In 2015, child psychiatrist Joan Luby, founder and director of the Early Emotional Development Program at Washington University’s School of Medicine, in St. Louis, argued that a “healthy human brain represents the foundation of civilization.” She reported that 22 percent of American children live in poverty and that “enhancing the early nurturing environment is a public health issue—critical for child development and cost-effective for society.”46
In 2013, Nobel laureate James Heckman, a University of Chicago economist and leader in policy studies of the economic and human costs of poverty, spelled out that “the accident of birth . . . [is] a principal source of inequality in America today.”47 For Heckman, adult success rests on a foundation of “neural pathways . . . for cognitive, linguistic, social, and emotional competencies . . . all shaped powerfully by the experiences of the developing child. . . . Disadvantage arises more from a lack of cognitive and noncognitive stimulation . . . than simply from the lack of financial resources.”48
Heckman examined two interventions that radically changed the trajectories of children who lived in disadvantaged environments. From 1962 to 1967, the Perry Preschool Program studied 58 low-income African American children in Ypsilanti, Michigan, randomized into experimental and control groups. The experimental children attended preschool in the morning, and each week a teacher visited the children’s homes. Focusing on noncognitive traits such as planning and social skill development, the program raised achievement test scores, because, Heckman observed, when children received such support they were eager to learn. After forty years, the Perry children had significantly higher high school graduation rates and higher salaries, and they owned more homes; they also had fewer arrests, and fewer received welfare. Heckman calculated the rate of return on the cost of the preschool program at 15 to 17 percent, from higher tax revenue, lower criminal justice expenses, and lower remedial education costs.49
Heckman’s second report examined North Carolina’s Abecedarian Project. For five years beginning in 1972, Abecedarian investigated 111 mostly African American children, half from families that lived below the poverty line.50 When it began, the program’s psychologist, Frances Campbell, was a skeptic who believed in nature over nurture. Incredulous that the researchers thought it would be possible to stimulate the cognition of young babies, she asked, “What in the world are you going to teach a baby that little?”51 From 8 weeks to age 5, the children participated for 10 hours per day, five days a week, in a year-round intervention and have been followed for thirty-five years. During the program, teachers met with parents to suggest supplemental activities, helped them locate employment, and provided other support.
The children gained 1.8 years in reading skills and 1.3 years in math. Their IQ scores rose 14 points.52 By age 30 they were four times more likely than those in the control group to graduate from college, 81 percent less likely be on public assistance, and 42 percent more likely to be employed over the previous two years.53 A skeptic no more, Campbell went on to direct Abecedarian research at the University of North Carolina. Along with Heckman, in 2014 she reported that as adults the research subjects had no risk factors for metabolic diseases, heart disease, stroke, and diabetes, while 25 percent of the control group showed those risks.54
In the 1980s, a third high-quality early intervention program, the Chicago Child Parent Centers (CPC), began and continues today. Like its two predecessors, CPC is a dual-generation program for low-income families. However, the program takes a long view, to have its subjects earn higher education degrees, which research calls “the most important . . . outcome of early childhood intervention.”55 CPC studied 1,539 subjects, a far larger cohort than in previous studies. It showed higher third-grade literacy and reduced special education assignments. CPC is nested into the Chicago public schools, and children remain in the program from age 3 until they are about 9 years old. Participants have been studied into their 40s. At a time when college graduation has become essential to climbing the career ladder and when CPC finds “barriers . . . make [that] more difficult for poor and minority youth,” CPC raised “rates of earned degrees by nearly 50%,”56 a success that spills into every aspect of the individual’s future, changes outcomes for family members, and benefits society.
