A Disability History of the United States (18 page)

Research into Alice’s family—her “pedigree”—was extensive. Informants included her nuclear family, aunts and uncles, great aunts and uncles, cousins and their spouses, second cousins, the local overseer of the poor, local police officers and reporters, and matron of the local Children’s Home. No stone was left unturned in uncovering the sexual, medical, moral, and death histories of each and every person in Smith’s extended family. The result was a four-generation pedigree chart that detailed the moral and physical defectiveness of the entire Smith clan. Such studies were commonly done, and used to determine which individuals should be sterilized and/or segregated within institutions.

The conclusion of the experts of the State Village for Epileptics, and that of eugenics advocate Harry Laughlin, was that Alice Smith was “congenitally defective, and [had] also inherited the epileptic tendency from her parents.” To allow her to return home would be “a crime against society.” Furthermore, “it would be indeed most wasteful to the nation and State to allow this defective to wander about, as it would entail perpetuation of her kind, and other evils due to this lack of proper care and segregation.” Sterilization was thus the solution—to improve Alice Smith’s life, and for the greater good of society.
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Beginning in Indiana in 1907, more than thirty states passed forced-sterilization laws. Their content varied, as did how, if, and to what extent they were put into practice. The model law developed by Harry Laughlin defined “socially inadequate classes” of people very broadly: “(1) Feebleminded; (2) Insane, (including the psychopathic); (3) Criminalistic (including the delinquent and wayward); (4) Epileptic; (5) Inebriate (including drug habitués); (6) Diseased (including the tuberculous, the syphilitic, the leprous, and others with chronic, infectious and legally segregable diseases); (7) Blind (including those with seriously impaired vision); (8) Deaf (including those with seriously impaired hearing); (9) Deformed (including the crippled); and (10) Dependent (including orphans, ne’er-do-wells, the homeless, tramps and paupers).” All state sterilization laws passed prior to 1921, and many after, applied to individuals diagnosed as sexual perverts. Because definitions of insanity included same-sex contact, the laws sometimes doubly impacted gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. And while sterilization laws were never sex-specific, more women than men were sterilized (despite the greater ease of sterilizing men).
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Proponents of sterilization argued that it was a patriotic cause, and a better solution than long-term institutionalization. For the health of the nation the electoral body had to be protected against degenerative elements. Politicians, those in the judicial system, educators, and medical experts increasingly conflated political and economic strength with bodily and mental health. In a time of growing class disparities, contested racial and gender power relationships, and large-scale immigration, democracy had to be protected. For Dr. H. C. Sharp of the Indiana Reformatory, that meant the sterilization of “degenerates”: which, he told the American Prison Association in 1909, 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 paupers found in our county poor asylums; also many of the children in our orphan homes.” Civic undesirability was slippery and broad; and the definitions of disability, degeneracy, and immorality vague and permeable. Sharp assured his reading and listening audience, however, in ironically patriotic language, that sterilizations (and he performed them without anesthesia) in no way “impaired” the “pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.”
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Perhaps because of the permeability of disability and degeneracy, related concerns spread regarded maintaining able-bodied and able-minded women. Opponents of women’s education such as Edward Clarke had warned in the 1870s that a college education had the potential to permanently damage and disable women. As the movement for female suffrage expanded, and as women’s employment and educational opportunities expanded, so did social concern about the consequences for the female body and greater society. This concern generally did not apply to all women—but focused on white middle- and upper-class women who sought expanded civic engagement.

The desire to maintain the female body needed for a healthy nation is exemplified by William Lee Howard, a prominent physician and author of parental advice books at the turn of the century. In 1909 he warned of rising physical and mental degeneration among women. According to Howard, “the female possessed of masculine ideas of independence,” who proclaimed “her sole right to decide questions of war or religion,” and “that disgusting anti-social being, the female sexual pervert,” embodied “different degrees of the same class—degenerates.” In essence, women who sexually desired other women, women who lived as gender nonconformists, and the mother “quick with children who spends her mornings at the club, discussing ‘social statistics,’” embodied different but related forms of a gender disability caused by a degenerating body and mind. The true tragedy, Howard argued, was that if such a woman had children, “she is then a menace to civilization . . . the mother of physical and mental monstrosities who exist as a class of true degenerates.” The poor children would have no good future, for their “weak, plastic, developing cells of the brain are twisted, distorted, and a perverted psychic growth promoted.”
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It was not enough to isolate the Alice Smiths of the nation; they had to be sterilized.

