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Authors: Deborah Blum

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There's an image I'd like to leave you with, from a day where I was visiting the Vilas Park Zoo in my hometown of Madison, Wisconsin. I was, as usual, admiring the monkeys and apes there and, yes, having a mental discussion with Harry Harlow. He did his first primate studies here with a pair of elderly orangutans. I went to visit the current family of orangutans. I actually love to look at them, their gray Stone Age faces and their powerful copper-haired bodies. On this day, the Vilas orangutans were outside with a new baby, wonderfully tiny in comparison to its bulky parents. I wrote then: “The orangutans at the Vilas zoo have a new baby. The mother holds it, heart to heart, as if letting go would violate all the natural laws of life. Perhaps science is finally catching up with common sense, as Harry liked to say. Perhaps the answer is as simple as the view through the glass: mother and child so close together that you might imagine the two hearts beating as one.”
I wouldn't change a word of that today. But I would add this hope: that our understanding of such principles, that the more sophisticated research built on the work of Harlow and his colleagues, helps us find a way to heal those who never had such moments, people like those described by the hospital nurse, people still looking for that solid foundation of affection. It would be an excellent end to the Harry Harlow story.
Acknowledgments
THE SAY THAT WRITING A BOOK is a solitary operation, but they lie. Oh, there are moments, when one is shackled to the keyboard, that it feels like a confinement. Moments stuck in the quicksand of some sentence, when you realize that no one else can save you from being sucked down. There are maybe too many moments when the book sounds so loudly in one's thoughts that it's almost difficult to hear anyone else over the thunder of the language inside.
But mostly, writing nonfiction is a community project. No one tells a story such as this, the story of another's life, the story of a changing science, without help, and lots of it. These travels through the life and times of Harry Frederick Harlow could not have been accomplished without many guides. The words that come to my mind are generous and patient and those words describe the people who helped me assemble, fragment by piece, the intricate mosaic that makes up a life.
I owe endless gratitude to Robert Israel, Harry's oldest son, and Helen LeRoy, one of Harry's closest colleagues and friends, for their time and many kindnesses. Bob Israel, who lives on one of the loveliest hillsides in the Pacific Northwest, invited me to his home and spent hours talking to me about family history, lending me photos, copies of his father's drawings and poems, and even sending me pages from an unpublished autobiography that he found boxed up deep in a closet. Helen LeRoy, here in Madison, who has carefully preserved the letters and documents and artifacts that illuminate Harry Harlow's life, put up with a near constant barrage of e-mails and questions and requests for documents and meetings to go over
facts; and she remained ever gracious and, equally important, meticulous about the accuracy of the story.
I also want to thank Harry's son, Rick Potter, Harry's daughter, Pamela Harlow, and his brother-in-law, Robert Kuenne, for their help with questions about family life. My gratitude also to the gracious people in Fairfield, Iowa, Harry Harlow's home town, who went into the local archives for me, located old neighbors, and drove me all through town so that I could understand the social geography of Jefferson County. In particular, I would like to thank Jim Rubis, Ron Gobble, and Hazel Montgomery.
I wish I could list every one of Harry's former students and colleagues who dug into their own files to find correspondence and dug themselves out of my avalanche of questions with kindness and humor. I particularly want to mention Robert Zimmermann, who worked with Harry on the first cloth-mother studies. Bob and his wife, Marian, invited me to their Michigan home, lent me copies of photos—including some of the old glass slides from the 1950s—and answered every follow-up question with great thoughtfulness. William Mason, of the University of California in Davis, a psychologist whom I have known and respected for years, and one of Harry's most influential postdoctoral students, talked me through not only the past but many of the present nuances of the science. Duane Rumbaugh, at Georgia State University, is a hero of this book. He sent me copies of illuminating life-long correspondence with Harry and guided me through much of the history of early animal intelligence research, always with his particular gift for emphasizing the value of the animals as well as the science. Jim King at the University of Arizona was everything a book researcher could hope for. He and his wife, Penny, played host, took me to Harry's former home there, arranged a dinner with the smart and funny former head of the Arizona psychology department, Neil Bartlett, and his equally smart and funny wife, Olive, and got me thoroughly drunk on one memorable evening that began with Rob Roys and ended in a dream-like haze of after-dinner drinks, whatever they were, I'm not quite sure.
