Love at Goon Park (6 page)

His adaptation of Binet's test would become known as the Stanford-Binet. It is still the granddaddy of all IQ and scholastic aptitude tests used today. Under Terman's design, the Stanford-Binet sorted a person into one of four categories: gifted, bright, average, or special. There was a range of ability in each of those groups. On the Stanford-Binet scale, if one scored below 30, that indicated a drooling, shuffling kind of mental handicap. A person had to rise into the 70s before the numbers shifted more toward intelligence. A score between 70 and 79 was still considered borderline retardation—what psychologists of the time called the “feebleminded.” In other words, 79 and down put you in the “special” group. Basic competence—being average—emerged in the 80s. At about 100, one started creeping into the “bright” region, and brilliance, or “being gifted,” began at a score of 140 or so.

Today, IQ testing is regarded by many as a limited probe, a measure primarily of analytical abilities. In retrospect, many psychologists also acknowledge that Terman and his colleagues in the IQ arena could sound elitist—and worse. The word “moron” was coined by another believer in intelligence testing, Henry Goddard, who used it to describe low scorers. Goddard went on to speak virulently against immigration, insisting that Jewish and Eastern European immigrants
would dilute good Northern European stock with their “low-intellect” genes. Supporters of intelligence testing argued, successfully, that “feeble-minded” men and women should be sterilized to avoid reproducing additional generations of imbeciles. Terman himself wrote that genetic superiority could be expected to predict social superiority.

But Terman was also willing to ask hard questions of the so-called elite. For instance, did very smart people naturally rise to the top, the cream floating up over the milky rest of the population? Or did they need extra support to rise? A few years before Harry Israel came to Stanford, Terman began a long-term study of the gifted. He started with exceptional students who were found first by questionnaires sent to elementary school teachers. Then he ran those students and their siblings through IQ tests. All the children that Terman selected scored at least 140 on the Stanford-Binet scale and some as high as 192. His core group—363 boys, 313 girls—had to pass other tests as well.

Because Terman thought gifted children should perform well in real life as well as on paper, he screened against handicaps such as shyness and disabilities such as limping or stuttering. His questionnaire asked about “prudence, forethought, willpower, humor, cheerfulness, fondness of large groups, popularity, generosity, truthfulness, commonsense, and energy.” He looked for children who had a desire to excel. And just in case those filling out the form were unsure what such a desire was, Terman provided a definition: “Does his utmost to stand first.”

There was no doubt that self-confidence was the order of the day when Harry was at Stanford. Terman expected his chosen students to damn well be smart. And act it. He selected carefully. One favorite was Nancy Bayley, who would become one of UC Berkeley's best-known child psychologists and whose own work on cognitive development would eventually directly contradict Terman's. (Bayley showed that parenting styles
did
seem to affect IQ. Little boys raised by unaffectionate mothers showed steady erosion in test scores. Little girls also faltered, especially if they were harshly restricted and
disciplined.) Terman did not expect his students to agree with him on everything. He did expect them to be good scientists, and really good if they wanted to win their arguments. Bayley credited Terman for teaching her to be a perfectionist. He was, she said, meticulous in his own work, always ready to praise students when they did well, and “very critical of sloppy work.”

Another graduate student recalled spending a year working on his dissertation, only to be told by Terman that it was substandard and he would have to begin again. Terman insisted that real scientists never took time off. Even at this exalted stage of his career, he often worked late into the night: “He was always working near the limits of knowledge,” said psychologist Robert Bernreuter, another of Terman's protegés. And Terman wanted his students to venture over those limits, too. “Usually Terman would point out two or three times each seminar something that needed additional research. This caused us to develop both a profound respect for research, and the feeling that we should do something about it,” Bernreuter said.

