The Orphans of Davenport

by Marilyn Brookwood

  Although following the Yearbook meeting the Iowans received little support from their profession, they might not have gauged how gravely McNemar’s and Goodenough’s critiques had damaged their studies’ credibility. But the only social science historian to thoroughly study the Iowa station, Hamilton Cravens, concluded that the doubt that McNemar cast on the station’s methodology weighed heavily. Citing 1970s interviews by Yale child psychiatrist Milton J. E. Senn, Cravens wrote that many individuals remembered the 1940 controversy “and without exception reported that it was the statistical criticisms that dissuaded them from looking more closely.”62

  However, research suggests that like Lewis Terman, many 1930s psychologists lacked expertise in areas that relied on statistical measurement. For example, NSSE’s secretary, psychologist Guy M. Whipple, who had a PhD from Cornell and was director of the Bureau of Tests and Measurements at the University of Michigan, warned 1940 Yearbook readers that he had struggled with the statistical material in many of the publication’s reports.63 Moreover, Diane Paul, a modern-day social scientist who has studied the history of genetics as related to the heritability of intelligence, reported that authors who are “expected to write on a topic where they lack confidence but which they know is a source of controversy . . . [may] turn to . . . sources thought to be good authorities.” Paul suggested that this results in the republication of material that “appears plausible because it confirms deeply rooted assumptions about the influence of genes on intellectual performance.”64 Paul’s 1980s insight may explain why many psychologists of the Iowans’ time relied on McNemar’s analysis rather than their own analyses of the Iowa studies’ suggestive research.

  Were the Iowa station researchers surprised at McNemar’s critique? According to Marie Skodak, they were not as resentful as they might have been: “Their feeling was, well, this is what you would expect.” But she also reported that the criticisms “hurt Wellman and Skeels very much.”65 One of Skeels’s subjects, Louis Branca, who as an adult discussed the attacks with Skeels, said, “I can’t begin to express how wounded he was.”66 Yet for Skeels’s experimental group children, the Iowa station’s research brought striking opportunities: eleven of those children now lived with adoptive families.

  In the summer of 1939, one of those children, Wendell Hoffman, said goodbye to the Glenwood women who had mothered and supported him and arrived in St. Paul, Minnesota, as the adopted son of Louis and Genevieve Branca. The Brancas had no idea that their 5-year-old, whom they renamed after his adoptive father, had already lived two identities: as a normal 1-year-old, then as a borderline deficient 2-year-old with a 75 IQ. Now, as Louis Carroll Branca, his IQ was 86, in the low average range, a positive outcome Skeels had hoped his subjects would experience. In the fall Louis’s parents enrolled him in a parochial school’s kindergarten and arranged for a tutor to help him achieve academic levels comparable to most children his age. A year later, when Skeels retested his intelligence, Louis’s IQ had risen to 92; in the four years after he left the Davenport Home, he had gained 17 IQ test score points, more than one standard deviation.67

  Following his painful Chicago appearance, Skeels’s 1942 follow-up of Louis and the other Woodward and Glenwood children was the only study he conducted. Here he reported that after his experiment, the test scores of nearly every experimental group member had continued to advance, with the greatest gain, 16 points, in a child adopted into a highly stimulative home. The single child who lost IQ points had been placed in a home with parents who, Skeels reported, seemed “far below the average for the group.”68 But in the contrast group, Skeels found that low IQ test scores persisted and suggested this was because “the psychological recipe [for intellectual stimulation] was . . . inadequate as to kinds of ingredients, amounts, and relative proportions.”69 Yet, Skeels also found that if placed in enriched environments, some contrast group children made progress. For example, one child transferred to Glenwood as a permanent resident gained 24 IQ test points, although that did not bring him to a normal IQ. The most significant finding from his 1942 report, Skeels explained, was “the marked relationship between rate of mental growth and the nature of the environmental impact.”70

  Following this report, Skeels—who since his college days had been in the military reserves—was called to serve in World War II as a captain in the army air force. He soon was promoted to major, and when the Blitz ended he was transferred to a desk job in London. Stoddard, Wellman, and Skodak had all received harsh criticism from Terman and his adherents, but the attacks on Skeels had been some of the most brutal. Skodak knew that his suffering had lingered and thought he might have been grateful to leave the Iowa station in order to serve in the war.71 However, Skeels may have had yet another reason for feeling relief when he departed for service overseas, something Marie Skodak intimated in her recollections: a fear that his sexuality would become a subject for further ad hominem abuse.

  For nearly a decade Skodak and Skeels had worked closely together, and a powerful bond had grown up between them based on their shared unease about the Davenport Home’s management and their empathy for its children. With such a relationship it would be natural to wonder whether the connection between two young, single professionals sharing their work day after day might not have become something more intimate. But Skeels always maintained a core of reserve that Skodak could not breach. Many years later, after his death Skodak spoke of his intense privacy. She told historian of child development Milton J. E. Senn that although Skeels cared very much about little children, he was “not a man cut out for marriage,”72 words that at the time conveyed more innuendo than information. The evidence is scant and circumstantial, but if Skeels were gay, in 1930s Iowa—as in most of the world—it would have been far safer for him to remain closeted. Still, the two researchers would remain friends for life, even after their careers took them far apart. And decades later, their work with the children of Davenport would bring them together again.

