Anti-eugenics research in 1930s Iowa

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I came across the book The Orphans of Davenport: Eugenics, the Great Depression, and the War Over Children's this week, and thought it would be interesting especially to the Iowans who read my blog. It tells the history of psychological research in Iowa in the 1930s that unsuccessfully (at the time) tried to to overturn beliefs about eugenics.

In the 1930s psychologists thought that IQ was fixed by genetics, that environment didn't matter that much, and that maybe people with low IQs should be sterilized. Biologists had largely dropped these views, but they persisted in psychology.

Then some researchers at University of Iowa realized:

  • hmm, when we put kids from intelligent parents in orphanages where they are neglected, they get less intelligent

  • hey, when kids who don't seem smart are taken from neglectful orphanages and put with loving families, they get smarter

  • wow, the longer a kid is exposed to neglect, the less intelligent they seem to be

Turns out that the environment a kid is raised in has a much larger effect on their intelligence than their genetics.

These were wild and surprising findings at the time and caused an uproar in the US psychology community. They were essentially buried, the researchers reputations' tarnished, and everyone went back to thinking that genetics were all that mattered. Then the Nazis made that super unfashionable, and psychology finally moved away from eugenics post WW2.

A very interesting book if you're interesting in the history of psychology, Iowa, or attitudes towards intelligence/eugenics. I skim-read the book in ~2 hours. It's nice that someone cataloged all this detail about the personalities involved, but it wasn't what I was interested in.

This book is probably more pro-Iowa than any other book I have read is pro any state. I'm from Davenport and have a brother with Down Syndrome, so there's definitely wishful thinking on my part to believe that historically Iowa has been at the front of anti-eugenics and nurturing children who would otherwise be left behind. But from what I can tell based on what is presented in this book, there is some truth to this view.

Other interesting bits to me:

  • Basically none of rural Iowa had no electricity in the 30s (tracks with what my grandma has told me)

  • Babies in the Davenport Home (now Annie Wittenmeyer for any Davenportians) were just put in cribs and left to sit there for months. They were fed and changed, but the only stimulation they had was the sunlight on the ceiling: "Light to shadows to darkness and then light again would have been everything she learned about the world."

  • The culture of the Iowa Station (research station at University of Iowa) was critical to allowing the truth-seeking - rather an accepting given psychological dogma. Great management and institutions really matter!