“Young Rebels Flee Psychology”: individual intelligence, race and foster children in Cleveland, Ohio between the world wars

Abstract

This study examines foster child case records to understand how intelligence testing was used by guidance counsellors and social workers to negotiate welfare resources with poor youths in the early twentieth century. Psychological testing justified racial hierarchy in a scientific language suited for a rational professional bureaucracy. Yet, it was also a technique for individual analysis that allowed poor children and youths to observe themselves and to speak about themselves in ways that countered biological determinism. The clinical reports and case notes suggest that foster youths often figured themselves as social actors resisting the unfavourable assessments presented by the professionals. The practice of making bio-social predictions about fostered youths, ironically, cleared space for an opposing figure to take shape in the recorded words of the youths: the agentive, political youth demanding recognition and resources. This article opens a rare window upon the “governmentality” of childhood by allowing us to consider the ways in which structures of assessment allowed the subject to view the self as an object.

Keywords:

• childhood
• discursive practices
• governmentality
• welfare
• foster care
• intelligence
• IQ
• testing
• race

Notes

¹“Family Files”, box 2, 18th folder, correspondence, “3 Young Rebels Flee Psychology”, Cleveland Plain Dealer, 4 December 1927, 6A. The use of county and state juvenile wards in medical and psychological research was common. See Susan E. Lederer, “Orphans as guinea pigs: American children and medical experimenters, 1890–1930”, in Roger Cooter, ed. In the Name of the Child: Health and Welfare, 1880–1940 (New York: Routledge, 1992), 96–123.

²The terms “political child” and “developing child” are defined as part of a larger landscape of modern childhood in Patrick J. Ryan, “How new is the ‘new’ social studies of childhood? The myth of a paradigm shift”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 38 (2008): 553–576.

³The data were drawn from all known surviving foster care records prior to 1945 from the Cuyahoga County Child Welfare Bureau. The whereabouts or even the size of the entire population of the original case records was unknown. Very recently, the foster child case records were moved from the county archives to a storage facility of the Cuyahoga County Children’s and Family Services. As a result, additional records were uncovered and made accessible. Research on these records is underway. The initial investigation, as reported here, included a complete reading and detailed analysis of all the documentation on the earliest 108 foster children from 49 families. These records are extraordinarily lengthy, and include medical, psychological and vocational guidance reports, interagency correspondence, family histories, occasional letters and photos from clients, in addition to daily or weekly notes made by case workers.

⁴Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, 2nd ed. (New York: Free Association Books, 1999), 123.

⁵Linda Gordon’s, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence: Boston, 1880–1960 (New York: Viking, 1988).

⁶See note 2 above.

⁷One of the most extensive studies demonstrating the first half of my point is Andre Turmel, A Historical Sociology of Childhood: Developmental Thinking, Categorization, and Graphic Visualization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

⁸The literature on intelligence testing and eugenics is complex, but the places to begin for the points made here are John Carson, The Measure of Merit: Talents, Intelligence, and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 111–194; James W. Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 155–166; Daniel J. Kevels, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985): 45–108.

⁹Debunking IQ or early-century eugenics as “bad science”, or setting it conveniently aside as a “race science”, threatens to reduce our treatment of the politics of knowledge to some combination of ignorance, conspiracy and economic interest. Uncritical assumptions about the progress of knowledge may be declining among historians, but they remain strong in respected popular works. See the many editions of Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man first published by W.W. Norton in 1981.

¹⁰On romanticism and the self, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). On utilitarianism and the self, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977).

¹¹On childhood and the twin elements of romanticism and utilitarianism in child nurture, see Jacqueline S. Reiner, From Virtue to Character: American Childhood, 1775–1850 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), 46–101; Bernard Wishy, The Child and the Republic: The Dawn of Modern American Child Nurture (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968).

¹²Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle-class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

¹³Mary Ann Mason, From Father’s Property to Children’s Rights: The History of Child Custody in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-century America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).

¹⁴The numbers represent the increase in the reported numbers of “foreign”-born persons living in Cuyahoga County by country of origin as recorded in the US Census and presented with an excellent summary in David D. Van Tassel and John J. Grabowski, eds. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), xxxiii–xxxiv, 541–542. Also see Part III of Jacqueline Jones, The Dispossessed: American’s Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present (New York: Harper Collins, 1992); Kimberly L. Phillips, “‘But it is a fine place to make money’: migration and African-American families in Cleveland, 1915–1929”, Journal of Social History 29 (1996): 393–413.

¹⁵Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 200–212.

¹⁶Robert H. Bremner, From the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 1956), 213; Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

¹⁷Paul S. Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).

