Love at Goon Park (14 page)

Of course, Harry also made Maslow work hard. Because Lewis Terman's standards were drilled into him, Harry insisted that Maslow make a rigorous study for his doctoral dissertation. When his graduate student protested that they'd already done innovative research—couldn't he just write that up?—Harry assured him in advance that the new work would be even more brilliant.

Maslow's dissertation was on relationships. Who has power, who doesn't? He spent hours at the zoo, watched thirty-five primates, from newborn to ancient, from spider monkey to baboon. He recorded every instance of what he considered dominant and submissive behavior. The resulting paper reads like a dictator's guidebook—and a testament to the way that hierarchy shapes social lives.

There was a clear sense of the system's winners and losers. Maslow pointed out that the power monkeys, the alpha males, pretty much had it their own way. They took food whenever they wanted it from other monkeys. They bullied subordinates. They initiated fights if they sensed a challenge. And they were always able to score sexually. The alpha male is pretty much guaranteed fatherhood and genetic success. Subordinate behavior was the near opposite. Male monkeys low in the hierarchy would cower when the power males strutted by. They were passive when attacked or muscled away from the females they had been courting. Their behavior was purely defensive; if challenged, they ran. This was hardly a position that promised a wonderful genetic future.

Maslow saw the ruler-and-serf pattern repeated across species. He concluded that the top-bottom structure defines most primate societies—monkeys, apes, and, although he did not say this, undoubtedly our own. In more recent years, primate researchers have marveled at the way a monkey pecking order can resemble a large
corporation or a military hierarchy. If social order is controlled through dominance, Maslow said, even sexual relationships can assert power rather than affection. There's little doubt that the latter also represents a facet of behavior that unfortunately is observed in human societies.

Maslow showed that monkeys need beautifully tuned social skills to navigate these often risky social byways. He had been startled to see how savvy the monkeys were in dealing with each other. Primates in the wild could establish a relationship just by the way they looked at each other or gestured back and forth, he said. They could read body language. After studying each other, they might start a gentle grooming or they might just hurry the hell out of there. Such subtle exchanges served many of the animals well. It often allowed them, Maslow pointed out, to avoid bloody, destructive fighting.

If an alpha male could just intimidate a young male challenger into backing off, he didn't need to beat him away. That result might just delay the fight—but, for the moment, both monkeys remained physically intact. The zoo, of course, didn't have enough animals in its colony for researchers to observe the full social range of behaviors. But it was clear that a social primate definitely needed to understand a vast and potentially treacherous terrain of relationships. If you didn't like your place in the landscape, you needed to understand whether it was possible to move. For a young, ambitious monkey, the critical point in that decision would be challenging the hierarchy without, say, getting killed before achieving adulthood. If that didn't look possible, then, obviously, the key to a successful life was learning how to get along.

For most of us, Maslow concluded, getting along with each other was exactly the way to navigate through a long life—and, perhaps, even a happy one.

Harry was unabashedly proud of Maslow's work. In his view, the work on dominance was one of the best studies on power relations ever done. And Maslow had accomplished it, Harry pointed out, in a small zoo, working under a professor who had no research budget.
“Now that is creativity, when you can work with nothing and make a great scientific breakthrough,” he wrote.

Even so, Harry was getting tired of working with nothing. He knew, Maslow knew, that monkeys were extraordinary animals. But almost no one else did. There was no network of federal primate research centers, although later Harry would help create that network. He no longer wanted a rat laboratory. He wanted a primate lab. To be taken seriously, he needed a place where he could gather his own animals, control his own experiments. Reporting out of the local zoo was not going to work indefinitely. It had been two years, by now, since Harry had arrived in Madison. The university still showed no interest in providing him research space of any kind. He was out of patience. If he was going to work in some outpost of science, a psychologist on monkey island, then he wanted a decent island.

The story of how Harry Harlow built the first primate lab at the University of Wisconsin still stands as a testament to determination—and deviousness.

In 1932, the university finally offered him an abandoned building. Harry described this gift horse as a “twenty-six-foot-square, two-story building on the wrong side of the Milwaukee Railroad tracks.” The building was an old forest service property, built to test wood products such as crates and boxes. The interior was a maze of reinforced concrete posts. Some were slender spikes. The largest were sixteen feet tall and six feet by three feet at the base. The ground floor also held a tangle of disconnected pipes. The university would let Harry have the building as long as he didn't expect much in the way of remodeling money or help with the construction. He didn't care. It was a space, his space. “It looked awfully good to us,” he said.

Harry persuaded a new graduate student, Paul Settlage, to help work on the building. Settlage was a friend of Maslow's. He was far less sure of where he wanted to go with psychology and more than willing to join in such a nontraditional approach to the field. Bearing sledgehammers, he and his professor marched up to the proposed
laboratory. First, Harry wanted to clear out the forest of pipes and pillars. They managed to smash out a couple of small pillars, but the big ones barely cracked. The next day, Paul brought a cousin, Walter Grether, who was working on a degree in physics. The three of them chipped away a few more pillars. The next day, Paul and Walter brought pneumatic hammers.

Within a week, neither Harry nor his student helpers resembled anything like members of an academic department. They were gritty with concrete, dust, and sweat. By the time they had finished clearing out the factory—Harry estimated that they removed a good thousand feet of pipe—they looked like bodybuilders. Harry was struck by their newly bulging biceps and chunky shoulder muscles. “No matter how abstract our research became, it started out by being very concrete,” he joked. By the end of the project, Grether had decided that psychology—or perhaps Harry Harlow—was a lot more interesting than physics. He changed his major.

