3/4: Marilyn Brookwood, THE ORPHANS OF DAVENPORT: Eugenics, the Great Depression, and the War over Children's Intelligence, by Marilyn Brookwood
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 17 December 2023
⏱️ 12 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Orphans-Davenport-Depression-Childrens-Intelligence/dp/1631494686
The fascinating―and eerily timely―tale of the forgotten, Depression-era psychologists who launched the modern science of childhood development.
“Doomed from birth” was how the 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.
1922 DC orphans
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This episode is brought to you by Ugg. |
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| 0:23.8 | Shrop the new winter lifestyle collection at ugg.com. This is CBSi and the world. I'm John Bachelor. Marilyn Brookwood. It's the author of The Orphans of Davenport, |
| 0:39.7 | eugenics, The Great Depression, and the War War for Children's Intelligence. |
| 0:44.5 | We go now to our heroes. |
| 0:45.9 | Harold Skeels, his colleague Maurice Skodak, who becomes a PhD student in Iowa in the |
| 0:51.7 | mid-1930s. Their Their director George Stoddard, we mentioned Beth |
| 0:55.5 | Wellman though we don't have time to tell the story but this was a supportive |
| 0:59.4 | atmosphere at the at the University of Iowa, Davenport is an orphanage that was established philanthropically |
| 1:08.2 | at the end of the Civil War for orphans for children of deceased or damaged children. for from all over Iowa and put them up for adoption. Harold Skeels and Maurice Kodak |
| 1:26.4 | with a car that's provided to them take upon themselves to visit the families |
| 1:31.2 | who've adopted children over the years to see if there's been |
| 1:34.7 | a change in the children. |
| 1:37.1 | And they travel all over in the winter of 35 and in the spring of 35. |
| 1:42.1 | And Maryland, these case studies are gripping because what they |
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