Annie's Ghosts

by Steve Luxenberg

  “often advocated measure for dealing with the unfit…” Pernick, p. 14.

  found quotes or commentaries from more than three hundred physicians and public figures…The doctor who delivered Annie was not among those quoted in the Detroit newspapers, Pernick told me after checking his list.

  many supportive of Haiselden’s position… A variety of notable figures in American life, including Clarence Darrow and Helen Keller, offered public defenses of Haiselden’s actions. Writing in The New Republic, Keller drew a distinction between her disabilities (deafness and blindness) and deformities that gave a child no chance at being “useful to itself and the world.” She argued that such children were “being spared a life of misery” and that “No one cares about that pitiful, useless lump of flesh.” In keeping with that era’s growing belief in science as a solution to society’s ills, she suggested that a “physician’s jury” could be set up to determine whether a deformed baby’s life was worth saving. The New Republic, December 18, 1915, also cited in Pernick, p. 96, and in Ian Dowbiggin, A Precise History of Euthanasia: Life, Death, God and Medicine (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), p. 74.

  a 1937 poll… Dowbiggin, p. 89.

  the three documents inside the envelope… These documents were Nathan Shlien’s Certificate of Arrival, Declaration of Intention (to become a citizen), and Petition for Citizenship. His typed Declaration misspells his name as “Nathan Thlien.”

  TWELVE: The Cigar Laborer

  it’s January 1964 now… My grandfather died on January 2, 1964.

  listed his occupation as “cigar labourer”… The passenger manifest in Hamburg uses the German phrase, “Zigarrenarbeiter,” or cigar worker. Staatarchiv Hamburg, Hamburg Passenger Lists, 1850–1934, available online at www.ancestry.com. The details about Chaim’s entry at Ellis Island come from “List or Manifest of Alien Passengers for the United States Immigration Officer at Port of Arrival, S.S. Patricia, July 20/21, 1907,” microfilm series T715, Roll 948, National Archives in Washington.

  One news article traced Detroit’s tobacco prominence… The quote and other details come from Thomas L. Jones’s report on cigar making in the Detroit News’s three-hundredth-anniversary section on the city’s founding, accessed online at http://info.detnews.com/history/story/index.cfm?id=24.

  home to the densest square mile in the country and perhaps the world… Many writers have cited this statistic, often without the qualifier that I have used and often inflating the number of people per square mile. The claim for the United States is based on the census count for the Lower East Side, which computed to 375,000 people per square mile in 1910, or 585 per acre. But knowing the densest square mile in the world would require comparable data from countries that took no census in that era.

  Detroit saw its population swell… The information on Detroit’s growth comes from the U.S. Census reports for 1900, 1910, and 1920.

  up to 21,000 cars… Conot, American Odyssey, p. 193, based on Graeme O’Geran, A History of the Detroit Street Railways (Detroit: Conover Press, 1931).

  Between 1881 and 1914, more than two million Jews… The immigration statistics in this chapter come from the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and the Reports of the Immigration Commission 1907–1910, known as the Dillingham Commission.

  no intention of ever going back… Non-Jewish immigrants returned to their native country in greater numbers than their Jewish counterparts, particularly those from Russia, who did not always view the countries of their birth as “homelands.”

  Radziwillow, in 1907, was no sleepy shtetl… For my portrait of the town, I relied primarily on two histories: Radyvyliv, by Ukrainian journalist Volodymyr Yashchuk, published in 2004; and Radzivilov sefer zikaron, the 1966 yizkor (memorial) book commemorating the lives of the Radziwillow Jews who died in the Holocaust. Alexander Dunai, our translator during a trip to Radziwillow in July 2007, found Yashchuk’s account and prepared a written summary for me; Sam Elrom of Baltimore did the same with the yizkor volume, which includes a history of the Jewish community in Radziwillow based in part on interviews with the town’s Holocaust survivors.