“They just don't make graduate students like that these days,” Harry once said, acknowledging that his early protegees not only studied at the primate lab, they built it. But when he and his team had finished remodeling the box factory, they immediately realized that it was too small. The university refused to approve or finance an expansion. Again, Harry was ready to get around that. There was a fair amount of land around the old building and one of his students had suggested that they might at least build some outdoor cages. Harry appealed to the university for materials to build these lightweight structures. This time, he won official approval.

It was all he needed. After all, Harry reasoned, the cages needed a concrete floor that could be hosed down. And you can't just pour cement straight onto the ground. So they put down six inches of cinders, four inches of crushed rock, and poured a good solid foundation. This was heavy work, obviously; but Harry had a few members of the football team in his class and he talked them into helping, “since they weren't doing very well in their studies.” Watching the halfbacks and fullbacks heave sacks of cement around was “a beautiful
sight,” Harry said. They were in such good condition, he was sure they would have an undefeated season.

And as long as they were putting down such a good foundation, Harry thought they might as well put up good wall framing. Why not build those frames with studs that would allow doors and windows? He and his students covered the walls with insulating material. But then, well, Harry worried about the roof. After all, it snowed a lot in Wisconsin. So they put on a solid, sturdy roof. But then the wellinsulated walls and the roof made the cages so dark that no one could see anything inside them. “There is no use in having an observation cage if you can't see in it,” Harry said. So they cut out spaces for windows. As long as they were doing that, it seemed reasonable to open up the doors, too.

It occurred to Harry that the cages would get pretty hot in the sun. The only solution seemed to be to cover them with better insulation. So they covered the insulating panels with siding. “The drop siding cost considerable money. The only sensible answer seemed to be to give it a coat of paint.” And then it turned out that the tarpaper on the roof kept peeling up. So they re-covered the roof with asbestos shingles. The shingles happened to have a twenty-year warranty. The new structure was so close to the lab building that it made sense to add corridors connecting it to the laboratory. The lab crew could do that with leftover concrete and wood scraps. “When we finished, we were horrified to see how much these Outdoor Observation Cages looked like real buildings.”

The university was horrified, too. Harry received what he called a “very sharp note” from the comptroller saying that it was absolutely illegal to build wooden buildings that didn't meet state specifications. Harry was unfazed. He had just loaned the university president a monkey (as a pet for the president's son), and the chief administrator himself had picked it up. Harry and his students were sitting on the roof, driving in nails at the time. “After we put on our shirts, we had a very friendly chat with the president. As far as we could tell, he wouldn't have cared if all his staff built laboratories.”

So Harry wrote to the comptroller explaining that this was just a project that had gotten out of hand. And, by the way, it needed some electrical wiring, steam heat, overhead lights, and good ventilating fans to really be up to code. While the university electricians were connecting the fans, Harry persuaded them to wire in floor plugs. The following year, his new extension appeared on the official campus map.

The laboratory now resembled nothing so much as a ramshackle house with a deeply overgrown yard. Harry dug into his own pockets again and paid for some shrubbery to give the laboratory—and the monkeys—some privacy. The researchers planted ivy and grapes along the fence, honeysuckle bushes, wisteria, lilacs, forsythia, pine trees, and poplars. “In the summer, we couldn't see out and others couldn't see in.”

It was a cheerful, informal place. Everyone had to do odd jobs to make it work, including the professor. If students were short of money, Harry let them unfold cots and sleep there. One summer, Paul and Walter, almost broke, moved into the laboratory and made their meals out of bread and fish caught from the campus lake. They occasionally shared tidbits with the monkeys. One black spider monkey named Gandhi loved the fish so much that they eventually let him join them at the backyard table for lunch. “By the end of the summer, Gandhi had table manners that would have been a credit to a Harvard man,” Harry said.

He was building up his small colony of monkeys: spider monkeys, like Gandhi, who were agile South American tree dwellers; a small group of capuchins, another South American rainforest species, once famed as organ grinder monkeys. There were Asian monkeys, too, especially sturdy rhesus macaques from India, who would eventually become the primary lab dwellers. The monkeys were built differently, colored differently, and regarded each other with deep suspicion. They seemed equally suspicious of their captors—but not hostile. Harry once accidentally locked himself into a monkey cage and only escaped when three passing sailors, home on leave, heard him
yelling and pried the door off its hinges. The monkeys had apparently considered Harry an extremely odd cage mate because they gave him as much room as possible during the entire episode.

Occasionally—too frequently—the animals escaped themselves. They could free themselves from cages far more adeptly, Harry noted, than researchers. In his early days, he said, they often had at least one monkey in a tree. On one occasion, half a dozen macaques terrorized a small neighborhood near the campus for more than a week. They raided restaurant kitchens and threw acorns out of trees at passersby until they were finally trapped after trooping through a window to explore a second-floor apartment.

At this point, Harry had wonderful stories to tell—during the week-long monkey escape, he had received a letter from Canada advising him to get the animals drunk—and some genuinely compelling studies of monkey intelligence. Mostly, he had small-scale tests at the zoo. Now, he had a place to show off what he—and, more important, his monkeys—could do. He had big plans for the systematic, controlled studies that would convince the behaviorist, ratmodel-trained psychologists who surrounded him. Now that his laboratory was completed—shabby, patched together, but there—he had every intention of tackling some of the mysteries of the thinking brain. Of course, he still wasn't sure exactly how to do that.

FOUR

The Curiosity Box

 

 

 

AT THE LITTLE LAB IN MADISON, Harry had a group of three capuchins, those limber, bright-eyed animals once known as organ grinder's monkeys. He named them Capuchin, Cinnamon, and Red. God, they were smart.