A Disability History of the United States

by Kim E. Nielsen

  As noncombatants, women could not receive disability service pensions. Could they be disabled? Women’s lives did not easily mesh with the definition of disability as an inability to labor. White women, particularly white women of middle- or upper-class status, were considered incapable of performing labor. Class- and race-based definitions of femininity presumed them unfit for labor. Race and gender paradoxically impaired and privileged such women. Working-class women, however, regardless of race or ethnicity, frequently engaged in rigorous manual labor: carrying heavy buckets of water up and down the steps of tenement housing or the narrow servant steps hidden in the back of luxury housing, planting and picking cotton, or daily milking cows. In the period after the Civil War, African American women sometimes were forced to perform wage work. They could be arrested for vagrancy if they did not engage in manual labor, while nearly all of society assumed that upper-class white women should never engage in manual labor. The increasing bureaucratic and social tendency to define disability as the incapacity to perform manual labor had radically different implications for different groups of people.

  Despite sometimes being unable to perform manual labor, disabled veterans embodied a unique disability status. Veterans had, by definition, proved their masculinity in wartime. They were, many insisted, the valiantly and deservedly disabled. As one Union surgeon wrote in 1864, “Suffering is unpleasant; but, if one must suffer it is better to do so in a good cause: therefore I had rather have my leg blown off by a rebel shell, than crushed by a locomotive, or bitten off by a crocodile.” Some men used their amputations to political advantage. Lucius Fairchild, for example, whose arm was amputated after being wounded in the Battle of Gettysburg, made much of his empty sleeve when he successfully ran for the position of Wisconsin governor (1866–1872). Disabled veterans Francis R. T. Nichols of Louisiana and James H. Berry of Arkansas used similar strategies while running successfully for their state’s highest office.14

  Wartime made disability heroic—but only for male veterans, and only for men with physical, and visibly exhibited, disabilities. Even heroic manhood, however, didn’t guarantee social acceptance and financial security for disabled veterans. Despite the expansion of federal pension and support programs, disabled Civil War veterans struggled to find employment and family economic stability; Confederate veterans even more so than Union veterans. Wartime also drew lines between those who became disabled valiantly and those who were unable to claim the status of hero.

  THE CONTRADICTIONS OF THE NEW ERA

  From the Civil War of the 1860s until the early 1920s, the numbers and kinds of institutions for and about (and only sometimes by) people with disabilities expanded. By the time of the Civil War, the nation’s citizens, and many of those who sought to be citizens, increasingly saw education as the means by which social reforms could happen, upward mobility could be achieved, and social integration could be either coerced or realized. This subsequently increased debates over who could appropriately and healthfully access higher education, and the race, class, gender, and ethnic appropriateness of education and educational contexts. Throughout all of this, people with disabilities sought to exercise their own educational, civic, and institutional leadership. Conversely, in contestations over who was fit to be present in the civic world, and who was not, people with disabilities often found themselves increasingly regulated. Those considered not fit for public life were variably shut away, gawked at, and exoticized.

  Important in this story is urbanization, industrialization, and class disparities. Between 1870 and 1920, the number of Americans increased from ten million to fifty-four million, and a growing number resided in major cities. In the 1870s, the nation experienced economic crisis, the consolidation of labor unions, and political unrest. Expanding and crowded cities meant a greater need for schools, running water, sewage systems, transportation, and food distribution—but often those needs went unmet. Poor hygiene and crowding facilitated the spread of disease. The explosion of industries such as steel and textiles that were enabled by technology meant expanded employment opportunities, wealth for some, and poverty and pollution for others. Industrial technologies also brought an increase in industrial accidents.

  What was to be the role of people with disabilities in these newly configured communities, if not in institutions? As Civil War veterans returned home, as urban areas expanded and the number of industrial accidents increased, cities across the United States began to pass what have been referred to as “ugly laws.” People with disabilities were to be made invisible. In 1867 San Francisco banned “any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object” from the “streets, highways, thoroughfares or public places of the city.” Chicago and many other cities adopted similar bans. Portland prohibited “any crippled, maimed, or deformed person” from begging in public spaces. In 1911, Chicago updated its law to prohibit “exposure of diseased, mutilated, or deformed portions of the body.”15

  City officials and the proponents of ugly laws justified them on the basis of class. Crippled, unsightly beggars, they argued, had taken over the public spaces of American cities. Through the creation of anti-begging ordinances, city officials perhaps unwittingly drew distinctions between deserving people with disabilities (those with money) and the undeserving, ugly, unsightly, and disgusting people with disabilities (those without). The laws also penalized people for whom street begging or peddling was often the only means of making a living. Locales sought to eliminate “any crippled, maimed, or deformed person” from public reminder. Such laws reflected unease: industrialization and all the eventual Progressive Era efforts between the 1890s and the early 1920s to study, regulate, and improve society had neither eradicated bodily difference nor prevented misfortune. To the contrary, industrialization actively generated disability.

  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.”16 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 simila
r 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.17

  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.18

  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.19

  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.”20

  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.21

  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.

  EDUCATING THE APPROPRIATE CITIZENRY APPROPRIATELY

  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.22

  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.”23

  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.”24 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.