The largest and most widely studied preschool intervention program in the United States, Project Head Start, the program Harold Skeels had discussed with the Shrivers, began in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiative. Its initial goal—six weeks of summer school to provide skills that would equalize children’s later school performance compared with children from more advantaged environments—today seems naive. Head Start soon expanded to a half-day, school-year-long intervention now established in every state and territory. Along with its ancillary program, Early Head Start for children from 8 weeks to 2 years, Head Start serves 38 percent of eligible children—a total of nearly 1 million—including about 50,000 who are homeless and nearly 150,000 who are disabled. About 50 percent of Head Start programs now operate on a full-day, school-year schedule. The program targets school readiness; provides medical and social services, including those for mental health; supplies parents with access to education and job training; and gives children one hot meal per day.57
The value of Head Start has been debated for decades. In 2010, a nationwide, randomly controlled trial found that Head Start’s success appeared limited, with “few sustained benefits” except for improved parent-child relationships through first grade.58 Subsequent evaluations, however, disagree. For example, a 2016 report from the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy research group, showed that “Head Start increased the probability that participants graduate from high school, attend college and receive a post-secondary degree, license, or certification.”59 Brookings found that Head Start significantly increased two qualities important to life success: self-esteem and self-control. In 2013, two Wharton School economists analyzed data collected but not included in Head Start’s own 2010 report that showed Head Start parents became far more involved in their children’s learning. They hypothesized that when parents saw their children’s increased interest in school, they became more committed to their education.60 Moreover, in 2018, Elise Chor, of Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research, discovered that the one-quarter of children whose own mothers had participated in Head Start performed sharply better than Head Start’s full 2010 sample. Through third grade they gained half a standard deviation in literacy and had higher mathematics skills, suggesting that their mothers’ Head Start experience resulted in increased investment in their children’s success.61
With investigations demonstrating that Head Start may significantly increase children’s social and cognitive skills, how can we understand reports that find that some cognitive skills gained in the program may not last? One interpretation may be that children who receive Head Start’s enriched curriculum and responsive attention lose ground when they move to under-resourced “struggling” schools. In those circumstances, education journalist Lillian Mongeau wrote in The Atlantic, “none of the biggest benefits are likely to accrue. Preschool is not an inoculation against the next 12 years of a kid’s life.”62
If the researchers of the 1930s Iowa Child Welfare Research Station could visit Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child, they would see that for all the attacks they endured during their careers, their work has been fully absorbed into the mainstream understanding of early development. One of the most advanced and dynamic institutions of its kind, the center utilizes today’s neuroscience scholarship in the design of policy initiatives in the United States and other nations and also provides information resources that help caregivers understand the needs of children’s developing brains.
The center’s founder and director, developmental pediatrician Jack P. Shonkoff, articulates the science of early development to colleagues and national and international leaders, legislators, policy experts, and even members of the US Hou
se of Representatives. No matter his audience, Shonkoff’s rallying points are clear:
Virtually every aspect of early human development, from the brain’s evolving circuitry to the child’s capacity for empathy, is affected by the environments and experiences that are encountered in a cumulative fashion, beginning early in the prenatal period and extending through the early childhood years.63
Agrainy image of Davenport’s orphans, taken in 1901 when the Iowa Soldier’s Orphans’ Home had been operating for thirty-five years, conveys a sense of all-is-wellness. Posed by the photographer in front of the Davenport Home’s well-kept administration building are a few hundred boys and girls grouped by age—the girls wear matched wide-collared calico dresses and light-colored high button shoes, the boys sport knickers, shirts and ties, high button shoes, and visored caps, some rakishly tilted. The photograph appears in a slim pamphlet authored by Davenport’s superintendent to show off the orphanage and its residents and detail its acceptance procedures. Included are views of the Davenport Home’s 57-acre property, “the most beautiful in the vicinity,”64 its working farm’s planted fields and livestock, and the institution’s two-story school finished with an elaborate cupola. Other views show eighteen children’s “cottages,” once wooden barracks but rebuilt in brick, each housing about twenty-four children and fronting on acres of playing fields equipped with swings and other apparatus.
The superintendent tells of children who arrive from families “of broken-down old soldiers, or from the unfortunate but worthy poor . . . [others] from homes of crime; some come in a most wretched condition.”65 With about 400 residents (by the mid-1930s there would be close to 800), he indicates “almost parental affection . . . between the cottage matron and her little group [where] cheerfulness and contentment reign in these happy cottage homes” and where the children benefit from some luxuries of the time, “pure water . . . steam heat, and electricity.” Sympathetically, he refers to Davenport’s “bright, promising children who . . . if brought under the right influences . . . become good and useful citizens.”66
Even if the pamphlet’s rosy account of institutional contentment were only moderately accurate, it was far from the Davenport Home that Harold Skeels and Marie Skodak found in the 1930s—an institution transformed by that era’s adversity into a place of neglect and indifference. But no one could have predicted that those conditions might cause some children to lose intelligence.
The arc of discovery about the effects of environment that began in Iowa did far more than transform the lives of Davenport’s orphans. It helped to launch a new field that seeks to protect children’s intellectual and social development. The Iowans became some of the first to explain why childhood interventions matter, very much. Their work, validated in Head Start, in the Perry and Abecedarian experiments, and in CPC and others, was shown in fresh detail by the BEIP’s foster care and today inspires countless programs worldwide. Each finding builds on the one before, and together they suggest that even after the stress of adversity, children can recover when caring interventions buffer them from toxic stress, provide stimulation and responsive care, and deliver good education. As Charles Nelson and his colleagues affirm, neuroscience’s expanding knowledge about how to counter the effects of disadvantage brings a special promise: translated into public policy it can relieve the “many ills that have challenged societies for millennia.”67 When that promise comes alive in children’s experience, they can thrive.
Illustrations Insert
The Davenport Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home, 1901. Engraving. (University of Iowa Libraries.)
French experimental psychologist Alfred Binet testing a child’s intelligence, ca. 1905. (AF Fotografie / Alamy Stock Photo.)
Meeting of the National Congress of Mothers, Des Moines, 1900. The Congress was an element of Cora Bussey Hillis’s campaign to establish the Iowa station. (State Historical Society of Iowa, Des Moines, Iowa.)
