THE ORPHANS OF DAVENPORT

A psychologist with experience in public education limns the 20th-century conflict over intelligence that raged for decades.

Brookwood makes her book debut with a revealing and thoroughly researched history of the long and fierce controversy about whether intelligence is inherited or influenced by environment, a debate in which eugenicists played a prominent role. Convinced that intelligence is hereditary and that people of low intelligence—particularly Blacks, immigrants, and the poor—should be barred from procreating, they advocated for sterilization of women who scored low on IQ tests, showed evidence of mental illness, suffered from alcoholism, or engaged in prostitution. By the 1920s, all states had laws permitting involuntary sterilization. Brookwood centers her attention on two groundbreaking psychologists: Howard Skeels and Marie Skodak, based at the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, who, in the 1930s, compared the IQ’s of children raised in overcrowded orphanages, where they were isolated and ignored, with children either adopted or sent to live in an institution for women diagnosed as mentally deficient, where they received loving attention by the inmates. In contrast to the prevailing assumption that IQ was innate, Skeels and Skodak found remarkable improvement among children placed in a nurturing, stimulating environment. As soon as their findings were publicized, they were viciously attacked by the influential psychologist Lewis Terman, who insisted that intelligence was an “innate, unmodifiable entity.” Threatening his reputation, Skeels and Skodak remained in his crosshairs until his death in the 1950s. Drawing on a dozen rich archives, Brookwood meticulously documents the scholarly dispute, which played out in journals and at conferences, and she reports many intriguing case histories of individual children, including those involved in a longitudinal study that Skeels and Skodak conducted, under the auspices of the National Institute of Mental Health, when the subjects were adults. That study confirmed their findings; other studies, too, testified to the benefit of preschool movements and lay the groundwork for efforts such as Head Start.

A substantive contribution to the history of psychology.