A Disability History of the United States

by Kim E. Nielsen

  6. Dolmage, “Disabled upon Arrival”; Alan M. Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace” (New York: Basic Books, 1994), chap. 3; Victor Safford, Immigration Problems: Personal Experiences of an Official (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1925), 245.

  7. Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 32; Terry, An American Obsession, 96.

  8. Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna Stern, “Which Face? Whose Nation?: Immigration, Public Health, and the Construction of Disease at America’s Ports and Borders, 1891–1928,” American Behavioral Scientist 42 (1999): 1322; Dolmage, “Disabled upon Arrival,” 40; Natalia Molina, “Medicalizing the Mexican: Immigration, Race, and Disability in the Early-Twentieth-Century United States,” Radical History Review 94 (Winter 2006): 24; Emily Abel, “From Exclusion to Expulsion: Mexicans and Tuberculosis Control in Los Angeles, 1914–1940,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 77 (2003): 823–49.

  9. Allan McLaughlin, “How Immigrants Are Inspected,” Popular Science Monthly 66 (February 1905): 357–61. For more on trachoma, see: Howard Markel, “‘The Eyes Have It’: Trachoma, the Perception of Disease, the United States Public Health Service, and the American Jewish Immigration Experience, 1897–1924,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74, no. 3 (2000): 525–60.

  10. Ronald R. Kline, Steinmetz: Engineer and Socialist (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

  11. McAlister Coleman, Pioneers of Freedom (New York: Vanguard Press, 1929), 265; John Winthrop Hammond, Charles Proteus Steinmetz: A Biography (New York: Century and Company, 1924), 8–9.

  12. Baynton, “Defectives in the Land,” 35; Canaday, The Straight State, chap. 1.

  13. Baynton, “Defectives in the Land,” 36–39; Canaday, The Straight State, 34–35.

  14. Baynton, “Defectives in the Land,” 36–39; Baynton, “The Undesirability of Admitting Deaf Mutes,” 391–392; Sarah Abrevaya Stein, “Deaf American Jewish Culture in Historical Perspective,” American Jewish History 95, no. 3 (September 2009): 277–305.

  15. Baynton, “Defectives in the Land,” 34–35. Emphasis in original.

  16. Canaday, The Straight State, 34, 36.

  17. Calvin Coolidge, “1923 State of the Union Address.”

  18. Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization, 164; The State, Alice Smith, Prosecutor vs. The Board of Examiners of Feeble-Minded (Including Idiots, Imbeciles and Morons) Epileptics, Criminals and Other Defectives, Defendants (1913), University of Wisconsin–Madison, General Library System.

  19. Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization, 293, 300; 1900 Census.

  20. Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization, 293, 294, 296, 300; Molly Ladd-Taylor, “Eugenic Sterilization in Minnesota,” Minnesota History (Summer 2005): 243. The linkage between young women’s sexual activities and feeble-mindedness was a common one. See, for example, Steven Noll, “Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded: Florida Farm Colony, 1920–1945,” Florida Historical Quarterly 69, no. 1 (July 1990): 57–80; Molly Ladd-Taylor, “Eugenic Sterilization in Minnesota”; Michael A. Rembis, Defining Deviance: Sex, Science, and Delinquent Girls, 1890–1960 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2011).

  21. Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization, 294.

  22. Terry, An American Obsession, 82; Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization, 446–47.

  23. Jonathan Katz, ed., Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the USA (New York: Harper Colophon, 1976), 143.

  24. George Chauncey, “From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: The Changing Medical Conceptualization of Female ‘Deviance,’” in Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, ed. Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons, with Robert A. Padgug (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992): 105; Douglas Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001).

  25. Buck v. Bell, 274 US 200 (1927); Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles; Anna Stubblefield, “‘Beyond the Pale’: Tainted Whiteness, Cognitive Disability, and Eugenic Sterilization,” Hypatia 22, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 162–81; Stephen Jay Gould, “Carrie Buck’s Daughter,” Natural History 93 (July 1984): 14–18.

  26. Dr. William Spratling, “An Ideal Colony for Epileptics and the Necessity for the Broader Treatment of Epilepsy,” American Medicine, August 24, 1901, 287.