Wanted: A Child Welfare Bureau. Cartoon by Iowa artist Ding Darling, 1915. (“Ding” Darling Wildlife Society owns the copyright of “Ding” Darling cartoons.)
Bird Baldwin, first Iowa station director, ca. 1920. (State Historical Society of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa,)
Beth Wellman (second adult from left), with University of Iowa laboratory school staff and preschool children, ca. 1930. (F. W. Kent Photographs Collection, RG 30.0001.001, University of Iowa Archives.)
Bird Baldwin and laboratory preschool staff. (F. W. Kent Photographs Collection, RG 30.0001.001, University of Iowa Archives.)
Harold Skeels at Iowa State College, 1927. (Iowa State University Special Collections and University Archives.)
Marie Skodak at The Ohio State University, 1933. (Ohio State University Libraries.)
The Girls’ Cottage at the Glenwood Institution for Feebleminded Children housed adult low-intelligence women who were called “girls.” The Davenport orphans lived with the women in their wards. (Photo by Marilyn Brookwood.)
George Stoddard, second director of the Iowa station, ca. 1935. (Staff and Faculty Vertical File Collection (folder: Stoddard, George), RG 01.0015.003, University of Iowa Archives.)
The Nursing cottage, Davenport Home, ca. 1930. (Davenport Public Library.)
Typical wicker basket Marie Skodak would have used to transport infants to the Davenport Home. (F. W. Kent Photographs Collection, RG 30.0001.001, University of Iowa Archives.)
Davenport Home preschool, 1934. (University of Iowa Libraries.)
Iowan Henry A. Wallace, who served as Secretary of Agriculture (1933–1940) under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and as FDR’s Vice President from 1941 to January 1945.
Charles B. Davenport, American biologist and director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the Eugenics Record Office, 1914. (Courtesy of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives.)
Eugenics Record Office workers, Cold Spring Harbor, New York, ca. 1920. (Courtesy of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives.)
Eugenics Society exhibit on human inheritance, used at meetings and state fairs, 1920s–1930s.
Eugenicist Henry H. Goddard in his Ohio State University office, ca. 1930. (Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology, The University of Akron.)
Lewis M. Terman, Stanford University, 1923. (National Library of Medicine.)
Carrie Buck with her mother, 1924.
Journalist Walter Lippmann, who challenged Lewis Terman’s eugenic ideas, ca. 1920. (Getty / Bettmann.)
Herbert Spencer Jennings, Johns Hopkins geneticist who rejected eugenics, ca. 1925. (From History of the University of Michigan, 1906, by Burke Aaron Hinsdale, p. 353.)
Nazi eugenic policies portrayed by Iowa cartoonist Ding Darling, 1933. (“Ding” Darling Wildlife Society owns the copyright of “Ding” Darling cartoons.)
Depression-era Iowa hut, ca. 1938. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection.)
Potatoes, cabbage, and pie: Christmas dinner near Smithland, Iowa, 1936. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection.)
“This Farmer is not on Government Relief.” Sign posted at a Rock Island, Illinois, farm, 1 mile from Davenport, Iowa, 1940. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographic Division, FSA/OWI Collection.)
Cell biologist Alfred Mirsky (right) with developmental biologist Eric Davidson, Rockefeller Institute, 1963. (Getty / Art Rickerby.)
Children at Vasliu Orphanage, Romania, ca. 1990. (Getty / Bernard Bisson.)
Developmental neuroscientist Charles Nelson, who studied the Romanian orphans.
Neuroendocrinologist Bruce McEwen, one of the scientists who pioneered the study of how stress impacts the brain. (The Rockefeller University.)
Jack Shonkoff, director of Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child, which relates developmental science to governmental policies that impact children and families.
Louis Branca, during army training for his pilot’s license, ca. 1952. (Courtesy of Cass Dalglish, Lou Branca’s widow and literary executor
of his memoir Little Boy Blue—Case Number Eleven.)
Louis Branca in 2012, holding Kennedy Foundation’s International Award, sent to him in 1970 by Harold Skeels. (Photo courtesy of Marilyn Brookwood.)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Orphans of Davenport benefited from comprehensive scholarship about the Iowa station from Hamilton Cravens, who addressed the station’s challenge to eugenics as a clash of opposing views of social enlightenment and who spoke with me at length about his findings. Also, Lewis Terman’s biographer Henry Minton deepened my understanding of Terman’s commitment to eugenics and generously replied to my queries concerning Terman’s motivations and shortcomings. Psychologist Bernadine Barr’s perceptive investigations of institutional life were essential, as were her reviews of my drafts and her consistent support for this project. And most crucial were the recollections of Marie Skodak Crissey, who recognized the importance of the Iowans’ discoveries and in the decades after the station’s work had ended became its unofficial historian. Fundamental to the narrative were the unpublished papers, drafts, letters, memos, and reports she saved.
The Orphans of Davenport Page 32