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Authors: Charlotte Gray

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Through the 1870s and 1880s, the two men agreed to disagree. But there was always a danger that the simmering disagreement might burst into open flames. The first warning sign came with Gallaudet’s proposal to start training teachers for the deaf at the Columbia Institution. In 1890, Gallaudet asked Congress for $5,000 to establish the program, and in pursuit of his subsidy he quickly learned his way around Congress. A good-looking man who waxed his mustache and sported pince-nez and immaculate white linen suits, Gallaudet was a real operator on Capitol Hill. A former student at the Columbia Institution described how, when the superintendent appeared before a congressional committee, Gallaudet would always “make a graceful bow to all the members, and then, in a clear cultured voice, explain the needs of the college, its need for expansion.… Should he be the butt of a joke by a congressman who had an abundant sense of humor, he would always laugh with them and prove that he was a good fellow.” His unctuous social manner had helped him obtain grants for new dormitories and other buildings on his school’s campus and money for scholarships for the deaf. Now he put the same charms to work on the congressional committee that was considering the budget request for his teacher-training program. He haunted the U.S. Congress’s marble corridors and invited leading committee members to lavish dinners.

Alec was very suspicious of Gallaudet’s plans for a teacher-training program because he thought Gallaudet was going to employ deaf teachers. This, he argued, would guarantee that deaf students would never learn to speak or lip-read. Although Gallaudet assured him that deaf people would not be eligible for his new program, Alec didn’t believe him. He went public with his opposition to the proposal. “I consider this a backward step,” he told Congress’s Appropriations Committee, “and not a step in advance.… The employment of deaf teachers is absolutely detrimental to oral instruction.”

The two men were quite a contrast. On one side stood Gallaudet, slender and smartly dressed, the single-minded spokesperson for his institution and a political wheeler-dealer. On the other side stood the world-famous millionaire Alexander Graham Bell, a big bear of a man who spoke with passion on the many issues that were close to his heart. The debate on the subsidy could have gone either way. Gallaudet’s students told reporters that they would prefer to be taught by deaf teachers, who might be less likely to make them feel “strange.” In the nineteenth century, as in this one, many deaf people thought deaf was a perfectly good way to be—as good as hearing, perhaps better.

Alec was blithely convinced that the correctness of his case was self-evident. But some of his Wednesday-evening friends were worried, so they suggested that he might take a leaf out of Gallaudet’s book and give a little dinner to the committee members, to butter them up. Charles Thompson, the butler, was in the room, and remembered his employer’s reaction: “Mr. Bell resented this suggestion at once, and raising his right arm, his eyes flashing fire, his hair seeming to raise on his head, face aflame, he said, ‘If the facts presented to these gentlemen do not convince them of the merits of this case, they can go to blazes.’ With this, his clenched fist came down upon the table with a bang.”

To Gallaudet’s fury, Alec’s arguments prevailed and Congress refused Gallaudet’s request for a grant. The refusal prompted the first open clash between America’s two leading educators of the deaf. Unaccustomed to failure, Gallaudet exploded. He accused Alec in the press of “meddling in affairs that did not concern him.” Alec tried to take the high road, simply sending a chilly letter to Gallaudet asking whether he had perhaps been misquoted.

Mabel watched from the sidelines the clash between her husband and Gallaudet, and made little comment on the debate. Gallaudet was no friend of hers. At one meeting, she confided to her mother, Gallaudet had urged her to acquire either the manual alphabet or sign language and to encourage her family to do likewise, so they could all use it together, and “then I should understand more of general conversation.” Mabel was furious: “I hate that man,” she wrote to Gertrude. She was adamantly opposed to Gallaudet’s campaign for special institutions for the hearing-impaired, because of her conviction that this would lead to the deaf being treated as a “peculiar people.” But she never publicly voiced these views, or her conviction that it was cruel to send deaf children to residential institutions like the Hartford School (“a virtual prison” in her private opinion) to learn sign language, because then they would be unable to communicate with people who did not know it. In the interests of passing, in her words, as “normal,” she hadn’t allowed Gallaudet’s arguments or pretensions to get under her skin. Now she winced as she saw that her husband was hurt by Gallaudet’s accusation, as well by Gallaudet’s more rabid supporters, who attacked Alec’s views as “pestilential,” “ranting,” and even the “vaporings of an idle brain.” On this occasion, knowing Alec’s propensity to explode with rage, she urged him to stay calm: “I am very pleased with your letter to Mr. Gallaudet. It is just exactly what it should be, to the point, dignified, and wasting no words.” But her own fury began to build.