Steve Suomi, head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) lab of comparative ethology invited me to his laboratory to talk—despite his doubts about my trustworthiness—and followed up for months responding to a thousand nit-picky questions. Jim Sackett met with me in Seattle to provide a candid and courageous interview, especially considering that he continues to be targeted by the local animal rights community. Seymour “Gig” Levine met with me both in San Francisco and in Madison, and as always charmed me into paying for lunch, gave me a hard time, and patiently explained both his work and its context. He has threatened to quit speaking to me for ten years now and I appreciate that he continues to answer my questions anyway.
I would like to also thank Dorothy Eichorn, who met me on a spring Sunday on the grounds of the old state mental hospital in Napa to talk about her long friendship with Harry Harlow; Albert Hastorf, keeper of the Lewis Terman gifted files at Stanford, who invited me into his office on a bright weekend day, handed me the files on Harry's first wife, Clara, and left to play tennis, saying “lock up when you leave”—which I took as an enormous compliment; the wonderful staff of the Archives of the History of American Psychology in Akron, Ohio, in particular, David Baker and Dorothy Gruich; and Margaret Kimball and Henry Lowood of the Stanford archives, who walked me through the documents I needed from Harry's early history there. And I am indebted to Robert Hinde, Leonard Rosenblum, Melinda Novak, Judith Schrier, Ed Tronick, Meredith Small, Stephen Bernstein, Sally Mendoza, Kim Wallen, William Verplanck, Irving Bernstein, Larry Jacobsen, and Richard Dukelow for their generous help and invaluable perspective. Two people interviewed for this book died before it was finished and I would like especially to mention their patience and humor with the process. They are Art Schmidt and Richard Wolf, and they are both missed.
The University of Wisconsin at Madison supported this book from the beginning, and in particular, the Graduate School provided funding for student researchers and summer salary so that I would have extra time to work on the manuscript. I was blessed with some dedicated
and extremely smart graduate students who read old psychology texts, tracked down long-lost contacts of Harry Harlow, and made a real contribution to the depth of this book. They are a group of outstanding young journalists named Tina Ross, Brennan Nardi, Suzanne McConnell, Krishna Ramanujan, Morgan Hewitt, and Maggie Miller.
I owe an infinite debt of gratitude to Robin Marantz Henig, Kim Fowler, and Peter Haugen, who read the book in its earliest, most chaotic version and helped turn it into an actual story. George Johnson and Shannon Brownlee were enormously helpful with some of the trickiest chapters in the book.
I am blessed, as always, in my agent, Suzanne Gluck, who believed in the Harlow story from the start and helped me see its potential as well. And I am doubly blessed in having the best possible editor in Amanda Cook. Amanda is such a good editor, so smart and so supportive, and so gifted in her ability to improve a story, that I have been congratulating myself on my good fortune almost since I started the book. Perseus's talented and meticulous production staff improved and clarified the story I wanted to tell and then packaged it beautifully and I would particularly like to thank copy editor Jennifer Blakebrough-Raeburn, who has a wonderful literary mind, and senior project editor Marietta Urban. And I also had the good fortune of being teamed with Perseus's terrifically smart publicist Leigh Weiner.
Last, but not least, as they say: This book is about family and love and partnership and relationships and there is no way that it would have been finished without the love and support of mine. I've been wrestling with the Harry story for so long now that both my children, Marcus and Lucas, also call him by his first name. So does my husband, Peter Haugen, who has held down the home front too many times while Harry, my laptop, and I were hunkered down in my basement office together. The three of them kept me from disappearing entirely into the book, partly because they never fail to remind me that nothing matters more than those we love.
