No Right to Be Idle

The Invention of Disability, 1840s–1930s

Sarah F. Rose

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781469624907
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Labour & Industrial Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans with all sorts of disabilities came to be labeled as "unproductive citizens." Before that, disabled people had contributed as they were able in homes, on farms, and in the wage labor market, reflecting the fact that Americans had long viewed productivity as a spectrum that varied by age, gender, and ability. But as Sarah F. Rose explains in No Right to Be Idle, a perfect storm of public policies, shifting family structures, and economic changes effectively barred workers with disabilities from mainstream workplaces and simultaneously cast disabled people as morally questionable dependents in need of permanent rehabilitation to achieve "self-care" and "self-support." By tracing the experiences of policymakers, employers, reformers, and disabled people caught up in this epochal transition, Rose masterfully integrates disability history and labor history. She shows how people with disabilities lost access to paid work and the status of "worker--a shift that relegated them and their families to poverty and second-class economic and social citizenship. This has vast consequences for debates about disability, work, poverty, and welfare in the century to come.

CHAPTER ONE

Her Mother Did Not Like to Have Her Learn to Work

Disability, Family, and the Spectrum of Productivity, 1840s–1870s

In 1869, Paul and Amelia Tucker removed their eighteen-year-old daughter, Emily, from the New York State Asylum for Idiots. As its superintendent, Hervey B. Wilbur, reported, during her two yearlong stints at the asylum Emily had “learned to read a little and write a little”; she had also “learned to work.” On the face of it, the Tuckers’ decision to bring their daughter home was not particularly unusual. During the asylum’s first two decades, parents routinely withdrew their children from the institution or kept them home at the end of summer vacation. In this case, however, the superintendent recorded an unusual rationale: “She was kept at home … because she was useful and perhaps because her mother did not like to have her learn to work.”1

Tucker’s mother’s comment flew in the face of contemporary rhetoric about “idiots.” This term encompassed people with a wide range of impairments, including cerebral palsy, epilepsy, deafness, and what would later be described as autism, as well as cognitive disabilities that could arise from thyroid disorders, head injuries, and high fevers. But in general, “idiot” referred to a person who was not able to care for himself or herself, do useful labor, or understand the legal consequences of his or her actions.2 In part to obtain funding for asylums from legislators skeptical that idiots could be educated, advocates such as Samuel Gridley Howe variously represented untrained “idiots” as specimens of humanity in need of uplift, as entirely unproductive burdens on overwhelmed families, and, often, as morally dangerous parasites on society.3

Educators’ and charity reformers’ elastic rhetoric proved successful politically. By the 1870s, a network of public idiot asylums, along with a few private ones, had emerged across the northeastern and midwestern states, thanks in no small part to the proselytizing and organizational efforts of Hervey B. Wilbur of the New York State Asylum for Idiots.4 The founders of these institutions sought to teach their pupils basic self-care and, if possible, the rudiments of reading and writing. Depending on their gender, pupils also learned either farm labor or household skills. Eventually, superintendents aimed to return their charges to their presumably rural families as “useful laborers” or, at least, as needing less daily personal care. Such an approach also proved popular with lawmakers perennially concerned with cost-cutting; consequently, Wilbur and his counterparts often relied on mixed public-private schemes to fund asylums. By and large, however, his training program—as well as those modeled upon it—worked remarkably well during the 1850s and 1860s.

But as suggested by Wilbur’s cryptic notation in Tucker’s file quoted above, families did not simply adopt superintendents’ oft-pejorative depictions of “idiotic” relatives. If we look beyond the asylum walls to examine the lived experiences of “idiots” in their families and communities—where, after all, the vast majority resided—a rather different perspective emerges.5 To be sure, relatives appreciated when pupils returned home more able to care for themselves and, in some cases, capable of contributing to the household economy—especially under the supervision of relatives. But families often fought hard to ensure that their “idiotic” relatives could live at home, even those who needed considerable care. Families did not view productivity in the simple black-and-white terms suggested by asylum superintendents, nor did the ability or inability to do useful labor determine an individual’s value in their eyes. Rather, relatives understood their “idiotic” children in light of the fact that people with diverse bodies and capacities had long performed domestic and manual labor in an economy and society of farms and small communities; such an economy also helped to sustain relatives’ capacity for caring. Indeed, such individuals were seen as simply part of a broad spectrum of productivity that varied according to age, gender, and ability.6

The Problem of Idiocy

The problem of “idiocy” first emerged as a social issue ripe for intervention in the mid-1840s, when several European and American educators and doctors challenged the long-standing presumption that idiots were incurable. Inspired by the common school movement and immersed in a transatlantic network of asylum builders, three men—Edouard Séguin, Samuel Gridley Howe, and Hervey Wilbur—set out to prove that idiots could in fact benefit from training. Howe, in particular, would make a crucial rhetorical contribution, one that would shape discourse on people labeled as “idiots” and, later on, “feeble-minded,” for decades to come.