  While we have only indirect evidence that Skeels might have been gay, it’s plausible he may have been alarmed by concurrent events: at the same time Skeels was being savaged by Terman, another Iowa professor was under scorching censure from his own department chair, who “tried mightily to have him fired, in part on explicit moral grounds.”73 That professor was Grant Wood, at the time a celebrated artist and creator of the iconic painting “American Gothic.” While his department chair, Lester Longman, cast his criticism as a disagreement about artistic vision and creative direction, recent scholarship has determined that what provoked his attack was Wood’s semi-open homosexuality.74 For Wood, or anyone so attacked, exposure would have meant ruinous public shaming or worse: given Iowa’s 1929 sinister sodomy laws designed to punish “moral degeneracy” and “sexual perversion,” sterilization and incarceration might soon have followed.75

  Further linking Skeels and Wood, both had close connections to George Stoddard, a champion of each in the face of controversy. From 1934, when Wood joined the University of Iowa faculty, he and Stoddard shared a friendship, at first based on Stoddard’s role as the dean of the university’s graduate school. “From the beginning,” Wood wrote to Stoddard, “we saw eye to eye on the art school situation. We spoke the same language.”76 In 1936, Wood had lectured on the role of art in children’s lives at the Iowa station’s annual child development conference. When Longman’s attacks unfolded, Stoddard became Wood’s confidant and acted as his intercessor with the university’s new president, Virgil M. Hancher, suggesting to Hancher that the attack on Wood was “a hatchet job.” Stoddard advised the president that “Mr. Wood is the particular glory of Iowa’s contribution to art . . . when the University is known at all it is known for just a few . . . and Grant Wood is at the top.”77 Whether the two discussed the motive for Longman’s attack is not revealed in their letters. However, with Stoddard’s intervention, in August 1941, the university transferred Wood from Longman’s department to the School of Fine Arts and promoted him to full professor
.

  While Wood’s and Skeels’s circumstances were far from identical, it seems credible that the attack on Wood suggested to Skeels that he would be wise to avoid public conflict, especially with Terman. Perhaps heightening Skeels’s concern would have been his knowledge that in addition to an emphasis on mental tests about intelligence, Terman’s scholarship also included studies of masculinity, femininity, and homosexuality. During the mid-1930s, Terman wrote many scholarly papers and a 600-page book in these areas, and to assess those traits he created his “M-F” test. One section of the test rated how homosexuals differed from the larger male population.78 He devoted a book chapter to “A Tentative Scale for the Measurement of Sexual Inversion in Males.”79

  In 1935, Wood, who had not been known to have had a relationship with a woman, married suddenly, but by the summer of 1939, he claimed that marital discord had led to financial woes and he actively sought a divorce. In 1934, Skeels had briefly married, but his divorce almost two years later was not contentious. He did not marry again. In retrospect, like Wood’s, Skeels’s marriage may have been a masquerade undertaken to camouflage his sexuality.

  Skeels’s practice of keeping mum about his private life is further revealed in a detailed letter Skodak wrote soon after his death to one of his only known relatives. “Despite his talkativeness about his research,” Skodak told Skeels’s cousin, “he was not communicative about his life, his family, his friends . . . in many ways [he was] a solitary and lonely fellow.”80 Skeels’s extreme reticence may have reflected a fear of exposure; it is also possible that to shield him, and so protect the integrity of his discoveries, Stoddard had encouraged Skeels to keep his head down. For Skeels, that would have been welcome advice.

  During the late 1930s, when the nature versus nurture dispute had become the most important topic in psychology and when the young Skodak had challenged important mainstream psychologists at a professional meeting, another early career psychologist, Lois Barclay Murphy, had helped found a laboratory nursery school at Sarah Lawrence College, in Bronxville, New York. From her own experience testing intelligence in young children, Murphy knew that the Iowa reports had to be correct, but alert to the possible career risks of speaking out, Murphy chose not to provoke Iowa’s attackers. However, after a forty-year silence during which she had become a leading scholar of early development, in 1980 Murphy delivered the Molony Memorial Lecture at the City College of New York. In it she explained that because 1930s psychologists looked only at group norms and disregarded case studies, they did not find evidence of individuals’ intelligence changes:

  The stable IQ fitted in with the wishes of psychologists who in the first quarter of the century felt insecure and timid because psychology was a new science and psychologists wanted it to be respected, like physics. . . . It was important for them to think in terms of . . . high correlations and predictability . . . unpredictability would have made people very nervous.81

  Murphy’s insights about the mental test psychologists of Lewis Terman’s era may explain the profession’s insistence that intelligence was inherited. She went on to confess:

  I feel guilty because in the 1930s I didn’t think anyone would pay attention, but I was finding parallel results with children who came to school with low IQs. One child’s IQ went from 89 to 136. I knew that Skeels and Skodak were sound, but with the whole establishment against us I didn’t think there was any point in trying to convince people. I didn’t have a statistical study as a weapon.82

  How many researchers may have avoided the potential career costs of supporting the Iowa station’s discoveries is unknown, but as Marie Skodak observed of Terman, “There was no way of saying him nay.”83 George Stoddard, reflecting later about psychology’s resistance to Iowa’s ideas, recognized that “all of us ‘environmentalists’ were confronting a state of mind,” but also, he said, “an entrenched position, at times . . . a lucrative business.”84 Stoddard and his colleagues had found that despite the benefits of Iowa’s discoveries for future Davenport children and institutionalized children throughout the nation, Terman’s commanding influence meant that his storm of attacks probably could not be turned back.