¹⁸On assimilation, see Rivka Shpak Lissak, Pluralism and Progressives: Hull House and the New Immigrants, 1890–1919 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989). For more institutional details on visiting and family regulation by the helping professions, see Anthony M. Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Juvenile Delinquency (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969); Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979); LeRoy Ashby, Endangered Children: Dependence, Neglect, and Abuse in American History (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997), 17–54.

¹⁹Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985).

²⁰Marian J. Morton, “Surviving the Great Depression: orphanages and orphans in Cleveland”, Journal of Urban History 26 (2000): 438.

²¹Bernadine Barr, “Spare children, 1900–1945: inmates of orphanages as subjects of research in medicine and in the social sciences in America”, PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 1992, p. 32.

²²C.V. Williams, “The Children’s Bureau”, Ohio Bulletin of Charities and Correction 22 (1916): 115–121; Mary Irene Atkinson, “Division of inspection”, Ohio Bulletin of Charities and Correction 28 (1921): 12–13; Harry H. Howett, “Division of child-care”, Ohio Bulletin of Charities and Correction 28 (1921): 36–39; George S. Addams, “Mother’s Pensions”, Ohio Bulletin of Charities and Correction 21 (1915): 19.

²³The strength of association for the gendered distribution of justification for custody was moderate to strong, 0.519 at the 0.0001 significance level. For more explanation, see Patrick J. Ryan, “Shaping modern youth: social policies and growing up working-class in industrial America, 1890–1945”, PhD dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 1998, pp. 187–196.

²⁴Contemporary studies establish that racial inequity continues to permeate a broad spectrum of American institutions for poor children. See Naomi Cahn, “Race, poverty, history, adoption, and child abuse: connections”, Law & Society Review 36 (2002): 461–488.

²⁵Carson, The Measure of Merit, 75–109, 159–194. Also see note 6 above, and William H. Tucker, The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002).

²⁶Leila Zenderland, “The debate over diagnosis: Henry H. Goddard and the medical acceptance of intelligence testing”, in M.M. Sokal, ed. Psychological Testing and American Society, 1890–1913 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 46–74.

²⁷Patrick J. Ryan, “Unnatural selection: intelligence testing, eugenics, and American political cultures”, Journal of Social History 30 (1997): 669–685.

²⁸Patrick J. Ryan, “‘Six blacks from home’: childhood, motherhood, and eugenics in America”, Journal of Policy History 19 (2007): 253–281.

²⁹H.M. Walker, The Social Adjustment of the Feeble-Minded: A Group Thesis Study of 898 Feeble-minded Individuals Known to Cleveland’s Social Agencies (Cleveland, OH: Western Reserve University Press, 1930).

³⁰Paul Davis Chapman, Schools as Sorters: Lewis M. Terman, Applied Psychology, and the Intelligence Testing Movement, 1890–1930 (New York: New York University Press, 1988).

³¹For more on ethnicity and gender, see Chapter 6 of my dissertation, “Shaping modern youth” as cited in note 23.

³²Approximately 37% of foster children’s mothers were deceased, and 57% of their fathers were some combination of unemployed or absent (the two are highly inter-related). Another factor was evidence of vice in the household. All three are present in Carter’s custody record and thus his case contains the most common justifications for authorities to take custody of children.

³³“Family Files”, box 1, 1st folder, third child, Humane Society Transfer Summary; case notes, 8-22-29 and 12-3-29. Unless indicated, all subsequent quotes come from this case record at the dates given with the type of document indicated.

³⁴Morton, “Surviving the Great Depression”, 444–446.

³⁵Case notes, 10-08-35, 10-29-35, 2-8-36.

³⁶Case notes, 1-15-35, 3-20-35, 4-2-35, 5-1-35, 7-12-35, 2-8-36, 4-3-36; Summer of 1936, 9-29-36, 11-2-36 and 3-11-37.

³⁷Case notes, 7-14-36; 5-9-38.

³⁸Vocational report 7-24-37 and 10-2-37.

³⁹Vocational reports, 1937.

⁴⁰Case notes, 10-18-37; 5-9-38.

⁴¹See note 2 above.

⁴²Case notes, 10-18-37; 5-9-38.

⁴³Case notes, 1-9-38, 2-3-38/2-23-38, 5-9-38, 7-28-38, 9-28-38, 11-28-38.

⁴⁴Case notes, 1938-1939 and 11-26-49.

⁴⁵Rose, Governing the Soul, 155–204.

⁴⁶Valerie Walkerdine, “Developmental psychology and the child-centered pedagogy: the insertion of Piaget into early education”, in J. Henriques et al., eds. Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity (London: Methuen, 1984), 153–202.