  27. Goodheart, “Rethinking Mental Retardation: Education and Eugenics in Connecticut, 1818–1917,” Journal of the History of Medicine & Allied Sciences 59, no. 1 (2004): 103.

  28. Laura Skandera Trombley, “‘She Wanted to Kill’: Jean Clemens and Postictal Psychosis,” American Literary Realism 37, no. 3 (Spring 2005): 225, 234; Michael Sheldon, Mark Twain: The Man in White, His Final Years (New York: Random House, 2010); Karen Lystra, Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain’s Final Years (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 95.

  29. Harry Hummer, “Insanity Among the Indians,” American Journal of Insanity 69 (January 1913): 613–23; Todd Leahy, “The Canton Asylum: Indians, Psychiatrists, and Government Policy, 1899–1934” (PhD diss., Oklahoma State University, 2004), 52–76.

  30. Pemina Yellow Bird, “Wild Indians: Native Perspectives on the Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians,” available at the website of the National Empowerment Center, http://www.power2u.org, 9; Zitkala-Sa, American Indian Stories (1921; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 55–56.

  31. Scott Riney, “Power and Powerlessness: The People of the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians,” South Dakota History 27, nos. 1–2 (Spring/Summer 1997): 56–59; Diane T. Putney, “The Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, 1902–1934,” South Dakota History 14, no. 1 (1984): 17–20; Yellow Bird, “Wild Indians”; Bradley Soule and Jennifer Soule, “Death at the Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians [1908–1933],” South Dakota Journal of Medicine 56, no. 1 (January 2003): 15–18.

  32. “‘Sane’ Indians Held in Dakota Asylum,” New York Times, October 15, 1933.

  33. Susan Burch, “‘Dis-membered’ Pasts: Histories of Removals, Institutions, and Community Lives,” paper given at the January 2012 American Historical Association meeting. Cited with permission.

  34. Putney, “The Canton Asylum,” 28.

  35. Martin Summers, “‘Suitable Care of the African When Afflicted with Insanity’: Race, Madness, and Social Order in Comparative Perspective,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 84 (2010): 70; Matthew Gambino, “‘The Savage Heart beneath the Civilized Exterior’: Race, Citizenship, and Mental Illness in Washington, DC, 1900–1940,” Disability Studies Quarterly 28, no. 3 (Summer 2008). See also: Matthew Gambino, “‘These Strangers within Our Gates’: Race, Psychiatry, and Mental Illness among Black Americans at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC, 1900–1940,” History of Psychiatry 19 (2008): 387–408. Other scholars have examined the relationship between public health policies, US imperialism, and racial segregation: Samuel Kelton Roberts Jr., Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Michelle T. Moran, Colonizing Leprosy: Imperialism and the Politics of Public Health in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

  36. Todd Benson, “Blinded with Science: American Indians, the Office of Indian Affairs, and the Federal Campaign against Trachoma, 1924–1927,” in Medicine Ways: Disease, Health, and Survival among Native Americans, ed. Clifford E. Trafzer and Diane Weiner (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2001), 54, 62.

  37. Ibid., 63, 65, 67.

  38. John Fabian Witt, The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 24, 38.

  39. Crystal Eastman, Work Accidents and the Law (Pittsburgh, PA: Russell Sage Foundation, 1
910), 146.

  40. Ibid., 146, 148.

  41. Ibid., 146, 149.

  42. Ibid., 227.

  43. Witt, The Accidental Republic, 3; Mark Aldrich, Death Rode the Rails: American Railroad Accidents and Safety, 1828–1965 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 2, 185; John Williams-Searle, “Cold Charity: Manhood, Brotherhood, and the Transformation of Disability” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 157–86; John Williams-Searle, “Courting Risk: Disability, Masculinity, and Liability on Iowa’s Railroads, 1868–1900,” Annals of Iowa 58 (Winter 1999): 27–77; Shelton H. Stromquist, A Generation of Boomers: The Pattern of Railroad Labor Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993).

  44. Witt, The Accidental Republic, 27; Allan Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace” (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 172–78, 180; Claudia Clark, Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910–1935 (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1997); Jill E. Cooper, “Keeping the Girls on the Line: The Medical Department and Women Workers at AT&T, 1913–1940,” Pennsylvania History 64, no. 4 (1997): 490–508.

