A Disability History of the United States (15 page)

At the same time, the public seemed to have an expanding and insatiable curiosity about deviant bodies. Since as early as the 1840s, in traveling freak shows, in vaudeville, at P. T. Barnum’s famous American Museum in New York and similar facilities, on riverboats, at county fairs, in circus side shows and World Fairs, the exhibition of human bodies considered both wondrous and freakish drew huge crowds always willing to hand over their cash. Exhibitors promoted armless wonders, legless wonders, conjoined twins, and humans considered unnaturally large and unnaturally small.

Lavinia Warren, one of the most privileged of those “exhibited,” wrote of her life, “I belong to the public.” Between 1862 and 1919, from age nineteen to seventy-eight, Warren traveled the globe, appearing at some of the most glamorous as well as some of the roughest public venues. She and her younger sister, Minnie, were dwarfs: two of eight children born to white, well-established, average-size parents in rural Massachusetts. After joining efforts with P. T. Barnum, and then marrying Barnum’s already-famous star performer Charles Stratton, known as General Tom Thumb, Lavinia became even more famous as Mrs. Tom Thumb. After Stratton’s 1883 death, Lavinia married an Italian dwarf, Count Primo Magri. Lavinia stubbornly clung to respectable self-presentation, insisting herself “an average middle-class new England woman of her day, conventional in all but size.” Those she met, however, often wanted to pet and hold her. “It seemed impossible,” she wrote in her 1906 autobiography, “to make people understand at first that I was not a child; that, being a woman, I had the womanly instinct of shrinking from a form of familiarity which in the case of a child of my size would have been as natural as it was permissible.”
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The public desire to pet and hold Warren, the perception of her as an innocent and childlike, made profits possible. At the same time, her size was her only means to the material comfort in which she lived. Her race, gender, and class rendered her a relatively safe and nonthreatening object for public viewing.

In comparison, exhibitors presented people of color as particularly exotic, embodied and savage missing links between humans and animals. The way they were shown, often with little clothing, was eerily similar to that on the slave block. Exhibitors made money from the titillating and perhaps slightly naughty nature, sometimes justified in the name of science, in which they displayed the bodies of people of color.