  Chapter Ten

  A CHILL IN THE AIR

  With the nation’s attention drawn to Europe’s conflict with Germany and America debating entry into that war, during the spring and summer of 1940, the Iowa psychologists failed even to return psychology’s quarrel to its previous stalemate. At the station the calendar of speaking engagements and research related to the Iowa studies was close to empty; no peers outside of Iowa initiated studies to follow up on environment’s role. It also became clear, despite a suggestion Stoddard had made at the St. Louis meeting that educators might curtail their use of IQ tests, and despite forebodings from Terman’s test publisher that orders for tests might decline, almost all the nation’s schools continued to purchase and administer the tests. By November Goodenough cheerlessly complained to Terman of her obligation to visit the University of Chicago “for one more discussion about the sins of our neighbors at Iowa.” It felt, she said, “like kicking a dead horse.”1

  By 1941, existential threats from Nazi Germany and Japanese aggression eclipsed research in child development and in most nonessential academic areas, and after the December attack on Pearl Harbor, nothing but the war mattered. From Flint, where Marie Skodak was now the director of a child guidance clinic, came her observation about that time: “You gave up careers, you gave up plans, gave up your personal life, because this was crucial.”2 Skeels had left Iowa for his war assignment, and Beth Wellman had been diagnosed with breast cancer. As was common medical practice in that era, she underwent significant surgery. Dauntless, she continued to teach and train graduate students, but her research slowed and she next published in the late 1940s. She died of her illness in 1952.

  George Stoddard, to whom the Iowa station represented everything he valued, now wondered if perhaps it was time to leave. First in his family to graduate from college, he had thrilled to the university’s and the station’s congenial faculty and intense intellectual life. Along with his lively household—there were four, soon to be five children—at his summer home on an Iowa lake, Stoddard gathered friends like Henry Wallace, Grant Wood, “who dropped by in his famous overalls,”3 and Robert Frost, who during several summers taught at Iowa. On cooler evenings Frost sat in the glow of the family’s stone fireplace reciting his poems to the Stoddards’ enthralled guests. “It was the full force of Iowa” Stoddard recalled, “a magnet, that kept me there.”4

  For the gregarious, charismatic Iowan there had been tantalizing offers to join other faculties. In 1935, Teachers College at Columbia University tempted him with a significant salary increase and the promise of potential colleagues the likes of John Dewey and Edward L. Thorndike, as well as New York’s sophisticated cultural scene. But that offer arrived as the station’s work on intelligence had begun to suggest startling outcomes. In 1939, Stoddard’s Iowa mentor, G. M. Ruch, now at the University of California at Berkeley, tried to lure him west. Again, Stoddard’s commitment to discoveries that had become even more thrilling, along with his NSSE leadership position, kept him planted.5

  Stoddard may have resisted moving, too, because his role as a trailblazer and nurturer of daring young psychologists supplied much of what his intellectual navigation system demanded: original thinking, a chance to innovate, and a route for his passion to uncover new knowledge. He explained his outsized intellectual drive as an unexpected gain from his partial deafness, a factor that, he said, made him attentive to “his constant inner life.” He recognized that such persistent self-reflection might suggest that he was

  deafer than I am . . . and can become a source of unintentional rudeness. . . . On the other hand . . . the hardest stance for me is to remain cool to what I regard as original and exciting. . . . My most intense pleasure is to be in touch with a warm creative person who represents what human nature is or could be.6

  But when th
e 1940 flood of contempt washed over Iowa’s research landscape, Stoddard’s perspective shifted. In an ordinary time, this effect might have been a setback, but not lethal. Now world events put research on hold, and with the station’s agenda suspended, he recognized that the vibrant milieu he helped create might not return soon, or ever. As he watched the University of Iowa’s student body melt away into the armed services and most research come to a near standstill, Stoddard began to search for a new position. His older children were approaching college age, which made the financial rewards of an administrative appointment even more tempting. In neither of his two autobiographical reports, nor in a detailed 1971 interview with Milton J. E. Senn, did Stoddard indict the failure of Iowa’s work to gain acceptance as decisive, but he must have wondered what role in research leadership he could envision for himself if he remained in place.

  In 1938, Stoddard had given a speech in New York State on “Child Development: A New Approach to Education.” In a region with almost no child development research programs, his talk about the interdependence of democracy and education was considered bold—even, some said, tilted toward socialism and communism.7 Nevertheless, in 1942, Stoddard accepted the position of president of the State University of New York and, concurrently, as New York’s commissioner of education.