"Happy and Useful:" Educating Children With Disabilities in Nineteenth-Century America (2015)
The content and meaning of childhood disability underwent a revolution' during the nineteenth century. Early in the century, a medical diagnosis of "idiocy" described a child whose apparent "mental deficiency" was presumed to be permanent. By the mid nineteenth century, European physicians proposed that such "arrested development of the will" could be overcome by judicious training in the classroom and gymnasium. Consequently, American reformers established residential schools for idiotic children across the United States, with the goal of making their pupils "happy and useful." By the end of the century, these schools had been transformed into enormous custodial asylums for the "feebleminded," and their medical superintendents became among the most vocal advocates of the eugenics movement. The nineteenth-century assertion that idiocy was "improvable" thus brought medical attention to disabled children. Lay Americans understood idiocy as a lifelong condition that impaired a person's ability to manage his or her own affairs: someone who struggled to meet the expectations of his or her gender, age, class, and race. Although medical definitions emphasized its mental origin, the presumed interrelation between mind and body meant that idiocy could encompass almost all shades of childhood disability. This project encompasses children and young people with learning and speech problems, mobility impairments and seizures, and difficulties in conforming to social niceties or securing employment. The diagnostic contents of idiocy and feeblemindedness were bound up in social expectations and cultural anxieties. In the mid nineteenth century, cultural norms emphasized rational self-government; children "unsuitable" for common schooling were called idiotic. By the late century, perceived threats to middle-class white masculinity bolstered anxieties about impressionable young men and saucy young women. These were the prototypical residents of institutions for the feebleminded. The meaning of disability changed alongside its content. Having to attend an antebellum school for idiotic children was not generally desirable; but feeblemindedness was a much more sinister diagnosis. Institutional superintendents gradually altered their goals to embrace custodial care and lifelong segregation, and associated negative moral qualities with many of their residents. The impact of being identified as disabled—unable to "pass for normal," as one superintendent explained—was therefore greater towards the end of the century. The establishment of residential schools and institutions expanded the options available to families with disabled children. Parents had varied goals for admission to an institution, including physical health, education, and discipline for their child, and respite for the family. How they weighed those options was colored by society's changing views on disability. In general, families resisted the more negative attitudes of physicians, but they were not altogether immune. This project imagines the experiences of disabled children in nineteenth century America through the lens of residential schools and institutions, fusing the social and cultural history of medicine with insights from critical disability studies. Beginning in 1848 at the height of popular reform movements, it follows the postbellum shift to "scientific charity." I propose two watershed moments linked to idiocy pioneers: in 1876 with the death of Samuel Gridley Howe, and again in 1896 following the death of Isaac Newton Kerlin. I draw on annual reports, superintendent papers, and a remarkable set of documents from the Elm Hill Private Institute for Feeble-Minded Youth, including a series of case descriptions spanning 1848-1896. These highlight the disproportionate impact of a small number of physicians in this new field; the role of families in shaping who was admitted and discharged from institutions; and glimpses of the preferences, habits, and experiences of disabled children themselves. Only a minority of disabled people ever found their way inside a residential school or institution for the feebleminded; even fewer could afford the private Elm Hill institution. Yet these histories are crucial for understanding the contours of modern disability history. The medical profession took disability under its purview at the moment that it gained cultural authority. This shifted the balance of power between parents, politicians, and institutional superintendents, leaving a diminishing role for external oversight or influence. Eventually, superintendents promulgated such a strict and narrow definition of normalcy that eugenic incarceration and sterilization seemed justified. In this history, the paternalist actions of policy makers, physicians, and families wrought great damage on disabled people: accordingly, disability rights activism is essential to prevent future harms.
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