In the mid-nineteenth century, idiots were hardly an unfamiliar sight to most Americans. Yet, idiocy itself was somewhat ill-defined medically and would remain so well into the twentieth century. For one thing, idiocy did not refer simply to people with cognitive or developmental impairments, such as those stemming from iodine deficiency, Down’s syndrome, or brain injuries induced by accidents or high fevers. Rather, the category included those who appeared “idiotic” because of mobility impairments, poor hearing or eyesight, or abuse and neglect, as well as what would become known as autism by the 1940s. English and early American legal theorists and social commentators, meanwhile, had defined idiocy as a permanent, “natural” lack of understanding (or mental deficiency) that typically dated from birth and which prevented self-support and moral judgment. In theory, lawmakers, judges, and doctors distinguished between the temporary nature of “distractedness,” which was roughly equivalent to insanity, and the permanent nature of idiocy, but such distinctions were challenging in practice.7 Charity officials, as well as many members of the public, had a clear, nonmedical definition of idiocy: the inability to care for oneself or do “useful labor.” Equally critically, idiots supposedly could not improve, even with training.8

Idiocy had yet more meanings: the result of sin, an appropriate object of study for those seeking to understand the natural world, and an innate characteristic of certain races. Both Puritan ministers and nineteenth-century charities officials, for instance, considered idiots to be evidence of parental sins such as intemperance and unchaste behavior. Yet, Cotton Mather and his fellow clerics also saw idiots as innocent beings and manifestations of “God’s diverse creations”—“curiosities” to be studied, in effect. In fact, Mather included the tale of two “uncommon Idiots” among his regular reports to London’s Royal Society.9 Antebellum proslavery advocates, meanwhile, sought to define African Americans as inherently feeble-minded. After the 1840 federal census purportedly tallied far higher rates of insanity and idiocy among free blacks than among slaves, southern writers proclaimed that freedom would bring only misery and disability to their human property. Samuel Cartwright, for instance, contended in 1851 that “it is this defective hematosis, or atmospherization of the blood … that is the true cause of that debasement of the mind, which has rendered the people of Africa unable to take care of themselves.”10

In antebellum America, people labeled as idiots encountered both extreme vulnerability and relative integration—often based on their family context. Because families served as the primary locus of care, disinterested or cruel relatives could confine individuals with cognitive or psychosocial impairments without any interference from authorities, such as Patrick Henry’s aforementioned “mad” wife, Sarah Shelton Henry, who died after spending several years in a basement in a straitjacket and accompanied only by a slave.11 Idiots’ presumed incurability, as well as their perceived inability to care for themselves or do useful work, also contributed to their neglect by charity officials. Following Elizabethan poor-law precedents, charity officials categorized idiots, simpletons, and imbeciles, among others, as part of the “deserving” poor; this status, however, did not necessarily lead to kind, or even good, care of those whose families could or would not look after them.12 While Dorothea Dix is best known for her advocacy on behalf of people deemed insane, her famed 1843 Memorial to the Legislature of Massachusetts raised awareness about the abuse and neglect suffered by “idiots” and “imbeciles” in poorhouses and jails. She came across “one idiotic subject chained” in a poorhouse, while another had lived “in a close stall for 17 years.”13 As Dix investigated the conditions of those labeled insane or idiotic in almshouses and jails across Massachusetts and New York, she discovered that the type of impairment mattered little. Rather, poorhouse keepers routinely relegated “incurables,” whether labeled insane or idiotic, to “close, unventilated rooms; narrow, dark cells, cheerless dungeons, cold and damp,” and, often, death.14

At the same time, as suggested by the numerous literary accounts of “town idiots” and “simpletons,” many idiots were relatively integrated into their communities. In part, this was due to the fact that antebellum Americans demonstrated considerable tolerance for nonviolent neighbors with cognitive and psychosocial impairments. The residents of Brampton, Massachusetts, for instance, lived with Jack Downs, who “regularly enjoyed plucking wigs off the heads of church worshippers with a string and fishhook, and was well known for throwing rotten apples at the minister during the sermon.”15

As might be expected, families’ financial resources also eased integration. Thomas Cameron, the oldest son of the wealthiest plantation family in South Carolina, attended several boarding schools in northern states during the 1820s, including a military academy. His parents hoped that he would thereby gain physical and intellectual strength. As an adult, he returned to his family’s plantation in South Carolina, where he served as a messenger between plantations, attended social functions such as weddings, voted and attended Whig political rallies, and developed close ties with his nieces and nephews. Later on, Cameron even became the local postmaster.16

Nevertheless, legislators and professional charity reformers viewed idiots through a different lens: as utterly resistant to education and, therefore, as inappropriate subjects for state intervention. Consequently, the asylum building movement of the 1820s and 1830s initially bypassed idiots.17 During these decades, legislators and professional charity reformers such as Samuel Gridley Howe established a wide variety of state institutions aimed at rehabilitating groups such as the poor, criminals, and blind and deaf children into moral, self-supporting inhabitants. These institutions reflected a millennialist faith in human perfectibility and societal progress, as well as a fervent belief in work as both a form of rehabilitation and a means of defraying expenses. In theory, segregating criminals, orphaned children, the insane, the poor, and children with disabilities in a bucolic yet disciplined setting would improve their morality, teach the value of steady labor, and perhaps even cure them.18 Prisoners at the Auburn and Ossining (now Sing Sing) state prisons in New York, for instance, labored six days a week in a communal workshop, from 5 A.M. until 6 P.M. Superintendents and legislators alike argued that inmates’ labors would inculcate industry and prevent criminal interaction among them.19 But since few thought idiots capable of improving, lawmakers saw no need to waste state money on a group whose morality could not be improved and who could not be made self-sufficient. Dorothea Dix’s exposés of the mistreatment endured by idiots in county poorhouses in Massachusetts and New York in 1842 and 1843, respectively, finally piqued lawmakers’ interest, as did the 1845 New York State census, which tallied sixteen hundred idiots in the state.20

Edouard Séguin’s work w...