The Orphans of Davenport by Marilyn Brookwood

Author:Marilyn Brookwood [Brookwood, Marilyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2021-06-25T00:00:00+00:00

While Stoddard stood up for the Iowans’ groundbreaking work, he knew his defense had been hobbled by an inability to rebut the severe critique that McNemar and Terman had withheld. He knew, too, that in the following weeks, as psychologists gained access to McNemar’s paper, they would find it had borrowed Terman’s combative style, promising to “demolish,” “destroy,” and “explode” Iowa’s argument. But Stoddard’s controlled demeanor cracked only once in St. Louis—when he addressed Terman’s stratagem that had kept the paper out of the Yearbook. “The largest single body of criticism directed, as you may surmise, against the rather massive Iowa materials, was never available for the Yearbook itself.”21 McNemar, Stoddard explained, had chosen to publish his paper elsewhere. Stoddard labeled the paper’s rhetoric “the tactics of a criminal lawyer” adding, “In such a melee truth is not so much crushed as smeared.”22 Finally, George Stoddard had lost his cool.

As the content of McNemar’s paper, published in February, filtered through the profession, the months that followed the meeting confirmed Stoddard’s fears. Although filled with careless or deliberate omissions and distortions, as well as criticism of the Iowans’ statistics, some of it unreasonable or so unnecessarily complex that it eluded many readers, the paper accomplished what McNemar and Terman had sought: the shadow it cast on the Iowans’ competence intensified doubts about their results.

McNemar’s review began by maligning the Iowans because, following their initial publication in scholarly journals, their discoveries often appeared in the popular press, a criticism Terman had also made in his July 7 attack at Stanford. “The new gospel,” McNemar wrote, “is being carried beyond . . . journals.”23 This summoned the age-old academic prejudice against any work that achieved popular acceptance—the perception that it must be slick or specious. As an example, McNemar cited a Wellman article that had appeared in the New York Times. He did not seem to know that the Iowa station’s charter required that it inform the public of its discoveries. According to Stoddard, every article that appeared in nonacademic publications was submitted at the magazine or newspaper’s request or came from local or national media coverage.24 Moreover, sixty letters between Wiggam and Terman written from 1925 to 1953 reveal that Terman regularly supported Wiggam’s popular-press articles, even providing him with suggested text.25

McNemar then tore apart the results of Wellman’s 1932 preschool study, Skeels and Wellman’s 1938 Davenport preschool study, Skodak’s 1938 and 1939 adoption studies, along with the Iowans’ other investigations that demonstrated the effects of environment. For reasons that are not clear, McNemar did not attack, or even mention, Skeels and Dye’s 1939 study of Davenport’s orphans at Woodward and Glenwood.

In his critique of Davenport’s preschool investigation, McNemar claimed that Iowa’s statistical analyses of children’s intelligence were inaccurate because over three years “only a few” of the original children remained in the experimental and control groups due to the adoptions of the others. In fact, eleven of the original twenty-one experimental children left the study because they were adopted. Each time this occurred, another child, similar in age, sex, and IQ, had been substituted.

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