In 1890, the two men managed to turn down the heat of their disagreement and dampen the flames of personal invective—although not without a great deal of spluttering. Gallaudet accused Alec of conducting the row “more in the spirit and attitude of a lawyer.… bent on winning his case, than as a philanthropist … striving to advance a worthy cause.” Alec reproached Gallaudet: “You have impugned my motives … and you have publically
[sic]
discredited me before young men and women of your college, whose interests I have at heart.”

A few years later, however, the hostility erupted into a firestorm. It was sparked by the breakdown of efforts to merge two teaching associations: the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf (AAPTSD), which Alec had founded and now financed, and Edward Gallaudet’s Convention of American Instructors of the Deaf (CAID).

This time, the breach was brutal. It occurred at an August 1895 CAID conference of teachers for the deaf in Flint, Michigan, at which many Bell supporters were also present. The meeting was held in an unventilated wooden hall, where the temperature hovered near 100 degrees Fahrenheit during that steamy week. Despite the heat, delegates had packed the hall in anticipation of Edward Gallaudet’s keynote speech. Members of the different associations fanned themselves, mopped their brows, and glowered at their opponents. Gallaudet, as he confided to an ally, had decided it was his moral duty “to ‘do-up’ Professor Bell.” He stalked up to the podium and proceeded to describe his valiant fight to establish the training college for teachers for the deaf—and Alec’s allegedly unprincipled opposition to it. He then mocked the rival teachers’ association, drawling out the cumbersome name “American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf.” The interpreter made the name seem even more ridiculous by spelling the whole thing out, letter by letter, in manual language. Gallaudet ridiculed Bell (who was not present) personally, and emerged, in his own eyes, as the champion of the deaf.

Gallaudet’s supporters applauded wildly. They saw Alec as blindly prejudiced against them: they had not forgotten the paper Alec had published in 1883, with the unfortunate title, “Memoir upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race.” But Alec had friends in the audience too. They saw the speech as a spiteful attack on their hero, designed to present him as a narrow-minded, unprofessional egomaniac, and they lost no time in describing it to Alec. Then they sat back and waited for his reaction. It was disappointingly mild. When Alec arrived in Flint a couple of days later, he made a speech in which he calmly rebutted the charges. Although his fans insisted that Alec’s speech was “inspired,” “a model for the highest type of a Christian gentleman,” his critics dismissed it as “lame.” But there was no mistaking the state of affairs between the two men. At one point, they were invited to come to the front of the hall and make peace. Both men hesitated: Dr. Gallaudet’s thin nostrils flared, while Alec frowned so fiercely that his bushy eyebrows almost met over his nose. Finally, each reluctantly made his way forward and, without smiling, extended his right hand. As Richard Winefield describes the encounter, “The tips of their fingers barely touched in the most frigid of handshakes.… The last chance to unify the field had been lost, resulting in many more years of antagonism and frustration for teachers, parents and deaf children.”

Writing to Mabel after the Flint fracas, Alec shrugged off the frigid handshake: “Had a lively time in Flint—Gallaudet having made a most outrageous personal attack upon me and my work for the deaf.… The address was simply ’bosh’—to excite the passions of the deaf.… I am seriously troubled about Gallaudet.… Don’t think any man in full possession of his senses would have written that address.” Alec insisted that the mood of the convention swung in his favor because it was dominated by “adult deaf-mutes from Illinois, Ohio and Michigan.… Enough to swamp the votes of all the Sup[erintenden]ts and Prin[cipal]s present.” Gallaudet, in Alec’s opinion, was “not quite sane upon the subject of Bell.”