PROLOGUE
Love, Airborne
IN A WHITE ROOM, TWO MEN are talking about love. One of them stands keenly upright, pressed into a deftly cut suit. The other is less elegant: slight, dark-haired, a little stoop-shouldered, shrugged into a floppy lab coat. Both their voices sound hollow in the pale space around them. The room seems glossy with cold. Nearby counters are polished to an icy sterility. Metal and glass equipment gleam bluish in the wash of fluorescent lights. Against this background—chilled essence of laboratory—the speakers sound like men out of place and time, their conversation absurdly soft with talk of poets and love songs, starry nights, and daytime dreams.
Or perhaps they are just ahead of their time. At this moment, in the close of the 1950s, no one stands in a laboratory to discuss love in these terms. Even psychologists—those perpetual students of human behavior—aren't lobbying to include warmhearted affection among the charts and the graphs and the calibrated machinery. Experimental psychologists have been rejecting the notion of love as good research material for years. Powerful psychologists have made it clear that fuzzy and sentimental emotions are the stuff of fiction, not of research reports. Researchers who study human relationships prefer to avoid using the l-word. You can still open the acclaimed history of
Psychology in America,
by Stanford's Ernest Hilgard, and find the word “love” missing entirely from the subject index.
So it's a professional gamble for the small man in the lab coat even to have this conversation. He
is
an experimental psychologist—a stubborn, scruffy, middle-aged researcher named Harry Frederick Harlow who happens to believe that his profession is wrong and doesn't mind saying so. Of course, he's often been told that the problem lies with him. The unexpectedly outspoken son of a poor family from Iowa, he's developed a habit of scrapping with mainstream psychology. Professor Harlow has already been asked to correct his language: He's been instructed on the correct term for a close relationship. Why can't he just say “proximity” like everyone else? Somehow the word “love” just keeps springing to his lips when he talks about parents and children, friends and partners. He's been known to lose his temper when discussing it. “Perhaps all you've known in life is proximity,” he once snapped at a visitor to his lab at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “I thank God I've known more.”
How close do you have to be standing to connect with a person? Harry liked to ask that question, drawling it out with a nice sarcastic edge. Three inches? Four? Could you build a relationship at a distance of six inches? His colleagues, as they told him, saw no need for mockery. He could choose other scientific terms if he didn't like proximity. The scientific vocabulary also offered attachment, conditioned response, primary drive reduction, stimulus-response, secondary drive reduction, object relationship—the last if you wanted to be Freudian about it. Why bring love into it?
And now here's Harry Harlow, on national television of all the damned places, with his intimate vocabulary and his insistence on emotional relationships. The conversation in the laboratory appears on a CBS show called
The Measure of Love.
The program is the 1959 premier of
Conquest,
the network's Sunday evening science show. In the entire half-hour presentation, the word “proximity” never crosses Harry's lips.
Charles Collingswood, a respected CBS journalist, is the man in the elegant suit. On camera, Collingswood stands authoritatively tall. Harry Harlow looks small by comparison, dwarfed inside the ubiquitous
lab coat. He has a square face, dark eyes under near straight brows, short dark hair slicked determinedly back. His voice is a little high-pitched, smoother than Collingswood's rumble.
But the voice of science is unexpectedly the voice suitable to a pulpit, slightly singsong in its cadence. There's music in the way Harry assures us that it is possible to make real what had previously been “undefinable and unmeasurable.” As he talks, one might even believe that love is substantial enough to be decanted into test tubes. When it comes to love, “your guess is as good as mine,” Collingswood says to the audience, “but guesswork is not the way of science and
this,
” and his gray granite voice deepens a notch, “this is a scientific laboratory.” At the start of the program, Collingswood stands holding a monkey in one hand. The monkey is a bright-eyed baby, a natural mohawk of fluff crowning its head. It nestles in Collingswood's curved hand like an egg in a cup, tiny fingers curled over the edge of his palm. Harry Harlow, after all, is a primate researcher, a pioneer in the emerging science of understanding monkey behavior as a way to understand us. Collingswood gestures slightly to emphasize that point, the monkey riding the sweep of motion: “In this laboratory, there are approximately 120 rhesus monkeys; the subject of a study that wants to know the answer to the question: What is an infant's love for its mother?”
BOOK: Love at Goon Park
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