Terman's students wanted desperately to “do something about it” in a way that would gain his approval. Perhaps more than some of the other students, Harry doubted his ability to impress the master. He knew he was smart, creative—even funny on occasion—but could he demonstrate that while he was at Stanford? The school brought out all the tentativeness and shyness you might expect from the son of a failed doctor in rural Iowa. His description of himself at that time was of “a shy, retiring youth with a rather poetic outlook on life. I tended to apologize to doors before opening them.” And when he did apologize, there was a slight speech defect that would have undoubtedly stricken him from Terman's study of exceptional students. Pronouncing the letter “r” had caused Harry trouble since his childhood and sometimes gave his conversation a cartoonish quality, in the “silly wabbit” style of Elmer Fudd. Embarrassed, he often chose to say nothing rather than to sound goofy. On the grounds of shyness, on the grounds of his speech defect, he could not have entered Terman's gifted study. And Terman made that almost painfully clear to him.

When Harry started on his master's degree, “Dr. Terman called me into his office and told me he thought I was a bright young man but that I was so timid that I would never be able to speak in public.” The “r's” only made that problem worse. Terman “recommended strongly that my future lay in teaching in a junior college as I would never be able to speak effectively before really large audiences.” Terman even had his secretary check into the requirements for such a job. It turned out that teaching at a junior college required education courses that Harry didn't have. “As a result, I was condemned to get a Ph.D.”

Upon Harry's graduation in 1930, Terman called him back. He was still worrying about Harry's future. This time it had do with the negative consequences of his last name. “He said that since my name was Israel, they had found it impossible to place me in an adequate academic position because of anti-Jewish prejudice.” Walter Miles had been talking Harry up at other universities and had been asked constantly about his student's religious background. The dean of a large state university told Miles that he didn't care how good the young psychologist was, he was not going to hire anyone with the last name of Israel. Harry often looked back with real disbelief at the depth of discrimination in the 1930s, even on supposedly enlightened university campuses. “I don't want to imply that I was persecuted, because I wasn't; but with the name Israel, and because I was a timid boy, I certainly had seen discrimination.” The Israels were not Jewish: “Gentile for generations. An aunt traced the name back to 1753, and found an ancestor who had been buried in a Jewish cemetery.” Harry had no patience with anti-Semitism; when he told the story of the name change, he tried to make that perfectly clear, even proposing that the faint Jewish ancestry was responsible for any intelligence in the Israel line: “I often wondered where the family got any brains.”

Terman said it didn't matter whether Harry was Jewish or not; the problem was that his name sounded Jewish. “He also indicated that even though the depression had already hit they would keep me on
some kind of basis for the forthcoming year.” As it turned out, Harry didn't need the extra support from Stanford. Shortly after his conversation with Terman—while the young psychologist was still considering his department head's proposal—a job offer came through. The University of Wisconsin had sent a one-line telegram to Harry Israel. It asked, “Will you accept an assistant professorship at the UW paying $2,750 a year?” In a heartbeat. He was packed, on the road, out of there. He almost left California, yet, as Harry Israel.

But Harry's last name still troubled Terman. In his letter to Wisconsin recommending Harry Israel, Terman had acknowledged the Jewish sound of the name. He then assured the potential employers that Dr. Israel was not “
that
kind of Jew.” He called Harry into the office and said that he was glad about the job but he still thought the name Israel was just wrong, too negative. It would continue to hold him back. Didn't Harry want to have a great future, not just an ordinary one? Of course he did. This was the Harry Israel who had written down “fame” as his ambition in his high school yearbook. He still desperately wanted to please Terman in some way, to prove himself beyond that junior college designation. And “I had seen anti-Jewish prejudice and did not want any son or particularly daughter of mine to go through it.” Okay, Harry said, give me a new name. Terman suggested that Harry choose a name that at least belonged to his family. Harry came up with two possibilities: Crowell, after an uncle; and Harlow, from his father's middle name. “Terman chose Harlow and, as far as I know, I am the only scientist who has ever been named by his major professor.”

