A Disability History of the United States (16 page)

After her 1893 graduation from Gallaudet, running counter once again to national trends, Agatha Tiegel accepted a teaching position at the Minnesota School for the Deaf (sometimes called the Faribault School for the Deaf). After six years of teaching she married Olof Hanson. Born in Sweden, Hanson had received his education at both the Minnesota School for the Deaf and Gallaudet. He became a successful architect, Episcopal minister, and president of the National Association of the Deaf (1910–1913). The couple, who eventually had three daughters, lived for most of their married life in Seattle. As president of the NAD, Olof Hanson resisted the exclusive reliance on oralism in deaf education, once claiming that “fully 90 percent of the deaf entertain these views, and among them are many educated by the oral method.”
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While Agatha’s views on oralism are not known, it is likely that she agreed with her husband.

Agatha Tiegel Hanson benefited greatly from the rise of women’s and deaf education, despite oralism. Via her education she experienced upward class mobility, she met her husband, and she moved into a vibrant deaf community that she apparently loved. She continued her lifelong love of poetry, even publishing her own poems. In one of her most famous poems, “Inner Music,” she wrote of deafness as an “imperfection,” but an imperfection that enabled “diviner harmony” and “peacefulness” that would otherwise have been lost “amid earth’s din.”
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Educator James William Sowell similarly resisted oralist trends in deaf education. Deaf since early infancy, Sowell attended the Alabama School for the Deaf, graduated from Gallaudet in 1900, and earned a master’s degree in literature from Johns Hopkins University. Despite a successful teaching career, Sowell later lost his positions at the Nebraska School for the Deaf when it became purely oralist. In a poem entitled “The Oralist,” he charged: “Oralist, whose traffic is a little child’s despair . . . Oralist, O oralist, turn your head aside, Know you not the pitying Christ for sins like yours has died?”
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Sowell considered oralism a sin. Despite his condemnation it would remain the dominant form of deaf education until approximately the 1970s. American Sign Language, however, remained alive and vibrant due to the sometimes covert, sometimes overt insistence and resistance of deaf people.

The period from the Civil War until the 1890s is one in which disability became increasingly institutionalized. The solidification of the federal government that developed in this period, along with emerging technologies and urbanization, aided the creation of institutions and the development of policies pertaining to people considered disabled. As the United States and its citizens debated the human capacity for education, they also explored and disagreed over which peoples should have access to various forms of education. In government policies and programs, in local laws, in entertainment, in educational institutions, and in asylums and other institutions that simply warehoused disabled people, the management of disability became increasingly built into national structures. The population of asylums expanded, sometimes resulting in horrific experiences. At the same time, educational institutions led and staffed by people with disabilities expanded, creating rich spaces of disability culture, although they generally remained racially exclusive. Some institutions enriched lives, others caused devastation, and some did both.

In his 1923 State of the Union Address, President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed, “America must be kept American. For this purpose, it is necessary to continue a policy of restricted immigration.”
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Coolidge was not alone. The mass immigration of southern and eastern Europeans who provided the cheap labor that fueled the nation’s industrial and economic expansion now generated fears about a deteriorating national body, as did the mass migration of African Americans out of the rural South and into the urban North. Since the early twentieth century, a growing wave of concern about the changing nature of the nation’s citizens had overwhelmed the United States, its politics, and its culture. People with disabilities fought against increasingly stringent and harsh laws and cultural attitudes, but despite their efforts the definition of “undesirable” became ever more wide, fluid, and racially/ethnically based. Physical “defects,” both scientists and the casual observer increasingly assumed, went hand in hand with mental and moral “defects.” This resulted in the forced sterilization of more than sixty-five thousand Americans by the 1960s, and in the most restrictive immigration laws in US history (that, among other things, excluded people with disabilities). The ideal American citizen was defined in increasingly narrow and increasingly specific physical terms.