This time, Mabel was not prepared to stay on the sidelines, watching the two men paper over the breach. Gallaudet’s personal attack on her beloved husband enraged her. She immediately wrote to Gallaudet, severing all social ties between the two families. The following March, at a reception at the National Geographic Society, she realized that the superintendent of the Columbia Institution (recently renamed Gallaudet College, after Edward’s father) was approaching: “I was sitting talking and looking straight ahead when Dr. Gallaudet walked slowly past looking me full and steadily in the eyes, just as a dead man might and almost as white. His face never changed, his eyes never left mine until the slow walk had carried him past me and I, well, I went on laughing and talking.” In Washington society circles, such a public “cut” was a dramatic gesture. In vain, Edward Gallaudet wrote to Mabel, assuring her that “I must, of course, accept your decision as to our future relations, but I am unwilling to have our friendship come to an end.” Mabel was unrelenting.

Even Alec was shocked by Mabel’s intransigence. “I don’t approve of your carrying your resentment so far at all,” he wrote to her. “I am very seriously of the opinion that he is only partly responsible for his actions—and that the future will reveal the fact of insanity taking the form of mono-mania against myself.” In fact, the ferocity of the disagreement did subside: Alexander Graham Bell was too large-spirited to harbor grudges. In later years, he would occasionally join forces with Gallaudet to protect the rights of deaf people. But the deep split that first cracked open in Flint, Michigan, between deaf educators who endorse lip-reading and those who promote sign language gapes as widely today as it did in 1895. It remains a battle between those, like Alexander Graham Bell, who aggressively push for the assimilation of deaf people into the mainstream and those, like Edward Gallaudet, who communicate through American Sign Language and regard the deaf subculture as a valuable minority, like any ethnic or linguistic minority—one that deserves an independent status within the larger culture.

Through all the
Sturm und Drang
of clashes between the two schools of deaf education, the friendship between Alexander Graham Bell and Helen Keller flourished. Helen made several visits to Beinn Bhreagh, where she enjoyed midnight swims in the lake with Daisy and Elsie: “The air was quite cold, but the water was deliciously warm and our joy knew no bounds!” She knew she could always call on Alec for assistance. In January 1907, she sent him a telegram asking him to accompany her on stage and translate her speech at a meeting at New York City’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel three days later. From Washington, Alec telegraphed back, “My dear little girl, I will come and help you.”

Yet Alec’s attitude to Helen Keller reflects both his large-hearted generosity to humanity as a whole and his insensitivity to individuals. One evening in 1902, when Alec was fifty-five and Helen was twenty, they sat alone on the creaking wicker chairs outside Beinn Bhreagh’s drawing room, enjoying the cool breezes off Bras d’Or Lake, which glinted below them in the moonlight. Alec mused on the unexpected turns his own life had taken, then turned to the young friend sitting close beside him and, as she recounted in her memoir
Midstream,
remarked, “There are unique tasks waiting for you, a unique woman.… The more you accomplish, the more you will help the deaf everywhere.”

But then Alec took the conversation in an unexpected direction. He spelled out on his young guests hand, “It seems to me, Helen, a day must come when love, which is more than friendship, will knock at the door of your heart and demand to be let in.”

Startled, Helen replied, “What made you think of that?” Alec continued, “Oh, I often think of your future. To me you are a sweet, desirable young girl, and it is natural to think about love and happiness when we are young.”

“I do think of love sometimes,” Helen admitted, “but it is like a beautiful flower which I may not touch, but whose fragrance makes the garden a place of delight just the same.”

The conversation, as Helen described it twenty-eight years later, was suffused with Alec’s heartfelt belief that disability should not prevent anybody from enjoying the full range of human experience. Happily married himself, he could not bear the idea that a woman whose attractions he thought obvious might not enjoy a similar relationship. “He sat silent for a minute or two, thought-troubled, I fancied. Then his dear fingers touched my hand again like a tender breath, and he said, ‘Do not think because you cannot see or hear, you are debarred from the supreme happiness of woman. Heredity is not involved in your case…’”

Helen, however, was all too aware of the stigma attached to someone with her disabilities. Where would she find a partner who would match her intellectually, desire her physically,
and
have the endless patience of Teacher? Even if she found him, would he respond to her? Smiling in Alec’s direction, she said quietly, “I cannot imagine a man wanting to marry me. I should think it would seem like marrying a statue.”

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