Alice Smith’s court-appointed attorney argued against her sterilization in a case that reached the New Jersey Supreme Court in 1913. The court agreed and pointed out that the surgery, salpingectomy, was dangerous. Those affected by the law, the court noted, were poor and institutionalized in public facilities. The law thus violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, because it was not applied to all. Alice Smith would not be sterilized. The court did not take up the more complicated legal question of whether or not sterilization statutes were constitutional.

In 1927 the US Supreme Court decided the issue in
Buck v. Bell.
In his majority opinion, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes argued that “more than once” the nation’s “best citizens” had given their lives for “the public welfare.” “It would be strange,” he went on, “if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices . . . in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” Holmes concluded that in the family of plaintiff Carrie Buck, her mother, and her daughter, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The Court decided that sterilization statutes calling for sterilization of the institutionalized did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. The Supreme Court decision of
Buck v. Bell
has yet to be overturned.
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Alice Smith remained at the State Village for Epileptics until at least 1930, when she was listed in the federal census. Whether or not she was eventually sterilized, and whether or not she was released or died while institutionalized at the Village, is unknown. One wonders what her later life was like.

Carrie Buck, however, the subject of the
Buck v. Bell
Supreme Court decision, was sterilized and then released from the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-minded. Like Alice Smith, she was a young, poor, white girl who bore a child outside of marriage. She then entered the court system, her child was removed from her, and she was institutionalized. After Buck’s sterilization and release she married and remained so for twenty-five years until her husband’s death.

In the Progressive Era, a period of active governmental and social reform between the 1890s and 1920s, institutions for people considered either insane or feeble-minded transitioned from places where education and assimilation were sought to places that were simply custodial. More institutions embraced an organizational and ideological framework called “the colony plan.” Dr. William Spratling, medical superintendent of the Craig Colony for Epileptics at Sonyea, New York (which many considered an ideal model), described the ideal colony as a beehive: “The innumerable hives picturesquely scattered through sweet smelling fields, or dotting the clover covered ground beneath fragrantly blooming apple trees, stand, in colony life, for contented and happy homes; the ceaseless hum of the wings of the busy little toilers stands for the activity of head and heart and hand of the common inhabitants of the colony, each striving for the common good; while the inevitable drones of the hives find their prototype in the lame, the unteachable and the mentally blind among the colonists, who are driven to seek refuge in such a home.”
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Spratling’s ideal architectural plans included an administrative building at the center from which paths radiated to various cottages. “Cottage” is a misleading term, for these spaces could house as many as fifty people. Such colonies embodied, as historian Lawrence Goodheart pointed out, an arrangement by which a “superior group rul[es] enclaves of inferior peoples.” It is no historical accident that such language developed at the height of US colonialism abroad, such as that in the Philippines, and in the same period in which
Plessy v. Ferguson
(1896) ruled that separate was equal and that segregation served the public good.
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In an era of US imperialism abroad, the supposedly inferior peoples at home, epileptics and the feeble-minded, remained segregated within their own geographical places, literally called a colony, and removed from larger society.

Money could provide one with a more comfortable facility, but money and social position did not remove the stigma from epilepsy, institutionalization, or insanity. Jean Clemens, the daughter of Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), began experiencing blackouts at the age of fifteen. Seizures began later and doctors diagnosed her with epilepsy. Family resources meant that Jean never entered the court system. Instead she made the decision in her mid-twenties to enter Hillbourne Farms, a “private health resort” for individuals with epilepsy, in Katonah, New York. The decision was one made out of desperation and a lack of other options, encouraged by her doctor. In her diary she noted, “It was desperately hard to leave Father and Clara [her sister] in order to come out to a totally strange place. I tried my hardest not to cry before them, but as the time of departure began to approach I found it growing more and more difficult to restrain myself.” During her fifteen-month stay Jean was aware, with some bitterness, of how difficult family life had been: “While I know that neither of them would admit being glad to have me away & therefore relieved of the presence of an ill person, I am sure that they must feel so . . . I am sure [father] is fond of me but I don’t believe that he any more than Clara, really misses me.”
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While Jean was never threatened with sterilization by doctors, the courts, or her family, her family made clear their strong belief that she should never marry or bear children. And once institutionalized, she was deeply dependent on and controlled by doctors’ orders and her father’s money.

Institutionalization could be individually devastating, but often it also served larger ideological purposes. The warehousing of those considered deviant in one way or another, combined with the threat of sterilization, policed behaviors and literally controlled the reproduction of social norms. In these cases, the rhetoric of disability, benevolence, and care (both of the individual and of the nation) combined with and sometimes masked broader impulses of social control.