At the end of January 1965, Harold Skeels received a letter from John Bowlby, who wrote to thank Skeels for sending mimeographed material about his recent study and to say that he had read Skeels’s just published “preliminary” results. Bowlby added, “The results are really of the very greatest value. . . . The enquiry has proved immensely worthwhile and brought your early researches to a triumphant conclusion.”100 Bowlby was referring to Skeels’s first journal article about his follow-up, “Some Preliminary Findings of Three Followup Studies on the Effects of Adoption on Children from Institutions,” published in the US Department of Health journal Children Today.
Then, early in April 1965, British pediatrician Margaret Lowenfeld received a packet of research articles from her friend and Skeels’s colleague, Simon Auster. The journal reprints had arrived just in time for her presentation to a government committee on adoption. Thanking Auster, she wrote, “That was a massive piece of cooperation!” But she added:
There is a puzzle that must be cleared up, the latest date of these publications is December 1948. We are now in April, 1965, 17 years later. I have not heard before of Skeels and the Iowa City Research, nor does this fundamentally radical work seem to have affected any of the current thinking on child development, IQ . . . etc. WHY? . . . It may be that this is an example of a situation I have suffered all my working life:. . . that the conclusions . . . are too upsetting to be accepted . . . “better treat them as if they didn’t exist.”101
If anyone who studied young children should have known Harold Skeels’s name it was Lowenfeld—a guiding light in child therapy, the originator of play therapy techniques used worldwide to treat troubled children, someone honored in the British Museum of Science’s Group Collection. Now she peppered Auster with questions: “Is Skeels still working? How was this work . . . received when it appeared? Has any parallel work been carried out? What do your geneticists and top psychologists working on brain function think of it?”102
Auster, who for some years had worked with Skeels, could not answer Lowenfeld’s questions because only when searching for material about adoption to send to his friend had he discovered Skeels’s Iowa work. “Your delight on reading the material I sent you,” he told her, “did not exceed mine.”103 To answer Lowenfeld and satisfy his own curiosity, Auster reached Skeels, recently retired from NIMH, in his new home in Southern California. No longer reticent, Skeels laid bare history about his work that until then he had shared with almost no one. He related to Auster his “serendipitous discovery” and told him of psychology’s refusal to recognize that IQs might change, but that Iowa had revised its adoption process so that children were placed at earlier ages.
But Skeels had little information for Lowenfeld about geneticists and psychologists working on brain function and intelligence because in the United States that was not happening, and he appeared not to know about the work of Donald Hebb, the Canadian neuroscientist who had shown that the brain changes with experience. Remarkably, in the 1963 edition of the standard experimental psychology textbook by Robert S. Woodworth, of Columbia, and Harold Schlosberg, of Brown, “environment” has one index notation and “intelligence” none at all. Although the book mentions Hebb, it does not include his work that showed the relation between experience and brain development.104 According to a 1968 review essay from psychiatrist Allan Marans and social worker Dale Meers, “the application of research to childcare programs in the United States falls far short of work elsewhere.”105
Skeels told Auster that after a long drought, his studies were now admired. He described his recent dinner at the Rockville, Maryland, home of President John F. Kennedy’s sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver and her husband, administrative powerhouse Sargent Shriver, where he had been invited to discuss his discoveries. At the time, Shriver simultaneously served as head of the late president’s Peace Corps, President Johnson’s War on Poverty, the Head Start project, and in Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity. That summer of 1965, a Head Start pilot program was about to enroll half a million children. At the dinner, too, was Stafford L. Warren, President Johnson’s special assistant for mental retardation.
Shriver let Skeels know he had learned that early education increased IQs, and said, “Being of an era when we thought you were born with an IQ just as you are born with blue eyes, that fact really . . . stuck in my head.”106 For Skeels, dinner in the midst of the Shrivers’ warm family signaled recognition of his life’s work from some of the nation’s most powerful officials. And of course, Harold Skeels could not have missed how far his ideas had come in the twenty-five years since Barbara Burks and other Carnegie Institution eugenicists had quashed George Stoddard’s blueprint for a national preschool program.