Many in power—including politicians, educators, religious leaders, and jurists—sought to explain and address the growing social concerns caused by industrialization and urbanization. They used Gregor Mendel’s scientific work on plant genetics and the newly developed Binet-Simon intelligence test to argue that criminality, feeble-mindedness, sexual perversions, and immorality, as well as leadership, responsibility, and proper expressions of gender, were hereditary traits (just as blue eyes were hereditary traits). Conveniently, this argument blamed the huge economic disparities between the small numbers of the rich and the large numbers of the poor on the deficiencies of poor people. While then and still widely discredited by many scientists, the gospel of eugenics was embraced wholeheartedly by many—including biologist Charles Davenport and then Harry Laughlin. Eugenics is the belief that the way to improve society is through better human breeding practices so that only those with “positive” hereditary traits reproduce. In law, in popular culture, in science, and even at local county fairs, eugenics was pervasive in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The arguments of Chief Justice Harry Olson of the municipal court of Chicago, who decided the fate of many individuals considered defective, are reflective of popular eugenicists. He warned in 1911 that the success of the United States depended on limiting its undesirable elements—degenerate immigrants being only one of the many undesirable categories. In his 1922 foreword to Harry Laughlin’s treatise on the state of eugenics in the United States, Olson warned that “the success of democracy depends on the quality of its individual elements . . . [If] there is a constant and progressive racial degeneracy, it is only a question of time when popular self-government will be impossible, and will be succeeded by chaos, and finally a dictatorship.”
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Given such weighty political importance, judicial officials, physicians, psychiatrists, and others who contributed to and managed insane asylums took their resulting responsibilities seriously. In 1899 Dr. Henry Clay Sharp of the Indiana Reformatory, for example, instituted a sterilization program in order to prevent the spread of hereditary defects among US residents. As he warned in 1909, “There is no longer any questioning of the fact that the degenerate class is increasing out of all proportion to the increase of the general population.” According to Sharp, the “degenerate class” included “most of the insane, the epileptic, the imbecile, the idiotic, the sexual perverts; many of the confirmed inebriates, prostitutes, tramps and criminals, as well as the habitual pauper found in our county poor asylums; also many of the children in our orphan homes.”
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With the degenerative population that large, action was necessary.

Laughlin had and would become widely recognized and effective as a leading proponent of restrictive immigration and forced-sterilization laws. The two strategies, he believed, together would ensure “the destiny of the American nation.” For the nation to succeed, he maintained, it must limit its already dangerously expanding pool of intellectually, physically, and morally defective citizens. Restrictive immigration laws, he would argue over and over again in print as well as before Congress, would “forbid the addition through immigration to our human breeding stock of persons of a lower natural hereditary constitution than that which constitutes the desired standard.” Forced-sterilization laws, accompanied by encouragement for those considered desirable for bearing children, would likewise limit the numbers of “socially inadequate, both within and not in custodial institutions,” and thus inhibit “the birth rate among degenerates.”
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Laughlin became recognized as a leading scientist in both the United States and Germany. His model sterilization law became internationally renowned, eventually taken up by Adolf Hitler in his own bid for a national racial purity.

Beginning with the Immigration Act of 1882 and continuing up until the highly restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, immigration law increasingly restricted potential immigrants deemed defective—morally, physically, or intellectually—or even potentially defective. The 1882 law prohibited entry to any “lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” Immigration officials determined “public charge” at their own discretion. In 1891 the phrase “unable to take care of himself or herself” was replaced by the far wider and more fluid “
likely
to become a public charge.” In 1903 Congress specified those with epilepsy and in 1907 added “imbeciles” and “feeble-minded persons.” As one Ellis Island official wrote, feeble-mindedness conveniently served as a “sort of waste basket for many forms and degrees of weak-mindedness.” By 1907 immigration officials demanded a medical certificate from immigrants judged “mentally or physically defective, such mental or physical defect being of a nature which
may affect
the ability of such alien to earn a living.” In 1917 immigration officials received instructions to reject all immigrants with “any mental abnormality whatever . . . which justifies the statement that the alien is mentally defective.”
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At Ellis Island, during the peak years of US immigration from 1870 to 1924, more than twenty-six million people entered the United States, driven by the lack of political, economic, and social opportunities in their home countries, and expanding opportunities, or at least the potential for them, in America. Potential immigrants, already limited by immigration laws that excluded nearly all Africans, Asians, and South Americans, went through a vigorous inspection process. The physical path through Ellis Island included a set of steep steps, several sharp turns, and, usually, dense crowding. Immigration agents prided themselves on their ability to make “snapshot diagnoses,” as each day a “handful of officials inspected between 2,000 and 5,000 people.” One official later wrote, “Defects, derangements and symptoms of disease which would not be disclosed by a so-called ‘careful physical examination,’ are often easily recognizable in watching a person twenty-five feet away.”
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If suspect, officials marked the potential immigrant with a chalked letter, usually on their back. Those who were chalk-marked endured further examination. The accompanying illustration shows these various marks. Money served as the first signifier of potential defectiveness, for first-class passengers experienced far less scrutiny—a visual examination, for example, to detect the eye disease trachoma, rather than a painful eversion of the eyelids by inspectors.

The “defects, derangements and symptoms of disease” proudly discernible by immigration inspectors also included the facial expressions, “oddity of dress,” “talkativeness, witticism, facetiousness,” and “unnatural actions, mannerisms, and other eccentricities” that they believed to be indicators of sexual perversion. As scholar Jennifer Terry has argued, “American physicians habitually characterized homosexuality as emanating from elements and forces outside the native-born white population.” Immigrants feared to be possible sex perverts were pulled aside for further inspection and could be asked questions such as: “Are you married? Do you want to marry? Do you care for the opposite sex? Have you had acquaintances of the opposite sex?” American physicians generally considered the desire for sexual contact with others of the same sex to be proof of an inheritable form of insanity, and an embodiment contrary to the able-bodied citizen sought by immigration officials.
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In this case, able-bodiedness included maritally restricted heterosexuality.