Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (9 page)

THE PIONEERS

Clark Heath, M.D., who served as director from 1938 to 1954, was a promising research scientist. He had once worked with Professor William Castle, a co-discoverer of vitamin B-12. He was also the staff internist, but his job description covered far more than that, and it expanded steadily over the years. He was responsible for the budget, for all necessary reports, for planning for the future, and for putting together case summaries of the Grant men. Still, it was not his administrative skills that made him so important to the young Study, but his clinical gifts.

The files of those early years make clear just how completely Heath epitomized the warm and caring physician. As each man joined the Study, Heath gave him an unusually complete two-hour physical exam. That was part of the Study routine. But until he left Harvard, returning Grant Study alumni came back to him voluntarily, seeking consultation for themselves and their families. When they needed more than mere medical advice, Heath saw a number of these ex-students for psychological counseling.

Lewise Gregory (later Davies), a perceptive Virginian, was the third member of this key trio. Bock needed a social investigator to interview all the Study members and their families. Gregory’s only professional education was secretarial school, but Bock chose her for her dazzling interpersonal skills and her innate talent as an interviewer. After her death, Charles McArthur, the second director, described her technique for a staff member who was writing a brief (unpublished) history of the Study. “When she would visit a student’s family, she
would
sit daintily with her legs crossed, affix her large blue eyes on the conversationalist, and the smitten parents would bare their lives to her.” She was an attentive and sympathetic listener, and the loyalty she engendered among the participants and their families would last a lifetime. She also endeared herself to the Study men as a big sister. (A very pretty one. And her sister was Margaret Sullavan, the movie star.) Miss Gregory was invaluable in bringing lost sheep back into the fold, and the Grant Study’s attrition rate—the lowest of any similar study in history—is a tribute to her diligence and her diplomacy.

In the beginning, Gregory’s job was to take a careful social history from each subject as he entered the Study, and then interview his parents. In those early years she traveled the length and breadth of the country to meet the men’s families in their homes. She obtained from the mother a detailed history of the early development of each Study man. She also took a family history that included descriptions of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and first cousins, and of any mental illnesses in the extended family. I encountered some of these family members many years later, and they still recalled her visit with great pleasure.

In her family interviews, Gregory accentuated the positive. The usual psychiatric social history with its emphasis upon pathology tends to make all of us look like fugitives from a Tennessee Williams play. Gregory asked about problems in the men’s growing up, but she also wanted to hear about what had gone well. Not only did this foster the alliance between the Study and its members, but it also meant that when pathological details did come up in the social histories, they were usually significant.

After her great work of 268 family interviews was complete, Gregory remained with the Study part time. Even in the 1980s, at the end of her tenure, she was still the one who could charm nonre
sponders
back into continued participation—which she did with astonishing success.

William T. Grant, of course, was an important figure in the founding of the Grant Study. Billy Grant, as his friends called him, was a tenth-grade dropout who founded a store for low-priced household wares in 1906. Nothing in his first store cost more than twenty-five cents—he prided himself on that—but it grew into the Walmart of the 1930s. Grant’s foundation has become world-famous, too, but it got its start in that first gift to Arlie Bock in 1937. The two men had different visions. Bock hoped that his research into an optimally healthy population would help the United States military select better officer candidates; Grant hoped that his new foundation’s first project would help him identify effective managers for his multitude of chain stores. They both hoped to identify superachievers. But Grant was more interested in social and emotional intelligence than the other Grant Study investigators, who shared the contemporary preoccupation with constitutional medicine. By 1945 this would lead to friction. But until the end of the war Bock maintained a close relationship with Grant, visiting him at his houses in Florida and Connecticut.