On a snowy January morning in 1966, as Marie Skodak worked at home in Flint, she received a long-distance call from a complete stranger. At a time when psychologists and biologists rarely talked to one another about their work, there was no reason Alfred Mirsky’s name would have been familiar, no way she would have known that he was a biologist at the Rockefeller Institute, now Rockefeller University, in New York City. From his book-lined office overlooking Rockefeller’s manicured Upper East Side campus, Mirsky sounded almost casual. He told Skodak he “had just run across” Skeels’s “marvelous” 1939 orphans study and Skodak’s adoption studies. When her caller identified himself as a “cell-biologist interested in the behavior of gene particles in different environments,” she immediately understood that this might be important. In a letter that day to Skeels and Gladwin, she said that Mirsky “went on at enthusiastic length . . . about how tremendous and significant” he found Iowa’s studies and how they related to his own scientific investigations.107 She told them that in Who’s Who, she had found inches about Mirsky’s credentials: “Harvard ’26 . . . membership in all kinds of distinguished societies . . . chief interest in cell proteins.”108 She suggested that Skeels send Mirsky additional papers.
That day Skodak mailed Mirsky a rough draft of Skeels’s 1966 follow-up report—the paper he would present at a May meeting and later publish in a prestigious psychology journal. Her enclosed letter told him, “I was much intrigued by the suggestion . . . that genes would respond differentially depending on the nature of the stimuli . . . the responsibility of schools and social institutions . . . under these circumstances becomes enormously more significant.”109
But the Rockefeller scientist had been cagy with Skodak. His interest in the Iowa work was neither recent nor casual. Alfred Mirsky had followed Iowa’s studies since the 1950s when his nephew, Lewis Lipsitt, then a PhD candidate in psychology at the University of Iowa and today an emeritus professor at Brown, first brought word of them. From that point, Mirsky frequently discussed Iowa’s findings with one of his graduate students, Eric H. Davidson, later the CalTech biologist who unraveled the role of genomic regulation in development and in 2011 won the International Prize in Biology. According to Davidson, Lipsitt, and Bruce McEwen, another of Mirsky’s students, what propelled Mirsky’s interest in Iowa’s discoveries was his long-standing abhorrence toward the racial, social, and cultural biases promoted by eugenics. Unknown to one another until 1966, Alfred Mirsky and the Iowans had long been allies.110
In the March 1964 issue of Scientific American, Mirsky had published a highly critical review of renowned British biologist Julian Huxley’s book in support of eugenics, Essays of a Humanist. In that review Mirsky challenged Huxley’s hereditarian statement that “it is now well established that the human I.Q . . . is largely a measure of genetic endowment.”111 Mirsky countered, plausibly referencing the Iowa studies: “It is now well known that not only ‘genetic endowment’ but also environment affects a person’s I.Q. and that it is exceedingly difficult to evaluate the relative importance of these two variables.”112
In a letter to Skeels, Mirsky explained why “a cell biologist should be so much interested in all this.” He wrote:
In my laboratory we investigate the activities of the chromoso
mes in the cell nucleus. We find that . . . genes become active or inactive depending on influences reaching them from the cytoplasm and from the surrounding environment. The conception of the genome handed down by classical genetics is rigid and biologically unsound. Perhaps . . . you can see that a sound cell biology goes along beautifully with the kind of psychology you did so much to develop.113
Skeels replied that while geneticists and biologists appreciated his work, psychologists “continued to be of the old school of intelligence being fixed at birth.” He told of psychologists’ disdain for Iowa’s claims, but at the same time confessed his own difficulty, even after his follow-up discoveries, in “coming to accept our findings.”114
According to Nobel laureate neuroscientist Eric Kandel and his colleague Larry Squire, it was not until the “latter part of the twentieth century when the study of the brain moved from a peripheral position within both the biological and psychological sciences to become an interdisciplinary field called neuroscience.” Beginning in the 1960s, Kandel wrote, the work of neurophysiologists eventually reversed psychology’s long-standing perception that the “neural approach to mental processes” was “too reductive.”115 Thus, it appears that Skodak and Skeels were among the first psychologists to receive an authoritative neuroscience hypothesis, simplified as it was, about how environment gets under the skin to influence development. As the Iowans now understood, Alfred Mirsky had perhaps explained the mystery of the changes in the Davenport children’s intelligence. What Mirsky’s work predicted, his student Bruce McEwen, along with other scientists, transformed into elegant explanations of complex phenomena that govern the interaction of environment and heredity to shape development. When he died in 1974, Alfred Mirsky was at work on a book for the general public about the interaction of environment and genetics, called Genetics and Human Behavior.
