After Stoddard announced he would leave Iowa, close to 2,000 congratulatory letters from every part of the nation poured in—although none came from mental test psychologists. In that prodigious response, the Iowa station’s leader must have found testimony that in the wider world of American thought his ideas had more impact than he had realized.
One letter came from Luther H. Gulik, President Franklin Roosevelt’s National Resources Planning Board chair. Weary from war concerns, Gulik told Stoddard that his appointment was “the best news for the schools of the whole country that we have had. . . . Everyonce [sic] in a while when one is pretty discouraged a thing like this happens and faith is restored.”8 Edmond E. Day, president of Cornell University, told Stoddard he would be filling one of the most important educational posts in the nation. And Wiley B. Rutledge—who in less than a year would sit on the United States Supreme Court—called Stoddard “the last bulwark of liberal thinking” at the university.9
A message of particularly wistful admiration came from an Iowa citizen, Ethel Collester, who wrote: “It is becoming too common . . . this lifting of our fine men from Iowa into further fields . . . Iowa has lost so many. I take advantage of my nothingness to say that I could have given up three or four others before I could . . . let you go. You so tenaciously stood by the things you believed in.”10 From this perspective Stoddard’s battle with the nation’s mental test psychologists might have begun to seem less material.
Along with his administrative talent, Stoddard brought to New York State his social justice commitment, during his inauguration warning of the hypocrisy of “school trustees [who drive] up in handsome cars on million-dollar roads, in order to cast a vote to lower the meager salary of the teacher.”11 Never forgetting that public higher education had made his own career possible, he helped enlarge New York’s university system, expanding its two-year campuses to bring higher education to students in rural areas.
While leading the way in these and other initiatives, in 1943 Stoddard also published his exhaustive consideration of children’s cognitive development, The Meaning of Intelligence, in which he analyzed past and recent research about the interaction of innate ability and environment. With little focus on Iowa’s attackers, Stoddard gave special emphasis to the Iowa findings, offering views that since the 1930s had won him much scorn. Stoddard also demonstrated the linkage between the attacks against the Iowans and eugenics’ “contempt for mass inferiority.”12 He reported that a leading eugenics group, the Human Betterment Foundation, in Pasadena, California, extolled America’s record of sterilizations—by 1939 a total of 30,690.13 How many of those victims, Stoddard had to wonder, had been raised in inadequate environments? The reading public paid attention, and the book went to ten printings; Stoddard earned royalties that in current dollars totaled about $400,000.
By 1945, Stoddard’s New York success encouraged the University of Illinois to name him its president. At a farewell dinner, Governor Thomas E. Dewey toasted, “My only regret is that . . . we have lost the warmth of his personality and the clarity of his thinking.”14
Before moving to Illinois, in 1946 Stoddard briefly headed a committee of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) that advised Japan concerning its establishment of postwar school programs and where he reported directly to General Douglas MacArthur. Among the committee’s recommendations was that Japan’s schools consider teaching history and geography as objective subjects, rather than departure points for “militaristic indoctrination.”15 As he completed his assignment, Japan’s emperor, Hirohito, asked Stoddard to help him locate an American tutor for his son, 12-year-old Crown Prince Akihito. Contrary to custom, the emperor said he would prefer the tutor be female. From the hundreds of American teachers who applied, Stoddard recommended Elizabeth Grey Vining, whose personal warmth and obvious love of children told him she had to be the choice. Vining, a childless widow of 40, considered this her opportunity “to serve the cause of peace.”16 The emperor agreed. In April 2019, after thirty years as Japan’s 125th emperor, Akihito abdicated the throne to his oldest son.
Several months after Stoddard became president of the University of Illinois, he drove down to Iowa to give a talk to his former university colleagues. A member of that audience nostalgically told the student newspaper that Stoddard “diffused exciting ideas that make everyone around him feel things happening.”17 The talents Stoddard brought with him wherever he landed would not change, but at Illinois, they would not always find appreciation. The writing may have been on the wall when, just as he began his new assignment, a national panel ranked the standing of the boards of trustees of America’s state universities: Illinois came in at number 47.18
However, Stoddard’s first efforts, directed at the 12,000 GI Bill freshmen entering the university after the war, were expensive but successful. And when, to great acclaim, he brought major artistic figures such as Igor Stravinsky to campus, he appeared to have the support of the university’s board of trustees. Perhaps overconfident, Stoddard seemed not to notice quiet manipulations of McCarthy-era trustees who had turned on him because of his spending, his “socialist tendencies”—such as his continuing service on a UNESCO committee—and his support for faculty who refused to sign McCarthy-era loyalty oaths. He also became entangled in a conflict with a board member he had appointed who sought to promote Krebiozen, a questionable cure for cancer based on mineral oil and other organic solvents. When the American Medical Association declared the cure worthless, Stoddard withdrew the university from further Krebiozen research and refused to keep quiet about it: as at Iowa, he defended empirical evidence against pseudoscience. Within days the board engineered a no confidence vote and Stoddard immediately resigned.