  “the more generalized sense of fear”… Several histories, including Ronald Sanders’s Shores of Refuge: A Hundred Years of Jewish Emigration (New York: Holt, 1988) and Gerald Sorin’s A Time for Building: The Third Migration, 1880–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), support Moreno’s description of Jewish emigration from Russia as a multidimensional phenomenon. The twelve-volume Jewish Encyclopedia, published between 1901 and 1906 at the height of the Russian Jewish migration, offers a thorough account of the “temporary regulations” imposed by the tsarist government in 1882 and the impact of those laws on Jews inside and outside the Pale of Settlement. Available online at www.jewishencyclopedia.com.

  searchable by town name… A database created by Steve Morse, available online at www.stevemorse.org, makes it possible to search passenger manifests by a town’s name, using an exact spelling or variants.

  Their tactics drew the scrutiny of Philip Cowen… Cowen wrote two reports on Russian emigration, in December 1906 and January 1907. On the pogroms, he pointed a finger directly at the Russian government, which he blamed for encouraging the attacks by giving promotions and other benefits to officers who participated in the violence. His reports can be found in case files 52411/56, folders 1 and 3, Subject Correspondence series of Record Group 85, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, National Archives.

  The panel, chaired by U.S. Senator William Dillingham of Vermont… The Dillingham Commission, created by an act of Congress on Feb. 20, 1907, published its forty-one-volume report in 1911. Nineteen volumes were devoted to statistical charts detailing the impact of immigrant labor on major industries.

  “the letters are read and re-read…” Dillingham Commission report, vol. 4, Emigration Conditions in Europe, p. 57.

  “requiring a degree of courage and resourcefulness…” Dillingham Commission report, vol. 4, p. 21.

  procured the necessary papers to leave… In volume 4, the Dillingham Commission included the English translation of a 1909 article in Russian by S. Janovsky, describing the “endless vexations” of obtaining emigration documents from local Russian authorities. Janovsky concluded that the process itself was responsible for opening the door to “a special type of middleman who take upon themselves the task of procuring all the papers necessary…” If obtaining a passport wasn’t possible, Janovsky wrote, these middlemen arranged to smuggle the emigrant across the border. Text of the Janovsky article in Dillingham Commission report, vol. 4, pp. 251–264.

  the detailed report of commission investigator Anna Herkner… Herkner’s account appeared in Dillingham Commission report, Steerage Conditions, vol. 37, pp. 5–40. She did not name the ships she sailed on, but she provided the specific dates of her voyages in old steerage, enabling me to match those dates with the list of arrivals at Ellis Island. Her report included a grim account of the routine sexual assaults on female steerage passengers: “Not one young woman in steerage escaped attack. The writer herself was no exception.” Dillingham Commission report, vol. 37, p. 22.

  A photo of the S.S. Patricia…Edwin Levick’s 1906 photo appears at the beginning of this chapter.

  the nine ships that appeared on July 21, 1907… From the passenger manifests for that day, microfilm series T715, Rolls 947–949, National Archives.

  the university president’s effort to counteract… Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell’s campaign for a discriminatory admissions policy, protested by prominent faculty members, drew press coverage at the time and has been well chronicled since. See, among others, Marcia Graham Synnott’s The Half-Opened Door: Discrimination and Admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, 1900–1970 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979), especially pp. 58–75.

  What happened to Detroit’s economy… My description of the auto industry’s growth between 1900 and 1920 comes primarily from Conot, American Odyssey; Charles K. Hyde, Th
e Dodge Brothers: The Men, the Motor Cars, and the Legacy (Great Lakes books. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005); and Vincent Curcio, Chrysler: The Life and Times of an Automotive Genius (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  Hyman no longer worked for Dodge… Personnel records for Dodge, which became a division of Chrysler in the late 1920s, are not among the records that survive from Dodge’s early days.

  projects and land annexations that would transform the city’s character… Based on news accounts and photographs of the building of the Book Cadillac, the Ambassador Bridge, and the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, as well as the capsule histories that open the 1920 through 1933 editions of the Detroit city directories.

  80 square miles to more than 134… From Manual, County of Wayne, Michigan, 1930 (Detroit: Board of County Auditors), a volume rich in history and facts about the governments of Wayne County and Detroit.

  social worker Helen Hall wrote… “When Detroit’s Out of Gear,” The Survey, April 1930.

  that misery overwhelmed the city’s welfare department… Relief statistics cited in Sidney Fine, The Automobile Under the Blue Eagle (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963), p. 19. The Detroit Department of Public Welfare’s 1938 “Handbook of Policy and Organization” also recounts the effect on the department.