Chapter Twelve
THE COUNTER-ARGUMENT
In 1966, scholars from the American Association for Mental Deficiency (AAMD) gathered in Chicago’s Hotel Sherman—notorious for its 1920s mobster gatherings—to signal acceptance of the work of one of their own. On May 12, they welcomed Harold Skeels back into their fold. Skeels had not publicly presented any research since 1939, when members of this same professional association, meeting in this same city and at this same hotel, had crushed him with their ridicule.
For nearly three decades Skeels had ruminated about whether he had deceived himself. Perhaps his study made too much of small changes in development, so fleeting others never bothered to mention them. Or perhaps the intelligence changes he reported resulted from incorrect statistical analysis or errors in the IQ tests themselves. Well aware of her friend’s uncertainties, Skodak shared these herself, even suspecting that Skeels had encouraged her 1938–1939 adoption studies as possible confirmation of his own work.1
Now, with NIMH support, Skeels had found evidence in his subjects’ life paths that demonstrated his studies’ import. An experimental group of thirteen once low-intelligence children had maintained their intelligence gains, unmistakable in their academic success and well-functioning lives. And with grief he had found that his contrast group subjects had paid a steep price—the loss of what might have been intellectually normal adulthoods—for the Davenport Home’s institutional indifference. Spectacular and terrible, Skeels wanted his findings to have psychology’s full attention.
Yet following his travels, Skeels, now in his mid-60s, found himself plagued with health difficulties. In 1964, when Skodak had arrived in Washington for a conference Skeels had organized, she found him confused. She and an NIMH colleague hospitalized him and she took over the meeting. In the following months, Skeels was in and out of hospitals for evaluation, and when Skodak spoke with him on the phone, his speech sounded “disconnected, and sometimes slurred” and she created excuses to visit Washington to check on him. An eventual diagnosis said that he had suffered a series of small strokes.
In 1965 Skeels admitted that his full-time job was now too demanding and took an early retirement, relocating to Balboa Island, California, a seaside community south of Los Angeles where he had friends. While he seemed to function day-to-day, his condition left him too distracted to write up the longitudinal findings to be presented in Chicago and he called upon Skodak, the only other psychologist who understood the arc of his work, for assistance. Together they penned the talk he planned to deliver at the American Association for Mental Deficiency meeting, and Skodak also wrote Skeels’s paper about his study, which had been accepted in the Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development. Although both psychologists’ names appeared on the unpublished talk, Skeels did not credit Skodak as the second author of his paper. Possibly this reflected an editorial decision at the journal. Possibly, too, Skeels did not wish to call his editor’s attention to Skodak’s role. However, in the paper’s acknowledgments he expressed “deepest gratitude” for Skodak’s “meticulous care and complete editorial revision” of his text.2
Presenting his work for the first time in twenty-seven years, Skeels knew that some at the Chicago meeting would be unfamiliar with what had come before, and he briefly reviewed the results of his 1939 study: an experimental group of thirteen once low-intellect children who lived with affectionate women labeled “morons” had become normal, and a contrast group of eleven once normal children who continued to live at Davenport and in other institutional settings had suffered significant intelligence declines. But the heart of Skeels’s talk compared the groups’ outcomes in education, marriage and family patterns, earnings, physical and mental health, and current institutionalization status, which in every area revealed the groups’ stark disparities.