Although Stoddard had the support of Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, much of the faculty, the American Civil Liberties Union, and a major Illinois newspaper that claimed that “from the day he took over as president” statehouse politicians seeking to use the university for political advantage had been stalking him,19 none of it mattered. Declaring that Stoddard had been “hot-tempered, sometimes high-handed,” Time magazine headlined the board’s action “The Final Arrow.”20 After his firing, he and his family moved to Princeton, a university town where one of his sons was attending graduate school and where he thought he would feel at home. During his yearlong stay, the university offered him a position, which he refused. He needed time to recover and decide how to proceed.
With Stoddard’s 1942 departure from the station, the University of Iowa faced the task of filling the position of station director at a time when most qualified administrators were in the military or had jobs they would not leave. Yet the choice of Robert R. Sears—a candidate with no research background or training in child psychology, early development, mental testing, or child institutionalization, and who had never held an academic leadership role—seemed baffling. But in Sears’s mostly Ivy League curriculum vitae, the university found one matchless credential: for a significant part of his life, Sears had been closely connected to Lewis Terman.
Sears’s father and Terman had been colleagues and friends, and as a first-grade student in Palo Alto, Sears qualified as one of approximately 1,500 highly intelligent young subjects for Terman’s groundbreaking work, Genetic Studies of Genius. (On Stanford’s campus those children became known as “Termites.”) Terman hoped his research about gifted children would counter the stereotypical view that they were bookish, socially inept young eccentrics. As an undergraduate at Stanford, Sears had studied psychology under Terman, but found his lectures unstimulating. However, with Terman’s encouragement he went on to earn a PhD in psychology at Yale, and before relocating to Iowa, he taught at the University of Illinois and then at Yale. In both appointments his research focused almost solely on aggression and frustration in adults.
When World War II began, Sears sought a war-related position in Washington, DC, but was unable to find an assignment. However, when offered the dir
ectorship of the Iowa station, what he called his most interesting option, he accepted. In an extensive 1968 interview, Sears did not address why someone who lacked a research history related to child development might have been offered that role. But he recognized that leadership of the Iowa station gave him a new academic credential—it made him a “developmental psychologist by fiat” rather than by training.
It is likely that the university knew exactly the type of scholar it sought to replace Stoddard—a figure who, by returning the station to a more orthodox research program, would restore academic credibility some feared had been lost. Sears did not describe how Iowa’s offer came about, but early in September of 1942, he and his family moved from New Haven to Iowa City, where Sears became the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station’s third director. Nearly thirty years later, Sears remembered, “I really was a coast-type culture person, and moving to a rather prominent position in a Midwestern community proved . . . a shock.”21
Sears encountered an even greater shock when he recognized that his Iowa colleagues, all child development specialists, “simply didn’t include the kind of people” that were at Yale. Other handicaps also contributed to his poor fit, first among them his age—while he was the station’s leader, he was the youngest member of its faculty. Just as important, Sears had no administrative experience. His “slightly stormy” debut made him uncomfortable, and he admitted later that he had suffered extreme anxiety for which he sought psychotherapy. Within a month of his arrival, he wrote to Stoddard, “I swear I have never worked harder in my life.”22 Although the two regularly exchanged collegial letters, each suggesting to the other that their families should visit, Sears only once mentioned his rocky transition.
As he began his duties, Sears became the lone student in an ad hoc intensive tutorial to qualify him for a job he already had. He plowed through child development readings, which he discussed with Beth Wellman and other station members, and found himself “struck . . . with astonishment to discover that here were some extremely able people.”23 He said that academics like Wellman were unknown to him, and he found it “interesting” that she and others had a remarkably different view of child development and behavior than most. Because many of the station’s psychologists, medical personnel, and other experts had left to become war specialists, Sears’s on-the-job training came from a much-reduced staff. He noted:
Psychologists moved off into research on gunnery. . . . Someone editing the Journal of Child Development did so from a military post in Europe. There was very little to do because there was very little research being done. . . . It was a very dim period for child development because there was nobody left to keep the shop running.24
But bringing fresh eyes to what had been, for him, an unknown area granted Sears freedom to articulate the complex demands of child development research, demands the Iowans implicitly understood but had not formally described. “Every child is a multidisciplinary object,” Sears observed, and the study of the child’s complexity required the contributions of separate disciplines of psychiatry, pediatrics, education, social work, and clinical psychology—“all have to deal with a child [who is] contained within one skin.”25
Without referencing the Iowans’ studies or McNemar’s flawed critique, Sears had identified an aspect that may have made those studies less satisfactory: they attempted to trace multiple developmental processes from a single perspective—the development of intelligence—when, Sears predicted, “the best research is going . . . to be done by people thoroughly grounded in one discipline, [who] understand the others . . . enough to talk the language of their colleagues.”26 Although unmentioned, embedded in Sears’s analysis was the Iowans’ core concept—that development emerged in a dynamic environmental framework—and he paid no attention to eugenic beliefs about inherited ability.