By the time the news reached Fairfield, Stanford was already printing the graduation program, and listed under Ph.D. graduates was that new man again, Harry F. Harlow of Palo Alto, California. Only once, and that was to a close friend, Harry said that he regretted the change, that it seemed to dishonor whatever Jewish ancestry he had, be it only ⅙4th that ran in the Israel family. That was long after he'd left Stanford, and after World War II and Adolf Hitler had put an end to the fancy—if people ever really believed it—that there
could be benign prejudice toward any people, that such attitudes were mere silliness. His fall-back position—as always—was a joke. In an interview in
Psychology Today,
he told it like this: “So I became a Harlow. I guess I'm not alone. Once a man called me up and said he was looking up the Harlow ancestry. I said I was sorry, but I had changed my name.” “Oh, heavens, not again,” he replied. “Everyone named Harlow that is worth a damn has changed his name.”

Changing the name, of course, doesn't change the person. Years later, one of Harry's best-known post-doctoral researchers, California psychologist William Mason, would wonder which man was the real Harry: the Wisconsin crusader called Harry Harlow or the shy loner from Iowa named Harry Israel. “What was the real man like?” Mason asked. “Very complex.” There's one aspect of the almost forgotten Harry Israel, though, that remains straightforward: He understood that you could win a lost cause. Against both odds and expectations, he'd become a Stanford-trained research psychologist. During his career, that belief—that you should rarely declare a battle lost—would guide many of his most defiant research choices. Eventually, his fondness for unpopular causes would lead him to labor for love. And to appreciate what a lost cause that was in the world of mid-twentieth-century psychology, you must appreciate the depth and righteousness of the opposition to love as part of daily life. Psychologists argued vehemently against cuddling children. Doctors stood against too close contact between even parent and child. There was real history behind this, built on experience from orphanages and hospitals, built on lessons learned from dead children and lost babies. There were careful experiments and precise data and numerical calculations of behavior to prove that emotions were unnecessary and unimportant. There was a decades-thick wall of research and an army of researchers to counter any upstart psychologist, including Harry Harlow
.
Naturally, it was just the kind of challenge that appealed to him most.

TWO

Untouched by Human Hands

 

 

 

THE FRUSTRATING, IMKPOSSIBLE, TERRIBLE thing about orphanages could be summarized like this: They were baby killers.

They always had been. One could read it in the eighteenthcentury records from Europe. One foundling home in Florence, The Hospital of the Innocents, took in more than fifteen thousand babies between 1755 and 1773; two thirds of them died before they reached their first birthday. In Sicily, around the same time, there were so many orphanage deaths that residents in nearby Brescia proposed that a motto be carved into the foundling home's gate: “Here children are killed at public expense.” One could read it in the nineteenth-century records from American orphanages, such as this report from St. Mary's Asylum for Widows, Foundlings, and Infants in Buffalo, New York: From 1862 to 1875, the asylum offered a home to 2,114 children. Slightly more than half—1,080—had died within a
year of arrival. Most of those who survived had mothers who stayed with them. “A large proportion of the infants, attempted to be raised by hand, have died although receiving every possible care and attention that the means of the Sisters would allow as to food, ventilation, cleanliness, etc.”

And yet babies, toddlers, elementary school children, and even adolescents kept coming to foundling homes, like a ragged, endless, stubbornly hopeful parade. In the orphanages, the death of one child always made room for the next.

Physicians were working in and against an invisible lapping wave of microorganisms, which they didn't know about and couldn't understand. Cholera flooded through the foundling homes, and so did diphtheria and typhoid and scarlet fever. Horrible, wasting diarrheas were chronic. The homes often reeked of human waste. Attempts to clean them foundered on inadequate plumbing, lack of hot water, lack even of soap. It wasn't just foundling homes, of course, where infections thrived in the days before antibiotics and vaccines, before chlorinated water and pasteurized milk. In the United States, more than one fourth of the children born between 1850 and 1900 died before age five. But foundling homes concentrated the infections and contagions, brought them together in the way a magnifying glass might focus the sun's rays until they burn paper. The orphanages raised germs, seemingly, far more effectively than they raised children. If you brought a group of pediatricians together, they could almost immediately begin telling orphanage horror stories—and they did.