  “Children scavenged through the street like animals…” Conot, p. 283.

  the welfare agency later hired Hyman as a part-time janitor… From Hyman’s Alien Registration Form, September 6, 1940. On this document, required by the Alien Registration Act of 1940, Hyman reports that he entered the country in July 1910 on the “Fatherland.” No such ship exists; there was an S.S. Vaderland, but my grandfather’s name (Chaim Korn) does not appear on Vaderland manifests between June and September 1910. Marian Smith, historian for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, tells me that many immigrants provided incorrect information on the registration forms, sometimes for no other reason than faulty memory. “The form required you to say how you got here,” she said, “and immigrants were afraid to leave it blank.”

  THIRTEEN: Invisible

  I tell Frassica what I’ve learned about Kidner… The Kidner biographical material comes from newspaper accounts, census records, Detroit city directories, the American Orthopedic Association, and Who’s Who in Orthopedics, a compilation edited by Sayed Behrooz Mostofi (London: Springer, 2005).

  Made of wood, covered with rawhide… Kevin Carroll sent me a 1958 Hanger Prosthetics marketing brochure, “Keeping Step,” from his personal collection of historical information about artificial limbs. Carroll said Annie’s prosthetic leg would have been similar in design and construction to the standard ones, made of English willow, shown in the eighty-four-page brochure.

  more than thirty thousand amputations of all sorts… The Union surgeons kept good records, which formed the basis for an 1865 report from the surgeon general’s office, “The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion.”

  IQ is a calculation, not a measurement… Alfred Binet, a French psychologist, developed the first of the modern intelligence tests in 1905 as part of the French Ministry of Education’s effort to identify students likely to have difficulty in conventional schools. In 1912, German psychologist William Stern proposed the idea of expressing intelligence as a single number—the intelligence quotient. Standardized intelligence tests, in their early form, were designed to compare students to each other: a ten-year-old performing at the level of a typical eight-year-old would register an IQ of 80 (100 × 8/10), while an eight-year-old testing at a ten-year-old’s level would earn an IQ of 125 (100 × 10/8).

  the clinic had earned a national reputation… Detroit schools started its first class for mentally retarded students in 1903. In 1911, the Detroit superintendent of schools sought to find more precise methods for identifying students in need of “special education,” which led to the establishment of the Psychological Clinic. During the summer of 1912, the clinic’s first employee went to New Jersey for instruction in administering the new Binet intelligence tests; the clinic then took over the job of placing “mentally retarded and socially maladjusted” students into special classes, according to a 2003 pamphlet put out by the clinic, now called the Office of Psychological Services.

  an IQ of 73, or “borderline”… The early years of the IQ testing movement coincided with the rise of modern science and the belief, particularly strong in the United States, that it was possible to quantify almost everything. Scientific classifications for various levels of mental deficiency soon found their way into the state laws and the public lexicon. A “moron” in 1925, when Annie took her first IQ test, referred to an IQ between 50 and 69; “imbecile,” between 20 and 49; and “idiot,” below 20. (These definitions appear in Lewis M. Terman, The Measurement of Intelligence [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916].) Those terms, already in disfavor by the late 1950s, disappeared from scientific, educational, and legal use in the 1970s, during the rewriting of nearly all mental health codes in the United States.

  FOURTEEN: One of the Thousands

  Zimmerman recounted…Jo Johnson, head of the Westland Historical Commission and overseer of the Eloise museum, provided me with a typescript of Zimmerman’s talk.

  “disperse gloom and monotony…” Altshuler describes his therapy approach in “‘Group Treatment’ of Mental Patients,” an essay in the 1937 Eloise annual report.

  prescribed one of the new antipsychotic drugs…. The Food and Drug Administration approved the first of these medications in March 1954; within eight months, the psychiatric community had tried Thorazine (chlorpromazine) on more than two million patients, according to Pete Earley’s 2006 book Crazy: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons), p. 68.

  “schizophrenia is so hopeless”…Letter from Abraham Brill to William Alanson White, quoted in Elliot Valenstein’s Great and Desperate Cures, p. 56.