  45. Amy M. Hamburger, “The Cripple and His Place in the Community,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 77 (May 1918): 36–37.

  46. Ibid., 41, 46.

  47. Ana Carden-Coyne, “Ungrateful Bodies: Rehabilitation, Resistance, and Disabled American Veterans of the First World War,” European Review of History 14, no. 4 (2007): 546. For more on disability and World War I, as well as adaptive technologies, see: Scott Gelber, “‘Hard-Boiled Order’: The Reeducation of Disabled WWI Veterans in New York City,” Journal of Social History 39, no. 1 (2005): 161–80; Walter K. Hickel, “Medicine, Bureaucracy, and Social Welfare: The Politics of Disability Compensation for American Veterans of World War I,” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 236–67; Michael J. Lansing, “‘Salvaging the Man Power of America’: Conservation, Manhood, and Disabled Veterans During World War I,” Environmental History 14, no. 1 (January 2009): 32–56; Beth Linker, “Feet for Fighting: Locating Disability and Social Medicine in First World War America,” Social History of Medicine 20, no. 1 (2007): 91–109; Beth Linker, War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War One (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Edward Slavishak, “Artificial Limbs and Industrial Workers’ Bodies in Turn-of-the-Century Pittsburgh,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 365–88.

  48. “Future Ship Workers: A One-Armed Welder,” 1919, Exhibit poster showing two scenes in which men with partial arm amputations are taught welding, Reproduction Number: LC-USZC4–7461, Call Number: POS—WWI—US, no. 32 (C size) [P&P], Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.

  49. “The disabled man who is profitably employed is no longer handicapped,” 1919, Exhibit poster, text only, calling for the extension of veterans’ benefits to all injured and disabled citizens, Reproduction Number: LC-USZC4–7379 (color film copy transparency), Call Number: POS—WWI—US, no. 38 (C size) [P&P], Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

  50. Calvin Coolidge, “1923 State of the Union Address.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  1. Robert Cohen, ed., Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: Letters from Children of the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 232–33.

  2. Ibid., 233–34.

  3. Paul K. Longmore and David Goldberger, “The League of the Physically Handicapped and the Great Depression: A Case Study in the New Disability History,” Journal of American History 87, no. 3 (2000): 904, 905, 907.

  4. Robert F. Jefferson, “‘Enabled Courage’: Race, Disability, and Black World War II Veterans in Postwar America,” Historian 65, no. 5 (2003): 1103, 1121.

  5. “Deaf” is capitalized here in the context of the self-defined cultural community, and lowercased in references to the physical condition.

  6. For more on the Deaf community in this period, see Susan Burch, Signs of Resistance: American Deaf Cultural History, 1900 to 1942 (New York: New York University Press, 2002); Michael Reis, “Student Life at the Indiana School for the Deaf During the Depression Years,” in Deaf History Unveiled: Interpretations from the New Scholarship, ed. John Vickrey Van Cleve (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1993), 198–223.

  7. Myron Uhlberg, Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love (New York: Bantam Books, 2008), 125–26.

  8. Barbara H. Baskin, “The Impact of Disability on Employment Opportunities in the Depression of the 1930s,” in The Unemployed (1930–1932), ed. Alex Baskin (New York: Archives of Social History, 1975), 18; David Shannon, The Great Depression (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1960), 163–71. In this case the WPA interviewer did not know American Sign Language. Most of the interview was conducted via writing.

  9. Uhlberg, Hands of My Father, 31.

  10. Burch, Signs of Resistance, 120–28.

  11. Ibid., 126.

  12. Ibid., 35–39. See also: Carolyn McCaskill, Ceil Lucas, Robert Bayley, and Joseph Hill, The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL: Its History and Structure (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2002).

  13. For a lovely chronicle of life at the North Carolina State School for the Colored Blind and Deaf, see: Mary Herring Wright, Sounds Like Home: Growing Up Black and Deaf in the South (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1999); Kim E. Nielsen, ed., Helen Keller: Selected Writings (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 183–84.

