report from Martin L. Reymert and Ralph T. Hinton Jr., of Mooseheart, a residential facility west of Chicago, found that children made IQ test score gains when they had been moved from “a relatively inferior to a relatively superior environment . . . before they reach the age of 6.” After that, IQ scores tended to remain constant.10

  Supporting the heredity argument was a study by Grace E. Bird, of the Rhode Island College of Education, who found that nursery school children’s intelligence showed a negligible effect from a superior school environment.11 A comprehensive multi-year study of young children by Nancy Bayley, of the Institute of Child Welfare at the University of California at Berkeley, that considered socioeconomic factors showed that changes in constancy of intelligence were “most likely to be found in the natural processes of development in the organism.”12 And Gertrude Hildreth, of Columbia University, found no evidence that adopted children placed into superior homes and who attended an excellent school gained in intelligence to the level of the family’s own children.13

  In closing the meeting, Stoddard exposed an issue seldom mentioned in the debate, but which, he suggested, explained eugenicists’ alarm about discoveries from the Iowans and other environmentalists: disbelief that intelligence actually could be increased when what was required to maintain a eugenically healthy society was sterilization. Stoddard pointed out that from 1909 to 1939, California, home to many leading eugenicists, was responsible for 43 percent of the nation’s sterilizations of insane and low-intelligence citizens.14

  For contrast, Stoddard highlighted the Yearbook’s report from Robert Rusk, director of the Scottish Council for Research in Education. Rusk’s study of the intelligence test scores of a random sample of Scottish children showed an even more unmistakable benefit of good environment than had the Iowans.15 Rusk studied every Scottish child born on February 1, May 1, August 1, and November 1 of 1926. He found that the mean IQ of those children born in cities was 100.9, for those born in industrial areas it was 99.2, and for those born in rural areas it was 100.9. Stoddard wrote that Rusk did not find “the deficiency of ability of rural children . . . so frequently reported for American children.”16 Rusk reported, “Perhaps nowhere has scholastic opportunity been more evenly equated than in Scotland; 99.7 percent of Scottish teachers are fully trained.”17

  Stoddard also quoted C. H. Waddington, a geneticist and eugenicist at the University of Edinburgh, who wrote, “A much greater improvement in intelligence could be produced by measures of social amelioration than by any eugenic steps.”18 Stoddard concluded the meeting by affirming “of the demonstrable impact of different environments upon the plastic, maturing organism which is the child there can be no longer any doubt.”19 But according to Lewis Terman, the environmentalist research published in the Yearbook was “strikingly like . . . E.S.P.”20

  While Stoddard stood up for the Iowans’ groundbreaking work, he knew his defense had been hobbled by an inability to rebut the severe critique that McNemar and Terman had wit
hheld. He knew, too, that in the following weeks, as psychologists gained access to McNemar’s paper, they would find it had borrowed Terman’s combative style, promising to “demolish,” “destroy,” and “explode” Iowa’s argument. But Stoddard’s controlled demeanor cracked only once in St. Louis—when he addressed Terman’s stratagem that had kept the paper out of the Yearbook. “The largest single body of criticism directed, as you may surmise, against the rather massive Iowa materials, was never available for the Yearbook itself.”21 McNemar, Stoddard explained, had chosen to publish his paper elsewhere. Stoddard labeled the paper’s rhetoric “the tactics of a criminal lawyer” adding, “In such a melee truth is not so much crushed as smeared.”22 Finally, George Stoddard had lost his cool.

  As the content of McNemar’s paper, published in February, filtered through the profession, the months that followed the meeting confirmed Stoddard’s fears. Although filled with careless or deliberate omissions and distortions, as well as criticism of the Iowans’ statistics, some of it unreasonable or so unnecessarily complex that it eluded many readers, the paper accomplished what McNemar and Terman had sought: the shadow it cast on the Iowans’ competence intensified doubts about their results.

  McNemar’s review began by maligning the Iowans because, following their initial publication in scholarly journals, their discoveries often appeared in the popular press, a criticism Terman had also made in his July 7 attack at Stanford. “The new gospel,” McNemar wrote, “is being carried beyond . . . journals.”23 This summoned the age-old academic prejudice against any work that achieved popular acceptance—the perception that it must be slick or specious. As an example, McNemar cited a Wellman article that had appeared in the New York Times. He did not seem to know that the Iowa station’s charter required that it inform the public of its discoveries. According to Stoddard, every article that appeared in nonacademic publications was submitted at the magazine or newspaper’s request or came from local or national media coverage.24 Moreover, sixty letters between Wiggam and Terman written from 1925 to 1953 reveal that Terman regularly supported Wiggam’s popular-press articles, even providing him with suggested text.25