"Doomed from birth" was how psychologist Harold Skeels described two
toddler girls at the Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home in Davenport, Iowa, in
1934. Their IQ scores, added together, totaled just 81. Following
prevailing eugenic beliefs of the times, Skeels and his colleague Marie
Skodak assumed that the girls had inherited their parents' low
intelligence and were therefore unfit for adoption. The girls were sent
to an institution for the "feebleminded" to be cared for by "moron"
women. To Skeels and Skodak's astonishment, under the women's care, the
children's IQ scores became normal.
Now considered one of the most important scientific findings of the
twentieth century, the discovery that environment shapes children's
intelligence was also one of the most fiercely contested--and its origin
story has never been told. In The Orphans of Davenport, psychologist
and esteemed historian Marilyn Brookwood chronicles how a band of young
psychologists in 1930s Iowa shattered the nature-versus-nurture debate
and overthrew long-accepted racist and classist views of childhood
development.
Transporting readers to a rural Iowa devastated by dust storms and
economic collapse, Brookwood reveals just how profoundly unlikely it was
for this breakthrough to come from the Iowa Child Welfare Research
Station. Funded by the University of Iowa and the Rockefeller
Foundation, and modeled on America's experimental agricultural stations,
the Iowa Station was virtually unknown, a backwater compared to the
renowned psychology faculties of Stanford, Harvard, and Princeton.
Despite the challenges they faced, the Iowa psychologists replicated
increased intelligence in thirteen more "retarded" children.
When Skeels published their incredible work, America's leading
psychologists--eugenicists all--attacked and condemned his conclusions.
The loudest critic was Lewis M. Terman, who advocated for forced
sterilization of low-intelligence women and whose own widely accepted IQ
test was threatened by the Iowa research. Terman and his opponents
insisted that intelligence was hereditary, and their prestige ensured
that the research would be ignored for decades. Remarkably, it was not
until the 1960s that a new generation of psychologists accepted
environment's role in intelligence and helped launch the modern field of
developmental neuroscience..
Drawing on prodigious archival research, Brookwood reclaims the Iowa
researchers as intrepid heroes and movingly recounts the stories of the
orphans themselves, many of whom later credited the psychologists with
giving them the opportunity to forge successful lives. A radiant story
of the power and promise of science to better the lives of us all, The
Orphans of Davenport unearths an essential history at a moment when
race science is dangerously resurgent.