Central to Sears’s intensive study had to have been Lawrence K. Frank’s seminal 1943 forecast of what lay ahead for the field of child development research, Research in Child Psychology: History and Prospect.27 Frank had graduated from Columbia University as an economist, then worked with Beardsley Ruml at the Rockefeller Foundation. He later directed its Laura Spelman Memorial in child development, eventually directing all Rockefeller Foundation child development programs. In that role, Frank became a familiar presence at the Iowa station and one of the nation’s most respected theorists in child development. In 1947 he won the prestigious Lasker Award in mental health.
Intolerant of any aspect of hereditarianism, in the harshest terms Frank condemned what he viewed as the tyranny of intelligence tests:
The assumption that a child of given chronological age has had the same opportunity as his contemporaries to develop his capacities . . . is becoming increasingly dubious. Moreover, the designation of these unhappy children as congenitally handicapped or defective and their assignment to the categories of the hopelessly retarded begins to appear as a cruelly unfair and socially intolerable practice for which no amount of quantitative and seemingly scientific sanction can be offered as justification.28
In the same article, Frank held that the recent formation of the Society for Research in Child Development, now one of the field’s most highly regarded organizations, was a signal to researchers that the field must collaborate with many disciplines to understand child growth, behavior, and personality.
Clearly, Sears’s thinking borrowed from Frank’s, yet with Skodak and Skeels gone and Wellman ill, during his tenure the station launched no initiatives about environmental influences on the development of institutionalized children, initiatives that might have safeguarded those who, at that very moment, lived in the Davenport Home. During that period, too, Sears allowed the productive alliance of the Davenport Home, the Iowa station, and the Iowa Board of Control to lapse to its pre-1934 status.
For several summers during the 1940s, Marie Skodak had returned to Iowa to follow up on her studies of children adopted into middle-class homes, investigations of how those children’s superior intelligence held up as they got older. On those visits, Skodak worked at the Iowa station under Sears’s leadership but recognized that she had reentered a changed world—one altered not only by a world war. The station’s work had shifted radically and now included no research into the development of institutionalized children, nor effects related to adoption, and little in the area of preschool attendance. Speaking of her 1946 visit, Skodak said: “[Sears] was not just a newcomer. . . . I found the whole atmosphere . . . so different that I said I would never go back. . . . The idea of doing something in the real world was not part of the thinking.”29 At the Davenport Home, and at the station, it seemed that the Iowa group’s vision and investigations had disappeared and left no trace.
It is likely that Sears arrived at the Iowa station certain that he would alter its research agenda, and when he shifted its studies from the effects of environment to areas of personality and social adjustment, he accomplished that goal. For example, in 1946 Sears published a paper, “Sex Differences in the Projective Doll Play of Preschool Children,” and in 1947 another, titled “Influence of Methodological Factors on Doll Play Performance.” As with much of Sears’s Iowa research, these topics bore no relation to Davenport’s children, who lacked dolls or other toys or even opportunities for ordinary play. When only two papers in this period, each by Beth Wellman, continued the station’s research path, America’s psychologists may have interpreted Sears’s neglect as further confirmation that the Iowans’ mission had lacked value.
Yet after the war, Sears would warmly welcome Skeels’s return to the station and support the continuation of his research. One could imagine, then, that earlier in his tenure, Sears’s inexperience may have presented a barrier to his appreciation of the Iowa scholars’ novel insights.
Less than a year after Sears’s arrival at the station, Harold Skeels wrote in 1943 from the Office of the Commanding General of the Army Air Forces Gulf Coast Training Center to say that he looked forward to returning to “roll up my s
leeves and have a part in the challenging program.”30 Over the next two years, the men exchanged friendly letters, Sears signing one “with enthusiasm for seeing you again.”31 Just before Skeels was demobilized, on December 1, 1945, he wrote, “I am looking forward with a great deal of pleasure to . . . the opportunity of working with you.”32 By the time of his official discharge, he had already submitted a proposal to Sears that spelled out his next project, a study of the mental development of children in adoptive homes who were now approaching adolescence.
It is even plausible that the inexperienced Sears had been anticipating Skeels’s return as a means to restore the Iowa station’s mission. He held nothing back when he approached the George Davis Bivin Foundation for funding to allow Skeels to travel throughout Iowa and beyond to test the intelligence of several hundred children. In a detailed three-page letter to the foundation’s president, R. H. Singleton, Sears explained that Skeels’s earlier reports on this cohort were “responsible for extensive changes in adoptive procedure in a number of states.” His new study would follow up on the children’s mental development, including an investigation of their schooling. He added that there was “resistance [to his findings] in some states because the data have not been carried through to the final conclusion.”33 He defined the study as one “of very extreme importance,” adding that Skeels’s early reports had been essential to modifying foster care placements in Iowa and had “saved a very large number of children in the state.”34 Skeels had already met with the foundation’s administrators, who seemed receptive to his research, and now they had Sears’s letter, which assured them of the station’s full support. Sears’s request to the Bivin Foundation to fund Skeels’s investigation suggested that after three years as director he had now embraced its historic child development focus.
The Orphans of Davenport Page 23