HEART-BREAKING PREJUDICE: 3/4: Marilyn Brookwood, THE ORPHANS OF DAVENPORT: Eugenics, the Great Depression, and the War over Children's Intelligence, by Marilyn Brookwood
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John Batchelor
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🗓️ 23 July 2023
⏱️ 11 minutes
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HEART-BREAKING PREJUDICE: 3/4: Marilyn Brookwood, THE ORPHANS OF DAVENPORT: Eugenics, the Great Depression, and the War over Children's Intelligence, by Marilyn Brookwood
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.
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS High in the World, I'm John Batch, for Marilyn Brookwood, it's the author |
| 0:08.4 | of The Orphans of Davenport, Eugenics, The Great Depression, and The War of Earth Children's |
| 0:13.1 | Intelligence. |
| 0:14.7 | We go now to our heroes, Harold Skiel's, his colleague, Marie Skodak, who becomes a |
| 0:19.6 | PhD student in Iowa in the mid-1930s. |
| 0:23.5 | Their director, George Stoddard, we mentioned Beth Welman, though we don't have time to |
| 0:27.2 | tell the story, but this was a supportive atmosphere at the University of Iowa. |
| 0:33.3 | Davenport is an orphanage that was established philanthropically at the end of the Civil |
| 0:39.9 | War for orphans, for children of deceased or damaged Civil War veterans. |
| 0:46.5 | It becomes, by 1900, a place where they take on orphans from all over Iowa and put |
| 0:53.1 | them up for adoption. |
| 0:55.1 | Harold Skiel's and Marie Skodak, with a car that's provided to them, take upon themselves |
| 1:00.1 | to visit the families who've adopted children over the years to see if there's been a change |
| 1:05.6 | in the children. |
| 1:07.3 | And they travel all over in the winter of 35 and in the spring of 35. |
| 1:12.3 | And Marilyn, these case studies are gripping because what they expect to find and what |
| 1:17.5 | they do find are completely different. |
| 1:20.3 | I love the scene that you paint where the adoptive parents hang back out of the room |
| 1:25.1 | as Marie Skodak and Harold Skiel sit down with these small children. |
| 1:29.5 | They can be three months, three years, or four years old. |
| 1:33.3 | And the parents are extremely worried that they'll be judged not worthy and taken back |
| 1:39.6 | to Davenport or put into Glenwood for the home for the feeble-minded. |
... |
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