  In 1948, seventy-four Eloise patients received insulin shock…Eloise’s annual reports routinely reported the number of patients who received shock treatments.

  “you had to be hypervigilant while the patients were in the comas”…Elliot Valenstein offers a similarly grueling description in his book, based on his experience of witnessing insulin shock therapy at 1950 at a Veterans Administration hospital in Topeka, Kansas. The thirty patients, he writes, were twitching, tossing, moaning, shouting, and gasping during their convulsions; Great and Desperate Cures, pp. 56–57.

  A 1934 survey, ominously titled… Fred M. Butzel, a noted Detroit philanthropist often involved in public issues, headed this survey, which can be found at the Library of Michigan in Lansing.

  the legislature rescinded the measure… This account of the legislature’s change of direction in increasing the number of hospital beds comes from Caroline Jean Whitaker’s 1986 University of Michigan doctoral dissertation, “Almshouses and Mental Institutions in Michigan, 1871–1930,” p. 296.

  the state had always relied on Eloise… In 1934, Wayne County residents occupied only 10 percent of the 10,323 available beds in state mental hospitals. From Irene Waryas, “A Program of Family Care for Mental Patients at Wayne County General Hospital and Infirmary,” 1950 master’s thesis, Wayne University, School of Public Affairs and Social Work.

  A partnership had evolved… This partnership began in 1897, when state law first granted reimbursement to counties for the care of mental “defectives.” In 1903, the legislature made the Wayne County asylum subject to the same rules as the state’s institutions.

  the federal government picking up nearly 80 percent of the tab… Eloise’s 1937 annual report has a detailed description of how federal dollars paid for various improvements at the hospital.

  95 cents a day in 1940… The reimbursement rates come from Eloise annual reports and minutes of Eloise’s board, known as the Wayne County Board of County Institutions after 1940.

  convert Ward 106 of N Building into four hundred psychiatric beds… Clar
k, p. 52.

  One female ward, designed for 18, had 45 patients… Many of the details in this paragraph come from a letter that Frank E. Kelley, chairman of Eloise’s board, wrote to Gov. Harry F. Kelly, June 19, 1945. The letter appears in the minutes of the Eloise board, available at the Westland Historical Commission.

  The governor, Harry Kelly, had been given plenty of warning… Kelly’s office kept extensive records on the overcrowding crisis, available in the State Archives: Gov. Harry Kelly Papers, RG42, Box 7, File 7, State Boards and Commissions, Hospital Commission, and RG42, Box 39, File 14.

  County officials didn’t like the Soo plan… Eloise board chairman Kelley suggested, in his June 19, 1945 letter to Governor Kelly, that the state investigate the possibility of buying “several idle summer resorts and converting them into temporary mental hospitals for the custodial care of mental patients.”

  only “comfortable and tidy patients”… This phrase appears in a Wagg letter to Frank E. Kelley, July 3, 1945. It’s clear from the Eloise board’s minutes and other documents that Wagg had several conversations with Kelley and Gruber about the state’s stipulations. Wagg pointed out that as state hospitals sent some of their patients to the Soo, that would open up beds for transfers from Eloise, implying that Eloise might be able to send more severely ill patients to those institutions.

  Eloise had assigned Waryas to place up to twenty-five capable patients… From 1950 Eloise annual report, p. 26.

  a mini-seminar on what we do and don’t know about schizophrenia… Medical researchers have made progress in understanding this perplexing disorder, but Regenold’s comments reflect the continuing uncertainty about its origins. “Schizophrenia is a disease without a diagnostic test,” wrote Michael Foster Green, a professor at UCLA’s Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, in his 2001 book, Schizophrenia Revealed: From Neurons to Social Interactions (New York: W.W. Norton), which makes diagnosis more of an art than a science. Green’s book provides an accessible overview of the latest research, which has focused on neural disconnection and dysfunction, but his larger purpose is to “demystify” schiozophrenia. He argues that popular culture has tended to treat schizophrenia as a “deep and profound” mystery, and thus incomprehensible. Only by demystifying the disorder, he asserts, can we avoid the romanticism and stigmatization that has characterized the disease for so many years.