Frederic Lyman Wells, Ph.D., the Study’s chief psychologist, was a psychometrician and one of the developers of the Army Alpha Tests, the major test for intelligence screening in World War I. Wells came from a distinguished New England academic family. He started college at fifteen, and by twenty had earned his M.A. From 1925 to 1928 he served on government advisory boards, such as the National Research Council and the National Committee for Mental Hygiene. His Grant Study brief was to determine the personality organizations, interests and aptitudes, and intelligence levels of the Grant Study subjects.
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Wells was probably the most distinguished scientist on the staff, and he gained further eminence as a consultant to the War Department
between 1941 and 1946, when he helped to develop the Army General Classification Test (a measure of intelligence and vocational skills). He was a hard worker and a methodical and systematic analyst, but given to dry and lengthy statistical expositions. His reports reveal little of the rich humanity of the Study men.

Carl Seltzer, Ph.D., a young physical anthropologist who had worked closely with Earnest Hooton and William Sheldon (on whom more below), was another exponent of constitutional medicine, specifically the relationship between body type and personality. John W. Thompson, Ph.D., a Scot and co-founder of the Fatigue Lab with Bock, and then Lucien Brouha, Ph.D., a Belgian refugee from war-torn Europe, served as early physiologists to the Grant Study staff. Both were gone by 1943, however, and funding for the Fatigue Lab seems to have halted by 1944. Vicissitudes in funding are one of the ways we know when scientific fashions begin to change. Constitutional medicine was on the way out.

The Study’s staff psychiatrists were responsible for extensive interviews of the Study members—about ten hours each. None of the five men who filled the position in the Study’s early days stayed longer than three years. Two of them went on to distinguished academic careers: Donald Hastings (1938) as chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Minnesota Medical School, and Douglas Bond (1942) as dean of Case Western Reserve Medical School. Psychiatrists William Woods (1942–45), John Flumerfelt (1940–41), and Thomas Wright (1939–40) also served as interviewers. Woods was also responsible for an assessment scheme of twenty-six personality traits that underpinned much of the early research.
10

Unfortunately, however, the early staffing and implementation of the Grant Study did not reflect the early work of four important investigators of personality. Their work profoundly affected my own later interpretation of the Study’s data, but in 1937–42 it was still
too
new to inform the Study itself. Heinz Hartmann, Anna Freud, Erik Erikson, and Harry Stack Sullivan all significantly shaped the modern understanding of healthy personality. The first three were instrumental in replacing Sigmund Freud’s view of personality as an often-pathological compromise between cognitive morality
(superego)
and irrational passion
(id).
Hartmann, Anna Freud, and her student Erikson offered an alternative conception of personality as a product of involuntary, but usually healthy and creative, adaptation. Anna Freud’s
The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense
was first published in 1937; two years later, Hartmann published his own classic work on ego psychology, which would appear in English as
Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation.
However, it wasn’t until 1967 that the Grant Study began to focus on the men’s styles of psychological coping (see
Chapter 8
).

Harry Stack Sullivan was another pioneer, who opened psychiatry up to the science of relationships that John Bowlby and his student Mary Ainsworth would make famous—but not until the second half of the twentieth century.

FROM BIOLOGY TO PSYCHOLOGY

Let me expand on these omissions for a bit, to show how time changes both science and scientists. It is easy to forget how very recent is our current interest in intimate relationships. For the first ten years of the Study, biological theorizing held undisputed pride of place. In 1938, constitution and eugenics (as in breeding) were considered far more potent forces than environment in how people turned out. Biological indicators were tracked in minute detail, but it was the rare social scientist who paid any attention to what would become known as “emotional intelligence,” particularly the capacity for love and close friendship. Harry Harlow was one of these, a psychologist/ethologist who
earned
renown for groundbreaking studies of relationship deprivation in monkeys. In his 1958 presidential address to the American Psychological Association, he felt driven to lament, “Psychologists not only show no interest in the origin and development of love and affection, but they seem to be unaware of its very existence!”
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At the time of Harlow’s speech, behaviorists like B. F. Skinner and John Watson were assuming that babies became attached to their mothers because their mothers fed them. Psychoanalysts Sigmund and Anna Freud believed essentially the same thing. However different the behaviorist and psychoanalytic psychologies, they shared a rather concrete view of the interplay between biology and emotion. Lust, hunger, and the vicissitudes of power ruled the psychological universe. Love was conceptualized as
Eros
—a matter of individual hedonistic instinct, not a process of reciprocal pair bonding,

