How much of a person’s intelligence do you think is genetic, and how much do you think is a product of his or her environment (how he/she was raised, education, etc.)?
If your answer was not “100% genetic”, it might be difficult to imagine a time when almost all professionals, including psychologists, believed that intelligence was static throughout one’s lifetime and was completely hereditary. That is the setting of Marilyn Brookwood’s new book, The Orphans of Davenport: Eugenics, the Great Depression, and the War over Children’s Intelligence. It recounts the story of the four Iowa psychologists who discovered that children’s intelligence can change dramatically due to environmental factors. However, these men and women were not believed by some of the most powerful people in the field at the time, so their names were besmirched and their research buried for years until other psychologists were willing to put aside their biases and listen to the truth.
A short history lesson may help with the context here. In the wake of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, some scientists quickly began to misguidedly apply Darwin’s theory to social questions. In other words, “survival of the fittest” began to describe not only how nature works but how social groups have gained power in history and in society. For example, some began to explain the white Europeans had become powerful on the global scale because they were “the fittest”: more intelligent than other racial or ethnic groups. This idea is often referred to as Social Darwinism. I could go into a historical analysis that debunks this idea, but most likely if you are reading this you would reject Social Darwinism out of hand.
Social Darwinism then led to the philosophy of eugenics, the belief that, since some people are born more “fit” than others, societies should encourage the breeding of “good stock”: those with “good” characteristics should be encouraged to have children and those with “bad” characteristics (“inferior races”, the poor, criminals, etc.) should be prevented from having children. Sometimes this prevention took the form of forced sterilizations in women who were deemed to have “bad genes”. Yes, this happened in America, and it was much more recent than we want to believe.
Many famous psychologists of the era were eugenicists. Francis Galton (cousin of Charles Darwin and a psychologist who pioneered psychometrics, fingerprinting, and much more), Charles Spearman (also a pioneer in intelligence research), and Lewis Terman (creator of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales and a major player in The Orphans of Davenport) were all eugenicists. The eugenics movement was the dominant force in intelligence research in the 1920s, and that is where the Iowa psychologists began to change the field forever (at least eventually).

The Orphans of Davenport gives immense detail to the story of how four psychologists in Iowa turned the assumptions of eugenicists on their heads. Harold Skeels, Marie Skodak, George Stoddard, and Beth Wellman conducted experiments on children from orphanages who came from terrible backgrounds. Yes, that sounds unethical, but the “experiments” consisted of testing the children’s intelligence after they were placed in more loving, stable environments. The psychologists saw the children’s extremely low IQ scores increase significantly in a very short time period, bringing Lewis Terman’s popular theory of IQ constancy into question.
The story within The Orphans of Davenport is as inspiring as it is insightful. Terman becomes the major villain in the narrative, as does the entire system that is willing to listen to the powerful few in the face of immense evidence that their theories are at least incomplete if not wrong. I do have questions about the accuracy of the intelligence testing at the time (I still have questions about it today, honestly, as I do our ability to define intelligence at all but that’s a topic for another day). The intelligence tests themselves are almost assumed to be accurate representations, and I’m just not sure about that. However, that does not diminish the power and importance of the story here. The Orphans of Davenport is written so that you don’t need a background in psychology or intelligence testing to understand the narrative. It is accessible, poignant, and important.
As questions abound on what gives a life worth, our society must come to terms with the eugenics movement and why it was morally wrong. It is not enough to say that such things are evil, because we may fall into them again in a different form. Knowing that someone’s intelligence is not determined by genetics is one way to counter the idea that one’s worth is not based on one’s birth. The Orphans of Davenport is a fascinating book to begin to learn about intelligence, child development, and the wonders of the human mind.

I received a review copy of The Orphans of Davenport courtesy of Liveright Publishing and NetGalley, but my opinions are my own.

A gripping read that will leave you both depressed and uplifted.

In the 1930s, the principles of eugenics were taken for granted as the truth among psychologists and the general public. "Feebleminded" parents produced "feebleminded" children, who had no future but to be institutionalized and often sterilized, for "the good of society". However, a small group of psychologists working with a disorganized and understaffed Iowa orphanage discovered that this was far from the case: infants classified as having low IQs actually increased their IQ scores to average and above-average levels when given individual care and attention. Unfortunately, their results were mocked and buried by the leading hereditarian psychologists of the day, and they would not be vindicated for decades.

The complex reaction one has to this book comes down to the contrast between the eventual triumph of Skeels, Skoda, and the progressive view that children's outcomes can be improved by improvements to their environments, and the depressing thought of how many thousands of people were written off in infancy, given no love or stimulation, and left to spend their lives in institutions.

The book is brilliantly written, wedding the content and rigor of academic history with the narrative style and readability of pop history. I recommend it to everyone.

This account of intelligence testing and the desire for creating smarter people, as it took place with the children abandoned by parents or otherwise without families and living in state institutions in Iowa is a very mixed bag. While author Brookwood frequently emphasizes her position on the abhorrence of eugenics, she also fails to interrogate the development of IQ tests and the other assessment tools used by researchers. Too often the slightly more humane eugenicists are celebrated over their worse colleagues, and this makes for a rather contradictory narrative.

Vile and shameful time in not only our history, but the world's. Lobotomies were being performed at about the same time and, of course, there's the rise of Hitler (who was actually inspired by the US's treatment of Native Americans and later eugenicists to exterminate people.) In more recent times, there were the poor, neglected Romanian orphans. Nothing good comes of warehousing babies and young children. It was interesting reading more about Alfred Binet's work and how it influenced intelligence testing. The nature vs. nurture aspect was fascinating.. Home life related to parents income has also been shown to be a factor in how much children know at a young age. More wealth, more experiences, better vocabulary, etc... Poorer children have very limited experience, so less vocabulary. Doesn't make them less intelligent, but less educated. I have a limited back ground in the psychology discussed in the book, but I work with children of a variety of backgrounds and have found much in the book to still be true. Kid's benefit from preschool; it exposes them to ideas and knowledge they may not get at home. Breaks my heart to read books like this. Too often children were removed from lower income or or ill or single parents to give to better off people who wanted babies. That in it self caused some horrors... Much can be said about today's love/hate of babies and children. But that's another subject. So much sadness. At least it shows how we all got beyond those days (tho' these new ones aren't looking to good of late) There's still a lot of work to be done. What the future holds is anyone's guess... Good, well researched and readable book.