Fascination with the supposedly deviant bodies and minds of people of color went beyond the commercial sphere and also pervaded medical ideology. Medical experts did not consider John Patterson’s physicality deviant, but they certainly considered his mind to be deviant and sought to remove him from the public sphere. In November 1867, Patterson entered the Alabama Insane Hospital as a patient. Hospital Superintendent Peter Bryce admitted the forty-five-year-old laborer, emancipated from slavery less than five years previous, with a diagnosis of acute mania. Bryce’s notes indicated that Patterson had been insane for twelve years. The cause of Patterson’s mental disturbance, Bryce reported further, was freedom—which, of course, had only come a few years prior due to emancipation and the Civil War.
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Superintendent Peter Bryce’s diagnostic skills reflected racial understandings of insanity shared particularly by Southern slavery apologists and medical practitioners since before the controversial 1840 census. J. F. Miller, for example, superintendent of the segregated Goldsboro (North Carolina) Hospital for the Colored Insane, argued that emancipation had alarming deleterious consequences. Both insanity and tuberculosis, he warned in 1896, had been “rare diseases among the negroes of the South prior to emancipation.” Indeed, conditions of enslavement were ideally “conducive to physical health and mental repose.” Slavery protected vulnerable African Americans from “their promiscuous sexual indulgence and the baneful influences of the liquor saloon.” Emancipation resulted in the removal of “the restraining influences which had been such conservators of healthfulness for mind and body.” Bluntly, freedom led to insanity. The “influences and agencies which would not affect a race mentally stronger,” combined with the innate weaknesses of the black body and mind, left African Americans succumbing to insanity in significant numbers.
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After the Civil War, segregated insane asylums developed quickly across much of the United States—simultaneous to and part of the trend by which schools for idiots, deaf, and blind people also developed. Many, but not all, were racially segregated. Southern state facilities included Central State Hospital (Virginia, 1870), Goldsboro Hospital for the Colored Insane (North Carolina, 1880), Mount Vernon Hospital for the Colored Insane (Alabama, 1902), Crownsville State Hospital (Maryland, 1911), Palmetto State Hospital (South Carolina, 1914), Lakin State Hospital for the Colored Insane (West Virginia, 1926), and Taft State Hospital (Oklahoma, 1933). An 1895 survey showed that asylums in Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Louisiana, and St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC, segregated patients, even while they shared the same facility.
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While many medical professionals made racist claims about the mental and physical deficiencies of African Americans, they did not move to provide expanded care. Historian John Hughes found that staff doctors at the Alabama Insane Hospital in Tuscaloosa, the precursor to the Mount Vernon Hospital, clearly responded to black patients differently than white patients. Doctors took skimpy case histories of their African American patients and used different diagnostic labels than they did for white patients. Hospitals provided inferior living conditions, and black patients received their care from the least experienced physicians. Hughes argues that hospital records suggest that the inmates of the Alabama institution were malnourished—and that such malnourishment “actually increased mortality.” As Hughes puts it, “blacks were admitted for a narrower range of conditions than whites and faced a greater chance of illness and death after admission.”
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Freedom clearly did not result in insanity, but for newly freed slaves with some physical and mental disabilities the consequences of freedom could be complex. Newly freed slaves, many historians have noted, eagerly sought to find employment, reconstitute their families (if torn apart by slavery), and relocate to places of their own choosing. Mobility became the method by which emancipated peoples lived and acted out their freedom. As historian Jim Downs has noted, however, “freedom depended upon one’s ability and potential to work.” The Confiscation Acts passed during the war promised freedom to former slaves who crossed Union lines, but only in exchange for performing often grueling manual labor. While other former slaves eagerly moved away from the land of their former owners, equating mobility with freedom, some of the newly freed literally could not do so. If a physical disability resulted in limited mobility, living out freedom became very difficult. A postwar 1867 report to the Union secretary of war Edward Stanton noted that many “helpless” former slaves remained working on the plantations of their former owners—simply unable to leave, and working for food. “Scores of disabled slaves,” in Downs’s words, “remained enslaved.” Hannah, of the Natchez district of Mississippi, for example, may have been emancipated, but the blind woman had no family to rely on. She remained in Natchez, unable to leave her former owner’s home, and continued to work for him.
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For Hannah, the material realities of disability, racism, social isolation, and a federal government that did not move to defend her, were tragic. Equally tragic were the lives of formerly enslaved individuals supposedly made insane by freedom. Such analysis on the part of experts makes clear that social attitudes and power dynamics influenced definitions of insanity and appropriate behavior in the nineteenth century. It also should make us seriously question the means by which people were committed to insane hospitals as well as educational institutions, and the populations of people both interred and not interred—such as Hannah.

In 1873 Edward H. Clarke, a prominent professor at Harvard Medical School, warned the country of an issue that he felt should “excite the
gravest alarm,
and . . . demand the serious attention of the country”: an important group of people had been “permanently disabled to a greater or lesser degree, or fatally injured, by these causes”: respectable white women. A higher education, he warned, could and had “permanently disabled” such women. He gave the example of “Miss G,” a fine young woman who had done well in college and her post-college life—but then died not long afterward, an autopsy showing no disease other than “commencing degeneration” of the brain. No woman, he warned, could simultaneously use “a good brain” and “a good reproductive system that should serve the race.” It was simply too much for the female body.
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By the 1870s the common school movement, which sought to establish tax-funded public schools, had greatly expanded educational opportunities across the United States. Its proponents argued that a successful democracy required an educated citizenry. While schooling was still limited by race, gender, and class, more Americans had access to basic literacy than ever before. By the 1870s, women (generally white women) increasingly taught in the public schools. While educational reformer Catharine Beecher had argued that women were uniquely suited for educating children due to their innate maternal qualities, female teachers, conveniently, could also be paid less than male teachers. As educational opportunities expanded, a small but growing number of colleges and universities began to welcome white women and African Americans, both male and female (such as the disabled Civil War veteran Thomas Perrine), into their classrooms and libraries.