It was only in 1950 that John Bowlby, who was both a psychoanalyst and an ethologist, began to establish awareness that attachment experiences are fundamental shapers of personality, and that babies “imprint” on their mothers not because their mothers fill their bellies, but because they cuddle them, sing to them, and gaze into their eyes. Experimental evidence soon followed. But I can attest that years after the Grant Study began, English teachers were still drilling the youth of the 1940s on Rudyard Kipling’s Victorian mantra “He travels the fastest who travels alone.” A relational world governed by oxytocin, mirror neurons, and limbic maternal attachment (a.k.a. love) was inconceivable in the psychology of the Study’s first decade.

There is an interesting parallel here with infantile autism. This fairly common disorder, which is due to a congenital absence of empathy, was not spotted until 1943, when a child psychiatrist finally noticed it in his own son. Its close relative, Asperger’s syndrome, was identified in 1944. But it was fifty years more before those genetic disorders were absorbed into psychiatry’s diagnostic framework. In other words, in the 1930s, the congenital impairment of attachment
reflected
in childhood autism was harder for scientists to grasp than quantum physics. The functional reality of relatedness had not been incorporated into the consciousness of the social sciences.

Cultural anthropology, pioneered by Franz Boas, captured the hearts and minds of college students in the sixties, but it was a relatively esoteric discipline in 1940, and physical anthropology still dominated. Ernst Krestchmer, a German psychiatrist, was nominated in 1929 for the Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on body build and character.
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Investigators inspired by him believed that personality was determined by
somatotype
—three physical bodily conformations (thin, frail
ectomorphs,
robust muscular
mesomorphs,
and soft, plump
endomorphs
). Social scientists still believed that the British Empire was the result of genetic racial superiority, not the environmental luck of owning the “guns, germs and steel” that Jared Diamond made famous in the brilliant book of that name, in which he proved once and for all that racial dominance was a product of culture and geography, and not of biological heredity.

So while the biological determinism of the early Grant investigators sometimes sounds like racism to twenty-first-century ears, it had less to do with cryptofascism than with the absence of an alternative paradigm. Many hours were spent assessing the physiology, somato-type, and “racial typology” of the Grant Study sophomores. During their ten hours of psychiatric interviews they were asked about masturbation and their opinions on premarital sex. But nobody asked them about their friends or their girlfriends. Until the 1970s at least, attachment and empathy were the province of sentimental novels, not of science. A pity.

THE MEN OF THE GRANT STUDY

As of this writing, all but seven of the surviving members of the Grant Study have reached their ninetieth birthdays. When the Study began,
however,
they were college sophomores, most of them nineteen years old. The original College cohort—the group of Grant Study men, who liked to refer to themselves as “the guinea pigs”—numbered 268. Sixty-four men were drawn from the Harvard classes of 1939, 1940, and 1941, and 204 came from a more systematic 7–8 percent sample drawn from the sophomore classes of 1942–1944.

About 10 percent of the men ended up in the Study by chance: a few volunteers; some younger brothers of already participating men; the occasional student referred by an advisor. The other nine-tenths of the sample were selected according to the following rough protocol, of which the details varied slightly from year to year.

First the Study investigators went through the new class, screening out any students who might not graduate. On the advice of the dean of students, they used as criteria the students’ SAT scores in combination with grade point average and observed measures of natural ability. A high school valedictorian with modest SATs would be preferred to a boy who tested well but whose class standing in high school was low. These criteria eliminated 40 percent of each Harvard entering class.