Superintendant's Home 1932

          During the Great Depression, the lavish expenditures on the WCTS program came under fire by the media and those looking to trim the county budget. After hearing pleas from its supporters and their argument that the exact same cross section of the population treated at WCTS was where the bulk of the criminal population stemmed from, the county auditors were persuaded to reconsider abolishing WCTS.” Due to his position as probate judge, Henry Hulbert stated that he personally could vouch for the fact that 70% of the county's criminal element originate from that “upper level of subnormal children;” thus, the work of WCTS was invaluable and to dismantle it would be calamitous. Hulbert stood by the school's record as his defense: out of the 527 children who had been sent back into society since WCTS opened in 1925, only nine had been entangled in any form of misdemeanor. He said that costs could be reduced by turning the WCTS into a purely custodial institution such as the Lapeer Home, but that would mean the children would be maintained there all their lives as tax burdens—sitting idle in dayrooms instead of being converted into self-sufficient taxpayers in a matter of a few years. Hulbert argued that in the long run, the school's seemingly expensive current mode of operation would prove the much cheaper option overall. ⁴⁵

          When Dr. Haskell took his post at WCTS in 1926, it was arguably with the goal already in mind of turning Wayne County in to the world’s leading center for research and treatment of feeblemindedness, under the auspices of the McGregor Fund and the school’s progressive founders, who sat on its governing board. Bringing Dr. Thorleif Grüner-Hegge onto its staff in May 1929 as head of the Department of Research was Haskell’s first step. He bestowed upon Dr. Hegge the task of directing the team of researchers that would accomplish this grand goal, and come to be known as the McGregor Laboratory. Hegge did his doctorate work at Royal Norwegian University in Oslo in 1918, studying the classification and analysis of the introspective process of the human mind. He stayed on as an assistant professor and university examiner at Oslo, and was awarded a Laura Spellman Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1927, during the course of which he spent two years at University of Michigan. He chose to remain in Michigan and came to Northville with his wife and daughter, accepting the position at WCTS. Up until 1944 Dr. Hegge offered courses part-time at University of Michigan on mental retardation. ⁴⁶   The McGregor Fund originally paid Dr. Hegge’s salary, since he could not legally collect pay from county funds as a result of not yet being a United States citizen. ⁴⁷

          The subsequent addition of Dr. Heinz Werner and Dr. Alfred Strauss to its staff cemented the foundation of what would flower over several decades into the WCTS's most lasting academic triumph; the validation of its once-laughable assertion that the “un-teachable” could be taught. A book by Scott Danforth on the “intellectual history of learning disabilities” contends that “[around 1929], countercurrents to the dominant narrative of educational hopelessness erupted at two American scientific sites,” which he names as the Wayne County Training School at Northville, and the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station (ICWRS) at the State University of Iowa. According to Danforth, who goes into much more detail on them than any other historian of psychology, these two institutions became “the scientific proving grounds for future leaders in the learning disabilities movement,” by delving into the question of the true learning potential of the feebleminded. ⁴⁸   He also explains that they represented each of the two schools of thought in this country on educating mentally “defective” children prior to World War II. The Iowa City researchers adhered to the American concept of “unitary” mental capacity as measured by the IQ test, while the Northville researchers adhered more to the European attitude that the human mind was multifaceted and that its many other capacities would remain fully functioning and unaffected by any learning failures it experienced. Part of the reason for this departure was that the key researchers who joined WCTS’s staff at that time were European transplants. ICWRS and WCTS shared one thing, however—an assumption that within every “defective” child lay hidden an untapped capacity for learning, despite some early-life failure to activate it. It was the scientific drive of these two institutions that really forged the change in American thought from the nineteenth-century mindset on mental defectiveness, that it was the product of an irreversible genetic flaw, to a more Progressive-era mindset that it was dependent on environment. One of Iowa’s main achievements was to challenge the popular idea that genetics predetermined an individual’s mental potential, and that the brain’s functioning level could be dramatically increased via early education. Author Hamilton Cravens asserted that this presaged the development of the Head Start program, and others like it. ⁴⁹