When Agatha Tiegel (1873–1959) graduated from DC’s National Deaf-Mute College in 1893 (renamed Gallaudet College in 1894), the young white woman engaged in direct conversation with Edward Clarke—as well as many others closer to home. In 1887, the institution that was to become Gallaudet, the premier educational institution for deaf Americans, had allowed female students to enroll as a two-year experiment. While a seven-year-old growing up in Pittsburgh, Tiegel had become deaf, and blind in one eye, due to spinal meningitis. She first attended public schools, then Western Pennsylvania School for the Deaf in 1886, and then Gallaudet. She began coursework in the fall of 1888 as one of only eight women and the youngest student on campus. Gallaudet had no female dormitory accommodations (the women lived at the home of President Edward M. Gallaudet), women could not leave the school without chaperone, and the faculty had ruled that women could not join the extracurricular literary societies because of the “obvious impropriety of association of the young ladies with the young men.” Skepticism remained about women’s presence. Would the women be able to handle the demands of the curriculum? Should women and men attend segregated classes, with separate curriculums, for women’s own safety and benefit? In 1895 some male students, using the language of the sideshows at which they easily could have been attendees, characterized the women “freaks.” Many years later Tiegel wrote, “I resented that there might be any question of the right, the God given right, of my sisters and myself to take our places in the sun.”
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As the valedictorian of 1893 Tiegel, the first female to graduate from Gallaudet with a BA, delivered an address entitled “The Intellect of Woman.” On Presentation Day, likely before an audience of congressional as well as university dignitaries, Tiegel proclaimed boldly that “there is no inferiority in [women’s] intellectual capacity, but only neglect of use and tardiness of development.” She argued that “restrictive circumstances” had held women “so far below her powers that we do not apprehend the full evil of these circumstances.” Tiegel drew connections between the racism that undergirded slavery and the sexism that undergirded the lack of educational opportunities for women, for both claimed that deficient bodies rendered women and African Americans unfit for a full civic life. “To argue also,” she went on, “that a woman is not fit to be trusted with her liberty on the score of her emotional nature, her poor powers of logic and judgement, is to copy the fallacies of the opponents of emancipation, who used as arguments those very faults in slaves that slavery had produced.”
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Tiegel had no African American students in her courses, for they were not permitted to be there. Indeed, Andrew Foster, the first African American to graduate from Gallaudet, did not do so until 1954.

The creation of Gallaudet reflected the continued expansion of institutions and residential schools for people with disabilities that had begun decades earlier. By the turn of the century, over 130 residential schools served deaf students, 31 served blind students, and approximately 14 schools had been established for those diagnosed as feeble-minded.
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The majority of adults in institutions, however, still lived in asylums, prisons, and almshouses—a radically different experience than that at the National Deaf-Mute College.

Life at residential schools for deaf students, and life for deaf people in general, changed dramatically in the years following the Civil War due to the rise of oralism. Oralism is the belief that deaf people can and should communicate without the use of sign language, relying exclusively on lip reading and oral speech. In the early years of deaf education in the United States, teachers taught and used sign language (called manual education). Sign language, they argued, “liberated deaf people from their confinement” and enabled them to receive Christianity. Deaf people became leaders in emerging deaf social communities facilitated by educational institutions. The post–Civil War generation of educational theorists, however, led by Alexander Graham Bell, argued that sign language served as an “instrument of . . . imprisonment.” Sign language, many proclaimed, made deaf people outsiders: “The gesturer is, and always will remain, a foreigner,” never a true American. While European Americans forbade the use of indigenous languages at Native boarding schools, and while national hysteria about rising immigration spread, oralist educators increasingly forbade the use of sign language at deaf boarding schools. The stigmatization of deafness increased. By 1899 nearly 40 percent of deaf students were taught without sign language; by World War I that number had increased to 80 percent. The number of deaf adults hired as principals and teachers plummeted. Gallaudet College refused to even train deaf people as teachers.
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