4/4: 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
⏱️ 10 minutes
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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
1925 national photo company collection
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city orphans
ambassador theatre
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a new book, The Orrhenes of the World. I'm John Bachelor. |
| 0:07.0 | Marilyn Brookwood is the author of the new book The Orphans of Davenport, |
| 0:11.0 | eugenics, The Great Depression, and the war over children's intelligence. |
| 0:14.8 | Harold Skills and Marie Skodak have now proved that their observation from the 1930s |
| 0:21.4 | are very much in shape in the 1960s when they revisit these children |
| 0:28.0 | who were placed in loving homes and developed very quickly having escaped the idea that they would be trapped in an orphanage |
| 0:36.7 | forever as they were called feeble-minded, they were called imbeciles, they were called morons, |
| 0:41.4 | these were terms used by eugenicists what happened to the eugenicis chiefly |
| 0:45.9 | what happened is the crimes of the second war chiefly what happened although there were |
| 0:51.2 | crimes in all directions, sterilization was routinely |
| 0:54.6 | practiced in the 1930s and 1940s. People who were isolated or schizophrenic were treated |
| 1:02.4 | as somebody like criminals all of this happened but |
| 1:05.1 | Marilyn eugenicists disappeared at people stop talking about it has there been any |
| 1:11.6 | effort to very carefully go back in places like Stanford to |
| 1:16.3 | Columbia or the University of Illinois University of Michigan and identify |
| 1:20.9 | those who offer the Ohio State University, Marie Scodex alma mater, |
| 1:27.0 | and to go back over the eugenicist and identify their prejudices and make it clear that these that the faculty went a ride. |
| 1:35.4 | Do they talk about it today, Maryland? |
| 1:37.8 | No, sadly, there hasn't been that kind of an effort. |
| 1:41.6 | What happened after the revelations of what the Nazis had done in |
| 1:47.4 | concentration camps was so horrifying to the nation that eugenics was just not mentioned at all after that period. |
| 1:59.8 | It's sometimes in the 60s some of that idea came back and they call it scientific racism. |
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