  14. Monika Deppen-Wood, Mark R. Luborsky and Jessica Scheer, “Aging, Disability and Ethnicity: An African-American Woman’s Story,” in The Cultural Context of Aging, 2nd ed., ed. Jay Sokolovsky (Westport, CN: Bergin and Garvey, 1997), 444.

  15. R. J. Altenbaugh, “Where Are the Disabled in the History of Education? The Impact of Polio on Sites of Learning,” History of Education 35, no. 6 (November 2006): 710. For more on the history of polio and the experiences of polio survivors, see: Daniel J. Wilson, Living with Polio: The Epidemic and Its Survivors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Daniel J. Wilson, Polio: Biographies of Disease (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009); Naomi Rogers, Dirt and Disease: Polio Before FDR (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Susan Richards Shreve, Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood at FDR’s Polio Haven (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007); Anne Finger, Elegy for a Disease: A Personal and Cultural History of Polio (New York: St. Martin’s, 2006).

  16. Daniel J. Wilson, “Psychological Trauma and Its Treatment in the Polio Epidemics,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 871.

  17. Altenbaugh, “Where Are the Disabled?” 721; Sucheng Chan, In Defense of Asian American Studies: The Politics of Teaching and Program Building (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 35–36.

  18. For more on FDR as well as an analysis of the implications of the erasure of his disability, see: Hugh Gregory Gallagher, FDR’s Splendid Deception (New York: Dodd Mead, 1994); Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “The FDR Memorial: Who Speaks from the Wheelchair?” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 26, 2001, B11–B12; Amy L. Fairchild, “The Polio Narratives: Dialogues with FDR,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 75, no. 3 (2001): 488–534; John Duffy, “Franklin Roosevelt: Ambiguous Symbol for Disabled Americans,” Midwest Quarterly 29, no. 1 (1987): 113–35.

  19. Daniel J. Wilson, “Polio,” in Encyclopedia of American Disability History, vol. 2, ed. Susan Burch (New York: Facts on File, 2009), 725–29. For more on Kenny, see: Naomi Rogers, “‘Silence Has Its Own Stories’: Elizabeth Kenny, Polio, and the Culture of Medicine,” Social History of Medicine 21 (2008): 145–61.

  20. Naomi Rogers, “Race and the Politics of Polio: Warm Springs, Tuskegee, and the March of Dimes,” American Journal of Public Healt
h 97, no. 5 (May 2007): 787, 791; Stephen E. Mawdsley, “‘Dancing on Eggs’: Charles H. Bynum, Racial Politics, and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, 1938–1954,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 84, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 227.

  21. Rogers, “Race and the Politics of Polio,” 791, 793; Bruce Watson, Freedom Summer: The Savage Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy (New York: Viking, 2010), 246; Fannie Lou Hamer’s Testimony before the Credentials Committee, Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, NJ, August 22, 1964. More research needs to be done on race and the vaccination process. For more on race, civil rights activism, and the March of Dimes, see: Mawdsley, “‘Dancing on Eggs.’”

  22. Doris Zames Fleischer and Frieda Zames, The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 33.

  23. Allison C. Carey, On the Margins of Citizenship: Intellectual Disability and Civil Rights in Twentieth-Century America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), 107; Kathleen Jones, “Education for Children with Mental Retardation: Parent Activism, Public Policy, and Family Ideology in the 1950s,” in Mental Retardation in America, ed. Steven Noll and James W. Trent (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 327.

  24. Jones, “Education for Children with Mental Retardation,” 325.

  25. For example, see: Where’s Molly (San Francisco: SFO Productions, 2007); Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, chap. 7; Carey, On the Margins, chap. 6; Harold Pollack, “Learning to Walk Slow: America’s Partial Policy Success in the Arena of Intellectual Disability,” Journal of Policy History 19, no. 1 (2007): 95–112; Jones, “Education for Children with Mental Retardation”; Katherine Castles, “‘Nice, Average Americans’: Postwar Parents’ Groups and the Defense of the Normal Family,” in Mental Retardation in America, ed. Steven Noll and James W. Trent (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 351–70; Barbara Bair, “The Parents Council for Retarded Children and Social Change in Rhode Island, 1951–1970,” Rhode Island History 40, no. 4 (1981): 144–59; Melanie Panitch, Disability, Mothers, and Organization: Accidental Activists (New York: Routledge, 2008).