The experimental group’s median educational level was twelfth grade; in the contrast group it was third grade. Eleven of the experimental group subjects had married and had twenty-eight children among them. Their children’s mean intelligence test score was 104, and their individual scores ranged from 86 to 125. Two of the contrast group subjects had married and had a total of five children, four of whom were children of the one subject who had experienced increased environmental stimulation and who achieved greater educational, relationship, employment, and financial success than any other contrast subject. Those four children had normal intelligence, but the one child of a contrast group parent who had low intelligence, a child Skeels believed had been abused, had below-normal intelligence. No experimental subject was divorced, and one contrast group member was divorced. Skeels reported that all of the experimental group adults were employed or married to someone who was. Seven contrast subjects were independent and minimally employed, and four lived in institutions. No experimental group members were mentally ill, but one member of the contrast group was institutionalized because of mental illness. No experimental group member had died, but one contrast group member had died during adolescence of a genetic condition, Gaucher’s disease.
There were significant differences in the costs to the state of Iowa for the two groups. Thirteen experimental group members lived in institutions for a total of 72.3 years, at a cost of about $31,000 (today about $251,000). Twelve contrast group members spent a total of 273 years in institutions, at a cost of about $139,000 (today about $1,122,000). In 1963 the experimental group’s median income was $5,220 (in current dollars, about $42,000). The median income for the contrast group was $1,200 (today about $9,700).3 The contrast group’s outlier subject, case 19, had yearly earnings greater than the earnings of the rest of the group combined.4 Clearly, the state of Iowa would have benefited financially from improved conditions at Davenport, both in savings from long-term institutionalization and from added tax revenue generated by employed citizens.
Published weeks later, Skeels’s paper described that while most adopted experimental group subjects lived in their own homes and had positive relations with their adoptive families (or if not adopted, with community members), contrast group members, with the exception of case 19, tended to live isolated lives. Those who
were not in institutions lived as boarders and had no family contact. He reported that on the 1960 US census socioeconomic status rating scale of 1–100, the experimental group ranked 52.2 and the contrast group ranked 14.4.5
His study, Skeels said, suggested that enough is known to counter the crushing effects of deprivation, lack of money, and ignorance of children’s need for affection and educational stimulation.6 He showed that those in one group might have had completely different lives if they had changed places, early, with the other. And Skeels told an interviewer of his hope that the grievous lives of those in the contrast group might serve as a warning so that “their lives will not have been in vain.”7
Skeels’s Chicago account and the research monograph that followed would radically reshape psychology’s perception of the Iowa station’s discoveries. But reported in just a few small-town newspapers, the results would only become widely known to the public in August of 1967 in a feature article published in Redbook, a popular women’s magazine. “The Case of the Wandering IQs,” Bernard Asbell’s detailed account of Skeels’s work, told of Davenport’s neglect, the children’s startling progress, and the adult outcomes that, at long last, had begun to convince Skeels himself.
Asbell, who taught writing at Yale and served as president of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, wrote that Skeels credited the work of Samuel A. Kirk and Martin Deutsch, 1960s scholars whose investigations confirmed Iowa’s discoveries. Asbell’s article captured psychology’s understanding of how the effects of environment contributed to Head Start, the national program that provides stimulating preschool experience to economically deprived populations. With some journalistic overstatement, Asbell wrote that “almost overnight the ‘wandering IQ’ . . . became a subject of high fashion in educational and psychological research,”8 but despite his remarkable discoveries, Asbell pointed out, almost no one knew Harold Skeels’s name.
The Orphans of Davenport Page 28